After a four-decade wait, The Other Side of the Wind will have its world premiere on Friday, August 31, at the 75th annual Venice Film Festival with press screenings the night before.
The festival posted today the official credits, descriptions and running times for Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind and director Morgan Neville’s companion documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead on its official website.
While more detailed information may be found in some cases on IMDb, the festival credits and synopsis make for interesting reading.
Note that some credits are listed in alphabetical order and may not accurately reflect the order they will appear on screen.
The Other Side of the Wind
Director: Orson Welles
Production: Royal Road Entertainment, Netflix
Running time: 122’
Language: English
Country: USA
Main cast: John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Robert Random, Susan Strasberg
Screenplay: Oja Kodar, Orson Welles
Cinematographer: Gary Graver
Editor: Bob Murawski, Orson Welles
Sound: Howard Chesley, Ronald G. Cogswell, Paul Deason, Luke Gibleon, Paul Hunt, Doc Kane, Anders Kwarnmark, Anna MacKenzie, Scott Millan
Special effects: Daphne Apellanes-Ackerson, Jeff Atherton, Lynwen Brennan, Patrick Brennan, Joe Ceballos, Graham Churchill, Rachel Galbraith, Angie Giuffre, Jonathan Harb, Chris Hawkinson, Frank Helbig, Geoff Heron, Tuan Ho
SYNOPSIS: In 1970, legendary director Orson Welles began filming what would ultimately be his final cinematic opus with a cast of luminaries that included John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg and Welles’s partner during his later years, Oja Kodar. Beset by financial issues, the production ultimately stretched to 1976 and soon gained industry-wide notoriety, never to be completed or released. More than a thousand reels of film languished in a Paris vault until March 2017, when producers Frank Marshall (who served as a production manager on Wind during in its initial shooting) and Filip Jan Rymsza spearheaded efforts to have Welles’s vision completed more than 30 years after his death. Featuring a new score by Oscar-winning composer Michel Legrand and assembled by a technical team including Oscar- winning editor Bob Murawski, The Other Side of the Wind tells the story of famed filmmaker J.J. “Jake” Hannaford, who returns to Hollywood after years in self-exile in Europe with plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie. A satire of the classic studio system as well as the new establishment who were shaking things up at the time, Welles’s final film is both a fascinating time capsule of a now-distant era in moviemaking as well as the long-awaited “new” work from an indisputable master of his craft.
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead
Director: Morgan Neville
Production: Tremolo Productions (Morgan Neville, Korelan Matteson, Josh Karp), Royal Road Entertainment
Running time: 98’
Language: English
Country: USA
Main cast: Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Orson Welles, Steve Ecclesine (and others)
Editor: Jason Zeldes, Aaron Wickenden
Music: Daniel Wohl
SYNOPSIS: This is the provocative story of the final fifteen years of life of legendary director Orson Welles. No longer the “wonder boy” of Citizen Kane, in 1970 he was an artist in exile looking for his Hollywood comeback with The Other Side of the Wind, a film about an aging film director trying to finish his last great movie. He shot the picture guerrilla-style in chaotic circumstances, with a devoted crew of young dreamers, all the while struggling with financiers and fate. In 1985 Welles died, leaving as his final testament the most famous unfinished film in movie history. The negative stayed in a vault for decades until now. With revelatory new insights from Welles collaborators – including Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall, Oja Kodar and Beatrice Welles – They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is the untold final chapter of one of the greatest careers in film history: brilliant, innovative, defiant and unbowed.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: Welles died on my 18th birthday. I was raised in a house of cineastes, where he was a holy name, and I remember feeling sadness that day when I should have felt joy. In the larger culture, however, Welles played a different role by the end of the 1970s. He was often seen as a has-been actor who did TV commercials and talk shows. That image has lingered. “What ever happened to Orson Welles?” is the common refrain. The answer is The Other Side of the Wind. He worked on this film throughout most of the 1970s, making a bold and daring effort to do what he had done before: reinvent cinema. I’d known Welles loved magic. What I didn’t expect was to be so inspired by his faith in the magic of cinema, even as he struggled to make a film that he could never finish. Orson burned and raved at the close of day. Gone was the sadness. I just felt joy.
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