NINE

[ToddBaesen]

I saw NINE last night and I didn't much care for it, but I was struck by how the opening scene (written by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella), seemed to echo the ending speech given by Jake Hannaford in Welles' script for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.


From NINE:
_________


INT. PRESS CONFERENCE ROOM - DAY
The flicker of film. Footage from a press conference.

GUIDO
You kill your film several times,
mostly by talking about it. A film is
a dream. You kill it writing it down,
you kill it with a camera; the film
might come to life for a moment or two
when your actors breathe life back
into it - but then it dies again,
buried in film cans. Mysteriously,
sometimes, in the editing room, a
miracle happens when you place one
image next to another so that when,
finally, an audience sits in the dark,
if you’re lucky -- very lucky - and
sometimes I’ve been lucky - the dream
flickers back to life again. That’s
why I’m secretive.

REPORTER (O.S.)
So what’s your favorite pasta?

GUIDO
Finally, a serious question.

Laughter.



From THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND:
_______________________________


JAKE'S VOICE
(on tape recorder playback)
...Remember those Berbers - up in
the Atlas mountains? They wouldn't
let us POINT a camera at 'em. They're
certain that it... dries up something
in the soul... ...The old eye, Y’know,
behind the magic box. Could be it’s an
evil eye, at that... The Medusa’s eye...

Whatever I look upon finally dies
under my gaze... Who knows, maybe
you can stare too hard at something,
huh? - Drain out the virtue –
suck out the living juice...

You shoot the great places and the
pretty people - All those girls and
boys... I’ve shot ‘em all.
Shot 'em dead...

[Glenn Anders]

Todd: I, too, saw NINE -- sort of by accident -- on Christmas week.

I liked the picture a bit better than you, the critics, or general audiences for sure, but we probably could both agree that it is not a successful extravaganza.

Your observation of the similarity between the opening press conference with "Maestro" Guido Contini in NINE and Old Master Jake Hannaford in The Other Side of the Wind is an apt one, and although we have seen the footage for both, I did not make that exact connection. What was clear to me was that Arthur Kopit, who did the book for the musical, Nine, and the late Anthony Minghella, who co-wrote the screenplay for NINE, were probably trying to expand the scope of the Italian original (by Mario Fratti) to include a general commentary, a psychodrama, on the kind of directors Federico Fellini, Orson Welles and (to bring in Rob Marshall) Bob Fosse were -- driven men, who at their best, worked from original ideas or visions through "happy accidents" to their finished films. And that kind of pressure took a lot out of them (and those around them), at the same time that it fueled their genius.

The basic problem with NINE, I thought, was that the continuity of several spectacularly edited musical numbers (especially "Fergie's") and the story of Guido Contini's directorial angst was undercut by the fact that many in the audience would have only a foggy idea in our age of cultural shorthand and trivialization just why anyone should care who a Fellini, Welles, or a Fosse was. I thought ME AND ORSON WELLES suffered from the same failing. If one were not a Wellesnetter, a theater nut, a Zac Efron swooner, a 78 year-old or a 93 year-old with hazy memories, Julius Caesar might just as well been a high school musical. For a satisfying number of viewers, that experience may have been enough for the audiences of NINE and ME AND ORSON WELLES, but as of yesterday, ME AND ORSON WELLES had taken in less than a million dollars in its American release.

NINE, of course, will lose enough (at a budget of $85,000,000) to produce several ME AND ORSON WELLES, but the failure of the latter picture, despite increasingly encouraging reviews, does not bode well for projects like The Other Side of the Wind which we would all like to see come to fruition.

[Amazingly, there is talk that the Weinstein Brothers may engineer a Best Picture Oscar Nomination for NINE!]

But, in our time, all that -- NINE, ME AND ORSON WELLES or The Other Side of the Wind -- becomes "old news," monographs of minor cultural sociology, or footnotes for Entertainment Tonight.

Pity.

Glenn

[Harvey Chartrand]

Is the world ready for The Other Side of the Wind, a film that gives us the lowdown on Hollywood... circa 1972?
Imagine if Citizen Kane had been stored in a vault and released 38 years after it was completed. Would anyone have noticed? Same difference.
Blast of Silence, a 1961 film-noir masterpiece with a no-name cast that played a few 42nd Street dives before vanishing into obscurity, somehow gets the Criterion treatment (http://www.criterion.com/films/538.) I wonder how that could possibly happen in today's "hip and happening" culture that is becoming ever more disengaged from the past. Blast of Silence director Allen Baron's later career wasn't very grand. He went on to direct a lot of episodic television. So it's strange that Blast of Silence is recognized as a classic, given a DVD transfer that is close to pristine, while The Other Side of the Wind (the work of an endlessly fascinating pantheon director) languishes in perpetual limbo.

[K Dobry]

It seems that The Other Side of the Wind will, if ever completed, be a cult film, in the same way that most of Welles' post-RKO films are.
It seems that Welles' status as a pantheon director begins and ends with his involvement with Hollywood studios.
"Welles-the director-of-Citizen-Kane" seems to have gotten (and still gets) people drooling over the prospective profits that might come from any of his unfinished projects, but Welles the artist/ avant-garde director seems to be more of an enigma for most folks....

If TOSOTW ever gets released in any form, it would probably find favour with the same types of film scholars/film lovers who can tell you about Tim Carey, Mario Bava, or Jean Eustache, or with art scholars...but certainly not with the average viewer or even the average "film buff". Even the few scenes that have gotten out to the public (like the ones from the AFI tribute) are so radical, so brilliant, and so ahead of their time (and even ahead of today's time), that any serious popular appreciation will probably be tough to gain. I'd say that Welles was to cinema what someone like Ornette Coleman was to jazz.

[Harvey Chartrand]

There can't be too many film lovers who can tell you about Timothy Carey. Here's an interesting story on Carey's bizarre sideline career as a zero-budget film director:
Timothy Carey: THE WORLD'S GREATEST DIRECTOR!
http://absolutefilms.net/tim_carey/FilmFax2004.html

And actor Paul Picerni recalls his encounter with Carey while shooting an episode of Dragnet:

"One strange thing happened on the Dragnet set. Jack Webb, Ben Alexander and I were taking a cigarette break and all of a sudden we see a commotion by the front gate. We see this tall guy running and two security guards chasing him. And he runs toward us and he grabs hold of Jack Webb and pushes him up against the wall and yells: 'You gotta give me a part in your show! You understand!' And Jack says, 'Yeah, of course, you got it, whatever you want!' The guy was a madman. It was the actor Timothy Carey. They got rid of him, of course. He might have been a great villain, but he scared the shit out of us. He was nuts." (Carey later pulled a gun on producer Hal Wallis, trying to get a part in The Caine Mutiny. – Ed.)

[tonyw]

Over a decade ago, Ben Johnson told us an amusing anecdote at the Memphis Film Festival about how he dealt with Timothy Carey in the manner of that no-nonsense Westerner he played to perfection. Apparently, he cowed Carey like a disobedient puppy by verbal means.