THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND Thread - 2002-2014 discussions

[Jedediah Leland]

Thanks for the tip-off, Nepenthe.

From the catalogue at http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/finding ... Li-VAA1237 it looks like box 30 of those Bogdanovich papers has TOSOTW correspondence, and seems the best hope for anything on this.

Box 50 also has TOSOTW material (but dated 1991?!?); while Box 165 contains draft chapters for an early version of "This is Orson Welles", including one on TOSOTW, and one which must touch on it, entitled "In the Future: Quixote, Jake & The Deep". Box 166 also looks promising, with a draft TIOW chapter entitled "Carefree". Then boxes 167-8 probably have second-drafts, but it's difficult to tell from this inventory, as those chapters are numbered rather than titled.

Boxes 45 & 46 have Bogdanovich's diaries/calendars for 1971-4 & 1975-91 respectively.

Other, remoter possibilities are boxes 2 ("1971: 'O' miscellaneous"), 4 ("1972: 'O' miscellaneous", "1972: Joe McBride" and "1972: Orson Welles correspondence"), 8 ("1973: 'O' miscellaneous" and "1973: Orson Welles correspondence"), 12 ("1974: Orson Welles correspondence"), 15 ("1975: 'O' miscellaneous"), 16 ("1975: Orson Welles"), 19 ("1976: 'O' miscellaneous" and "1976: Orson Welles"), and 240 (13 audio tapes on "Orson Welles").

[Wellesnet]

As reported on the main site at http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=8469

In a Nov. 20, 2013 interview with indiewire.com, Peter Bogdanovich detailed the "very, very difficult situation" surrounding OSOTW.

"I think it will get done some time but not in the near future," Bogdanovich said.

"(Producer) Frank Marshall and I have been trying to put it together for many years. Orson died in 1985 and we've been trying ever since. It's just ridiculous. The problem is that a lot of different people own parts of it or claim to own parts of it. And so the chain of title is difficult to establish," Bogdanovich said. "But it keeps inching forward and we keep getting closer and closer and things fall apart again."

[mido505]

TOSOTW will not be finished after Welles's death for the same reason it was not finished during Welles's lifetime - no one wanted, and wants, to finish it.

Despite not having control of the negative, Welles possessed the rushes, and could have edited a lot more than he did. He didn't. Why? I am now convinced that Welles saw TOSOTW as one of those commercial projects, like THE DEEP, that was to be a "lead-in" for his real obsession, DON QUIXOTE which, unlike THE DEEP and TOSOTW, he returned to again and again, cutting, changing, transforming. In the early 70's, during the New Hollywood era, TOSOTW would have been topical; its frank eroticism would have been shocking; its stylistic verve and verite roughness would have demanded attention and admiration; and the film might have been a success. As money problems caused production to drag on indefinitely, TOSOTW began to look like another Wellesian eccentricity, fit for the art houses and little else, and Welles lost interest.

Money problems. It's always money problems. Oja Kodar always claimed that money problems kept Welles from completing THE DEEP, despite Welles putting 100's of 1000's of dollars of his own money into new projects while THE DEEP sat rotting in a warehouse. And the story of the soundtrack being lost, or stolen, or whatever, is bullshit too. Another excuse. Choice, not fate, kept many of Orson's late projects unfinished, although fate had a hand in it too. With Welles, the timing was always off. The closest Welles ever got to telling the truth of the matter was his perennial answer to the question, "when will you finish DON QUIXOTE?" "It will be finished when I want to finish it," he would reply wearily, with the corollary being, "it will be finished IF I want to finish it."

After Welles's death, the story is more mundane, and sordid. Greed, ego, ambition. Joseph McBride is a real eye-opener here. Bogdanovich and Oja Kodar do not come out unscathed. Beatrice threw her hat in the ring back in the day, but I sympathize with her - I think that TOSOTW should be released as a documentary and not as a "Welles film". How could it be? Besides, according to Bogdanovich, Beatrice ceased to be a problem around 2006.

How could it be? Despite his claims to the contrary, Bogdanovich is no cutter. He was able to cut his early films because there was nothing to cut - point, shoot, edit. When his real cutter, Verna Fields, left his side to edit JAWS for Steven Spielberg, Bogdanovich's films, and career, went into the toilet. The Goddess's just punishment for Bogdanovich's betrayal of his real muse, wife Polly Platt.

