Famously unfinished, Orson Welles' The Other Side Of The Wind has lain dormant for decades as the rights passed between different owners. Now, thanks to effort to complete the film, it'll finally see cinemas and the first trailer has arrived.
Wind 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 at the party who are intent on unravelling the director's macho persona. Peter 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.
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. The unfinished negative has been in a vault in Paris ever since, with occasional rumblings of its re-surfacing. More than a thousand reels of film negatives languished in a Paris vault until March of 2017, when producers Frank Marshall (who served as Welles’s production manager during his initial shooting) and Filip Jan Rymsza spearheaded efforts to have the film completed after over 40 years. A team including Bogdanovich and Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski have worked on it with funding from Netflix, and the movie is finally ready for screens.
With a premiere planned for the Venice Film Festival this weekend, the film will then have a limited cinema release and hits Netflix on 2 November.
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