By RAY KELLY
Amid considerable fanfare, Orson Welles’ long-awaited The Other Side of the Wind debuted at fall film festivals in Venice and Telluride, and its troubled 1970s production was recounted in a companion documentary by Oscar winner Morgan Neville titled They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.
Obscured by these higher profile premieres is A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making, a 38-minute hidden gem, which expertly chronicles precisely how behind the scenes artisans combed through 1,083 reels of negative and film elements, carefully piecing together the movie in a painstaking effort to honor Welles’ artistic vision.
Directed by Ryan Suffern (Finding Oscar) and led by Wind producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza, A Final Cut for Orson has (so far) only been publicly shown at the Telluride Film Festival. It was lauded by both The Hollywood Reporter and veteran critic Leonard Maltin, who said he hoped Netflix will make sure it seen by a much wider audience.
A Final Cut for Orson is a mesmerizing testament to the unwavering devotion shown by those who completed a master filmmaker’s work more than 30 years after his death.
“For me, this was a documentary on the love everyone had for Orson,” Marshall told Wellesnet. “He had a troubled reputation, but I want people to know why we were all so dedicated to this film.”
Marshall says A Final Cut for Orson pays tribute to the members of V.I.S.T.O.W. – Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles, both those who labored on the 1970s shoot and those who utilized the latest technology to complete the movie decades later.
“This film highlights a new generation of V.I.S.T.O.W. members,” Marshall said. “The documentary captures the passion and dedication we all have for Orson.”
Suffern, who heads up documentaries for The Kennedy/Marshall Company, was tasked with chronicling the project. He filmed the post-production process from the negative’s arrival in Los Angeles from Paris on March 13, 2017 to the completion of The Other Side of the Wind on April 30, 2018.
“From the onset, we had to be choosy with what we could include,” Suffern said. “We had to tell the story in a concise manner and we weren’t going to be overly indulgent. We also had a wealth of material, which is a great spot to be in.”
Despite its brevity, A Final Cut for Orson is an engrossing, and often moving, account of what it took to honor Peter Bogdanovich’s 47-year-old pledge to complete his late friend’s movie should he not live to see it finished.
The hurdles the post-production team faced were far greater than what producers publicly revealed during the year-long process. For example, Welles’ negative was at one point divided among various locations in France. There was 96 hours of footage to comb through and some first-generation audio elements were missing. (“Once we got the negative back, we were off to the races,” post-production supervisor Ruth Hasty recalls in A Final Cut for Orson. “We just didn’t know what we were getting into. It was like dredging up the Titanic … a scavenger hunt the whole way through.”)
The dedication and hard work of Hasty, veteran negative cutter Mo Henry, editor Bob Murawski, re-recording mixer Scott Millan, supervising sound editor Daniel Saxlid, music editor Ellen Segal, and composer Michel Legrand, as well as ADR talent including Danny Huston are recounted. The high-tech efforts of Technicolor’s Mark Smirnoff, Jason Brahms of Video Gorillas and Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic also get their due.
Using artificial intelligence and complex algorithms to compare 12 million frames per second, Video Gorillas was able match images on the workprint to the corresponding shots on the Technicolor’s 4K scanned negative. Brahms notes in A Final Cut, “The process took two and half days of machine time. If a human being were to do it, it would take eight, nine months to do.”
ILM used replicas of dummies seen in the Welles-shot footage, a green screen, and small explosive charges to convincingly complete a sequence where John Huston’s drunken character guns down mannequins.
Suffern’s insider account leaves little doubt that the completion of The Other Side of the Wind would have been technically impossible had it been attempted a decade or so earlier.
“I don’t know if we could have ever finished the movie if we were only working on film,” Marshall acknowledges in the documentary. “It was kind of meant to be that it took so long because we now have the ability to put it all together and make it work.”
A Final Cut for Orson offers some fascinating fly-on-the-wall moments of Bogdanovich, Marshall, Rymsza and Murawski at work. (“There’s a lot of transitional scenes I don’t think we even need, ” Murawski tells his colleagues at one point. Marshall responds, “Yeah, I think we need to stay on point as much as we can.”)
Yet, A Final Cut for Orson offers far more than the nuts and bolts of film restoration and reconstruction. It sparkles with moments of genuine warmth.
Marshall jokes about his routine firings by Welles during filming; Bogdanovich poignantly recalls the personal direction given to him by Welles for Wind‘s emotional climax; and Murawski explains how he wanted to complete the movie to honor his friend, the film’s late cinematographer Gary Graver.
Perhaps most touching of all is the scene where Danny Huston loops the voice of his late father, John Huston, with loving ease.
“Filming Danny Huston as he embodied his father’s voice and then getting his thoughts on that was surreal,” Suffern recalled.
A Final Cut for Orson also offers up a lesson in how filmmaking has changed since Welles’ death, as the team deals with actual film negatives, workprints and Nagra audio reels .
“I started working in film when it was shot on film,” Suffern said. “With this, we had an opportunity to tell not just Orson Welles’ story, but how movies were made then.”
He added, “I hope this film is seen by everybody who sees the motion picture or they will not fully realize what everyone had to do to accomplish Orson’s last thoughts.”
Hopefully, A Final Cut for Orson will earn a place on film festival schedules as the November 2 premiere of The Other Side of the Wind on Netflix approaches.
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Update: A Final Cut for Orson may be seen for free at the bottom on this Netflix webpage, https://www.netflix.com/title/80085566 or embedded below.
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