TOSOTW is not TARGETS. Miles of footage. A vague script. Endless notes. A dead director who kept it all in his head. Real editing talents like Walter Murch and Oliver Stone watched some of TOSOTW and ran for the hills. They knew a shit-bath when they saw one. There ain't no way.

Mark my words. Bogdanovich is now an old man. He doesn't have the energy, or the stomach, for the job anymore. When he passes, as we all must, expect the likes of Wes Anderson, or Steven Soderbergh, to announce that Bogdanovich made him promise to finish TOSOTW after he's gone. For Orson.

[Le Chiffre]

Despite not having control of the negative, Welles possessed the rushes, and could have edited a lot more than he did. He didn't. Why?

According to the film’s French producer, Dominique Antoine, Welles did prepare a 2 ½-hour rough cut of the film. But no one except her is known to have seen it.

I am now convinced that Welles saw TOSOTW as one of those commercial projects, like THE DEEP, that was to be a "lead-in" for his real obsession, DON QUIXOTE which, unlike THE DEEP and TOSOTW, he returned to again and again, cutting, changing, transforming.

I’m a bit sceptical of the idea that Welles was obsessed with DON QUIXOTE. Barbra Leaming’s book, written with Welles’s cooperation, mentions DQ only once in passing, describing it as a “little home movie” that Welles would pull out and play with when he couldn’t find another gig.

As money problems caused production to drag on indefinitely, TOSOTW began to look like another Wellesian eccentricity, fit for the art houses and little else, and Welles lost interest.

That’s a key point. Had the film been finished and released in the early 70’s, it would have been relevant to what was going on in Hollywood at the time. But by the late 70’s, in the wake of the Lucas/Speilberg revolution, the film’s concerns would have looked hopelessly anachronistic.

Beatrice threw her hat in the ring back in the day, but I sympathize with her - I think that TOSOTW should be released as a documentary and not as a "Welles film". How could it be?

I agree. The docu could have and should have been done a long time ago. If it was done well it could have even stimulated financial interest for a possible completion of the film.

When his real cutter, Verna Fields, left his side to edit JAWS for Steven Spielberg, Bogdanovich's films, and career, went into the toilet.

Another interesting point. As Biskind’s EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS put it:
"Fields turned down Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love to do Jaws. When Verna told him the bad news, Peter is reputed to have burst into tears."

Real editing talents like Walter Murch and Oliver Stone watched some of TOSOTW and ran for the hills. They knew a shit-bath when they saw one. There ain't no way.

Stone did, however, incorporate some of Welles’s TOSOTW techniques into his own films, such as mixing different film stocks. This was most effective in JFK.

Mark my words. Bogdanovich is now an old man. He doesn't have the energy, or the stomach, for the job anymore.

I wonder if he had any involvement in the complete 1999 workprint cut prepared by Gary Graver and Oja Kodar, and if not, why not? You might think these people would want to work as a team.

[etimh]

Fantasy scenario: a comprehensive documentary is made on all aspects of the film's history, with original quality negative footage used as illustrations for the discussion of all of the various issues involved, from production, to content, to fate and legacy. Additionally, using the best available elements, the actual film is put together as a close estimation/reconstruction of Welles original vision based on any available documentation and scholarship. The second project is controversial, I realize, but I'd be willing to accept it as the best case scenario.

And I finally have to disagree about the film's current "irrelevance." Perhaps its relevance might have waned in the aftermath of the 1970s, but in the contemporary environment, where independents struggle against the hegemony of corporate media-conglomerate filmmaking, the story of an industry and artform in transition seems particularly relevant and poignant. And the film's release (and the story that it tells) may once again generate a renewed conversation about Welles' crucial role and legacy as the ultimate independent.

Tim

[Dark Horse 77]

Fantasy scenario: a comprehensive documentary is made on all aspects of the film's history, with original quality negative footage used as illustrations for the discussion of all of the various issues involved, from production, to content, to fate and legacy. Additionally, using the best available elements, the actual film is put together as a close estimation/reconstruction of Welles original vision based on any available documentation and scholarship. The second project is controversial, I realize, but I'd be willing to accept it as the best case scenario.

