By NICOLAS CICCONE
Orson Welles’s last completed film, The Other Side of the Wind, began as a story set not near Hollywood in the U.S., but instead around the bullfighting rings of Spain.
Welles largely outlined this version of the story in a 1963 Albert Maysles film Orson Welles in Spain, which can be found on YouTube. (In outtakes from the movie, featured at the end of Morgan Neville’s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Welles explains his backup plan to convert the movie into a documentary about its own making, should the film lose interest for an audience.) Even then, the story was about a film director, an old American bullfight enthusiast and “macho” whose chest hair might as well be heavy brush. The old director falls in love with an actor much younger than himself. However, rather than admit his feelings for the younger man and sacrifice his machismo, he decides to mentor the young man. He puts him in his next film and coaxes him into being a bullfighter, hoping to turn him into the ideal man he always aspired to be. But gradually, he destroys the young man, revealing his perverse desire to feed off others’ misery, and alienates his friends and admirers in the process. Welles’s story was largely inspired by his fascination and repulsion of writer Ernest Hemingway, a bullfight enthusiast and famous macho whose suicide hinted at a darker, more-vulnerable person beneath the hardened surface.
As Welles turned the story over in his head, the focus shifted more and more towards cinema. This shift was fueled perhaps by the fact that one of Hemingway’s friends was a famous film director whom Welles considered his main influence – John Ford. An Irish-born, macho, distinctly-American filmmaker, Ford also had a homoerotic attraction to men. Of course, this he deeply-suppressed, as has been amply documented in Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford, though he catapulted people like John Wayne and Henry Fonda to stardom. Similar vaguely-homoerotic traits were seen by critics in other prominent directors of the time, including Howard Hawks, a friend of both Hemingway and Ford, and the comparatively-younger Nicholas Ray, who forever stamped James Dean with the image of the Rebel Without a Cause, Jim Stark. Eventually, Welles changed the location as his mind drifted away from bullfighting: not from Spain to the US, but instead to the French Riviera during the Cannes Film Festival.
The first screenplay written for this story was The Sacred Beasts, sometime in the mid-to-late 1960s. The extensive Welles-Kodar collection at the University of Michigan includes fragments of various drafts of this screenplay alongside almost all of the script material for The Other Side of the Wind. These fragments include draft pages of individual scenes (sometimes paginated without respect to any others) and pieces of longer drafts in which the page numbers have obviously gone through a wide variety of revisions; for example, one page has a typed number of 105 but a penciled-in number of 59. Though the fragments are frustratingly-incomplete (especially with page numbers that seem random without a complete draft available), a narrative can be reconstructed based on the available material. Of note is that, while the screenplay occasionally has the characters being trailed by cameras, it does not seem to have the “found footage” narrative device that Other Wind uses, nor any film-within-the-film element; there is only the dramatic story of the fall of director J.J. Hannaford, including moments where cameras are not present. The fragments will be quoted extensively, not only to reconstruct the narrative, but also to show how much of this script was recycled for Other Wind.
Unless otherwise noted, the script pages below can be found in the folder “Old Wind Scripts & Treatment” in box six of the University of Michigan’s Welles-Kodar Collection. The other fragments can be found among miscellaneous undated draft pages for Other Wind in box three.
The Sacred Beasts begins with a prologue on Hannaford’s yacht before moving for its first act to a hotel near the Cannes Film Festival. Hannaford’s yacht, according to a fragment with the page number “6”, is shown off the coast of Monaco at sunset: “A sombre, villainous-looking deckhand is caressing a guitar. A pirate crew is aboard– Lascars, Malays, Mexicans… picked up in odd corners of the world on JAKE’s far wanderings. … In spite of its elegant lines, JAKE’s boat is not really a yacht at all, but a grizzled professional of the deep waters taking its ease among the pampered amateurs…disreputable and wholly unabashed.” This descriptive fragment ends without any action, but other fragments imply that the rest of the scene would provide the script’s entrance for Jake, introducing him on his yacht, in his element, with the details of the ship giving us insight into Jake’s character. He is rough, macho, well-travelled, and highly-complex. The ship’s various knickknacks have the same function as the junk at the end of Citizen Kane.
