With the kind permission of Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride Film Festival, and co-founder Tom Luddy, Wellesnet is delighted to present a 30-minute video of the panel discussion that accompanied the North American premiere of The Other Side of the Wind on September 1, 2018.
The panel features three original crew members who also played roles in the movie’s completion: Executive producer Peter Bogdanovich, who co-starred as Brooks Otterlake in the film; producer —and original production manager — Frank Marshall; and consultant Joseph McBride, who played film critic Mr. Pister in the movie. (Producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski were absent from Telluride having been at the Venice Film Festival for the screening there.) The Telluride panel was moderated by Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter, who was also a party guest in the movie and appeared in Welles’ unfinished Filming The Trial.
Frankly, we were unaware of the existence of this exceptional video until approached by McBride, who graciously arranged for a transcript of the Telluride panel talk as well.
The Telluride panel video serves as a companion to the remarks made at the premiere of The Other Side of the Wind at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2018 by Rymsza and Murawski, which can be seen in their entirety at https://youtu.be/5U7VtGoMIdc. An excerpt of the New York Film Festival presentation made by both producers, Bogdanovich and Murawski on September 29, 2018 can be viewed at https://youtu.be/vXRFfALLJWs
Transcript: The Other Side of the Wind — Telluride Film Festival — Introduction and panel discussion at North American premiere
Palm Theater, Telluride, Colorado, September 1, 2018.
With Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall, Joseph McBride, and moderator Todd McCarthy.
Introduction to the film
FRANK MARSHALL: Good morning, good morning all. Thank you for getting up early and getting a cup of coffee and joining us here at what is kind of an amazing moment for us. Forty-eight years ago, the three of us started this picture, and here we are today. I guess a labor of love you could call it. So I’m going to turn it over to Peter and Joe, just give you a brief introduction to the picture. But I’m kind of sad, because I won’t be able to get to say to Tom Luddy at the end of the festival this year, when he asks me, “When am I getting Orson’s movie?.” and I’ll say, “We’re going to get it next year.” We finally got it.
PETER BOGDANOVICH: I got a call from Orson in [August] 1970. He said, “What are you doing Thursday?” What? I said, “I’m going to Texas to shoot The Last Picture Show,” which he had read the script of. He referred to it as “a dirty picture.” He said, “When are you leaving?” I said Thursday. He said, “What time?” I said three o’clock. “Good, meet me at the airport at noon. You know where the planes fly low over the street?” I said yeah. He said, “Meet me there at noon.” I said, “Orson, what are we doing?” He said, “You’re shooting a dirty picture, so I’m shooting a dirty picture.” I said, “Oh really?” So I showed up, and that was the first scene we shot, that I shot, for The Other Side of the Wind [actually Bogdanovich had shot initial scenes a few days before]. I was playing a completely different character [from the one he plays in the finished film]. It’s a long story how I got to play the other part, which I’ll tell you afterward. But it is, as Frank said, quite amazing that this is finally here. And it is a kind of a dirty picture. I hope you enjoy it, thank you.
JOSEPH McBRIDE: Well, thank you to Frank and Peter. Peter was the guy who got me into the movie. He was recruiting young cineastes for the film and he recommended me to Orson because he thought I was funny, and I was writing notes on my hand, which I’m still doing. So he said to Orson, “Put Joe in the film.” So we did some shooting the first day and we thought the movie would be out a year later, and here we are. Orson gave an interview in 1966 where he talked about the filming and he said, “It’ll take six weeks, tops!” [Actually, he said in the Maysles Brothers’ filmed interview, Orson Welles in Spain, “It can’t take too long. I think that the whole thing is eight weeks at the most.”] But here we are forty-eight years later. But it’s the experience of a lifetime for all of us, so that’s why we all dedicated ourselves to it. So thank you for coming, and this is a big moment for everybody, including you and us. Thank you very much.
