(Editor’s note: Noted film historian and author Joseph McBride was a cast member in The Other Side of the Wind from the first day of shooting to the last and worked to see the film released in the years after Orson Welles’s death. He has kindly shared with Wellesnet his reaction to learning that the footage is now in Los Angeles, where it will be edited for release.)
By JOSEPH McBRIDE
I thought I would have to use a walker to go to the premiere, but now it looks like I won’t need one. All of us who worked with Orson Welles on The Other Side of the Wind – we call ourselves members of VISTOW, or Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles – put everything we had into it, matching his commitment to what we knew would be a major late work, his artistic statement about Hollywood and his métier. But as the problems standing in the way of completion multiplied over the years, they seemed insurmountable. Those of us who tried to get the film completed – especially Orson’s loyal cameraman, Gary Graver, who gave his life to the project – never quite gave up hope, but it seemed an increasingly quixotic venture, doomed to remain in fragments like some other tantalizing Welles projects.
So it’s with astonishment and great admiration that I have watched the efforts of producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall over the last few years to finally get this ill-fated production close to completion. What they have been through in concluding the deals with various parties, especially with Welles’s seemingly intractable companion Oja Kodar and the family of the late Iranian investor Mehdi Boushehri, is a testament to their indefatigable dedication and extraordinary diplomatic skills. Everyone who cares about films and Orson Welles should be endlessly grateful to Filip and Frank, and to Netflix for bankrolling the completion. And to Peter Bogdanovich, who was with the film “from before the beginning,” as Mr. Bernstein puts it in Citizen Kane, and never stopped telling people he was working on trying to get it finished in the next few months. The time is finally in sight when The Other Side of the Wind will actually be released throughout the world and we will be able to say, with Bernstein, “And now it’s after the end.”
The six years I spent acting in the film, from the first day of shooting in August 1970 through the last in 1976, was a Walter Mitty dream for a young cinephile. Playing a spoof of myself, Mister Pister, a gauche young film critic writing a book about the legendary director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), I let myself be putty in Welles’s hands for the first three years. Since I was a nonactor, I willingly put up with his bullying treatment and autocratic instructions, but after a crew member relayed the director’s praise for my work, I relaxed and had fun for the second half of the shoot. The Other Side of the Wind was my film school, giving me the chance to work for the greatest actors’ director in film history, write my dialogue with him, and watch him shoot with a fascinatingly varied cast for eighteen-hour days, often making up scenes as he went along. Graver told me, “It’s really a hand-made movie, frame by frame, and nobody makes a movie like that anymore; that’s why it’s taken so long.” But as the shooting dragged on, the horizon of completion began to recede. Fellow cast member Mercedes McCambridge (a veteran of Touch of Evil) advised me that when you work for Welles, “You keep your costume in a box in the attic.” I have kept my laughable J. C. Penney’s Mister Pister suit in a box all these years, in case any reshoots might be needed, though I can no longer fit in it (they can still use it for CGI shots, using a Pister avatar).
When I worked with Graver for a couple of years in the 1990s trying to interest a series of potential investors in the film, our experiences were mostly disheartening. I remember a screening for representatives of a company who had flown from Seattle to see the work print Gary had assembled, 105 minutes of scenes, including 41 minutes of footage smoothly edited by Welles himself and some scenes cobbled together roughly by Gary, with a makeshift ending and many key scenes missing. I suggested to Gary that we recut the material into about an hour’s worth of sample footage that wouldn’t give the illusion of a semicompleted film, but he disagreed. “Civilians” can’t make sense of any rough cut, but even people in the business sometimes have trouble understanding one. This film, so avant-garde in its conception and so unlike what people might expect of Welles, left the Seattle party mute. Gary and I waited and waited for a response, and nothing was said; they just walked out.
Finally, we made contact with Showtime through a friend of mine and interested executive Matthew Duda in the project. He saw its potential as we explained Orson’s intentions. Nobody had ever seen all the nineteen hours of footage that had been shot, even Orson or Gary, since most of it had not been printed as rushes. Duda continued to believe in the project and tried to make it happen, but though Gary managed to smooth things over with the long-disgruntled and abused Iranian investor, Boushehri, other parties caused complications. (Beatrice Welles, the director’s youngest daughter, had raised objections to the Showtime deal, but has signed on enthusiastically to the Netflix project and will be one of the executive producers.) Showtime made a $3 million offer in 1998 to buy the rights and complete the film, but when I was booted off it soon after that by Oja Kodar and Bogdanovich, I decided to go quietly in order not to hurt the film, and the deal quickly fell apart. In a way I was relieved to be free of the burden. I had put so much time and grief into the project, and I can only imagine what Filip has gone through to make it happen and bring the warring parties together. The sad part is that Orson and Gary are not here to see the film to fruition. It would be fitting to have the film dedicated “In Memory of Gary Graver.”
Now that the film footage is actually back on the ground in Los Angeles, where most of it was shot, we can look to the future of The Other Side of the Wind rather than dwelling on its insanely troubled past (which I chronicled from a personal perspective in my 2006 book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career and Josh Karp expertly summed up in his riotously entertaining, deeply researched 2015 book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of “The Other Side of the Wind”). While I’ve been writing this article since the announcement on March 14 of the deal’s completion, I’ve already read some skeptical comments about whether this latest development means the film will actually be completed and released.
