In March of this year, Wellesnet.com published an extraordinary article on the long-rumored completion of Orson Welles’s “lost” penultimate film, The Other Side of the Wind, partially produced and then all but abandoned in the early seventies. The article in question, which features two extensive and fascinating interviews that Lawrence French conducts with Other Side star Peter Bogdanovich, can be read here:

http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=213

The narrative of Welles’s film aside (which has been widely discussed and reiterated elsewhere, to the point of overfamiliarity), French’s and Bogdanovich’s reflections on specific scenes from The Other Side of the Wind deliver three immediate emotional and aesthetic impacts: they evoke the aura of a fascinating and long-buried cinematic artifact inseparable from the heady filmic experimentation and aesthetic onscreen landscapes of the early 70s (not unlike the BBS productions Drive, He Said and Henry Jaglom’s woefully underrated Welles-starrer A Safe Place); they suggest a feature that ties into the preoccupations of layered realities which dominated Welles’s later years, concerns more explicitly explored in his subsequent 1973 masterpiece F for Fake; and they also suggest that it was somehow appropriate and eerily prescient for the film to ultimately go unfinished, topically dealing as it does with an unfinished motion picture and the unfulfilled end of a fictional movie director, freewheeling J.J. Hannaford (John Huston).

What’s apparent at this point is that the film (which Showtime is reportedly producing under the aegis of Frank Marshall, and which the network allegedly plans to air at some point in 2009 or 2010) stands no chance of ever being gauged on par with, say, Citizen Kane, Ambersons, or Touch of Evil, but sounds and looks truly fascinating. Less apparent from the French-Bogdanovich interview are the reasons for the initial lack of completion; if Welles finished the bulk of principal photography as suggested (aside from one missing piece of vocal work by Jeanne Moreau), what held him up from completing post-production? Was it, as one presumes, the simple absence of post-production funds?

Of course, this may have been yet another casualty of Welles’s longtime dismissal by Hollywood - one that extended back to the early 1940s. As an addendum to the said interview (a dialogue originally conducted just after the release of The Cat’s Meow), Bogdanovich describes the infamous Hearst debacle, widely credited with permanently destroying Welles’s directorial career. Similarly, in a 1985 article that Jaglom wrote just after Welles’s death for the Australian periodical Cinema Papers, he seems to imply that no one would touch Welles as a director in his later years – “A magnificent artist could never get back to the canvas they [Hollywood] pulled out from under him.” (The anger that Jaglom feels about this is palpable). Frankly, I’m with him. It feels rather baffling (and, let’s face it, disgusting) that Orson’s inability to secure funding for successive projects extended into the ’70s and ’80s, ultimately growing so prevalent that it prevented him from the measly task of completing post production on a feature starring no less than Huston and Bogdanovich, and making completion of his Don Quixote film impossible. That brings another key question about Welles to light: had he lived, say, an additional 20 years, into the independent film boom that swept through America during the early-mid 1990s, would that have made a difference for his career? Of course, there is no way to know. As a film professor of mine once acknowledged, Hollywood’s treatment of Welles was a joke.

At the very least, we have the reconstruction of Other Side to look forward to, and can be deeply grateful that Welles willed completion of the endeavor to one of Bogdanovich’s editorial intuition. It may not arrive exactly as Welles would have intended, but with Bogdanovich behind it (whose knowledge of Orson’s work is peerless), the project is in excellent hands.

Take a look at this intriguing youtube clip from Other Side of the Wind, featuring the J.J. Hannaford birthday party scene: