The Other Side of the Wind is a 2018 drama about a Hollywood director who emerges from semi-exile with plans to complete work on an innovative motion picture.
“If you want a happy ending that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” – Orson Welles.
The Other Side of the Wind can now be seen as a NETFLIX original; though a first glance you will also see something that says “40 years in the making.” You can’t say that about many movies what is this all about? Now I hope to give context to films I write about, but in The Other Side of the Wind’s case this is a film whose context is overwhelming. Overwhelming to those, like me, who have wanted to see this film for most of their lives, and strangely to those cinema junkies to whom those 40 years has acted as promotional hype the film can’t possibly live up to. I first heard about this film from reading John Huston’s autobiography, “An Open Book” when it first came out in 1981. At that point the movie was already nearly ten years in the making.
But what about the rest of the film watching world?
Fact is perhaps most of them, or you reading this, may not even know what it or who Orson Welles is—I won’t say was because his career and mythical life has never been satisfactorily culminated—and generates as much new debate as it perpetuates events and lies from his very first wide public exposure on the Radio in the 1930’s. One, very good, reason most people who weren’t even born during some or most of the 40 years of the making of this film have never heard of Orson Welles, or know him only as an actor/ or TV pitchman. This is because as a filmmaker his films virtually never made a dent in pop culture. His finished films, he started as many or more films than he was able to finish, cherished and much examined by cinema junkies were almost all commercial disasters, many never aired on television or home video either.
Welles biggest impact on America was the accidental success of his radio version of H.G. Wells THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. The script for which was written to play out like real news broadcast breaking into a music program. People tuned in, almost accidentally, and thought this broadcast was real news happening at the moment and ran into the streets looking for or fleeing from an invasion from Mars. Many thought this was real news broadcast because they never listened to Welles Radio show in the first place, so had absolutely no reason to doubt Mars was attacking. Sure Welles had been successful in theatre but that audience was tiny and specialized compared to Film and radio audience. Broadway was a place most people never went to and if the mass audience knew anybody who did theatre it was because they became a Movie Star.
But with this credential of causing a sensation, Welles, still in his 20’s at the time, was wanted by Hollywood to cause more sensations just like that. He got what few should argue was the greatest contract in the history of film and after a period of development hell, yes Hollywood has this waiting for all who dare scale it’s cliffs, made Citizen Kane. Kane attempted a new sensation, by attacking a rich well known, newspaper owner and political and social mover and shaker, William Randolph Hearst and his young actress girlfriend. A few years after this the, at the time, world’s most popular and successful comic filmmaker and performer Charlie Chaplin made a film to parody his look alike dictator-on-the-rise, Adolf Hitler; survivors from Hitler’s inner circle said that Hitler saw the film at least twice and found it very funny, even adding that Hitler liked to laugh and was not a kill joy. Well, Hearst lacked Hitler’s sense of ‘fun’ and set out to be a kill joy for Orson Welles career. Though the film survived to get released and get a number of Oscar nominations—almost all of which it didn’t win, Welles directing career was deeply damaged, his greatest contract of all time was renegotiated, leaving him open to the same studio meddling most Hollywood directors have always endured.
That film deservedly now resides in any top ten list of the greatest films ever made and over the years made money. It was the starting point for a large number of long Hollywood careers for its cast and crew. But as far as the general movie going public the only film Welles directed, that was an immediate commercial success is The Stranger, a film Welles himself mostly disowned. Welles did star in that film as a Nazi in hiding—a genre that continues to this day, and it was his starring roles in commercial successful films, Jane Eyre and especially Tomorrow Is Forever that made him a “name” actor a box office draw. Ultimately, though Welles claims to have hoped originally to be a director, not an actor any longer, it was his long career as an actor that enabled him to get any films made of his own for the rest of his life.
As far as pop culture was concerned Welles was an actor who over the years grew fat and slummed his way through too-numerous-to-count films in smaller and smaller roles, until he became a frequent ‘personality’ on television both on the Dean Martin show (A producer on this show knew Welles personally and initially got him on the show as a favor—showing Welles could make friends as well as enemies in Hollywood) and then the Merv Griffin show. (Merv being a sort of ELLEN or OPRAH of the day) Welles career had become one of being famous for being famous.
With this fame he did commercials and, just as Rod Serling in his later days became more often seen and or heard as a pitchman for any sponsor who would wave enough dollars in his face. This fate no longer allowed them to display their real talent and continue to hone their skills.
When I finally, and first saw, Citizen Kane in film a guy next to me literally almost fell out of his chair when confronted with the fact that the old man who sold wine, Jolly Green Giant products and smoked cigars while doing clunky magic acts on Merv Griffin was the young guy who seemed to do it all better than anyone in Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane, by way of interest, has a huge number of 1’s on IMDb, it has more 1’s than many films even have votes at all on IMDb—showing how people gag on what’s supposed to be good for them.
