From the editor and writers of Bright Lights Film Journal
Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
"I dare anyone to squeeze between
two covers a more varied, useful and
flat out entertaining sampling of
the personalities that make the
seventh art the liveliest."
— David Hudson, IFC.com
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Inherit the Wind
Talking with Peter Bogdanovich and
Joseph McBride
About The Other Side of the Wind
Life with the restless ghost of
Orson Welles' last movie
In 1970, after two decades of
European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957-58 to make Touch
of Evil — one of the many films a Hollywood studio took away
from him — Orson Welles came home to Hollywood to make his last
feature, The Other Side of the Wind. Funding the
production largely from his own pocket and shooting entirely outside
the system, the fragmented filming finally wrapped in 1976. 30 years
on, the movie, infamously, remains unedited and unreleased, bound up by
bad luck, personal feuds and byzantine legal tangles that saw the
negatives actually physically locked out of reach in a vault in Paris
for decades.1
In the intervening years, as
scratched and smuggled clips2 and script
extracts have leaked out,3 Welles' final
film's legend has grown.4 Shot on the run
around L.A. and in Arizona, with a reportedly dazzling central
performance from John Huston, the movie tells a story that strangely
parallels its own making: the doomed tale of an embattled, aging,
old-school director, trying to make a film to compete with the
sex-and-symbolism flicks of the young guns of the New Hollywood of the
early 1970s. A movie about making movies, it has become the Holy Grail
of Welles' career, his Rosebud — perhaps the slyest, most mystifyingly
revealing statement he ever committed to celluloid.
Welles spent the last decade of his
life fighting to have his film released. Twenty-one years after his
death, that fight goes on. Rumours about The Other Side of
the Wind's completion have come and gone in abundance over
the years. But, while it pays to have a pinch of salt handy, it could
be that we are now getting close to finally seeing the damned thing.
The latest whispers are that the Showtime channel, which has been
involved in the attempts at having Welles' film completed and released
over the past decade,5 will soon be
making an announcement. Keep watching the skies.6
In the meantime, in the absence of
the movie, all we have to go on are the tantalising accounts of those
who were involved in its protracted making. Two of the most significant
of these are Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride.
As well as being Welles' friend,
biographer, confidante and collaborator during the last two decades of
his life, Bogdanovich took time out from his prestigious directing
career to co-star alongside Huston in The Other Side of the
Wind. McBride, a self-confessed "film-buff nerd type" when he
was bewildered to find himself with a role in the movie in 1970, has
since, with his books on John Ford, Steven Spielberg, and Frank Capra
among others, become one of our finest Hollywood biographers. His
latest book, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait
of an Independent Career — which focuses intently on the
period during which The Other Side of the Wind was
made — confirms that he is also one of the greatest Welles scholars.
Here, as the campaign to bring the
film to the screen shifts gear again, Bogdanovich and McBride sit down
with Bright Lights to recall Welles, Huston, the
New Hollywood, and their long years of "guerrilla warfare film-making"
on "the greatest movie the world has never seen."
Damien Love:
To begin, could you describe The Other Side of the Wind,
in terms of form and content?
Peter
Bogdanovich: Okay. The first thing to say is, it's a hugely
ambitious picture. It's about age and youth, success and failure, love
and sex, betrayal and friendship. And it's about Hollywood and
film-making. You could call it a mockumentary. The conceit is you're
watching a documentary on the last day in the life of this old
director, a character called Jake Hannaford, played by John Huston (right,
with Bogdanovich). He's an old he-man type director, who's just
returned to Hollywood from Europe, and is trying to make this very arty
film — which is also called The Other Side of the Wind.
But his young leading man has walked off in anger, in mysterious
circumstances, leaving Hannaford with an uncompleted movie. So, it's
the night of his 70th birthday, and Hannaford's throwing a big party
for all his friends and enemies, anybody he knows. Among them is this
young director Brooks Otterlake, who I played, a protégé of Hannaford
who's become more popular than him. Hannaford keeps up his tough-guy
façade, but he's really desperate to raise money. During the party,
amid the gossip and bitching, he screens footage from his movie at his
house, then again later, after a power blackout, at a deserted
drive-in. Finally, in the wee hours of the morning, as the sun comes
up, he drives off, very drunk, gets into an accident and dies in a car
crash. That's not giving anything away. As with Citizen Kane,
the film begins at the end: the first thing you see are shots of this
burned-out Porsche and a voice-over — which was supposed to be Orson's
— saying: "This is Jake Hannaford's car. He died on the morning of his
70th birthday. What you are about to see is a reconstruction of that
evening, made with the footage shot that night." You see, a bunch of
film students, TV journalists and documentary crews all turn up for
Jake's party, all of them filming what's going on. And Orson shot all
of it, all this raw, rough mockumentary footage, as well as Hannaford's
film, the movie-within-the-movie, which is very beautifully composed.
And so the movie is extremely complicated visually, woven together from
all these pieces, 16mm, 8mm, and 35mm, colour and black and white,
moving images and still photography. It's really fast and loose, really
cutty, very unusual, very modern, very "today."
How did you first meet Welles,
and how did that led to your involvement in this film?
Bogdanovich: We
first met because I was the first to do a Welles retrospective in the
US, and as part of that the first to publish a book on him in the
States. I wrote things like, Touch of Evil was a
great film, Othello was the greatest Shakespeare
film ever made, and these were anything but common opinions at that
point. They might have been considered correct in Europe, but not in
America. Not then. I sent him that monograph in 1961. He got back to me
seven years later. It was 1968, and I was now living in LA. I'd made a
film, Targets, it had just opened, and Orson called
me out of the blue. "I can't tell you how long I've wanted to meet
you," he said. I said, "That's my line!" He said, "You've written the
truest words ever published about me ... in English." I said, "Really?
