Hollywood Ending

October 29, 2014 7:22 AM

Hollywood Ending Near for Orson Welles's Last Film. The Other Side of the Wind due in theaters next year.
posted by goatdog (26 comments total)

I'll be there, though I'm not sure how high my hopes should be. Peter Bogdanovich has always spoken passionately about it, in lost masterpiece terms. On the other hand, I had the chance to talk to Simon Callow last year (chance encounter in the lobby of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater), and he claimed to have seen the footage and that it did not amount to much.

Hopes high anyway.
posted by chimpsonfilm at 7:35 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

See also, Jesus Franco's Don Quijote de Orson Welles.
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:47 AM on October 29, 2014

While I love Orson Welles, I must say that The Other Side of the Wind sounds to me like a sequel to Terrance and Philip's Asses of Fire.

Which, if it did have Orson Welles in it, would be so awesome.
posted by Harvey Jerkwater at 7:52 AM on October 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

Funny, somehow in my head, I thought of Welles as being old and over the hill by 1971 but he was actually only 56 years old; roughly the same age as Linklater or Fincher are today.
posted by octothorpe at 7:55 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

Anybody believe that Beatrice Welles is doing it for the "art"? I heard she was a major thorn in the side of that restoration of Touch of Evil that came out a few years ago. I think there was bad blood between Beatrice Welles and Oja Kodar for the obvious reason that Kodar was Welles' partner at the end of his life and Welles had previously divorced Beatrice's mother, Paola Mori.
posted by jonp72 at 7:56 AM on October 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

The Wikipedia entry for Paola Mori (Beatrice Welles' mom) suggests that Beatrice was mostly in it for the money, not the art:

When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw Welles out of their Nevada house, and she and Beatrice did not see him for the last year of his life, although they still talked regularly on the telephone. Their daughter Beatrice states: "They sort of separated toward the end because he had a girlfriend. My mother found out about it, and he denied it. She told him he could come back home as soon as he stopped lying to her. He didn't come home during that last year of his life, but he and my mother talked on the phone every day."[6]

This situation had serious ramifications for the copyright status of Welles's work after his death. Welles left Kodar his Los Angeles home and the rights to his unfinished films, and turned the rest over to Mori. Mori contended that she should have been left everything, and a year after Welles's death, Mori and Kodar finally agreed on the settlement of his will. On the way to their meeting to sign the papers, however, Mori was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas on August 12, 1986. Mori's half of the estate was inherited by Beatrice, who refused to come to an arrangement with Kodar, who she blames for undermining her parents' marriage. Legal wranglings between the two have persisted for over 25 years, leading to complex ongoing legal battles over who owns Welles's unfinished films - legal action by Beatrice has at least three times prevented Welles's last film, The Other Side of the Wind, from being completed, and Beatrice launched legal action to try to stop a re-release of Welles' Touch of Evil in 1998 without paying royalties to her (even though the film was wholly owned by Universal Studios, and at no time was Welles due to receive royalties), and also filing an ongoing lawsuit attempting to seek over 60 years of accumulated royalties for Citizen Kane (even though, again, Welles did not own that film, nor did his contract ever entitle him to any royalties).

If anything, I suspect that the film is coming out now, because Beatrice Welles figured out that the centenary of her father's birth is the perfect time to "cash out" with an unreleased Welles film.
posted by jonp72 at 8:01 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

I was always under the impression that Wells and Kubrick had the same number of released feature length films (this is not true). So had hoped that through the magic of the multiverse we would be able to see a completed Napoleon just to even the count.
posted by munchingzombie at 8:07 AM on October 29, 2014

Hmm...an Orson Welles movie that has fallen into the hands of others and will likely be mangled into nothing more than a tantalizing mess. I've heard that one before.

But, regardless, I'm a nut for Welles and have been waiting for this news for a long time.
posted by hadlexishere at 8:10 AM on October 29, 2014

While I love Orson Welles, I must say that The Other Side of the Wind sounds to me like a sequel to Terrance and Philip's Asses of Fire.

Which, if it did have Orson Welles in it, would be so awesome.

Thinking about Orson Welles dramatically muttering "asses of fire" singlehandedly improved my morning from a C to a B+.
posted by saturday_morning at 8:24 AM on October 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

Even if this is horribly flawed and incomplete, it's a goddamned Orson Welles picture. It'll still have some moments of sheer, exhilarating brilliance to it. Bring it on.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:44 AM on October 29, 2014 [4 favorites]

We ignite no ass before its time.
posted by jonp72 at 8:44 AM on October 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

Funny, somehow in my head, I thought of Welles as being old and over the hill by 1971 but he was actually only 56 years old; roughly the same age as Linklater or Fincher are today.

