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Peter Bogdanovich: “Showtime has greenlit work to finish Welles’ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND”

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Craig Weinstein and Drew Reiber, two Wellesnet correspondents in Florida wrote to report that Peter Bogdanovich appeared at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando last night (March 30th) and announced that Showtime's long simmering deal to finance the completion of The Other Side of the Wind has finally been consummated.

Apparently the contract was as good as signed, and while on the surface, this is very good news, as with anything pertaining to The Other Side of the Wind, there are many obstacles that still may appear. However, there is little doubt that this is a giant step forward in getting the film completed.

As Bogdanovich told Weinstein and Reiber, "We now have a lot of work ahead of us."  That work will begin with taking inventory of all the footage that has been locked away in film vaults for over 30 years.

Bogdanovich's plan is to attempt to assemble the footage as closely to Welles original vision as is possible. He outlined his approach in the Searching For Orson documentary:

BOGDANOVICH: This is Orson Welles only unrealized film project that could possibly be completed without the great man himself. There are many arguments to support this hope. But my goal would be to work with everybody who worked on the picture, Oja Kodar, and anybody who was around a lot. Frank Marshall was there for quite a while, so I would ask them what they all remember, and we would all pool are memories of what Orson had in mind. The idea would be to try and get as close as we can to what Orson had in mind, following the script and following notes that he made, and things he said to Oja about writing the script, and things he might have said to me. There's a certain rhythm (in the film) that he obviously had in mind, and we'd try to get to that kind of rhythm, depending on the scene and also depending on the things we know about Orson.

(more...)

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Joseph McBride and Peter Bogdanovich on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Monday, February 5th, 2007

The new issue of Gary Morris's Bright Lights online film magazine has a terrific interview with Joe McBride and Peter Bogdanovich, by Damien Love, about their work on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. It can be accessed here:  

http://brightlightsfilm.com/55/windiv.htm 

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OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Script Excerpt

Here is a brilliant piece of writing from Welles's script, which contains numerous in-jokes.  Just the fact that Welles calls all the guests at the party taking place at Jake's ranch house  "Citizens" would seem to be enough reason to finish the film.

But the naysayers, led by David Thomson, say it's not a Welles' masterpiece. Well, maybe it's not, but having read the script, I say it is a masterpiece... of screenwriting acumen, if nothing else, and it could still possibly be one of Welles greatest works, if it were finished properly. 

As evidence, I submit this script excerpt.  At the very least, there are fabulous performances from John Huston and Lilli Palmer.  I'd rather see even a very rough version of an unfinished Orson Welles film, than any of the the crappy movies Hollywood is willing to lavish 10 to 100 million on these days... it's really a sad comment when $4 million can't be found to finish this film. Even if it were $10 million, there is absolutely no excuse for this situation. 

 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND - Script Excerpt

________________ 

 

THE SIDE TERRACE - JAKE'S RANCH HOUSE 
A minority group of well-established Hollywood citizens.

FIRST CITIZEN

(winding up a little speech) ...Screen Director’s Guild waiting around on their tired old asses for the phone to ring. His ass is tired too, but he don’t sit on it. Jake gets out and HUSTLES.   SECOND CITIZEN Sure – just to keep up all of this...  THIRD CITIZEN
Who says he’s keeping it up? I hear he’s
in trouble...
 
FOURTH CITIZEN 
Look at the dictators... Symphony conductor – look at THEM. Power – that’s then answer.
You don’t keep going just by playing GOLF.
Get a country under you, or a whole orchestra – that charges up the old batteries...
 
He stops – catching sight of JAKE, who has come up behind them, drink in hand...
 
FOURTH CITIZEN
(continuing, to Jake)
How about it?
 
JAKE
(a sardonic lifting
of one eye-brow)
Give me an orchestra and we’ll see...
 
JACK SIMON
(who has been lurking in
the background)
And go on playing the same old piece?
 
JAKE
(with perfect serenity)
Nice to see you, kid.
 
JAKE smiles sweetly at him.
 
THE BARON
We do chug along a little, Mr. Simon,
with the times...
 
JACK SIMON
Which times? – and who are YOU?
 
THE BARON
There never was an artist yet who didn’t
work from memory.
 
JAKE
The Baron is in charge of metaphysics.
 
ABE VOGEL
(turning on Simon)
And who got HIM an invitation?
 
JAKE
“Confrontation” is the word, Abie. Take
it up with our hostess.
 
ABE VOGEL
Zarah? She must be nuts.  (more...)