The next two fragments, representing pages 11a-15 and 17-19, take place at the Croisette, where a whole crowd of fans and reporters awaits the appearance of Hannaford’s new young star. Though the two sets of pages were written on two different occasions, and hence are from two different drafts, the fragments form one complete scene. John Dale, called so in pages 11a-15 and “Dale John” in pages 17-19, appears on the balcony of his hotel room “wearing a pair of blue jeans and nothing else.” He carries a bag of cherries, which he eats one by one to the squeals of his fans. He gingerly drops the pips onto his fans, who catch each of them with fervor and glee. Then, he blows up the bag and pops it to thunderous applause.
The Croisette-lingerers near the hotel crowd include characters both familiar and strange. The familiar ones are Ossawatomie Duluth, a young critic of Jake who seems to be a cross between Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, and Brooks Otterlake, who is strangely given the title “Lord” and is described as “a pink and gingerish young Englishman, gigantically tall, with a face of a rather likeable moose.” Other characters vanished when this script was adapted into Other Wind. These include Mimsey (Reardon in the scene’s first set of pages; Sachs in the second), John Dale’s reporter-girlfriend and a friend of Ossie; Turner Baldwin, an author contracted to write a book on Hannaford; and Mimsey’s friends Roux and Jean Sachs, aspiring young producers who want to do a picture with the now-famous John Dale. Mimsey is here to do an interview with the “high priestess” of “the Hannaford wolf-pack”. In this scene, she is identified as Lili Endor or Ember (with obvious reference to Lili Palmer), but other fragments in box 3 explicitly identify her as Marlene Dietrich.
As Dale plays around with his cherries (there is no other phrase available), Mimsey pulls the bewildered Turner out of the throng to chat with Ossie and Jean. The young entrepeneurs are thinking about starting a project with Dale. They are joined by Roux, who points out how Dale’s contract gives him the right to “do an outside picture.”
“And bullfighting,” Jean adds.
Remarks are made about Hannaford’s love of bullfighting when Lord Otterlake bounds into scene. He gives Mimsey an enveloped invitation – “From the Skipper,” Otterlake says – to attend a cruise on his yacht. “Several of your friends are going to be there,” the note reads; Mimsey guesses that this refers to Dale.
It turns out Dale has been suspiciously avoiding Hannaford recently. In a fragment with page number 28, Roux is mulling about with other producers in the hotel lobby. Jean prepares to head to Hannaford’s party on the yacht, as she plans to meet Dale as well, but Roux says Dale “seems to have sneaked out of his room somehow.” A few pages later, on page 34, Hannaford has arrived at the hotel, having made an apparently big entrance, and is carrying some roses. Along with Turner and Matt Kelly, his personal assistant, Jake is in his hotel room which, interestingly, is adjoining Mimsey’s. He is preparing to enter it with the flowers. The page begins with Jake telling off Matt, and a comparison with Other Wind implies that it is over Matt telling Otterlake how broke Jake is: “That could have been the general idea — Until you loused it up on us.” As a note says, “(Poor MATT – JAKE has succeeded in putting him very much in the wrong.)” It seems that Matt originally occupied the role poor Billy Boyle would play in Other Wind.
A shattered Matt exits with Turner into the hall, but from Mimsey’s room can be heard not only Jake’s voice, but also John Dale’s. Dale asks Hannaford what he’s doing in Mimsey’s room, Jake replies that he thought Mimsey might want some flowers, and Dale retorts: “I’ll get her all the flowers she needs, fatso.” Dale bursts out of the room, asking for Roux, and Jake says he will not be doing any picture with Dale anytime soon:
DALE stands for a moment staring down the long hall at JAKE — then all but throws himself down the stairs…
After a moment JAKE turns back into his room… MATT and TURNER exchange nervous looks. JAKE reappears with a bottle.
JAKE
I forgot I had this.
Matt says he had “the screening” the day before. “I showed them the rough-cut,” he adds, “and rough it sure is.” Still, Hannaford does not pay much attention to this bad news and progresses down to the awaiting guests in the lobby. After two missing pages, Otterlake, “now festooned with cameras,” is talking with Mimsey, who has just appeared. She says she can’t find Dale anywhere. Jake pops into their conversation to say they were just talking in her room: “Fixing some flowers for you, popsie. But now you’ve spoiled the surprise.”
