Italian film scholar Massimiliano Studer in a new academic essay has analyzed and connected various versions of the script for Orson Welles’ last major work, The Other Side of the Wind.
Shot between 1970 and 1976, the film was completed in 2018 for Netflix by Peter Bogdanovich, producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski. Several versions of the script Welles co-wrote with collaborator Oja Kodar between the spring of 1971 and fall of 1974 are in collections in Spain, Italy and the United States.
Studer is the author of two books on the late filmmaker: Orson Welles and the New Hollywood: The Case for The Other Side of the Wind and At the Origins of Citizen Kane. Too Much Johnson: Orson Welles’ Lost Movie.
He has spent the past three years tracking down the scripts and analyzing the writing.
Studer has published Lo Stemma codicum della sceneggiatura di The Other Side of the Wind: l’opera incompiuta di Orson Welles. The English translation is The Stemma Codicum (Family Tree) of The Other Side of the Wind Screenplay: Orson Welles’ Unfinished Work. It is currently available only in Italian.
In an English translation the abstract provided to Wellesnet, Studer wrote: “This study aims to fill, as far as possible, a research gap relating to one of Orson Welles’ unfinished films, The Other Side of the Wind. Thanks to a structured and in-depth analysis of various Wellesian archives, both European and North American, it was possible to consult and compare a substantial quantity of screenplay drafts, written by Orson Welles over several years, between April 1971 and September 1974. A comparison that made it possible to draw up the Stemma codicum (in philology, a stemma codicum [“genealogical tree of codices”] is the graphic representation, in branched form, of the path that leads from the archetype to the witnesses of a text) of the screenplay for The Other Side of the Wind.
Financial and political challenges prevented Welles from editing the footage he shot in the 1970s before his death in 1985.
During the production, Welles asked Bogdanovich, who co-starred in the film and co-authored a book with Welles, to complete the movie in the event of his death.
Following its release, The Other Side of the Wind found a spot on nearly four dozen Best of 2018 year-end lists, including Sight & Sound, The Hollywood Reporter, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair.
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