Legendary Director Orson Welles's Lost Final Film Will Finally Be Completed
Orson Welles in 1942
Orson Welles’s last film will finally be completed.
After years of fighting and negotiations, and even a period in which the footage went missing, a deal has been struck that will allow The Other Side of the Wind to be edited together and released 30 years after the great filmmaker and actor’s death, The New York Times reports.
It will be a happy ending for a film that became something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Shot between 1970 and 1976, the feature starred John Huston as a temperamental director fighting the powers-that-be in Hollywood to achieve his great vision. Welles, known both for his brilliance and ego, had trouble with the studio system throughout his career. He lost control of the editing of his Citizen Kane follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, as well as his 1947 film, The Lady From Shanghai.
Years later, Welles financed The Other Side of the Wind by acting on TV and tapping a broad network of investors. One of those investors, a brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, ultimately took control of the footage on behalf of his company, Astrophore, after fighting with Welles over spending.
The footage was stored in Paris, but Welles was able to smuggle out a 45 minute reel in 1975. He would obsessively work on the edit until his death in 1985, though he was unable to fully complete it or get back what he lost, making the film something of his own Rosebud.
For five years, Royal Road Entertainment worked to strike a deal between Welles’s daughter and sole heir Beatrice Welles, his partner and collaborator Oja Kodar, and Astrophore (which had one point briefly lost the reels). In 2012, producer Frank Marshall, who was a line producer on the film, joined the negotiations, alongside the director Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in the film.
A scrappy production that often saw the cast and crew stealing shots in locations where they were not permitted to film, Wind includes a hodgepodge of 35 millimeter, 16 millimeter and Super 8 film, with parts in color and others in black and white. Bogdanovich said that the 45-minute reel was edited in a very “fragmented” and “idiosyncratic” way, which could make compiling tricky. They’re aiming to have a completed version done in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’ birth.
“We will set up a cutting room and Peter Bogdanovich and I will assemble the film,” Marshall told the Times. “We have notes from Orson Welles. We have scenes that weren’t quite finished, and we need to add music. We will get it done. The good news is that it won’t take so long because of all of the technology today.”
Photo credit: AP File Photo