After another missing page, Hannaford turns to Turner and tells him what the party is for: “Celebrating my birthday, kid. We’re going to let a lot of new waves break over our grizzled heads… ‘You don’t know what I’m up to’. Well, frankly, Turner — neither do I!”
Unlike Other Wind, The Sacred Beasts makes Dale a successful discovery of Hannaford from the beginning. A conversation (paginated 1/0 and 2/0) between Mimsey (spelled “Mimsi”) and Matt reveals that Hannaford’s first picture starring Dale catapulted the director to new-found success. Revealingly, Dale is called “James Dale” in this fragment:
MATT
Getting pretty big for his boots, isn’t he?
MIMSI
If Jake really needed him he’d wait…
MATT
Jake’s gotta come with his hat in his hands? He’s gotta be down-and-out? – Broke –
MIMSI
He was broke before “Hellsgate”. He isn’t now.
MATT
And your boy fixed him up, I suppose? Bailed him out? Set him on his feet again? You figure he’s done all he needs to for the poor old guy? And he’s done him all the good he can get out of him; there’s that, too, isn’t there?
MIMSI
That’s pure corn, Matt, and you know it.
MATT
I guess you think gratitude is corny.
MIMSI
Dale can’t go on being Jake’s property! He’s got to be Jimmy Dale.
MATT
Yeah… I look at that name plastered all over the world—in magazines and papers—spelt out in letters bigger than my house—‘James Dale’—and I ask myself: who is he?
MIMSI
It makes you angry. It scares me. That’s the only difference between us.
MATT
He’s so big now that it frightens you?
MIMSI
It’s real. Call it luck, if you want to, but luck is real, too. It’s not something he’s proud of because it isn’t rightfully something of his own. But it’s something he can see, and hear and count. There’s no kicks in that; it’s just all he’s got to hang on to.
In this screenplay, Jake has already made his comeback picture, Hellsgate, which seems to be an epic Western. This puts the setting of the film in the mid-1960s, after which the screenplay would have stopped being relevant with the advent of the socially-conscious, art-house-oriented New Hollywood. There are traces of the conflict between Hannaford and the new “scene,” but it is not as prominent as in later drafts. More prominent is the crush of cineastes and film scholars surrounding Hannaford and his company.
Though Otterlake is presumably Jake’s friend, there is also tension between them. In the box three fragments, Jake moves in on Mavis Henscher, Otterlake’s college-aged girlfriend. In a fragment set outside the hotel, Jake is about to enter his car when he comes across Mavis and Ossie (for some reason spelled “Ossawaltourie”!); Otterlake and Roux are nearby. “Hello, Ossawaltourie,” Jake says, “We like your friend.”
Brooks comes between them to clarify that “She’s mine.”
Jake wants to fly Mavis down to Mexico next Sunday to watch deadly miura bulls: “A Miura bull once killed a man… we’ll see what happens next Sunday to our boy…” As it was said earlier that Dale wanted to take up bullfighting, this line seems to explicitly refer to Dale himself, unlike the anonymous “new boy” of Other Wind.
Jake reveals to Brooks and Roux that he knows they want to make films with Dale. Apparently, Jake lied when he told Dale that Roux wanted nothing to do with him. Roux clarifies that Dale is now looking for Mimsey, as they are still together. The French Roux adds that Dale and Mimsey are still “very cool.” Jake bristles at Roux’s French-accented beat slang when Matt enters, saying, “A year ago you wouldn’t have touched him. He wasn’t big enough. So now Jake’s made him big– well, we got a contract, bub.”
Brooks asks Jake, “How long do you think you’ll be able to hold him?”
Jake answers, “Nobody holds actors. Like the girls: they only stick with us if they want to. And a kid like that… who’d even try? Holding him is like stroking a cat that won’t purr…”
Presumably, the activity then moves to Hannaford’s yacht, overlooking his ranch in Monaco. As in Other Wind, the script contains several conversations reflecting the growing reverence of the auteur director by interview-studying cineastes, products of the growing “scene”. One fragment in box three features a trio of film scholars listening to Jake’s voice and quoting him from transcripts:
In all the first civilizations– the supreme deity was female. Three-headed — the virgin, the whore and the witch. That was the trinity, and as long as we were tuned in — turned on to Her…we were at home with magic. But ever since Big Daddy took over the Store all that’s left is a vague rumor of miracles.
