Film historian Joseph McBride, along with Peter Bogdanovich and cameraman Gary Graver, joined Orson Welles on August 23, 1970 for the first day of filming The Other Side of the Wind.
Cast in the movie as film critic Mr. Pister, McBride would continue to work for Welles throughout the early 1970s.
“Acting for Orson Welles was a Walter Mitty experience for a young film scholar writing a book about Welles, especially since I had never acted before and had just arrived for my first visit to Hollywood. That week I met my three favorite directors — John Ford, Jean Renoir, and Welles — as well as the up-and-coming Peter Bogdanovich,” McBride recalled. “By that Sunday fifty years ago (hard to believe it’s been that long; seems like yesterday), I was playing a spoof of myself and helping Welles write my dialogue as the comically earnest film scholar Mister Pister.”
He added, “The first day Peter and I and a few others, including Eric Sherman and Felipe Herba as documentary crewmen, shot for twelve hours in and around Welles’s rented house in Los Angeles, and I became friends with Welles’s brilliant, energetic, and amiable young cameraman Gary Graver. I was able to see how Welles would respond to what was in front of him and constantly revise his concepts in a creative way. By the time I flew back to Madison that night, exhausted but happy, my life had been changed by my experience as a ‘participant-observer’ in Welles’s world, to use the phrase by Henry James’s biographer Leon Edel about what a chronicler should be. Half a century and three books later I am still studying Welles and writing about his work.”
After Welles’ death in 1985, McBride worked with Bogdanovich and Graver on an unsuccessful effort to finish the movie for Showtime in 1998 and was a consultant on the completion spearheaded by Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall in 2018.
(You can read his account of his journey and reaction to the finished film at wellesnet.com/joseph-mcbride-other-side-wind-exceeds/)
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first day of the shoot, McBride has been kind enough to share with Wellesnet readers several previously unpublished photos he snapped of Welles, Bogdanovich and Graver that day at the start of The Other Side of the Wind.
All photos copyright of Joseph McBride. Used with permission.
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