A “Revolutionary” Narrative Style: Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind

With space limited inside the car of cinephiles interviewing director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), Joseph McBride handled the clapper board on the first day of shooting The Other Side of the Wind, August 23, 1970, in Los Angeles. (From the Netflix documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead; frame enlargement)

 

An article adapted from the section on The Other Side of the Wind in the newly revised and expanded third edition of Joseph McBride’s critical study Orson Welles, available from Sticking Place Books.

* * *

I suspect that all of us, or at least most of us, who worked with Orson Welles on The Other Side of the Wind did so knowing that it would be the best work we would ever do in a film. That’s why we put up with exhausting hours, low or no pay, tempestuous production problems, the occasional irascibility of the director, and the seemingly interminable waiting involved in making this film a reality. Frank Marshall was one of the team who began working on the film in his youth (as a unit production manager) and kept with it for nearly half a century. Frank’s preternatural sense of professionalism, maturity, and calm enabled him to navigate the project’s many peaks and valleys with his saving grace of humor. He went on to become a producing collaborator of Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas and eventually used his industry clout to serve as the major force driving this seemingly impossible project to a conclusion in 2018, forty-eight years after shooting began. Filip Jan Rymsza was another dedicated producer who spent years moving the project along in conjunction with Marshall, and Bogdanovich, in addition to acting in the film, was instrumental in its completion as one of the executive producers.

Along the way, Frank coined the term “VISTOW” to refer to “Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles,” our cast and crew whose dogged loyalty helped Welles make his testament film about filmmaking. We members of VISTOW were the indefatigable followers whose shared dedication, endurance, and stubborn streak of masochism kept the project alive throughout the nearly six years of production (1970-76) and the subsequent decades of anxious limbo before Other Wind (as it was called on the slates during shooting) was almost miraculously completed and released through Netflix.

What is bittersweet about the long gestation of Other Wind is that Welles, John Huston, who plays the legendary director Jake Hannaford, and many other key collaborators did not live to see our joint efforts reach the public. Also absent from the Venice and Telluride festival premieres was Gary Graver, the heroic cinematographer who gave his life to make it possible for the celebrated yet largely ostracized director to keep working steadily during the last fifteen years of his life. Gary poured everything he knew into Other Wind, recognizing it as the summit of his artistry; I was disappointed that the producers ignored my urging to dedicate the film to Gary, without whom it would not exist.

Graver’s lensing is virtuosic in both the framing scenes of Jake Hannaford’s seventieth birthday party – a spoof of cinéma-vérité in 16mm, both color and black-and-white – and in the lushly shot 35mm footage of Hannaford’s film-within-the-film, which is being shown at the party as part of his desperate attempt to raise end money. The young cinematographer’s lyrical style proved a major influence on Welles in enabling him to counterfeit two different styles, neither recognizably “Wellesian,” as well as to capture the cinematic zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Welles’s device of two radically different kinds of stories running in parallel was why he told me before shooting began that Other Wind would have a “revolutionary” narrative style.

Because I was only twenty-three when I began acting in Other Wind from the first day of filming on August 23, 1970, playing a spoof of myself as the earnest film critic and historian Marvin Pister (called “Mister Pister”), I was among the few living cast members when the film was finally released. So I was available to loop my dialogue when part of the soundtrack had to be reconstructed. And a crew member observed that because of my youth, I am the only character who visibly ages during the film, on which I was shooting for the whole five-plus years even though it takes place in one day and night. The fascinatingly eclectic cast is a potpourri of major and minor characters interacting – old cronies of Welles as well as newcomers to his world – with the volatile blend Welles liked of professionals as well as nonprofessionals, some playing ourselves or satirizing our own images.

 

Cherishing Actors

Welles told an audience of student directors at the Cinémathèque française in Paris in 1982,

The most important thing in a movie is the actor. And everything which is in front of the camera. And the decadence of the cinema – and we have a certain decadence – comes from the glorification of the director as being not the servant of the actors but his master. Because the job of a director is to discover in the actor something more than he knew he had. . . . So let us please, since I’m not talking to actors, let us respect and love them and cherish them and help them to be great, because they are the people who have made the cinema unforgettable.

Welles’s belief in the primacy of actors in cinema was evident in his demeanor during shooting, which for the actors (if not the crew) actually resembled a party. Films portraying Welles as a character usually depict him as dour and bullying, but that is far from the truth about his generally jovial demeanor on set (an honorable exception is Christian McKay’s mesmerizing performance in Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater’s 2008 film about Welles’s 1937 stage production Caesar, which captures his mercurial charm and creativity, but even that film shows Welles gratuitously firing a young protégé, which didn’t actually happen). Welles wanted to keep his actors in Other Wind happy and lively, so he entertained us by making jokes, telling stories from his lavish stock of showbiz experiences, offering brilliantly unexpected suggestions about our characters, and even singing a favorite song. It came from Finesse the Queen, a musical comedy revue he starred in as an eleven-year-old at the Todd School for Boys in 1927:

Everyone loves the fellow who is smiling,
He brightens the day and lightens the way for you –
He always makes other people happy
Looking rosy when you’re feeling awful blue.