I thought they were kinda superficial." He said, "Well … you haven't
read some of the things that have been written about me." We met next
day, at the Polo Lounge, a hangout in Beverly Hills, and our friendship
began. By the end of that meeting, we'd agreed to do an interview book
together. One of the reasons he wanted to do the book, which we worked
on for years all over the world, was because he wanted to correct the
many myths about his career, many of which still unfortunately persist.
7
We started in 1969. He was acting in Catch-22 down
in Guaymas, Mexico. One night down there, he started talking about this
idea for a movie he'd had. I'd mentioned that a lot of the directors I
knew who were older were having serious trouble getting work in
Hollywood. People like John Ford and Howard Hawks; these men were
considered over the hill. Orson got very upset about that. He thought
it appalling. He said, "It's only in one's older age that one does
one's best work. Youth and old age are the two greatest moments;
middle-age is the enemy of art." He went into this whole thing about
it. Then told me the story of this movie, about an old director. The
Other Side of the Wind — although it wasn't called that yet.
I asked if he had a script, and he said he had five. He talked about it
off and on after that. Then, at the end of 1970, when I was, literally,
just about to go to Texas to make The Last Picture Show,
Orson called me out of the blue. He always referred to Last
Picture Show as "that dirty movie you're making." He'd read
the script and said it was a dirty movie. So, he said he was in LA,
what was I doing next Thursday? I said I was leaving for Texas. He
said, "What time?" I said, "Uh, about 2.30." He said, "Good, meet at
the airport at noon on your way, that place where the planes fly low
over the street." I said, "Okay ... what are you doing there?" He said,
"I'm shooting." I said, "What do you mean you're shooting? What're you
shooting?" "I'm shooting a dirty picture. You're making a dirty movie,
so I'm making a dirty movie. The one about the
movie director." I said, "Oh my God. Who's gonna play him?" "I don't
know. Maybe me, maybe John Huston, I'm not sure. We can keep him
off-camera for this stuff."
Joseph McBride:
In the late 1960s I was living in the Midwest, in Madison, Wisconsin,
and I was writing articles about Welles. I'd decided to write a book
about him,8
and I was selling chapters to film magazines like Sight and
Sound and Film Quarterly in order to get
attention for it, and I started mailing some of those articles to
Welles. He was very elusive in those days. You never knew where he was.
Occasionally there would be a little article in Variety
that he'd been seen in London or Paris, it was all very mysterious. So
the only way I could get ahold of him was I would mail these things to
his lawyer in New York. I had no idea whether Welles ever saw any of
it.
Then in 1970, I went to Hollywood
for the first time. I was writing a book on John Ford, who is my other
favourite film-maker, and I went out there for the purpose of
interviewing Ford, but I wanted to meet Peter Bogdanovich, because I
was a fan of Targets. It was pretty unknown in the
U.S., but I had seen it in Chicago when I was protesting the Democratic
convention in '68, when there was all the violence and the
tear-gassing, and I was very impressed. So I went to a film bookstore
in Hollywood and they gave me Peter's phone number! And as it happened,
when I called, he said, "I'm on the other line with Orson." It was
bizarre. Then he said Welles wanted to talk with me, would I call him
the following day. So I said, uh, sure. I called Welles from a
payphone, and he got right to the point. "We're about to make a movie,
would you like to be in it?" I was stunned. All I could think of saying
was, "Is this going to be a feature-length film?" This really stupid
question. And Welles chuckled and said, "We certainly hope so." I guess
that question wasn't so dumb after all.
Filming on The Other
Side of the Wind started late in 1970. What would you say the
popular perception of Welles was in the States at that time?
Bogdanovich:
The general conception was of a guy who had made a film called Citizen
Kane, and hadn't done anything since. That was pretty much
it. I mean, he was revered in some quarters, by serious film-lovers and
film-makers around the world, but as far as Hollywood and the man on
the street in America was concerned, he was a kind of has-been who'd
done one great film and then disappeared, got fat, and now acted in
crappy movies and did TV chat shows. That persisted for a while.
McBride: He was
kind of — I wouldn't say forgotten exactly, but he was at a pretty low
ebb in terms of his prestige in America. We would see him mainly in
small roles in movies, and a lot of them were very bad films, most of
them made in Europe. He was very undiscriminating in terms of what
films he would act in. He had complete integrity in terms of what films
he would direct. I always saw that as an interesting contrast to John
Huston, who would direct any old film in order to keep himself
bankable. What Huston would do was, every once in a while, he would
direct a really great film, but the price he paid for that was making a
certain amount of schlock. But Welles didn't choose that path. Welles
would act in a lot of films to support his habit of making independent
films as a director. But the problem with the public was, they never
saw the films he directed — Chimes at Midnight
hardly got shown in America at all. So all they would see of him was
him turning up in supporting roles in things like Start the
Revolution Without Me, or the occasional prestige film like Catch-22,
where he plays a sort of buffoonish role. So they just thought of him
as a buffoonish character who would appear in all kinds of garbage. The
reason he came back to Hollywood was to be in The Dean Martin
Show, he became a kind of regular sidekick on the show. But
then again, he really enjoyed that kind of clowning around and getting
the chance to do some Shakespeare on the show once in awhile. And then,
once he was back living in LA, he began making all those commercials,
so the perception of him was as the guy who would sell cheap wine on
TV.
And do you think the way he was
perceived in the U.S. — this schism between the artist that he was and
the burnt-out celebrity he was perceived to be — actively concerned
him?
Bogdanovich:
Yeah, of course. And for one simple reason: because it made it
difficult for him to work, to get money to make movies. One of the
reasons he wanted me to write the book about him was precisely because
he wanted to get the record straight, because the record that existed
was making it difficult for him to get money for movies. He wanted to
correct the misapprehensions. There were a lot of myths about Orson, a
lot of things that weren't true, and he wanted to get it right. This
general disparagement of him continued until he died. It did get better
after he died — as he predicted. He once said to me, a few weeks before
he died, "God, how they'll love me when I'm dead." And he was right.
