BEFORE: I'm going to get back to Owen Wilson in just a bit - it kind of feels like it's going to be his year, he's already scheduled to tie with Maya Rudolph for most appearances in 2020 - and I'm also going to get back to Zach Galifianakis in just a few days. But first, a little detour - this film and the documentary about making it have been on Netflix since 2018, and it's taken me a year and a half to link to them, because of the odd mix of people in the cast. But finally, I found a way.
Now, I've got a bit of a dilemma, because I've never had the opportunity before to watch a film AND a documentary about that film back-to-back - which should I watch first? If I watch the documentary, then I'll go into the narrative film with more information about it, but then, on the other hand, there could be fewer surprises. And wouldn't Mr. Welles want me to come into the narrative cold, with no preconceived notions about what's going to happen and what it all means? That sounds like the best plan, because if I get totally lost, I can just watch the doc the next day and ideally, all will be explained.
Peter Bogdanovich carries over from "Are You Here".
THE PLOT: A Hollywood director emerges from semi-exile with plans to complete work on an innovative motion picture.
AFTER: Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, it's not just the year of Owen Wilson, it's the year of weird movies - and this is a weird movie. Not because it's about something weird like an alien invasion (and Orson Welles might have known a thing or two about that) but because it's weirdly put together - and somehow directed from beyond the grave by Orson Welles, who died in 1985. Obviously there's a story here, and it's one I'm going to have to research in a bit, but again, I've got the documentary about this scheduled for tomorrow, so anything I don't understand tonight, I may get explained to me tomorrow. Today, I may just want to scan down the list of characters in this film, just so I understand who is who and what everyone's relationship is to the central film director, and then maybe I'll just give a few rough impressions and leave the rest for tomorrow.
I know that this was filmed over a six-year period in the 1970's - that may have a lot to do with how disjointed it all feels, and why every character needed to explain what was going on at every single moment, because the cast and crew were probably all trying to remind themselves what point they were at in the narrative. Perhaps the only film that took a longer span to film might be "Boyhood", I'm not sure. One imagines that instead of starting and stopping the production every time Orson Welles had a new idea or was able to scrape together some money for a new roll of film stock, it was probably cheaper just to keep a party constantly going at some house near Hollywood between 1970 and 1976, just in case Orson felt inspired on any particular day. And I'm betting there were probably a few parties in Hollywood that never stopped during that decade.
Speaking of parties, there's a weird mix of both old Hollywood (directors from the 1930's) and new Hollywood (familiar sitcom faces from the 1970's), many of whom appear as party guests, or playing themselves as cinephiles, reporters or documentary filmmakers. Earlier this year I was stunned to learn that Steve Guttenberg and Laurence Olivier had once been in the same film ("The Boys from Brazil"), but that seems almost normal compared to learning that Rich Little, William Katt and Cybill Shepherd all were directed by Orson Welles in the same film. And THAT guy later produced "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Back to the Future", and THAT guy later directed "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous", and THAT guy went on to become the chairman and CEO of CBS (umm, though he's not any more...). Also Paul Mazursky appears here, and a few weeks ago I found out from watching "The Last Laugh" that he used to know all these old comedians in Hollywood and hang out with them at a particular restaurant - just imagine how many people Orson Welles knew from all his years in Hollywood, and add to that all the people in the 1970's who would trip over themselves just to be in one of his movies.
There's no question he had quite a reputation after "Citizen Kane" in the 1940's and "Touch of Evil" in the late 50's, but by the 1970's I think he'd become something of a punchline, no? He hadn't really directed a feature since 1962, and I remember seeing him on TV during the 1970's, on a celebrity roast or maybe on "Hollywood Squares", poking fun at his own image. And of course there were the famous commercials he appeared in for Paul Masson wines ("We will sell no wine before its time") and there are out-takes of him arguing with commercial directors while recording voice-overs selling frozen peas and fish filets (with a "crisp, crumb coating"). So my opinion is that by the 1970's he was running on reputation alone, Hollywood had pretty much passed him by, and he was running out the clock.
Hey, it happens to everyone - thankfully Hollywood is a place where dinosaurs can still find work, appear on talk shows and keep themselves busy before (or even after) qualify for assisted living. After seeing this film, I'm going to take a stab at guessing that actress Oja Kodar was something of a muse for him later in life, either in a professional or personal way, or possibly both. (Yep, I'm right - Welles was married at the time to his third wife, Paola Mori, and lived with her in Vegas, but Welles had a second home in Hollywood with Kodar.). So that's how he kept himself busy, and possibly why he never got around to finishing "The Other Side of the Wind".
Now, let me try to break down this film a bit, which is tricky because it seems a bit tough to separate reality from fiction, since fading director Orson Welles made a film about a fictional fading director, Jake Hannaford, so the safe bet is that the Hannaford character is a stand-in for Welles himself. But if that's the case, and we've got a film about a group of people making a film, there's the film I watched, called "The Other Side of the Wind", and there's a film-within-the-film, which I think has the same exact title, you can see where things might start getting a bit confusing. (Kind of like how the 2019 film "Little Women" had one character trying to pitch her novel, which was also called "Little Women", but the story-within-the-story was written by Jo March, not Louisa May Alcott).
So there's a fictional film-within-the-film called "The Other Side of the Wind", directed by Jake Hannaford, and the film is unfinished because the male lead, Johnny Dale, walked off the set one day after a dispute with the director. The fictional story of making this film is the framing device, during which Hannaford screens a rough cut of the film for the cast, crew and various other film business people at a party (which later moves to a drive-in after the house's generators fail TWICE). And this film (the one I watched) is also called "The Other Side of the Wind", and was also unfinished for many years, but for very different reasons - there were legal, political and financial problems, which I assume I'll learn more about tomorrow, but the main problem seemed to be Orson Welles himself.
