The Other Side Of The Wind =LINK=
The story utilizes a film-within-a-film narrative which follows the last day in the life of an aging Hollywood film director (Huston) as he hosts a screening party for his unfinished latest project. The film was shot in an unconventional documentary style featuring a rapid-cutting approach between the many cameras of the story's numerous journalists and news-people with both color and black-and-white footage, 8 mm and 16 mm. It was intended among other things as a satire of both the passing of Classic Hollywood and of the avant-garde film-makers of Europe and New Hollywood in the 1970s. The unreleased results would be called "the Holy Grail of cinema".[5] It holds the record for the longest production time in history at forty-eight years.
The Other Side of the Wind
Due to the 48 years taken for the film to be completed, and the advanced age of many of the actors playing Hollywood veterans, most cast members died long before the film's 2018 release. The first two major cast members to pass away were Stafford Repp in November 1974 (before principal photography had even been completed), and Norman Foster in July 1976 (only six months after filming wrapped). Both had shot all of their scenes in the first half of 1974. Other cast members who died before the film's 2018 release included Huston, Strasberg, Palmer, O'Brien, McCambridge, Mitchell, Stewart, Selwart, Tobin, Carroll, Rubin, Mazursky, Hopper, Harrington, Chabrol, Audran, Jessel, Rossitto, Wilson, Graver, and of course Welles himself (who has a cameo as an offscreen journalist). Over the years, while the film's negative remained sealed in a Paris vault, several production members expressed frustration at their inability to see the film - Tonio Selwart, for instance, was in his late 70s when he acted in it, and considered it his "swan song" from acting. In 1992, he said that he would probably never see the film, considering both his advanced age and declining eyesight. He died in 2002, aged 106, with the film still unreleased.
Our story is about a pseudo-Hemingway, a movie director. So the central figure ... you can barely see through the hair on his chest; who was frightened by Hemingway at birth. He's a tough movie director who has killed three or four extras on every picture ... [but is] full of charm. Everybody thinks he's great. In our story he's riding around following a bullfighter, and living through him ... but he's become obsessed by this young man who has become ... his own dream of himself. He's been rejected by all his old friends. He's finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur ... a fellow who lives off other people's danger and death.[10]
The film features an exceptionally large number of film directors, besides Huston and Bogdanovich, in acting roles, including Claude Chabrol, Norman Foster, Gary Graver, Curtis Harrington, Dennis Hopper, Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky, mostly playing Hannaford's entourage of journalists and young film-makers. Other Hollywood celebrities who were friends of Welles were asked to participate, including Jack Nicholson, but either declined or were unavailable.[11]
Much of the party scene was filmed in 1974 on Stage 1 at Southwestern Studio in Carefree, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, with John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Stafford Repp, Dan Tobin, Norman Foster, Cathy Lucas, Peter Jason, and others.[17] Welles used the living room set and furniture designed for The New Dick Van Dyke Show that remained standing when the show left Southwestern Studio to return to CBS in Hollywood.
Other party scenes were shot in 1974 in a private mansion among the boulders of Carefree, not far from the studio, that was rented by Welles and used as his and other members of the company's residence during the shoot. The opposite house on the same street was used in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point.
The first of the backers Orson managed to find in Paris was a Spanish acquaintance of his from the international film community who enthusiastically agreed to kick in $350,000, a little less than half of what Orson and Oja had already invested. Shortly thereafter an equivalent sum was pledged by a French-based Iranian group headed by Mehdi B[o]ushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah ... Dominique Antoine, a Frenchwoman, made the deal with Orson on behalf of the Iranians ... Orson left France with the understanding that the Spanish partner would act as intermediary with the Iranians in Paris ...