Panel discussion after the screening
TODD McCARTHY: You know, more than anything I would love to have a couple of hours and hear the opinions of every single person here about what they’ve seen, because it’s such a unique creation, the making of it was unique, everything about it was unique. And for people like us who were around at the time it means one thing, [but] for a lot of you who weren’t even born yet or were just born in the last twenty years it means something else. First I’d like to get the reactions of all the gentlemen here that were involved and have been involved in this thing for forty-five years and more, and just sitting here watching it with an audience, what did you feel just now? Frank?
MARSHALL: It’s sort of bittersweet. I kind of thought for a while it was going to be a lifelong project. But to see it in a big screen with the sound and everything, I never imagined we would be here. I’m thrilled to see it with an audience, and having it play as it did and to see the performances that are in there, it’s just kind of stunning.
McCARTHY: Peter?
BOGDANOVICH: It’s a very sad moment, actually. Not only Orson’s last movie, but it’s sort of like the end of everything. It comes across to me like the end of the world, you know. It’s a very sad movie. Orson made a lot of sad movies, actually, but his artistry was the antidote; it was almost as though he was saying that art is the only thing that can save us from the end. So anyway, it’s sad because Orson’s not here to see it — or maybe he is, but we can’t see him. Those of us who knew him well or knew him at all loved him, and he was like nobody else I’ve ever met.
McCARTHY: Thank you. Joe?
McBRIDE: Thanks, Todd. Todd was in the movie as well. You were around a few days there. It’s such a surreal experience to see it, as Frank was saying, you know, because [it began] forty-eight years ago, most of our lifetime, at least mine. I was thinking during the film, Finnegans Wake occurred to me, because Joyce spent thirteen years writing that book and he said he crammed everything in and he spent so long writing it so that all of us would have to spend the rest of our lifetimes reading that book to try to figure it out. I think this film, I’ve been trying to read it for forty-eight years. It’s such a dense, rich film. Very intelligible, I think. The reactions of the critics have been kind of predictable. They’re respectful, which is great, but they’re somewhat befuddled. One reviewer said Wellesians are going to spend years debating the quality of the film and what it’s about and all that, but I think Orson wanted us to have that experience. I mean, he packed so much into every film, and this is his testament about filmmaking and life. It’s a very rich film, so many meanings, but I’d love to hear what other people think too.
McCARTHY: One of the things that’s immediately striking about the film for anyone, it’s interesting how it dovetails a little bit with what Joe just said, you have certain expectations of a Welles film based on Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, and so on, the style is very, very individual, recognizable, and pronounced in those films. The Other Side of the Wind is so different from that style, and I’m curious about any of you, who spent so much time with Orson and watched him — and Orson was only fifty-five, he was not an old man when he started making this film. So I hate to think of it as an old man’s film, it really isn’t an old man’s film in that sense. To what do you attribute the drastic change in his style from those earlier black-and-white days to what we see here, which is similar to the style that he made up for F for Fake [1973], which is kind of overlapping when he made The Other Side of the Wind [1970-76]?
BOGDANOVICH: Well, he talked about that. We were talking one day about the difference in filmmaking, and he said he didn’t have the actors all of the time, he didn’t have them all there, he didn’t have the equipment that they had in Hollywood: the grips, the guys who move the dolly and cranes, all that stuff that you get in Hollywood. He didn’t have that in Europe. He also didn’t have the actors all at the same time, so he had to develop a new way of making the pictures, which was cutting. And he was brilliant at editing. He talked about a musical form, that editing is like music. He was brilliant at the editing, of course.
