A lost piece of Hollywood history is reportedly hitting the big screen next year, in time for the centenary of the birth of its infamous director Orson Welles. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND has a story behind it as compelling as any movie – the production was disrupted by embezzlement and Welles fell out with investor Mehdi Bushehri, who seized the negatives. The auteur then managed to smuggle out an incomplete version which he worked on until his death in 1985, nine years after the original shoot that in itself was legendarily long (1970 – 76). Then there was the story itself, inspired by Welles’ drunken and ferocious encounter with author Ernest Hemingway. That became the starting point for the tale of Jake Hannaford, a beleaguered director trying to complete his celluloid masterpiece against the backdrop of 1970s Tinseltown.
The film was also notable for the casting of various maverick directors in acting roles. John Huston played Hannaford and Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol and Peter Bogdanovich all featured. Bogdanovich, a personal friend of Welles, was key to getting the project extricated from the tangled web of rights holders and now he and fellow petitioner Frank Marshall (who was a line producer on TOSOTW) are labouring to finish the editing process as close to Welles’ original intentions as possible. Marshall commented:
It’s hard to say why it’s coming together now except that everybody realizes that the longer we wait the less people will be around to know Orson’s wishes. Everybody recognizes that it’s the last chance… We have notes from Orson Welles… We have scenes that weren’t quite finished, and we need to add music. We will get it done. The good news is that it won’t take so long because of all of the technology today.
Royal Road Entertainment are buying the rights and aim to finally bring this complex chapter to a conclusion with a release next May. While a note of caution should always be sounded during an enterprise like this, a proper airing for this labour of love should form a decent last hurrah for a controversial figure who changed the landscape of American cinema via CITIZEN KANE before falling prey to the shark-infested industry that made his name.
Sources: Variety, New York Times