McBride: Yeah, he
realised his image made it difficult for him to function. I think that
when he came back to Hollywood, he didn't have very many illusions
about being commercial as a film-maker. He'd really given up on that
after Touch of Evil. He'd really tried to
re-establish himself as a commercial film-maker with that, and made a
film that he thought was commercial. But Universal was shocked by it
and basically dumped it. The final trauma in his career as a studio
director, I think, was being taken out of the editing of Touch
of Evil. After that he really had an aversion to working with
major studios as a director. Even though he made sporadic attempts to
set up projects, I think he had more or less resigned himself to
working totally independently. The situation was so completely radical
for him that I think he just accepted the fact that he was never going
to be a commercial film-maker again.
Bogdanovich: The
Other Side of the Wind was a film that, again, he started
financing himself, with his own money, then he got a backer. So of
course what people thought of him was very important, because it had a
lot to do with his ability to raise money. Finally, he had about a
million dollars in it himself, and got somebody to put up another
million, so what he had was about a two million dollar picture. But,
yeah, I think his "public image" weighed on him. And, yes, I guess the
fact that he was back making a movie right in the middle of Hollywood
made it more palpable. A lot of people were happy to see him — they
gave him the special Oscar and the AFI Life Achievement thing in '75,
and there was a lot of talk about Orson — but nobody gave him any
money.
I should ask you to say a little
about the characters you play in the film.
Bogdanovich: That
first day when Orson was shooting down at the railroad tracks, I said,
"What am I gonna play?" He said, "A cineaste. I want you to play it
like Jerry Lewis" — I do impressions, you see, and he loved them — "I
want you to do your Jerry voice." And so I went down the day before I
left to shoot Last Picture Show, and acted in
Orson's movie, playing this cineaste who talks like Jerry Lewis and
asks questions like "Do you think the camera is a phallus??" That stuff
just amused the hell out of Orson.9 Then later, at
some point, I don't remember exactly when, but he was shooting in this
rented house in Carefree, Arizona, I called him to see how he was
doing, and he said he was doing terribly. I said, "What's the matter?"
He said, "Well I just finished shooting with Rich Little. I had to let
him go." Rich Little was a comedian noted for doing impressions, and
he'd been playing the young movie director who's a friend of the Huston
character — this kind of protégé who's eclipsed him. So he'd had to let
Rich Little go, and it cost him 25 Gs he couldn't afford. I said,
"Why'd you have to let him go?" He said, "He does great impressions.
But he can't act." So, Orson's saying, "I don't know what to do now,
I've got John waiting, I'm in terrible shape, I don't know what to do."
And here was this character who was (a) a young movie director who'd
had three big successes; (b) did impressions; and (c) was clearly based
on me to an extent. And I said, "Well, why don't I play it?" There was
a long pause, and he said, "That never occurred to me." I said, "Orson,
the guy's a young film-director who's had three hits and he does
impressions all the time — it never occurred to you?" He said "But
you're playing that cineaste part." And I said, "Well, you could shoot
that stuff again with somebody else." He said, "My God, of course you
could do it. You'd be great for it. My God, will you? You just saved my
life." So that's how I got that part. And I went to Carefree, and we
shot for more than 10 days, some of it with John Huston, then more in
my house in LA, and later and on the road, in a car. But I shot mostly
in Carefree and L.A.
McBride:
(right, as Mr. Pister) I basically play the
cineaste type Peter had played at first. Welles had asked Bogdanovich
to find him some "film-buff types" to be in the film, because it's a
pseudo-documentary about Hollywood in the Easy Rider
era, so he wanted some real film-buff types, just like he had real
actors and directors in the film.
10
And Peter had rounded up a few friends of his. Peter had thought I was
perfect for a film-buff type. He was amused by a few things — not only
was I a film maniac, I had been to see Fellini's Satyricon
that first day I met him, and, as I tend to do when I run out of paper,
I had scribbled notes on my wrist with a pen. Peter had thought that
was very funny, and he told Welles, who thought it was hilarious, the
kind of thing a crazy film buff would do. And so Welles told me to
write notes on my wrist when we did the first scene, and so for six
years of shooting I had to keep writing stuff on my wrist, which was
quite a nuisance after a while. It's hard to keep continuity over six
years! But who knew how long this would take? My role was a total
buffoon, the most obsessed, obnoxious film buff. I would follow the
John Huston character around and ask endless questions. Which I
actually tended to do in those days. I was a little intense. Just kept
hammering people with questions, and Welles would find that irritating
sometimes, too. In the movie, he would have me do that to the point
where I got thrown out of Huston's car — for asking him what effect his
father's suicide had on his film work. I came up with that question,
because Welles told me the Huston character was modelled on Hemingway,
and I was a big Hemingway fan and so I knew Hemingway's father had
killed himself — and that was one of the reasons Hemingway may have
killed himself, that terrible sense of fate. But I didn't know at the
time that Welles himself believed his father had
killed himself, too. So I was treading on some very sensitive ground
there, but Welles eagerly embraced that line as being disturbing. It's
the kind of thing that cuts too close to the bone for Huston's
character. I wound up shooting 45 days over the six-year period. Three
days here, four days there and every day I had some dialogue. But the
film is not yet cut together, so how big a part I have, I don't really
know. But Welles at one point said he wanted everybody to have the
same-sized part. It's a very democratic film in that sense — although
obviously Huston and the Bogdanovich character are the central
relationship.
What would you say about John
Huston's performance? How were he and Welles together?
McBride: It was
fascinating to watch. Welles was about as great an actor's director as
ever existed. And one of his secrets is that he treated everybody
differently, he didn't just have one way of directing. And with Huston,
it was fascinating to watch, because Huston was really his peer in a
way that nobody else was, someone he respected greatly as a director,
and an old friend. He was not the kind of person you could order around
or bully. You had to treat him with great diplomacy. But Huston was the
most compliant kind of actor, because he always said, being a director
himself, he always wanted to be as helpful to the director as possible.