Now you may already be getting overwhelmed by context where all this is really just back story that lead to when The Other Side of the Wind began to become a movie. Welles had in fact been using the money he made from trashing and immortalizing his public image, to make a number of films with increasingly dubious financial backing.
Thanks in large part due to the emergence in Europe of the Auteur Theory about directors, Welles also was finally attracting a small fan base among cinema fans who were actually starting to write and speak about film as being an art form that belongs alongside the accepted forms of Art.
Now though much of what has, and probably always will be said about The Other Side of The Wind will be putting it into, or freezing it out of, Welles’ films as director. But this film is almost as much about two other major figures in film that deserve mention and invoke interest in seeing this film. Two much more commercially successful filmmakers, both friends of Welles at the time, are in this film playing the lead characters. John Huston, son of a well known actor and father to two actors himself, plays an aging director struggling to finish a film, named Jake Hannaford.
Now as much as it’s been said that Huston is playing a version of Orson Welles, the character’s name is a combination of a famous, and at the time unemployed film master, John Ford—who frequently was called Jack. Many, including Welles, have they learned how to direct by watching Ford’s film Stagecoach. Ford was considered a drunk has been by the mid 1960’s but did live long enough to get a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute. (An award that would soon go to Alfred Hitchcock, who perceived the award as being a death sentence.)
The other real life inspiration for Jack Hannaford is Ernest Hemingway. Welles spent much time in Spain where Hemingway fought unsuccessfully trying to stop the rise of fascism there. Hemingway was a widely influential “modern” author who in part, contradictorily saw, and convincingly expressed in his writing, the joy of hunting and killing animals for sport. He became, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, famous for committing suicide, either because he couldn’t resolve the varied macho demons, possibly including some repressed homosexuality, inside of him, or because he thought was written out, or because he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Take your pick, the least symbolic of these probably being the truth or all of the above being the correct answer.
The Other Side of the Wind starts with the mysteriously famous Hannaford’s day of death being announced, the very same date and month that Hemingway died, and Hannaford’s death is rumored to have been autocide—death by purposefully crashing your car. Huston’s own career as a director is much closer to Hemingway’s themes than Welles’ are, including an infamous supposed obsession with killing and elephant while making one of his classics The African Queen. Huston is ideally cast in this role, better than Welles would have been himself, and Welles’ films often got into trouble when Welles’ himself wasn’t the principal character.
This opening is like that of Welles’ previous films Citizen Kane and Mr. Arkadin. We know right away the ending for our hero/bastard lead character, and the fact that the events of this film are now, decades in the past adds more power to the voice over spoken by none other than Peter Bogdanovich. He is the other Big figure, playing a major role in this film, Brooks Ottlerlake. Bogdanovich, probably mostly forgotten today, was a fan of old Hollywood directors at a time many of them had been forgotten. Along with this incisive interest in filmmakers, he himself was a struggling, want-to-be filmmaker at that time. Now Welles began filming bits for this film, as he had with Citizen Kane, before financing was fully in place. Much of the film takes place at a birthday party at a remote house, the party populated by, at the time, up and coming actors turned filmmakers like Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky, and other Welles first generation cronies like Norman Foster and Paul Stewart who knew Welles from his first arrival in Hollywood.
Norman Foster in particular deserves mention as playing a key character, Billy, a supporter and toady for Hannaford who remains faithful to the end. Norman Foster’s own career went from 1926 until his death in 1976—which is when the photography on The Other Side of the Wind ended. He was a multi hyphenate and started working for Welles on Radio but his career extended way beyond that. He was for a time married to movie star Claudette Colbert, starred in other big films, directed features in the United States and abroad into the 1950’s and then mostly on television working for, among others, Disney. His friendship, in real life with Welles survived a Foster film being canceled midway through production when Welles’ career took a dive at RKO. Many people who know film history may argue with my earlier statement that most people don’t know who Orson Welles is, but if most don’t, then nobody knows Foster anymore—though his career is notable.
The cast of cameo and supporting players and insiders was typical of Welles’ European films and a thick book could be written about each of their own careers. Though I’d read and seen whatever was available from the film over the years, I didn’t know until recently that the great Edmund O’Brien is also in the film along with Lilly Palmer—who in her youth was a source of lust and sort of one notch down Ingrid Bergman figure for a Welles’ generation. The whole cast is a who’s who for a truly hardcore movie trivia night or TCM Film Festival.
