Orson Welles died in the early hours of October 10, 1985, at his modest home in the Hollywood hills. The maverick director had been sitting at his typewriter preparing a production of Julius Caesar. It was typical of Welles's inventive spirit that he had decided to perform all the roles himself. But fate intervened, and he suffered a fatal heart attack.
When he died he left behind a plethora of unrealised ideas and scripts, including 300 cans of celluloid, amounting to a handful of uncompleted movies. And in the past 20 years, one of those films has become a source of fevered speculation: is it the best movie never released?
The negatives of The Other Side of the Wind have been under lock and key since 1976, embroiled in a byzantine legal wrangle that began long before Welles's death. The problem started as a question, as it often does in the film industry: who owns the rights to the movie? Welles's idiosyncratic methods of filming and financing obscured the matter, and his death confused things further. Parties at war over the rights to the film include the statuesque and darkly exotic Croatian actress Oja Kodar, his companion in the last 20 years of his life; his daughter Beatrice, from his third marriage, to an Italian aristocrat; and the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. For the best part of three decades, the prints of Welles's unseen masterpiece have been sitting in a Paris bank vault gathering dust. Now, however, there are strong signals that the film may be released.
After years of frustration, the actor and film director Peter Bogdanovich says that an agreement has nearly been reached between the squabbling factions. "These negotiations have been going on for five years now," he told me from his Manhattan home, "but they are nearing a resolution." A large cable company has put up the $3.5m needed to finish the editing and put the film onto the big screen. It is a personal triumph for Bogdanovich. Though possibly better known today as Dr Elliot Kupferberg of The Sopranos, he has just published Who the Hell's in It? (Faber and Faber), his memoir of a lifetime in Hollywood. He was one of Welles's closest friends and collaborators, and was given a starring role in The Other Side of the Wind.
Welles made Bogdanovich promise to finish the film should anything happen to him. Bogdanovich has spent the intervening years trying to do just that. At least three titans of Tinseltown, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and George Lucas, have rejected the option to finish it. It is reasonable to wonder: is it really a masterpiece? Or just the last, failed hurrah of a bloated, unfocused, overindulged ego?
The movie is a three-hour essay on the process of film-making, with all the strutting machismo that often accompanies it. A film within a film, it focuses on the last 24 hours in the life of a movie director, Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston), who dies on the night of his 70th-birthday party. Hannaford is an insufferable braggart who swaggers about, sycophants in his wake. Bogdanovich plays Brooks Otterlake, a one-time protégé of Hannaford, who has become more commercially successful than his old master.
In my interview with Bogdanovich, he let slip that the film starts with the ghostly voice of Hannaford explaining that he died in a car crash that night. The audience is about to see his last hours re-created through the eyes of his entourage, who had been filming his party, along with TV news footage, and sound recordings made by journalists of the event. The movie becomes a frantic collage. Viewers watch his life approach its tawdry end as fragments of his unfinished film — an arty thriller also called The Other Side of the Wind — flicker onto the screen. "It's an extraordinarily complicated exercise in film-making," says Bogdanovich.
The film contains explicit sex scenes featuring Oja Kodar. One in particular is "remarkably erotic", Bogdanovich says. "Oja is making love in a car, and a crowd of onlookers are standing outside in the pouring rain." The car shakes frantically as the lovers grapple with one another. The film, too, is about to reach its climax. It is, he says, "very, very sexual" — not familiar territory for Welles.
It was Kodar who inspired the highly charged content. "Orson called me his erotic adviser!" she laughs from her home in Zagreb. "I'm very proud of that scene. It is very erotic. Orson was a little embarrassed by the whole thing." Kodar appears nude in one pretentiously arty sequence. The movie ends with the sun rising over Hollywood.
As the sun finally set on Welles's life, his reputation lay in as much disrepair as the film he failed to finish. Many critics still insist his 1941 film Citizen Kane was his only real achievement. After that, he acquired a reputation as a profligate director who could never finish his movies on time. He made his last film with a big studio in 1958. But Welles's defenders believe The Other Side of the Wind will challenge his critics and secure his position in the Hollywood pantheon. "There is no doubt it is the work of a genius," says Stefan Droessler of the Munich Film Museum. "It is a very daring film. It is beyond doubt one of the outstanding specimens of Welles's incredibly innovative oeuvre." The New York writer Kent Jones agrees. "You're not looking at a fallen genius but a creator at least 20 years ahead of his time."
It was Kodar who came up with the title. She was with Welles, scouting for locations in Rome one day, when a gust of wind blew his cape and floppy hat up into wild flurries about him. "He suddenly turned into this gigantic, menacing bat," she says, "and many people thought that is what he was like. But he was a gentle and kind man, and I thought, ÔI wish people could see the other side of Orson Welles.' " She began working on a script called The Other Side of the Wind, which ventured to explore this contrast between the public perception and the private truth.
Welles worked on his own script. It owed its inspiration to his years in Europe, where he spent much of the 1960s, shunned by Hollywood. He settled in Madrid, finding that Spain's traditional society suited his temperament. He became intrigued by that other Midwestern icon who had adopted Spain as his spiritual home, Ernest Hemingway. Welles shared the writer's passion for bullfighting and was wryly amused by his entourage of young flunkies. He conceived the idea of a film about the relationship between a veteran bullfighter basking in past glories and a brilliant young matador who is a protégé, friend and rival. He was intrigued by the macho mythology in which a matador needs to shroud himself — not unlike that of a film director.
The critical triumph of his 1966 epic Chimes at Midnight encouraged him to try to get the bullfighting film made. Potential investors were summoned to Madrid, where he made an eloquent pitch in his velvet baritone. The idea now centred on a Hemingwayesque movie director obsessed by a brilliant young bullfighter whose life he is documenting. But the director is living his life through the matador, suffering from what Welles called emotional parasitism. "It has to do with the mystique of the he-man. This whole picture is against he-men." The central figure is exposed as a fake who gets a thrill out of the dangers and deaths of others. It would be a dark movie about dying, decadence and ruin. It would also be a radical exercise in film-making, shot on a low budget in a quick-fire documentary style.