Although it’s natural that the seemingly endless history of the project leads to some doubt, what the skeptics miss is the most significant part of this development, which was obscured in the New York Times report but highlighted in Ray Kelly’s article on Wellesnet: Oja Kodar signed a binding legal agreement with the producers and distributor, removing the longest-standing impediment to its release. So Rymsza & Marshall & Bogdanovich now can finally get down to the creative work.
Some important aesthetic decisions remain to be made. No doubt some controversies will arise in the process. The completed film will startle people; as happened with every Welles film (and every Stanley Kubrick film, for that matter), opinion will be divided on it, and it may take years to be acclaimed as a classic, as usually happened with Welles’s work. The Other Side of the Wind was far ahead of its time when we began shooting in 1970. Welles was aiming to capture and satirize what we now call “The Easy Rider Era” in Hollywood, when the studios were crumbling and the young radicals were taking over. It was a time of great excitement and much touting of illusory revolutionary change, but Welles, as he revealed in a 1970 Look article that I found somewhat baffling at the time, was highly skeptical of the New Hollywood and the trend to deify the director (he wrote that shots of directors on cranes reminded him of Mussolini on his balcony). He wanted to puncture those balloons by exposing not only the corruption of the old system but also the pretensions of the newcomers. He did not buy the inflated claims of the younger generation that they were going to change everything for the better; the film is prophetic in its skepticism. And he wanted to settle a score with Ernest Hemingway, who had once called him “Some damn faggot who runs an art theater,” by showing Jake Hannaford as a phony Hemingwayesque macho man with homosexual tendencies that come out as his life and career spin out of control. But the film is not simply an act of revenge; Welles’s films usually deal with homoerotically intense male friendships that end up in betrayal. Even though Welles does not play the lead role, The Other Side of the Wind is as deeply personal as any of his films.
What is perhaps most radical about Other Wind (as the film was known on the camera slates during production) is its shooting style. Each Welles film is a drastic departure from what preceded it, and Other Wind is unlike any other, and undoubtedly some people will be confounded. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has noted, the film is shot in two styles, neither of which is Welles’s own. The framing story of Jake’s seventieth birthday party is shot in 16mm (black-and-white and color) as a parody of the cinéma-vérité style of the Maysles Brothers and Robert Drew’s Direct Cinema, with deliberately rough framing and searching for camera subjects. Some viewers will not understand that parody or the film’s conceit of being assembled from found footage shot by people at Hannaford’s seventieth birthday party. Interspersed are scenes from Jake’s incoherent, wildly pretentious film-in-progress, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, his risible attempt to be “with it” in his comeback attempt. This is shot in 35mm, beautifully lit and composed, but in the arty, opaque style Welles scorned in Michelangelo Antonioni, whose Zabriskie Point (1970) Welles is directly parodying (actually, Zabriskie Point holds up surprisingly well in retrospect as a commentary on the empty nihilism of many young American radicals). People coming to Other Wind with preconceptions about what a Welles film is will need to discard them and take the leap with him into new artistic territory. The film’s stylistic and thematic daring should make it seem as modern today as when it was made. And it will serve as a fascinating time capsule of Hollywood in the Easy Rider era. If you were to recreate that period now, it would cost tens of millions of dollars, but the low-budget Other Wind simply needs an opening title reading “Hollywood 1970.”
At the time we were shooting, I worried that the extremely rapid editing of the party scenes (such as can also be seen in Welles’s 1973 documentary F for Fake) might be too disorienting for viewers. But over the years such a frenetic editing style has become so familiar that today’s audiences shouldn’t have a problem with it. Welles managed to edit forty-one minutes of footage before his death, and scored it with Dixieland-style jazz music. That material should serve as a template for Rymsza & Marshall & Bogdanovich & Co. as they assemble the final form of the film. The real aesthetic question remaining is how much of the film-within-the-film – which gives a window into Jake’s tangled psyche – should be interspersed into the framing narrative. Welles scholars are divided on that question, and I confess I am still mulling the issue myself. I think the producers should wait and see how the film shapes up as it is being edited before making final decisions about the editing in consultation with their colleagues and Welles scholars.
That way the film itself, and Welles’s hand as filmmaker, can guide the process. And I am sure there are many surprises for all of us in the nineteen hours of footage he shot. In any case, The Other Side of the Wind as it emerges will be at most a devoted approximation of what Welles might have intended its final shape to be. He was notorious for changing his conceptions of films and even reediting them years after their release, so it’s likely that his views about Other Wind and the footage itself would have remained malleable if he were around today to edit it. The completed work will be a labor of love by members of VISTOW, past and present, to present the film as we think it might have been intended by Welles, not as as a “director’s cut.” When some people argued that we should leave the film unfinished, or simply use the footage he edited as the centerpiece of a documentary about the making of the film, I argued to the contrary. Welles put so much of his life and passion into The Other Side of the Wind and shot virtually all of it (only a couple of CGI shots at the end of the story remain to be filmed) that it would have been a tragedy to leave it unfinished, rotting away in a laboratory or sitting in an archive for only scholars to ponder.
My Jesuit teachers in high school used to tell me, “Vita brevis, ars longa” – a Latin saying meaning, “Life is short, but art is long.” After its long and tortuous path to completion as a worldwide release through Netflix, The Other Side of the Wind, thanks most of all to Filip and Frank and Peter and Gary, will now have a chance to prove the wisdom of that saying.
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Joseph McBride is the author of nineteen books, including What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006), Orson Welles (1972; revised and expanded edition, 1996), and Orson Welles: Actor and Director (1977). McBride is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching film history and screenwriting since 2002.
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