After a typical eighteen-hour day of working with Welles, my face would actually hurt from smiling and laughing so much, such was the jolly atmosphere he fostered. His banter included pet phrases he nurtured from long ago, such as calling for a close-up the way silent movie star Pola Negri used to do – “Und now a big head of Pola!” – or facetiously reminding people, “Always remember that your heart is God’s little garden.” I looked forward for years to playing my one intimate scene with Huston in which he was to squeeze my cheek and say that line to me sarcastically. But when the time finally came to film it in March 1975, Huston was off in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco directing The Man Who Would Be King. So he was doubled by a young crew member wearing a safari jacket while standing with his back to the camera. Huston later spoke the line to me separately in an extreme close-up, and my own tight close-ups were edited smoothly into the scene with characteristically Wellesian sleight of hand to give the impression that Huston and I were in it together.

“Every one of Orson’s pictures involved ensemble acting,” Joseph Cotten observed. Cotten felt that “in his whole career as a director [Welles] never led an actor or even allowed an actor to make a move alien to his own nature or utter a self-conscious line of dialogue. This is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that all actors felt safe in his hands. He was uncanny at instant personality perception. I have seen him change the whole concept of certain characters to take advantage of an inspirational, on-the-spot discovery of a natural human quirk.”

I saw him do that too, sometimes with me. When Welles discussed his early plans for the film with American tourists in a 1966 documentary short by Albert and David Maysles, Orson Welles in Spain, he said he was planning to shoot what was then called The Sacred Beasts “as though it were a documentary,” with the actors making up their own dialogue as a cinematic experiment. To pull off such an experiment with his film, Welles said, the actors “have to be people of a certain kind of stature . . . people who are images” (he also said he wanted them to be “personages” in their own right). In retrospect it seems wistfully ironic that Welles assured his listeners in 1966, “It can’t take too long, I think that the whole thing is eight weeks at the most.”

Bob Murawski, an Oscar winner with his wife, Chris Innis, for The Hurt Locker (2010), shares editing credit on Other Wind with Welles, who edited forty-one minutes of footage before his death, setting the templates for the film’s dual styles. Murawski admirably managed to pull off this experiment in following the two distinct styles throughout, both suffused with elements of masquerade, as if they were made by other people. The witty spoof of cinéma-vérité in the framing party scenes, supposedly assembled from the cameras of numerous voyeuristic media observers, transcends parody by becoming a Wellesian psychodrama about friendship and betrayal. And for the exuberant pastiche of art-house pretension and exploitation movies in Jake’s mostly wordless film-within-the-film, in which the old director simultaneously panders to the early ’70s youth movement and reveals his own inner life, Welles was roused to genuine visual eloquence through a new challenge of modernist experimentation in representing kinky sexual fantasizing. Other Wind continually intercuts those two levels of storytelling, giving nearly equal time and space to Jake’s last birthday celebration and his unfinished film, also entitled The Other Side of the Wind.

The dual strands of Welles’s film are tied together by the stylistic variations of Michel Legrand’s musical score, which is jazzy (like the Dixieland temp music Welles used when he showed clips at the 1975 American Film Institute Life Achievement Award tribute) but somewhat monotonous in the party scenes. In those scenes the score unfortunately sounds like Muzak, perhaps in an effort to avoid competing with the density of the dialogue. In contrast, Jake’s film (mute, other than in the sex scene he accompanies with venomous directorial comments and in Oja Kodar’s laughing and screaming) lends itself to more effectively flamboyant, even bombastic underscoring. In overall mood as the film progresses, the score takes on a somber quality the composer (who also scored F for Fake) called a “requiem.” That tone befits Other Wind’s thematic concentration on the end of Hannaford’s life and career amidst the apocalyptic ruin of the Hollywood studio system.

F for Fake – made during a break in filming Other Wind and released in 1973 – is a mockumentary, the postmodern genre that Welles helped invent with that film. F for Fake, centered around art forgery, is an inquiry into the nature of art itself. Welles adopts a free and malleable blend of styles to deal with the demands of various kinds of material. The film blends found footage by another director but rearranged by Welles – material shot in cinéma-vérité style by documentarian François Reichenbach for his TV profile of the roguish old forger, Elmyr de Hory – with footage newly shot by Welles, including an episode falsely presented as docudrama until he reveals that it’s pure fiction. Other Wind, with its daring contrasts in visual style, is just as avant-garde in its own way as F for Fake. The framing story of Other Wind could also be called a mockumentary, since it’s made up of what is supposed to be found footage shot by the myriad of camera operators prowling around Jake’s party. Welles’s experimentation with what would become the mockumentary form goes back to his radio days with “The War of the Worlds” spoof newscast (1938) and the faux documentary News on the March that fills us in on the life of Charles Foster Kane before Citizen Kane (1941) begins to explore him more intimately.