McBRIDE: I just finished up an interview for Criterion, a video interview about The Magnificent Ambersons [1942], which is my favorite film of all time, and I thought it was very surreal to be working on these two films at once. They’re both about ruination and destruction of a world, and then Ambersons was mutilated. This film [The Other Side of the Wind] was a miracle, that it survived forty-plus years in the lab, and we owe it to Frank and Peter and the whole crew, Ruth [Hasty, associate producer, present at the screening] and other people. Bob Murawski did a fantastic job of editing, the postproduction is a miracle. Frank did a wonderful documentary on it; Ryan Suffern directed [A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making]. Just the work involved and the sensitivity and the fidelity to Welles’s vision is remarkable, and all the technical feats that were needed to accomplish it. Building on what Peter said, Welles started a new style after Ambersons, he did It’s All True [1942] in South America, he didn’t have cranes, he didn’t have dollies, so he was using a lot of fragmentation and mixture of actors and nonactors, a mixture of color and black-and-white, so he had that style for the rest of his life.
MARSHALL: I’ll tag onto that as well. When I first started working on the movie, we had this character, Zarah Valeska, who was hosting the party, but she was never there. We were there in Carefree, and I kept saying, “Are we going to meet Lilli Palmer?” And Orson said, “No, no, it’s already done already.” And I go, What? And all of the scenes with Zarah are shot in Paris [and Spain], talking to John Huston, talking to the different characters. I’m just astounded even today that it all goes together, and it all works —
BOGDANOVICH: He kept it in his head.
MARSHALL: Yeah, he had it in his head. Then sort of as an homage, we left Orson in interviewing her as one of the cineastes.
McBRIDE: Playing a character called Fiona in the script, actually. I’d like to say a little more about the cast. I was a little disappointed the reviews didn’t praise the amazing cast enough. I mean, Peter is wonderful, John Huston wonderful, and then you have this great array of character actors — just oh man, these people! Edmond O’Brien, Susan Strasberg, and Tonio Selwart, who’s a revelation to me in this film. My favorite supporting character is Norman Foster. I just think he’s wonderful. Wow, what a guy, and what a performance! He’s like a Shakespearean clown with a tragic dimension, and it’s just a canvas of great people, some from Welles’s past and some newcomers that Peter rounded up and Frank rounded up and Gary Graver rounded up. I also want to praise Gary. This is such a tour de force of cinematography, it’s amazing, and when you see it — probably some of you have seen the battered work print that Gary and I were schlepping around trying to sell for years to people — everybody turned it down, except Showtime at one point was interested. Gary was the guy who believed in this film, gave his life literally to this film; the tragedy is that he’s not here to see it. But such a great job of cinematography all the way through, and it’s preserved so beautifully in this print.
BOGDANOVICH: I asked Orson once, “What would you say is the difference between doing a scene in one shot, all in one shot, or cutting it up into a lot of pieces?” He said, “Well, we used to say that was what separated the men from the boys.” But he had no choice with this — like you said, Lilli Palmer wasn’t even there! So from the time he started to shoot in Europe, which begins with Othello [1949-51], I guess, a little bit with It’s All True, but nobody ever saw that; he had to cut, there was no other way to do it.
McBRIDE: He said that whenever you see somebody from the back in one of his movies it meant it was a double, the real actor wasn’t there. In Chimes at Midnight, there’s a scene with eight actors; he said only one of them is the real actor, and the others have their backs to the camera. There’s a lot of that in this film, trickery. But he loved that magic of editing. But I think [in] this film, Bob Murawski’s editing — he should, if there’s any justice in this world, there would be a lot of Oscars for this film. But of course, Welles had a contempt for the Academy Awards. Gary, Bob, etc., and then the cast, John and Peter —
BOGDANOVICH: Huston is extraordinary. He’s demonic. And all the colors that he has, that stuff about God being a woman and all that, that’s all from Robert Graves, who was Orson’s favorite writer. It’s very interesting how he wrote that and had me say it, I didn’t know what I was saying! I hadn’t read Graves yet. I didn’t read Robert Graves until after he died.