Welles had spent most of the 1960’s working in Europe, while this growing idea of filmmaker as artist was developing. He came back to America, along with his European girlfriend Oja Kodar for what turned out to be an extended period to make this film. Though his own European productions were either unfinished or little seen in the United States, European art films were kind of the rage in the early 1970’s, in part because they first offered up nudity and forbidden, in the States, subject matter. Welles who himself when he first came to Hollywood was considered a kid by an industry populated by adults, was by 1970 an adult in a world more and more run, or at least harassed by what became called, the young generation. These free love and Vietnam War hatin’ kids grew up on television reruns of Hollywood movies, and some old Hollywood figures had new careers and fans watching their films. They even became dorm room poster cool heros because they seemed anti-establishment, Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West and dead-before-they-could-grow-up Monroe and Dean even misunderstood and betrayed Monsters became popular dorm room posters, like Frankenstein and the Wolfman.
Mae West was one of the few still alive and living in America at the time and even got to make a film again, Sextette (1978)—though notoriously bad, it got made and released by a major studio. Orson Welles was very much alive so why couldn’t he cash in on this? Welles credentials for rediscovery by a young restless generation would be as the central rogue in The Third Man. He already had a fan and friend in Bogdanovich who was part of new Hollywood. Welles fit right in as a young genius who Hollywood had killed too soon, creatively at least. So he was a living martyr to the rising film-school-educated crowd. (The idea of film being something you could become an Academic at would have been laughable up until that time.)
Welles, through his television career of being himself, had no doubt run across popular impressionist, Rich Little—who did impersonations of many of these dead, now hip again actors, along with rising to real topical fame for his, true to life impersonation of an increasingly sweaty and neurotic Richard Nixon. So Welles cast Little to be in a dramatic role, giving him a hip pop culture star in what would be his Hollywood comeback movie. Chief among Welles’ other assets leading towards getting a new film made in America was a young hopefully rising cinematographer Gary Graver who would prove to be the film’s longest champion and possible Achilles’ heel in the 40 years in the making that soon began.
Now, many Welles fanatics will go into this film hoping to see the trappings of previous Welles films. That’s why part of the promotional hype for The Other Side Of The Wind has promoted it as being a bookend film to Citizen Kane. But a revealing interview on a new documentary, also on Netflix, called, They will Love me When I’m Dead, about Welles and The Other Side of the Wind troubled history, I think THE KEY POINT is made by Welles himself on his approach. He says that in this film he is wearing multiple masks. Masks of style.
First there is John Huston playing the over the hill director struggling to hang onto his career, certainly a part Welles based on himself and his heroes Ford and Hemingway, but the film Hannaford is trying to finish and which we see parts of throughout the story, is nothing like any film Welles himself ever made. There is even another mask, that being the, now-called, mockumentary way the whole story of Hannaford’s dark night of the soul birthday party takes. Hand held shakey, Blair-Witchy style, is the way most of this film is shot and much of it in Black and White—a format that Welles called ‘the actor’s friend.’ At the time Black and White was the cheapest type of film to shoot. People looking to see an Orson Welles formally baroque visual style, could well be turned off by all these masks that Welles employed and enjoyed here. This grab-bag style allowed Welles to make a virtue out of cheaply shot footage, by his stalwart, though questionably capable Cinematographer, Gary Graver. Though again Citizen Kane sets up much of its story through convincingly fake newsreel footage, so this style isn’t just the result of poverty that some Welles’ purists will ascribe it to, or decry it for.
This film offers two very different styles of filmmaking—though neither is what Welles hoped you’d expect from him. Hannaford is making a film that is slickly shot, and seemingly virtually silent film about two usually naked young people amid vivid psychedelia and formally composed shots that are still stunning—perhaps more stunning today as that the time they would have been seen for what they are which is a sort of parody, or homage, to Italian filmmaker Antonioni’s brand new, at the time, American Studio film, Zabriskie Point. This film-within-a-film is called The Other Side of the Wind and as it’s seen in bits and pieces during this film it is more than once presented with people asking what it’s about or what it means. This would have, at the time, be a hip critical virtue.
Welles himself didn’t like to confuse an audience. He said an audience who doesn’t understand quickly gets bored, so therefore he is both showing (and proving vividly) he can DO trendy arthouse filmmaking as well as anybody can. A weakness to The Other Side of the Wind is that Hannaford doesn’t himself ever express any thoughts about the film himself. People around him offer up theories, all his says is ‘we won’t talk about the movie.’ The reason for this initially is that his leading man has quit the film and the studio is probably not paying to finish it.
The story starts showing Hannaford only in fleeting pieces as he’s shooting what seems to almost be some Lesbian porn scene, how this fits into The Other Side of the Wind isn’t satisfactorily explained. Is Hannaford shooting it just to have something to shoot so the studio doesn’t shut the film down, is he shooting it just to ‘get-off’ on it? Eventually when we see footage of the actor quitting it’s during the filming of a scene where Hannaford is encouraging the actress to practically castrate him with a pair of scissors! The leading man’s leaving is more than just creative differences. There could be some homosexual tension, or at least a sexual tension between a fading once Romeo confronting with a new one to take his place—all this can relate back to the Hemingway suicide theories.
