Cinematographer Gary Graver spent the last 21 years of his life promoting Orson Welles’ unseen work and looking for funds to edit and complete The Other Side of the Wind.
Graver, who died in 2006, did not live to see producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall put together the deal that will bring the movie to Netflix next year. But his son, Sean Graver, is lending a hand with the project.
In a recent posting on the website GaryGraver.com, Sean Graver, who makes his home in the Pacific Northwest, detailed how he spent a day with members of the production team “going through the remaining items from my father’s belongings.”
“(We) went through boxes of documents, tapes, film, photos, slides, negatives and many personal effects that may be related to the 15 years Gary Graver worked with Orson Welles,” Sean Graver wrote. “Some of this material is related to the 20 years after Orson’s death when Gary traveled the world evangelizing Orson’s work and telling the world about this movie that needs to be edited and released. From 1985 to his death in 2006, there wasn’t much that took more precedence in his life than finding a way to see this film completed. Now, thanks to Filip Jan Rymsza, Frank Marshall and so many others, that dream is getting closer and closer to reality.”
(Editor’s note: Graver’s traveling The Unseen Orson Welles presentations contained just 40 minutes of The Other Side of the Wind taken from Welles’ workprint. He exhibited footage from The Deep, Merchant of Venice, The Dreamers and The Magic Show, as well as Japanese whiskey commercials, the silent short The Hearts of Age, the unsold TV pilot Fountain of Youth and the AFI short Four Men on a Raft.)
Netflix is funding the completion of The Other Side of the Wind and a companion documentary from Oscar-winner Morgan Neville.
Digital scanning of the 16mm and 35mm negative of The Other Side of the Wind was completed last month as producers prepare to edit the late director’s unfinished 1970s comeback film. Concurrent with the 4K scan of the negative by Technicolor in Los Angeles, the original 1/4-inch audiotapes were synced with more than 10,000 logged shots, Rymsza said in a statement on Sept. 15.
“There’s way more material than anyone thought and the 4K scans confirm what we observed in Paris – the negative is in pristine condition and the scans look absolutely stunning,” Rymsza said. “Seeing these materials is enough to make any cineaste’s heart skip a beat.”
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