BEFORE: I'm scheduled to go back to work today, one of the animation studios I work for is going to re-open, and so I'll be on a part-time schedule of three days a week until the other studio re-opens. I can still claim this past week with the unemployment office, so I'll get at least one more week of benefits, after that it seems I'll have to take a bit of a pay cut and be regularly employed again. I did enjoy my little 10-week staycation, to the extent that I could, played through a couple video-games and binged on "Tiger King" and "Arrested Development" in addition to all my movies.
I certainly didn't plan things this way, but perhaps it's appropriate that my last film watched during lockdown is this one, which is about the craft of filmmaking itself - perhaps this will motivate me to get back to filmmaking myself, though I hesitate to compare myself or even my boss to Orson Welles. Still, when I have moments when I doubt my own career path, it helps to look at the big picture, why I do what I do, and also to think about other people who have gone before and encountered doubts or struggles when trying to get things done.
I come down pretty hard on directors sometimes, including Orson, but I also understand that being the chief creative force behind the making of a movie is a tough row to hoe, I gave up on that during film school and decided instead to devote my time to helping other people make their movies, thus simultaneously insuring my future employment and also taking the coward's way out, creatively speaking. If it's not my idea, and the film that gets made is bad, I'm not likely to get blamed for it, and chances are that I'll still get paid. Yep, it's the coward's life for me.
Dozens of people carry over from "The Other Side of the Wind", starting with Orson Welles - the rest are listed below. Some were interviewed here, others appear only in archive footage, but I'm tracking them all.
THE PLOT: In the final fifteen years of the life of legendary director Orson Welles, he pins his Hollywood comeback hopes on a film, "The Other Side of the Wind", itself a film about an aging film director trying to finish his last great movie.
AFTER: Some of the people who appeared in or worked on the production of "The Other Side of the Wind" are also, like me, of the belief that while Orson Welles claimed that the central character was NOT a stand-in for him, that this was an imcomplete or untrue statement. Some even noted how "weird" it all was, once they realized that Peter Bogdanovich was essentially playing himself in the film, a producer/director who had attached himself to a more famous mentor under the guise of writing a book about him, and then becoming a friend and collaborator.
And while this is not conclusive proof by any means, the character Jack Hannaford died on his 70th birthday, and years later in 1985, Orson Welles also died at the age of 70. Coincidence? Or did he know, somehow, what fate held in store for him? But if he did, then why didn't he finish his final film? Well, it turns out there were some strong forces that kept him from doing so.
However, this film only scratched the surface when it came to the production problems that occured while filming "The Other Side of the Wind" from 1970 to 1976. Those scenes in the "film-within-the-film" that looked like they were shot on abandoned studio lots were exactly that, Welles and a crew would sneak on to studio lots in a van when they weren't being used and all that footage was shot renegade-style, without permission. Forget any trespassing laws, this is a terrible idea because of the liabilities involved, if any crew member were to get injured during the production there would be no insurance covering that, so medical costs would need to be paid out-of-pocket, then there could be court cases, investigations, violations of labor laws, fines for filming without a permit, and so on.
I realize Welles was probably mad at the studio system, because he hadn't made a studio film in over a decade, but that's no reason to break the law and put all the cast and crew members at risk, is it? Yes, it's cheaper to make a film that way, as long as everything goes right - but if one thing goes wrong, and suddenly there are lawsuits and legal fees, there goes your budget.
This does break down SOME of the problems that occured during the shoot - like the fact that Rich Little was originally cast as Brooks Otterlake, and the original plan was for him to do a different voice or impression in each scene (Bogdanovich is apparently also known for doing impressions, and was first cast as a film reviewer who followed Jake Hannaford around, and happened to sound a lot like Jerry Lewis.). However, Rich Little had been told that the whole shoot would last about a week, three weeks tops, and after seven weeks of filming, he realized he missed his wife and/or was about to miss out on some scheduled appearances, so he split. Some claim that he left when there was just one day of filming left, but this is a bit unclear. Either way, all of his scenes then had to be re-shot with Peter Bogdanovich taking over the role, and his role of the reviewer was re-cast, and those scenes then required re-shoots as well. But here's where the irony kicks in, because Bogdanovich ended up playing the part that everyone assumed was modeled after him, because his friendship with Welles closely resembled the friendship between Otterlake and Hannaford.