And I finally have to disagree about the film's current "irrelevance." Perhaps its relevance might have waned in the aftermath of the 1970s, but in the contemporary environment, where independents struggle against the hegemony of corporate media-conglomerate filmmaking, the story of an industry and artform in transition seems particularly relevant and poignant. And the film's release (and the story that it tells) may once again generate a renewed conversation about Welles' crucial role and legacy as the ultimate independent.

Tim

Sounds great to me, give us everything there is. And as far as being irrelevant, who cares, it's Orson Welles for crying out loud.

[Jedediah Leland]

I agree with mido as far as the original intention of TOSOTW - regarding Welles's 1960s statements that he knew Don Quixote would be a deeply personal, non-commercial film which would alienate almost everybody, and that he would need a surefire, bankable, commercial hit to come out before that; and so the lack of one was what stopped him from releasing Quixote for so long, even though he had at least two different near-complete rough cuts at various points.

And I also agree that Welles's interest in The Deep was for creating just such a commercial hit, and that the reason he willfully abandoned that film (and he did by 1970, long before Lawrence Harvey died, when he could have certainly used the TOSOTW money to complete the last few effects and bits of dubbing on The Deep) was because he'd got caught up in making TOSOTW instead, and had high hopes that this was a much better prospect of a "now" film that would be a big commercial hit. Indeed, TOSOTW held out the promise to be BOTH a critical arthouse hit (which The Deep was never going to be, by Welles's own admission) AND a commercial hit, following the New Hollywood zeitgeist. It's an idea mido & I have previously discussed on the Don Quixote thread.

But I do disagree with him on one thing - correct me if I'm wrong (I don't wish to misrepresent mido's argument), but I think mido's making the assumption that Welles's intentions towards TOSOTW remained static, and that wasn't the case.

If TOSOTW had been completed up until 1974 (maybe '75 at a stretch), it's believable that it would have been a major hit, mocking the New Hollywood movies that were still big money then. But by the time principal photography wrapped in '76 (and assuming editing wouldn't have been completed until '77 at the earliest), it would have already looked quite old hat on release. And it's around '77-'78, long before the Iranian revolution, that Welles lost hope on the TOSOTW legal situation, and sank into a deep depression during those years.

But if you look at the comments Orson made about TOSOTW from those years onwards, he didn't talk about abandoning the film altogether, but refashioning the material - he openly acknowledged that it had already become dated. In much the same way he was talking about re-editing his Don Quixote material into a new form using some colour footage, I think this is what he had in mind for TOSOTW.

So I disagree with mido's conclusion that Welles abandoned TOSOTW - as his numerous pleas and memos make clear, he'd invested too much in the film to let it go; not only financially, but in terms of his reputation, with people in Hollywood continuing to call him "that crazy Welles" as long as no TOSOTW came out when they all knew he'd been at work on this major movie with big names for so long. Unlike Don Quixote, it wasn't a personal essay film done in his spare time, it wasn't 100% self-funded, it had major (if dubious) backing, and big star names attached to it.

So what did Welles have in mind after '77/'78?

My guess is Welles successively planned at least FOUR radically different versions of TOSOTW, which is partially confirmed by Welles telling Bogdanovich in 1972 that the film had already been through several screenplays:

1) "The Sacred Beasts", the original 1960s screenplay he wrote about bullfighters & bullfight followers in Madrid, with the Huston character as Hammingway-esque Bullfight enthusiast.

2) TOSOTW, as envisioned in the earlier screenplays c.1970-1. This was much more of a collaborative effort with Oja Kodar than any other version - it merged her story ("the film within a film", which gave us the title "The Other Side of the Wind") with his story (about Jake Hannaford), and interviews Welles gave around this time stressed that the final film would be a 50/50 split between the two films. Since Welles was mainly photographing the Antonioni-esque film-within-a-film material, it makes sense that this was when he was most enamoured with it. It would have also been much more topical (Antonioni was much hotter stuff in 1970 than he was later in the decade, when his output slowed and his critical reputation waned somewhat), and so a 1970 film stressing that footage would have been more "now".

