It's hard to judge whether 'The Other Side of the Wind' is a masterpiece without some distance, but it can be said that the accompanying documentary, 'They'll Love Me When I'm Dead', was endlessly fascinating and informative. Again, hats off to Netflix for ponying up the money for the entire project. A significant page of not only Orson Welles' career but a time capsule of the history of American cinema was illuminated. But that's not the entire story.
First, the 'Auteur' theory must be examined and explained to those who may not know it or understand it. The theory started in 1946, when the French, not having had any American pop culture shoved down their throat for the previous half decade, were suddenly inundated with all things from the United States. It was the beginning of New York City and Los Angeles being the cultural centers of the world, not Paris, London or Rome, although there would be a tug of war over the next twenty five years. French film critics went absolutely nuts over American movies, coming up not only with the term 'Film Noir' but the Auteur theory.
'Film Noir', translated as 'black film', was the genre invented by the French for mostly low budget thriller set in contemporary Los Angeles starring weak men and domineering woman. In reality low budget B pictures used to fill programming in the days before television provided that type of entertainment, the critics were amazed at how much darkness filled the screen, both literally and figuratively. The men were always doomed, often dead or ruined by the end, usually due to the machinations of the lead woman. They filmed at night, when the streets were dark, using blackness and shadow to cover for budgetary deficits.
That style wasn't invented overnight. As usual, there were technological advancement. It had something to do with improved cameras, film stock and better cinematographers. More importantly, two directors who had made their first film in 1941 were largely responsible for the look, if not the content. Orson Welles' 'Citizen Kane' is a film full of inky blackness and doomy shadows, borrowing from the style of pioneering Russian director Sergie Eisenstein as well as German Expressionism, but in a modern setting. And John Huston's 'The Maltese Falcon' had the same dark look, with Humphrey Bogart playing the archetypical detective maneuvering around a femme fatale.
Ironically, neither made the defining Film Noir. Instead, Viennese transplant Billy Wilder's 1944 'Double Indemnity' is universally considered the first absolute Film Noir, even though Wilder today is mostly known for his comedies. But the shadow-filled screen and two-timing dames had been there before, just not in the right proportions. So the French critics not only noticed the new type of American film, but they noticed the directors who made them.
Thus was born the Auteur theory, of the notion that the real 'author' of a film is the director, the person's who's stamp defined the tone of the movie. Frankly, it is a flawed theory, one that has more holes in it than Swiss Cheese. To start with, a film can have over 100 people working on it, from technicians to actors to writers to producers, all of whom can have more influence than the director. Ray Harryhausen, Marlon Brando, Dalton Trumbo and David O. Selznick are one from each category who overpowered any director throughout their careers.
There's also the notion that every director has a vision to impart on the screen. Not true; most directors moved from job to job at the studio's whim, and every day's footage was gone over with a fine tooth comb for quality control. Any deviation from the script, anything that wasn't going to show the assets of the studio to their best advantage, was going to get you called on to the carpet and probably fired. The director controlled the day-to-day operations on the set, but they did not control the flow of money.
That is the fatal flaw of the Auteur theory, the idea that the director was in charge of everything. The French critics didn't have any experience in the kind of factory setting that Hollywood really represented. Later, quite a few would have careers as directors, but in the European film market, where the financial backing changed from film to film and the amounts spend were a fraction of American product. In Hollywood, it was a studio town, and the studio, from the producers to the East Coast money men, ran the show, not the directors.
That's not to say that the Auteur theory is completely wrong. There were some great directors who put their vision on everything they did. Listing their names is a who's who of Film School favorites; Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, John Ford, Howard Hawks, etc.. At the absolute head of the list would be Orson Welles. Noticeably absent from it is John Huston.
Welles, once he made his masterpiece 'Citizen Kane', had to fight to make every other of his thirteen films. Money wasn't there most of the time. If a Hollywood studio was involved, you could be sure that the film would be yanked away from Orson's control and re-molded into something else. Even in Europe he dealt with two-faced producers most of the time. Despite all this, every film, even those taken out of his control, have the unmistakable outlook of Orson Welles, at once ironic and tragic.
No other Auteur had to struggle so much to get anything at all done. Any biography of Welles will not only be full of unfinished projects, but deviations into radio, television, and print. Orson fled America a couple of steps ahead of an FBI investigation into un-American activities, living like a gypsy in hotels across Europe. A sought-after actor, he would fund his many projects by appearing in anything presented to him. Orson the actor was very different from Orson the director, assuming no control over the end product except a willingness to re-write his lines.
If you compare this to the career of John Huston, it's night and day. It helped that John's father was a Hollywood actor who had a great deal of success, Walter Huston. Growing up in Tinseltown, John often knew the moguls personally. Starting out as a script writer, he snuck into directing with 'The Maltese Falcon', which was a surprise hit, having exactly the right tome for a country just getting into a World War for the second time.
John Huston knew how to work the system, although he did pay his dues by getting involved in Frank Capra's war propaganda efforts. And he usually made good movies, even a few classics. But Huston could also being a willing hack, putting out exactly what the bosses wanted, from the lukewarm 'Key Largo' to helming 'Annie' decades later. In between, John would make his personal films. Like a lot of the longer running directors, it was usually 'one for the studio, one for me.'
Orson never learned that lesson. Every film was personal, and every loss hurt. He raised money any way he could. but he also wasted a lot of time floundering around on projects that were never finished. 'The Other Side of the Wind' was actively in production for 15 years. That's nothing compared to 'Don Quixote', started in 1955, still being worked on 30 years later. Being eventually self-financed despite $25,000 seed money from Frank Sinatra and one producer being briefly involved, Welles didn't really seem interested in finishing it. The process mattered, not the product.
