Chapter 13
The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
Orson Welles, as noted extensively in the previous chapters, tended to have a hard time getting money for his films and The Other Side of the Wind is no exception. In fact, it’s the greatest example of how complicated his financing deals were. The long and short of it is that Welles had gotten a sizable investment from a French company that was headed by the Shah of Iran’s brother-in-law. This money and ownership of the negative put the film in a French vault for over 40 years, from the completion of shooting in 1975 to 2016 when it was finally turned over to Welles’ estate and finished by Peter Bogdonovitch (Welles’s protégé and an actor in the film) and producer Frank Marshall (who’s first production credit this was, or rather, would have been). The ride from the start of shooting in 1972 to just before the project to finish it went into full swing is wonderfully documented in Josh Karp’s 2015 book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, so that part of the story will be left out here, for brevity’s sake.
The result of the restoration/finishing team’s work is a fascinating one. Welles himself had cut 40 minutes to an hour before he died in 1985, leaving a workprint to cinematographer Gary Graver until his death in 2006 which he desperately took around trying to get end-money for it. Bogdonovitch and Marshall’s crew used this finished section to pattern the rest of the film on, so it is as close to Welles’s vision as they were likely to get without him, and certainly closer than the studio recuts of Ambersons, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil (including the 1998 recut).
The final product is possibly the most ‘Wellesian’ film ever made (both in the production and in the construction) and alternatively the least ‘Wellesian’ film he ever conceived of. His original goal was to make something so far outside his wheelhouse to prove that he was still a vibrant, essential filmmaker. To do this, he decided to “out Antonioni Antonioni” with a film-within-a-film that was largely beautiful imagery without a clearly defined plot. Framing this is a birthday party for the director, Jake Hannaford (played brilliantly by John Huston) and a showing of this in-progress film.
Welles uses the party as an excuse to play with different film stocks and perspectives, culling some footage from all different sources, including people making various documentaries about Hannaford and just partygoers who had cameras given to them to record the party. Welles bounces between these different angles and stocks to create multiple points of view, getting reactions to the party and Hannaford from his closest friends, the people who have worked with him for years on his films, critics, historians, and every other kind of sycophant imaginable as well as making the person shooting the film into a unique voice because it is choosing to focus on specific groups expressing specific sentiments. This method also worked to his advantage in that the same scene could be shot from multiple angles at once without regard for any other cameras in the shot and a buffer to mask long periods between shoots. If it all looks different all the way through, who’s to know if it was shot in the same day/week/month/year? This was finally the answer to the problem that had plagued him his entire independent career (which he also employed in F for Fake).
The film-within-a-film, whose title is also The Other Side of the Wind, is a kind of stream of consciousness, impressionistic work that only has a story if someone is narrating or explaining it. Hannaford’s assistant, Billy (Norman Foster) is in the position of explaining the rough assembly to a studio head, in the hopes of getting end money for the picture. What unfolds over the course of the film is a series of odd encounters between a handsome boy (John Dale, played by Robert Random) and a beautiful girl (billed as The Actress, played by Oja Kodar, Welles’ lover of many years and co-writer of the film). In this film, these two people appear to be the only people left on earth (except a scene in a crowded locker room/bathroom) or at the very least, the last two people in some barren wasteland filled with abandoned buildings.
Welles uses this dialogue-free impressionist film to indulge his inner silent film director. He presents a story that is all about masculinity, sensuality, sexuality, abandonment, betrayal and more all without having any of the speak a lick of dialogue. Sometimes you will hear Hannaford yelling direction to them, which does help serve as exposition, of a sort, for what we’ve been seeing. It’s also important to note that the film is still in production, so the sound mixing, and post-synchronization/dubbing hasn’t happened yet and since Welles often shot silent and overdubbed the lines in post, it’s safe to assume that Hannaford works in a similar fashion. Regardless of whether Hannaford would have put in dialogue or not, Welles did not and did not intend to. He wanted this portion to be left as open to interpretation as possible.
Juxtaposing that wide open concept of the film-within-the-film, the framing device at the party gives you so many sides of Hannaford that it’s impossible to know how much, if any, of what the partygoers really know of him and how much they’ve made up. There is never a point where Welles gives Hannaford the chance (or desire) to share his perspective. Hannaford is content to have people think anything about him they want, as long as it’s not the truth (a personality trait shared between Welles and Huston). He doesn’t just us a visual juxtaposition, but an aural one as well. The party portions are loud, sometimes overwhelmingly so (just like a real party) with a lot of cross-cutting sound and fragmented conversations, while Hannaford’s film is quiet apart from ambient noises like wind, footsteps and vehicles.
These opposing portions coalesce into a work that is representative of the life and mind of an artist. The party is the chaos of daily life, while the film is the peace found in the expression of art. The turmoil comes when the peace is shattered by the chaos, with non-artistic things causing the potential ruination of the idyllic, which is creating without heed of anything else.