Another problem was that they started filming before John Huston was cast in the lead as Hannaford, so there were several weeks of shooting those party scenes without the main character present. Which is something they keep up for a while, but at some point, you need the actors to appear in front of the camera - perhaps this is one of those things that turned Rich Little's one-week shoot into that seven-week shoot, I'm not sure.
Other actors and actresses were cast poorly, or for purely personal reasons on Welles' part. The casting of a young local diner waitress with zero acting ability was done because Welles felt she resembled Cybill Shepherd, who Bogdanovich had started dating when she was 19, so Welles was making some kind of statement about Shepherd's acting ability because he had some kind of axe to grind, or was jealous of her hold over Bogdanovich, or something to that effect. Welles lived in the same house in L.A. with Bogdanovich and Shepherd for a time while making this film, so perhaps it was a case of roommates getting on each other's nerves in the close quarters of a Hollywood mansion.
Eventually Bogdanovich moved on and made his own films, like "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon", while Welles appeared on a late-night talk show with Burt Reynolds, where they both made fun of Bogdanovich's film "Nickelodeon", a box-office bomb that Burt had starred in. The friendship between the filmmakers was shattered after that - Welles wrote both an apology and a non-apology to Bogdanovich and told him to treat whichever one he wanted as the truth. Classy move.
I believe that film school students tend to make movies about people struggling to come up with an idea, that's pretty basic stuff. Also I've noticed that I've seen a large number of movies centered around writers struggling to write, it's a common topic, because that's what writers know. But filmmakers late in their careers, when they don't really have an idea, can always fall back on a story about a successful filmmaker who's got an idea, but is struggling to get it made. Apparently one thing you learn as a mature director is that it's never YOUR lack of vision that's at fault, it's all the other forces at work around you, like the studio, lack of financing, actors who quit the production. (Yes, you may notice that in the film-within-the-film, Johnny Dale quits before filming was completed, and in real life, Rich Little did the exact same thing.)
Welles also was making a film in the style of "New Hollywood" with a cast made up of directors from "Old Hollywood", one that also spoofed European art films in its "film-within-the-film", but what he didn't know was that the Age of the Blockbuster would soon arrive - films like "Rocky", "Jaws" and "Star Wars" in 1976 and 1977, so he kept on doing what he planned on doing, what he knew how to do. He could adapt to the style of films like "Easy Rider", with the hippies and free love, but the film world was changing more rapidly than he realized, for six more years he acted as if the 1960's were still going on, which is a bit like the dinosaurs not noticing that the asteroid had already hit, and it might take a few years for the sun to be blocked out and the next ice age to hit. They were doomed already, they just didn't know it.
(The whole film industry went through a similar change just in the past decade, with the conversion to digital production, storage and streaming - any filmmaker still shooting on film now is either a senior citizen, a throwback or someone who just didn't get the memo. Either way, if that director didn't adapt, they're probably out of the business by now.)
I wanted to learn more about the financial troubles of the film - it seems there was an investor running off with the money. Well, it was his money, so I guess technically that's not stealing from the production, it's just taking back his investment, but it still left the production hanging. The documentary didn't really go into great detail about this, but there was a Spanish go-between who was supposed to deliver money from Iran, invested by the brother-in-law of the Shah. The Spaniard claimed that the Iranians weren't sending the money, only they were, and he was pocketing it. Another producer allegedly took off for Europe with $250,000 of Welles' money, and also didn't cover Orson's three-month hotel bill in Madrid like he was supposed to.
Then, once the film was finished, there was the question of whom the materials belonged to, because the Iranians wanted a return on their investment, even though most of the money never reached the production, and the film materials were held in a Paris vault until ownership could be established. And while the Paris courts tended to side with film creators rather than investors on this point, they failed to do so in this case, putting Welles in the position of needing to raise money all over again, from a new set of investors, just to get his film reels back from the first set of investors!
Instead we get footage of Orson Welles pimping his upcoming masterpiece at an AFI tribute to himself, which would have been awesome if he had any footage from it to show, or a definite timeline for finishing the film - so instead he told the audience how great the film was going to be, but he neglected to tell them that they'd have to wait until 2018 to see it. Reportedly there was an investment offer of finishing funds made after the AFI tribute, only Welles' producer turned it down, assuming that a larger offer would be forthcoming, only one never came.
