They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Morgan Neville’s look at the making of The Other Side of the Wind and the final 15 years of Orson Welles’ life, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on Friday, August 31.

Along with Neville, The Other Side of the Wind cast and crew members Peter Bogdanovich, Joseph McBride, Peter Jason,  Lou Race and Larry Jackson were in attendance at the 150-seat Le Pierre Theater.  Neville’s editors and composer also were introduced at the screening, as was executive producer Frank Marshall, who was a line producer on Welles’ 1970s shoot.

The 98-minute documentary raises the mischievous, debatable suggestion (with the help of 1966 Maysles Bros. interview footage from Welles talking about the project) that the making-of format might be even more interesting than the finished feature film  itself.  (Welles toyed in later years with turning the footage into a documentary a la Filming Othello or Filming ‘The Trial.)

“Neville’s documentary is a fascinating, multifaceted look at Welles and the making of The Other Side of the Wind,” said McBride, a consultant of Wind., who appears in the Neville documentary and receives special thanks in its credits. “It basically covers the period from the start of shooting in August 1970 through Welles’s death. It deals with the financial and legal problems that held up the completion through then and with Welles’s frustrated attempts to try to finish it.”

McBride added, “The documentary mostly skips over attempts to finish the film by cinematographer Gary Graver and others after Welles died and does not discuss hindrances to the film put up by Beatrice Welles or Oja Kodar. It leaves the subject of the postproduction technical and creative process to the other Netflix companion documentary produced by Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza and directed by Ryan Suffern,  A Final Cut For Orson: 40 Years in the Making, which is
also showing at Telluride.”

In They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Kodar’s voice appears in an interview, but she does not appear onscreen, while Welles’s comments are often heard in audio clips and film and TV interviews. The documentary deals extensively with Welles’s complex relationship with Bogdanovich and their eventual falling-out. Graver’s decades-long personal and professional sacrifices to make the project and other late Welles film possible is given extensive and sympathetic treatment.

It also contains a candid section on the allegations of embezzlement by Spanish producer Andrés Vicente Gomez, though it does not take a decisive position on that matter and has Gomez denying any wrongdoing, claiming he made a settlement with Welles.

The editing somewhat mimics the kaleidoscopic editing style of Welles’s 1974 documentary F For Fake, which Neville said in the Q&A  was the major influence on him in his choice of a career as a documentarian.  (A portion of the Q&A can be seen below.) Alan Cummings appears as on-camera host in what seems a homage to Welles’s 1950s British documentaries.

“Neville chose to include a great deal of outtake footage from Other Wind as a valuable, revealing way of showing Welles’s working methods and some false starts, including his lengthy shooting with comic impressionist Rich Little as Brooks Otterlake before Otterlake was replaced in the role by Bogdanovich,” McBride said.

Little is interviewed and gives his own account of why he felt he had to leave the shooting before he finished his role (contractual obligations with other gigs), but the film also presents an alternate account of Little being dissatisfied with Welles’s shooting methods and the filming.

“Neville said afterward that he found there are many conflicting truths about Welles and his work and that people who knew him often take diametrically opposite
views, which can both be partially right. He said Welles’s work teaches us that the human personality is multifaceted wnd often contradictory. While the film offers a strongly sympathetic view of Welles’s integrity and determination to finish the film his own way — and rejects the ‘fear of completion’ theory — it paints an often disturbing portrait of Welles allowing his deep-seated fear of betrayal to influence his friendships, notably that with Bogdanovich, as well as profoundly influencing his work. The documentary examines Welles’s psyche as much as it does his work and shows their interrelationships,” McBride said.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, September 1, where it was warmly received by the audience. Long lines were reported for the screenings.

The film was represented there by producers Korelan Matteson and Josh Karp, who wrote the book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind.

