WELLESNET MESSAGE BOARD

I just sent a private message to a member who may or may not still be watching the board, so I thought I:d post it here just in case anyone has some 2025 news on DQ:

As for DQ, it is, of course, the last major project of Welles's that remains to be reconstructed, and when Oja won against Mauro who then had to return all of his DQ footage to her, I think since that time she has had all of the DQ materials: Welles's, Mauro's, Suzanne Cloutier's, and all the footage collected by Patxi Irigoyen and Jesus Franco from around the worl for the 1992 debacle. But of course that 1992 version suffered from not having the material that Mauro had, especially the Party McCormick material which included the opening scene and the cinema scene. So, as you know, they added some documentary material Welles had shot for his 1964 documentary on Spain, and the dubbed voices were terribly done, the editing was awful, etc. etc.
But just recently, with the remarkable advances of AI, a proper reconstruction of DQ could, for the first time since Welles's death, be undertaken. An expert on DQ the novel would be necessary, a team assembled with knowledge of Welles's film version, a remarkable editor, lots of AI film reconstitution technology to even out the different film stocks used, and AI to create Welles's voice he used for DQ and Tamaroff's for Sancho.
Add some Spanish classical guitar music, foly some sound effects and creat credits, and the film could be successfully reconstructed, although all of this would cost several million dollars. Netflix spent $7 million on the 2018 Wind (which I consider almost as botched as the 92 DQ, and almost as unwatchable), and DQ needs a lot more work than that did, so who's going to come up with $10 or 15 million dollars for Welles's last film? I wish one of these tech billionaires were a Welles fan: these guys make 15 million an hour.
But the signs from the Oja camp habr not been promising. Oja, apparently having given up on the project and traumatized from her 1992 disaster, has given up on even raising the money to preserve the film on safety stock and/or digitizing it. In addition, she apparently hasgiven complete control of the DQ project to her nephew Sacha Welles (it's not clear why her nephew has the surname Welles) who, unsurprisingly with zero experience in film preservation/reconstruction, has accomplished absolutely nothin in the ensuing years.

So here we are, all these years, still hoping and wishing..

Another thing that handicapped the Jess Franco version was that the DQ footage that he was allowed to use was of very low quality. I can't think of a single shot in the film that looked like it was straight from the camera negative.

Welles appears to have chosen not to finish Don Quixote, so I don't think anyone else should either (is there even a completed script anywhere?). I would be curious to see what AI might do for the footage, though. A thorough, perhaps multi-part documentary would be the most logical, and respectful way to go.

Le Chiffre wrote: Thu Aug 21, 2025 1:28 pm Welles appears to have chosen not to finish Don Quixote, so I don't think anyone else should either (is there even a completed script anywhere?). I would be curious to see what AI might do for the footage, though. A thorough, perhaps multi-part documentary would be the most logical, and respectful way to go.

I was going to say much the same thing Le Chiffre. The lack of a screenplay, along with Welles ever-changing vision for the project makes any attempt at a "completion" an impossibility (in my own humble opinion). What we do not need is another assembly of footage claiming to be "Orson Welles' Don Quixote".

That is not to say the Quixote footage should just be left. It's preservation is vital and I believe it could be utilised to create something that is befitting of Orson's talents but respectful to his wishes as well. A documentary along the lines of It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles seems to me a far more suitable path for potential producers to take.

I think that years ago one option concerning the restoration of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND was a documentary concerning its making using extracts from the footage. Please correct me if I'm wrong here since I'm referring to memory.

Welles himself started talking about turning WIND into a film essay by the 1980s, though I think that was due to his concern that its subject matter was past its expiration date. In truth, its relevance was in question even by the time he finished shooting in 1976. As a treatise on the transition to New Hollywood , it would have been at its most potent around 1971. However, the fact that it took several more decades to be financed brought it full circle, giving it a time capsule quality that I think justified the decision that was ultimately made to follow the script.

Trying to complete DON QUIXOTE posthumously feels more sinful than WIND, because while the latter is a work of speculation, Welles seems to have blessed the idea of his collaborators finishing the movie on his behalf. One doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) view it as, strictly speaking, an Orson Welles movie, but I think it has a credible right to exist, especially with that upfront disclaimer, and we'd have been missing out on what proved to be a major and fascinating piece of work if the voices that said it was inappropriate had won out. By all accounts Welles wanted WIND completed and released, and it was logistical and legal issues that prevented it from happening at his own hands.

QUIXOTE was more personal, a garage movie, and he seems to have been happy to tinker with it indefinitely. (I'm not aware of any evidence that Welles consciously abandoned the project, though there may be quotes I'm unaware of.) There's no indication he wanted somebody else to take up that torch, which makes its completion a little more dubious a proposition. However, the existence of the notorious 1992 version means there's no sanctity left to protect, so it probably would be worth seeing a more tasteful reconstruction attempt, assuming all of the footage was available and worthier talents were given the creative authority. Wellesnet reported last December that the disparate elements were at least being catalogued, and I'll settle for that for now.

Not sure if this is news or not – can't remember where we were up to with DQ – but there was this quote from Jonathan Rosenbaum in an interview with Film International published early August:

... I do have some very good news to share. Catherine Benamou and I have convinced Oja Kodar to let a Spanish film archive, the one in Madrid, have Welles’ Don Quixote. Oja finally got all the footage back after a lot of lawsuits. I’m glad it will be preserved and am hopeful it will soon become possible to see. The best material, none of which is in the awful Jesús Franco version, tends to be the scenes with Patty McCormack. I haven’t seen everything, but from what I’ve seen, I think it’s a more important film than The Other Side of the Wind..."

Full interview (not much more on Welles) is here:
https://filmint.nu/jonathan-rosenbaum-i ... -monovich/:

That's wonderful news, it would be interesting to see this in a less butchered form. Though i wonder how possibly it could be edited in any more of a sensible way... interesting stuff

I saw a 40-minute assembly of scenes from DON QUIXOTE at the Pacific Film Archieve in Berkeley
of material from the Cinémathèque Française, put together by Costa-Gavras.
It was beautiful and lives up what Peter Bogdanovich told me in 1970
after viewing some version in Rome, that DON QUIXOTE is "Welles's
most Fordian film." Ford was Welles's favorite director, and they
share a lament for the inevitable passing of old traditions. That becomes
a major theme of Welles bringing Cervantes's character into
the modern world.

I don't want to derail the thread, but I'm a little bummed by the indication in that interview that Jonathan Rosenbaum has a settled into a fairly negative position on WIND seven years (how has it been that long?) after his more undecided first impressions. I take his point that there's an irony that such an unconventional movie should end up finished by a fairly "mainstream" post-production team, but I thought it ended up being a pretty successful marriage. It's not like what Welles shot could have ever been assembled into a conventional Hollywood movie anyway. It's probable he would have pushed the avant-garde nature of the editing even further, but the end result felt like a fairly well-intentioned attempt to extrapolate from what the workprint suggested. It is by definition not the movie Orson Welles would have made, but it still feels miraculous to me, and it has a ton of value even in its speculative form.

Anyway, here's hoping the preservation of the DON QUIXOTE elements sets the table for something that will do it justice. At the very least, there could be a great documentary in it. Anything to unseat the Jesús Franco massacre as the most public artifact of the project.