3) TOSOTW, as it had evolved in filming by c.1974-5. As is well-established, Welles placed huge premium on improvisation in making his films. ("The definition of a director is one who presides over accidents" he said, more than once.) By the time he'd shot all the great material with Huston, it looks like the later screenplays were moving the film-within-a-film footage into small clips glimpsed in the background or only run full-screen for a few seconds at a time, as something that would be glimpsed a small piece at a time, making up no more than 20% of the final film.

4) This is where mido and I seem to differ. He argues that Welles abandoned TOSOTW. I disagree. Given by the 1980s he indicated to people like Barbara Leaming that he'd still like to use the footage in a "making of" kind of documentary, I can imagine he had it in mind to shoot some modest new material - something like "Filming Othello", on a TV budget - to frame the material, and show off the best edited sequences; perhaps some sort of mockumentary about the life of Jake Hannaford. Versions (2) and (3) were meant to be a collage of lots of different mockumentaries inter-cut with the unfinished film. Version (4), released in an imaginary 1980s, would have looked a lot more like a low-budget 1980s series of "talking heads" for a mockumentary, presenting the ranch house footage inside the framing device of people like Peter Bogdanovich and Cameron Mitchell talking about their recollections of Jake Hannaford.

I don't think Welles ever abandoned TOSOTW. "The Deep", yes; and you can even make a case for some of his other projects. But this was an intensely personal film - of his later projects, only "The Big Brass Ring" rivaled it as a project momentous enough to rival "Citizen Kane", and to definitively show the younger kids and the naysayers that the old master still had it.

Personally, I think version (4) would have been a LOT less interesting than versions (2) and (3), while version (3) promised to be by far the best. But while I blame Beatrice for an awful lot, let's bear in mind that what she's insisted on (a "making of" documentary) isn't a million miles from version (4), which Welles himself was pushing in his lifetime.

The one thing I'd say about why version (3) would have been superior - aside from the far bolder editing - is that (3) represents the work of a man striving to achieve something ground-breaking and new, whereas (4) represents a man who's suffered innumerable setbacks and is struggling to salvage even some small shred of his work as previously conceived - in much the same way as Welles did try to collaborate on some (but not all) of the bowlderisation of "The Magnificient Ambersons" and "The Lady From Shanghai", tearfully offering to cut some sequences, so that the most cherished material could still get a release.

[mido505]

Excellent post, Jedediah. I had been hoping that you would jump in because a) I knew you would have something deeply insightful to offer, and because b) my conversations with you over at the DQ thread convinced me that Welles wanted to use TOSOTW( as well as THE DEEP and, yes, F FOR FAKE) as a commercial lead in for DQ.

But I do disagree with him on one thing - correct me if I'm wrong (I don't wish to misrepresent mido's argument), but I think mido's making the assumption that Welles's intentions towards TOSOTW remained static, and that wasn't the case.

Regarding the above quotation, I believe you are correct and yet incorrect - I don't believe Welles's intentions towards TOSOTW remained "static", as you put it, but I do believe he "abandoned" TOSOTW when the financial issue and, more importantly, the passage of time, served to dim its commercial prospects. In a sense, our views are compatible. While I accept your excellent "sequence of intentions" for TOSOTW, I contend that the shift from Version 3 to Version 4 was essentially an abandonment of the film. Version 3 was what TOSOTW was ultimately supposed to, and never will, be, the final glorious flowering of Welles's intense cultivation, over most of a decade, of the original SACRED BEASTS seedling. Version 4 was a dilatory afterthought, something Welles mentioned in interviews when the subject came up; something he could do with that expensive footage when and if he ever got control of it; and a way to stave off the inevitable accusations of "fear of completion". That Welles, as far as we can tell, never edited one frame of TOSOTW to conform to Version 4 only serves to show that his commitment by that point was perfunctory at best.

For me, the proof is in the editing, or lack of it. With time of the essence, and Welles in control of the rushes, if not the negative, one would think that Welles would want as complete a version as was possible so that, when the negative was liberated from the Iranians, he could finish quickly. But aside from the six or so months of work in Paris with Marie-Sophie Dubus (editor of FAKE), and the burst of activity to get something presentable for the 1975 AFI tribute, little seems to have been done. From 1975 to 1979, when the Iranian revolution drove a stake through the heart of the project, four long years, nothing. That says a lot.

