The Other Side of the Wind

The Other Side of the Wind
Directed by	Orson Welles
Produced by	Orson Welles & Dominique Antoine
Written by	Orson Welles & Oja Kodar
Starring	John Huston Bob Random Peter Bogdanovich Susan Strasberg Oja Kodar
Cinematography	Gary Graver
Country	America / Iran
Language	English
Budget	c.$2 million

The Other Side of the Wind is an unfinished film directed by Orson Welles, shot between 1969 and 1976, and starring John Huston, Bob Random, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg and Oja Kodar.

Summary

The film covers the 70th birthday party of movie director Jake Hannaford, who is struggling to make a commercial comeback. It opens with Hannaford's death just after the party, and mostly focuses on the night before his death. We also see extracts of Hannaford's daring new film-within-a-film, The Other Side of the Wind. As we learn more about Hannaford at his party, the audience realises that he is a far more complex character than he seems, and harbours several big secrets.

The film presents a cynical portrait of Hollywood in the 1970s, parodying the passing of the studio system, and the experimental new film-makers of the new Hollywood, as well as mocking successful European directors such as Antonioni. It was shot in a variety of different styles - colour, black-and-white, still photography, 8mm, 16mm and 35mm film, all rapidly inter-cut together, and was planned as a collage of these different styles.

Plot

The film features John Huston as Jake Hannaford, an aging Hollywood director modeled on Ernest Hemingway. The film opens with narration over the wreckage of Hannaford's crashed car, casting doubt as to whether the crash which killed him on his 70th birthday was really an accident. The narrator sets the tone for the film by telling us "This [film] was put together from many sources — from all that footage shot by the TV and documentary film-makers — and also the students, critics and young directors who happened to bring sixteen and eight millimeter cameras to his birthday party..."

Just before his death, Hannaford was trying to revive his flagging career by making a "hip, with-it" film in the style of Antonioni, laden with gratuitous sex scenes and violence, with mixed results. At the time of Hannaford's party, this film (The Other Side of the Wind) has been left unfinished after its star stormed off the set, for reasons not immediately apparent to the audience. The film includes extensive excerpts of this film-within-a-film, as well as excerpts of a documentary on Hannaford's life.

After the titles, we see a screening of some incomprehensible parts of Hannaford's unfinished experimental film. The screening is being held to attract "end money" from clearly-unimpressed studio boss Max David (Geoffrey Land). Hannaford himself is absent, and a loyal member of his entourage, the ageing former child star Billy Boyle (Norman Foster) makes an inept attempt to describe what the film is about. When David asks "Jake is just making this up as he goes along, isn't he?", Boyle can only reply, "He's done it before." after an awkward pause.

Intercut with this scene, we see various groups setting out for Hannaford's 70th birthday party at his Arizona ranch, including Hannaford and his young protégé Brooks Otterlake (played by Peter Bogdanovich), a young, commercially successful director who has a talent for mimicking well-known celebrities. (Bogdanovich, then a successful young director, also has a talent for mimicry.) One of the people they share their car with is the obnoxious cineaste reporter Mr. Pister (Joseph McBride), whose flurry of intrusive questions culminates in, "Mr. Hannaford, in the body of your film work, how significantly would you relate the trauma of your father's suicide?" and he is thrown out of Hannaford's car.

Stranded in the desert, Pister hitches a lift on a bus that is taking crew and reporters to Hannaford's birthday party. Although there are many journalists in the bus, they are also carrying several dozen life-size clay dolls of Hannaford's leading man, taken from the set of the unfinished film. The scene is indicative of the experimental nature of the picture, and includes much overlapping dialogue: a tape recorder belonging to reporter Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg) playing back Hannaford's voice, while a member of Hannaford's entourage Pat (Edmond O'Brien) reads out an authoritarian anti-hippy diatribe of Hannaford's, fellow reporter Pister struggles to thread the tape back onto his reel-to-reel tape recorder, and at the same time, film footage of the scene is rapidly intercut with footage from Hannaford's film.

Further scenes depict the festivities at Hannaford's party, including fireworks, assorted midgets, and a musical number with John Carroll leading a rendition of "The Glow-Worm".