Other Wind goes beyond the labyrinthine narrative style of Kane by treating storytelling in an even more dizzyingly splintered and shattered postmodernist manner, a mixture of styles that’s both ahead of its time and befitting the mood of the early ’70s. Welles daringly intercuts the frenzied final day and night of Hannaford’s life with running glimpses into his inner life, candidly displayed in the twisted sexual fantasies of his last work. Jake’s film is also left in fragments, though sometimes filmed at a languid pace as a contrast to the party scenes. The agitated collage filming and editing style of the framing story captures the uneasy, perilously shaky, unresolved, and stitched-together nature of Jake’s late-life image, both as seen by others and as he appears to his own disintegrating sense of self.

Welles called the journalists pursuing Hannaford “witnesses, and the story – insofar as it is a story – is the sum of their testimony.” The party guests also serve as a chorus, like the townspeople in The Magnificent Ambersons, and we provide much of the exposition about Hannaford, giving background about his life and career, especially in the early section of the agglomeration of media people and Hannaford cronies traveling to his birthday party. Since some of the background we provide is drawn from legends, the remainder of the film serves to separate legend from fact. And since Hannaford is partly based on John Ford, it’s apt for Other Wind to have a thematic similarity to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with its famous line from the twentieth-century newspaper editor (Carleton Young), “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Like Ford, Welles prints the facts behind the legend to illuminate the process of how legends are created by the public and the media.

Those two films also share a cast member, Edmond O’Brien, a Hannaford crony for Welles and the frontier newspaper editor for Ford, the one with more integrity than his later counterpart. O’Brien was a member of Welles’s Mercury Theatre company and replaced Welles as Brutus in the touring cast of their landmark anti-fascist Caesar. By the time we made Other Wind, O’Brien was suffering from what we didn’t realize was Alzheimer’s disease but was still capable of giving an eloquent performance. When Welles took some dialogue I was struggling with on the bus going to Jake’s party and gave it to O’Brien, the director explained kindly that it was better suited to Eddie, since he was such a “magnificent ruin.”

The demanding visual and editing style of the pandemonium surrounding Hannaford is not entirely a departure for Welles, however, but a handheld hyperextension of his characteristically ceaseless flow of actor-camera movement. Welles once explained that this way of filming “corresponds to my vision of the world: it reflects that sort of vertigo, uncertainty, lack of stability, that mélange of movement and tension that is our universe.” Pushing that style to its furthest extremes for the documentary-like portrait of Hannaford moving among members of the media and his cronies and colleagues is also Welles’s way of conveying the feeling of imminent collapse in Hollywood and the overall American society in the early ’70s, a surreal time of disintegration in both Hollywood and the United States in general.

The film succeeds brilliantly in establishing that ambitious mood, with its satirical wink. Yet even some viewers accustomed to the quick cutting prevalent in twenty-first century movies have found the headlong speed of Other Wind’s editing by Welles and Murawski and its juxtaposition of jaggedly mind-bending images disconcerting, especially since the film deals with a host of interacting characters who carry complex subtexts.

As I discuss in my book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006; revised 2022), I had doubts that the cross-cutting in Other Wind would work if the fragments of Jake’s film were allowed to run at length, breaking into the rhythm and mood of the party scenes. When I talked with Bogdanovich about that issue in the 1990s, he had similar feelings about the film-within-the-film, thinking it should be seen mostly in brief fragments, such as reflections on doors, rather than being allowed to run at length. But that was not what Welles intended when he told me the film would have a “revolutionary” narrative style, and I was pleasantly surprised to find how successfully Murawski and the rest of the creative team who finished Other Wind managed to carry out Welles’s plan of intercutting the sequences from Jake’s film with the framing party scenes. That audaciously bifurcated approach to narrative enables the viewer to simultaneously examine Hannaford as others see him and as he sees himself, with all the tensions and revelations involved in the private and public life of a creative personality.

Taking the “Mickey” out of Directors

In Citizen Kane, Welles was less concerned with “solving” a jigsaw puzzle, as the journalist Jerry Thompson (William Alland), our surrogate figure, sets out to do in his search for the meaning of Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” and more with pointing up the irreducible complexity of the human personality, as Welles also does in Other Wind. Another reporter says to Thompson in the cluttered great hall of Xanadu at the end of Kane that if he had found out what Rosebud meant, “I bet that would’ve explained everything.” But Thompson, so cocky initially, has become chastened by what he has been learning with his quest into the life story of this famous man. Thompson’s reply is, “No, I don’t think so. No. Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.”