Welles did return to TOSOTW in the 80’s with his mysterious last editor, Jonathon Braun. One gets the impression from Braun’s testimony that the footage had been collecting dust - pieces of TOSOTW were strewn all over Hollywood and Europe. They began by watching some edited sequences, and unedited rushes, and discussing various structural approaches; then one day Welles announced that he wanted to work on TOSOTW, and they began cutting….the party scene! One of the scenes in the 40 minutes or so that Welles had supposedly, ah, finished! One of the many dispiriting anecdotes that Braun relates is that many of the most crucial sequences for the film were not written down, but existed only in Welles’s imagination. When Welles described them to Braun, “they made sense. They were the kind of glue that held everything together, that joined everything.” Now do you see why I believe that TOSOTW will never be finished, and why I believe that Bogdanovich knows this, if only subconsciously; and that when (if?) Welles made Bogdanovich promise to complete TOSOTW after his death, the great cosmic ironist and deceiver was flipping the bird to his dime-store Prince Hal one last time?

Bogdanovich once called Welles, who was shooting a scene from TOSOTW to ask him if he should film his ersatz musical AT LONG LAST LOVE, in black and white. After telling Bodanovich what a “great idea” that was, Welles hung up, turned to the cast and crew and burst into laughter. “Black and white! Hahahahahahahahah!”

We know that Welles fought to the end to regain control of TOSOTW, but that is a separate issue. To be in control of the film is to be able to choose not to finish it, as well as to finish it. We know that the Iranians threatened to release their own version of the film, in order to recoup their costs, provoking Welles to abscond with the rushes. We know that Welles was notoriously obsessive, secretive, and controlling regarding the editing process, which is why I doubt the “Bogdanovich promise”, and why I think the much-maligned Beatrice was more in synch with her father’s attitude than most people give her credit for being. “Oh, how they’ll love me when I’m dead” can easily be rewritten to “oh, how they’ll profit when I’m dead”. Beatrice is having none of it. Good for her.

I agree with Beatrice that TOSOTW should be completed as a documentary about an unfinished Welles film because TOSOTW is an unfinished Welles film. Version 3 is lost to us because Welles is lost to us. No one else can do it, certainly not the director of SQUIRREL TO THE NUTS. Welles abandoned Version 3 for Version 4; why not follow his lead on this, even if Version 4 will never be Welles's Version 4? At least with Version 4, there is room to maneuver. Bogdanovich’s Tom Petty documentary was pretty good. That gives me hope.

[Jedediah Leland]

Thanks for another thought-provoking post mido - and apologies if I didn't quite accurately summarise your position.

We certainly diverge in interpreting what Welles's TOSOTW intentions were beyond the late 70s, and you make a very good case for his moving towards abandonment. Thanks for the details you threw in regarding Welles's editors and anecdotes - all very enlightening. (Sadly I can't match this detail, I'm currently away from home with all my Welles books, so can only speak in generalities!)

But I'd still err towards accepting at face value Welles's insistence that he hadn't abandoned hope of finishing the film, and that it was the practicalities of the funding/legal situation which barred him from finishing the film.

We know that Welles fought to the end to regain control of TOSOTW, but that is a separate issue. To be in control of the film is to be able to choose not to finish it, as well as to finish it.

True, but as far as Welles was always concerned, loss of control meant the project was no longer worth releasing. This is particularly the case when one considers how central editing would have been to TOSOTW (as you say in making the case for why version (3) shouldn't be "finished" by someone else).

From 1975 to 1979, when the Iranian revolution drove a stake through the heart of the project, four long years, nothing. That says a lot.

Welles's trouble with the Iranian-backed Les Films Astrophore started with the accusations of misappropriated funds in 1974 - the shortfall in funds that Welles/Antoine/Bogdanovich/Kodar claimed had been stolen, and that the Iranians claimed to have paid (they didn't believe the funds had been stolen), created the rift over whether additional funding would bring the investors the right to a final cut, to secure a speedy release & return on their investment. This dispute was already pretty bad by 1975, when the AFI tribute went out as an SOS, and things really went off the rails c.1976-7.