Many of the journalists attending are all brandishing cameras, and the film follows the perspectives of individual journalists as they follow Hannaford everywhere, even to the toilet, asking personal questions. In the second half of the film they begin querying Hannaford's sexuality and whether he has long been a closet homosexual, in spite of his macho public persona. Each camera's footage is displayed in a distinctive style, representing the perspectives of different directors and cameramen.

Throughout the film, there is rapid inter-cutting between simultaneous conversations at Hannaford's party, so that the viewer hears a few lines of dialogue from one conversation, switches to another conversation, then another, before returning to more of the original conversation. (A similar technique was used in the 1998 restoration of Welles' Touch of Evil.)

Several party guests comment on the conspicuous absence of John Dale (played by Bob Random), Hannaford's androgynous-looking, leather-clad leading man in his last film, whom Hannaford first discovered when Dale was attempting suicide by jumping into the Pacific Ocean off the Mexican coast.

Meanwhile, guests are shown more scenes from the film in the private cinema Hannaford has at the ranch.

The scenes of the film-within-the-film intercut throughout the film include:

• A scene set in a Turkish bath, which plays over the opening titles.
• John Dale's onscreen character pursuing "The red, red Indian" (Oja Kodar) on his motorcycle, with increasing ambiguity as to which of them is pursuing the other. These scenes involve extensive use of flat landscapes and plains; and tall, high-rise glass skyscrapers, the mirrors and windows of which form various optical illusions reminiscent of the 'hall of mirrors' scene in Welles' earlier The Lady from Shanghai. (This is mixed in with the sound of the audience responding unenthusiastically.)
• A graphic sex scene between Random and Kodar in a station wagon being driven through heavy rain, culminating in the driver of the car (Robert Aiken) throwing Kodar out.
• A sexual dream sequence involving Kodar walking at least partially nude in front of a giant black phallus. (Commentary from Huston can be heard through this.) This short scene was directed by Kodar.
• The violent death of John Dale's character in the film-within-the-film.
• A graphic sex scene between Random and Kodar, filmed from below, looking through the bedsprings in the style of Russ Meyer. The scene takes place on a rusting bed in a deserted movie lot. Throughout this scene, Hannaford provides increasingly voyeuristic and intrusive/abusive off-screen direction, prompting an enraged and humiliated John Dale to storm off the set.

As the party continues, Hannaford gets progressively drunker. He is washing his face in the bathroom when he tearfully breaks down in front of Otterlake, asking for the young director's help to revive his flagging career, and desperately trying to sober up before returning to the screening of his still-unfinished film.

A power cut in the middle of Hannaford's party interrupts the screening mid-way. The party continues by lantern-light, and eventually reconvenes to an empty drive-in cinema, where the last portion of Hannaford's film is screened.

Later in the film, Dale arrives at the party. At one point, a drunken Hannaford makes a pass at Dale, and is rebuffed. Hannaford has a history of seducing the wife or girlfriend of each of his leading men, but maintains a strong attraction to the leading men themselves. Hannaford then uses a rifle from his Indian trophy room to shoot several life-sized clay dolls of Dale. This is paralleled by a subplot about the unnamed actress playing "The red red Indian" seducing Dale at Hannaford's party and being rebuffed, leading to her shooting at him towards the end of the film. Dale is no longer alive by the end of the film.

Having relocated to the drive-in cinema, intrusive journalist Juliette Riche asked Hannaford the most explicit questions of all about his sexuality. At this moment, Billy Boyle stops the film cameras, although with the soundtrack still running, and through a montage of still photos, we gather that Hannaford violently assaults Riche.

The film's final scene features Hannaford's sports car - which he had originally bought as a present for Dale - crashing into the screen of the drive-in cinema, killing him. At the time, the screen had been projecting the end of Hannaford's new film, and the sun sets behind it. It is left ambiguous whether his death was the result of drunk driving or suicide.

A monologue from Hannaford is heard in voice-over during the final scene: "Remember those Berbers - up in the Atlas? They wouldn't let us point a camera at 'em. They're certain that it...dries up something. The old eye, y'know, behind the magic box. Could be it's an evil eye at that...Medusa's...Who knows, maybe you can stare too hard at something. Huh? Drain out the virtue; suck out the living juice...You shoot the great places and the pretty people - all those girls and boys...shoot 'em dead..."