Immediately following its premiere, the first reviews appeared online. Here is a sampling of what critics had to say:

Variety: “A companion documentary about Welles’ particular obsession with this film, and the final decade or so of his career, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is not a traditional making-of, nor is it an especially useful reference to how the movie came to be completed. It contains nothing about the restoration and release of Welles’ film (which will find its way to Netflix after special screenings at the Venice and Telluride film festivals). But it says more about the man behind it than any documentary to date, cut together with such a supreme understanding and care for its subject that director Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) seems half-justified in suggesting that his project may as well be the missing film. In other words, if you have the choice of seeing either The Other Side of the Wind or They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, you would do well to choose the latter. … Watch this first, and then weigh Neville’s playful assertion that his meta-movie may in fact be truer to the master’s intentions. It’s a bold claim, all but unprecedented in behind-the-scenes docs: Could They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead be the real  The Other Side of the Wind”?

The Wrap: For cinephiles, it’s a high-calorie, clip-and-interview-laden feast of biography, insight, and gossip. Add to that the bonus that — unlike the dashed promise felt after absorbing Jorodorwsky’s Dune that the cinema gods were robbed — in this case there’s a finally completed Wind,  assembled in recent years, also going out through Netflix. to go with Neville’s exhaustive behind-the-scenes appreciation. (Having watched They’ll Love Me prior to Wind, it’s safe to say they can be enjoyed in either order, since repeat viewings are likely for movie lovers, anyway.) …  After the rollercoaster journey They’ll Love Me details, it’s enough to make one contemplate: Could Neville’s documentary be, in a sense, what Welles wanted The Other Side of the Wind to be all along? Someone else’s movie about Orson Welles’s movie about a fictional director’s movie which is inside another movie that’s ultimately about all movies? Cheekily, Neville reveals he knows you’re thinking this, and it’s the perfect capper for his engaging hat-tip to a legend for whom the movies were always worth imagining, celebrating, and forever trying to get made.”

The Hollywood Reporter:  “The frenetic style Neville employs to tell this rollercoaster of a tale is arguably in synch with the crazy-quilt nature of the tale itself; the filmmaker clearly made a firm decision to take this route rather than to stick with a more scholarly, traditionally informative approach. It generally succeeds, even if at times it goes a bit too far and may not supply all the gritty details some viewers and scholars might want (for a more straightforward and thorough account of how The Other Side of the Wind was finally edited and finished, see Frank Marshall’s 37-minute useful documentary A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making). What’s great about They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is that it’s got virtually everybody who had anything important to do with The Other Side of the Wind under one roof, from the stars to the loyal Welles-worshipping youngsters to the literal hangs-on who rode dangerously on the backs of speeding cars to get shots. You can’t help feeling crestfallen upon learning that the only reason Welles agreed to receive the third American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1975 was that he thought the good-will and prestige accruing from it would inspire someone to step forward with finishing money. No one called.”

IndieWire:  “The Other Side of the Wind  has been in post-production limbo for decades, and with time it became the golden unicorn of his filmography, a final potential masterpiece that remained uncompleted at the time of the rapscallion’s death. While Netflix stepped up to finish the project decades later, Welles’ experimental, semi-autographical drama about a washed-up filmmaker requires a fair amount of context for anyone except diehard Welles fans, especially if it’s expected to appeal to viewers on an international platform. Enter They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, documentarian Morgan Neville’s endearing, playful overview of the false starts and sudden roadblocks that marred the production as Welles’ rocky career sped toward its conclusion. In effect, Neville has given the movie the prequel it deserves.”

Screen Daily:  “Entertaining and informative as a contextualising accompaniment to Welles’s reconstructed experimental project The Other Side of the Wind – and premiering alongside it in Venice before being released by Netflix – Neville’s film may reveal little that hardcore Wellesians don’t already know. But it offers a lively evocation of the great man’s brilliance, waywardness and pained relationship to Hollywood history.Despite a fussy presentation style – somewhat channeling the frenetic fragmentation of Welles’s own F For Fake – the film will be a must for cinephile viewers, although it’s strictly a de luxe supplement to the fabled main attraction.”

 

 

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