Well, he did get off to an auspiciously early start. Everyone knows he was only 25 when he made Citizen Kane, but even then, he had already been a well-known national celebrity for several years. He was 23 when he made the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, and not quite 21 years old when he staged the famous voodoo production of Macbeth in Harlem for the Federal Theatre Project, which first launched him to prominence.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:16 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

[My age bracket only] He was the guy who appeared at the end of The Muppet Movie.
posted by Melismata at 9:18 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

While I love Orson Welles, I must say that The Other Side of the Wind sounds to me like a sequel to Terrance and Philip's Asses of Fire.

Or what happens when you eat too many Findus frozen peas.
posted by zamboni at 9:20 AM on October 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

Did anyone else see Jodorowsky's Dune and absolutely delight in the anecdote about finding him in the French restaurant and needing to promise they'd bring the chef with them in order to get him involved in the project? <3 <3

(Can't wait to see this interesting experiment in posthumous editing)
posted by Mooseli at 9:22 AM on October 29, 2014 [3 favorites]

what happens when you eat too many Findus frozen peas

You get a green peaness?
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:22 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

Would like to get excited about this but having other folks assemble/edit a Welles picture means it's not a Welles picture. It's like saying "hey we found some of the paint Picasso used and one of his canvases...so a new Picasso!"

I'd like to illustrate this with two clips of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND that have been on YouTube for years - but now seem to be removed. A scene with John Huston facing reporters and a sex scene in an automobile: both astonishingly edited with rhythms unlike anything experienced before in cinema.

I appreciate they have notes from Welles, but so what? Look at the famous Walter Murch edit of TOUCH OF EVIL - am sure he followed the notes best he could but it transformed TOUCH into a Walter Murch film - you could feel the 'Murch Heaviness" throughout.

So am concerned WIND is gonna be a real aggravating watch. If you're a Welles fan and haven't seen F FOR FAKE I recommend that instead.
posted by jettloe at 9:31 AM on October 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Even in the article, Bogdanovich says flat out that he doesn't know if he can truly approximate Welles' editing technique. And he's a gifted filmmaker who was one of the man's best friends.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:38 AM on October 29, 2014

When Mori found out about Kodar in 1984, she threw Welles out of their Nevada house, and she and Beatrice did not see him for the last year of his life

Not to derail into Hollywood gossip, but I never knew this part of the story. So Welles and Kodar were a thing for over two decades before his wife found out? That's up there with John Cowper Powys and Phyllis Playter (though I believe the consensus there is that the long estranged Mrs. Powys knew all along, it was just never a public thing).
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 9:50 AM on October 29, 2014

I hear ya DirtyOldTown, but imagine if you gave Bogdanovich 40 minutes of F FOR FAKE and a bunch of unfinished reels? It'd be something; good, bad, I don't know. But it wouldn't be a Welles film.

The argument can be made that editing was Welles primary art, (in cinema at least), so...it's not a stretch to say we're gonna have another IT'S ALL TRUE situation here.
posted by jettloe at 10:16 AM on October 29, 2014

This is my point: not even Bogdanovich think it's really going to be the same thing. He's agreeing with you. Me, too.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:25 AM on October 29, 2014

Got it - am probably responding to my inbox which is flooded today with the news that there was "a new Welles" film; so am just taking out my frustration of having to "talk down" all these folks! :)
posted by jettloe at 10:30 AM on October 29, 2014

FWIW, I wouldn't have wanted to be denied It's All True, even though it was admittedly a shadow of what Welles himself would have made of it.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:33 AM on October 29, 2014

So Welles and Kodar were a thing for over two decades before his wife found out?

Yeah, that's nutty. Mori must not have ever seen F For Fake, the whole sequence with Kodar being leered at pretty much reads as a confession.
posted by anazgnos at 4:06 PM on October 29, 2014

Yeah, Mori couldn't have seen it. Just the way he says "Her name...is Oja" tells you everything you need to know.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:56 PM on October 29, 2014

chimpsonfilm: No matter how good it is, for a lot of people, there's no way it can live up to expectations. It's just become too legendary. It'll be just like Duke Nukem Forever - it's ratings didn't form a bell curve, they were shaped like a pair of breasts. The one on the right represented people who genuinely thought it was good and people who kept buying into the hype and declared it to be the greatest thing ever created by man. The one on the left represented both people who genuinely thought it wasn't very good and people who were so disappointed after all the hype that they declared it to be worse than if the entire game were just the word CUNT that changed colors on the screen when you pushed buttons. People aren't expecting this to be a movie, they're expecting it to be a transcedentally amazing experience that will force cinemagoers to step over the bodies of people who killed themselves because they knew that they would never experience anything remotely as beautiful.

Wow. I think I just channeled Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:17 PM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]