The film concludes as Hannaford's voice says, "Cut!"

Released scenes

Although the film is unfinished, at least five scenes have been available to a wider public over the years.

The most commonly seen of these are two edited scenes (in workprint form), which can be seen in the documentary film Orson Welles: One Man Band, which is available as a bonus feature on both the Criterion Collection R1 and Madman Entertainment's Directors Suite R4 DVD release of F for Fake. The scenes included in the documentary are:

1. A scene from the start of the film featuring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and Susan Strasberg at Hannaford's 70th birthday party.

2. A scene from Hannaford's sensationalist film-within-a-film featuring Oja Kodar and Bob Random having sex in a station wagon driven by actor Robert Aiken.

The scenes were originally cut by Welles to show during his AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony in 1975. Both of them run to around two and a half minutes, with the second scene being slightly longer. (The full sex scene runs to around seven minutes, and follows the clearly uncomfortable driver becoming increasingly incensed, and ends in Kodar's character being ejected from the car mid-climax, but the released version only shows the first part of this.)

Welles screened a further scene for the AFI in 1975:

3. This involved the screening of a rough cut of Hannaford's film to a clearly unimpressed studio executive, while Norman Foster plays a Hannaford aide ineptly trying to describe what the film is about.

This scene has been less widely seen because it was not included in the One Man Band documentary; but the entire AFI ceremony was broadcast in the 1970s as the TV special AFI Salutes Orson Welles, and was subsequently released on VHS. The tape includes the above two scenes, as well as the third scene.

A fourth scene is included in Gary Graver's 1993 direct-to-video documentary Working with Orson Welles, and uses footage in Graver's possession:

4. It involves an extensive dream-like sequence from the film-within-the-film, portraying Bob Random's character chasing Oja Kodar. Much use is made of optical illusions with mirrors and reflections in glass skyscrapers and phone booths.

A fifth scene has been circulated on internet video websites, in two different cuts of the same scene. Both versions are filmed in black and white and consist of Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky arguing together on the nature of film, then asking increasingly personal (and sometimes pretentious) questions to Hannaford.

5a. The shorter version is more tightly edited and runs to five and a half minutes, featuring only Jaglom and Mazursky.

5b. The longer version runs to six and a half minutes, contains the same footage as above, but also has Dennis Hopper joining in, as well as contributions from John Huston's character. At the time this scene was filmed, in 1971, Huston had not yet been cast, so his own lines are unread, and were evidently meant to be dubbed in later. In this version, Welles can occasionally be heard providing off-screen direction between lines of dialogue.

Cast

• John Huston as Jake Hannaford
• Bob Random as John Dale
• Peter Bogdanovich as Brooks Otterlake
• Susan Strasberg as Juliette Riche
• Oja Kodar as The Actress aka The Red, Red Indian
• Joseph McBride as Charles Pister
• Lilli Palmer as Zarah Valeska
• Edmond O'Brien as Pat
• Mercedes McCambridge as Maggie Fassbender
• Cameron Mitchell as Zimmer
• Paul Stewart as Matt Costello
• Peter Jason as Marvin P. Fassbender
• Tonio Selwart as The Baron
• Howard Grossman as Charles Higgam
• Geoffrey Land as Max David
• Norman Foster as Billy Boyle
• Dennis Hopper as Lucas Renard
• Gregory Sierra as Jack Simon
• Benny Rubin as Abe Vogel
• Cathy Lucas as Mavis Henscher
• Dan Tobin as Dr. Bradley Pease Burroughs
• George Jessel as Himself
• Richard Wilson as Himself
• Other cast members include Stéphane Audran, John Carroll, Cameron Crowe, Pat McMahon, Cameron Mitchell and Robert Aiken.

The film features an exceptionally large number of film directors in acting roles in the film, including Claude Chabrol, Norman Foster, Gary Graver, Curtis Harrington, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky and Dennis Hopper, mostly playing Hannaford's entourage of journalists and young film-makers.

