Italian publisher Mimesis Edizioni will release a new book on The Other Side of the Wind by Massimiliano Studer on October 28 entitled Orson Welles E La New Hollywood: Il Caso di The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles and the New Hollywood: The Case for The Other Side of the Wind). The book includes a foreword by noted Welles scholar and Filmoteca de Catalunya director Esteve Riambau. Mimesis Edizioni, Studer and Riambau kindly allowed Wellesnet to publish an English translation of the foreword. (The translation was done by Nicolas Ciccone.) Studer is also author of Alle origini di Quarto potere. Too much Johnson: il film perduto di Orson Welles (At the Origins of Citizen Kane. Too Much Johnson: Orson Welles’ Lost Movie).
By ESTEVE RIAMBAU
When Orson Welles died alone in his Los Angeles mansion in October 1985, his last dramatic feature
film released in the United States was Chimes at Midnight. This film was a Spanish production from
twenty years earlier about the Shakespearean character Falstaff, one of Welles’s alter-egos.
The projects he released to the public afterwards included a French television drama (Une histoire
immortelle, 1968), a documentary on art forgery (F for Fake, 1973), and a television essay (Filming
Othello, 1977), the last of which hardly appears in English-language filmographies. Nevertheless, to
his dying breath, Welles never stopped working on various projects which would be left unfinished
or unreleased. These included two fictional films (The Deep, 1967-69, and The Other Side of the
Wind, 1970-1975), a television pilot (The Orson Welles Show, 1979), and a Don Quixote adaptation
which he never stopped tinkering on his moviola with it after its initial production in 1957. Other unreleased fragments
include It’s All True (1941), shot in Mexico and Brazil, the unaired television pilot The Fountain of
Youth (1956), a TV “Portrait” of Gina Lollobrigida (1958), parts of a British television special called
Orson’s Bag (1968-1971), and an anthology of illusionism entitled The Magic Show (1968-1985).
He also left behind short films, recitations and improvisations, that are essentially home movies but
interesting nonetheless.
Many of these unfinished materials were deposited by his partner and heir Oja Kodar at the Munich
Filmmuseum. A conference held there in October 1999, under the guidance of Robert Fischer and
Stefan Drössler, made the materials available to scholars from Germany, the United States, France,
Italy, Luxembourg, and Spain. My 1993 book Una España Immortal claimed the essential importance
of this country in Welles’s life and work, from his first youthful visit two years before the Civil War
to his ashes’ eternal rest in a well at torero Antonio Ordóñez’s “finca” in Ronda. In this country he
had shot important scenes for Mr. Arkadin (1954), the entire series Nella terra di Don Chisciotte
(1961-1964), Chimes at Midnight, Une histoire immortelle, pieces of F for Fake, Don Quixote, and
also The Other Side of the Wind until he reset its story in the heart of the early seventies’ New
Hollywood. This last film was, once again, the portrait of an older and more powerful man, in this
case a director, working in an area he thinks he dominates but to which he eventually winds up being
a victim. John Huston embodies this character as one part Welles himself and another part Ernest
Hemingway, an aspect that reflected the original Hispanic connections. In a game of mirrors with an
Antonioni-esque film inside and other contemporary cinematic styles outside, Peter Bogdanovich
poses as the young disciple destined to succeed the master, much like Prince Hal with Falstaff in
Chimes, or even George Minafer with Eugene Morgan in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).
Supported by some first-hand testimonies, my book traced the Spanish roots of The Other Side of the
Wind to Welles’s unpublished script The Sacred Monsters (set in the world of corridas), the initial
assiduity of the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez, the financial ties with the Shah of Persia’s brother-in-law via a Paris-based production company, the actual filming in Los Angeles (California) and Carefree (Arizona), as well as the mounting obstacles that prevented the film from being finished.
After Welles’s death, this project had become his White Elephant, the most substantial and
commercially appreciated of his unfinished films. Many were the film’s suitors until Netflix publicly
announced the purchase of its rights and released a reconstruction in 2018. Almost fifty years have
passed since the start of filming and twenty-five since the publication of my book, during which time
there have followed other relevant books from Joseph McBride (What Ever Happened to Orson
Welles. A Portrait of an Independent Career, 2006) and Josh Karp (Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The
Making of The Other Side of the Wind, 2016).
