By RAY KELLY
The saga of The Other Side of the Wind – one of Hollywood’s most legendary unfinished films – has provided grist for film scholars and authors for decades: Why wasn’t it completed? Who’s to blame? Will it rot away in a French lab?
Now there is something new to ponder – What will a “new” Orson Welles’ movie mean to his legacy.
Producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall, working with executive producer Peter Bogdanovich, will complete the movie as Welles intended in 1976 using his detailed notes, scripts and the 41 minutes of footage he had edited himself. The materials are being scanned by Technicolor in Hollywood and a team is being assembled to complete the task. The finished film will be streamed to 93 million Netflix subscribers in 190 countries, making it the widest release ever of a Welles movie.
Todd Tarbox, who wrote Orson Welles And Roger Hill: A Friendship In Three Acts, noted that his grandfather Roger “Skipper” Hill and Welles had talked about several planned projects and unfinished films, including The Other Side of the Wind on the night Welles died. The late director had remarked to his longtime friend, “Like a tenacious bulldog, I continue to fight the good fight to find the money to complete a few of my films…”
James Naremore, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles, said he had begun to fear the fight would never end and “The Other Side of the Wind would never be seen by the general public – there were just too many rumors and announcements and funding campaigns that seemed to end in nothing.”
“The news that a 4K version will soon appear and that Netflix is going to distribute it is cause for celebration among all of us who admire Welles’s work and the cinema in general,” Naremore said. “I hesitate to predict how it will be received at this late date. Welles himself feared that it might seem dated by the time it appeared, because it’s so full of inside references to ’70s Hollywood and a particular period of film style. At one point he considered the idea of making a documentary about it. I only know I eagerly look forward to it, as do other Wellesians. Where will it fit in the Welles canon? I won’t even hazard a guess. People will be discussing that for years to come. Now if we only had Don Quixote!”
Film historian Joseph McBride, who has penned three books on Welles, is one of the few film scholars who can boast an intimate knowledge of The Other Side of the Wind. He was cast by Welles on the first day of shooting in August 1970 and remained with it until principal photography wrapped in 1976. Further, he labored with Welles’ late cameraman, Gary Graver, to broker a deal to complete the movie in the 1990s.
In a recent reflection written for Wellesnet, McBride said, in part, “The completed work will be a labor of love by members of VISTOW (Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles), past and present, to present the film as we think it might have been intended by Welles, not as as a ‘director’s cut.’ When some people argued that we should leave the film unfinished, or simply use the footage he edited as the centerpiece of a documentary about the making of the film, I argued to the contrary. Welles put so much of his life and passion into The Other Side of the Wind and shot virtually all of it … that it would have been a tragedy to leave it unfinished, rotting away in a laboratory or sitting in an archive for only scholars to ponder.”
Although more than 40 years has passed since principal photography wrapped, Matthew Asprey Gear, author of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City,” said he believed that a “posthumously finished version of the film will surprise audiences – thrill some, puzzle others, and raise a whole lot of controversial questions.”
“The prospect of a never-before-seen Orson Welles film is as exciting as ever. His stature in the history of filmmaking has never been greater, and this major piece of the puzzle has been a largely unknown quantity for too long,” Gear said. “After all, we can now listen to assemblies of legendary unfinished albums like Brian Wilson’s Smile and Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. We can read editions of Kafka’s Trial and Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. Shouldn’t we be able to watch a full-length version of The Other Side of the Wind that will (at the very least) give us a better idea of what Welles was working on for all those years?”
Other authors feared that editors will find it too difficult to replicate what Welles intended, despite the edited footage, scripts and notes he left behind.
“The material is in parts magnificent, in other parts of it baffling, and altogether in need of huge creative input to make it cohere,” Welles biographer Simon Callow said. “It will be fascinating to see what these very gifted gentlemen make of it, but whether it can then be described as Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind remains to be seen, given Welles’s very well attested radical rearrangement of material in the cutting room, any more than completions (of which there are many) of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony can really be regarded as Schubert’s.”
(Note: While Welles finished principal photography on his work, Schubert wrote just two movements for his Symphony No. 8, prompting many composers to complete its unwritten second half.)
Esteve Riambau, author of three books on Welles and director of the FilmoTeca de Catalunya in Barcelona, said that while he is enthusiastic about the current effort, the shadow cast by Jess Franco’s critically lambasted Don Quijote de Orson Welles in 1992 “is too big to forget.”
“There is the impossibility of replacing Welles’ editing style. Knowing that only 40 minutes were edited by Welles himself, I hope that the ‘reconstructed’ version will not fall in the temptation to be released as a ‘finished’ film as Welles planned to do it…. And a documentary about the life and times of the film, since it was first conceived as The Sacred Monsters to be shot in Spain, should be a great story. I’m very curious about the reception of this film, very specifically linked to the New American Cinema’s style of the ’70s. A great surprise in the context of Welles’ career.”
The Other Side of the Wind centers on veteran director Jake Hannaford (played by the late John Huston), struggling to make his comeback film in the New Hollywood era.
Chris Welles Feder, who penned In My Father’s Shadow, said she was “very curious to see the release,” but lamented that her father’s unavoidable absence: “He created his films in the editing room, and his often spontaneous decisions were his alone.” Her step-sister, Beatrice Welles, who is an executive producer on the movie, said she was happy the “ordeal” of reaching an agreement was over and editing could finally begin. “My father never gave up on any movie.”
No author has probed the film with the depth demonstrated by Josh Karp. His Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind chronicled the 1970s shoot and the attempts to complete it in the decades that followed.
Karp’s book painted a portrait in dedication, not only by Welles and his devoted crew, but by those who fought for its completion in the decades since the director’s death in October 1985.
“I remember crew member Mike Stringer explaining to me that you had to work on this film for the right reasons. Nobody did it for the money or acclaim. People did it because they cared about movies and understood how important it was to support Orson and his project. And almost everyone I spoke with told me how intoxicating it was to work on that film and to be around Orson while he created. That was the reason to be there and those who were on the film for any length of time were unbelievably dedicated to Orson and knew what it meant for him to be making a movie,” Karp said.
He added, “Frank and Filip have shown the same determination in working to get this project out of the lab and onto the screen. Both have been involved in this for years now and have untangled and resolved issues that made this movie seem almost impossible to complete in the thirty-two years since Orson’s death. Many incredible people have tried to make this project happen and some got close, but something always got in the way. The fact that Frank and Filip have hung in there and gone over, through or around what must have been many obstacles is a demonstration of how dedicated they are not only to the film, but also to Orson Welles and his legacy.”
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