Welles said he added that speech “to take the mickey out of” Rosebud, as “a disclaimer” because “the whole shtick is the sort of thing that can finally date, in some funny way.” In fact, Thompson’s cautionary speech serves more than that function: his words can be taken as a core thematic statement in Kane and indeed of Welles’s subsequent work. Despite all we learn about Hannaford in the course of the framing story of Other Wind and despite seeing the fragments of his self-revealing film, he also remains partly a mystery.

We come to know Hannaford through the psychodramas he triggers with his cronies until he and his mask fall apart in the final scenes and through the revealing glimpses into his psyche he provides in his cinematic fantasizing about sex: kinky and often violent images involving a dominating woman and a largely passive man. Welles scholar James Naremore, in an essay on the film, aptly identifies Jake’s “castration anxiety” as a major motif in his torturous unfinished film. Jake’s waning potency as both a man and a filmmaker is a key issue in Other Wind. Thanks in large part to the artistically liberating influence of Oja Kodar, Welles’s partner in what I’ve called his “Oja period” and the female lead of Hannaford’s film, the pervasive sexual imagery of Other Wind is equated with the frantic loss of creative juices in the career of this aging artist. Perhaps, as the film suggests, Jake was never as personally or artistically fecund as the muy macho director liked his admirers to think.

Shortly after Welles began filming Other Wind, he wrote a sobering November 1970 article for Look magazine on the transition underway in the New Hollywood and the future of the movies, “But Where Are We Going?” It implicitly reveals his intentions for his satirical drama about Hollywood in terms similar to those he used to debunk the glibness of the media in Kane: “We need, at last, to take the mickey out of the myth of the Director as The Great Man of Our Times. The prestige of that myth, the heady sense of power, the glorious Napoleonic solitude – none of this has anything to do with the making of movies.” And he chastises the tendency to pass off a fashionable incoherence as art in the work of some New Hollywood filmmakers: “Let [the director] remain, in the best sense, the servant of his actor, not his rival for attention. Above all, let him be loyal to the story. It’s a fine thing to be free, for a while, at least, from the creaking machinery of the formal plot. Who needs a plot? But who can live without a story?”

That article – and its caustic observation that “it does sometimes seem as though the Duce’s balcony has risen again from the ashes in the form of a camera crane” – baffled me at first because of the skeptical and rather pessimistic attitude it conveyed toward the New Hollywood youth movement, which so many people, especially in the media, were celebrating. I later realized that Welles was bitter about what he found on returning to America, because he had come back full of hope, believing that since he was a hero to young cinephiles, that would enable him to find work as a director in Hollywood again. Instead, while “the bosses and the banks are actually happiest when a director has absolutely no experience at all,” he was being rejected by the studios and independent producers precisely because he had a track record. What was especially galling was that his reputation as a director was largely based on the myths and lies promoted by RKO when it fired him on false pretenses in 1942, alleging he was over budget in his Brazilian documentary, It’s All True, when in fact he was considerably under budget (see my discussions of the figures in Orson Welles and What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?). The studio’s derogatory claims have been maliciously spread ever since then by the Hollywood establishment in general and the compliant news media.

No director exemplifies auteur cinema more spectacularly than Welles, but his skepticism about the media deification of the director in that era was partly a realistic form of self-knowledge and partly a prescient critique of the shallowness of the supposedly radical changes underway in Hollywood. Welles managed to continue functioning in his role as an independent filmmaker working with his own money – earned from his acting roles, commercials, and voiceovers – and that put him at odds with the system that briefly was enabling young, largely untested newcomers to make films with backing from the crumbling studios and often shaky independent companies. The passion and vehemence that suffuses Other Wind stem from Welles making it a cautionary tale to debunk the New Hollywood myth of the omnipotent director-as-god. In so doing, he set out to deflate the false image Hannaford tragically substitutes for what should have been his true calling as an artist and as a man.

Welles and the Media

Even though Welles was breaking new visual and editing ground in his career, his lifelong obsessions and bedrock thematic concerns, such as his examination of the dangers of power and the distorting effects of the mass media, are pervasive in Other Wind. Critiques of the media and how they shape the minds of the public were constants in his career, going hand in hand with his attacks on the abuse of various media by powerful leaders and oppressive capitalist forces.

That concern went back to his Mercury Theatre radio days in the late 1930s, notably to his CBS broadcast updating H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, which he reworked as a warning against fascist warmongering on the radio by Hitler, Father Coughlin, and other demagogues. The British author’s science fiction tale of Martians landing was updated and treated as a live newscast, causing something of a national panic (although those reports were considerably exaggerated). And the controversy over Citizen Kane stemmed from Welles’s politically provocative viewpoint on the role of the media in influencing the public. Basing its quasi-fascist media tycoon primarily on publisher William Randolph Hearst, Kane critically examines how newspapers and the fictitious News on the March newsreel (a spoof of Henry Luce/Time Inc.’s The March of Time) shape history as well as helping to create and destroy a powerful man’s public image.

