One of the highlight’s of Gary Graver’s memoir, Making Movies with ORSON WELLES is the inside view it gives us on the making of The Other Side of the Wind. Perhaps the book may finally help to sweep aside the last remaining obstacles and get the Showtime deal to finish the movie back on track.
Here’s how Gary Graver sums up The Other Side of the Wind in his book:
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Orson viewed The Other Side of the Wind as a bookend to Citizen Kane. It’s an interesting film that needs to be completed so it can be viewed alongside Orson’s classic films. I think it will shed new light on Orson’s artistic legacy. It’s quite different from anything else he ever did. It’s a marvelous film. Its structure–the movie-within-a-movie–and all of Orson’s ideas were so fresh. The dialogue and the visuals are terrific.
I think it’s Orson’s finest film since Touch of Evil, and I think the public deserves the opportunity to see the film and decide for themselves where it ranks in the canon of Welles films. I think it will enjoy a long shelf life and make millions for whoever ends up finishing it. Today Orson is bigger than ever. He has fans in countries all around the world. What bigger market could you want for such a film?
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The book also offers us a true insider’s portrait of Orson Welles, which could only be written by somebody who worked with Welles intimately over a period of 15 years. We even get a sense of the despair Welles must have felt when, by 1977, it became apparent that The Other Side of the Wind was doomed to join the ranks of Welles other unfinished projects.
In a poignant hand-written note reproduced in the book, dated Aug. 24, 1977, Welles writes the following plea to Graver:
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Gary:
This is a real cry for help — Please, please call me!
Orson
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That same year, Welles stopped active work on The Other Side of the Wind, for reasons that are explained in this excerpt from an 11-page letter Welles wrote in 1977 to Mehdi Boushehri, the primary Iranian backer of The Other Side of the Wind:
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…My own first priority, for much too long now, has been “THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.” Tragically, very little of that time has been spent on constructive work. Overwhelmingly, it has been time lost in simply waiting for the chance to work—time utterly wasted. Weather in the movie business is highly changeable. The market itself fluctuates quite wildly, and my “market value” both as a performer and filmmaker has slipped to the lowest point in all my career.
The Film Institute “Tribute” dramatized the presumed advent of “THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.” That picture, so eagerly looked forward to, has failed to appear. And for me, professionally, that failure has been mortal. As a director, my reputation by now appears to have been blackened beyond reparation. In this industry—in this small town—two things are said of me today. “That picture isn’t finished yet—the Crazy Welles…” and “No use offering him a part, he’ll turn it down; he doesn’t want to work.”
The “Tribute” should have been a turning point. It certainly created for me a notable renewal of interest on the part of the Hollywood Community. During the year that followed, and for several months after that, I received any number of film, theatre and TV offers—all of which I turned down. What I could have accepted (without any conflict in time) comes—according to (L. Arnold ) Weissberger’s documentation—to something more than two million dollars.
I sacrificed all this, as you know, in order to keep myself free for the completion of our film…
I have been in the performing arts, working for my living, for some forty-seven years. I have never been rich. In this rather ridiculous business we learn to sustain ourselves on hope and enthusiasm. So I’ve never been really poor.
But today I find myself not only without income, but without prospects. With my professional credit destroyed, it’s not too easy—in the sixty-second year of my life—to make plans for a fresh start…