The Other Side of the Wind

As both an art school and film school graduate, a rare combination that allows me to pontificate on all manner of things visual, I have to give a sincere thanks to Netflix for putting up the money to finish Orson Welles' final film, the long awaited 'The Other Side of the Wind'.  It has to have been a completely non-commercial enterprise, one strictly done for the prestige. Frankly, even after watching it a couple of times, it's still too early to declare it either a masterpiece or a mess. As typical of Welles, there is as much or more interesting  happening behind the camera as in front.

Wells' career is a spectacular failure played out on the largest stages of the 20th century, going from boy genius in 1940 Hollywood to crashing his career for the next forty five years. That's a lot of time to burn up in re-entry into the atmosphere. He left a blazing trail of films, all done under some kind of duress, all sneaked out into the market, all compromised. The drama is in how he insisted on continuing to go forward. Orson never learned to stay down when beaten.

None of this reflects at all on the quality of the films he made, or the work he did on stage, on radio, and on television. In Hollywood, quality doesn't matter. It never did. The financial remuneration, both for the participants and of the completed project, is all that matters, and the time span only goes back a cycle or two. Welles was doomed from the start because he never understood that fact. He set out at the very beginning to make the best, most audacious movie ever made, and he did.

Let me state for the record, no matter what the critics have decided; 'Citizen Kane' is, without a doubt, the greatest motion picture ever made. Not 'Vertigo', which frankly needs to be viewed half a dozen times to figure out the plot, which verges on the supernatural, it is so preposterous. 'Citizen Kane' zooms the audience back and forth through time half a dozen times from multiple points of view, using the most dazzling and innovative transitions and plot points. The totality of the movie remains even more mysterious than any one thing. You know the answer to the puzzle, yet the riddle is even deeper with that knowledge.

Young Orson, besides all the family drama, wanted to be a magician. That mind set stayed with him his entire life, as amply displayed in 'Magician; the Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles', a 2014 overview of Orson's life. It's also plain to see in some of his films, in the way that he misdirects your attention to one thing while slipping the rug out somewhere else. It is most obvious in 'F For Fake', his brilliant and completely unique documentary/mediation about art forgers and the nature of authenticity. interestingly, it was made with the same essential creative crew as 'The Other Side of the Wind', Oja Kodar and Gary Graver.

Looking for similarities in Welles work to his last film, the obvious choice is his next to last one, 'F For Fake'. It has the same lead actress and the same jerky camera work and editing, pulling the viewer from point to point. Welles was not necessarily a great director. He was a great editor, not only able to finish a punch two years later on another continent yet make the action seamless. but able to direct the attention of the viewer like a dog to a flashlight.

Yet 'F For Fake' may be the friendliest, most jovial, and almost comedic thing Welles ever did. Orson liked his drama, and he liked it heavy. He came from a Shakespearian background, yet he never did the comedies, only the biggest tragedies. Huge emotional guilt had to be involved. And the lead character had to be doomed, like Orson himself. And that does not describe 'F For Fake'.

The film that 'The Other Side of the Wind' most reminded me of, strikingly at times, was Welles' gigantic European mess 'Mr. Arkadin', otherwise know as 'Confidential Report' and a couple of other names. Joe Dante calls it "Nobody's favorite Orson Welles film", yet I find it both very interesting and entertaining. It is a failure, but in failure the truth is sometimes revealed. Considering that the movie was done by an American expatriate living hand-to-mouth in Europe during the height of the Red Scare, there's more to the film than simply meets the eye.

Both films start with the death of the main character, and end with the same death happening off screen, in both cases for budgetary reasons. In both films, the main character is revealed as the film goes on to be a horrible person, especially to those closest to him. The investigation uncovers a sordid truth that the lead tries to dismiss but seems to cause him to self destruct at the end. Both hinge on lots of drinking and big party scenes. And Peter Bogdanovich did the restoration on both projects.

Going back to when Welles was still a name in Hollywood, he wasn't into his third project before he had an unfished film on his resume, the South American war propaganda film 'It's All True'. Orson loved telling the story of how he was virtually ordered to Brazil by Nelson Rockefeller to help the war effort by making a documentary. Using strictly non-professional actors, Welles seems to have gone native a little, fascinated by Carnival and the native dancers. The studio used his absence to film a new ending and re-edit his second film, 'The Magnificent Ambersons', a magnificent but dreary mediation on the passage of time.

Why exactly 'It's All True' remained unfinished is unclear, but it seems that Welles, upon returning from Brazil, finding himself barred from RKO Studios, his film completely restructured, had a major temper tantrum. In refusing to finish 'It's All True', he gave Hollywood every reason to consider him a liability as a director. He didn't get another official credit until 1946, four years later, and even that film, 'Lady From Shanghai', was taken away from him in the editing room, cut by around 45 minutes. Orson always tried to make his black balling a great mystery, but it was equally his own fault.

While having a reputation of doing Shakespeare, Welles really loved pulp at least as much. 'Journey Into Fear' (uncredited director), 'The Stranger', 'Mr. Arkadin', 'Touch of Evil' and the unfinished 'The Deep' are all pure pulp. Even his treatment of 'Macbeth' low budget as it is, plays like a pulp version, all brawny masculinity and spooky scares. His career was rescued by acting in another director's movie, portraying the evil Harry Lime in 'The Third Man', a truly great movie as well. Orson took that character on to radio, playing him for years. That was where the genesis of 'Mr. Arkadin' came from, a character in the radio series.

