Inside Orson Welles’ final movie, ‘The Other Side of the Wind,’ on Netflix

(L-R) John Huston, Orson
Welles, and Peter Bogdanovich on the set of “The Other Side of
the Wind.”
Netflix

• Orson Welles’ final movie, “The Other Side of the Wind,” will
  be available on Netflix on Friday.
• It marks a huge cinematic moment, as the movie was considered
  lost forever due to Welles never finishing the movie before his
  death and its legal woes.
• Some of the main people involved with picking up where Welles
  left off spoke to Business Insider about the decades-long process
  to get the movie to audiences.

42 years after Orson Welles was finally finished with his movie,
“The Other Side of the Wind” (which took him 6 years to complete
principal photography on), Netflix will release it on its
streaming service Friday. 

For movie lovers, it’s the ultimate “lost movie,” a work that the
iconic director toiled over until his death on October 5, 1985,
but never completed. For Welles fans, it’s a glimpse into the
evolution of their maestro. He will always be known for making
“Citizen Kane,” which many still regard as the greatest movie
ever made, yet with this movie he proved he could make something
as edgy and forward-thinking as the up-and-comers of the era like
Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin.

But for those who have spent years (and in some cases decades)
trying to get Welles’ final film to the public, this weekend
marks the time they can finally take a giant exhale. 

“I’m thrilled to be done,” producer Frank Marshall (behind the
Indiana Jones and “Jurassic Park” franchises) told Business
Insider with a laugh. He was also a production manager on “The
Other Side of the Wind” when he was 25.

“It was a long and tortured road, at times,” producer Filip Jan
Rymsza said looking back. He worked the last nine and a half
years trying to settle the copyright issues surrounding the
movie.

In many ways, the story of how “The Other Side of the Wind”
finally made it to audiences is as epic as Welles’ ambitions for
the movie itself.

6 years of ‘the poor man’s process’

In 1970, Welles was back in Los Angeles after living in
self-exile in Europe for more than a decade. Sensing the
independent film wave that was building in America following the
success of Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” Welles was ready for a
comeback, and the project that would bring the auteur back into
the zeitgeist would be the strangely titled “The Other Side of
the Wind.”

It’s a tale that feels as if Welles bottled everything that
happened to him in the latter half of his life and spilled it
into a script — though he always claimed the movie wasn’t
autobiographical. 

You can be the judge. 

The movie follows the final day in the life of famed director
Jake Hannaford (played by a famed director, John Huston).
Celebrating his 70th birthday, Hannaford is trying to get the
finishing funds to complete his comeback movie after being in
Europe for years. Told mostly using handheld, faux-documentary
footage (some in color, some in black-and-white), the bulk of the
movie takes place at his birthday party, where Hannaford has
brought financiers, critics, filmmakers, and film students to
come and see the footage of his movie (which is shot on pristine
high-quality film).

Welles cast the party with real film students, real filmmakers
(Dennis Hopper, Henry Jaglom, and Paul Mazurksy all appear
chatting about the craft), as well as his good friend and fellow
filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in the role of Brooks Otterlake, a
rising-star director who owes his career to Hannaford. This very
much mirrored the real-life relationship Welles had with
Bogdanovich. In fact, during the making of the movie, Bogdanovich
went and made “The Last Picture Show,” which would give him
auteur status like his mentor.

Oja Kodar in “The Other
Side of the Wind.”
Netflix

As depicted in Josh Karp’s book, “Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The
Making of the Other Side of the Wind,” the six-year process to
make “The Other Side of the Wind” was filled with many starts and
stops as Welles constantly was looking for enough money to
continue shooting. The script was changed almost daily by Welles,
location shoots were often done without proper permits (a lot of
it was shot at Bogdanovich’s home during the years Welles lived
there), and scenes were pulled off in low-budget ways.

Read more:


This book on iconic filmmaker Orson Welles looks at his infamous
final movie

Take, for instance, one of the movie’s most memorable scenes: the
sex scene inside a car featuring Welles’ collaborator and
mistress Oja Kodar as the rain is pouring outside. 

“It was the poor man’s process,” Marshall said of the scene,
which he was on set for the shooting of. “We were just shaking
the car to make it look like it was moving, would walk by with
lights so it looked like cars were passing by, and had a garden
hose for the rain.”

With Welles pinching pennies to get the movie finished, it was
impossible to fathom how he’d find the money for post production.

Let’s make a deal

For years, Welles was very much like Hannaford, searching for
deep pockets to finish his movie. Even when Welles was honored
with the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1975, a portion of his
acceptance speech was him pitching “The Other Side of the Wind.”

Sadly, by the time of his death, Welles only had a 40-minute cut
of the movie to show for the six years of effort he put into
making it. Left behind, along with the cut, were hours of
footage, notes on how to shape it all into a feature film, and
mass confusion about who really owned it all.

When Welles died in 1985, he left many of his assets to his
estranged wife, Paola Mori, and following her death a year later,
they were inherited by their daughter, Beatrice Welles. But
Welles also left assets, like “The Other Side of the Wind” and
other unfinished projects, to Kodar. Then there was a third party
who claimed ownership, Mehdi Bushehri, the brother-in-law of the
Shah of Iran. 