But Welles treated him with kid gloves. He would say things that were
really quite brilliantly seductive. I remember one scene that I thought
was particularly good, where Huston's character has this young blonde
teenage girl that he's got as a sexual toy. They'd found this young
girl in Phoenix who had never acted, Cathy Lucas. She was so obviously
not an actor at all it was almost a joke, she was just a typical
teenager, but what's amazing is, when I saw the rough cut, she's
actually really good. Welles somehow makes her
poignant. Huston's supposed to put the lecherous eye on her at one
point, and he did it in a way that was crude. It was too much, and it
was obvious it was wrong. And there was sort of a pause and Welles
looked down, then he said, "John? Do you know who you remind me of in
this scene?" And Huston said, "No, Orson, who?" And he said, "Your
father." And Huston beamed, because he was always very happy when
anyone brought up his father, you know, Walter, a great actor himself.
He said, "Really, Orson, why?" And Welles said, "Well, because he had
that kindly, paternal air — but nobody ever had a higher
score." And Huston cracked up. He thought that was
delightful. But only an old friend who knew what he was talking about
could say something like that and not irritate somebody. But Huston
just thought it was great that his father was this foxy old guy. Welles
didn't say, "I want you to play it like that" — but when we redid the
scene, it was perfect, because Huston had this kindly, paternal air,
and it made it a richer scene, less obvious and crude. It was a quite
brilliant way of directing.
Bogdanovich:
Huston was great to work with. He had a really funny habit of never
saying he didn't know what the line was. If he'd forget a line, he
wouldn't announce it as actors usually do — "I'm sorry, I forgot,
what's the line," or whatever. He would just, with great
authority say something, which usually had nothing
whatever to do with the scene, and then he would simply exit the shot,
like that was what he was supposed to do, leaving me and the other
characters on-camera saying "... Wha?" Orson found this very amusing,
he'd be laughing. John would say, "Was that the line, Orson?" Orson
would say, "Well, not exactly John. I dunno what
the hell you just said." And after about 5.30 or 6pm, John would
usually have had too many drinks, anyway, so we'd quit.
McBride: Welles
actually encouraged Huston to drink a lot, I guess to lower his
inhibitions. That's often not considered a very good directorial
technique, but in this case it worked. Actually, Hannaford, in the
movie, gets more drunk as the film goes along and in his two best
scenes, he's very drunk; there's a scene in a bathroom, when he's
really drunk, and he's unloading on people and ranting about life in
general, and it's brilliant, it's like the film's King Lear scene. I
guess Welles felt he could get Huston sort of drunk and still get him
going as a good actor. Huston didn't say much on the set, he'd be kind
of introverted. It was hard to get to know Huston. But, y'know — maybe
he was thinking about The Man Who Would Be King or
something. One of the funniest things about the film was, we were
shooting and shooting and shooting for years, and at one point Huston
had to go, and I asked where he was going and they said, "Oh, he's
going to go and shoot this film called The Man Who Would Be
King." So he went away, it seemed like two months, and dashed
off this masterpiece in the mountains of Morocco. Then he came back and
we were still at the house doing pretty much the same stuff.
Bogdanovich:
Huston was brilliant in the film. For me, this is better than his
performance in Chinatown. He loved working with
Orson, loved the casual way he did it, and was very, very complimentary
of Orson, very attentive and deferential, almost. He told everyone that
would listen that the way Orson was working was so much fun and so
creative — "guerrilla warfare film-making." He wanted to buy the movie
actually. Before he died Huston wanted to try and help get The
Other Side of the Wind finished and he wanted to cut it,
because he was so pleased with it. He's extraordinary in it. It doesn't
seem like a performance at all, it's extraordinarily real, very John
Hustonish. An extraordinary film performance, the best thing he ever
did as an actor.
The character that Huston plays,
though, is pretty close to home: he's this Hemingwayesque figure, this
legendary macho director. But then there's the whole sexual thing about
the character that comes out toward the end of the movie. How did he
feel about that?
Bogdanovich: Oh,
I think he knew it wasn't him. It wasn't him and it wasn't Orson. It
was a kind of macho type, Hemingwayesque movie director, like Huston,
like Jack Ford, like Hathaway. It was that sort of guy, but I don't
think John ever thought it was him. Although he and Orson had private
conversations I was never privy to, but I don't think that ever came up
on the set.
McBride: I
remember there was one day Welles was directing some of Huston's more
intense scenes, this was in the house in Carefree, Arizona, and all the
other actors had to go sit in this other room for about four or five
hours, because Welles didn't want us watching him do an intense scene
with Huston. It was almost like when directors do a sex scene — they
clear the set of everybody except the cameraman and the actors. There
was something about Huston that was a little removed and distant as a
person, but Welles managed to get deeply into him, to get him to be
less inhibited and more serious as an actor, but he did it in a very
intense way that we weren't allowed to witness often. I really think
the reason Welles didn't play the role himself was that, if he had,
people would have seen it as autobiographical — I think especially the
latent homosexuality of the character would have been interpreted as an
autobiographical reference, which would have been difficult for Welles,
because that was an issue that never got talked about. You could read a
lot of his work as being somewhat homosexual in its overtones, because
the central relationship in a Welles film tends to be between two men,
and it's a very intense relationship of love and betrayal, usually. In
addition, Huston really was a notorious homophobe, so I think Welles
was kind of having fun, playing on that and teasing Huston, I don't
know whether Huston actually realised that his character was supposed
to be gay. There's a book by Peter Viertel, Dangerous Friends,
where he was writing a bit about The Other Side of the Wind,
and he said he thought Welles was kind of needling Huston by making him
play this part to some extent. But Huston was such a sophisticated guy,
and so cynical in a sense, that he didn't mind. I'm sure he was aware
of a lot of what was going on, and he didn't seem bothered by playing
this kind of character.
It seems that after he met Oja
Kodar [Welles' companion and collaborator over the last two decades of
his life, and co-star and co-writer on The Other Side of the
Wind], Welles was a lot more open in dealing with themes of
sexuality and eroticism.