All Hannaford offers to a female critic at his birthday party is the remark, “We’re all ruled by the wind.”
Not only isn’t this film-within-a-film not like an Orson Welle’s film, it doesn’t seem like a John Huston/Jake Hannaford film either. Though that is part of the point, I still think it’s not totally convincingly connected to the story when all is said and done.
In Welles’ case he saw some of a film Peter Bogdanovich was making at the time, one that proved soon to be his break out, and probably still best film, The Last Picture Show. Much of the plot revolves around youthful lust, even including a scene of dog’s humping—that the film’s veteran cinematographer, Robert Surtees, refused to shoot. Welles told Bogdanovich while making The Other Side of the Wind, ‘See I can make a dirty movie, too.’
Most of this nudity is provided by Orson Welles mistress then, and for the rest of his life, Oja Kodar. The key sex scene takes place in a moving car in the rain and it’s a fascinating and sexy sequence. For the most part the end/literally climax of the scene is subjective—a rare way to shoot a sex scene. Kodar gets a co-writing credit on the finished film and was Welles source of erotic content in life and in his previous, frequently great, film F is for Fake. (Their relationship ultimately lead to years of infighting, after Welles death, between Beatrice Welles, his mostly abandoned daughter, and Kodar over Welles’ estate, especially unproduced script and unfinished film materials.)
The most Wellesian visual aspects of the film are to be found here in the various multiple reflections being used constantly, perhaps overused at times, harkening back to the one great scene in Welles’ previous film i. But what’s most interesting, to me anyway, is that this film within a film is at once the most modern style of film of the time while at the same time it’s a film virtually silent—accompanied by a new, though appropriately anachronistically jazzy/ euro rocky score by one of the inventors of this sound, Michel Legrand. I’ll guess that Welles would have been happy, and lucky, to have hired him back in the 1970’s to score the film, and now, luckily still alive, and got to score it after Welles’ death. Legrand would probably have been too expensive for Welles to afford at the time of production.
Now the bulk of the film is about a crowd of film students, groupies, co-workers and journalists, photographing and attempting to fawn all over, or critically analyze/psychoanalyze Hannaford at his 70th birthday party. The enthusiastic cinephiles are dismissed by Hannaford and used as comic relief in the film. Many of the industry characters refer to them derisively as spies, as fireflies attracted to the flame of Hannaford, even ultimately as midgets who ruin the party—though there are literal midgets there as well.
Welles is biting the hands that try to feed him with this approach. Chief among these, the leader of the pack, is the charmingly goofily named, Otterlake character very much based on Bogdanovich, played originally by Rich Little—the biggest name in the film.
In the final film seen today, it’s played by Bogdanovich himself, in a very good performance, and one steeped in irony by now, but more on that later. At the time his career and relationship with Welles was almost exactly as it’s portrayed – The hot mega successful new director and the about to be finished old-timer. A trenchant line in the film sums up the basic attitude expressed here about the whole film industry, “No machine produces as much as it consumes.”
Hannaford finds himself failing with studio heads, and uninterested in fans or with critics. This leaves him with what Welles’ films most cherished item. Friends and friendship.
The previous Welles’ films that most closely follows the heart of this film are Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight and Touch of Evil. Chimes is a film Welles at times said is his best film and came from a key part of the other side of Welles’ career in all it forms, Shakespeare. Chimes is about an old trickster Falstaff and his young partner in naughty, if largely harmless crime, Prince Hal. By story’s end Hal becomes King and must cast off his old friend—a deed that Shakespeare intended to show as a heroic dedication to true honor and the cause of the masses, but one that Welles’ convincingly portrays as heartbreaking tragedy.
In Touch of Evil we have, in its most successful sections, the story of a once great, now corrupt aging detective(here you can ‘word replace’ with Director) whose world is now collapsing around him as his current schemes have, this time, lead to disaster, while a devoted toady tries to explain and defend him from outsiders. Here these outsiders begin as being his, students, even apostles, but it leads to tragedy at this birthday party which turns out to literally be a last super full of Judas figures. Early in the evening Hannaford himself says, “Movies and friendship, those are mysteries,” to which is added “and religion,’ this coming from Bogdanovich/Otterlake, who then describes himself as an apostle to Hannaford.
The director calls himself God, just as the corrupt detective was playing god, framing suspects he thinks are guilty to speed up the process. Here we have a director framing up an unknown actor to be a star, one that he will own and control, and in both cases this is a large part in the director/detective’s downfall.