Impressionist Rich Little was originally cast as Brooks Otterlake, but walked out of the film part of the way through. Filming was completed with Bogdanovich playing Otterlake. This necessitated reshooting all of Little's scenes. Little's interpretation of the Otterlake character would have had him using a different accent or impression for every single scene - a device which Joseph McBride thought "uncomfortably labored". By contrast, although Bogdanovich did several impressions in character as Otterlake, he played most of his scenes with his own voice.

According to McBride, several of the characters were based on real-life people. "The Baron" parodied Welles' former business partner John Houseman, whom he had acrimoniously separated from in the 1940s. "Max David" ridiculed then-studio boss Robert Evans. "Jack Simon" mocked young macho director John Milius. "Abe Vogel" was a play on veteran agent Abe Lastfogel. "Mavis Henscher" poked fun at Bogdanovich's then-girlfriend, actress Cybill Shepherd. "Juliette Riche" was a thinly-veiled spoof of film critic Pauline Kael, with whom Welles was in a public feud over her allegation (later disproved) that he did not write Citizen Kane. (The role had originally been written with Jeanne Moreau in mind, and was initially played by Bogdanovich's then-wife Polly Platt, who also served as the film's production designer, before eventually being taken over by Strasberg, who reshot the scenes with Platt.) "Charles Higgam" was a parody of Charles Higham, who had written an influential and unflattering 1970 biography of Welles which had wounded him with its accusation that he had a "fear of completion" on films. McBride's own character, "Mr. Pister", was an amalgamation of various cinephiles and socially awkward film critics whom Welles had met over the years.

Bogdanovich taking over the role of Otterlake meant refilming the scenes featuring Higgam, since Bogdanovich had originally played that (much smaller) role. Bogdanovich played Higgam by doing an impression of Jerry Lewis (at Welles' request), although there is no evidence that Howard Grossman played the role that way when he took over.

The characters played by Foster, Jessel, McCambridge, O'Brien, Stewart and Wilson form Hannaford's entourage, representing the "Old Hollywood"; while Chabrol, Harrington, Hopper, Jaglom and Mazurski play thinly-veiled versions of themselves, representing the "New Hollywood." The "Old Hollywood" characters serve as something of a chorus for Hannaford, providing various commentaries on his life.

According to the shooting script, Welles intended to provide the film's short opening narration, intending to dub it in post-production. However, he never recorded it.

Many of the cast and crew worked either for free, or for low wages and/or in exchange for favours from Welles. Huston, a close friend of Welles, worked for the nominal fee of $75,000. Welles said he could not afford to pay his cinematographer Gary Graver, so instead gave him his 1941 Academy Award statuette for the script of Citizen Kane by way of thanks. Joseph McBride's salary comprised two boxes of cigars. Paul Mazursky recalls that he was never paid for the one night of filming he acted in.

Production history

The film has a troubled production history. Like many of Welles's personally funded films, the project was filmed and edited on-and-off for several years.

The project evolved from an idea Welles had in 1961 after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. Welles had known Hemingway since 1937, and was inspired to write a screenplay about an ageing macho bullfight enthusiast who is fond of a young bullfighter. Nothing came of the project for a while, but work on the script resumed in Spain 1966, just after Welles had completed Chimes at Midnight. Early drafts were entitled Sacred Beasts and turned the older bullfight enthusiast into a film director. At a 1966 banquet to raise funds for the project, Welles told a group of prospective financiers:

Our story is about a pseudo-Hemingway, a movie director. So the central figure...you can barely see through the hair on his chest; who was frightened by Hemingway at birth. He's a tough movie director who has killed three or four extras on every picture...[but is] full of charm. Everybody thinks he's great. In our story he's riding around following a bullfighter, and living through him...but he's become obsessed by this young man who has become...his own dream of himself. He's been rejected by all his old friends. He's finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur...a fellow who lives off other people's danger and death.

When Welles moved back to the United States in the late 1960s, the script's setting changed to Hollywood, and filming started in 1969. Early filming in 1969-71 focused on Hannaford's film-within-a-film. Welles was initially unsure who to cast as the film director and whether to play the role himself, finally settling in 1971 on his friend the actor-director John Huston. The few party scenes shot before 1971 were shot without Huston, and often contained just one side of a conversation, with Huston's side of the conversation filmed several years later and intended to be edited in to the earlier footage.