Jake Hannaford is pure pulp as well,  more a piss take on John Houston than Welles, all empty Hemingway-esque macho posturing. His great secret is that he is gay, in love with the leading man in his movie, not his leading lady, as everyone assumes. It is his job to be the lady killer, not, as he shouts, "A faggot!". That might be why he kills himself, his reputation in Tinsel Town varnished, his lover gone. He commits a possible suicide in the car that would have been a gift to his lover, had he finished the film.

John Houston and Orson Welles both directed their first films in the same year, 1941, and both were classics, 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'Citizen Kane'. Both were also actors, although Houston didn't start until late in the game, around 1963, where Orson always featured himself as well as loaning out his talent. Houston had a lot of flops along the way as well as a couple of troubled productions, especially 'Let There be Light', a documentary about PTSD that the Military kept unreleased for 50 years, as well as 'The Red Badge of Courage', which, despite financing it himself and shooting it on his own property, was drastically cut by the studio before release. The difference was that Houston knew how to play the studio game while Welles was essentially clueless.

In fact, Houston often behaved completely irresponsibly while in charge of multi-million dollar cinematic investments. His drinking was legendary, as was his elephant hunting during the difficult shoot for 'The African Queen.' Many of the claims made about Welles weren't true, simply because he never had money, always hand-to-mouth, living on credit cards and room service, always skipping town one step ahead of a foreclosure. Houston could play the studio system like a maestro, ripping them off endlessly to support his lifestyle, his mistresses, his adventures.

That is the character of Jake Hannaford in 'The Other Side of the Wind'; successful, impudent, willful, mildly abusive, and full of himself. Welles knew it and Houston knew it, but it didn't matter. The movie was really about all the players of that generation aging out as a new generation comes into power in the New Hollywood of the 1970s. In that respect, the movie plays like a documentary. Strangely, Houston was one of the few old timers to survive the cut, although he had to stoop to making 'Annie' to get there.

So far, I haven't really talked much about 'The Other Side of the Wind'. It is a radical departure from anything Welles ever did, even 'F For Fake'. There are two or three stories going on at the same time, making it  disconcerting to try and keep up with. Part of it is mostly black and white and in a 4 x 3 format. Meanwhile, we keep getting glimpses of the film-within-the-film 'also called The Other Side of the Wind', which needs completion money, something dear to Welles' heart. That is a completely different style, wide screen, technicolor. It is also a parody of the art films of the age, specifically targeting Michelangelo Antonioni.

Then there is the amount of sex and nudity in the film-within-the-film. Just as Welles wasn't known for comedy, he wasn't known for sex films either. yet things get pretty salacious, with a couple of scenes that push the envelop. Oja Kodar, Welles' collaborator on the script, spends a lot of time naked. There is also at least one orgy scene and a couple of sex scenes, including a spectacular one, at least seven minutes long, in a moving car in the rain. It is the highlight of the movie. You can't miss it. Everyone who's seen the movie knows exactly what I am talking about.

I can't help but think of Stanley Kubrick, that other famous film auteur, equally surprising the public with a very sexual movie at the end of his career, 'Eyes Wide Shut'. Yet Welles spends all this time and effort to make a movie that is not in his style, a parody of what the art critics of the time thought was important. It's one last middle finger to an industry that couldn't handle his talent. He does an art film better in parody than any of the Europeans, or Dennis Hopper for that matter, ever did. Yet he's tossing it off as an inside joke, another impenetrable layer.

The main narrative is what is so confusing, as the art film really has no context except to set up the shot of the leading male actor walking off the set naked after being provoked too long by Jake Hannaford. Predicting out current media environment, Welles has a army of film students and critics pouncing on both Hannaford and Peter Bogdanovich like a plague of locust, a ridiculous amount of 16 millimeter cameras shoved into every available space. Today it would be cell phones, ubiquitously recording every moment. The conversations are sliced and diced, jerky, disjointed, but the information is there if you pay attention.

There's a party that no one seems to really want to go to, probably the last for the organization that Jake Hannaford has surrounded himself with for decades. It's bitter sweet, made worse by cars full of journalists shoving microphones in everyone's faces. The party gets sloppy, midgets show up, people get knocked out, fireworks go off. There are dummy, too, but I'm not sure what they are for, except maybe to parody the excessive violence in the current movie scene and to provide some beautiful shots when lit by the roman candles.

The third plot is even more fragmented, with various toadies trying to get funding, failing every time. All three plots come together at the end, in a drive in theater rented to show the film. By this time, everyone, including the audience, is frazzled by sensory overload. Typical of Welles, there isn't so much a final showdown as a few carefully controlled letdowns. Shortly after, the film wraps up, not even bothering to show the fatal accident at the end.

Is it a masterpiece? I don't know, although I enjoyed it much more on the second viewing, not having to try so hard to unravel it, just letting the movie roll past. There are certainly moments of brilliance, but there is also the sense of a patchwork quilt, too. I admire Peter Bogdanovich for finishing it. In my next blog posting about this, I will talk about 'They'll Love Me When I'm Dead', the companion documentary about the making of this film. Bogdanovich paid a price, both personally and professionally, in helping Welles with this film. Like Orson, he had the fortitude to see it through to the end, damn the consequences.