OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND - John Huston on making the film

[Harvey Chartrand]

I remember reading that Peter Bogdanovich wanted Welles to direct a film based on Gavin Lyall's MIDNIGHT PLUS ONE. Here is a plot synopsis taken from a fan site.

"Lewis Cane was once a hero; under the nickname Caneton he was an SOE operative in the French resistance. After the war, he hasn't really found what he wants to do, until an expensive lawyer hires him to transport a businessman across France. Magonhard can't just travel in the usual manner; not only are his enemies seeking to stop him, but they have also arranged a false accusation of rape to ensure that the police will also be looking for him. He needs to arrive in Liechtenstein as soon as possible, to save a business that the death of one of his partners seems set to destroy.

The journey is partly about Caneton showing that he is still competent in this kind of work, but more interestingly also about him coming to terms not just with his own history but with the realisation that the past is past and that this is no longer what he does. It makes the novel more than a run of the mill thriller, as Lyall examines a side of "the hero" not so commonly part of the genre - what happens when the time for heroism is past. Cane is a contrast to the other man accompanying the party across France: an alcoholic bodyguard unable to cope psychologically with the work that he is supremely gifted in - another interesting character.

An excellent thriller, well worth reading."

Sound kind of Wellesian, doesn't it? But would this property have the makings of a seventies CITIZEN KANE? Still, it's a pity fiftysomething Welles wasn't given the green light to direct MIDNIGHT PLUS ONE. Then again, if it was my money, I'd probably have assigned the project to a younger, hotter director like Bob Rafelson.

I'm getting the impression (from the last posting) that Peter Bogdanovich's downfall – the whole sorry saga of divorce, career missteps, bankruptcy, murder, critical opprobrium, box office failure and gun-for-hire status – originates with Welles' endorsement of DAISY MILLER. I've never seen the picture. Does it really deserve its bomb rating? In any event, Bogdanovich suffers a very Wellesian descending career arc after DAISY MILLER. It's as if Welles placed a curse on Bogdanovich.

In 1972, Bogdanovich was ideally cast as the mega-successful young film director in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, who is envied by his former mentor Jake Hannaford. Yet within five years, Bogdanovich's directing career was in almost as bad shape as Welles'. At least Bogdanovich was able to bounce back to some degree, unlike Welles, permanently exiled from Hollywood. They wouldn't even let the Great One direct for television.

[L French]

Thanks for the synopsis of "Midnight Plus One" Harvey. It sounds like it would have made a very interesting film - and may still, if anybody ever decides to make it.

And here is what Oja Kodar had to say about the project:

OJA KODAR: We came to Hollywood, in 1970, to see the producer Bert Schneider. He had called Orson about directing a story called MIDNIGHT PLUS ONE (from Gavin Lyall's novel). Orson wanted to make it, with either Robert Mitchum or Yves Montand in the lead, as well as myself (as the female lead). Columbia had the rights to do it, and it was a thriller set in France, after the Nazi occupation. It was about the people who came out of the war and remember the wrong they had done to each other, and how they tried to catch up with each other, for vengeance. Finally, we realized we weren't going to be able to make it, because Columbia wasn't getting behind it, so it all fell apart.

In the meantime, Orson and I were sitting in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, with our living expenses being paid by Columbia. Orson said, "we can both write, I'm a director, you're an actress, lets think of a film to make while we're here in Hollywood. We had two stories, Orson had one called "Jake", which is the name of the main character played by John Huston, and I had a story called "The Other Side of the Wind'. So we mixed the two stories together and started working on it, until finally we had a script for THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Of course Orson was the main writer, I in a minor capacity. Then Gary Graver came into the story. He presented himself to Orson at the Beverly Hills Hotel...

[Gordon]

Bogdanovich suffers a very Wellesian descending career...
In 1972, Bogdanovich was ideally cast as the mega-successful young film director in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, who is envied by his former mentor Jake Hannaford. Yet within five years, Bogdanovich's directing career was in almost as bad shape as Welles'.

It's so interesting a story.