A real life Hollywood analogy to this can be found in Alfred Hitchcock and his discovery Tippi’ Hedren. Hitchcock took a lot of critical knocks for trying to make a model a leading actress. The two soon clashed personally and made a commercial bomb of a movie, Marnie, a movie about a powerful man trying to control a psychotic female thief. The whole thing damaged both of their careers from that point on. Welles’ loved a good story or scandal and would have known the story. His own early career involved a mentor figure and partner in John Houseman. Welles told a story of getting Houseman to stop trying to convince him of things by being in a bathtub during meetings with him and rudely standing up naked to finally drive him from the room and end the meeting. Whatever other sexual interests Welles inferred might have been Houseman’s … could be another story. It was a key partnership and break up in Welles’ early career, Houseman going on to a long mainstream career and even becoming an award winning actor while Welles became an exile.
In Welles’ own life he had a brief relationship with both his parents, had to fake his way into an acting career by pretending to be an adult before he was, and you could argue he never really grew up in emotional ways. He remained the unruly genius child never a devoted husband or a paternal figure, and though he could be an exploitive friend he was more often a deep friend. Joseph Cotton, whose film career kick off was Citizen Kane, in his autobiography told how Welles came to visit him after a stroke that robbed him of most of his ability to speak. In their conversations, when Cotton said wrong words, Welles would assume him saying, “Joe, those are better words than the real ones anyway.”
So instead of family Welles had friends and mentors, ones he both needed and at times rebelled against himself. Welles saw betraying a friendship as being THE cardinal sin. As a child a key father figure substitute was nick named “Skipper” exactly the name Bogdanovich uses affectionately in this film. As much as Welles claimed this wasn’t meant to be a film about him, the clues that it is, are more obvious than in anywhere else in his work.
Back at the beginning of his film career in Citizen Kane the story was poking fun and condemning an outside real life successful popular figure, in William Randolf Hearst. Here the story is being portrayed by the actual people it is examining and criticizing, Huston and Bogdanovich. Hannaford/Huston is shown to have a super young no-clue hot girlfriend, who Welles cast with a non-actor/waitress almost certainly because she looked like Cybil Shepard, Bogdanovich’s girlfriend at the time. But in the middle of this production Welles himself has his own young girlfriend, Oja Kodar, running around naked on screen. Was all, or any of this, lost on those making the film?
Another real life parallel, a disaster for the production of a film about a director in trouble because his lead actor has disappeared, was when Rich Little left the almost completed film for a previously booked job. Welles had gone over schedule and now, like his film’s lead director had no lead.
In the documentary about this film, there is a comment that the only source of information for the crew during production was Welles himself, who seems to have quickly said that he was, in fact, glad, Little was gone, because he couldn’t act. The crew learned that Little was gone when he just wasn’t there one day.
I have to frankly wonder if the whole, lead actor leaving the film within a film story wasn’t worked into the ever changing script after the fact. Welles, in a brilliant piece of advice, said that a great director should take any accident and turn it to his advantage, not try to work against it. This is something actors on stage are often told to do, to work with the mistake, never pretend a prop didn’t fall over, turn it into a choice. There are no accidents only spontaneous inspiration!
Welles called Bogdanovich, told him Little couldn’t act and that’s why he was gone. What he needed and wanted was for Peter to come play the part, which he did. Not long after this the original production budget had been spent and a lot of material had to be reshot, as most any scene with Huston also would have had Little right by his side. With this ‘accident’ the production was well on its way to being a 40 years in the making experience. This problem would not have seemed new or too shocking to Welles. He’d had his lead actor die in his long-in-production film, Don Quixote, that was also never finished within his own lifetime. (Trying to make a film of Don Quixote has more recently become a similar problem for director, Terry Gilliam.)
Huston stuck it out, though sources say this was helped by keeping him as drunk as possible, whatever the case, Huston gives a great and authentic performance. Huston’s directing career had in fact stumbled to a near stop by this point, he’d had a string of critically rejected and publically ignored films. This began in the mid 1960’s he had played Noah in his own big budget Biblical dud, called THE BIBLE. Huston got panned for directing except for his acting. He took the role largely because of his own love of animals. His own home in Mexico was sort of a Noah’s arch of various animals. Huston’s father had been a full time famous actor, why not do it himself more frequently?
1970 was an especially bad year for his directing career. His would-be spy thriller, The Kremlin Letter, a film he thought was good, came out and bombed and he quit, or was fired off of, The Last Run, the timing of which left room to come act for his friend Welles. In addition to his career problems, Huston’s own health was finally starting to fail under the weight of smoking and drinking and he soon or even at this point could have been diagnosed as having emphysema, now known more euphemistically as COPD, a degenerative lung disease.
So Huston by this point saw the dark at the end of the tunnel. Huston’s most widely seen acting, would be in one of the great films of the 1970’s, Chinatown. I think one of the real pleasure to The Other Side of the Wind being finished is to see him, as actor, and in his biggest role, one more time.
During the protracted production of this film Huston did finally make one of his dream projects as a director, The Man Who Would be King, a film my friend, the late Richard Hatch, correctly described as being one of the last truly great films ever made. This film invigorated the rest of Huston’s career which continued at a high level, with an equal number of duds and delights, I think his own accepting that he was entering his own end game propelling him to the end.