What we’re hungry for is magic. Technology’s a poor substitute. We’re being processed by computers, and there’s nothing female about a computer. No machine can be pro-grammed for goose-pimples– for the shiver and thrill of the wind.
Yet another box 3 fragment has a “QUESTION” (the name of the character!) addressed to Jake: “Many critics consider you essentially religious…”
JAKE
I like a good plot… a story.
QUESTION
The Christian story?… You believe in it?
JAKE
I’m a mick, y’know—a baptized fish-eater, but I’ve got no use for the guys in dog-collars and skirts. They smell like wet umbrellas. As for Mister Jesus himself—I got a sneaky hunch I would have liked him. Everybody did—except for the wet umbrellas who turned him in to the authorities… It makes you puke what they did to him afterwards—that smarmy eunuch they invented. … There’s a lot of reels missing. Mister Jesus could have been a king. He was in line for it: the rightful heir to the throne, with a big popular following. Look at Palm Sunday. But what happened on Friday? Did he cop out and burn his draft card for the sake of our immortal souls? The bleeding hearts who reworked the script left something out of the story.
QUESTION
Ever think of filling it in?
JAKE
Sure.
Hannaford’s egotism is apparent in his projecting his macho ideal onto Jesus. Moreover, just as in the completed film, Jake’s seemingly-progressive ideas (here, a hatred of organized religion) are gradually revealed to have a more reactionary streak to them, albeit of an individualist variety. Hence, the “draft dodging” remark. This is not the sort of character who would show sympathy for hippies as Welles himself seemed to. From another fragment in this same box:
JAKE
Then comes your trap—the orgasm.
QUESTION
Ahh…
JAKE
Even if the whole audience is actually beating the meat in unison, how can you time it? A girl comes—she could be faking—(like they do) just by way of encouragement—kidding us, even kidding herself. But photograph the leading man getting his nuts off and if he isn’t too early, he’s too late. Don’t forget that the beast crouching out there in the darkness is a woman. The sex of any audience is female … Your audience is a she—to be wooed, seduced and banged. Well and truly. Even beaten up. We owe it to her to be spared the kind of short-changing the ladies have to put up with back home in bed.
Hannaford’s macho tirades are not the only point of this exchange. Rather, it is how his deeply-lined misogyny is enabled and given legitimacy by the questioners. The exchange is a satire of the hypocrisies of the film industry. Further on in box 3’s undated pages, Jake confesses to Brooks Otterlake why Dale is so special to him, despite the conflict between him and Brooks:
JAKE
I had a new toy: an underwater motor-scooter… Just before dawn I’d started into the water to play with it, when I saw him out there… He was tiring, about ready to give up, swimming away from shore–
OTTERLAKE
(under his breath)
Suicide?
A pause.
JAKE
There must be a queer streak there. We try to keep pretty well clear of the freaks… I’d brought the kid back to life… Bringing him back to manhood wasn’t as easy.
OTTERLAKE
How did you do it?
JAKE
Signed him on the yacht as a deckhand, made a sailor out of him… Sure I rescued him.
(grimly, after a moment)
I’ve been rescuing him ever since.
OTTERLAKE
Well, he’s hardly the first actor you’ve discovered.
JAKE
(after a brief silence)
Huh…like you went pearling for ‘em, and squeezed your movie star out of a lucky oyster…
Dale’s rescue is clearly meant to be a secret, not the well-known story of Other Wind. One fragment has Turner admit to Mimsey that he knows about it, reminding her, “I’m writing a book. Remember. Me and a couple of hundred other people.” Hannaford is possessive of Dale in this screenplay, but he is loath to admit why, as it reveals a tender side to him that he wants to hide.