It was natural for Welles, in the latter stage of his long career, to continue this pattern in The Other Side of the Wind by exposing and satirizing the deleterious effects of the media’s over-the-top hero worship of a filmmaker as well as Jake’s exploitation of the power that inflated image gives him to abuse his subordinates. As Welles told me shortly before filming began, “The joke is that the media are feeding off him, but they end up feeding off themselves. It’s sort of his last summer. That’s what it’s all about.” Hannaford is mostly based on Ernest Hemingway, and the film probably was inspired in part by Hemingway’s 1960 Life magazine series on his following, with an entourage in 1959, the bullfighting mano a mano between Welles’s friend Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Dominguín. The articles were a mediocre job trading on Hemingway’s reputation from Death in the Afternoon (1932) as an expert on the corrida and were later published in book form as The Dangerous Summer. William Kennedy in his New York Times review described it as “a quest for, and a statement about, his own youth, his own heroism, his own art, his own immortality; for he was dying, psychically and artistically, and he seems to have intuited that. . . . Hemingway went to Spain searching for youth and found mortality and madness.”

The media feeding frenzy surrounding Hannaford, in an attempt by his friend and former leading lady Zarah Valeska (Lilli Palmer) to keep Jake relevant to the young (to use a common buzzword of that period), proves to be a disastrous mistake. Welles’s ostentatious counterfeiting of two radically different styles of filmmaking is a Brechtian device to make his audience think about his strategies of cinematic representation in depicting a period of clashing ideas about cinema. And these contrasting elements are part of Welles’s way of highlighting how cinematic style influences and warps the public perception of artists who have become media celebrities as well as distorting their own lives.

Jake’s Attempt to “Get with It”

Jake’s unfinished film is shot lavishly but deliberately incoherently in 35mm by Welles and Gary Graver. The principal target being spoofed is Michelangelo Antonioni. With his stylistic longueurs and deliberately obscure approach to storytelling, the Italian director was Welles’s bête noire, the contemporary director he most loathed for his often languid and opaque pretension. The vague radical-chic plotline of Jake’s film seems to be lifted largely from Antonioni’s American-made film, Zabriskie Point. Released by MGM in February 1970, six months before Other Wind began filming, Zabriskie Point was a notorious flop, a somewhat surreal take on youthful revolt and the pernicious effects of capitalism, dealing with young radicals escaping from urban violence into a desert sexual fantasia. But when seen today, Antonioni’s film is surprisingly effective in capturing the nihilistic, zombie-like nature of Weather Underground radicals of that era.

Jake’s artsy comeback project takes off after Zabriskie Point in being filled with sex and violence and having a radical-chic storyline about a young man (Bob Random) planting a bomb while pursuing a mysterious Native American woman (Kodar, whose character is billed simply and symbolically as The Actress). Welles also works in elements from Russ Meyer’s bravura softcore sex movies, with their semiserious veneer of social criticism, as well as luridly expressionistic freak-out motifs from exploitation films capitalizing on the psychedelic drug culture, such as Roger Corman’s The Trip (1967) and Richard Rush’s Psych-Out (1968). Jake’s stunning, wildly surreal, druggy nightclub sequence, with its daring slashes of light and boldly clashing colors, leads into a bathroom orgy and then to the sequence of The Actress and John Dale, Jake’s leading man and covert sexual interest (Random), having sex in a moving car. Jake’s visual tour de force shows him misguidedly slumming in a market for which he seems ill-fitted.

But his film draws from the countercultural Hollywood world Graver knew well from his other career in exploitation pictures, and since Welles was making up Jake’s film as he went along, it’s likely that its style was directly influenced by Welles deciding to work with a young cameraman who came from that field. Their serendipitous collaboration, instigated by Graver cold-calling Welles and volunteering to help him make a film, had a major effect on the shape of the project. Graver’s resourceful, indefatigable working methods and lyrical style of cinematography also helped Welles make Other Wind so fresh and contemporary. Welles chose Graver because he was only the second cameraman to ask to work with him; the first was Gregg Toland on Citizen Kane. And it’s fitting that Kane and Other Wind are the two Welles films most directly influenced by the distinctive personal styles of their cinematographers.

The aging Hannaford miscalculates with his comeback attempt, however, by trying to give the new youth market what he thinks it wants. His anxious stooge Billy Boyle (Norman Foster) has the thankless task of showing parts of the unfinished film to a Hollywood studio chief in the hope of raising end money. The prototypically slick, unsmiling, dead-eyed executive, Max David (Geoffrey Land, a Robert Evans lookalike), scorns the project (accurately enough) as an incoherent example of how “you old guys are trying to ‘get with it’ – is that what this movie’s about?” The very image of the close-mindedness and cold-hearted bottom-line mentality of the Hollywood studio establishment, Max walks out of the projection room saying, “Tell Jake he wasted my time.”