In The Other Side of the Wind, his character and his previous pupil now recently hot director increasingly are alone together as the rest of the party fades into the background of the story. Much of this more and more two person drama is shot in hand held black and white, I frankly think some of this was an after the fact decision of the final post production finishing of the film—overseen largely in a creative sense by Oscar winning editor Bob Murawski, and by Bogdanovich. My problem with this is there isn’t motivation by this point in the shakey crudely lit material in some of these scenes, as the crowd of people filming are nowhere to be seen. The performances are so good it almost doesn’t much matter, and any mockumentary style movie is prone to have unconvincing moments like this, but it’s a distraction at a crucial moment.
What’s happened in the story is that it becomes clear that Hannaford, who has a legendary reputation for not just creating stars but literally saving them, was set up by his now vanished leading man. In a biting bit of dialogue—and there are many, Hannaford says the near drowning of this nobody/now leading man was actually just his audition. There is also a story from the actor’s past that may have lead him to think that Hannaford was in some way coming onto him or rejecting him, Hannaford early on in the film tells Bogdanovich’s character not to ‘stick it in me.’ (I’m not saying that Welles is expressing some homophobia here. I think he sees it as, in this context, as an affront to his ‘holy of holies’ friendship.)
Now to look at this as Hannaford as Huston, there are accusations, denied by Huston, that when he realized actor Montgomery Clift was gay, the two did two excellent films together, The Misfits and Freud, he was rather cruel to him, Huston was known to be a practical joker. Though not long after Clift’s death Huston made a film Reflections in a Golden Eye, which is all about repressed homosexual desire in a macho army officer. Though the film was another major commercial bomb for Huston’s career, it is a daring effort to confront the topic. So I wouldn’t brand Huston, in an ultimate sense, with the homophobe iron either.
Hannaford looks for a practical solution to his problem. He has had a makeup man, played well by Cameron Mitchell, create a bunch of dummy lookalikes of this missing actor—in an attempt to finish the film without him. Hannaford/ Hemingway/Huston has now lost virtually everything, even his machismo, here being the ability to finish a movie and live up to his own legend. Hannaford, knowing he’s been had, and exposed to the world as having been had, memorably goes out and shoots at the manikins placed around the house on various rocks like an audience watching the party house.
The power has literally also gone out, stopping the screening of Hannaford’s The Other Side of the Wind, and the party breaks up so they can go to see the rest of the film at a drive-in, this being the lowest form of release for films at the time aside from porn theatres. There is a long promised arrival of midgets to set off a fireworks display at the house. Though the budget had shrunk, sorry for the unavoidable pun, to the point they could only afford 2 little people, though one is Angelo Resito who was in the infamous Freaks—a film that ruined its famous director Tod Browning—a fact Welles would have known.
During one of the many days of the seemingly endless production and like Rich Little before him, and the lead actor in the film-within-a-film, Welles’ Spanish producer vanished. As money would trickle in from various sources, shooting would continue for six years off and on! The little people and other footage was now being shot at Bogdanovich’s own house, in what turned out to be a three year term of Welles living there, and continuing to shoot the film, and being like that John Belushi sketch on SNL, The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.
The film when it leaves the house and goes to the drive in it, loses steam, but there are some powerful images. The final images of the film within the film show our wandering naked man and woman now separated by much space, as the couple in Citizen Kane is show first together at a tiny table which eventually becomes them sitting as opposite ends of a long dining table. The Other Side of the Wind is Hannaford’s end. He propelled all those around him.
Here the real wind blows over the broken almost totem/megalithic pieces of abandoned sets, a phallus shaped piece of the collapsing scenery symbolically flops over in the foreground. By this point the man and woman are tiny isolated figures in a barren windswept landscape. Early in the film one of the young hangers on asks Hannaford if the camera is a phallus, here at the end that joke is now paid off as being not funny at all.
Now that it’s all but too late, this missing leading man does return to the now empty party house, here we get a few of the deep focus wide angle lens shots we’d expect from a Welles’ film. Hannaford asks the young, still silent, to get into the car. He doesn’t and Hannaford drives off to the end we’ve known from the beginning. Hannaford, having lost his friends, as well as losing the upper hand in the relationship of director and actor, and mentor and student, of it’s hinted vaguely as some sort of sexual interconnection, doesn’t even by this point want to finish his film, only to finish himself.
He’s likewise previously left his chief and nearest thing to son or true supporter behind in Bogdanovich. Hannaford wanting his pupil/ now wunderkind director, to give him money to complete the film, after first saying he won’t hit up his friends of money, is turned down. Though Hannaford by also says that no amount of money would be enough. Perhaps Hannaford’s non-reactions to watching the bits of his own film reveal that he knows it doesn’t mean anything, other than the end.
