The Only Thing More Unbelievable Than Orson Welles's Final Movie

The Only Thing More Unbelievable Than Orson Welles's Final Movie For almost half a century, Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind ...

The Only Thing More Unbelievable Than Orson Welles's Final Movie

For almost half a century, Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind has had a reputation for being the greatest film never madeâ€"and perhaps the most bizarre cinematic production ever undertaken. After a decade of self-imposed exile, Welles returned to Hollywood in 1970 to cinematize the last day of an agin g, man’s man director (legendary filmmaker John Huston) struggling to complete a movie and secure his legacy.

Welles believed his cinéma-vérité film, with its autobiographical reflections, would return him to the top of the Hollywood totem pole; instead, he spent six long years toiling on its filming, and nearly another decade piecemealing its footage together. The film remained unfinished upon his death in 1985.

Now, thanks to Netflix, the movieâ€"which Huston once called “an adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing”â€"has come to something. Rescued from cold storage in Paris, and masterfully recut and restored by Academy Award-winning editor Bob Murawski according to Welles’s specifications from beyond the grave, the film is finally ready for its close-up. It premieres on the streaming service November 2, alongside Morgan Neville’s masterful documentary about the film’s unbelievable backstory, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead.

Josh Karp, author of the 2015 book Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of the Other Side of the Wind and co-producer of Neville’s documentary, knows the ups and downs of this cursed film better than anyone. For him, its wild ride is epitomized by one memorable scene caught in the doc: Huston sitting behind the wheel of a convertible, accidentally speeding down the wrong way of an L.A. freeway, with Welles, Peter Bogdanovich (who is also in the film), two cameramen, and an actor hanging off the automobile’s trunk.

Throw in other behind-the-scenes moments like Welles helping to edit a porn film, forging shoot ing permits, and sneaking past MGM security to shoot on the lot by hiding in the backseat of a carâ€"his ever-present cigar still in his mouthâ€"and you can see why he and Neville needed to tell this story.

Vanity Fair: Is there any Hollywood filmmaking experience that rivals this one?

Josh Karp: You’d be hard-pressed to find one. You’ve got the Shah of Iran’s brother-in-law producing, with Welles filming on the run, ditching out on hotel bills, shooting with no lead for years. He films half of a scene in Arizona, then the other half three years later in Spain without any of the same actors. But everyone involved loved it. One of the crew members told me, “We got paid nothing, the set was dangerous, and the hours were probably illegal. But we were all thrilled just to be working for Orson Welles.”

What’s The Other Side of the Wind actually about?

It’s two films. There’s the story of an aging director, Jake Hannaford (Huston), fighting against his mortality and creative dissolution, trying to remain relevant in Hollywood. Welles edited that part documentary-style with quick cuts, pre-MTV, in a Natural Born Killers style. Then there’s the film within the film in which Welles mocks Michelangelo Antonioni films. It’s high on symbolism, cinematography, and beautiful imagery, but doesn’t mean anything.

You’ve said the film’s protagonist is based on Hemingway.

Welles claimed he was hired to narrate a Spanish Civil War documentary that had been written by Hemingway. He was only in his early twenties, but already so confident in himself that he suggested script edits, which didn’t sit well with the author. They wound up in a soundstage brawl that ended with them laughing over a bottle of whiskey. Twenty years later, Welles started writing The Sacred Beasts, a script about a man’s man novelist, living in Spain, who’s become c reatively and sexually impotent. Trailed by sycophantic critics and scholars, he’s secretly in love with a young male toreador. Over time, the Hemingway character became a swashbuckling Hollywood directorâ€"someone like John Ford or John Huston, who’s obsessed with the male lead of his new movie.

Why did it take so long to produce?

Welles’s films rarely made money, so he didn’t have conventional funding available and had to do everything on the cheap, often financed by himself. So, he’d shoot part of the film for a few months, then disappear and act in a movie for money, then reemerge ready to shoot again. He even did things like have his cameraman, Gary Graver, pretend he was leading a U.C.L.A. film class so they could rent the MGM lot at a discount. Money was so tight that Graver once passed out from exhaustion, and a crew member caught the camera instead of Graver because he knew how expensive the camera was.

From the documenta ry, it seems Graver and Welles have the oddest relationship.