Starts with The Young Orson Welles looking up the Jake Hannaford's of the silent era, who were unable in 1940 to get their calls answered in Hollywood. The story of the Old Directors and the Young Welles is reminiscent of Bogdanovich (and MacBride) interviewing Hawks, Ford & Welles.

30 years later we have Welles & Bogdanovich as Falstaff and Hal,

Then 25 years on, King Henry turns back into Plump Jack for Tarantino.

The saga is like an amazing cycle.

[Roger Ryan]

I'm getting the impression (from the last posting) that Peter Bogdanovich's downfall – the whole sorry saga of divorce, career missteps, bankruptcy, murder, critical opprobrium, box office failure and gun-for-hire status – originates with Welles' endorsement of DAISY MILLER. I've never seen the picture. Does it really deserve its bomb rating? In any event, Bogdanovich suffers a very Wellesian descending career arc after DAISY MILLER.

I tend to think it was the one-two punch of "Daisy Miller" (1974) with the even more questionable follow-up "At Long Last Love" (1975), an homage to classic MGM musicals starring Burt Reynolds! Bogdanovich returned with the charming "Nickelodeon" (1976), but it too was a box office failure. Three strikes and you're out, I guess. Personally, I'm a fan of the little-seen "They All Laughed" from around 1980, but Bogdanovich only hit pay dirt once more with "Mask" about five years later. "The Cat's Meow" (2002) was a fine return to form, I thought; easily his best work since his early '70s heyday.

[Harvey Chartrand]

SAINT JACK (1979) is an amazing film. It's my favorite Bogdanovich picture – even better than TARGETS (Karloff's swan song). I caught SAINT JACK a few nights ago on Bravo (Canadian arts channel). Excellent print. Few commercial interruptions. Great performances by Ben Gazzara and Denholm Elliott. Bogdanovich was very good as a shady character, sort of a Vietnam-era Harry Lime. Weird cameo by former James Bond George Lazenby. Did I read somewhere that Welles wanted to direct a film version of the Paul Theroux novel?

[Eve_h]

I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but I just came across an article in "Sunday Times" Magazine from 13th february titled
"Awesome Welles - Orson Welles died without completing 'the greatest film never released'. This feature unravels the strange story of the legendary director's enigmatic masterpiece".
Has anyone read the piece? (doesn't sound as if it would contain any news)

(please excuse my bad English)

[colwood]

Eve_h, your english sounds fine. Thanks for the head's up on the article.

Here it is, courtesy of the Sunday Times.

Awesome Welles
Orson Welles died without completing 'the greatest film never released'. Tim Carroll unravels the strange story of the legendary director's enigmatic masterpiece

Orson Welles died in the early hours of October 10, 1985, at his modest home in the Hollywood hills. The maverick director had been sitting at his typewriter preparing a production of Julius Caesar. It was typical of Welles's inventive spirit that he had decided to perform all the roles himself. But fate intervened, and he suffered a fatal heart attack.

When he died he left behind a plethora of unrealised ideas and scripts, including 300 cans of celluloid, amounting to a handful of uncompleted movies. And in the past 20 years, one of those films has become a source of fevered speculation: is it the best movie never released?

The negatives of The Other Side of the Wind have been under lock and key since 1976, embroiled in a byzantine legal wrangle that began long before Welles's death. The problem started as a question, as it often does in the film industry: who owns the rights to the movie? Welles's idiosyncratic methods of filming and financing obscured the matter, and his death confused things further. Parties at war over the rights to the film include the statuesque and darkly exotic Croatian actress Oja Kodar, his companion in the last 20 years of his life; his daughter Beatrice, from his third marriage, to an Italian aristocrat; and the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. For the best part of three decades, the prints of Welles's unseen masterpiece have been sitting in a Paris bank vault gathering dust. Now, however, there are strong signals that the film may be released.

After years of frustration, the actor and film director Peter Bogdanovich says that an agreement has nearly been reached between the squabbling factions. "These negotiations have been going on for five years now," he told me from his Manhattan home, "but they are nearing a resolution." A large cable company has put up the $3.5m needed to finish the editing and put the film onto the big screen. It is a personal triumph for Bogdanovich. Though possibly better known today as Dr Elliot Kupferberg of The Sopranos, he has just published Who the Hell's in It? (Faber and Faber), his memoir of a lifetime in Hollywood. He was one of Welles's closest friends and collaborators, and was given a starring role in The Other Side of the Wind.