Bogdanovich: Oh,
that's true. That's true. That's self-evident. Oja's Slavic, Hungarian,
y'know, and she was kind of funny sexually, by that I mean she would
make jokes and things, and Orson had always been rather reticent about
that kind of thing. She brought him out. He was definitely influenced
by her.
McBride: In his
later work, The Other Side of the Wind, F
For Fake, The Immortal Story and the
screenplay for The Big Brass Ring, suddenly all
these themes come out, and that, to me, is his Oja period. She
encouraged him to deal with sex and other issues he'd been avoiding.
His films up to that point are rather chaste, almost puritanical in
their treatment of sexuality, but then there's a sudden explosion of
the treatment of sexuality in the work of this older director, which is
kind of interesting.
Can you describe a typical day on
the set of The Other Side of the Wind? Was there
such a thing?
McBride: Every
day was different.
Bogdanovich:
Every day was different.
McBride:
But there are certain general things you could say. Welles worked long,
and I mean long, days. One of the big myths about him was that he was
sort of a fat, lazy guy who just sat around and ate and drank. But he
was an extremely hard worker — the days on The Other Side of
the Wind tended to be 18-hour days, which is really
exhausting for anybody. And the crew were all very young guys. The
cinematographer, Gary Graver (above right, with
Welles), was young and he had a bunch of young people he worked with,
the camera guys and sound guys were as young as 19 years old, so they
were able to work long, long hours. The reason the film was made at all
was partly due to the accident that Gary Graver came into Welles' life.
When Welles came back to Hollywood, Gary called him out of the blue,
there was a little item in the trade press that Welles was in town, and
Gary was a fan and called him and said he'd like to work with him. What
Gary said was, he could make a film very cheaply for Welles with his
crew of several guys, so Welles realised he could make a film for very
little money — here's this young guy, and why not.
11
And Welles was indefatigable. He'd just keep going. However, there'd be
times, I remember one day he just decided he'd go home and take a nap.
That reminded me of Charlie Chaplin — if Chaplin didn't feel good, he
wouldn't come to the studio for a week or a month. He could do it
because he owned the film. And Welles could do it because he owned his
film — but you could just never do that if you were working for Warner
Bros., say. That was appealing to Welles, because he could work like an
artist, when he felt like it. And he contrived a situation where we all
went along with that. Sometimes it was frustrating, because you never
quite knew what was going on. Sometimes you'd be all revved up and
there'd be nothing happening. But most days it was very intense. The
other thing about Welles was, it was tremendous fun to be around him.
He made the shooting great fun because he would be constantly telling
stories and jokes, and that kept the set entertained and loose, unlike
a lot of movie sets. It was like a big party, even though it was very
disciplined at the same time. But Welles felt people should have a good
time when they were making a film.
Bogdanovich: It
was always a lot of fun. A small crew, between six and ten people, all
overworked, and a bunch of different actors at various times. Orson
would arrive and he'd be very friendly and very funny and charming, and
kind of do everything he could to make the actors comfortable before
getting them to change into costume — which in my case was my own
clothes, but he'd often pick out which clothes I was to wear from a
bunch I'd brought up there. I'd brought two suitcases full of clothes,
and he went through them to pull out my costume, pulled out a sweater,
another sweater, two or three pairs of slacks, then said, "There, put
those on." I said, "You know, these are my clothes, but I've never worn
them in this combination." He said, "Well there, you see, now you know
how a successful young film director dresses." It was just him jollying
me up and wanting me to be comfortable. That's what he was like, he
really made life comfortable for the actors on the set. And then he'd
tell you what the scene was — there was a script, but he'd often
rewrite the scene, a little or a lot. You'd be getting pages just
before you made it, then he'd interpose things as you were shooting. He
was very encouraging, funny, rather casual in a way, but very, very
together. I remember one time shooting at night, it was a scene with
Oja Kodar. I had to run up with a rifle — I don't remember exactly what
was going on — but every time I got up to her, I'd break up, because I
just felt ridiculous, and then she'd break up and we couldn't get it.
We did that about 10 times. Finally, Orson said, "Alright, let's just
do it." And I came running up, and I didn't break up, and Oja and I
were sort of getting into the scene — then from behind the camera, I
hear Orson breaking up. I don't know if we ever got
that shot. It was like that. It was a light-hearted atmosphere, even
though there was a lot of work being done. The house was total chaos.
He trashed that house in Carefree, but I remember laughing a lot. A lot
of the time we were laughing, having a really good time.
McBride: When
Peter was in Europe shooting Daisy Miller, Welles
was living at Peter's home in Bel Air, and we were shooting The
Other Side of the Wind there for three or four months. It was
kind of extraordinary. There would be hordes of people running around
Peter's house. I thought Peter was very nice to allow his beautiful
house to be taken over — but I don't think he actually ever knew just
what was going on there in his absence.
Bogdanovich: When
I got back there were certain camera marks on the floor... but it was
okay. Over the years, I've actually met a lot of people who've said,
"Hey, I was in your house in Los Angeles." I say, "Really?" They say,
"Yes, I was acting for Orson Welles ..." He had crowd scenes and a lot
of extras. Literally, I've met 10 or 12 people like that. "I was in
your house ..."
McBride: I
remember one time sticks out. One night I showed up at Bogdanovich's
house, and there were a lot of people standing around, and it was kind
of dark inside the house, and Welles said "Get in front of the camera."
And I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "We're doing a musical
number." And I said, "Well, okay. I can't sing." He said, it doesn't
matter, just move your lips, you don't have to know the words. We're
doing 'The Glow-Worm Song.'" This goofy novelty song from the 1940s. I
was wearing glasses without lenses, because he said the lenses
reflected the light, so he made me take them out, and I couldn't see
the cue cards. So I just stood there and looked confused. Which was
perfect for my character. And the actor John Carroll was leading people
in this song, even though he wasn't actually present that night and
wuold be filmed later. He was an old Republic Pictures actor from the
'40s, he played one of Hannaford's stooges. And Welles just decided to
do this. "We're doing a musical number!"
