By RAY KELLY
After laboring nine years to bring The Other Side of the Wind to the screen, it’s understandable that producer Filip Jan Rymsza was not looking to embark on another Orson Welles project.
But time and a nudge from a friend led to Hopper/Welles, which will have its world premiere next week during the 77th Venice International Film Festival.
Comprised of previously unseen footage uncovered and assembled by Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski, Hopper/Welles captures a November 1970 conversation shot during The Other Side of the Wind between the Citizen Kane filmmaker and Easy Rider director Dennis Hopper. Two cameras filmed the approximately two-and-a-half-hour conversation, which has been trimmed to 130 minutes. (Director of photography Gary Graver shot 13 black and white 16mm rolls and camera operator John Willheim another 11 for a total of 4 hours and 48 minutes of available footage.)
“Filip and I watched all of the dailies of The Other Side of the Wind,” Murawski recalled. “When I did put (the Hopper conversation) on, I watched it until 2 a.m. I was amazed how compelling it was.”
Rymsza concurs, but noted there was no place for large sections of it in The Other Side of the Wind.
“Obviously, we knew not a big part of this was going to fit into The Other Side of the Wind,” Rymsza said. “At the time, footage that didn’t fit in Wind was sent to Morgan (Neville for his companion documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead). But it didn’t really fit with that either.”
Rymsza and Murawski also screened 20 minutes of Welles with director Curtis Harrington and two hours of bickering and debate between filmmakers Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky — though neither had the standalone theatrical appeal of the Hopper conversation.
“From a visual standpoint, this — with the two cameras dancing around — is much more appealing,” Rymsza said.
Murawski put together an assembly from the 24 reels of Hopper footage before post-production wrapped on The Other Side of the Wind in 2018 with no immediate plans for it.
However, a conversation a year later with Nick Ebeling, who directed the Hopper documentary Along for The Ride, prompted Rymsza to reexamine the footage.
“Last summer, I had lunch with a filmmaker friend, who did Along for The Ride, and he asked me about the footage,” Rymsza recalled. “I was coming out of my Wind fatigue and I watched it with Nick.”
He was impressed with its intimacy and content, which finds Hopper and Welles in a Los Angeles living room lit with hurricane lamps delving into such topics as the role of a movie director, Coptic gospel passages and radical politics.
Rymsza was looking to bring his feature film, Mosquito State, to Venice when festival programmer Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, who had learned of the Welles footage from Ebeling, asked about showing Hopper/Welles too.
“It’s incredible, especially given how competitive it was. I am extremely honored,” said Rymsza of presenting two movies at the same time at the world’s oldest film festival.
Working from remote locations because of the pandemic, Murawski, Rymsza and the Warsaw-based restoration and post-production house Fixafilm polished Hopper/Welles into a finished movie. The producers have not yet had the opportunity to see the finished product projected on a big screen. It will be screened 10 times in theaters on Lido di Venezia on September 7-9.
Audiences there will notice in the end credits that the Oscar winning Murawski is listed as “cutter,” a wink at Welles’ unflattering remark in the movie that film editors should only be referred to as “cutters.”
“He had an attitude toward editors,” Murawski said. “Maybe it was a little jealousy over Robert Wise, perhaps, who started as his editor (on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons) and then had an amazing and successful career on his own.”
Like Welles, Hopper takes a swipe at film editors in the movie. It’s just one of the similarities that exist between the two actor-directors.
“Hopper was the Orson Welles of his time,” Murawski said. “He broke a lot of the rules and was at the top of his game” after the success of Easy Rider.
Both men, mavericks who shook up Hollywood in different eras, followed their landmark directorial debuts with troubled sophomore efforts. However, Hopper’s The Last Movie and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons each found a greater appreciation from audiences in the years that followed their release.
Hopper discusses Easy Rider‘s reception in Hopper/Welles, as well as his ongoing work on The Last Movie, which would become mired in post-production madness and prompt him to stay out of the director’s chair for nine years. “There are warning signals,” Rymsza noted.
Despite assertions by some over the years that Hopper was smoking marijuana heavily during the Los Angeles shoot, he appears to be puffing on Marlboros and sipping a gin and tonic with the pasta dinner Welles had served him.
“He was as articulate and as open as I have seen him in an interview,” Rymsza said.
Murawski says flatly, “I don’t think he was high at all.”
While Hopper is lucid, viewers may be taken aback by a few of the remarks coming from Welles, who sometimes takes on the role of The Other Side of the Wind’s then-not-yet-cast lead character, Jake Hannaford. Speaking as the fascist Hannaford, Welles advocates bomb making and other practices he clearly did support during his lifetime. The producers address this bit of role playing in the opening credits of Hopper/Welles, though it will likely confuse some viewers.
Following its Venice debut, Hopper/Welles will be shown at the 58th New York Film Festival and offers from distributors will be accepted via CAA and weighed.
Hopper/Welles could likely be the last time either Rymsza and Murawski delve into the Welles canon.
“We could do The Magic Show or the restoration of 3AM,” joked Murawski, referring to an unfinished Welles anthology of prestidigitation and a 1975 Graver-directed porn flick that Welles helped edit to free up his cinematographer for a shoot.
Rymsza reaffirmed he said “never again” after The Other Side of the Wind, adding that other unfinished Welles films like The Deep and Don Quixote simply do not hold the same allure for him.
“I don’t see anything else coming up — other than something that supports a physical release,” said Rymsza, referring to potential extras on a future The Other Side of the Wind Blu-ray box set.
While Welles fans have clamored for a home video release, Rymsza says that decision that rests with Netflix, which financed the bulk of that movie’s completion, and the Criterion Collection, which has recently distributed Netflix titles like Roma, Marriage Story and the upcoming The Irishman.
“There has to be a demand,” Rymsza said. “But I do have a basis for hope.”
If Netflix and Criterion agree to a Blu-ray release, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Hopper/Welles could somehow wind up as part of a massive “bundle” that included The Other Side of the Wind, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and the documentary short A Final Cut for Orson, Rymsza said.
HOPPER/WELLES
Director: Orson Welles
Producer: Royal Road Entertainment (Filip Jan Rymsza)
Co-producers: Grindhouse Releasing (Bob Murawski) and Fixafilm (Wojciech Janio)
Executive producers: Jon Anderson, Jonathan Gardner
Cast: Dennis Hopper, Orson Welles with Janice Pennington and Glenn Jacobson
Director of photography: Gary Graver
Cutter: Bob Murawski, a.c.e.
Assistant editor: Dov Samuel
Camera operators: Gary Graver, John Willheim
Assistant camera: Connie Graver
Gaffer: R. Michael Stringer
Sound: Bob Dietz, Jussi Tegelman
Title design: Garson Yu
Running time: 130 minutes
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