In 1972 Welles said that filming was "96% complete," (which seems to have been an exaggeration, since many of the film's key scenes were not shot until 1973-5) and in 1976 the last scene of principal photography was completed.

Welles described the film's unconventional style to Peter Bogdanovich during an interview on the set:

I'm going to use several voices to tell the story. You hear conversations taped as interviews, and you see quite different scenes going on at the same time. People are writing a book about him - different books. Documentaries...still pictures, films, tapes. All these witnesses...The movie's going to be made up of all this raw material. You can imagine how daring the cutting can be, and how much fun.

[PB: Have you written a screenplay?]

Four of them. But most of it's got to be ad-libbed. I've worked on it for so long - years... If I were a nineteenth-century novelist, I'd have written a three-volume novel. I know everything that happened to that man. And his family - where he comes from - everything; more than I could ever try to put in a movie. His family - how they were competing with the Kennedys and the Kellys to get out of the lace-curtain-Irish department. I love this man and I hate him.

John Huston confirmed that the film was photographed in a highly unconventional style: "It's through these various cameras that the story is told. The changes from one to another - colour, black and white, still, and moving - made for a dazzling variety of effects." He added that principal photography was highly improvised, with the script only loosely being adhered to. At one point, Welles told him, "John, just read the lines or forget them and say what you please. The idea is all that matters."

A ranch in Arizona was rented out for many of the party scenes, while much of the film was shot in Bogdanovich's own Beverly Hills house, which Welles stayed in for nearly two years, and which doubles for other parts of Hannaford's house. Other scenes were shot in Reseda (where the drive-in cinema scenes were filmed in the same location as the climax of Bogdanovich's Targets), Culver City, Connecticut, France, Holland, England, Spain, Belgium, and the MGM backlot. (The latter was filmed without MGM's permission, with Welles smuggled onto the backlot in a darkened van, whilst the rest of the cast and crew pretended to be a group of film students visiting the backlot. The backlot, which was seriously dilapidated, was demolished shortly afterwards, and only one more film - That's Entertainment! (1976) - was made on it before its demolition.)

Principal photography was undermined by serious financial problems, including embezzlement by one of the investors, who fled with much of the film's budget. Barbara Leaming described the situation in her biography of Welles (based on extensive interviews with Welles):

The first of the backers Orson managed to find in Paris was a Spanish acquaintance of his from the international film community who enthusiastically agreed to kick in $350,000, a little less than half of what Orson and Oja had already invested. Shortly thereafter an equivalent sum was pledged by a French-based Iranian group headed by Mehdi Bouscheri, the brother-in-law of the Shah...Dominique Antoine, a Frenchwoman, made the deal with Orson on behalf of the Iranians...Orson left France with the understanding that the Spanish partner would act as intermediary with the Iranians in Paris...

But no sooner were Orson and Oja in Spain than trouble started. "We were perfectly all right as long as I was using Oja's money and mine," says Orson, "but the moment we got associates!" The Iranians appeared not to be living up to their end of the deal. Orson heard from the Spaniard who had flown in from Paris, that the Iranians had not given him the money they had promised. There were heavy rains and flooding in Spain, so Orson and Oja were basically cooped up in their hotel, where they worked on a new script together. The Spaniard returned to Paris to try again. "In a minute they're going to have it," he told Orson later. "It looks all right." In lieu of the Iranian funds, he gave them very small sums of money, which he said were part of the investment he had agreed to make. Not until afterward did Orson discover that the Iranians had indeed been giving the Spaniard the promised money, which had come from Iran in cash, and that, instead of bringing it to Spain, the sly fellow was pocketing it. Says Orson: "We just sat, month after month, while he went to Paris, received the money, and came back and told us that they wouldn't give him any money. He was very convincing to us, and very convincing with them in Paris. He kept flying back and forth extracting money from them. We didn't know them, you see. We knew him." The small sums of money he had been giving Orson as if from his own pocket actually came out of the Iranian funds. His constant reassurance to Orson that the Iranians were about to come through was calculated to keep Orson in Spain out of contact with them. On his part, Orson did not want to interfere in what he presumed were his emissary's delicate negotiations with them. It simply never occurred to him that the fellow was lying - and had never any money of his own to invest in the first place...