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David Thomson vs. Wellesnet

Tuesday, November 14th, 2006

David Thomson mentions the recent conversation I had with him in a San Francisco bookstore (about The Other Side of the Wind) in his Nov 7th piece appearing in The Guardian. In it, he argues for cutting back on the glut of film festivals so we don't have to make all those demanding choices about which movies we can now actually see, instead of merely reading about.   

Since his argument seems to be at the heart of why he doesn't ever want The Other Side of the Wind to be shown, here are the last two paragraphs of the article, followed by our conversation regarding The Other Side of the Wind.  Mr. Thomson states that we should let OSOTW linger a while, and that I am desperate to see it.  Well, he's quite right. After waiting 30 years, I am a bit desperate to see it completed.  But here's a final question for Mr. Thomson: Don't you think waiting 30 years is quite enough lingering?  

Our conversation below begins with a brief exchange about who is actually today's highest paid actress, Julia Roberts or Nicole Kidman.  

__________________

Let us not see it all
 
As film festivals grow in number and size, the thrill of discovering a rare gem diminishes
 
By David Thomson
 
Tuesday November 7, 2006 - The Guardian
_____________________________________
 
What has availability done? It has killed a lot of the passion and the fun. If you doubt that, talk to a few people who recall the 60s and 70s and who sometimes passed years of their lives waiting for the chance to see some rare movie. The cinema is founded in desire - and desire does not do well when granted immediate and multiple satisfaction. Now that people can see nearly anything, their eagerness relaxes.
 
I had a conversation recently with a young film buff who was desperate to see Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind. This is a picture left in the untidiness of Welles's estate, not quite finished. In the years since, efforts have come close to completing it. I argue that it should be left to linger a while. Let there be some films we are denied. Let desire build. And it is in the same spirit that I urge a moratorium on festivals, a Cromwellian meanness about them. It's the only way we'll rediscover the heady fun of Restoration.   

(more...)

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Susan Strasberg & John Huston on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Monday, September 4th, 2006


Here's a very nice piece on OSOTW featuring comments from John Huston, Susan Strasberg and Gary Graver, written for the March, 1976 issue of AFTER DARK, a New York based magazine that billed itself as "The National Magazine of Entertainment." 

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ORSON WELLES AND FIVE YEARS OF

"THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND"  

By VIOLA HEGYI SWISHER -  AFTER DARK -  March,  1976  
 
 
Orson Welles' upcoming new film. The Other Side of the Wind, is already five exciting years old. Parts of it, anyhow. It stars not only stars, but stellar directors, too. Nevertheless, all's Welles. He wrote it. Produced it. Directed it. Masterminded the lighting. The cinematography. He even worked the clapboard that snaps out the number of the scene about to be shot and chalks up whether it's Take One—or Take Twenty. The only thing he didn't do in The Other Side of the Wind is act. And who knows? He may have done that too by now.
 
Welles assigned roles with prodigal unpredictability, in some cases casting to type, in others casting against type. John Huston was typecast. Susan Strasberg, definitely not. Huston slips naturally into the role of a big-time director because, of course, that's what he is. His own most recent distinguished directorial achievement is The Man Who Would Be King, which stars Christopher Plummer, Sean Connery, and Michael Caine. Director Huston bypassed actor Huston for King. However, it should be noted that in Wind he enacts with authority the role of director not because he is a director, but because he is an authoritative actor.
 
As to Welles' other manner of casting—against type—there's diminutive Susan Strasberg. She combines a flair for feminine chic dramatically interwoven with the fiber of our unisex times and the delicate sensitivity of an instinctual psychic. With all these subtleties going. Susan plays a callous critic. And you know how they are! Citing their separate experiences with Welles, Huston and Strasberg, at different times and different places, arrived at parallel conclusions. The most restrained remark Huston made was a vibrant, "Orson's a rich and varied creative talent."  
 
Her hands painting space-sketches as she described Welles' juxtaposing of 35mm color and blown-up 16mm black-and-white techniques, Susan put it this way: "His concept is brilliant." Clearly, this motion picture, with its film-within-a-film idea and image, can be a new experience for audiences as it was for the participants. "Only Orson could have done this picture."
 
John Huston, with an air of finality, puffed life into one of those huge, expense-be-damned cigars. Grizzled, gracious as he beamed his personal mid-morning salute to Welles, Huston greeted the California sunshine with matching warmth. All pale gold and green, the canyon outside was only minimally tamed to accommodate the spacious dwelling in an apparent wilderness not far from the Pacific Ocean. Inside the house, pre-Columbian art, modern paintings, books—classic and contemporary—and the memorabilia of the illustrious gave special distinction to the living room of Huston's home away from home in Ireland.