Bogdanovich: He
also shot on the MGM lot, but MGM never knew. I'd arranged for his crew
to shoot on the back lot, but I didn't say that it was Orson Welles. I
said it was a UCLA college student crew, and Orson hid down below in
the car, so he could get into MGM without being recognised. Every time
a security guard or someone passed by, he'd hide. And they shot for
about 24 hours, they didn't take a break, they just kept shooting
because they knew they couldn't be there again, and they had to be
careful so no one ever knew it was Orson Welles. That's gone now. That
whole lot is gone.
McBride: I mean,
you'd get to sit around with these amazing people like Edmond O'Brien,
Mercedes McCambridge and John Huston. Y'know, you could talk about the
golden era of Hollywood or whatever. There was a scene on a bus, where
I had a long speech, the longest in the film that I had, and I was
supposed to be reading transcripts of interviews the Huston character
had given, and I was supposed to read this diatribe he had said about
hippies. And I didn't really get the point of it, and I didn't feel I
was up to the scene. And Welles took me aside and he very gently said
he was going to give the speech to Edmond O'Brien. He gave me a
beautiful explanation, "Eddie is such a magnificent ruin." O'Brien was
a wonderful actor, but he was suffering from the early stages of
Alzheimer's disease. We didn't know that then. We thought he had some
kind of brain injury or a drinking problem or something. He was still
able to do scenes, but he was very eccentric. So what he does in the
scene is, he grabs the transcript from me and begins reading it, and it
made the scene so much better. It was a brilliant improvisation, and
made so much more sense, because O'Brien was playing this old doddering
reactionary character, raving about hippies — like a lot of old actors
and directors in those days would rant and rave about sex and hippies
and stuff. That's the kind of improvisation Welles would do, he'd
evolve the film as he went along, based partly on the personality of
the actors. That's one of the reasons he was such a great director — he
would see what was happening in front of him, and kind of go with the
feeling that he got. Welles had this ability to get people terribly
motivated, where we'd all be fully aware that this was a great
privilege, that we were all doing something very special. That this was
a very groundbreaking film.
One of the themes in The
Other Side of the Wind is the whole "New Hollywood" of the
early 1970s, the so-called Easy Riders — Raging Bulls
era. What were Welles' thoughts on that generation of film-makers?
McBride:
For me, the answer to that lies in an article he wrote in 1970 for Look
magazine, called "But Where Are We Going?" It's a strange article. It's
ostensibly his reaction to the New Hollywood, but it's actually a
cautionary piece attacking the auteur theory, the idea of worshiping
directors and treating directors like gods. He connects that to fascism
— when he sees pictures of directors up on a crane, looking very
dramatic, all he can think of is Mussolini on his balcony. He's also
quite scathing in there about how, he says, "Any young idiot can go out
and get a film made these days." He really sounds bitter. And there
were all kinds of bad directors who got to make films in that period
because they were young — some had talent, and a lot didn't, and yet
Welles, with his great track record couldn't get work. Although,
actually, I think the reason he couldn't get work is because he did
have a track record, of controversial flops and things like that. But
if you had never made a film, people were more willing to let you make
one in that period. It was sort of crazy. In a way it was good, because
a lot of new people were given a break, but in a way it wasn't good,
because a lot of garbage got made. So his article is quite scathing to
that whole mindset. And I think that was his attitude. The
Other Side of the Wind is partly his reaction to that. He's
contemptuous of the New Hollywood to some extent.
Bogdanovich: I
think he had mixed feelings about it. Very mixed feelings. He thought
that maybe the work was gonna debase the audience, because the movies
were getting so vulgar. He thought that some of the younger film-makers
were simply making films like the films they liked when they were kids.
Some of the work I think he liked. It's complicated. He was very
encouraging to me — I don't actually remember him talking very much
about some of the other directors, I don't really recall a lot of
conversation about that. He had a slight impatience with a lot of it,
but, then, I don't think he saw that much of it, y'know.
The Other Side of the
Wind has a lot of themes strung through it: an old director
and New Hollywood; an exploration of machismo and sexuality; Welles
himself once called it "a film about death." What do you think the film
is about?
Bogdanovich: Oh,
y'know, age and youth and success and failure and betrayal and
friendship, and ... like that. It's also about Hollywood and
film-making in general, in a way.
McBride: I was
standing near Welles on the set one day, and Richard Wilson, Welles'
longtime aide, was in the scene, and he asked "Orson, what's this movie
about?" And he said, "It's an attack on machoism." So I guess, in his
mind at least, that's what the movie is about. It started out it wasn't
about movies at all, it was about bullfighting, about a famous man who
followed bullfighting, based on Hemingway — you know that story about
Welles and Hemingway having a fistfight, back in 1937? I always
wondered if that planted the seed of the whole thing.
12
And, obviously, Welles had been thinking about the changes in Hollywood
when he'd come back, that it was a very different place and he was
reflecting on the fact that a lot of young directors were getting to
make films. So I think there were a number of things he wanted to get
off his chest. Some sexual issues he wanted to explore; his view of
Hollywood, old age and mortality. He was having trouble getting work
precisely because he had age and experience — his experience was being
held against him, because he'd had these disasters like The
Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil
being taken away from him. And yet he had made Citizen Kane
and all kinds of great work, and yet it didn't help him. So that was
really rankling him. That's probably what the film is about, too.
[To Bogdanovich] I first
interviewed to you about The Other Side of the Wind
back in 1997, when there had been a real effort to get the film finally
finished and released, probably via the Showtime channel, but those
plans stalled. Recently the rumours have been that the Showtime deal
has been reactivated. What is your understanding of the current state
of play?