It starts with Graver cold-calling Welles at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and six hours later becoming his permanent cinematographer. Gary dedicated the rest of his life to Welles at his own expense, going through marriages, losing money, canceling trips to Disneyland with his kids. They were completely tied together. Someone called it a father-son relationship, but one of Graver’s wives told me Welles didn’t have a single paternal bone in his body.

What’s your take on Welles’s guerilla filmmaking?

Welles loved getting up every day to a group of people committed to making his creative vision a reality. And he loved chaos. He’d stay up every night re-writing based on what he’d shot that day andâ€"it seemsâ€"what was going on in his own life. Sometimes people wound up playing out their own relationships with Welles without really knowing the characters were based on themsel ves. The script supervisor said it got to the point where you couldn’t tell what was the film and what was real life.

Neville’s documentary helps capture the insanity of this filmmaking process. What stories most stand out for you?

Two. The first is Welles shooting a cocktail-party scene andâ€"without explanationâ€"telling everyone to look down at their feet in disgust. Rich Little, who was then playing Bogdanovich’s part, was mystified and asked Welles what they were doing. Welles told him, “There are midgets running between your legs.” “No there aren’t,” Little replied. Totally exasperated, Welles looked at Little and shouted, “I know! I’m going to shoot them in Spain this spring and cut them in later!” The other story is when Graver needed to finish work on a porn film andâ€"in order to get him back to work on Welles filmâ€"Welles wound up helping him edit it. The best part of the story is Welles, being Welles, e dited the film as if it were a Welles movie. You can see a clip in the documentary.

Would you say that this is Huston’s greatest performance?

Welles said in an interview if he ever gets into heaven, it’ll be because he gave Huston this role instead of taking it himself. In real life, Huston’s this impenetrable, unshakeable force. His character’s that, too. Yet somehow Welles gets him to reveal vulnerability underneath. It’s incredibly powerful to see. I don’t use the word “heartbreaking” much, but I think that’s the only word that could apply here.

Is it Oscar-worthy?

Huston’s deserving of a nomination. And Murawski, who put it all together, deserves one for editing. What he did borders on miraculous.

How did the negatives end up locked away in Paris, with Welles at war with Iran?

Most of the financing came from the Shah of Iran’s brother-in-lawâ€"a man named Mehdi Boushehriâ €"who’s been unfairly cast as a villain. In truth, he wasn’t on board with the brutality of the Shah’s regime. He was a sophisticated, well-educated man who genuinely believed in Welles and had incredible patience. Welles constantly needed more money, and Boushehri gave it to him, until things went bad in Iran. When the Ayatollah took over, he tried to save the film by selling his ownership to a Canadian group, but Welles walked away from the deal. Ultimately, the negative was impounded in Paris as an Iranian asset. Then there was a dispute, because under French law, Welles owned the moral rights to his art, while Boushehri owned it financially. Nobody could touch anything without an agreement.

And why did it take decades to resolve the issue?

The beneficiaries couldn’t reach a settlement. When Welles died, he left his mistress the moral rights, but made his daughter Beatrice the heir to his estate. So now you have the Iranians, his mistress, and his daughter in a 30-plus-year battle to close a deal. How Netflix pulled this off is as close to a Hollywood miracle as you can get.

Where did the documentary’s name, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, come from?

It’s something Welles told Bogdanovich while trying to raise money for the film. While still alive, he couldn’t get money and understood he had a big myth, not always positive, to drag around with him. Once he was dead, however, he knew everyone would be talking about what a genius he was. And he was right.

Does the movie live up to your expectations?

When I saw it the first time, I was just taking it in. The second time, it blew me away. My brother-in-law told me that he was thinking about it for days afterwards. It’s that kind of movie. Welles’s daughter says in the documentary that for Welles, every frame was a canvas, and he was painting every corner of the canvas to have mea ning. People don’t make movies like that anymore.

What’s the cumulative effect of watching both projects together?

Welles is a complex man. He could be one thing and its opposite. He was brilliant and charming one moment, then explosive and self-destructive the next. Some will leave the documentary thinking he never wanted to finish production, while others will conclude this was meant to be his comeback. Both films provide a portrait of a man whose life and art merged into one. There’s no other project I know where someone loves making a film for eternity. He was a one-of-a-kind Renaissance artist.

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