Even here, where Jake is captivating the audience with his charm, there is further bad news coming. In the box 6 fragments, Matt brings in Hannaford’s drama teacher from the Clivedale School for Boys, Dr. Bradley Pierce Burroughs, and tells Jake that Dale always wanted to be an actor. Only one page of The Sacred Beasts’s version of this exchange is available, but the rest is summarized in a surviving page of Welles’s story treatment:
Jake didn’t let Burroughs go ‘till he’d squeezed him dry on the subject of Dale. Most importantly, he’s got the full story of Dale’s father, whose illness is being treated in a mental home. (That’s where the money goes.) Between the lines, Jake reads something that Burroughs pretends not to suspect: That the scandal behind the father’s fight in the locker-room of the Boys Athletic Club which led to his being committed–was not a ‘mad fit,’ or drunkenness. Alcoholism was merely an official alibi, and he was put away to escape criminal persecution. Some hints of this must have reached Dale…and at a time in his childhood when this could do him the worst possible injury… Sex is therefore, not only sin and degradation for Dale, but insanity and crime. And the fear of perversion haunts his dreams–scaring him silly… Sometimes twisting into a kind of temptation which scares him even more. Now that he knows Dale had gone to Mexico especially to see him, Jake is sure it was only partly for a job. He feels that his own highly-publicized reputation as a hairy-chested he-man—big game hunter, and all round ‘man’s man’—must have made him seem to Dale a symbol for a kind of way of life. This boat must have represented a kind of haven of masculine health.
(This is Jake’s idea anyway.)Where was that letter? Burroughs told him about a famous letter Dale was supposed to have written to him, ‘baring his soul’! Matt must have tossed it overboard with the rest of the mail.
Could his failure to answer it have had something to do with the attempted suicide? Does that failure to reply explain, in any way, Dale’s antagonism? Or does Dale hate Jake for the simple reason that he owes him his life? Dale didn’t want to live. He doesn’t seem to want to live now. He can’t feel gratified for having been forced back into a world he loathes. If that’s so, he can’t hate Jake for having done him a favour. Can it be that Jake has come to personify life itself–and is it maybe just for this reason that Dale resists him?
(All of these are Jake’s questions and Jake’s answers.)
Though Welles seems to leave some elements of Burroughs purposely ambiguous, the takeaway of the exchange for Hannaford, his guests, and the film’s audience is that Dale wasn’t the poor, innocent discovery the old director thought he was. All his career-risking efforts to make a celebrity, a man out of the boy, have been in vain, at least in his own eyes. As in the now-finished film, this pushes Hannaford further into despair.
Mimsey, fresh off an interview with the Lili/Marlene character, drinks heavily at the party and gives some disturbing reflections on the relationship between Hannaford and Dale. In one version, she gives these to Turner; in what seems to be the more complete draft of the scene, she shares her reflections with Maggie, Hannaford’s female editor. As the fragment shows, Welles at this point toyed with the idea of Maggie being a listening ear for the abused women at Hannaford’s party.
“He’s got to be stopped,” says Mimsey, who’s been cheated on by Dale herself. “He can’t go on running away all the time… But, of course, he won’t listen to me. Christ! Not any longer—not after what happened with me and Jake… I woke up in his cabin, Maggie. What do you think about that?” Mimsey was drunk and was seduced by Hannaford the previous night. Possibly, the original entrance for Jake showed Mimsey waking up on his yacht.
“Fun,” she continues, “is vulgar.”
“Who says so?” asks Maggie.
“Marlene,” Mimsey answers. “A woman must not ever permit herself to make love simply for the fun of it. … She impressed me. She’s a great woman. Jake’s a great man.”
At the sound of applause from the party, Mimsey breaks down in tears for a moment. Maggie offers her a handkerchief and Mimsey continues. She says sleeping with Hannaford was “like I’d had an affair with [Johnny’s] father… like it was some kind of incest—Crazy. … Jake and Dale – that’s important…”
Holding her eye, she raises the bottle to her lips… MAGGIE takes it away from her (uncomfortably suspicious of censorious eyes).
MIMSEY
Just like Dale. He won’t admit it, but he’s kind of priggish, too.
MAGGIE
Look, if he’s really in love with you…
MIMSEY
Does that have to make him a prig?
