Editor’s note: Woodstock organizer Michael Dawson says the TOSOTW workprint was not screened as part of the festival. Audience members tell Wellesnet some 40 minutes of footage with title cards were shown at what was described as a private screening for 30 ore so people on the final day of the centennial celebration.
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Orson Welles’ still-unfinished The Other Side of the Wind was turning heads Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival in France and at the close of the centennial celebration in Woodstock, Illinois.
The Washington Post reporting from Cannes noted the showings of two new Welles documentaries and three of his finest films before adding “the buzziest Welles project here isn’t being screened.”
TOSOTW producer Filip Jan Rymsza, who is lobbying for support in Cannes, spoke with the newspaper about the efforts to complete Welles’ final movie.
“This was a six-year journey to unite the rights, to get all parties on the same page in terms of approach to the material and now the process has shifted to finding a way to do this in keeping with the way that Orson would have gone about it, which is to retain as much control as we can,” Rymsza said.
The Indiegogo drive to raise $2 million to finance the completion got a much-needed plug in The Washington Post report.
Meanwhile, a bootlegged video dub of Welles’ 42-minute workprint 0f The Other Side of the Wind got a surprise showing at the close of Welles centennial celebration in his adopted hometown of Woodstock.
Centennial festival organizer Michael Dawson used the workprint screening at the Waverely House to make an appeal for the Indiegogo drive, which has raised $223,000 so far.
Earlier in the day, The Other Side of the Wind cast and crew members Joseph McBride, Larry Jackson and Mike Ferris spoke about the filming of the 1970s movie in a panel discussion headed by Josh Karp, author of Orson Welles’s Last Movie. Noted Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum also took part.
The Woodstock celebration spanned three weekends in May.
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