Josh Karp's new book on TOSOTW

[Wellesnet]

Coming April 21st. Library Journal says "Orson Welles's Last Movie" is: "Easily one of the most informative and enjoyable books about Welles ever published" and "An intimate, humorous and staggering tale of one of the great creative minds of cinema and his attempt to simply do what he did best"



Josh karp discusses the new book in a podcast:
http://jogroad.podbean.com/e/28-josh-ka ... k.facebook

[Wellesnet]

Review by Boris Kachka for The Book Reader:
http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/boo ... ovie-.html

[Wellesnet]

As the book hits stores tomorrow, here is the latest roundup of reviews:

Hollywood Reporter:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/o ... ook-786518

New York Post:
The time Orson Welles secretly edited a porn film:
http://nypost.com/2015/04/18/that-time- ... porn-film/

Extended excerpt from the book in Vanity Fair:
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/201 ... -making-of

[mido505]

Extraordinary book, one of the best written on Welles and his projects. Karp is a genuinely talented writer, with a sympathetic yet appropriately critical eye, and he has done his homework. He's funny, too. I especially appreciate Karp's fair-mindedness in areas where it is easy to become partisan and vitriolic, while being unafraid to point out obvious failings by Welles, Kodar, and Bogdanovich.

I read it in one sitting.

[RayKelly]

Entertainment Weekly says: "Welles is as ripe a subject as any to depict Hollywood hubris, but Karp’s lively tone keeps him on a balanced, human level. More than anything, Movie paints the Citizen Kane vanguard as something of a Gatsby desperately seeking his own Nick Carraway to understand his overactive mind."
[url]http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/30/orson-welles’s-last-movie-josh-karp-ew-review[/url]

[RayKelly]

Matthew Asprey Gear has done a fantastic interview with Josh Karp about his book with a few tidbits you will not find anywhere else. Check it out at Bright Lights!

http://brightlightsfilm.com/orsons-charmed-circle-of-fragments-welles-a-conversation-with-josh-karp-on-his-new-book-orson-welless-last-movie-the-making-of-the-other-side-of-the-wind/#.VULxpGa0bKo

[Wellesnet]

WSJ:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-genius-wi ... 1430512500

Entertainment Weekly:

Filmmaker Orson Welles blustered about a great many things—artistic control, casting, hell, even frozen peas. But in Josh Karp’s excellent new book, you get a sensitively rendered and panoramic depiction of that famous megalomania. Orson Welles’s Last Movie chronicles the disastrous making-of drama behind Welles’ Iranian-funded, still-unseen final film, The Other Side of the Wind, a deeply strange, supermeta project about a legendary closeted moviemaker’s 70th birthday party, which happens on the final day of his life. (Spooky: Welles himself, who many assumed was the basis for the lead character, also died at 70.) Welles is as ripe a subject as any to depict Hollywood hubris, but Karp’s lively tone keeps him on a balanced, human level. More than anything, Movie paints the Citizen Kane vanguard as something of a Gatsby desperately seeking his own Nick Carraway to understand his overactive mind. There’s no shortage of hilarious anecdotes here: Welles berating a PA for not getting sandwiches for the crew members so they could then work with one free hand; the actors questioning a note to dejectedly look down at their feet so Welles could add “midgets” to their scene later. But the most delicious irony of all might be that this tale of the ultimate movie gone wrong could make for a pretty wonderful movie. A–

MEMORABLE LINES
“There’s only one other thing I hate as much as [an actor praying on film] and that’s sex,” Welles said. “You just can’t get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.”

Philly.com:

Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of "The Other Side of the Wind" by Josh Karp. (St. Martins Press, 336 pp., $26.99). "An adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing" is how John Huston described his long and stormy collaboration with Orson Welles on The Other Side of the Wind, a show-biz drama, written and directed by Welles, that was going to redeem his career.

Begun in 1970, when the Citizen Kane auteur returned to Hollywood after years of self-imposed exile in Europe, Welles' ambitious comeback was about a legendary director - played by legendary director Huston - who returns to Hollywood from, yes, years of exile in Europe. Left unfinished at his death, Welles' swan song became ensnared in decades of legal and financial dispute. Karp explores every aspect of the making - and unmaking - of Welles' project, which he insisted wasn't autobiography.

