ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELLES
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND I Orson Welles’ satirical swan song arrives… finally.
Better late than never, as they say. Some 48 years since it started shooting, Orson Welles’ final film, The Other Side Of The Wind, is with us. After a six-year on-off shoot, the director of Citizen Kane struggled in the edit suite for almost a decade until his death in 1985. “He was always looking for money to not only complete the shooting but complete the post-production,” says Frank Marshall, who teamed up with Netflix to finish what Welles started.
Long before Marshall was the producer of Jason Bourne, Jurassic World and dozens of other blockbusters, he was an enthusiastic 25-year-old, roped into working on what would ultimately prove Welles’ swan song. “Every day was exhilarating,” he remembers. Hardly surprising when the likes of Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol and Peter Bogdanovich were regularly glimpsed on the set of this peek into New Hollywood.
Starring legendary director John Huston as filmmaker Jake Hannaford, it’s a surgical look at the movie industry from a man who frequently battled the studios to get his vision on screen. “It’s a very dark, dark film,” says fellow producer Filip Jan Rymsza. “A lot of the pain that the industry caused
Orson… this was probably therapeutic for him to get a lot of that venom out.”
When it came to completing Welles’ vision, there were more than 100 hours of footage, a 350-page annotated script and countless Welles memos to sift through. One two-minute bathroom scene of Oja Kodar, for example, had more than nine-and-a-half hours of material to work from. “It was a bit of an expedition,” Rymsza says, putting it mildly. But now it’s done, what would Welles think? Marshall laughs. “I think he would’ve said: ‘Why did it take so long?’”