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.
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