By RAY KELLY
Answering “What’s up with The Other Side of the Wind?” has become ever more convoluted than explaining the plot of The Trial.
In his recent New Yorker article, The Shadow: 100 Years of Orson Welles, Alex Ross aptly summed it up: “In the world of Welles, nothing ever goes according to plan.”
Wellesnet has remained in regular contact with the parties involved. And, sadly, there is little news to report as talks to complete Welles’ unfinished film drag on.
Rights co-holder Oja Kodar’s representative, nephew Sasha Welles, told Wellesnet on Tuesday that an agreement on The Other Side of the Wind is still being negotiated, but declined to go into specifics. Likewise, producers will not discuss their contract offer, which observers say includes a $1.4 million payout for Kodar.
After 40-years, the unedited negative remains locked away in a film laboratory outside Paris. The film is owned by Kodar and producer Filip Jan Rymsza. The latter purchased the shares once held by Les Films de l’Astrophore and the late Mehdi Boushehri, the major investors in the film. Also having a say in its fate is Beatrice Welles, who manages her father’s Estate and had allied herself with producers in the recent campaign to complete the film.
Kodar’s relationship with producers soured months after an agreement was signed in October 2014 that would have given her $1 million in installments throughout the process. The producers could not immediately attract a suitable distributor to finance the film’s completion without first showing footage edited from the negative. Kodar would not release the negative without payment, so alternative funding methods were explored and obtained, leading to a $1 million lump sum offer to her last summer. By then, Kodar’s camp had grown unhappy with the delays and believed the producers had breached the contract by not creating and funding an escrow account by January 2015.
A new deal was drawn up and awaits approval of both sides.
Meanwhile, fans who contributed $406,405 to the producers’ crowdfunding campaign in July to help pay for the film’s eventual editing, are wondering what’s up. Some fans who have contacted Wellesnet have questioned the wisdom of their donation.
If The Other Side of the Wind was an unfinished Frank Capra movie, we could expect the magic of the holiday season to come through.
Still, if you spot the Jolly Old Elf at the shopping mall, it would not hurt to ask him to put a signed contract to complete and release The Other Side of the Wind under the Christmas tree this year.
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