Welles’ epic may see light

The film that Orson Welles believed would mark his Hollywood comeback may be released after 40 years, thanks to a campaign by a film producer.

The Other Side of the Wind was Welles’ last film and one he hoped would match the acclaim of Citizen Kane, but funding problems and a tangle of legal claims meant he failed to complete it before his death in 1985.

Starring John Huston as a struggling Hollywood director, it is regarded by some as the most famous film never to be released.

Filip Jan Rymsza, an independent film producer, has obtained the blessing of Welles’ daughter, Beatrice, to complete a final edit and is seeking US$2 million (NZ$2.7m) in donations on a crowd-funding website. Rewards for donors range from email updates about the film’s progress for US$10 to Welles’ scrapbook containing clippings about Citizen Kane for US$50,000.

Rymsza said he had needed to resolve legal disputes that had been running for decades.

‘‘Obviously, it’s a thing of legend,’’ he said. ‘‘Even in 2011 as we were close to resolving all that, the French lab that stored the original camera negative went bankrupt and the materials went missing. It took us years to recover them. When we did, I sat there thinking: ‘Is there another way? Hasn’t this film suffered enough?’

‘‘It’s like a lost Picasso rolled up in a closet somewhere. Let’s give it the frame that it deserves so that Orson’s final film can be seen and admired in the way that he intended.’’

The film, which tells the story of a director struggling to obtain funding to complete a film also entitled The Other Side of the Wind, began as art imitating life but ended up as life imitating art.

Josh Karp, author of Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of the Other Side of the Wind, writes in Vanity Fair that filming was chaotic, and Welles repeatedly fired and rehired his producer.

By 1975, he had the footage but could not raise enough funds to complete the film.