Exploiting the Archives: The Fractured Mirror 2.0 #2: The Other Side of the Wind (2018)
Orson Welles is nearly as well known for his professional frustrations as his successes, for the films he could not get made or finished as much as the ones he completed. That’s no small feat considering that Welles’ achievements include helming a popular choice for the greatest film ever made as a first time writer-director-star in 1941’s Citizen Kane.
Of all of Welles’ maddeningly, famously unfinished projects, none loomed larger than The Other Side of the Wind, an experimental, post-modern exploration of the clash between Old and New Hollywood starring John Huston as a melancholy old show business lion celebrating and mourning his epic life and career during a wild, raucous birthday party that’s also his final day alive.
For agonizing decades, it felt like the satisfying completion and release of The Other Side of the Wind was just never going to happen, that the fabled lost film was doomed to join Jerry Lewis’ notorious Holocaust drama The Day the Clown Cried high atop the cursed pantheon of the most famous and talked about unmade films of all time.
Then something miraculous occurred: The Other Side of the Wind, after decades of stops and starts and legal wrangling and headaches and replaced actors and seemingly all the bad luck in the world, was completed and released on Netflix in 2018.
Even more remarkably, Welles’ great lost film turned out to be just that: great. The Other Side of the Wind lives up to the seemingly infinite promise of an Orson Welles’ New Hollywood psychodrama/head film/show business melodrama/satire that finds the old master taking advantage of the freedoms of the age, sexual, creative, stylistic and otherwise.
The Other Side of the Wind makes for a glorious bookend/companion piece to Citizen Kane. Welles began his career as a cinematic auteur as a 25-year-old firebrand blessed with the gravitas and wisdom of an old man. Welles ended it with an elegiac exploration of another towering figure of Shakespearean depth and complexity that’s alive with the electricity and energy of a youth movement exploding across American cinema, American pop culture and American society.
Like Citizen Kane, Welles aspires to do nothing less here than present a portrait of a man in full, in all his complexity and messy humanity.
Given the exhilarating tension between New and Old Hollywood that powers The Other Side of the Wind, it’s fitting that the lead role of Brooks Otterlake, an unmistakably Peter Bogdanovich-like eager student of the old masters turned showboating Hollywood titan is played by Welles’ close friend and protege Peter Bogdanovich,.
Rich Little was originally cast as Otterlake, which makes at least a modicum of sense in light of the character’s oft-displayed gift for celebrity impersonation but feels perverse given how much of the film is a meditation on Bogdanovich’s own complicated mythology as the disciple who became the master as well as his complicated personal and professional relationship with Welles, who struggled to get movies financed and/or completed during the period in the 1970s when Bogdanovich was among the hottest and most powerful directors in the business.
As a filmmaker, actor, raconteur and cinephile icon, Bogdanovich is a unifying figure, a living link between Old and New Hollywood, the long-ago age of John Ford and Orson Welles and Groucho Marx and the bold, provocative cinema of his more experimental, less reverent peers.
Bogdanovich is seemingly never more comfortable and engaged than when luxuriating in the outsized shadow of a giant like Boris Karloff (star of his breakthrough film as a director and actor, Targets), Welles or John Huston, who lends his volcanic presence to the juicy role of Jake Hannaford, a hard-drinking, hard-living director and world-class carouser whose most recent leading man has gone AWOL, imperiling the completion of his most recent film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind.
Considering how powerfully The Other Side of the Wind is plugged into the times that created it, it’s a little jarring hearing the modern-day Bogdanovich, now the voice of weary experience himself, contextualizing what we are about to see as a “little historical document” shot by countless sixteen and eight millimeter cameras from party guests, home movie makers and TV and movie documentarians in a time before “Cell phone cameras and computerized images.”
The Other Side of the Wind takes the form of a mock documentary cobbled together from the footage of various filmmakers, TV crews and home movie auteurs that collectively provide an exhilarating and revealing snapshot of a legendary filmmaker at the end of his tether, his royal court of employees, hangers-on, friends and worshippers and his world.