Bogdanovich:
Well, a major American cable company has been negotiating with the
parties involved, which involves Orson's estate, Oja Kodar, and the
Iranian Medhi Boushehri, who invested some money into the picture. I
don't want to say which network, but it's been going on for six years
now, the negotiation, and I would say we're one signature away from it
becoming a reality. Orson, at one point in 1971 or '72, said to me that
if anything happened to him before the film was finished, that he
wanted me to finish it. I said, "It's not gonna happen, Orson, why'd
you even bring it up." He said, "I'm very Anglo-Saxon that way, I don't
mind talking about death. If anything did happen, I'd want you to
finish it. Do you promise?" And I said yes. So, ever since he died, in
'85, I have tried to figure out ways to do it. And that has been a
heavy burden. It's very frustrating, because virtually all of it is
shot and about 40 minutes has been cut by Orson. The rest is in vaults,
in daily forms. There's notes on a lot of stuff, there's a screenplay,
and it's gonna require quite a bit of work to get it done, mostly
editing, but luckily now we have computer editing, which makes things a
lot easier. Orson would have loved that — he'd have loved to have lived
to see computer editing, it moves things much faster, you can try stuff
far more quickly than you could years ago.
So you're confident it will be
seen?
Bogdanovich:
Quite. I'm confident it will be seen within the next two years. Of
course, I've been thrown a lot of curveballs, and so was Orson. This is
nothing if not a circuitous tale of woe, but it seems to me that it
should be seen, and I think it will be seen. It will never be seen
quite exactly the way Orson would have wanted it — because that's
impossible, that died with him. But all we can do is try to put the
footage that he shot together the best we can based on his notes and
scripts, and the memories of those people who were there when he made
it, and based on the template of the sequences that he left behind that
he's fine-cut himself.
From what you've seen and what
you remember, if it were to be seen, how relevant would it seem? Would
it have any impact on the way Welles is perceived today?
McBride: This is
partly what I write about in my new book, What Ever Happened
to Orson Welles? He was doing all kinds of fascinating work
in his later period, 1970-1985, after he came back to America. He was
breaking new ground all the time, trying new things, experimenting with
the medium in ways he hadn't done before. He was doing this all through
his career, but the problem is people didn't see these films. They
thought he was just sitting around eating and drinking and making
commercials. But he was shooting almost every day, his own films, but
he was doing it in a way that was totally contrary to the norms of the
industry, so for the media, he just didn't exist. The media are very
rigid in America: if you're not doing things in the commercial way,
there's something strange and wrong about you. So people don't know
that he was always fresh and interesting. People always wanted him to
do Citizen Kane again, but that was the last thing
he wanted to do, because that was a film that was of its time. What
could you do that would be similar, anyway? They had this irrational
idea that he'd made this one great film, and everything else was a
failure. But I think, when The Other Side of the Wind
is finally seen, people might be struck that he was trying some new,
looser styles, with handheld cameras and fast cutting, the modern style
that evolved in the '60s, and also dealing with nudity, sexuality,
homosexuality, and dealing with the youth culture, and all kinds of
stuff he hadn't done before. Y'know, as a student film buff, I loved Citizen
Kane because it was so perfect and designed. Every shot was
meticulously crafted and to me that was what a film was supposed to be.
So I was kind of surprised when I arrived on the set of this film and
found Welles shooting with hand-held cameras and the actors were
improvising, and if something happened, Welles would put it in the
film. It really surprised me that he would be doing something so
spontaneous. But he told me, "Movies should be rough." He had evolved
into a different style of film-maker, he was always changing and
evolving, and not just trying to remake what he had done before, or
replicate his success. Hitchcock got frustrated that he kept having to
do the same kind of film all the time, but he did it in order to keep
viable. But Welles would never do that. That was the basic problem
Welles always had. Well, there were two: One was that he was an artist
and he was intransigent, he wouldn't do it "their way." But the other
was he never made the same film twice. A lot of great directors do
repeat themselves. Like a John Ford. You knew pretty much what a John
Ford film was going to be like, and a Hitchcock film or a Howard Hawks
film. There was more consistency in their careers. But not with Welles.
He was always trying something totally different every time.
Bogdanovich:
It's hard to say how relevant it might seem. It was a massively
complicated and interesting conception, very much in the Orson Welles
style, by which I mean the very different way of approaching things. He
didn't do the same thing twice, so it's very much in Orson's way. I
think it's very modern from what I've seen, both cut and uncut. And
it's quite relevant to today's world, even though it deals with that
other world of the early 1970s: it's still love and hate and envy and
competitiveness, and life and death and making movies — those things
are all pretty much still the same. There are arty movies today, and
this is about a kind of arty movie that Huston was making, trying to be
"with it." Orson's last film is certainly in a modern idiom. And maybe,
when they see it, people will see that he was doing some pretty
interesting and pretty unusual work right up until the end, and regret
that he wasn't allowed to finish it — and finish a lot of other things
he wanted to do as well: King Lear, The
Cradle Will Rock, The Big Brass Ring, The
Merchant of Venice, The Dreamers — there
were a lot of movies Orson could have and should have made. But what he
left behind is what he managed to make, despite all the jealousy and
the small-mindedness and the vicissitudes of art and trying to be an
artist in the second half of the 20th century in America. If that sums
it up pompously enough.
Notes
1. Briefly: Welles raised $1 million for The Other Side of the Wind himself and received a further $1 million from a Paris-based Iranian company, Les films de l'Astrophore, headed by Medhi Boushehri, who happened to be the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law. At this point, a Spanish investor embezzled around a quarter of a million from the production and disappeared into Europe. The Iranian company agreed to provide further funding to replace the missing cash, on the condition they received a higher percentage, with the result that l'Astrophore finally owned around 80 percent of the film, and were denying Welles the right to final cut. At this point, the Iranian revolution happened, the Shah fell, and the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and all foreign assets, including the negative of Orson Welles' final film, came under his jurisdiction. Shit happens. (And then your biographers come along and start theorising about your "fear of completion.")