In another bit of truth, the heavily promoted Antonioni film Welles was out-doing/sending up, Zabriskie Point, turned out to be, at the time, a critical and commercial bomb and ended any further American films for its director as well.
In 1979 key part of money for Welles’ film came under literal attack. This money came from son in law of the Shaw of Iran and when its pro-western dictator was thrown out of the country and assets were frozen so too was ownership of The Other Side of The Wind. He would edit on what materials he had, and when his own American Film Institute tribute came, he used the edited material as a pitch to get money to finish the film. A tragic hero view of this is nobody in successful money grubbing Hollywood wanted to help, the truth is closer to Welles didn’t own the film at that point. Whatever interest there was or could have been had nowhere to go. In fact the various rights and such were only resolved in the last few years, some money was raised in a a kickstarter campaign.
After Welles death it was up to cinematographer Gary Graver and Oja Kodar to try to finish it.
I myself saw footage Graver said he has just edited together—badly I have to in truth add, at a screening at the American Cinematheque. Oja Kodar was there, and though I admit I had a rather dim view of her as being Welles’ girlfriend who he kept by his side by putting her in these various unfinished films. But, she was in person a vivid presence. She won me, and the crowd over. She and Graver said the film could be finished and they needed 1.3 millions dollars to do so. Yet it still didn’t happen and Graver himself died long ago, a true keeper of the flame unable to see it finally catch fire.
In a final moment of neglect the Cannes film festival did not debut the film, Cannes being a place Welles had won awards when everyone else seemed to no longer care, but the film’s existing as a ‘made for’ film on the new would be king of all media, NETFLIX makes it available to an audience wider than any Welles ever had. The film will probably get no attention at the Academy Awards this year either, though I’d like to think at least John Huston might, and deserves a nod for best actor.
As I quoted from Welles’ at the start, a happy ending depends on where you stop the story, and The Other Side of the Wind’s story is finally ended where it should be, as a complete film.
This may be a problem for Welles’ followers, though always small in number compared to the mass audience that Welles captured once, by accident, with War of the Worlds. This film has, near its end, a scene between Hannaford and an old lover, played by Lilli Palmer (in a part not unlike that played by Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil) Hannaford actually refers to her as mother at one point. Then Hannaford ask if they might see each other more often—though he used words less strong than this. She replies “With an old friend it’s quite enough to know he’s there … durability can be rather fragile. The bad thing is to find a friendship was between a couple of other people.”
And that’s where some who know and love Welles, ‘not wisely, but too well,’ may initially or forever find themselves with this now completed film. As with Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut, they can say it wasn’t really finished by the auteur and so should be rejected as a faux film, not to part of the canon. I’d suggest these folks watch The Other Side of the Wind, as much as they have watched the ‘real’ Welles’ films and test their own ability to regain the wonder and awe those other films inspired in them. Though they may find, for them, their truth lies in the lines I quoted above.
I would hesitate to say this is the last Welles’ film. He did in fact film segments for his lover, Kodar, and loyal cinematographer, Gary Graver to use after his death, in a film of Isak Dinesen’s, The Dreamers. Graver showed these scenes at the Egyptian Theatre that night I was there. Welles in what would be his entire part in the film gives a moving performance. They explained that this was shot in secret because Welles knew by that point any unfinished film on his resume would damage his chances at a final comeback. Welles seemed on the verge of such a thing when, though he’d lost 50 or more pounds in the year previous to prepare for finally getting a new film made, died of a heart attack at 70—the same age Huston’s Hannaford dies in The Other Side of the Wind.
But a variety of other unfinished films float around, refusing to sink or come to shore, so far at least. Shortly after Welles died I came to the American Film Institute, to receive an award myself for a student film, but of more interest to me was a variety of rare Orson Welles’ material they were showing throughout this event.
In particular they were showing a documentary on Spain and Don Quixote that Welles had done in exchange for more money to pour into his own Don Quixote adaptation. It had Spanish narration, with no subtitles, but whoever was there who knew Welles, said the narration was garbage anyway, but Welles’ original script for the narration was great, and could be added easily. I saw this back in 1986!
The person to whom watching The Other Side of the Wind must be the most confounding is Peter Bogdanovich. By this point in his life, as filmmaker, film historian, writer, and occasionally as an actor, he has played, in real life, virtually every role a in the film, including tragedy brought on by his being a director of an upcoming star discovery. In his case it came about by having an affair with ‘his’ star Dorothy Stratten, who was then viciously killed and violated by her own controlling would be macho jealous husband who then killed himself.
Long before this crime, Welles and Bogdanovich had had a falling out. In the film this is predicted by a line a critic says about director and apostle, “If you part you will realize how much you hate each other.” Indeed, Welles pretty much openly called him an egomaniacal A-hole on the tonight show. Now this could be written off as a mentor refusing to accept a pupil as a superior, except that other voices joined in to condemn the same faults so when Bogdanovich stopped making big hits his career guttered out almost completely.