MAGGIE
Well, I’m a prig, or so you tell me, and I’m not in love with you–
(she breaks off)
The music has stopped… we feel the silence.
The two women stare at each other…
Suddenly, they both start to laugh…
The sound of a small private plane…
MIMSEY starts laughing and looks up…
MIMSEY
That could be Dale…
MAGGIE
He’s got a plane.
The plane dips its wings, circling, quite low over the ranch…
MIMSEY
He’s got a pilots license… The hell with him. Always trying to make the big impression on Jake–
The sound of the plane fades away…
The hell with you, too…
MAGGIE
Alright, honey– the hell with me.
MIMSEY
About going to bed; I didn’t tell you what Marlene said–
MAGGIE
(not interested in Marlene)
Yes, you did.
MIMSEY
I didn’t finish it… You should go to bed, Maggie, to make babies, to make love, or to make money. Those are the respectable reasons… Just for fun is vulgar. That’s me, Maggie: vulgar.
(hands her her glass)
You finish it. I’m getting sober now, and I want you to believe this
— How about you?
MAGGIE
I’m not outstandingly sober, no.
MIMSEY
He’s in danger… I mean danger. Listen, I know what I’m saying.
(still more hushed)
He tried it before. Did you know that?
MAGGIE
What, honey? Suicide?
JAKE
(entering the scene)
Christ, Maggie! Aren’t you tired of that story?
MAGGIE
(flatly)
Yes, I am. Would-be suicides ought to be treated like drunks: they’re the same kind of bores. Why do we make such a fuss over them? If they don’t car– then why should we?… Because we care about life, I suppose… We’re just being loyal to life.
JAKE
(to MIMSEY)
New information has come in. He wasn’t killing himself. He wasn’t even drowning. He was auditioning.
MATT
I found this drama teacher from his boarding school…
JAKE
(breaking in)
Would-be suicide, hell! –a would-be actor!… And I’m supposed to have forced him into it? I’m supposed to have thwarted him– frustrated his ever-loving death-wish!
MAGGIE watches JAKE… He stops pacing, then turns to her…
MAGGIE
There’s a question of identity. Away from you he’s not so very sure who he is…or what.
JAKE
(with great contempt)
An actor–
MAGGIE
Well, you’re a director.
JAKE
Oh, mother!!
(he says this like ‘Oh, Christ.’ Not a prayer– a curse)
MIMSEY
He’s very much in awe of you.
JAKE
He hates my guts.
MAGGIE
Oh, yes, that too. But he was the centre of your life, and you see, he’d grown used to the tension… the pressure. Now it’s gone he feels a kind of weightlessness– a loss of gravity.
JAKE turns away.
JAKE
(sarcastically as he goes)
Just in sight of my boat– we got tired of that old gag in silent pictures!
Though seeming world-weary and down-to-earth, Maggie is more likeable here than in Other Wind, which shows her as a more hollowed-out, embittered woman who has given up any hope of standing up against Jake. Her philosophical expositions on life in Beasts, some of which were given to the Lili/Marlene character in Other Wind, seem to prefigure the rationalizations and deep thoughts of the Baron. Indeed, the multiplication and splitting of characters became more pronounced as The Sacred Beasts was converted to Other Wind. The characteristics of Matt in The Sacred Beasts would be distributed to the Other Wind characters Matt Kelly/Costello, Pat Mullins, Al Denny, and Billy Boyle; meanwhile, Maggie’s character would be split up into Other Wind’s Maggie Noonan/Fassbinder, the Baron, and a female character from early drafts called Andre.
Interestingly, Maggie appears in this draft to be lesbian, making a joke about being in love with Mimsey, who laughs. This provides an interesting contrast between the frank way women handle homosexuality among themselves and the toxic way men handle whatever homosexuality they have.
Other members of the estranged Hannaford wolf-pack appear on the yacht as Hannaford drives himself to drink and self-destruction. A fragment in box 3 shows “high-priestess” Marlene Dietrich greeting make-up and prop man Zimmer with a kiss; he’s overjoyed to see her. The old veteran is in his room, working on mock legs, arms, and heads for John Dale dummies.
“What’s your opinion of the original?” Marlene asks.
Zimmer says he hardly knows him.