Welles made Bogdanovich promise to finish the film should anything happen to him. Bogdanovich has spent the intervening years trying to do just that. At least three titans of Tinseltown, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and George Lucas, have rejected the option to finish it. It is reasonable to wonder: is it really a masterpiece? Or just the last, failed hurrah of a bloated, unfocused, overindulged ego?

The movie is a three-hour essay on the process of film-making, with all the strutting machismo that often accompanies it. A film within a film, it focuses on the last 24 hours in the life of a movie director, Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston), who dies on the night of his 70th-birthday party. Hannaford is an insufferable braggart who swaggers about, sycophants in his wake. Bogdanovich plays Brooks Otterlake, a one-time protégé of Hannaford, who has become more commercially successful than his old master.

In my interview with Bogdanovich, he let slip that the film starts with the ghostly voice of Hannaford explaining that he died in a car crash that night. The audience is about to see his last hours re-created through the eyes of his entourage, who had been filming his party, along with TV news footage, and sound recordings made by journalists of the event. The movie becomes a frantic collage. Viewers watch his life approach its tawdry end as fragments of his unfinished film — an arty thriller also called The Other Side of the Wind — flicker onto the screen. "It's an extraordinarily complicated exercise in film-making," says Bogdanovich.

The film contains explicit sex scenes featuring Oja Kodar. One in particular is "remarkably erotic", Bogdanovich says. "Oja is making love in a car, and a crowd of onlookers are standing outside in the pouring rain." The car shakes frantically as the lovers grapple with one another. The film, too, is about to reach its climax. It is, he says, "very, very sexual" — not familiar territory for Welles.

It was Kodar who inspired the highly charged content. "Orson called me his erotic adviser!" she laughs from her home in Zagreb. "I'm very proud of that scene. It is very erotic. Orson was a little embarrassed by the whole thing." Kodar appears nude in one pretentiously arty sequence. The movie ends with the sun rising over Hollywood.

As the sun finally set on Welles's life, his reputation lay in as much disrepair as the film he failed to finish. Many critics still insist his 1941 film Citizen Kane was his only real achievement. After that, he acquired a reputation as a profligate director who could never finish his movies on time. He made his last film with a big studio in 1958. But Welles's defenders believe The Other Side of the Wind will challenge his critics and secure his position in the Hollywood pantheon. "There is no doubt it is the work of a genius," says Stefan Droessler of the Munich Film Museum. "It is a very daring film. It is beyond doubt one of the outstanding specimens of Welles's incredibly innovative oeuvre." The New York writer Kent Jones agrees. "You're not looking at a fallen genius but a creator at least 20 years ahead of his time."

It was Kodar who came up with the title. She was with Welles, scouting for locations in Rome one day, when a gust of wind blew his cape and floppy hat up into wild flurries about him. "He suddenly turned into this gigantic, menacing bat," she says, "and many people thought that is what he was like. But he was a gentle and kind man, and I thought, ÔI wish people could see the other side of Orson Welles.' " She began working on a script called The Other Side of the Wind, which ventured to explore this contrast between the public perception and the private truth.

Welles worked on his own script. It owed its inspiration to his years in Europe, where he spent much of the 1960s, shunned by Hollywood. He settled in Madrid, finding that Spain's traditional society suited his temperament. He became intrigued by that other Midwestern icon who had adopted Spain as his spiritual home, Ernest Hemingway. Welles shared the writer's passion for bullfighting and was wryly amused by his entourage of young flunkies. He conceived the idea of a film about the relationship between a veteran bullfighter basking in past glories and a brilliant young matador who is a protégé, friend and rival. He was intrigued by the macho mythology in which a matador needs to shroud himself — not unlike that of a film director.

