The Other Side of the Wind
The Other Side of the Wind is a 2018 satirical drama film co-written, co-edited, and directed by Orson Welles, and posthumously released in 2018 after 48 years in development. The film stars John Huston, Bob Random, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, and Oja Kodar.[4]
The Other Side of the Wind
- Orson Welles
- Oja Kodar
- Bob Murawski[1]
- Orson Welles
- Americas Film Conservancy
- Les Films de L'Astrophore
- Royal Road Entertainment
- SACI
- August 31, 2018 (Venice)
- November 2, 2018 (United States)
122 minutes[3]
- United States
- Pahlavi Iran
- Islamic Republic of Iran
- France
- English
- German
- $2 million (1970 USD)
- $6 million completion funds (2018 USD)
Intended by Welles to be his directorial comeback amid the incipient New Hollywood era, the film began shooting in 1970 and resumed on and off until 1976. Welles continued to work intermittently on editing the project into the 1980s, but it became embroiled in financial, legal, and political complications which prevented it from being completed. Despite Welles' death in 1985, several attempts were made at reconstructing the unfinished film. In 2014, the rights were acquired by Royal Road and the completed project was overseen by Bogdanovich and producer Frank Marshall.
The story utilizes a film-within-a-film narrative which follows the last day in the life of an aging Hollywood film director (Huston) as he hosts a screening party for his unfinished latest project. Using both color and black-and-white footage, the film was shot on 8 mm and 16 mm in an unconventional documentary style, featuring a rapid-cutting approach between the many cameras of the story's numerous journalists and news-people. It was intended among other things as a satire of both the passing of Classic Hollywood and of the avant-garde film-makers of Europe and New Hollywood in the 1970s. The unreleased results would be called "the Holy Grail of cinema".[5] It holds the record for the longest production time in history at 48 years.
The Other Side of the Wind had its world premiere at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2018, and was released on November 2, 2018 by Netflix to critical praise, accompanied by a documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead.
Shot over many years in many locations, the film had many crew members, some of whom may be difficult to ascertain. The following crew list also contains the locations where they worked and any authenticating references. The crew members often were performing multiple tasks, so that defining the various roles is difficult.
Production history[edit]
Inception of the project, 1961–1970[edit]
The film had a troubled production history. Like many of Welles' personally funded films, the project was filmed and edited on-and-off for several years.
The project evolved from an idea Welles had in 1961 after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. Welles had known Hemingway since 1937, and was inspired to write a screenplay about an aging macho bullfight enthusiast who is fond of a young bullfighter. Nothing came of the project for a while, but work on the script resumed in Spain in 1966, just after Welles had completed Chimes at Midnight. Early drafts were entitled Sacred Beasts and turned the older bullfight enthusiast into a film director. At a 1966 banquet to raise funds for the project, Welles told a group of prospective financiers:
The film is covered in depth in the following books and articles: