“This is a picture about the love of death.”
-Orson Welles in Spain trying to raise money for The Other Side of The Wind
“This is a movie that everybody in this room, myself included, has been waiting decades to see.”
With these words Kent Jones welcomed the 55th N.Y.F.F. audience to the first New York screening of a 35mm print of Orson Welles’ last movie, The Other Side of The Wind. Welles had begun production on the film in 1970 when he returned from exile in Europe at the age of 55. It was intended as a comeback, but Welles couldn’t get funding to finish it.
When the American Film Institute gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1975, Welles used it as a platform to promote the movie and to ask for funding.
He received none.
In an interview, Dick Cavett noted that Citizen Kane had been consistently voted the greatest film of all time for several decades running and asked if Welles thought that Kane was indeed the best film ever. Welles replied that it was not, but his next film, The Other Side of The Wind, certainly would be. This was a thinly veiled effort to steer public attention toward the project.
It didn’t work.
Filming wrapped in 1976, and then a tangle of financial and legal disputes involving the Shah of Iran, among others, prevented Welles from finishing it. The French production company Film d’Astrophore tried to take final cut and ownership of the film away from Welles, but he fought back, eventually leaving his stake in the movie to his lover and the film’s co-writer Oja Kodar in the hopes that she would be able to finish it.
She could not.
Before his death, Welles made his close friend and most devoted protegee, Peter Bogdanovich, who stars alongside John Huston in the film, promise that he would finish The Other Side of The Wind if Welles died before doing so himself. Bogdanovich was one of the best and most commercially successful directors in the world at the time, and Welles must have felt certain that his star pupil’s influence would guarantee the film be finished.
It did not.
George Orson Welles died in 1985 and The Other Side of The Wind remained unfinished.
Around 2008, Frank Marshall (The Bourne Identity, Jurassic Park), who had worked for Welles on The Other Side of The Wind, joined forces with Filip Jan Rymsza, a Polish filmmaker who first heard about the movie in a Vanity Fair article. Rymsza spent four years compiling a three-hundred-page document cataloguing every transference of the movie’s fragmented ownership so a French judge could rule who Marshall and Rymsza would have to buy the movie from in order to complete it.
The original negative was finally recovered by Marshall and Rymsza from a vault in Paris, and the two partnered with Peter Bogdanovich to find investors to complete the post-production process Welles had started decades ago.
They failed.
In desperation, the team of three successful filmmakers launched an Indiegogo campaign to crowdsource the funding to finish the movie.
This was back in 2014, a week after I had finished reading Bogdanovich’s book, This is Orson Welles, which is still considered the definitive text on Welles, and the closest thing to an autobiography of his life that exists. Bogdanovich begins the book with a quote by Oscar Wilde. “The public is wonderfully tolerant, it forgives everything except genius.”
The campaign was supported by filmmakers like Wes Anderson, J.J. Abrams, Sofia Coppola, Noah Baumbach, and Edgar Wright. I contributed $800 in full confidence that these legendary producers could raise the rest of the money.
They could not.
The Indiegogo campaign failed. I sent email after email but news was vague and rare.
In 2017, I attended a screening of one of Bogdanovich’s best films, They All Laughed at the Metrograph theater in New York. During the Q&A afterwards, I asked Peter what had become of The Other Side of The Wind.
He said that he was glad I asked, because after, “over fifty years of hopeless begging,” yesterday Netflix had agreed to fund and distribute the movie and he was flying to Los Angeles tomorrow to begin post-production.
A year later, on September 29th, 2018, I walked into the Alice Tully theater in New York and sat down in the last row to watch the premiere screening of a 35mm print of Orson Welles’ last movie.
Martin Scorsese was in the audience too. He’s one of Welles’ most devoted disciples. Scorsese recalls watching Kane as a child and, for the first time, becoming aware of a director’s vision guiding the images he saw.
Francis Ford Coppola once invoked Welles during a fight over how to shoot a particularly important assassination scene in The Godfather. Coppola wanted an overhead shot and the director of photographer asked, “Whose point of view is that?” Coppola yelled back, “It’s my point of view! It’s God’s point of view! It’s Orson Welles’ point of view!”
Steven Spielberg’s most prized possession is a sled from Kane.
It’s impossible to comprehend just how far reaching Welles’ influence on the moving image really is.
