By RAY KELLY
It has been a year since a deal to complete Orson Welles’ long-unfinished The Other Side of the Wind was trumpeted on the front page of The New York Times.
It was exciting news that Welles fans had longed for decades to hear – but a year later editing has yet to begin.
Oja Kodar, Welles’ companion and a rights holder of The Other Side of the Wind, has had misgivings with the deal she signed in October 2014, prompting delays and continued talks. A revised proposal submitted by producers in late summer resulted in further legal wranglings. But negotiations have been continuing, leading to guarded hope that a deal could be reached to release the film.
Kodar’s nephew and representative, Sasha Welles, declined to detail the latest offer with Wellesnet, though Peter Bogdanovich revealed at a Chapman University appearance six weeks ago that Kodar’s original $1 million payout had jumped to $1.4 million under the terms of the new offer.
The original deal hit a snag a few months after producers Filip Jan Rymsza, Frank Marshall and Jens Koethner Kaul reached an agreement with Kodar last October. The producers could not attract a suitable distributor to finance the film’s completion without first showing footage edited from the 40-year-old negative, which remains in storage at a film laboratory outside Paris. Kodar would not release the negative without payment, so alternative funding efforts were explored and eventually obtained, leading to a lump sum payment of $1 million being offered to her in July. Unfortunately, Kodar had grown unhappy with the delays, and her relationship with the producers turned frosty, according to multiple sources close to her.
Without access to the Paris negative, work has not commenced on the film’s completion.
“We have never agreed to release the negative unless certain demands are met, the producer never met them, as a matter of fact, they breached our contract from October 2014 in January 2015,” Sasha Welles wrote in an exchange of emails with Wellesnet. “The October 2014 agreement was automatically null and void when producers failed to deposit finances and create an escrow by the date agreed in the contract.”
He added, “Since then until present we have not reached another agreement. We are not looking to ‘renegotiate,’ our demands have been known and (the) same for some time now.”
Rymsza has purchased the stakes in The Other Side of the Wind once held by Les Films de l’Astrophore and the family of the late Mehdi Boushehri, making Rymsza a co-owner of the unfinished film. Beatrice Welles, who manages her father’s Estate, will reportedly receive a fraction of what has been offered to Kodar, yet her relationship with the producers remains solid despite the delays. Once considered an obstacle to the film’s completion, she has publicly championed its release.
The present situation leaves open questions about Kodar’s motivations.
In Joseph McBride’s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career and Josh Karp’s Orson Welles’s Last Movie, numerous individuals (investors, attorneys, executives and others) who have been involved with the project since the late 1990s all told a variation on the same tale in which Kodar derailed attempts to complete the film by reneging on agreements; pitting investors against each other; secretly shopping for better deals and shifting her allegiances at critical junctures.
If the current deal falters, it will do nothing to erase the unflattering portrait painted of Kodar in those two books.
Still, it is quite possible that with talks continuing, a deal may soon be reached to get the negative out of the lab and the film finally into theaters. The suspense continues for those who want that to happen.
As for the producers’ position, they have remained characteristically tight-lipped as negotiations continue.
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