Something Cloudy, Something Clear: A book on Orson Welles’ ‘ The Other Side of the Wind’ due out in 2013
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
By RAY KELLY
While the future of The Other Side of the Wind is always cloudy, one thing appears clear: A book chronicling the making of this unfinished Orson Welles film is in the works.
Josh Karp, who teaches journalism at Northwestern, is writing about The Other Side of the Wind for St. Martin's Press. Due in 2013, An Adventure Shared By Desperate Men (That Finally Came to Nothing) looks at the filming of the 1970's Welles movie starring John Huston as an aging director attempting to revive his career with a hip, artsy film.
Karp has written for Salon, TV Guide, Premiere, The Atlantic Monthly Online, The LA Times Sunday Magazine and other publications. He is the author of A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever and Straight Down the Middle: Shivas Irons, Bagger Vance and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Golf Swing.
Karp, who is conducting some of his final interviews for the book, agreed to field a few questions from Wellesnet.
RAY KELLY: Your previous two books have dealt with golf and National Lampoon. What attracted you to an unfinished Orson Welles film?
JOSH KARP: The simple answer is that it’s a great story and something I could gladly work on for a year or two.
What first got me interested were the stories from the set. I’d read about Rich Little and the midgets; John Huston driving the wrong way on the highway; a movie funded by the Shah’s brother-in-law; Welles seeing the amazing sunset outside the open studio door and saying, “It looks fake.” I just loved all of that.
Then you had Welles and Huston who are almost literally characters out of novels (Huston was once described as “A Hemingway character lost in a Dostoevsky novel”). Complicated, charismatic, larger than life men and remarkable artists.
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