It was hoped that an epic restoration of The Other Side of the Wind, with Peter Bogdanovich as one of its driving forces, would have its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which begins May 13. It is not on the festival schedule.

[RayKelly]

Film rights to Josh Karp’s ‘Orson Welles’s Last Movie’ purchased
http://www.wellesnet.com/film-rights-to-josh-karps-orson-welless-last-movie-purchased/

[atcolomb]

So far i have read 60% of it on my kindle and what great stories and alot i did not know. It sounds to me that it took so long to make it because Welles did not want to finish it because making it gave him great pleasure in making movies and did not want it to end. The story behind the making of TOSOTW is just as exciting as the movie itself.. if it ever comes out.

[Le Chiffre]

The two together would make a good double feature.

[Wellesnet]

Josh Karp discusses his book on the Los Angeles radio staion KCRW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baQ09GmUjUY

NYT review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/books ... .html?_r=1

[Wellesnet]

Sydney radio interview with Josh Karp:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/audio/2015/ ... 295634.htm

[Wellesnet]

Another good review of Josh's book:
https://cinemaarete.wordpress.com/2015/ ... ast-movie/

Also, the new book was reviewed in the Sept/Oct issue of Film Comment magazine:

Josh Karp’s thoroughly researched and thrillingly narrated Orson Welles’s Last Movie constitutes the first book-length chronicle of The Other Side of the Wind, a semi-improvisational guerrilla experiment tand art-becomes-life fantasia that’s nowconsidered one of Hollywood’s most infamous unfinished masterpieces/follies. Rare is the filmmaker whose “what-might-have-beens” warrant significant verbiage, but Karp proves Welles a more than deserving case: an exceedingly bizarre production, The Other Side of the Wind appears to fully embody the legendary director’s outsize, quixotic ambition.

“Appears” is the operative word—very few people have actually seen the film, which has remained in postproduction and distribution limbo for 30 years. Beginning in 1937 with Welles’s violent run-in with Ernest Hemingway (the model for The Other Side of the Wind’s pugnacious protagonist) and largely taking place during the carnival-esque, industry transitioning Seventies, Karp’s book smoothly navigates the film’s complicated, protracted history—which at one point intertwined with the Iranian Revolution—while successfully evoking its chaos. Indeed, The Other Side of the Wind ceaselessly courted crisis as a result of Welles’s unorthodox shooting methods and rough dealings with friends and associates, both due in large part to a constantly mutating, real-life-incorporating script. To wit: initially driving a wedge between Peter Bogdanovich and his moviemaking idol, the film eventually incorporated that tumult when Welles cast the ascending New Hollywooder as a disillusioned protégé of a larger-than-life, self-destructive director (fittingly played by John Huston).

Welles fervently denied that The Other Side of the Wind was autobiographical, and Karp wisely avoids such a reading in understanding the man behind the movie. Instead, Karp’s depiction of Welles is refreshingly balanced, on the one hand deflating the myths surrounding the director’s prodigality and creative “fear of completion,” and on the other hand providing a sober critique of his lack of practicality and financial acumen. Refusing to pity its subject, Orson Welles’s Last Movie paints a bittersweet portrait of an inimitable artist not so much out of control as both lost within an industry and in thrall to the art that could express that disorientation.—

[Wellesnet]

Mick LaSalle of the SF Chronicle today recommends Josh Karp's ORSON WELLES'S LAST MOVIE: THE MAKING OF "THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND":
"This book came out at the end of April, but I like it so much I'm including it here. This is a book about a movie that, 40 years later, still hasn't been completely edited and released (though the excerpts I've seen look brilliant). Why should that be
so interesting? The book tells an absolutely riveting, funny and frustrating story about Welles and his circle, and it's just irresistible. It would be difficult to make up fictional characters on this grand a scale and have anyone believing them."

[Colmena]

On p269 Karp offers a very brief but instructive comparison of Kane and Welles, followed by a brief comparison of Hannaford and Welles. Recommended.

Also the book made it clear what a hard time Welles had with money: He needs money but cannot deal with conceding authority to those with money. And then he acts up, becomes "impossible." Similarly, he does not know how to manage his money, but cannot delegate this task, since (again) this would end up conceding authority to his bookkeeper /paymaster, which he cannot abide.