McBRIDE: I think it’s a very contemporary film. One review said the sexual attitudes in the film are antediluvian: I think the guy totally missed the point. Welles is critiquing macho behavior all the way through the film, he’s attacking it, he’s attacking the Hemingway cult. He said I love Hemingway and I hate Hemingway, I love John Ford but I hate that he punched Henry Fonda, he sit was such shit. He said, I want to express my love and hatred for this kind of guy and hope the audience will have the same attitude. For people not to see that, and maybe it’s a sign of the times, but this film is kind of unexpectedly timely in the era of #Metoo, because John Huston’s character is like a poster boy for what’s wrong with male behavior. Welles was there forty-eight years ago, and stylistically it’s way ahead. Can you imagine if this came out in 1971? But maybe it’s coming out at the right time.
McCARTHY: All of us who met Welles, it was terrifying. If you’d never met him before, I mean you just don’t know what he’s going to do or say, accept you or whatever, but then at a certain point you get over that. I’m just wondering how did the three of you all enter, maybe not Orson’s orbit, but on this picture, how did you get involved in this film from the start? Maybe the short versions. There’s one view you have of Welles from the outside, and there’s another one you have once …
BOGDANOVICH: In 1961, I was asked to do a retrospective of Orson’s work at MOMA [the Museum of Modern Art] in New York. And I wrote the accompanying monograph. Orson wasn’t in New York, he was shooting a picture in Europe. And seven years later I get a call, I’m out in Los Angeles by then: “Hello, this is Orson Welles. I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to meet you.” I said, “Wait a minute, that’s my line. Why do you want to meet me?” “Because you have written the truest words ever published about me — in English.” And he invited me to have a drink with him the next day. So I went up and met him at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and we had a drink. Within two hours I felt I could say anything to him, I felt I’d known him all my life. We were very close, and it was amazing. So I had the temerity to say, “You know, there’s only film of yours that I’m not really that fond of.” “Which one?” “The Trial [1962].” And he said, “I don’t either!” So I thought, “Wow, we’re really close.” About six months later I said something about The Trial, something slightly derogatory, and he said, “I’d wish you’d stop saying that.” I said, “I thought you didn’t like it either?” He said, “No, I just said that to please you. I like it very much. I think it’s one of my best films. But every time you denigrate it, you diminish my small treasure.” “Oh shit, Orson, I’m sorry.” “That’s all right.” So then we were in Paris about a year later, and he said, “They’re playing that picture you hate, do you want to go?” I said sure. Anyway, that was the beginning of our relationship.
How I got the part in this picture: He was shooting with Rich Little in Carefree [Arizona], and I called him and said, “How’s it going?” He said, “Terrible.” I said, “What do you mean?” “I just had to let Rich Little go, and it cost me 25g’s, and I don’t have that kind of bread.” I said, “That’s terrible, you mean you have to reshoot his stuff?” “Yes, everything, I can’t use any of it.” “Why not?” “He can’t act!” “Jeez, Orson, that’s terrible, what are you going to do?” “I don’t know.” “Why don’t I play it?” There was a long pause: “It never occurred to me.” It never occurred to you? The guy’s had three hits in a row and does impressions, it never occurred to you? That was me. you know, I had three hits in a row and I did impressions. He said, “But you’re playing that other part.” I was playing this other part, kind of a Jerry Lewis imitation of a cineaste. [In a Jerry voice:] “Do you think the cinema is a phallus?” [Bogdanovich’s version of that line can be heard in an outtake in the documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, but McBride’s version of the line from the first day of shooting is in The Other Side of the Wind.] I said, “You can get anybody to do it, you don’t need that part, it’s just another cineaste.” He said, “Well, of course, you could be wonderful in it, would you do it?” I said, “Sure.” “When can you get here?” I said, “Tomorrow.” He said, “All right.” That’s how I got the part.