The critical triumph of his 1966 epic Chimes at Midnight encouraged him to try to get the bullfighting film made. Potential investors were summoned to Madrid, where he made an eloquent pitch in his velvet baritone. The idea now centred on a Hemingwayesque movie director obsessed by a brilliant young bullfighter whose life he is documenting. But the director is living his life through the matador, suffering from what Welles called emotional parasitism. "It has to do with the mystique of the he-man. This whole picture is against he-men." The central figure is exposed as a fake who gets a thrill out of the dangers and deaths of others. It would be a dark movie about dying, decadence and ruin. It would also be a radical exercise in film-making, shot on a low budget in a quick-fire documentary style.

There was a script, said Welles, but he wasn't going to show it to any of the actors. When it came to their scene he would tell them their lines and what was supposed to happen. It would be up to them to interpret their roles. He wanted lots of improvisation. "Have you done that kind of thing before?" asked a voice from the audience. "Nobody's ever done it," responded Welles. "Aren't you concerned that the end result won't have any control or any form?" asked another. Welles said he was not. He didn't raise a peseta.

**********

At around this time, Welles, unusually, was finding some sort of equilibrium in his private life. For decades he had been famed as a misogynist, treating all three of his wives with casual disregard. The first, a Chicago socialite, accused him of mental cruelty. He cheated on his second, the screen siren Rita Hayworth, blatantly pursuing affairs with Marlene Dietrich and the Mexican beauty Dolores Del Rio. He did the same with No 3, the elegant Italian Paola Mori, Countess of Girfalco. And it was no secret that women always played minor parts in his movies.

Throughout the 1960s, however, Welles was having an on-off affair with a woman he would begin to idolise. He was approaching 50; she was in her twenties. An actress, writer and sculptor, Olga Palinkas was very funny and very smart. For once, the boot was on the other foot. They were travelling with a Croatian friend in France one day when Welles said that Palinkas was like a "gift from God" to him. Palinkas translated for her friend, and it emerged as two words that made "Kodar". "Orson said, ÔThat sounds nice — and K is a good letter to begin a name with,'" Kodar recalls. "I don't know if he was thinking of Citizen Kane." So Palinkas became Kodar. As the 1960s swung into the 70s, Welles continued his romance with Kodar and the loveless marriage with Paola. He returned to California, settling with Kodar in Hollywood.

Welles had long known of an up-and-coming director called Peter Bogdanovich, and in 1968 he invited him to drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They got on well and talked of collaborating. Bogdanovich used his connections to get the older man appearances on chat shows, which Welles used to relaunch his career as a parody of himself.

About that time, another admiring young man wrote to Welles. Gary Graver was a Vietnam veteran who had had some success as a cameraman and director on exploitation B-movies. Welles was impressed by the quality of his work, produced on a shoestring. After an initial meeting, he suggested they did some filming the next day. Graver turned up with his camera but without his tripod. "Not to worry," Welles said. "We'll try tomorrow." The following day he forgot his zoom lens. "It was kind of comical," says Kodar, "and Orson was unusually patient. But Gary's a very likable guy and soon all three of us were inseparable."

Sometime afterwards, Bogdanovich was preparing to fly to Texas to make The Last Picture Show. He received a call from Welles, who said he was making his own movie, and would Bogdanovich do a bit of filming the next day?

Bogdanovich, for whom working for Welles was like "breathing pure oxygen all day", was more than willing to help. But, he lamented, he was flying out of town the next day. "All right," replied Welles. "Meet me at noon — where the planes fly over. I'll shoot you there for an hour and let you go." So the following day, Bogdanovich found himself at Los Angeles airport meeting a ragtag crew and Orson Welles. The movie was The Other Side of the Wind, a fusion of Welles's own idea and Kodar's, which the couple were paying for out of their own pockets. "My role was to be a film journalist and I was to ask Hannaford pretentious questions like, ÔDo you think the cinema is a phallus?'" Bogdanovich is a gifted mimic, and Welles asked him if he could use a Jerry Lewis accent. "He was amused by that."

Filming and editing continued, on and off, for five years, whenever Welles could pay for it. Characters came and went; the story line often changed. Welles anguished over the central character of Jake Hannaford. "Goddamit," he told Bogdanovich, "this is such a good role, I should have it." But he knew he did not have the rugged earthiness it called for. It was two years before he finally cast John Huston. His old friend thought it "an ingenious idea" but asked what the story was about. "It's about a bastard director who's full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It's about us, John. It's a film about us."