The soiree attracts an eclectic, multi-generational gaggle of countercultural freaks, ancient Hollywood lifers, critics, New Hollywood players like Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky and Henry Jaglom in cameos as themselves, journalists and various figures from throughout every stage of Jake’s life and career. Many of the film’s characters are modeled on real-life Hollywood figures in Welles’ orbit, like philistine pretty boy studio executive Max David (Geoffrey Land), a devastating parody of Robert Evans, Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg), a parody of Pauline Kael who comes to the party/screening seemingly out to “get” Jake and Zarah Valeska, an elegant and melancholy veteran actress based on Welles’ Touch of Evil co-star Marlene Dietrich.
Oscar “John” Dale (Bob Random), the smolderingly sexy male lead of The Other Side of the Wind, is conspicuous in his absence. Jake’s interest in the moody, mysterious young stud with the James Dean intensity and dashing good looks feels sexual as well as professional. Dale is the one that got away, in more ways than one, but Jake’s macho sensibility won’t allow him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he might be attracted to another man.
Random’s role in The Other Side of the Wind’s film-within-a-film-within-a-film (it gets very meta here) is silent, as is that of his female co-star, Oja Kodar, who also co-wrote the screenplay and was Welles’ on and offscreen partner during this time. When you’re as staggeringly, hypnotically sexy as Kodar and Random, words are unnecessary.
The film Jake is struggling mightily to finish before he self-destructs is achingly sensual, an erotic feast for the senses that’s arty and opaque, transgressive and pitched fascinatingly if uncomfortably between parody and homage. The psychedelic, acid rock rhythms and brain-melting imagery of the film within the film look and feel like nothing else Welles had created before or would create again.
The Other Side of the Wind occupies a fascinating, unique place in the history of film. It finds Welles drawing inspiration from the army of filmmakers, foreign and domestic, arty and mainstream, who were influenced by Welles’ revolutionary stylistic advances but also by his legend as the personification of the tortured artist pursuing an iconoclastic vision too pure for the brutes in studio boardrooms to understand.
The camerawork and editing of The Other Side of the Wind is loose, lively and percussive in the style of the French New Wave but also Welles’ other playful masterpiece of the era, F Is for Fake, a similarly jazzy exercise in aggressively, provocatively blurring the lines between reality and fiction, documentary and narrative film, cold, dreary reality and colorful show business myth-making.
In the bold new world of the unfinished film at the heart of this legendarily unfinished film is one without any need for words or talking, plot or convention, only sensation and ennui, rebellion and the heady intensity and inherent drama of youth. This understandably makes it a curious fit for raconteurs like Welles, Huston and Bogdanovich, who are nearly as famous for talking as they are for directing.
The Other Side of the Wind grows progressively darker and more claustrophobic as the lively satire and vivid melodrama of the early party scenes with the remarkable ensemble cast gives way to a dark night of the soul for Jake and Brooks that only one of them will survive.
The behind the scenes drama echoes the action onscreen so uncannily that it can be tough to tell them apart. The drama of the film is largely one of completion: a legendary filmmaker is desperate to attain the resources needed to finish the film that will get him back in the game, that will prove that he is a contemporary auteur plugged into the tricky and complicated youth zeitgeist, not an old dinosaur out of his league and out of touch with an industry that no longer needs him. That’s also, more or less, the position Welles himself (and Huston, for that matter) was in when the film was made.
It’s nothing short of a tragedy that it took decades for Welles to prove that he still had it as a filmmaker, that he was every bit as relevant and hungry and ambitious as he was when he was changing film, radio and theater forever while still in his twenties. But it is an absolute triumph that we somehow now have the obscene pleasure of getting to experience his vision a lifetime later.
With his dazzling final film, the great old magician masterfully executed one last trick: pulling a final masterpiece out of his hat, decades after his death and distributed through a technology that did not exist during in his staggeringly eventful lifetime.
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