In a series of taped interviews, which served as the foundation of the book This Is Orson Welles, the late filmmaker spoke with friend Peter Bogdanovich about the plight of great directors in their later years.
Welles, then in his mid 50s, mused there was another decade or so of work ahead of him before he was dismissed as over-the-hill.
The conversation, circa 1970, prompted Welles to tell Bogdanovich about a movie he was contemplating. It would center on a macho, closeted gay film director in the twilight of his career, and his attraction toward his young leading man. Set against the backdrop of bullfighting in Spain, Welles boasted the complex screenplay he had written was his “best story.”
The project, once known as Sacred Beasts, would be retooled to eliminate the bullfighting aspect and ― with input from his companion and lead actress Oja Kodar ― evolve into The Other Side of the Wind. On the audio tapes, Welles said he wanted John Huston to star as the aging director in his final days.
What follows are Welles’ remarks to Bogdanovich taken from the expanded audiobook edition of This Is Orson Welles. They are not included in the print edition of the book.
I’ve got a story that I have worked on for many years. My story of the old director in his last days and I am crazy enough to do that in preference to anything else because it touched some kind of nerve with me.
He is all the big macho, hairy-chested fellows ― basically (John) Ford with some (John) Huston and (Ernest) Hemingway thrown in ― in his last summer following a bullfighter around Spain with a man who is making a movie about him, a man who is making a book about him, and LIFE who is making a picture about him; and everything is coming to an end…
Who should play (the director) is John Huston… I can do it, if I can’t get Huston, there’s nobody else but me – but it really should be Huston, saying “Listen kid…”
It’s terrible because he’s half queer. He’s discovered male actors all his life, and made five or six great male stars. His thing is that he has to go to bed with every girl that the male star goes to bed with, and then he has to finally destroy that male star. Oh, it’s the sickest story I’ve ever thought up in my life.
At the end, because the boy is a kind of Jimmy Dean character, it begins with this wrecked car, which they both got. At the end, the boy who he’s destroyed is put into a corrida (bullfight) and let the bulls taunt him and everything, the boy that he’s lost, he’s covered up like a mummy, with his pinada, and he’s in the car, and he says “C’mon, fatso. Wanna get in the car?”, because that’s what Jimmy Dean used to call George Stevens, because he hated him. “Are you chicken?” And you know that Dean is going off to kill himself in that car, but he gets in the car, because he has to show he’s a man. It’s a terrifying story… and complex, you don’t know where you are, it’s so complex… I have written four (screenplays).
You never see a bullfight in the story. You only see them in the bullring looking at the bull, and you never see a bull, and you never see a bullfighter except in his hotel room. It’s about the whole macho thing that I’m so fed up with, although I love it. I love Ford, and I think it’s a lot of shit that he punched (Henry) Fonda, and I love Hemingway, and all that shit… I love this man, and I hate him, and that’s what I think is so great about this story. I want (audiences) to love him, hate him and show him in all that.
The only thing against (Huston) in it (is) he doesn’t give the feeling of violence. Some of the scenes he can do much better than I can, but some I can do because you can believe I that would put my money on the mantel piece and fight the other fellow. There is something about Huston which is a little clerical. He’s like an unfrocked priest a little.
We’ll see, but it is my best story.
It has to be ad libbed. I have to take the cast away for six or eight weeks, tell them the story and talk with them – it’s a cast of only about six people – and then we go into the temporada, with three or four cameras, many of which show, because they’re making a movie about this man. You don’t know what’s the movie or not. They’re doing one of those portrait, Reichenbach things, and there’s someone like you, and a girl, like Candy Bergen…
And then right at the end, while they’re trying to bite off a piece of him, like they were with Hemingway at the end, when he was just a symbol and nothing else, and he knows it.
Then, there’s a terrible scene with the boy, who’s already been fired, and he has to be destroyed, and he has a dummy of the boy, to be destroyed in some awful way, and it doesn’t work at the beginning, and this truck is getting empty. There’ll be one shot of this truck with all the dummies of the boy that’s traveling around, and you keep seeing these dummies being set up and destroyed, and he doesn’t like it.
It’s terrifying ― and it’s right for now.
Bogdanovich would go on to co-star as a successful young film director opposite Huston in The Other Side of the Wind. He was asked by Welles to complete the movie in the event of his death.
Welles shot The Other Side of the Wind between 1970 and 1976. It remained unedited and unreleased until 2018 when it was completed for Netflix by Bogdanovich, producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall, and Academy Award winning editor Bob Murawski.
The movie, which will premiere at the Venice and Telluride film festivals during Labor Day weekend, will also have a theatrical release. It will be streamed to 125 million Netflix subscribers in 190 countries on November 2.
The Other Side of the Wind takes place at the 70th birthday party of maverick director J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (Huston), who is struggling to complete his comeback film during the rise of New Hollywood. Attending the party are successful young directors, like Brooks Otterlake (Bogdanovich), hangers-on and critics. Hannaford dies at the conclusion of the party. Welles’ movie recounts Hannaford’s final hours using a mix of 16mm and 35mm color and black-and-white film shot at the party, along with scenes from his unfinished movie, which stars Kodar and Bob Random.
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