This time last year, Peter Bogdanovich warned that, due to the "mess with who owned what", Orson Welles' final unfinished film may never see the light of day. According to the Observer however, the knots tying up Welles' **The Other Side of the Wind may soon be untangled. Well it's only been forty years since production began.
The film stars John Huston as a Welles-ish, Hemingway-esque film director, throwing a party on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The narrative flashes backwards and forwards through events in his long life, and encompasses the points of view of journalists present at the party, who are intent on unravelling the director's macho persona. Bogdanovich co-stars (much of the film was shot at his house, where Welles lived for two years), and the cast also includes Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol and Welles' long-term partner Oja Kodar.
It's one of a number of unfinished Welles projects, which also include a version of Don Quixote (Terry Gilliam sympathises) and The Merchant of Venice, which was actually completed but then immediately stolen, never to be seen again. Other completed independently-produced Welles films have remained difficult to see, although **Chimes at Midnight **is finally released on DVD in the UK this February.
Shooting and editing on The Other Side of the Wind took place sporadically over several years, taking in Arizona, France, Holland, England, Spain, Belgium and MGM studios. Welles called it "96% complete" in 1972, and "on the brink of completion" in 1976. By 1979 Welles had edited about 40 minutes of the film, but then hit legal trouble over rights ownership. Like many of his later films, The Other Side of the Wind was self-financed, with Welles in this case drumming up funds from the brother of the Shah of Iran. The subsequent overthrow of the Shah proved... inconvenient.
The unfinished negative has been in a vault in Paris ever since, with occasional rumblings of its re-surfacing. The Showtime network had many of the rights problems ironed out by the late 1990s, but faced opposition from the Welles estate. Bogdanovich stated his intention to start putting the film together according to Welles' notes in 2004, but it's only now, according to LA lawyer Kenneth Sidle, that a deal to complete and release the film is close.
Both Kodar (who also co-wrote) and Jacqueline Bousheri, the widow of a relative of the Shah of Iran, are selling their stakes to a buyer (Showtime?) who "wouldn't be putting up money if they weren't confident," says Sidle. "These negotiations for the picture would lead to its finishing and public exhibition. Hopefully within the next few weeks we will know."
Welles explained to John Huston that the film "is about a bastard director... full of himself, who creates people and destroys them. It's about us."