(more...)

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Mercedes McCambridge on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Sunday, September 3rd, 2006

One of the saddest things to realize about Orson Welles late career was the lack of support he received not only from studios, but from the "bankable major stars."  Part of the reason he couldn't launch a movie during the eighties was because most top actors, like Redford, Nicholson, Newman, Beatty, Eastwood, etc. were demanding and getting an incredible amount of money.

One only has to recall the story of Welles trying to cast any of the above actors for the leading role in The Big Brass Ring, to realize how lucky Welles was in the olden days of Hollywood to have friendship's with people like Marlene Dietrich, Charlton Heston, Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Jeanne Moreau and Mercedes McCambridge.  When they got a call from Welles most of them would usually try their best to drop everything in order to appear in his film. But how times changed...   

By 1980, top actors, many of whom stated they loved Orson dearly and would be do anything for him, (like Jack Nicholson and Burt Reynolds), found convient excuses not to appear in  The Big Brass Ring--even though they would make at least $1 million.  In retrospect, it makes all the actors who agreed to appear in The Other Side of the Wind for virtually nothing, real Wellesian heroes.  But as Mercedes McCambridge points out in this wonderful chapter from her 1981 autobiography, The Quality of Mercy, “Only a certain breed of actor should ever even try to work for Orson Welles.” And to all those actors, who worked soley for ars gratis artis,rather than for profit, we should be erternally grateful.

Actors like McCambridge, Tamiroff, Dietrich, Moreau, Gielgud, Redgrave, Huston, Keith Baxter, and virtually everyone who ever appeared in a Welles film before the mid-seventies.  Those actors usually worked for peanuts, just so they could be in a film by a great director.    

 

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     I'm one of a host of people who were in a film of Orson's that has never been finished.  I don't see how it can ever be finished.  Those of us who began the film when it began are either dead or unrecognizably older.  People change over a span of a decade or more. 

     The filming turned up from time to time in strange places and stranger situations.  One scene was shot in the San Fernando Valley on Mother's Day, in a battered rented yellow school bus filled with life-sized cloth dummies dressed in GI raincoats and frizzy blond fright wigs… sixteen of these things strapped into the seats of the beaten-up old bus!  The actors were Edmund O'Brien, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, and I.  
    

            It was a hot valley-Sunday morning, and weaving up and down peaceful little streets called Ethel and Dorothy and Eunice was a bus full of strange things to come across on a Mother's Day.  People on their way to Sunday service watched us pass.  Sitting next to the bus driver on a makeshift stool and facing the rear of the bus was a monster; naked, bearded, and smoking a large cigar!  Orson was naked only to his waist, but the churchgoers had no way of knowing that.  Gathered around him and over the head of the squeezed-in driver were several half-nude young hippie-type fellows holding camera equipment.  We would travel up Dorothy Street and back down Ethel, then across Eunice to Agnes and then back down to Harriet Place.  Orson was shooting every Blade of grass on every street.  It was hot, and we were hungry and thirsty.  We said so.

            Orson ordered the poor rented bus driver to stop at a pizza palace.  There were some customers seated at the outside tables under the garish sun parasols.  It must have been unsettling for those people to see our group pile out of our conveyance, leaving behind, strapped into their seats, the sixteen dummies in the raincoats and blond wigs.  Orson refused to alight from the bus.  That was just as well.   

 

(more...)

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The New York Times: Orson’s Back and Marlene’s Got Him!

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

After The Other Side of the Wind had been shooting for only a few months, Charles Higgham, whose error-ridden book on Welles had recently been published, wrote this short piece about the filming of OSOTW. It appeared in The New York Times on January 31, 1971, and since Mr. Higgham's piece gets almost  100 % of his facts wrong, it seems likely, that as other N Y Times reporters have been known to do, he may have simply "invented" many of his facts.  In retrospect, however, it certainly makes for quite an amusing read.  In fact, it makes a nice companion piece to Richard Schickel's recent Welles book review in the L A Times!

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ORSON'S BACK AND MARLENE'S GOT HIM!
By CHARLES HIGHAM, author of "The films of Orson Welles"

For months now, Hollyood has been talking about a secretly made feature film being directed by Orson Welles, his first American movie since "Touch of Evil" 14 years ago.  Made largely on location in Los Angeles, the picture's cast includes Marlene Dietrich, and it is financed by Welles himself.  Shooting began last September, but few have know exactly when or where since;  the crew has been loyally silent, few of the cast can be reached for comment.  In a controversial exchange in these pages last year, Peter Bogdanovich, Welles's Boswell, denied that Welles was making the picture at all, even though he had assisted him in the production, which was shooting at that time.  Yet the same day that Bogdanovich's denial appeared, Welles was creating a sequence at Century City, and there wasn't a self-respecting gossip in town who hadn't spread word of it. 
 