McBRIDE: I got my part through Peter. I came to Hollywood [in August 1970], I was only twenty-three. I actually — you might find this amusing — I had long hair and a beard at the time, and I cut them off because I was coming out to interview John Ford, who was my favorite director, and I was writing a book about him [with Michael Wilmington, the critical study John Ford, published in 1974]. It turned out to be his last interview; he retired in the middle of our interview. I hope I didn’t provoke him into that. So I thought maybe Duke Wayne would walk in, so I better have short hair. Actually, I found out later John Wayne said, “I never minded guys with long hair because I had long hair in Westerns all those years.” But anyway, I was meeting one of the role models for the film. And I called Peter, whose work I admired because of his criticism, I was trying to emulate that, but I also loved Targets [the 1968 feature Bogdanovich directed], which Frank worked on too. A great film. Anyway, so I called him [Bogdanovich], and he said, “I’m on the other line with Orson.” I was surprised, because I thought Orson was in Europe, and I just finished writing my [first] book about him [the critical study Orson Welles, published in 1972; revised and expanded in 1996]. Peter got back and said, “Orson would like you to call him.” I called Orson the next day, and the first thing he said was, “We’re about to start shooting a film. Would you like to be in it?” I was stunned because he was Orson Welles, but I had never acted, unless you count being an altar boy for years — it’s a form of acting, but it’s like a Robert Bresson movie, because you have your back to the audience and you speak in monotone and you speak Latin and you don’t have any inflections and you can’t change the lines.
With Welles it was very different. He wanted this to be an experiment where he wanted the actors to contribute to their parts, and we all play kind of exaggerated versions of ourselves. We’re not literally playing ourselves. Welles once said, I heard him say [that] when he came to Hollywood he wanted to be the American Charles Dickens. That was his ambition. He thought of Dickens as the archetypal popular artist, and you see a Dickensian tone in the caricatures, but they have sudden emotional reality in midst of the comic thing. Welles allowed me to write my lines with him, and he did that I think with a lot of the actors too [actually only a few, despite his original intention], so it was a very creative experience. It went on for six years. It was one day of story for six years, and I aged five years in the making of it. It was hard to keep in character, but I did it.
BOGDANOVICH: I told Orson that I’d met a young critic who took notes on his hand.
McBRIDE [displaying his hand to the audience]: Still doing it.
BOGDANOVICH: And his arm. Orson said, “He writes on his arm and his hand?” I said, “Yeah.” “I got to meet him.” That’s how he met him.
McBRIDE: Thank you, Peter.
McCARTHY: Obviously, I wasn’t there but the one affiliated story to that, in terms of getting to work with Orson, was Gary Graver, who was a good friend of mine as well as Joe’s, the cinematographer. He was in Hollywood and he called up the Beverly Hills Hotel; Orson is there. So Gary called him up out of the blue and he’d just been an Army cinematographer [actually with the U.S. Navy in the Vietnam War] for a while, and said, “I would love to work for you.” Orson immediately said, “You’re hired, because the only other cinematographer that ever called me cold like this and said he wanted to work with me was Gregg Toland.” He did Citizen Kane. So that collaboration worked out very well too.
McBRIDE: He thought that was a good omen. Gary made it possible. Gary said, “I can shoot a film for you for ten thousand dollars.” The crew were all nineteen-year-old people, mostly young guys, few women, but they worked eighteen hours a day. Some of them quit, they couldn’t take it, but Orson worked eighteen hours a day, it was exhausting. But every day my face hurt when I came home, because I laughed so much. He was so much fun, he was constantly telling jokes and telling stories, and his laughter was so infectious.
BOGDANOVICH: Yeah, he had the greatest laugh. He was wonderful with the actors; he was less wonderful with the crew. I remember one time we were shooting about three o’clock in the afternoon, Frank was working on the picture, and he comes over to Orson [and] he says, “Orson, the crew’s been here since seven, and it’s three o’clock. Don’t you think we should send them to lunch?” Orson said [petulant voice], “All right, if the crew has to eat, let them go to lunch. I’m not hungry.” Frank said, “Well, they have been here —” “All right! Let them go to lunch! I’m not hungry!” I said, “I’m not hungry either.” “Fine! Peter and I will stay here while the crew goes to lunch.” So everybody left. So Orson and I talked for about five minutes, and then he turns to me and says, “Are you hungry? Because I’m absolutely starving!” We went into the kitchen, and on top of the refrigerator there was this gigantic, I would say industrial-size bag of Fritos, and Orson ripped off the top, poured most of the stuff out onto the kitchen table, and sat down, took a huge handful and put it in his mouth. I did the same. So we’re sitting looking opposite each other, both chewing. And Orson says, “You know, you don’t gain weight if nobody sees you eating.”