Meanwhile, on account of the foul weather, Orson had decided to abandon Spain for Arizona, where John Huston and a host of other faithfuls joined him...The swindler continued his game of collecting cash from the Iranians who, having heard only from him, still did not know that anything was wrong. When they received a telex purportedly from John Huston's agent to ask for a $60,000 advance, Dominique Antoine did ask for further verification. But this did not deter the swindler, who sent her a Screen Actor's Guild form with a bogus Social Security number and signature from the States. The Iranians dispatched the $60,000, which was pocketed by the Spaniard rather than Huston, who, out of friendship for Orson, was actually working for much less. After having sent the money, Dominique Antoine had second thoughts about it. Until now she had deliberately left Orson alone because she sensed he preferred it that way. But now something told her there was a problem. "I think I have to go there," she told Bouscheri, "even if Orson isn't pleased." Since Orson had yet to receive a penny from the Iranians, their French representative was the last person he expected to see in the Arizona desert. He could not have been happy to see her. When almost instantly he asked her where the money was, and she nervously told him that she had been making regular payments to the intermediary, who obviously hadn't passed them on to him, he broke down.

This story is corroborated by Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote in November 1997 of the production, "another producer ran back to Europe with $250,000 of Orson's money and never was heard from again (although I recently saw the person on TV accepting an Oscar for coproducing the Best Foreign Film of the year.)"

In February 1975, Welles was awarded an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and used the star-studded ceremony as an opportunity to pitch for funding to complete the film. (With a touch of irony, one of the scenes he showed his audience featured Hannaford screening a rough cut of his latest film to a studio boss, in a bid for "end money" to complete his picture.) Sure enough, one producer made what Welles later called a "wonderful offer", but Antoine turned it down on the assumption that an even better offer would arrive. No such offer came, and Welles later bitterly regretted the refusal, commenting before his death that if he'd accepted it "the picture would have been finished now and released."

Welles estimated that the editing of the film in a distinctive and experimental style would take approximately one year of full-time work (which was how long he had spent on the experimental, rapidly-cut editing of his previous completed film, F for Fake). A change of management at the Iranian production company in 1975 resulted in tensions between Welles and the backers. The new management saw Welles as a liability, and refused to pay him to edit the film. The company made several attempts to reduce Welles' share of the film profits from 50% to 20%, and crucially, attempted to remove his artistic control over the film's final cut. Welles made numerous attempts to seek further financial backing to pay him to complete the editing full-time, including attempting to interest a Canadian backer, but no such funding materialised, and so Welles only edited the film piecemeal in his spare time over the next decade, between other acting assignments which the heavily indebted actor-director needed to support himself.

Legal difficulties, and efforts to complete the film

By 1979, 40 minutes of the film had been edited by Welles. But in that year, the film experienced serious legal and financial complications. Welles's use of funds from the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran came back to haunt him after the Shah was overthrown. A complex, decades-long legal battle over the ownership of the film ensued, with the original negative remaining in a vault in Paris. At first, the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini had the film impounded along with all assets of the previous regime. When they deemed the negative worthless, there was extensive litigation as to the ownership of the film. By 1998, many of the legal matters had been resolved and the Showtime cable network had guaranteed "end money" to complete the film.

However, ongoing legal complications in the Welles estate and a lawsuit by Welles's daughter, Beatrice Welles, caused the project to be suspended. When Welles died in 1985 he had left many of his assets to his estranged widow Paola Mori, and after her own death in 1986 these were inherited by their daughter Beatrice Welles. However, he had also left various other assets, from his house in Los Angeles to the full ownership and artistic control of all his unfinished film projects, to his longtime companion, mistress and collaborator Oja Kodar, who co-wrote and co-starred in The Other Side of the Wind. Since 1992, Beatrice Welles has claimed in various courts that under California law, she has ownership of all of Orson Welles' completed and incomplete pictures (including those which he did not own the rights of himself in his own lifetime), and The Other Side of the Wind has been heavily affected by this litigation. The Guardian described how she "stifled an attempt by US cable company Showtime and Oja Kodar (Welles's partner in the latter part of his life) to complete The Other Side of the Wind", whilst the Daily Telegraph stated that Beatrice Welles had "blocked" the film. A clause of Welles' will, specifying that anybody who challenges any part of Kodar's inheritance will be automatically disinherited, remains unenforced.