The picture is "The Other Side of the Wind," a story written by Welles about a crusty, veteran director of the Henry Hathaway/John Ford breed who comes back to Hollywood after a long exile to be confronted by the self-conscious intellectualism and Beverly Hills hippiedom of Hollywood in the 1970's--with fantastic and often funny results.  Typically, Welles has been shooting off the cuff, improvising the story daily.  It hasn't been settled whether John Huston or Welles himself will appear in the role of the director, whose scenes are to be shot last. 
 
Nobody knows when the picture will be finished: shooting was interrupted recently when Marlene Dietrich had to return to Paris to attend the funeral of her close friend, Coco Chanel.
 
Paul Mazursky, director of "Alex in Wonderland," who appears in the film, told how he came to be in it on a radio show I conduct: he was at home one evening when Bert Schneider, an independent producer, called him to ask if he would like to appear in a film of Orson Welles's.  "Naturally I said, 'Yes.'  To all of us, he's the idol.  When Bert said, 'Come to Welles's house tonight,' and gave me the address I couldn't believe it.  I went over, and quite a few directors were there to play the scene with me:  Monte Hellman, Bob Rafelson and others.  I'm excited by Welles's improvisatory methods, which have influenced my own." 
 
The scene in which Mazursky and the directors of "The Shooting" and "Five Easy Pieces" appear concerns a sudden power failure that plunges Marlene Dietrich's Bel Air dinner party into darkness. The guests start interviewing each other obsessively.  It is characteristic of Welles that he should combine in the sequence an impish humor at the expense of the contemporary film scholar's interviewing obsessions, and an overriding concern, visible in all his films, with the nature of human identity. 


Akradin rides again.  

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ORSON WELLES: “But Where Are We Going?”

Friday, September 1st, 2006

Shortly after Welles had begun filming The Other Side of the Wind, he published this piece in Look magazine (Nov. 3, 1970), about the rise in prominence of young directors who were now seen as the driving force behind Hollywood's biggest box-office hits. Films like Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider and Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice - both of whom would appear in The Other Side of the Wind as spokesmen for the hip new generation of young Hollywood filmmakers.  But, ironically, although these directors were given the same kind of freedom Welles had on Citizen Kane - a fact which Welles wryly notes in his opening remarks - they strangely succumbed to the same fate as Welles with their follow-up films. Both Hopper and Mazursky produced box-office disasters. The Last Movie virtually ended Hopper's directing career, while Mazursky's Alex in Wonderland, came very close to sinking his.

At any rate, Welles essay here is a vintage piece of his writing acumen which makes for a superb introduction to his own script that was very much written in the spirit of experimentation and freedom that the late sixties engendered.

Of special note is how prominently Welles speaks of Napoleon, whose story Stanley Kubrick was, at the very same time, vainly trying to convince MGM to finance for his own epic film about the life of the French Emperor.

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BUT WHERE ARE WE GOING?

By Orson Welles – Look, November 3, 1970

Just at this modish moment, everybody under 30—and his idiot brother-wants to be a film director. And why not?

(more...)

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Frank Marshall update on “The Other Side of the Wind”

Sunday, June 25th, 2006

Thanks to Colin Hand for sending along this link to a nice interview with Frank Marshall about his latest movie, Eight Below, which also covers Marshall's long association with Peter Bogdanovich.

However the highlight for Welles fans is a tidbit about Marshall's ongoing involvement in producing The Other Side of The Wind, which is apparently now an on-again project for Showtime:

Box Office Mojo: Any plans to work with Peter Bogdanovich in the future? 

Frank Marshall: Actually, we're re-cutting and updating the John Ford documentary (Bogdanovich's Directed by John Ford with narration by Orson Welles). We've done new interviews with Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Walter Hill and others. It's really exciting. It will air on Turner Classic Movies this October. Ford is so important to my history in the business. We're also working with Showtime on finishing Orson Welles' last movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which I worked on in the 1970s (as production manager). We have a script. We shot it all—I worked on it for over five years—but we never put it together. Showtime has been incredibly supportive. I'm producing what will be the final movie that Orson directed.

Link to: Frank Marshall interview

 

 

 

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