McBRIDE: One of the wonderful scenes in the film, I’d never seen it until I saw it [all] put together, it’s a speech Tonio Selwart gives at the drive-in [as The Baron] about how you have to find “good soldiers” [for a director to make a film]. And there’s a beautiful shot of Billy [Norman Foster] running with the cans of film, it’s so touching. The reason [Welles] did that, he’d fired the whole crew, they were shooting until four in the morning and they had two hours of cleanup, and then Orson wanted them back at noon. Gary came to him and reluctantly said, “Can we have a two o’clock call? These guys need some sleep.” Orson exploded and fired everybody and said, “I can’t work in this atmosphere with everybody against me! I’m going to Europe!” So like four days later, they started shooting again, and nobody said anything. He wrote that speech, [production associate] Lou Race said, as “Orson’s tribute to the little people” — [his] tribute to the crew, kind of in contrition for what he had done. As Peter said, he was tough on the crew, he was a hard taskmaster, he expected perfection. Gary worked like a maniac. [Welles] was loving with the actors, he felt the actors were the most important people in the film — except for me, he bullied me for three years until I started relaxing; he wanted to get me in character. But he was so wonderful — to watch him working with these older actors was just great. And to sit around talking to these people between takes, because there’s so much down time on a film, to ask Edmond O’Brien about Hollywood, and Mercedes McCambridge, all these wonderful people. It was just something. And Paul Stewart, who was in Citizen Kane.
BOGDANOVICH: I think, Frank, didn’t he fire you about ten times?
MARSHALL: He fired me every other day, just about. We all knew he was kidding. It was just wonderful, it was so much fun to be there, I think it’s one of the things that we all cherish. The memories of being with him and his sense of humor, incredible sense of humor, and it was just a joy to be there working every day, and we worked twenty hours a day.
BOGDANOVICH: Oh yeah.
McBRIDE: That’s something that’s never captured in any of the films about Orson, except for Me and Orson Welles [2008]. Most of them portray him as this dour, dictatorial [figure]; he wasn’t like that, he was fun. He believed in entertaining people, he told funny stories, he would burst into song from an old play [Finesse the Queen by Roger Hill and Carl Hendrickson] that he did at Todd School back in the ’20s every once in a while. He was very entertaining, he was like a big party. They don’t capture that in movies about him.
BOGDANOVICH: I just loved him. He was like nobody you’d ever met. The last scene with Huston that I have in the car when I say, “Our revels now are ended” — that wasn’t with Huston, Huston wasn’t there. I played it with Orson. He said to me, his direction to me on that scene was: “It’s us.” It’s very touching to me to see that scene, and I remember that direction was brilliant. But Orson was like nobody you’d ever met. He was funny and he was complicated, and you were never bored with Orson, that’s for sure.
McCARTHY: For everyone here who might not know, there’s two documentaries, films coming at it from different angles [They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and A Final Cut for Orson] which are at the festival, very worth seeing. There’s a book which was written three years ago about the making of the film [Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of “The Other Side of the Wind” by Josh Karp], and there will be many more, I think, commentaries about it coming up. So there’s a lot of sources you can look at for the whole background, and what it took all these years to go through. We really appreciate you coming out and being the first [American] audience to see this film.
MARSHALL: I have one last thing — our documentary that is about the finishing of the movie [A Final Cut for Orson] is at 2:30, and 9 a.m. tomorrow, at the Backlot [Theater]. So thank you for coming, everybody, we’ll see you soon.
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