Many of the theories of aesthetic criteria used to evaluate movies are simply different ways of comparing them to Citizen Kane.
As I took my seat, I felt nervous under the weight of this history.
What if Wind wasn’t a work of genius? What if Orson’s most ambitious artistic experiment failed? What if I’d spent $800 on a flop?
The question of divine omnipotence had to be answered.
Could Orson Welles, deprived of the aid of a studio, and with only a micro-budget and volunteer student crew, shoot a movie, that through sheer cinematic technique and creative vision, would constitute a great work of art?
The lights went down.
The Other Side of the Wind is a montage of metatextual “found footage” more than a traditional narrative film. It is a fictious documentary of the filming of a film within a film. It uses a variety of film stocks (35mm, 16mm, Super 8mm), aspect ratios, and both color and black and white. The soundtrack is a muddle of murmurs and musics. There are almost no establishing shots, the average shot duration is a couple of seconds, and it seems as though Welles intentionally cut as many times as possible.
Although a few avant garde filmmakers had experimented with some of the formal elements Welles employed, and the idea of a film within a film was not new, the combination of style and substance Welles marshalled for The Other Side of The Wind was something that had never been tried on such an ambitious scale before.
The story is that of legendary film director, J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (John Huston) trying to raise money to finish his last movie (also titled The Other Side of The Wind) at his 70th birthday party on what turns out to be the last day of his life.
Hannaford fails to raise the money and dies in a car crash without finishing the movie.
In the discussion afterwards, Scorsese called it distressing. Especially because of how obviously the film was about Welles’ lifelong struggle to make movies and all the pain it caused him. There are many stories of Welles seeing his ruined masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons and crying. Ambersons is the film Welles made at RKO immediately after Citizen Kane which the studio recut without his permission and which now only survives in part. His original 132-minute version was likely the greatest film ever made, but it has been destroyed forever leaving Kane as the best film.
The Wind is littered with Welles’ loaded aphorisms. “I think it’s relatively easy to make a good movie. Not a great movie — that’s something else,” “No machine ever produces as much as it consumes,” and “It’s alright to borrow from each other, what we must never do is borrow from ourselves.”
Orson’s other films are known for their extended takes and deep focus. Touch of Evil, for example, has a twelve-minute opening shot that was unprecedented in the history of narrative film at the time. However, Wind is so visually and aurally obliterated by its director that it feels like a pile of broken glass.
Welles’ final film does not serve to extend the thesis he created in Kane and perfected in Ambersons, but exists as an antithesis of it.
Without going into detail, one reason Kane is considered the best movie ever, and there are several, is that it represented a theoretically ideal movie from the perspectives of the three largest schools of film theory at the time. Namely, Imagist, Expressionist, and Realist Theories. Each school had its own adherents and dogma. These theories were considered incompatible with each other, until Welles made Citizen Kane as an antithesis which synthesized them all into a completely new united theory of film.
A miracle.
With The Other Side of The Wind, Welles chose the largest and strongest possible thesis against which to launch his final antithetical assault, himself, and in so doing he succeeded in at once destroying and remaking himself in a grander way than otherwise possible. Thereby, offering one of the most titanic dialectical achievements ever attempted in art.
So, the answer to the question about the limits of his cinematic powers is that we haven’t found them yet.
Welles once said, “I would like to do something which would leave at least the art form concerned, or the profession, better for my having done it. To use this medium for something except entertaining.” And somewhere between Citizen Kane and The Other Side of The Wind he has certainly done that.
Of course, most of this is of little to no interest to the average Netflix subscriber who is looking for a piece of light entertainment to occupy the background of their evening, and for that reason, I do not generally recommend that anyone watch this movie.
This, like all Orson Welles movies, is only important to see if you love movies. And even though most people would say that they do, the tragic life of Orson Welles, and the fate of his movies, are proof that very few people actually do.
But if by chance you have ever seen a movie and felt less alone, somehow more alive or more connected to your fellow man, then maybe you should see this movie.
Not because you will like it.
But because Orson Welles never got to see it.
And now you can.
Which is sort of a miracle really.
The last trick by the greatest magician of all time.
To hear Bogdanovich tell it, you would think it was a kind of resurrection.