Yet in pastiching Jake’s pastiche, Welles avoided making the film-within-the-film simply a parody of early ’70s trendiness. Making this outré footage could not help stirring Welles’s prodigious creative impulses as he gleefully crafted abstract, expressionistic sets (resembling an apocalyptically burned wasteland) with art director Polly Platt while encouraging the active directorial participation of Kodar and Graver. Welles’s young collaborators occasionally did some shooting of the film-within-the-film when he sent them off on their own, just as Jean Cocteau used to tell his collaborators: “Astonish me!” Welles and Graver also made dazzling use of the coldly modernist architecture of Century City, the former backlot of Twentieth Century-Fox that was then still in the process of development. But it is not true, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has claimed, that Kodar directed the car sex sequence in which her character is atop John Dale while humping him in a car being driven through a rainstorm by her boyfriend (Robert Aiken). Graver and Random confirmed that Welles directed that tour-de-force sequence over a three-year period in Los Angeles and France, even if Kodar, by dint of her centrality to the scene, obviously made major contributions.

Welles also shot nine hours of footage for the nightclub bathroom orgy in Jake’s film and spent six months cutting it, but his cut was lost, and when Murawski discovered the raw footage late in the editing process, he did a quick but effective montage (about six minutes in length) over a single weekend. Unfortunately, though, the inclusion of the orgy led to the shortening of the car sex sequence, the best part of what Welles shot for Other Wind. Originally seven minutes long in Welles’s edit, it was cut by Murawski et al. to only four and a half. It’s a tour de force of flashing and psychedelically changing colors in a headlong rush of rapidly accelerating cuts and strobe effects (Graver’s spectacular lensing is even more impressively nuanced when seen in 35mm rather than digital projection). As The Actress becomes increasingly heated as she takes sexual control, her breasts and beads swaying in close-up rhythmically with the rest of her body, the montage as cut by Welles viscerally conveys the sensations of a female orgasm, a feeling heightened by the whooshing sounds of rain and passing vehicles mixed with a thumping noise on the soundtrack.

But since it was thought that the full seven minutes of this scene following the late addition of the orgy scene would take the audience away from the framing story for too long, the car sex scene unfortunately was condensed and intercut with shots of Jake and his director protégé Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich) watching it, which adds to the pervasive aura of voyeurism but further distracts from the intensity of the mood Welles had designed. In the process, the meaning of the scene was drastically changed: it was turned from a conveyed sensation of ecstatic release to a depiction of female frustration. That is evident even before her boyfriend in this kinky triangle angrily slams on the brakes, Kodar plunging headlong into a rain puddle and Dale jumping from the car. The condensing of this sequence – originally one of the finest in Welles’s body of work – is a major loss that I and Rosenbaum vigorously argued against in our roles as consultants. It is hoped that if Other Wind ever gets a Blu-ray release (which Netflix has been resisting), the Welles version of the scene will be included as an extra.

Jake’s film in one sense is a potpourri representing his misguided jumble of pandering to the younger generation for what he hopes will be his comeback in what we now call the Easy Rider era. But more importantly, the dreamlike shards we see of Jake’s shattered film let us into his hidden passions and sexual hangups. Some observers have felt that a director of Hannaford’s age, stature, and position in the film industry would never have made such an aggressively unconventional, semi-pornographic film. They ignore the fact that Huston himself had made such a film with Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), a self-consciously arty adaptation of the bizarre Carson McCullers novel dealing with a repressed homosexual Army officer (Marlon Brando) obsessed with a young GI (Robert Forster), who at one point rides naked on horseback through the woods. Some critics of Other Wind also found it absurd for a director in the early 1970s to attempt a comeback with a virtually silent film. But they miss the point of what Jake’s film represents.

Welles wrote that it “was conceived as a sort of dream. Jake himself would have dismissed the word ‘surrealism’; but we will have to use it ourselves to describe his last motion picture.” Welles also wrote that “WE SEE HIS FILM AS IT EXISTS IN HIS OWN MIND.” It also takes place in Welles’s mind. Rather than simply mocking an aging filmmaker desperately trying to keep his place in a changing marketplace, Welles could not restrain his own artistic impulses. In setting out to spoof the stylistic and thematic excesses of that period, while also exploring the dark crevasses of Hannaford’s sexuality, Welles created his own lush, eerily beautiful imagery.

