There was a script, said Welles, but he wasn't going to show it to any of the actors. When it came to their scene he would tell them their lines and what was supposed to happen. It would be up to them to interpret their roles. He wanted lots of improvisation. "Have you done that kind of thing before?" asked a voice from the audience. "Nobody's ever done it," responded Welles. "Aren't you concerned that the end result won't have any control or any form?" asked another. Welles said he was not. He didn't raise a peseta.
At around this time, Welles, unusually, was finding some sort of equilibrium in his private life. For decades he had been famed as a misogynist, treating all three of his wives with casual disregard. The first, a Chicago socialite, accused him of mental cruelty. He cheated on his second, the screen siren Rita Hayworth, blatantly pursuing affairs with Marlene Dietrich and the Mexican beauty Dolores Del Rio. He did the same with No 3, the elegant Italian Paola Mori, Countess of Girfalco. And it was no secret that women always played minor parts in his movies.
Throughout the 1960s, however, Welles was having an on-off affair with a woman he would begin to idolise. He was approaching 50; she was in her twenties. An actress, writer and sculptor, Olga Palinkas was very funny and very smart. For once, the boot was on the other foot. They were travelling with a Croatian friend in France one day when Welles said that Palinkas was like a "gift from God" to him. Palinkas translated for her friend, and it emerged as two words that made "Kodar". "Orson said, ÔThat sounds nice — and K is a good letter to begin a name with,'" Kodar recalls. "I don't know if he was thinking of Citizen Kane." So Palinkas became Kodar. As the 1960s swung into the 70s, Welles continued his romance with Kodar and the loveless marriage with Paola. He returned to California, settling with Kodar in Hollywood.
Welles had long known of an up-and-coming director called Peter Bogdanovich, and in 1968 he invited him to drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They got on well and talked of collaborating. Bogdanovich used his connections to get the older man appearances on chat shows, which Welles used to relaunch his career as a parody of himself.
About that time, another admiring young man wrote to Welles. Gary Graver was a Vietnam veteran who had had some success as a cameraman and director on exploitation B-movies. Welles was impressed by the quality of his work, produced on a shoestring. After an initial meeting, he suggested they did some filming the next day. Graver turned up with his camera but without his tripod. "Not to worry," Welles said. "We'll try tomorrow." The following day he forgot his zoom lens. "It was kind of comical," says Kodar, "and Orson was unusually patient. But Gary's a very likable guy and soon all three of us were inseparable."
Sometime afterwards, Bogdanovich was preparing to fly to Texas to make The Last Picture Show. He received a call from Welles, who said he was making his own movie, and would Bogdanovich do a bit of filming the next day?
Bogdanovich, for whom working for Welles was like "breathing pure oxygen all day", was more than willing to help. But, he lamented, he was flying out of town the next day. "All right," replied Welles. "Meet me at noon — where the planes fly over. I'll shoot you there for an hour and let you go." So the following day, Bogdanovich found himself at Los Angeles airport meeting a ragtag crew and Orson Welles. The movie was The Other Side of the Wind, a fusion of Welles's own idea and Kodar's, which the couple were paying for out of their own pockets. "My role was to be a film journalist and I was to ask Hannaford pretentious questions like, ÔDo you think the cinema is a phallus?'" Bogdanovich is a gifted mimic, and Welles asked him if he could use a Jerry Lewis accent. "He was amused by that."
Filming and editing continued, on and off, for five years, whenever Welles could pay for it. Characters came and went; the story line often changed. Welles anguished over the central character of Jake Hannaford. "Goddamit," he told Bogdanovich, "this is such a good role, I should have it." But he knew he did not have the rugged earthiness it called for. It was two years before he finally cast John Huston. His old friend thought it "an ingenious idea" but asked what the story was about. "It's about a bastard director who's full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It's about us, John. It's a film about us."
By then, thanks to one of his more bizarre assignments, Welles had mustered enough funds to do some location shooting. In 1972 he made a documentary about the Shah of Iran, which brought him into contact with Mehdi Bouscheri, the husband of the Shah's sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi. Impressed by Welles, Bouscheri, a principal in the Paris-based production company Les Films de l'Astrophore, agreed to invest $1m-plus in The Other Side of the Wind. Welles and his crew set off for a dusty backdrop called Carefree in the Arizona desert. He hired a ramshackle house, and two Beverly Hills chefs served gourmet meals. At the house there was a party atmosphere, while the set was in perpetual disorder. Huston found Welles, in flowing robes, demanding imperiously to be obeyed. "Why must I be questioned in this manner?" he would demand of some underling. Huston was amazed to find that he had no script, but soldiered on manfully.
Chaos turned to crisis when Welles decided the actor he had chosen to play Brooks Otterlake, the young protégé-cum-rival, was not quite right. That evening he called LA to discuss the problem with Bogdanovich, by then a hot new talent, The Last Picture Show having been hailed as the most important film since Citizen Kane. "Why don't I do it?" he asked. "My God!" said Welles. "Why didn't I think of that?" Bogdanovich was soon in Carefree. The role of the pretentious journalist went to someone else.
The lure of being part of a Welles project attracted a collection of young talent — the firebrand Dennis Hopper, the directors Paul Mazursky and Henry Jaglom, and Cameron Crowe, then a journalist struggling to become an actor, who played a journalist struggling to become an
actor. Apart from the food and wine, it was all done on a shoestring, though Kodar had the best costumes, the best make-up — and the most provocative scenes.
The coffers rapidly emptied. The chefs were sent home and the crew were reduced to eating at the local burger bar, even downing tools one day at 3pm because they had not eaten since breakfast. On another occasion, Welles said to Bogdanovich: "If anything should ever happen to me, I want you to promise that you will finish this film." Bogdanovich was taken aback. "Nothing is going to happen to you," he said. Welles replied: "I know. But if it does."
