Of all the broken-down Orson Welles projects scattered through the years, The Other Side of the Wind has always been the most intriguing. First there’s the semi-autobiographical storyline, which finds a Wellesian director played by John Huston trying to revive his career with a youth-market film full of trendy sex and violence. Then there’s the troubled production history, outlandish even by Welles’s standards. The film was shot catch-as-catch-can style throughout the early ‘70s, with Welles periodically announcing that it was nearing completion. One of the film’s backers was the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, and legend has it that the completed footage was seized by the Ayatollah after the Shah was overthrown. Other rumors had the film’s negative locked away in a Paris vault while litigation over its ownership dragged on for decades.
Now it seems The Other Side of the Wind may finally see the light of a projector near you, with none other than Peter “personal friend of Orson” Bogdanovich putting the finishing touches on the film. Wellesnet (The Orson Welles Web Resource, dontcha know) recently spoke with Bogdanovich about the status of the project, the completion of which is being financed by Showtime. “I don’t want to go into details, but there were some rights we still needed, but hadn’t gotten,” says Bogdanovich. “But Showtime is still going to go forward with the project. We just have to work out of few more of the rights issues… I still haven’t seen everything, because there is so much stuff to look at. It’s the dailies and so on and it looks great.”
Bogdanovich says the work will take about a year to complete, but it sounds like there’s still quite a bit to be ironed out. For instance, that footage locked up in the Paris vault? “We’re working on that still. There’s footage in Paris that I don’t think is here, so there’s a lot of material.” And it still isn’t clear if Welles actually shot everything he needed. “I don’t think we need to shoot anything, but we still have to see all the footage, so we’re not entirely sure. But Orson said he didn’t think there was anything left that needed to be shot. We’re going to put the whole thing in the form of a documentary about the making of a film, that was a mockumentary of itself.”
So…maybe don’t get those hopes up too high. As it is, some footage from the film is available for viewing: the documentary Orson Welles: One Man Band, included on the F For Fake DVD, features a couple of edited scenes. And Wellesnet also links to some improvised material, in which a weirdly-coiffed Paul Mazursky, a Last Movie-era Dennis Hopper and the always insufferable Henry Jaglom spout off about Huston’s fictional director, Jake Hannaford. “I was supposed to think that Jake was this great director, like Orson Welles, and Jaglom was taking the line that he was a big phony,” Mazursky says, which may help you figure out what’s going on in this clip.