“Movies Should Be Rough”

“Movies should be rough,” Welles’s surprising remark to me shortly before we began shooting, is a key to his approach to the framing story of the party. The effect of “Jake’s” elegantly shot film-within-the-film (shot in widescreen color) is all the more striking for its juxtaposition with what Welles called the deliberately “rough” style of the framing story. Actually, much of that is quite beautiful as well, especially when it turns into black-and-white, which Graver uses to such evocative and haunting effect. Welles liked to refer to black-and-white as “the actor’s friend,” claiming hyperbolically that there never was a great film performance in color. As the framing story of Other Wind evolves from a seriocomic pseudo-documentary to a stark drama of failure, black-and-white increasingly dominates the film’s palette.

The cinéma-vérité style of the party scenes is a distorting mirror that makes Other Wind an extreme example of late style in cinema, aesthetically distanced, self-reflexive, with its end-of-Hollywood story filtered through the distorting eyes of the media. In this case the film represents the styles of two aging artists, Welles and Hannaford. Jake’s dilemmas are treated largely ironically until the latter parts of the film become rawly emotional, revealing the drunkenly despondent old lion letting his guard down to his intimates behind the scenes in a confessional, self-flagellating manner (and even in such supposedly private moments, someone with a camera is always lurking, the film implies).

Graver thought the initial draft of Welles’s thoughts on the changes underway in the American film industry was his 1959 Esquire article, “Twilight in the Smog.” That prescient piece about the terminal decay of Hollywood anticipates the crises that would not become fully apparent to most people until the following century. Welles noted the increasing industrialization of American filmmaking as cut-rate television production, answering to advertising agencies, crowded out more ambitious film productions: “Is Hollywood’s famous sun really setting? There is certainly a hint of twilight in the smog and, lately, over the old movie capital there has fallen a gray-flannel shadow. . . . There must always be a strong element of the absurd in the operation of a dream factory, but now there’s less to laugh at and even less to like. The feverish gaiety has gone, a certain brassy vitality drained away.”

Although Welles’s one-note negativity toward television was belied by some of his own innovative work in that field before and after he wrote that article, he probably was thinking about how his truly innovative TV pilot The Fountain of Youth (shot in 1956 but not shown until two years later) was deemed too unusual to be picked up for a series akin to his Mercury Theatre on the Air radio series. What he was decrying above all in the article was that the standardization of Hollywood was even more prevalent than he had encountered in the past: “A genuine individual is an outright nuisance in a factory.”

The “revolutionary” promise of the New Hollywood fulfilled that article’s pessimistic forecast when the initially promising youth movement, giving control to individual directors more in tune with the zeitgeist than the veterans, turned out to be only a brief, transient period of artistic glories and debacles before the industry became increasingly corporatized and descended into the bloated, empty age of the blockbuster. Welles could see the inevitable evidence of that flameout when he started filming Other Wind and wrote his admonitory “But Where Are We Going?”

Is It a “Mess”?

When we were filming Other Wind in the early 1970s, I wondered how its fast and audacious style would be received by audiences, since it was far more extreme in its shooting method and pacing than even the rapidly cut films of that time. The lightning editing style of Other Wind was notably anticipated by Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s classic 1929 avant-garde documentary Man with a Movie Camera, even though Welles laughingly told me he had never heard of Dziga Vertov. But it was not until many years after we began filming that such a headlong pace of editing would become more common in movies as the ADHD of the audience accelerated. Even when Other Wind was released in 2018, some filmgoers still had trouble keeping up with its speed and intricate levels of meaning. I suspect that is the source of some of the vague, inarticulate complaints about it being a “mess.”

Those detractors don’t tell us why they call it that, as if the film they are describing is self-evidently a disordered, hard-to-follow jumble. They don’t stop to consider that the unconventional stylistic approach of Other Wind – the two films running in parallel with different ways of conveying disintegration – is intended to dramatize the breakdown of a major artist during an acute period of social and film industry breakdown. Those detractors mistake an expert dissection of an illness for the illness itself. The real question is how well the film conveys that dual state of collapse, both viscerally and analytically, with the tragic poetry Welles was seeking to achieve in setting himself such an ambitious artistic challenge.

 

But this film is such a radical stylistic experiment that even the people who finished it, when they initially were confronted with ninety-six hours of confusingly catalogued footage, can be heard using the word mess in describing the challenge of putting it together into a feature. That discussion of their initial reactions is in A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making (2018), a fascinating documentary on Netflix by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern about the film’s extremely complex postproduction process. But their worry became moot, in my view, when the team succeeded so admirably in mastering the daunting task and making a coherent, richly layered, and intricately textured film from the material, following Welles’s script and notes and the templates he established by editing parts of the two storylines.

The reviewers and filmgoers who still called the film a mess after seeing the final result, on the other hand, were displaying what I consider an inability to comprehend an avant-garde film that no doubt is demanding but rewards the kind of close study rarely asked of movie audiences today. That distinguishes Welles’s film from some of the failed experimental films that were made in Hollywood at the time, such as Michael Sarne’s notoriously nonsensical, virtually unwatchable Myra Breckenridge (1970), which makes even Dennis Hopper’s coked-out pseudo-Western The Last Movie (1971) look sort of coherent.

