Netflix is the surprising home to a startlingly good doco on the last years of Orson Welles
Orson Welles was a giant of film and theatre the likes of which we might never see again. Welles was born in 1915, into an affluent family that promptly imploded.
Welles’ father had made a fortune as the inventor of a bicycle lamp, although he did his damndest to drink every cent of it. Welles’ mother – a musician – died when he was only nine. Father and son went travelling for years, but Orson was orphaned at 15.
The young man went to Europe, appeared in plays in Ireland, returned to the US and was a respected working actor in his late teens. By 20, he was directing theatre in New York. His first production was an all-Black cast Macbeth, with the setting shifted from Scotland to Haiti. It was a critical and popular smash hit.
But film is what Welles remains best known for – and especially Citizen Kane. Routinely and meaninglessly called ‘‘The Greatest Film of All Time’’, Kane nevertheless put Welles in the centre of the Hollywood map.
And from there, Welles’ story becomes one of unbelievable
levels of studio interference, financial disasters rediscovered as triumphs, years, or decades later – and Welles’ relentless drive to find a way to make a film without a studio, to make enough to finance his own films, or to secure a backer who allowed him complete creative control – despite his only-partly-deserved reputation for going over budget and over time.
It all came together at the end of Welles’ life.
His last film was to be The Other Side Of The Wind, a satirical mockumentary about the last day in the life of a film-maker. Welles shot it over six years, from 1970 to 1976, as financiers and friends came and went. When Welles died in 1985, The Other Side Of The Wind was abandoned and unfinished.
And so it would remain for 30 years, until 2014, when the rights to the footage were finally obtained by producer Frank Marshall and director Peter Bogdanovich, who oversaw an edit that would be released – to huge acclaim – in 2018. From roll to release, the production had taken 48 years. A record that Welles will probably always hold. I think he would have laughed at that too.
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is a startlingly good and funny documentary on all of this – and much more. While The Other Side Of The Wind is also available to view. Both, almost unbelievably, are on Netflix.