In Welles’ search for self financing on “The Other Side of the
Wind,” which gave him the artistic control he craved, the
director found a French-based Iranian group headed by Bushehri.
Through years of tension between Welles and Bushehri’s company
during production, things only got worse when funding became
non-existent after the Shah was overthrown in 1979. However,
Bushehri continued to have an ownership stake in the movie. 

This was the mess Marshall found himself in starting in the
1990s, when he tried to help Bogdanovich and others finish what
Welles started. Though there was the 40-minute Welles cut they
could show potential investors, most of the movie was locked away
in a Paris vault. 

(L-R) Frank Marshall,
Peter Bogdanovich, and Filip Jan Rymsza.
Getty

“I kept meeting with financiers — people from Canada, people from
Europe, people from Malibu,” Marshall said. “They all had an idea
of how to do this and the more we talked about it the more
riskier it got for them. And then they would not come back.”

Then, when it seemed someone could pull it off and get the money
needed, the three parties that needed to agree — Beatrice Welles,
Oja Kodar, and Mehdi Bushehri — couldn’t. 

“Everyone wanted the film to be completed,” Rymsza said, “they
just wanted it done on their own terms. It was a minefield. And
if you made an enemy with this group you made an enemy for life,
so that was the tricky part.”

And as more and more potential financiers went to the wayside,
the legend of “The Other Side of the Wind” only grew. 

While writing the book, Karp was told stories of footage from the
movie having been seen all over the world. The movie’s
cinematographer, Gary Graver, kept footage of the movie in his
refrigerator. Karp even remembers one of the directors who made a
cameo in the movie, Paul Mazurksy, telling him that one day at a
farmers’ market someone walked up to him and whispered, “Hey, you
ever seen ‘The Other Side of the Wind?’” and that he was given an
address and a time to see it.

“The stories were just crazy,” Karp said. “There was also stories
of this mythical three-hour cut of the movie that people told me
they saw that Welles was very close to completing.” 

However, Karp could never prove that such a print existed. It’s
just another story that elevated the myth of “The Other Side of
the Wind.”

Thanks Netflix, now open the vault

What finally led to the vault in Paris being opened so the movie
could be completed and released was Netflix. 

One of the biggest challenges a potential investor had to take,
outside of the cost for the rights all three parties would agree
on, was the unknown price tag for competing the movie. Both
Marshall and Rymsza said they drew up separate budgets for the
cost to complete post production, but without seeing the footage
and its condition, they had one hand tied behind their
backs. 

“I didn’t know it would be 100 hours of material,” Rymsza said.
“I had done a paper inventory and so I knew the amount of film
elements but it’s difficult to foresee how much material there is
and a lot of these factors would drive the cost of post.” 

Behind the scenes on the set of “The Other Side of the
Wind.”
Netflix

Rymsza would not divulge how much his original budget was, only
saying it was a “significant price tag” and that they did go over
budget to complete the movie. 

Netflix announced in August it would give the funds needed to
compete the movie (it also greenlit the documentary, “They’ll
Love Me When I’m Dead,” in which director Morgan Neville looks
back on the making of the movie).

Along with a score being made for the movie, and special effects
done to complete the drive-in movie scenes, there wasn’t any
sound for three weeks of shooting, so that was a major
undertaking. Also, a team of negative cutters had to come in to
reconstruct the original negative of the movie, which took
months. However, Netflix never wavered in backing the
project.
 
“Netflix supported us above and beyond,” Marshall said. “They
were basically like, ‘We know you bought an old house and you’re
going to have old house problems,’ which is exactly what
happened. And we would go in and explain what we needed and they
would say, ‘Okay.’”

So what is the movie really about?

“The Other Side of the Wind” is a fascinating look at a legend
trying to get back on top. But is it autobiographical? It’s hard
to not come to that conclusion after watching the movie, which
seems to also explore Welles’ complicated relationship with
Bogdanovich.

The most compelling moments of the movie are when Hannaford and
Otterlake are having conversations about their work and their
friendship. And on set, it was more than obvious to those who
were there that Welles was putting his relationship with
Bogdanovich on screen.

Take, for example, at the end of the movie in the drive-in, when
Otterlake is speaking to Hannaford and at one point says to his
mentor, “What did I do wrong, Daddy?”

“Huston wasn’t there that day for that scene,” Marshall recalled.
“Peter was playing it to Orson. Orson was also directing him and
his direction to Peter for that scene was, ‘It’s us.’”

Orson Welles.
Netflix

Bogdanovich didn’t just drop everything to be in “The Other Side
of the Wind” whenever he was called upon by Welles, or let him
live in his home with his then-wife Cybill Shepherd, he also
invested money in the movie to keep it going. Welles was
grateful, but had a weird way of showing it sometimes, like the
time he went on “The Tonight Show” and made fun of Bogdanovich
with guest host Burt Reynolds.

But despite all that, Bogdanovich has never faltered in trying to
accomplish his mentor’s final request: finish “The Other Side of
the Wind” if he died.

“Peter became a much more heroic figure to me in just how much he
cared about Orson,” Karp, who is also a producer on the
documentary, said about talking to Bogdanovich for the book.
“Welles took a lot from Peter and Peter got a lot from Welles.
Welles truly loved him but in a way that probably didn’t feel
like he was being very appreciated at the time. But Peter is a
true believer, and there’s a lot to be said about that.”

“The Other Side of the Wind” and “They’ll Love Me When I’m
Dead” are both available Friday on Netflix.