2. The two most famous of these are a long, frenzied segment depicting Hannaford's entrance to his party, and a sex scene in a rain-swept car in L.A. at night that out-Lynches David Lynch. Both of these, along with clips from Welles' mountain of unfinished and unreleased late work, can be seen in Vasili Silovic's essential 1996 documentary, Orson Welles: The One-Man Band.
3. A fascinating, lavishly illustrated edition of the complete screenplay — or one version of it — was published jointly by Cahiers du Cinema and the Locarno International Film Festival in 2005, to mark the festival's Welles symposium.
4. Indeed, the very notion that The Other Side of the Wind is Welles' "last movie" is part of its legend. As ever with Welles, the truth is far more complex; after Wind wrapped, he continued shooting films and film-essays for nine years, literally until the day he died. When he suffered his fatal heart attack, Welles, seemingly undaunted by the rejections and disappointments that had greeted his efforts to attract studio backing over the preceding two decades, was working at his typewriter on material he planned shooting later that day: an abridged Julius Caeser in which, true to remarkable form, he would play every role. Of his myriad of late projects, however, The Other Side of the Wind is considered by many who worked with him as the most significant, and the closest to completion. Gary Graver, cinematographer on all Welles' late works, himself called it "the film that bookends Citizen Kane.
5. A Showtime deal to finish and release the film was looking in great shape at the end of the 1990s. The owners of the movie — Welles' partner and co-writer Oja Kodar and the Iranian investor Medhi Boushehri — had reached an agreement; Joseph McBride was in place as producer, along with Rick Schmidlin; and Peter Bogdanovich and Welles' cameraman, Gary Graver, were going to collaborate in the editing and post-production. But then, as a source intimately involved in the deal back then puts it to me, "Welles' daughter Beatrice stopped it. She basically goes around trying to get money or block projects, claiming that she has ownership rights of one kind or another. The thing is, Welles explicitly left The Other Side of the Wind to Oja in his will, so it seems that Beatrice has no legal rights to do anything with this film. But y'know, when studios or companies are hassled like that, they often back away. If Showtime is still interested, I guess the idea is that Beatrice will have to be pacified in some way. On some films she's been paid off, y'know. When Universal did that superb revised version of Touch of Evil, based on Welles' memo, she actually complained to Universal that they were 'tampering with Daddy's vision.' And of course, the irony is, they were untampering with the tampering that had been done to Daddy's vision back in 1958. But she managed to block that video release for a while, and I think Universal wound up finally paying her some money and then she went away."
6. At the time of writing, early October 2006, Peter Bogdanovich, who remains involved in trying to have the film completed, reports that "Things are now moving along very well with The Other Side of the Wind, and there should be an announcement within the next 2-3 months."
7. This indispensable, fantastic, and fantastically entertaining interview book was finally published as This Is Orson Welles in 1992, seven years after Welles died. A revised, expanded edition was released by Da Capo Press in 1998.
8. McBride's superb critical study, called simply Orson Welles, appeared in 1972. A radically revised and expanded edition was put out by the industrious Da Capo in 1996. It remains, as Cinema Journal put it, "one against which others are going to have to measure themselves."
9. The "phallus line" has since become something of a bone of contention. Peter Bogdanovich has claimed several times that he delivers the line in the movie, but in fact the line was suggested, and is spoken, by Joseph McBride as the film's pesky cineaste figure, Mr. Pister. "Peter sure loves that line," McBride adds.
10. Among the actors and directors glimpsed playing themselves in the movie are Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, Chabrol's wife Stéphane Audran, Henry Jaglom, Curtis Harrington, Paul Mazursky, and Richard Wilson. Citizen Kane's butler, Paul Stewart, can also be seen as one of Hannaford's henchmen.
11.
Following a long battle with cancer, Gary Graver (right),
the Vietnam-veteran cinematographer with whom Welles worked exclusively
over the last 15 years of his life, died on November 16, 2006, while
this article was being written. He was 68. Of all the players involved,
Graver campaigned the most tirelessly to have The Other
Side of the Wind completed and released, and kept the
film's flame alive down the decades by screening extensive assemblages
of scenes — along with clips from the mountain of other projects he
shot for Welles — at film festivals around the world. He was involved
in the attempts to have the movie finished right until the end; that he
died without having the chance to see it released throws new
perspective on how frustrating, time-wasting and ultimately ridiculous
the arguments keeping it in limbo have been. Welles worked with some of
the greatest cameramen of his age, of course, and is instantly
associated with black and white. But, working on miniscule, home-movie
budgets, Graver's colour cinematography captured some of the director's
most sublime shots: the twilight montage of Chartres cathedral in F
for Fake; the unutterably beautiful fragments of Welles'
unfinished adaptation of The Dreamers.
Joseph McBride says that his book What Ever Happened to
Orson Welles?, "is almost as much about Gary as it is about
Orson; Gary was the hero of the book. He was a great guy all around, a
wonderful artist, beloved by all who knew him." Welles himself
nicknamed Graver "Rembrandt."
12. Welles first conceived the movie — which was originally called The Sacred Beasts — in the early 1960s, as an attack on the artist as macho man and the jet-trash, cafe-society crowd that followed the bullfighting circuit. The main character, a burned-out artist running on past glories, was modelled on Ernest Hemingway, whom Welles had observed haunting Spanish bullrings with his flunky entourage in the late '50s. Welles had first met Hemingway years before, in 1937, when he was hired to read the narration the author had written for the documentary The Spanish Earth. The two got into a fist fight when Hemingway complained Welles read "like a faggot." When shooting on The Other Side of the Wind finally started, Hemingway seems to have remained on Welles' mind: Jake Hannaford's fatal birthday party takes place on July 2nd, the date Hemingway put a shotgun to his head.
Note: Some of the photographs here are reproduced from Joseph McBride's excellent new book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). The photographer for the shot of Welles rehearsing Bogdanovich and McBride was Felipe Herba. We would like to thank Mr. McBride for his kind permission to feature these rare images.
Subscribe to BLFJ
Contact Us
Never miss a movie again -- by using online video recorders! Start recording online now!
Deals for Our Readers