(Why stop here? Why not continue this "Inception"-like thinking even further? If Orson Welles was the creator of this reality that contained a fictional film and director inside his movie, then what if the life of Orson Welles was just a fiction created by some larger cosmic film director? Does this mean that God is the bigger Orson Welles?)
According to Wikipedia, the film-within-the-film is a spoof of European art-house cinema - there's a lot of nudity (this could be one reason why the film couldn't get released in the 1970's) and a sex scene in a Ford Mustang where the actress starts having sex with a male passenger, then finishes by also having sex with the driver, and a scene in a psychedelic nightclub where many hippies are making out in the co-ed bathrooms, and then the two leads meet at a table, where he gives her a doll he has bought for her, and she proceeds to cut the doll's hair with a pair of scissors. In the final reel, the man and woman meet again in a deserted railroad car, then have sex on a bed on a street in an empty studio street scene, after which the male actor walks off the sex, leaving the film unfinished. Sure, it's easy to say these scenes represent a "spoof" of European movies, but isn't it just as likely that Welles was aiming for something, missed the mark completely and then labeled it as a "spoof"? What's clear to me is that he was aware of the look and feel of films like, say, "Easy Rider", only he didn't really understand the culture well enough to make a similarly ground-breaking film, he could only imitate and not create.
The framing sequences, which take place in and around this movie set, then the party in the screening room at the director's house, and finally the rented drive-in, are a bit of a jumble. Some shots are in color, some are in black and white, there are several shots of the same action from different angles, and there are a lot of rapid cuts to get us from here to there. It's quite confusing as everyone pours out of the Hollywood lot, headed for the party, and it takes time for everyone to have some kind of dialogue or interaction that tells us who they are. There's a lot of unnecessary detail about HOW each person is getting to the party, who's riding in which car, and there's also a bus full of mannequins and another (presumably smaller) one for the "midgets" (remember, it was the 1970's, before P.C. language was the norm - the lead actress is often referred to as "Pocahontas). Then when we see all these people again at the party, they all need to remind us who they are and why they are there - that's probably because the scenes were filmed years apart, and everybody had to announce themselves and their reason for being, just to make sure they wouldn't be edited out of the film.
While Welles claimed that the Hannaford character was not based on himself, but perhaps was more reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway, or other similarly macho film directors like John Ford, of course there were bound to be some similarities. Peter Bogdanovich played Hannaford's protege, and Bogdanovich himself became close friends with Welles after interviewing him on the set of "Catch-22" and so he may sort of be playing a character here based on himself. (Although, a young Peter Bogdanovich in the 1970's reminded me very much of Rick Moranis in the 1980's, and now I'm thinking that if Moranis never played Bogdanovich in a skit on "SCTV", it's a damn shame. I'm thinking this must have happened at some point.). Other film directors appear here either playing themselves, or a fictionalized version of themselves, or a thinly-veiled version of one of Orson Welles' own friends, like the enigmatic retired leading lady who probably represents Marlene Dietrich.
It seems that if Orson Welles wanted to take a personal shot at someone, this is how he did it, by casting someone else to play them, or a version of them, in this film. There's an author who wrote an unflattering biography of Welles in 1970, claiming Welles was past his prime and had a "fear of completion" on new projects. Welles tweaked his name slightly and put a character based on him into this film to slam him, but if you think about it, wasn't that biographer correct? Welles never finished "The Other Side of the Wind", even though he had nine years to do so before he kicked it. In fact, a good portion of the cast died before the film was released in 2018 - one actor desperately wanted to see this, his own final acting role, but even though he lived to be 106, he died in 2002 and never got to see it.
But then, who did finish "The Other Side of the Wind"? I guess, quite literally, that's a story for another day - and that day is tomorrow.
Also starring John Huston (last seen in "Chinatown"), Oja Kodar (last seen in "F for Fake"), Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Robert Random (last seen in "This Property Is Condemed"), Lilli Palmer (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), Edmond O'Brien (last seen in "Julius Caesar"), Mercedes McCambridge (last heard in "The Exorcist"), Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart (also last seen in "F for Fake"), Gregory Sierra (last seen in "The Trouble With Spies"), Tonio Stewart, Dan Tobin (last seen in "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer"), John Carroll (last seen in "Rio Rita"), Stafford Repp, Geoffrey Land, Joseph McBride, Pat McMahon, Cathy Lucas, Alan Grossman, Robert Aiken, Gene Clark, Peter Jason (last seen in "Streets of Fire"), Larry Jackson, Cassie Yates, Benny Rubin (last seen in "The Tender Trap"), Gary Graver (also last seen in "F for Fake"), Richard Wilson (ditto), Frank Marshall, Michael Ferris, Eric Sherman, Felipe Herba, Paul Hunt, Bill Weaver, Mark Turnbull, with cameos from Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky (last seen in "Miami Rhapsody"), Dennis Hopper (last seen in "The Pick-Up Artist"), Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, George Jessel (last seen in "Reds"), Angelo Rossitto, Rich Little (last heard in "Grudge Match"), Cameron Crowe, Les Moonves, William Katt (last seen in "Super"), Cybill Shepherd (last seen in "She's Funny That Way") and the voice of Orson Welles (last seen in "The V.I.P.s")
RATING: 4 out of 10 bedsprings
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