During the discussion after the screening, Bogdanovich, said, “It’s sad to me. It’s a very sad story, it’s a sad movie, it’s an ‘end of everything’ kind of movie. The only thing that survives is the artistry. And that’s what Orson did even in Citizen Kane, which is about as negative a movie as you can imagine. Nobody gets what they want, it all ends in tragedy…All of Orson’s movies are all so tragic and sad, but in the end the artistry itself is the only thing that survives. Art is the only thing that saves you. So, Orson is still alive.”
At one point in Wind, Hannaford is compared to Prospero, the protagonist of Shakespeare’s last tragedy, a powerful sorcerer who could control gods, change the weather, and even raise the dead, saying “Graves at my command have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth, by my so potent Art.”
Hannaford’s screenwriter says, “I’d call him a necromancer, but I do not know if he has raised the dead.”
One of the cloying cineastes in Wind says that the movies are, “Dream projections of Hannaford himself…He made ‘em real. He gave ‘em existence. He molded ‘em out of clay. He conceived of them. Like a god.”
In fact, Hannaford is repeatedly compared to God. There is talk of “The Gospel According to Jake” and references to Jake as “God the Father.” Hannaford himself even says that if it were not for the difference in sex between himself and God, “how could you tell us apart?”
You may not believe in such things, but I have seen The Other Side of The Wind.
And who but God can work such a miracle as that?
Orson Welles said, “this is a picture about the love of death,” and The Other Side of The Wind finally amounts to one of our most profound examinations of the human fascination with deicide.
At 26 years old, a boy genius who had never set foot on a movie set directed the best film anyone had ever made. His next picture was even better.
So, we destroyed it.
And then killed him.
And that is what this movie is really about.
Killing God.
We killed Orson Welles for the same reason Lucifer rebelled.
For the same reason Ahab clutched his harpoon.
Bogdanovich playing director Brooks Otterlake in Wind says, “The man [Hannaford] is infested with disciples, but I am the apostle.” But no number of apostles could save Jake Hannaford, or Jesus, or Orson Welles.
Welles’ camera catches the red letters of a drive-in theater’s marquee that reads “I DRINK YOUR BLOOD. I EAT YOUR SKIN.”
As if all of this was meta-textual enough, Netflix is also releasing a documentary about the making of The Other Side of The Wind called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, the title of which comes from a remark Orson once made to Bogdanovich.
Because of course, once men have killed God, then they are finally ready to resurrect and worship him.
Once they had destroyed Ambersons, they were quick to praise Kane.
At the Oscars this year, they’ll dig Welles up and parade him around and profess what good disciples they’ve always been.
The sycophantic fucks.
But no matter that now.
The artistry will survive.
These are the final words from Orson Welles’ script for The Other Side of The Wind as reported by Peter Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles.
They appear, in part, in the film released by Netflix.
Recut, one last time, without his permission.
JAKE: (His face is pale. His eyes glazed with liquor. He’s not drunk but he’s been drinking heavily.) The Medusa’s eye. Know what I mean? Whatever I look upon finally dies under my gaze. The Medusa’s eye. Yeah. Somebody once told me about that. Maybe it’s true. The eye behind the camera. Maybe it’s an evil eye at that. There were some Berbers once up in the Atlas Mountains that wouldn’t let me even point a camera at them. They think it dries up something in the soul. Who knows? Maybe it can. Aim too long at something. Stare too hard. Drain out the virtue. Suck out the living juices. The girls and boys, even the places. I’ve shot ‘em all. Shot ‘em dead.
The final shot is that of a drive-in screen playing Hannaford’s unfinished movie. The camera pulls back to reveal there is no audience watching.
Huston snaps off the last line.
Shoot ‘em dead.
Hannaford dies.
Welles dies.
And the eye of God closes for the last time.
The Other Side of The Wind and They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead are now available for streaming on Netflix.
If you look closely under the “Special Thanks” section at the very end of the credits for The Other Side of The Wind you will find there listed the name of one John Matthew Gillen.
Another unworthy disciple.
Who wasted $800.
Our revels now are ended: These our actors—,
As I foretold you—, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind: we are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.— Prospero, The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1, Shakespeare’s Farewell
- The Murder of God: Orson Welles and The Other Side of The Wind - November 27, 2018
- American Ugly: A Dramatic Comedy of Dark Secrets - September 21, 2018
- Pepto-Bismol and Whiskey: The Allusive Imagery of Paul Schrader’s ‘First Reformed’ - June 14, 2018