By then, thanks to one of his more bizarre assignments, Welles had mustered enough funds to do some location shooting. In 1972 he made a documentary about the Shah of Iran, which brought him into contact with Mehdi Bouscheri, the husband of the Shah's sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi. Impressed by Welles, Bouscheri, a principal in the Paris-based production company Les Films de l'Astrophore, agreed to invest $1m-plus in The Other Side of the Wind. Welles and his crew set off for a dusty backdrop called Carefree in the Arizona desert. He hired a ramshackle house, and two Beverly Hills chefs served gourmet meals. At the house there was a party atmosphere, while the set was in perpetual disorder. Huston found Welles, in flowing robes, demanding imperiously to be obeyed. "Why must I be questioned in this manner?" he would demand of some underling. Huston was amazed to find that he had no script, but soldiered on manfully.

Chaos turned to crisis when Welles decided the actor he had chosen to play Brooks Otterlake, the young protégé-cum-rival, was not quite right. That evening he called LA to discuss the problem with Bogdanovich, by then a hot new talent, The Last Picture Show having been hailed as the most important film since Citizen Kane. "Why don't I do it?" he asked. "My God!" said Welles. "Why didn't I think of that?" Bogdanovich was soon in Carefree. The role of the pretentious journalist went to someone else.

The lure of being part of a Welles project attracted a collection of young talent — the firebrand Dennis Hopper, the directors Paul Mazursky and Henry Jaglom, and Cameron Crowe, then a journalist struggling to become an actor, who played a journalist struggling to become an
actor. Apart from the food and wine, it was all done on a shoestring, though Kodar had the best costumes, the best make-up — and the most provocative scenes.

The coffers rapidly emptied. The chefs were sent home and the crew were reduced to eating at the local burger bar, even downing tools one day at 3pm because they had not eaten since breakfast. On another occasion, Welles said to Bogdanovich: "If anything should ever happen to me, I want you to promise that you will finish this film." Bogdanovich was taken aback. "Nothing is going to happen to you," he said. Welles replied: "I know. But if it does."

Filming dragged on intermittently until 1975. Welles was so desperate for money to complete it that he even turned up to receive a Life Achievement award from the American Film Institute. He used the event to show clips of the film and appeal for finance, but nothing came of it.

Then the project came to a grinding halt in a legal dispute over ownership. Welles and Kodar had put about $1m into the project. But of the $1m-plus that Bouscheri's company, l'Astrophore, had put in, $250,000 had been embezzled by an investor. Bouscheri agreed to make up the difference only if l'Astrophore was granted an 80% stake in the film. The row ended up in a Paris court, where the two parties were ordered to sort out the details themselves. They failed to do so for 10 years, and Welles flew back and forth between LA and Paris many times to no avail.

His death only complicated matters. He left the rights to his unseen films to Kodar (including writing and directing fees). The rest of his estate went to his third daughter, Beatrice, who became highly litigious, slapping writs on studios that tried to re-edit his films, and pursuing minor copyright infringements. Inevitably, Beatrice and Kodar were soon at loggerheads: Kodar wanted to complete the editing of The Other Side of the Wind; Beatrice insisted it should remain unseen. "It's heartbreaking for me," Kodar complained. "I have worked for years to get it on cinema screens. I know in my heart that is what Orson wanted."

But according to Bogdanovich, Beatrice is no longer blocking the film's release, and the myriad people who have spent nearly 30 years quibbling over fees and shares of profit are also on the verge of reconciliation: "The cable company is talking to everybody involved."

**********

Welles's last role in life was not the Julius Caesar he had been working on the morning he died, but voicing a toy commercial. He would have laughed at that. And there was a twist to his passing that he would have chuckled at too: the friend who discovered his body was the actor who stumbled on the recently expired Charles Foster Kane.

