An old bootlegged workprint, battered and missing many scenes, was given an unauthorized screening to a public audience August 24 in Richmond, California ― falsely presented as Orson Welles’s cut and the “world premiere” of The Other Side of the Wind. The final edit of the long-in-the-making film will have its official debut at the Venice Film Festival August 31.
The bootleg screening was announced as The Orson Welles Project, aka The Other Other Side of the Wind online and in the Richmond Standard, and held for about fifty people in a grungy industrial park containing storage facilities as well as artists’ and filmmakers’ studios in the small town near Berkeley in the San Francisco East Bay area. The organizers told the Richmond Standard, “The film will make another debut in a different edited form, so this is your only chance to see the original cut as it was intended by legendary director Orson Welles.”
Wellesnet had a spy at the screening at the Bridge FILMSpace, a small rental studio. Donations were accepted and refreshments were sold, but admission was not charged, and complimentary beverages were served. The bogus premiere was organized by Oakland plumber Tony Fazule, who told the audience he plans more screenings of the 105-minute rough assembly in Richmond, Oakland, and possibly at the “Burning Man” festival being held today through September 3 in Nevada.
Clockwise from top left; poster for The Orson Welles Project; host Tony Fazule chats with attendees; and the audience arrives at the Bridge Storage and ArtSpace in Richmond, California, for the bogus premiere.
The Wellesnet spy, who did not make himself known in the screening room, filed this report:
“The version shown was the same old partial assembly that cinematographer Gary Graver showed, along with Joseph McBride, Oja Kodar, and Frank Marshall at various private screenings in the late 1990s to try to raise funds to complete the film. None of those screenings in Los Angeles to film companies and individuals was successful except for one for the cable company Showtime, which made an offer in 1999 that later fell through.
“The workprint contains much of the approximately forty minutes Welles edited for the film, familiar from various documentaries, as well as other scenes that Graver and an editor friend, Frank Mazzola, put together to give a very rough semblance of a dual-narrative throughline. The print, evidently made from a bootleg DVD and projected from a laptop computer, is not only battered and missing many key elements but has temp music and unmixed, sometimes absent sound. It gives an appearance of incoherence, largely due to the omission of transitions and other key scenes, as well as choppy editing. The sound as projected was weak, unmixed, and often hard to hear. After the bravura car sex scene, one man in the audience called out, ‘I didn’t get that.’
“Fazule, a big jovial fellow who had his plumbing truck parked outside, appeared in his work outfit and introduced the film falsely. Calling it the ‘world premiere,’ he told spectators, ‘This is Orson’s cut of The Other Side of the Wind.’ He warned the audience not to take photographs or otherwise record the screening, brandishing a plumbing tool for comic effect. Asking them to write their thoughts in a book after they saw the print, he said he would post the comments online.
“A friend of Fazule told attendees milling around before the screening that the workprint had been obtained from someone in New York and described it as ‘what Orson edited before he died . . . not tainted by someone else coming in and putting his two cents’ worth in it.’ When Fazule was asked by an audience member at the screening, ‘How did you get this?,’ he replied, ‘We’re not going to talk about it.’ He told the spectators that the finished film would be shown at Venice in an edited version and ‘We can make a comparison afterward and laugh at those guys.’
“The audience, which seemed to consist largely of film buffs, filmmakers, and artists, gathered on folding chairs in a small screening room. They sat respectfully through the assembly and even gave it two rounds of applause at the end. There were only two walkouts about half an hour into the film, just before the sex scene in the car. I wondered what the audience thought of the roughness of the material, since it was not clearly explained what they were watching. It was a shabby and dishonest way to present the film and a pathetic attempt to compete with the imminent world premiere.”
On a related note, Wellesnet and a freelance magazine writer were approached separately a year ago by an individual, not Fazule, representing he had Welles’s lost edit of The Other Side of the Wind, which he had obtained through a business relationship with Peter Bogdanovich. It was, in fact, the 105-minute assembly of scenes created by Graver and Mazzola more than a decade after Welles’s death.
The Other Side of the Wind, which began production in 1970, will have its actual world premiere at the Venice festival August 31, followed by the North American premiere that same weekend at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. It will be shown at the New York Film Festival before its theatrical and worldwide streaming run November 2 on Netflix, which paid for the rights and much of the postproduction costs.
The Other Side of the Wind was produced by Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza and executive produced by Bogdanovich, Beatrice Welles, and others. The final version, whose editing is credited to both Welles and Bob Murawski, runs 122 minutes. The rerecording mixer and supervising sound editor is Scott Millan, and the film has a musical score by Michel Legrand.
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