The structure of his film is a version of how he structured Citizen Kane (which actually breaks a cardinal rule Hannaford states in response to the claim Otterlake stole everything from him: “It’s all right to borrow from each other, what we must never do is borrow from ourselves”), providing a fascinating bookend to his career. Both films deal with an attempt to understand a man after his death using nothing from that man’s own perspective. Both films are journalist’s ideas of understanding a person, simply getting the facts of their lives instead of trying to understand the person’s motivations and feelings. Welles never concerns himself with more than the public perception of Kane and Hannaford, as if it doesn’t matter who the person really was, just what they were to others. That is, after all, our legacy, isn’t it? What we leave behind are the things we’ve done and if others have shaped that narrative, who you really were to yourself and those closest becomes lost if they were ever truly discovered. Welles is making a biting social commentary with these two films, not just calling out the behavior, but showing that nothing had changed in the intervening years. Public perception still ruled as strongly in 1975 as it did in 1941. Tragically, upon its release in 2018, still nothing had changed, causing a film that had been in a vault for almost 40 years to be fresher and more culturally aware than things released in the same year.
The idea of public perception shaping a person has been a constant theme in Welles’ films, and this is his ultimate expression of it. Hannaford is so overwhelmed by his public image that he can’t live and work the way he wants to. This takes a tole on him and he turns to drinking to keep going, which ultimately kills him. The public perception of Welles ultimately killed him too, because he was ever more concerned and upset that he had the reputation of never finishing a film himself. This caused much stress on his life, which was not aided by his ever-increasing weight.
Much has been made of this film being autobiographical, most of which Welles himself refuted when discussing the film (which he did as often as he could for several years). It is true that the film is about a self-exiled Hollywood director who has difficulty getting money for his projects and studios and distributors who is making a film he feels will be his comeback, which is obviously the situation Welles found himself in while making the film. There is also a coincidental connection between Hannaford and Welles. Both died (under very different circumstances) on their 70th birthdays, meaning that Welles wrote a first draft of his death around 10 years before it happened (Hannaford dies in a car wreck, while Welles died slumped over his typewriter). Welles obviously used elements of his real life in the writing of the Hannaford character, there really aren’t any ways around it, but he used elements of his real life for Charles Foster Kane too. This isn’t new to the world of writing to say the least. It’s one of the main tenants of introductory writing classes: “Write what you know”. Welles did that and told his story to a point, but Hannaford is not much like Welles in personality at all, which would eliminate this as his autobiography, and as all works of art are inherently semi-autobiographical, we can just leave that out of this.
Welles uses this springboard of his personal life to jump forward in his craft, not just his career. Welles took daring and bold risks with The Other Side of the Wind, most notably shooting the first nudity and sex scenes in his career. His method of editing was also much different than what he’d done before, however not different than what he had wanted to do as far back as Touch of Evil, the rapid cross-cutting and non-matching reverse shots were all in his head even then, but no studio would release a film that broke so many editing, camera and sound rules. With this, he didn’t have a studio (no matter how much he thought he wanted one) so he was left to create and innovate all the way through the process. The rapid editing of some party sequences and the jaggedness of those cuts are what would become the way many music videos would later be edited, much like the sound editing technique he attempted on Touch of Evil that wasn’t discovered until Walter Murch was reading the notes and realized he was credited with inventing something Welles had envisioned in the ‘50s.
The sound is something that should be discussed as well, because it is quite unlike his usual sound design. The dialogue was captured live on set, as opposed to filming largely silently and dubbing in the vocal performances later. This is caused in part by his having died before the sound work could begin, but it all feels so carefully crafted to sound live. Welles didn’t give a script to any of the actors, he just wanted them to improvise, and the only way to capture the mood set by that atmosphere is to record live and work out issues in post, which is exactly what was done. It also works within the aesthetic of the documentary, with answers being captured by two different cameras and cutting between the shots, but the sound still matches.
That is the kind of filmmaker Welles was and the kind of skittish market that he tried to operate within. His difficulties through the ’50, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s gave a glimpse into the strangulation of the New Hollywood by the re-established Studio control in the ‘80s, limiting risk and making the directors that couldn’t adapt to the formula just had to find their own money and means of distribution.
If the release of The Other Side of the Wind teaches us anything, it’s that commerce has always held back art and many of our filmmakers are capable of so much more, but we’ll likely never get to find out. Fortunately, we do have The Other Side of the Wind and everything that goes along with it, including the joy of being able to pour over a new Welles film long after his death and the sadness that we could have had more like this if Welles had been rewarded for his genius instead of relegated to the talk show circuit for the last decade of his life. The Other Side of the Wind is dense, thought provoking, jarring, outlandish, indulgent and brilliant. As this film becomes incorporated into the greater body of Welles’ work, it is sure to become known as one of his many masterpieces.