"Orson did not die a bitter man," says Bogdanovich. "That wasn't his thing." And why on earth would he? To film aficionados, his achievements, including those never fully realised, far outstrip those of the Hollywood moguls with their mansions and millions. "There's never been any doubt in my mind that he's one of the greatest, if not the greatest director of all time," says Bogdanovich. "Its bullshit to say the only real success he had was Kane. The first hour of The Magnificent Ambersons is as good as anything anybody's ever made." Gary Graver says: "His genius was in trying to do things no one had done before."

Stefan Droessler agrees, but he is sceptical about plans to edit the film, believing that it should be shown as it is. One glaring problem is that, though the film's events take place over 24 hours, because it was shot over six years the characters look different from one scene to the next. Bogdanovich admits to having had doubts over whether the film should be edited or preserved as it is. But he was always reminded of his promise to his friend. Cynics question whether The Other Side of the Wind can be that good if three of the most accomplished directors want nothing to do with it. Stone thinks it is far too experimental. It is not known what the others' objections are.

Kodar has a simple explanation:. "They don't want to finish Orson's film because they don't want to give him any credit. They've spent 30 years stealing his ideas. But the difference between them and Orson is that he was an original mind and made his movies for peanuts, not millions."

It is a delicious thought to picture Spielberg, Stone and co sitting uncomfortably in the cutting room as the great master's images flicker before them. Could it be that they hear a ghostly echo of that inimitable booming voice: "It's about a bastard director who's full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It's about us, John. It's a film about us"?

[Wilson]

A good article, but as always, I'll believe it when I see it on a screen. But if that article is to be believed, I am eternally grateful that Spielberg, Lucas, and Stone didn't want anything to do with it.

[Harvey Chartrand]

We are more likely to see peace in the Middle East before we see THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. It is, I'm afraid, gone with the wind.

[jbrooks]

I don't know. It sounds like Bogdanovich might finally pull it off.

I have a couple of issues with the article's facts. Is the picture 3 hours long? From what I've read, it isn't or at least it won't be once they remove alternate takes of the same scenes. Also, are there onlookers outside in the rain in the sex scene in the car? Not that I remember. Isn't the car supposed to be moving? Did Bogdanovich simply mispeak or has he not seen the film in a long time?

And do we know for a fact that Spielberg, Lucas, and Stone passed up opportunities to finish the film? I have read from several sources that each of them viewed some of the footage (presumably one of Gary Graver's workprints). But did they really have the abiltiy to say "I want to finish this film for Welles"? Didn't Orson give that responsiblity to Bogdanovich? Or was Oja willing to let anyone finish it so long as they could muster the financial resources and overcome the legal obastles?

[Johnny Dale]

I don't know. I still can't imagine myself with my DVD of TOSOTW in my player.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Did anyone see Peter Bogdanovich in the 'Sex Club' episode of LAW AND ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT, which aired on Sunday, February 20/05? Bogdanovich amusingly portrayed a character based on Playboy Magazine publisher Hugh Hefner. Such delicious irony, as it was Hefner who promoted Dorothy Stratten – the October 1979 Playmate and B-movie actress (GALAXINA). Hefner introduced Stratten to Bogdanovich. They became romantically entangled. Bogdanovich was grooming Stratten for stardom (casting her in THEY ALL LAUGHED). Then Stratten was murdered by her loser husband Paul Snider.
Seeing Bogdanovich guesting on LAW AND ORDER: CI so reminded me of Welles making a living from his acting gigs. Such intriguing parallels in both their careers!

[Hannaford]

Here's a summation of how THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND was going to end.

Jake Hannaford and all the guests at his Birthday party drive their cars out to a local drive-in after the power at Hannaford's ranch fails.

Once at the drive-in, the screening of Hannaford's movie continues, and shortly afterwards, a drunken Hannaford drives his red Porsche out of the lot, only to crash it behind the screen. A mushroom cloud from the car wreck rises behind the drive-in as Hannaford’s movie fades from the screen while the morning sun comes up. The assembled guests exit the drive-in in their cars (perhaps Welles intended this as a sort of mock funeral procession, as in OTHELLO ), while on the soundtrack the tinny drive-in speakers echo Hannaford last direction: “cut, cut, cut...”

[Johnny Dale]

Jake,

Is there one place where the entire screenplay of TOSOTW is summarized?

Dale

[Gordon]

welles wiki