“I guess it’s that old Chinese thing of yours – remember?” adds Marlene. “Owning the life you save? Jake knows better than that. You don’t own people… You don’t disown them, either. That boy didn’t run away. He was thrown away.” This, of course, refers to the charged encounter between Hannaford and Dale in the hotel, where Hannaford lies about Roux’s offer.
“Like an empty tin can,” a voice from the doorway says. It’s Jake, “His eyes glazed with liquor (not drunk but he’s been drinking heavily).”
A fragment in box 6 that seems to pick up from this scene has Jake add, “Holy Jesus, what a relief! Like getting rid of a bad tooth… a monkey on my back.” His assistant Matt gestures cautiously to the cameras, but the hate-filled director stares them down: “That means a drug habit, sure. Something you’ve gotta kick–well my foot was getting sore.”
Fragments of Jake’s conversations with the Marlene character show a more edgy relationship than in the completed film. They portray Hannaford as a more unhinged, openly-homophobic man, suggesting that they come after the Burroughs revelation. When Marlene gives Montaigne’s “every man” quote in a fragment from box 6, Jake replies:
JAKE
Yeah… you gave me his book once. And then you went and spoilt the present by telling me who gave the book to you. Speaking of queers–
MARLENE
Ossawatourie Duluth? I know, you don’t happen to like him.
JAKE
I don’t like the way he wiggles his ass when he walks, no—
MARLENE
Well, he doesn’t keep baring his chest to show you the hair on it. You’ve got queers on the brain—
JAKE
Don’t give me that, Marlene—You don’t like ‘em either.
MARLENE
The only sex I don’t like is women. And neither do you. Not in general. Just one at a time.
JAKE
One or two, Marlene. Women can pretend to forgive us our affairs, but never our friendships. They keep us away from each other. Keep us separated. Keep us at home.
Obviously, the Marlene character is more accepting of gay people than Hannaford is. At the same time, her beliefs are still entrenched in older attitudes towards non-heterosexual folk. Hannaford’s circle of friends in The Sacred Beasts are at once both critics and enablers.
Assuming the screenplay had a three-act structure, Welles might have had the party move to the ranch. Not found among the fragments is any climactic confrontation with a film critic who reveals the truth about Hannaford, only for Hannaford to assault them and throw his career away. There is also no final goodbye between Jake and the Marlene/Lili character that prefigures this final self-destructive gesture. However, given the available fragments, one might guess that it is Mimsey in this script who reveals to everyone Hannaford’s habit of bedding the female partners of his leading men. She has certainly been the victim of his advances herself.
In any case, Mimsey leaves the party to find Dale. A fragment in box 6 finds Hannaford and Turner locating Otterlake in a room, listening to Hannaford’s voice on a tape-recorder:
Barrett, McCullough… O’Neill… Most of the old actor managers were Irishmen. There was dough in ward politics, but on the stage there was glory. My old man, Junius Junior even made it into Society. Among the micks he was a pioneer snob blazing the trail for the Kelly’s and the Kennedy’s…
Hannaford switches it off. Upon hearing from Otterlake that Mimsey has “split,” Hannaford says, “What the hell — the world’s still full of skirt, thank God.”
Matt tells him that she’s gone to look for Dale.
Hannaford vaguely replies, “They deserve each other.”
Despite his desperate attempts at machismo, Hannaford knows he is done. In what seems to be (what might be called the) curtain speech of the screenplay, Hannaford says to Maggie in a fragment paginated 115:
The Medusa’s eye…know what I mean?
Whatever I look upon finally dies under my gaze–the Medusa’s eye… The eye behind the camera–maybe it’s an evil eye at that…There were some Berbers once up in the Atlas Mountains who wouldn’t even let me point a camera at them… They think it dries up something in the soul. Who knows, maybe you can…aim…too long at something. Stare too hard. Drain out the virtue–suck out the living juice…
The girls and boys…Even the places…I’ve shot ‘em all. Shot ‘em dead…
Are they really dead, Maggie? — the great places, and the pretty people? They can’t be–not all of them. Jesus. Not everything… You stuff yourself and then you feel emptier than the things you spoil. It must have been pretty tough on Medusa, too.