I met him once at a screening, he was there to support former friend and former lover/star, Cybil Shepard, who was a producer and star of that particular film. I’ve heard him speak unpretentiously and differentially at screenings of The Last Picture Show and at Targets. At the Targets screening he said Sam Fuller had written most of the film but refused a credit. He also hosted a Roger Corman tribute, at which he acknowledged Corman for helping start his career and for helping him again get a film made after his career bottomed out.
He’s also become THE defacto Welles expert, speaking incisively on almost all releases of Welles films Home Video versions. When in LA, he can be seen as a house guest with Quentin Tarantino and or Brett Ratner, and, he even sings on an album of standards done by Raymond De Felitta. The film is now, as much or more a thinly veiled biography of him by Welles, much of it predicted in this film in a way as good or better than Nostradamus and other Welles’ historic magicians and or charlatans, all of whom Welles’ loved.
I’ve tried to speak as much about the film itself as about the long, arguably more fascinating, filmmakers and collaborators involved with it. I think it deserved to be finished and almost certainly couldn’t have been finished by better existing hands. Original production members Bogdanovich and Gary Marshall were involved in this, but I’d suggest a lion’s share of the credit, creatively, to editor Bob Murawski, an Academy Award winning editor who has previously helped with a variety of restoration efforts including some Lucio Fulci films. Bob has dreams of finishing another notorious unfinished film by a major director—though I won’t spill the beans on that one.
I’d seen various edited fragments of The Other Side of the Wind over the years. The finished film proves there was indeed a whole movie there, one that with its topics, including one that fits right into the Me-Too movement, are still topical and valid as a look at the film industry, but also as a story of the patron and pupil/father/son rivalries of life.
Welles, it turns out, had done edits of about 50 minutes of material at most, much of this involving the film within a film scenes – a couple of which go on a bit too long. Murawski is responsible, largely for the rest and, I think, proves to be a better editor than Welles. The film is less choppy and more finished in feeling than some of the later films Welles did complete himself. It’s easily the best of a number of Welles’ A.D. restorations and completions out there.
In the final moments of the film Oja Kodar, the female lead watches alone the final moments on the drive in screen as the sun rises. It was revealed earlier that she was signed by a studio and is now off to what should be a big career. A voice over by Huston/Hannaford speaks about watching or making an image for too long that you suck the life out of it, that you shoot ‘em until they are dead.’ I say The Other Side of the Wind now is alive at last.
But wait there’s more. Odds and ends:
- After The Other Side of the Wind, Welles remained in Hollywood for the most part trying to get various films made. One of those he hoped to enlist in this goal was Steven Spielberg, who bought the famous Rosebud sled from Citizen Kane for $60,500 in 1982, but would not help Welles get a film made. Welles died in 1985.
- Also on Netflix is a new documentary, They Will Love Me When I’m Dead, about The Other Side of the Wind. This acts as a sort of “special features” doc about the film and features deleted material with Rich Little. My slight word of warning though is the film could have been made ten years ago or more as it doesn’t cover the film actually being completed. The film assembles most of the still living participants from the original production of the film, then let’s them say almost nothing! Regardless of this, and especially if you’ve never read anything about the making of the film before, it’s a must see, at least until a hopeful DVD/BLU RAY release of The Other Side of the Wind, which will hopefully tell more of the story of the film’s completion, leaving one with the depressing impression it was all for nothing.
- Danny Huston, John’s son, briefly tried his hand unsuccessfully at directing, before becoming an increasingly successful actor, playing a major role in Wonder Woman for example. He also played Orson Welles, in the film Fade to Black from 2006. The film is, ‘inspired by real events,’ about Welles’ acting in what is a pretty good film Black Magic, which was shot in Italy in 1948. However Huston, though a gifted mimic, doesn’t actually do a Welles impersonation in this misfire—a very bizarre decision given the circumstances.
- I’ve read pretty much everything I can get my hands on about Welles, and if I could only recommend one book, I couldn’t but, I have to recommend three, so far, these being an ongoing series of sequential biographies by Simon Callow. These offer, I feel, the most convincing facts and then theories about Welles’ various strengths and weaknesses. It has taken Callow decades to research and publish the first three volumes, hopefully he will be able to cover Welles’ whole life and career.
- And of course seek out John Huston’s 1981 autobiography, An Open Book.
- And, also of course, and especially—as it’s one of the best autobiographies I’ve ever read, Joseph Cotton’s 1987’s, An Autobiography – Vanity Will Get You Somewhere.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
DIRECTED BY ORSON WELLES
Starring director/writer/actors
John Huston
Peter Bogdanovich
Norman Foster