The Other Side of the Wind: The unfinished Orson Welles movie trapped in cinematic purgatory

Could this potential classic from the iconic director ever have a chance at making it to cinema screens?

(AFP/Getty)

It’s a film about an unfinished film – and it looks as if it may never be finished. The Other Side Of The Wind was made by Orson Welles in the early 1970s. The New York Times published a story in late 2014 suggesting that the film would soon be ready. In 2015, a crowdfunding campaign raised more than $400,000 (£304,000) for the project. Earlier this year, there were reports that Netflix was ready to put up $5m to fund the completion of the movie and to distribute it worldwide.

In The Other Side Of The Wind, John Huston plays Jake Hannaford, a macho, Hemingway-like movie director trying to resurrect his career. Welles claimed shooting was more or less completed by 1972 but production carried on for several years after that. Iranian co-financier Mehdi Bushehri (brother-in-law of the late Shah of Iran) argued with Welles over money and reportedly wouldn’t let the film be distributed until he was reimbursed.

The Iranian revolution complicated the picture further. At one point, author Josh Karp revealed in his book about the film, the Iranian government tried to seize control of the film’s negative. The negative was co-owned by Bushehri’s company, and by Oja Kodar, Welles’s collaborator and companion in the latter part of his life, Welles himself died in 1985. There have been several attempts to complete the film since then, none of them successful.

During the shooting of the film, Welles asked his fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who appears in the film, to finish the project in the event that anything happened to him.

When producer Filip Jan Rymsza of Royal Road Entertainment acquired Busheri’s rights to The Other Side Of The Wind and secured the support of Welles’s daughter and heir Beatrice Welles, it appeared that the decades-long logjam was finally over.

There was talk of a Cannes premiere to tie in with Welles’ centenary last year. Heavyweight Hollywood producer Frank Marshall (who had worked on the film as a young man) is part of the team trying to get The Other Side Of The Wind finished. He told the New York Times “it won’t take so long because of all of the technology today” to finish the film.

The film materials (all 1,083 reels) are in a laboratory outside Paris. The hitch is that Kodar still won’t give permission for the negative to be released. Rymsza and Marshall have been negotiating with Kodar’s representative (and nephew), Sasha Welles. Kodar hadn’t signed off – and unless she does so, the film looks destined to remain in limbo yet longer.

“Sometime in the summer of 2015, Filip (Rymsza) offered a lump sum payment to Oja of the $1.3m but, by then, I think there was a great deal of bad blood,” says Welles expert Ray Kelly, who operates the Welles website, wellesnet.com, of the negotiations.

The saga of the non-completion of The Other Side Of The Wind is entirely in keeping with Welles’s career. Few other major filmmakers have worked on so many unfinished projects – or have had such problems on the ones they did complete. The irony about The Other Side Of The Wind is that, this time round, there are no arguments about how the film should be finished. Bogdanovich is still expected to supervise the editing of the film.

“I have not heard from anyone that the delay is over artistic merits,” Kelly says. “No one is disagreeing over how it will be completed; nobody is disagreeing over the editing; no one is disagreeing over who will do what or who will be involved. From what I understand, the negotiating sticking points have been monetary and distribution.”

One of the inevitable side effects of the continual postponements of the completion of The Other Side Of The Wind is that expectations about the movie grow and grow. The longer it is delayed, the keener fans are to see it.

There is a danger than when the film finally surfaces, if it ever does, it could prove to be an almighty anti-climax. Welles fans still talk darkly of Jess Franco’s botched attempt at completing Don Quixote, another of the director’s unfinished films, in the early Nineties. “An abysmal assembly” is what Ray Kelly calls that effort.

Another factor that causes excitement as well as misgiving about The Other Side Of The Wind is that the film opens Citizen Kane-style with Welles’s voice on the soundtrack and with the death of the lead character. Hannaford is killed in a car crash. The movie itself is an attempt to “sketch a film likeness of the man” through many different viewfinders.

This is Welles working in – and commenting on – the Hollywood of the 1970s. It’s a film in which an old timer collides with “the younger people of the cinema”, the critics, hangers-on, stars and directors from the Easy Rider generation. “From what I know it was one of his best things and sooner or later it will see the light,” Bogdanovich commented when footage was shown at the Locarno Festival in 2005.

Ray Kelly agrees about the quality of The Other Side Of The Wind. “I have seen at least two hours of footage. It is a remarkable film and I think it holds up. John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich give wonderful performances.”

Forty years after Welles finished shooting, the film is as close to being completed now as it ever has been. Kodar’s nephew Sasha Welles has confirmed that his attorney is working on a new agreement with the producers. Whether Kodar will sign off on it is, of course, another matter.