People who dismiss Other Wind with a single word remind me of the complaint by Mordaunt Hall in the original 1929 New York Times review of Man with a Movie Camera that “its glimpses are too fleeting. It is a disjointed array of scenes in which the producer, Dziga Vertoff [sic], does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention. . . . But often one would like to dwell upon some of the doings. M. Vertoff, however, is in a hurry.” Welles’s films, like Vertov’s and Stanley Kubrick’s, often take years to be recognized as classics after initially being met with incomprehension and distaste because they are so advanced and sophisticated and so unlike the standard screen fare of their day.

Other Wind’s long gestation makes it, to some degree, a film out of time. It’s both a period film shot in the actual period it documents and a modernist film shot long before its time of release that reflects back on its period. And it emerged from near-oblivion as a document from the past of an avant-garde director, designed to confound its more conventional viewers. Other Wind is a film that doesn’t present all its richness up front, foreground its subterranean themes, or unravel all its mysteries of theme and character on first viewing but a film that demands repeated attention, like a major novel. On first acquaintance, it may well be a dizzying experience to some viewers. But Welles wants to keep the audience off-balance in his characteristic way of visually presenting the world as being in an unstable, vertiginous state.

Perhaps I can help the film’s inarticulate detractors by explicating what I think they might mean and countering their vague objections.

One of the dictionary definitions of “mess” is “a situation that is very complicated or difficult to deal with.” The film admittedly is complicated and difficult, but that fragmentation is a governing artistic and philosophical principle of its multiple levels of meaning. Another definition for “mess” is “disordered, untidy, offensive, or unpleasant usually because of blundering, laxity, or misconduct.” That suggests some of its detractors may find the film’s characters and themes morally or otherwise offensive or unpleasant – while leaving them uncertain or afraid about how to discuss the subjects of their concern – as well as feeling that Welles, Murawski, and the others who finally assembled Other Wind are guilty of being disordered and untidy.

Even some reviewers who found the film admirable felt it necessary in the fraught cultural climate of 2018 to shade their opinions out of caution. Manohla Dargis gave the film a largely positive yet qualified review in The New York Times, calling it “a checkered masterwork.” She hedged by describing it as “something of a seductive tease, a haunted film that at times entrances and delights and at times offends and embarrasses,” without specifying what she found offensive or embarrassing, other than perhaps the way Welles “cherished” Kodar’s derrière in shooting Jake’s “visually florid yet stultifying . . . comical-looking cine-smut.” But Dargis praised the framing story and “how Welles places people in the frame, his brilliant use of dialogue – which overlaps but also suggests that people are incapable of speaking to one another – or the delicacy with which he directs his actors, his friends and his loves. If there’s a self-portrait, it’s the one reflected in all those beautiful, ragged, immortal faces.”

And it helps to approach Other Wind with some knowledge of Welles’s previous work and a willingness to be intrigued rather than offended by avant-garde styles of filmmaking as well as by postmodern tendencies toward allusion, irony, and pastiche. Welles’s always-adventurous approach to filmmaking style helps account for why The Other Side of the Wind, when it finally and belatedly reached audiences after forty-eight years, even then seemed radically challenging and so startlingly new.

Notes on Sources

Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, 2006; revised edition, 2022); “Twilight in the Smog: Notes on ‘The Other Side of the Wind,’” Sight & Sound, November 2018 (included in 2022 edition; two earlier pieces by McBride on the filming are included in Orson Welles with the new material).

Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum, This Is Orson Welles (HarperCollins, 1992; rev. ed., Da Capo Press, 1998); Welles’s articles “Twilight in the Smog,” Esquire, March 1959, and “But Where Are We Going?” Look, November 1970; and “Orson Welles Explains ‘The Other Side of the Wind’” (this outline written apparently in the 1970s), wellesnet.com, March 25, 2023.

Manohla Dargis, ”’The Other Side of the Wind’ Is Orson Welles’s Haunted House of Mirrors” (review), The New York Times, November 1, 2018; Mordaunt Hall, “Fleeting Glimpses of Russia” (review of Living Russia or The Man With the Camera [Man with a Movie Camera]), The New York Times, September 17, 1929; Ernest Hemingway, The Dangerous Summer (Scribner, 1985); William Kennedy, “The Last Olé” (review of Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer), The New York Times, June 9, 1985; Todd Tarbox, opening address for “Woodstock Celebrates Orson Welles,” quoting the song from Finesse the Queen, “80th anniversary celebration of Orson Welles and Roger Hill’s Todd Theatre Festival underway in Woodstock, Illinois,” wellesnet.com, May 16, 2014.