I think it was Lawrence French who published on Wellesnet the 1977 letter which makes it clear that 1977 was the year Welles realised TOSOTW was going nowhere, due to this legal/financial impasse. That does seem to coincide with Welles's deep depression I alluded to above, a general drop-off in productivity in 1977-8, though in late '78 he gets back to work and finishes Filming Othello, and then by '79 he's at work on The Orson Welles Show (which I have a very low regard for!)

But a crisis point in 1977-8 doesn't mean he paid only lip service to getting it completed post-'77 (although I can see why you've reached that conclusion). There were perfectly plausible reasons why he might see little point in doing the gruelling editing work that might kill him, if the film's release was still uncertain.

There were financial factors to consider. Welles's editing work on TOSOTW would not have been cheap - it involved hiring five full-time assistant editors to do the cutting while he directed their edits. That's five salaries. (He'd only ever done something like it before on F for Fake, when there were three editors working at the same time, and Les Films Astrophore was picking up the tab.) If the right to a final cut was already in doubt, why should he hire five editors out of his own pocket for chipping away at some small part of TOSOTW which would only ever be screened once and never get a wider release, when he could hire just one or two people (and get Gary Graver to do some filming for free) to work on something else? It would cost a fraction, so he could get more work done, and he was never going to be able to raise the completion funds for TOSOTW all by himself. And solving the legal/financial problems would allow him to hire the scale of help that he needed for such a big task.

And if you look at the problem of attracting "end money", it seems symptomatic of Welles's approach. He could never raise the funds to complete his own feature films, but he could use his earnings to film tests, tasters and shorts to attract proper funding - for a fraction of the cost of TOSOTW, he could shoot fragments of "The Dreamers" and "King Lear", and hold out hope of a proper budget. But only an outside investor could give him the millions needed for TOSOTW, to buy out the Iranian investors as well as covering the (relatively smaller) lab costs & editors' salaries.

By the way, does anyone know how long the Khomeini government impounded the negative for? Impounding of US assets happened in 1979, and Welles certainly told Leaming in 1985 that it had now been released. But was the negative released any earlier tha 1985? (If so, that would strengthen your argument for Welles abandonign TOSOTW.)

Also, my above comment probably sounded more anti-Beatrice than I'm trying to be on this point. I'm not generally inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt as to her motives, but re. TOSOTW, I think we're in agreement that what she's ended up arguing for is not a million miles from version (4) of what Welles envisioned.

I should also concede that in my above summary, version (4) has more than a little speculation from me. Welles talked about doing something with TOSOTW in the 80s, and talked about a framing device. To my knowledge, he never mentioned a "talking heads" approach, but given the approach of F for Fake and Filming Othello, I think it's not unlikely. But it's open to debate!

One other interesting point you make:

They began by watching some edited sequences, and unedited rushes, and discussing various structural approaches; then one day Welles announced that he wanted to work on TOSOTW, and they began cutting….the party scene! One of the scenes in the 40 minutes or so that Welles had supposedly, ah, finished!

The party scene was cut with the AFI ceremony in mind - not the final film. That this is significant becomes obvious when you compare the projector room scene as shown at the AFI, with the published TOSOTW script. In the script, what appears as one continuous scene at the AFI is actually inter-cut with lots of other outside scenes, in small inter-cut chunks. This becomes obvious when you watch the projection room scene again with that in mind - a lot of Max David's comments are non-sequiteurs, because we're actually meant to have cut to another scene, and come back to him several minutes later. So even ignoring the possibility that Welles changed his approach to the party scene, he may just have been trying to undo the temporary "taster" editing work he did for AFI.

[Wellesnet]

This interview with Francois Widhoff is in French with no subtitles, but it contains some snippets of TOSOTW footage that I haven't seen before:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz7r33 ... shortfilms

As Seth Alexander Thevoz notes:
"The most interesting thing she says is that she's donated her papers on F for Fake and TOSOTW to the Cinematheque in Paris. (She was Francois Reichenbach's assistant.)

Some interesting reminscences from her, including being the go-between giving the producers' money to a certain party, and not asking for a receipt, which came back to bite the production!"