Massimiliano Studer, a pupil of Ciro Giorgini’s school, burst into Welles scholarship in 2018 with a
book (Alle Origini di Quarto Potere: Too Much Johnson) about the discovery of other unreleased
Welles material in Italy: footage that the wonder-boy had made in 1938, before Citizen Kane, as a
prologue to the three acts of a play he directed. In 2016, the research he carried out on this work took
him to the National Cinema Museum in Turin, where he gained access to unpublished documents on
the making of The Other Side of the Wind. This valuable collection, supplemented by other documents
from the University of Michigan and the Cinémathèque Française, formed the basis of his 2021
doctoral thesis, as well as this book. The documents collected by Studer are as rich as they are
complex, made up of hundreds of letters, telegrams, notes, memoranda, and different versions of a
script that, like all of Welles’s works, was a work-in-progress. If the director claimed that a film is
shot in moviola, what consistency could a script have for him that, as in this case, had passed
from the world of bullfighting in Spain to the last birthday party of an American director? With
photography done by his inseparable cameraman Gary Graver, Welles shot some material with Lilli
Palmer in Malaga, which he would edit years later into scenes shot with John Huston in Arizona —
pure bricolage pushed to its limits.
Studer studied the aforementioned documents and managed to endow them with a meaning which,
like a mosaic, illustrates not only the gestation of the film but also Welles’s working methods. Stefan
Drössler at the Munich Filmmuseum had carried out a similar process by creating a possible edit of
The Deep without pretending that it was the final one; just so, he deduced that the slate numbers for
Welles’s recitation film Moby Dick corresponded to the pages of Herman Melville’s novel. I was
lucky enough to witness Studer’s investigative process. Through email, WhatsApp, a trip to
Barcelona, and video calls during the COVID lockdown, I was kept updated on the new discoveries,
in which every clue — a name here, a date there — made greater sense of the film. Personally, I found
it extremely gratifying that many of Studer’s findings corroborated the hypotheses I had advanced in
my book, now with irrefutable evidence. At the same time, his research has opened up new and
important doors showing Welles’s connections to different territories: to the New Hollywood of the
seventies (where he parodied and paid homage to the “Easy Rider generation”), to Spain (where the
project was born), to France (where the film was edited and produced), and to Iran (whence the funds
came until fundamentalists overthrew the Reza Palhavi dynasty). If Gregory Arkadin hired a detective
to erase his traces around the world, then Studer has retrieved the pieces needed to understand the
production history of Welles’s most international film.
Studer’s work also investigates the various attempts to finish the film after Welles’s death and the
ensuing legal dispute between Oja Kodar and Medhi Bouscheri. It so happened, however, that around
2016, Netflix came in with the necessary funds to access the materials and reconstruct The Other Side
of the Wind. Aside from those involved with its completion, no one with better authority than Studer
knew enough about the film’s details to compare what Welles had made with the version premiered
by the streaming platform at the 2018 Venice Film Festival. Just like Jesús Franco did with his Don
Quijote de Orson Welles in 1992, Netflix touted the result as if it were the movie Welles would have
made. However, Studer’s philological analysis contained in this book shows how the final result,
decided on by Netflix’s editor and producers, diverges from the different versions of the screenplay
and the forty minutes originally edited by the director.
It’s impossible to know what an unfinished Welles film would have looked like if he had put the final
touches on it. Personally I think that there never was a single Don Quixote, but rather several versions
that were eventually munged together: the project’s evolution began with a TV show, in which Welles
talks with a girl named Dulcie, and ended with a film concept similar to 1973’s F for Fake, whose
on-screen title is Question Mark. In the case of the Netflix The Other Side of the Wind, many questions
arise: what standards did they follow during the editing? Why did they change what Welles had
already edited? And moreover, was Welles really satisfied with the material he shot? Studer does not
enter into this debate but integrates Netflix’s version into his meticulous reconstruction of the film to
shed new light on Welles’s inexhaustible work. In addition to the Munich presentation of Welles’s
unseen films, others were held in Mannheim (2002), Locarno (2005), Udine (2006), Barcelona (2015)
and Paris (2015), with new contributions added. In recent years, the internet has allowed access to
virtually all of the multifaceted 20th century creator’s radio career, as well as materials related to his
theatrical side.
Unreleased scenes from The Merchant of Venice (1969) have been found, but the film version of
Moby Dick — Rehearsed (1955) remains unseen. An expedition to Brazil has been organized to locate
the final reel of the original Magnificent Ambersons, while Don Quixote cries out for a new
interpretation in light of all the materials currently available. Much remains to be done. In the case of
The Other Side of the Wind, we will never know how Welles would have finished it. However, the
work of Massimiliano Studer is essential to understanding how he conceived it, how it was developed,
and how much it unlocks the point of view of its director, a man who debuted with Citizen Kane and
never stopped dreaming of returning to Hollywood’s front door. The Other Side of the Wind was the
key with which he intended to open it.
Esteve Riambau
July 2021
English translation by Nicolas Ciccone
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