The film's producer Dominique Antoine subsequently endorsed the above account from Barbara Leaming as being "entirely accurate".[19] A July 1986 article in American Cinematographer also corroborates this story, describing Antoine's arrival in Arizona on the set at Southwestern Studios late at night.[20] Welles himself told interviewer Tom Snyder in 1975: "I got a backer, and we shot a couple of weeks, and then that backer ran away with my money as well as his."[21] This story is further corroborated by Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote in November 1997 of the production, "another producer ran back to Europe with $250,000 of Orson's money and never was heard from again (although I recently saw the person on TV accepting an Oscar for coproducing the Best Foreign Film of the year)".[22] In 2008, film scholars Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas identified Spanish producer Andrés Vicente Gómez (who collected a Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 1994) as the alleged embezzler, and they date his withdrawal from the project to 1974.[23] Gómez first met Welles in Spain in 1972, during the making of Treasure Island, in which they were both involved. Gómez then negotiated Welles' deal with the Iranian-owned, Paris-based Les Films de l'Astrophore, the first product of which was the 1973 film F for Fake, followed by The Other Side of the Wind.[24] As well as the accusation of embezzlement, Welles also had this to say of Gómez: "My Spanish producer never paid my hotel bill for the three months that he kept me waiting in Madrid for the money for The Other Side of the Wind. So I'm scared to death to be in Madrid. I know they're going to come after me with that bill."[25]
By 1979, forty minutes of the film had been edited by Welles. But in that year, the film experienced serious legal and financial complications. Welles' use of funds from Mehdi Boushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, became troublesome after the Shah was overthrown. A complex, decades-long legal battle over the ownership of the film ensued, with the original negative remaining in a vault in Paris. At first, the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini had the film impounded along with all assets of the previous regime. When they deemed the negative worthless, there was extensive litigation as to the ownership of the film. By 1998, many of the legal matters had been resolved and the Showtime cable network had guaranteed "end money" to complete the film.
In March 2008, Bogdanovich said that there was over a year's worth of work left to be done,[40] and a month later, he filmed the opening of the Los Angeles vault where Oja Kodar had kept the workprint material cut by Welles, along with other positive film materials. However, the full original negative remained sealed in a warehouse in France. Throughout the rest of 2008, some work was done on the Los Angeles material. In June 2008, the Showtime Network set up an editing suite in Los Angeles, to begin preliminary logging in work on all of the material. Bogdanovich personally directed the work, Tim King was the Showtime Executive in charge of post-production, Sasha Welles (a nephew of Oja Kodar) worked on the production as an assistant editor, and internships were advertised for people to work on cataloguing the film materials.
The Indiegogo campaign deadline was extended in June and the goal revised to $1,000,000 after potential outside investors offered to match that amount.[57] Acknowledging that the campaign had struggled, Marshall said that his objective was to put the first 15 to 20 minutes of the film together to win over a distributor who will help finish the post-production. "They don't trust the fact that he was this genius and the guy that made Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil and The Magnificent Ambersons, and there might be this fantastic movie in there", Marshall said.[58] The campaign closed on July 5, 2015, having raised $406,405.[59] At the end of 2015, efforts to complete the film were at an impasse.[60]
In March 2017, the original negative, alongside dailies and other footage, arrived in Los Angeles, allowing the film's post-production work to resume. Later, the negatives were scanned in the offices of Technicolor in Hollywood.[64][7]
The film was included on dozens of Best Films of 2018 lists, including Sight & Sound, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, The Los Angeles Times and Vanity Fair. It received awards from the National Board of Review, National Society of Film Critics, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, San Francisco Film Critics Circle and others.[81]
Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here.
Had it been released in its own time, alongside the directors it was parodying (some of whom cameo in it), Welles's final film might have put the town's lewd, drugged-up, manspreading "auteurs" on notice. But much like his own subject, Welles was in over his head with production troubles and couldn't finish the movie while he was alive. A sequence of nasty legal battles, not to mention the overthrow of the Shah of Iran (long story), kept the film negatives locked away for more than four decades.
Those disciples are Welles's gateway into the story, which was conceived found-footage style decades before that term existed. Cameras are everywhere around Hannaford, of every variety, pushing him into corners and willing the other characters to prance around theatrically as they talk to each other. Most of the footage is being shot by a cabal of snooty "video freaks" (the film's term; no offense taken) who hound the true creatives in their midst with festival-Q&A questions like, "Is there a difference between a tracking shot and a dolly shot?" Up to you whether the film's editing style, which cuts with abandon from color to black-and-white, 16mm to super 8, crystal clear audio to fuzzy dialogue, is a mockery of these form-obsessed hangers-on or an indulgence of its own. 041b061a72