Thanks to Seth for this other article as well, as well as help with the translation:
http://www.cinematheque.fr/fr/musee-col ... -wind.html

Here's the rough translation:

"The archives of "The Other Side of the Wind" have been offered to Francoise Widhoff. For years, she was the partner of Francois Reichenbach, the filmmaker and producer of "F for Fake" who introduced her to Orson Welles. She worked with him on this film and then on "The Other Side of the Wind". The latter was produced, among others, by the Iranian Film Society, "Astrophore". In 1983, after the Revolution, the children of it's other producer, Boushehri, entrusted the company to Francoise Widhoff. She said to him: "Boushcheri saved Francois Reichenbach from bankruptcy by purchasing the negative of his documentary, for use in "F for Fake", which he did through me. From that, Astrophore also inherited "The Other Side of the Wind", the last unfinished opus of Orson Welles, and a film which very nearly ruined Astrophore". "

This gift contains the records of production of the company: the contracts, many matches (including mail and telex of Orson Welles) and a dozen financial and legal workbooks. The records provide details on the project "The Other Side of the Wind": a production started in 1973 with great enthusiasm.

Part of the filming took place in the United States, and an initial cut was done between 1974 and 1975, followed by a sudden stop of the production. From 1975 onwards, several attempts to agree to finish the film would prove futile. The implementer disappeared regularly and seemed to oppose the provisions taken by the production, consciously blocking the advancement of the project. One sentence of a folder, yet factual, says a lot about the personality of Orson Welles at this time: "Any individual new, risk of suffering the charm, the influence and reputation of Orson Welles, and of prejudice to the economic and financial elements in question".

One learns however that a working copy of the final cut was in possession of Orson Welles and has never been shown. With the help of Francoise Widhoff, we may some day mount this with the original negative elements of "The Other Side of the Wind".'

[Roger Ryan]

This interview with Francois Widhoff is in French with no subtitles, but it contains some snippets of TOSOTW footage that I haven't seen before...

I'm pretty sure all of those clips come from the Munich Filmmuseum's "Scenes From 'The Other Side Of The Wind'" compilation which has been presented at various Welles retrospectives over the years. Thanks for sharing!

[GlennandersFraser]

Yes, I can substantiate what you say, Roger, about the less familiar clips -- the scenes shown in the interview of the leading man following "The Girl" (Oja Kodar) by car and on motorcycle -- exist in compilations in the possession of Stefan Droessler's Munich Filmuseum. When Todd Baesen, French and I saw the material, I was under the impression that this sequence was, in some way, intended to tie "The Film" to the ongoing, overall plot of the main picture.

I'm impressed with the erudite discussion you are carrying on with mido and Jed.

Glenn Anders

[Le Chiffre]

From "Orson Welles - A First Inventory" by Jonathon Rosenbaum:

The principal obstacle to completing The Other Side of the Wind [as of 2007], despite many attempted deals, has been the inability for Oja to obtain a contract allowing herself and Gary Graver to have final creative control. Given Gary’s shooting of the entire film and Oja’s substantial input as writer, actress, and even director (in a climactic sequence of the film-within-the-film), I consider them the only ones with the knowledge and sensitivity as well the moral right to carry out this work, but other egos and power positions have periodically argued otherwise.

Oja may indeed have a moral right to complete a version of the film - although her position has probably weakened since Graver's death - but it seems that those few people with that kind of money to invest in a completion would prefer someone else (like the film's producer, Frank Marshall, for example) to do it. Therefore, it seems that the only way out of this mess may be to have TWO different completions of the film. That would be messy, but would also make it true to it's Wellesian pedigree anyway, since there are so many other Welles films with multiple versions as well.

[Wellesnet]

Here we go, folks:
http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=11078

NYT announcement:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/movie ... .html?_r=0

[Jedediah Leland]

Firstly, if this is true, and not a wind-up, then I'm as thrilled as everyone else.

But my second thought was uh oh, this part sounds ominous, in the New York Times:

The producers say they aim to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth, and to promote its distribution at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif., next month.

Have we learned nothing from Franco's Don Quixote experience? That was rushed into existence in 1990 to make the deadline for Seville's Expo '92, when more time was clearly required. May is just seven months away. Previously, Bogdanovich had talked about the cataloguing of all the footage alone taking at least a year, and then editing could potentially take...who knows? Another year? If this is done, I think we all want to see it done properly, and a seven month turnaround from announcement of the agreement of the rights to the premiere does not sound adequate to me.