While the original negative of the film remains in a Paris vault, two workprint versions of the raw footage were privately held - one by Welles' cinematographer the late Gary Graver, who shot the film, and one by Welles himself, who covertly smuggled a copy out of Paris after the legal difficulties started. Welles left his own workprint copy to Kodar, as part of the clause of his will giving her all his unfinished film materials.

Peter Bogdanovich, a director in his own right as well as a Welles expert and film historian, announced in 2004 that he planned to restore the film and release it soon. He cited a conversation before Welles' death in which 'Orson said to me, "If anything happens to me, you will make sure you finish it, won't you?" It was, of course, a compliment and also a terrible moment. He pressed me to give some assurance." It was rumored that Oja Kodar's nephew Sasha Welles was to edit the final release of the film. Details of the release, however, were murky at best. A common reservation was that while raw footage exists for the entire film, editing the remaining footage in Welles's style may be difficult. However, Welles himself finished editing between 40 and 50 minutes of the film and reportedly left behind extensive editing notes for the rest of the film.

A turning point came in 2006, when Mehdi Bouscheri died, resolving several of the film's legal problems. At a March 29, 2007, appearance during the 16th Florida Film Festival, Peter Bogdanovich responded to a question about the status of the film. He announced that the four parties involved (Oja Kodar, Mehdi Bouscheri's heirs, Beatrice Welles and the Showtime network) had come to an agreement earlier that week and that the film would be edited and released in the very near future.

Bogdanovich stated in an April 2, 2007, press report that a deal to complete the film was "99.9% finished," with a theatrical release planned for late 2008. However, in March, 2008, Bogdanovich said that there was over a year's worth of work left to be done.

In December, 2008, Showtime put the project back on hold due to unspecified complications. A piece in Variety in February, 2009, stated that Showtime was still willing to pay for its completion, but they wanted to be sure all the materials exist. The negative resides in a lab in Paris, but the permission from all the estates must be obtained before access to the negative can be granted. Bogdanovich commented, “It’s going to happen in the next month or so. We’re aiming for Cannes (in 2010). Everybody wants it to happen. It’s film history. It will be something for it to finally be seen after all these years.”

In January, 2010, during a public Q&A after a screening of one of his films in Columbus, OH, Bogdanovich stated that the film had been examined and was in good condition, but "Orson left such a mess with who owned what," and wondered whether editing the film would even be possible.

A report in The Guardian in January, 2011, suggested, once again, that a legal settlement was close and that a release would be possible in the near future. This report, however, was accused by Welles' partner Oja Kodar of being a hoax.

As of 2011, the situation is that all copyright difficulties have theoretically been resolved between the respective parties. However, the Showtime network which had previously pledged to provide funding for the project has refused to specify what the budget would be. Oja Kodar has stated that she does not want a repeat of the debacle over Welles' posthumously-completed Don Quixote, which was universally panned after being cheaply put together from badly decayed, incomplete footage which was sloppily edited, badly dubbed, and often incoherent. As such, she will not grant permission to proceed until she has received assurances that the project will be done professionally, and to a high standard, with an adequate budget.

Missing elements to the film

Ten hours of raw footage exist, but the film is missing the following elements:

• Welles never recorded the opening narration. Bogdanovich has speculated that he could do the narration instead, in character as Otterlake.
• There is one scene missing - Hannaford's car exploding as it crashes into the cinema screen. Since the Reseda drive-in theatre used has been demolished since filming in the 1970s, this would most likely need to be accomplished by a model shot.
• With 40-50 minutes of film edited by Welles, approximately 70-80 minutes still require editing. Welles consistently maintained that he did not like films over 2 hours long, and most of his films were just under 2 hours.
• The film currently lacks a musical score.