More legal battles came after the Shah of Iran was deposed, and a new government took over. Things got even worse after Orson died, and courts had to decide which assets belonged to his wife and daughter, and which belonged to his live-in girlfriend, Oja Kodar, who wrote "The Other Side of the Wind". The documentary also fails to tell the audience who DID work towards completion of the film, after Orson's death - I had to look it up on Wikipedia, it was a coalition formed between Kodar, Bogdanovich, cinematographer Gary Graver, producer Frank Marshall, and critic Joseph McBride. They screened a work-print in the late 1980's and early 1990's for people like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Oliver Stone and Clint Eastwood, trying to find someone to finish directing the damn thing, but they all turned it down. Lucas said it was too avant-garde to be commercial, and that he wouldn't know what to do with it.
More time passed, the Iranian investors finally allowed work to proceed, and Bogdanovich took up the project once again in 2004. In 2008 he announced there was still about a year's worth of work to go, but at the same time, Beatrice Welles was trying to turn the same footage into a psuedo-documentary for Showtime. More legal troubles with six different parties all claiming they had the rights to the footage, and by the time they got everything settled in 2011, then Showtime no longer wanted to be involved. An Indiegogo campaign in 2015 to raise $2 million for for digital scanning and editing only raised $400,000, so still no progress. Finally Netflix chipped in $5 million in finishing funds, but for a two-picture deal, to stream "The Other Side of the Wind" and this companion documentary. Wow, what a long, strange trip it's been.
I really wish this doc had gotten into all of the twists and turns in the 1990's and 2000's, instead of spending so much time breaking down Orson Welles' career, like who doesn't already know about "Citizen Kane" and "Touch of Evil", geez, we're not morons! Anybody who's ever studied movies could have just skipped all this, and if this doc could have, too, there would have been more time to break down what exactly went wrong with his final film. After an hour of talking about the man and his work and his grand plan for his last film, I started to wonder if they were ever going to get around to the production problems, which would have made this an ill-advised puff piece.
Still, I enjoyed the film about the making of "The Other Side of the Wind" more than I enjoyed watching the film itself. Because the documentary has a structure, a beginning, a middle and an end, while the narrative film, eh, not so much.
Also starring Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Peter Jason, Larry Jackson, Joseph McBride, Michael Ferris, Henry Jaglom, Cybill Shepherd, Robert Random, Rich Little, Frank Marshall, Eric Sherman, Dominique Antoine, Pat McMahon, Howard Grossman, Cathy Lucas (all carrying over from "The Other Side of the Wind"), Alan Cumming (last seen in "Burlesque"), Steve Ecclesine, R. Michael Stringer, Neil Canton, Simon Callow (last seen in "Notting Hill"), George Stevens Jr., Jonathon Braun, Richard Waltzer, Glenn Jacobson, Louis Race, Josh Karp, Danny Huston (last seen in "The Constant Gardener"), Beatrice Welles, Andrés Vicente Gomez, Keith Baxter, Bob Kensinger, Freddie Gillette,
with archive footage of John Huston, Dennis Hopper, Gary Graver, Norman Foster, John Carroll, Claude Chabrol, Curtis Harrington, Paul Mazursky, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Susan Strasberg (all carrying over from "The Other Side of the Wind"), Warren Beatty (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Jack Lemmon (ditto), Michael Caine (last heard in "Dunkirk"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Sean Connery (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Joseph Cotten (last seen in "F for Fake"), Faye Dunaway (last seen in "Life Itself"), Charlton Heston (ditto), Carrie Fisher (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Alec Guinness (ditto), Mark Hamill (last heard in "Batman: The Killing Joke"), Mary Hart (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Rita Hayworth (last seen in "Pal Joey"), Peter Jennings (last seen in "Straight Outta Compton"), Janet Leigh (last seen in "Who Was That Lady?"), Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "Filmworker"), Anthony Perkins (last seen in "Catch-22"), Burt Reynolds (last seen in "The Crew"), Charlie Rose (last seen in "Top Five"), Frank Sinatra (last seen in "Quincy"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Barbra Streisand (last seen in "Yentl"), Liv Ullmann (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Shah of Iran.
RATING: 6 out of 10 fake noses
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