Restoring lost vision
Hollywood’s most famous unreleased movie has finally found a home — and 86 million potential viewers.
Netflix announced this week it has acquired the rights to The Other Side of the Wind, a film Orson Welles left unfinished at his death.
“The promise of being able to bring to the world this unfinished work of Welles with his true artistic intention intact is a point of pride for me and for Netflix,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told the Guardian newspaper.
Welles, the acclaimed director behind Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, left behind several incomplete projects when he died of a heart attack in 1985. Perhaps the most famous was The Other Side of the Wind, a film he began shooting in 1970 and mentioned in his New York Times obituary as a “major project” that “remains unfinished.”
Not only has it been the subject of several books, it has long been at the centre of legal battles among its rights holders, which included Welles’ daughter Beatrice and Mehdi Bushehri, the brother-in-law of the former shah of Iran.
Meanwhile, 1,083 reels of negatives gathered dust in a Paris warehouse, the New York Times reported in 2014.
That same year, Royal Road Entertainment announced it had reached an agreement to purchase the rights to the film, which it planned to complete and screen on May 6, 2015, the 100-year anniversary of Welles’s birth. A producing team of Frank Marshall, an original line producer on the film, Filip Jan Rymsza and Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in the film, would finish the movie using Welles’ notes.
Rymsza said the purchase was backed by a private investor, whom he did not name. That financing, as Slate reported, fell through. A campaign to crowdsource the $2 million required to finish the film raised only $406,605, and Royal Road essentially fell silent until this week’s announcement. It remains unclear what happened to that money.
Also unclear is when the film will be finished and released.
Welles reportedly worked on the movie for 15 years, hoping it would serve as his triumphant comeback in Hollywood.
Many reasons exist for it not being completed in the first place, among the most likely being Welles’ consistently shifting vision for the picture.
The film, which features Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper and Bogdanovich, is ostensibly about a director named Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston) who returns to Hollywood from Europe to work on his comeback movie (also) titled The Other Side of the Wind.
But Josh Karp’s book about the movie says Welles wrote many versions. After burning through several scripts — enough to fill a “three-volume novel” — and revising them nightly, Welles at one point in 1966 said “We’re going to shoot it without a script.”
He planned to shoot the entire enterprise in eight weeks. That soon turned into six years of filming, much of which he did before even casting an actor as Hananford, the main character.
Further complicating matters, four years into shooting “almost nobody seemed to understand the plot beyond their own role,” Karp wrote. “... every scene seemed to exist primarily in Orson’s head. And there were even days when Welles seemed confused by what he was filming and why he was filming it.”
His film seemed to mirror his own life, but Welles long insisted it wasn’t autobiographical.
Karp says one day Welles told Huston, “It’s a film about a bastard director . ... It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”