Critical opinion of the film

As a member of the cast, film historian Joseph McBride saw the rushes, and later saw a two-hour rough cut assembled by Gary Graver in the late 1990s to attract potential investors. McBride wrote that the film "serves as both a time capsule of a pivotal moment in film history - an "instant" piece of period nostalgia set in the early seventies - and a meditation on changing political, sexual and artistic attitudes in the United States during that period." However, he differentiated the bulk of the film - which he praised very highly - from the footage of Hannaford's film-within-a-film:

I found that while the languid visual style of the film-within-the-film interludes would give the audience ample time to recover from the frenetic pacing of the party scenes, a more serious obstacle to the film's playability is the largely undramatic nature of much of the material putatively shot by Hannaford. Little or nothing happens in these sequences except for Oja mysteriously wandering seminude around picturesque locales and Bob Random doggedly roaring his motorcycle through expressionistically lit landscapes. The footage is beautifully shot, and there is some stunning photographic magic, such as a sequence filmed among the skyscrapers of Century City with the two characters' images vanishing into ten mirrors arranged invisibly among the stone steps and glass columns of the coldly geometrical modern office buildings...However, in the rough cut assembled by Graver to show potential investors, the film-within-the-film sequences not only interrupt the narrative but also go on at such length that they lose their satirical point, becoming exasperating examples of what Welles was trying to spoof.

Film critic and historian Jonathan Rosenbaum has seen most of the film, either in rushes, or in scenes cut by Welles, and has praised "its complex and shocking reflections on machismo, homophobia, Hollywood, cinephilia, eroticism, and late-60s media, not to mention its kamikaze style", and has contrasted this with the opinion of David Thomson, who has not seen the film, and who wrote in his highly critical biography of Welles, "One day, it may be freed. I hope not. The Other Side of the Wind should stay beyond reach." John Huston described a private screening in which Orson Welles showed the unfinished film to some friends: "I didn't get to see it, but those who did tell me it is a knockout."

Screenplay

Welles declared that he had written at least four versions of the screenplay by 1972. However, the improvisational style of filming meant that none of them was followed to the letter. For instance, in the various versions of the screenplay John Dale is not present at the party, yet in the final shoot Bob Random improvised some scenes playing him at the party, leading to Dale's death.

For years, bootleg copies of various screenplay drafts offered the most detailed glimpse of the film. Despite threats of legal action from Beatrice Welles, Cahiers du Cinéma and the Locarno International Film Festival went ahead with joint publication of a screenplay in 2005, in a limited edition. The published edition is an amalgamation of two versions of the screenplay. Although the edition is in French, it includes the original English-language screenplay text, and numerous photographs from the shoot, as well as French-language essays by Kodar, Bogdanovich, Giorgio Gosetti, Bill Krohn, Paolo Mereghetti, André Labarthe, Stefan Drössler and Daniel Kothenshulte:

Bibliography

The film is covered in depth in the following books:

• Giorgio Gosetti (ed.), [Orson Welles and Oja Kodar,] The Other Side of the Wind: scénario-screenplay (Cahiers du Cinéma & Festival Interational du Film de Locarno, Switzerland, 2005) 221pp.
• John Huston, An Open Book (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1980) 448pp.
• Clinton Heylin, Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios (Cannongate, Edinburgh, 2005) 402pp.
• Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: a biography (Viking, New York, 1985) 562pp.
• Joseph McBride, Orson Welles (Da Capo Press, New York, 1972 [rev. 1996 ed.]) 245 pp.
• Joseph McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? A portrait of an independent career (University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky, 2006) 344pp.
• Andrew J Rausch (ed.), Gary Graver, Making Movies with Orson Welles: a memoir (Scarecrow Press, University of Michigan, 2008) 191pp.
• Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), Peter Bogdanovich and Orson Welles, This is Orson Welles (DaCapo Press, New York, 1992 [rev. 1998 ed.]) 550pp.

External links

• The Other Side of the Wind at the Internet Movie Database
• Wellesnet articles on the film
• Article:"Deal Near on a Lost Welles", April 2, 2007 New York Sun