More than anything, these fragments show what Other Wind may have looked like if Welles had played it as a straightforward drama, without any found-footage framework. The characters of The Sacred Beasts are more open about their feelings than they are in Other Wind, in which they are constantly trailed by cameras even if they cannot see them. Hannaford himself is more openly-hateful, more likely to lash out and less prone to bottling up his emotions until, as in the completed film, he blows the heads off the Dale dummies in a self-destructive fit. The lack of a mystery element and an absence of investigator-character interaction results in a clearer dramatic arc where the characters seem more developed on the page. Another notable difference is that Matt and Maggie seem more complex than in the final version, which is fitting for a more dramatic story as this. However, within the found-footage framework Welles eventually decided on, such complexity would distract from the central mystery of Hannaford and the culture that shaped him. Giving him complex friends would add too many mysteries to the film; in addition to the audience picking Hannaford apart, they would also need to pick apart Matt and Maggie. Hence, why Matt and Maggie’s personality traits would be split up amongst multiple characters during the scripting and protracted shooting process of Other Wind.
The setting fits of The Sacred Beasts fits in with Welles’s locus of operation in the mid-to-late 1960s. Welles’s activities were centered in Europe, allowing him to create a production company based in Switzerland, Ropama. A setting at the Cannes Film Festival would have been permissible, given Welles’s travels and acceptance by the emerging French New Wave. The script, indeed, seems keenly aware of such a cinephile culture, which had yet to move over to Hollywood. Like Hitchcock with Truffaut, Jake has had several interviews with French cineastes. The parody element is here, as it is in Other Wind, as all the cineastes pick apart his recorded, semi-informed remarks about religion, society, and philosophy in an absurdly-Talmudic fashion. Welles himself would get this kind of treatment from Peter Bogdanovich beginning in 1969, when the would-be young director embarked on several interviews with the now-celebrated “auteur”. This was one of several encounters with New Hollywood filmmakers that made Welles change the setting from Europe to America.
Despite all the development that the fragments betray, the rapidly-changing, increasingly-experimental landscape of the film “scene” meant that Welles would need to find other directions for the film by the time production began. Not only would Welles’s film itself have to stay relevant, but it would need to be modified in a way that would benefit the story Welles was trying to tell.
The story of Hannaford’s party became a found footage piece, to be compiled in-universe from 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm cameras wielded by cineastes at Jake’s party. This allowed Welles to keep up with current trends in using anarchic cutting, à la Godard, and cinema verité, à la John Cassavetes’s Faces. However, it also was in keeping with Welles’s interest in documentary/mockumentary filmmaking, as well as lifelong desire to paint his complex characters through multiple different “lenses”.
Just so, with the growing popularity of Michelangelo Antonioni, Hannaford’s contemporary comeback film would be done in an art-house style Welles found self-indulgent. The result of this, however, was that such a comeback film would reflect the fictional director’s desperations and desires, would bear his soul. Including footage from this movie would only have added another layer to the testimony of Hannaford’s last day. Hence, Welles would include it as a film-within-the-film, its artsy content largely supplied by his partner Oja Kodar.
It was with this complex, bold, new concept in mind that Welles began shooting The Sacred Beasts in 1970, when he and Oja found themselves in Hollywood. The story was now retitled The Other Side of the Wind, after the fictional Jake’s soul-bearing last film.
Works Cited
- Maysles, Albert. “Orson Welles in Spain.” 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gcp9-_bfI.
- McBride, Joseph (2011 edition) Searching for John Ford: A Life. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
- Neville, Morgan (Director). They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead [Documentary]. United States: Netflix.Fjos
- Welles, Orson, and Oja Kodar. The Other Side of the Wind. Draft pages and story notes (annotated typescript, carbon, and photocopy), and March 16, 1971-April 28, 1971 undated (3.0 folders). Box 3 of the Welles-Kodar Collection. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
- ——. Draft pages “Old Wind Scripts & Treatment” (annotated typescript and carbon), undated. Box 6 of the Welles-Kodar Collection. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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(Nicolas Ciccone is a Master’s Candidate in the University of Michigan’s School of Information. All rights reserved, 2019.)
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