That thinking is what doomed Orson Welles in Hollywood, where film is not an art but a tool of commerce. Who knows what he would have done today, where every movie is a cookie cutter made by a committee of faceless corporate drones. The very fact that we still have some Auteurs left speaks more of their powers to behave like John Huston, not Orson Welles. Today, you have to have more skill behind closed doors than on the set of a film to survive.
Orson Welles antagonized the people in power from the beginning of his professional career. His days in the New York City theater during the Great Depression was marked by great boldness and a willingness to be controversial, whether doing a 'Voodoo Macbeth' or having the actors of 'The Cradle Will Rock' speak their lines from the audience when banned from the stage. Radio was no different, with 'The War of the Worlds' creating a national panic. Looking at the slight smirk on Welles' face when he is forced to explain his actions the next day, it's clear that he thinks it is great fun while crying crocodile tears.
It was that controversy that propelled Welles to the best first-time director's contract in Hollywood history. It wasn't a great studio; RKO's last breakout hit had been 'King Kong' in 1933. When writer Herman Mankiewicz suggested the story for 'Citizen Kane', based on William Randolph Heart, a man who he and not Welles knew very well, having attending many parties at San Simeon, Orson agreed. Why not? Controversy had worked so many times before.
It was the greatest movie ever made and the greatest disaster that anyone ever had perpetrated to his or her career, all at the same time. Welles was washed up in Hollywood before the premiere, when the heads of all the studios got together and tried to buy the negative from RKO, burning the film before it was ever shown to the public. It was fortunate that Orson had acting to fall back on. Marrying a movie star and then changing her signature look, as he did to Rita Hayworth, really sealed the deal, sending into European exile.
Welles' career in Europe was hugely influential, both to a film industry trying to recover after being ruined by World War Two and to the French critics who started the first serious academic studies on film as art. He didn't shoot with live sound because he couldn't afford it, but the assistants assumed that was how all Hollywood movies were produced. A generation of Italian films were done without live sound as a result. It helped when they had to be exported in dozens of different languages.
The French critics wrote countless articles and books about American cinema, and Welles was often the topic. He would make up stories as he went along, trying to use the moment to advance whatever new folly he was pursuing. When a new generation of Americans started going to film school, these French writings formed the basis of the curriculum, thus elevating Orson to virtual a God in the New Hollywood that emerged in the late 1960s. It was one of the main reasons he went back there to work after 1969.
It was these same young men and women who would become his devoted slaves on the production of 'The Other Side of the Wind', all willing to sit a the foot of the Master in the hopes of learning something. Getting paid nothing for months at end, people like Gary Graver, Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall let Orson shamelessly use them for years while he tinkered with his last major picture. It was the fact that they managed to find some weird Iranian funding that made Welles push to recover the negative, suing unsuccessfully in European courts. But the Iranian Revolution in 1979 gave him the biggest headache of his career, and he was too old to squeeze out of it.
By then, the New Hollywood was dead, a brief window of artistic freedom for a select few directors. 'Heaven's Gate', Michael Cimino's totally excessive dog that wasted millions of dollars, sealed the coffin. There were even younger directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who knew how Hollywood really worked, who knew the importance of pleasing the crowd and building franchises. These guys were perfect for the new Corporate Hollywood, and they thrived while the likes of Francis Coppola and William Friedkin were marginalized much like Orson Welles.
It is crucial to understand that 'The Other Side of the Wind' was much more about John Huston than Orson Welles. The part played by Huston is exactly who Huston was in real life, except perhaps not as charming. Huston had some serious indulgent flops in his career, such as 'Night of the Iguana', 'Reflections in a Golden Eye' and even the 1967 'Casino Royale', a film that really was made up as it went along. Welles hadn't had a meeting with a Hollywood producer since 'The Lady From Shanghai' in 1947. Huston had them all the time.
Watching the Huston character burn his bridges while he is on them, showing an incomprehensible film that mocks much of what the New Hollywood worshiped, having Dennis Hopper ramble on in a stoned haze must have been cathartic to Welles, but it wasn't going to win him any friends in the business. Only Huston, a drinking buddy for three decades by this point, would be willing to play that part, except for Orson himself. It was a swipe at everything Hollywood stood for, where nobody, including the critics and the new generation of fanboys, was safe from withering criticism. Like 'Don Quixote', it seemed a project that Welles would have liked to string out forever, never finishing. That wasn't the point, at least not to him.
Welles filmed for three years before he could talk Huston into playing the part. While a sometimes actor who behaved exactly like Welles when employed in that capacity, Huston's great performances were all in front of him, including chilling turns in 'Chinatown' and 'Winter Kills'. He knew how Welles could get lost in the weeds, making himself scarce whenever the money ran out. More importantly, he knew the part of Jake Hannaford all too well, having made up productions on the spot as early as the infamous 'Beat the Devil' fiasco in 1953, floating around Europe with a drunken Truman Capote writing the next day's script every night with the help of a bottle of whiskey.
Welles has often been compared to the character of Charles Foster Kane, but perhaps he behaved more like Don Quixote. He was blinded by a romantic ideal about art, charging at windmills, mistaking tavern wenches for fair maidens all the time. He was doomed from the start, but he always seemed to be able to secure the services of various Sancho Panza types. Most tellingly, Welles' version of the story took Quixote and Panza into the modern world of Spain in the late 1950s, where they were faced with the horrors of television and the cinema.
Interestingly, while 'Chimes at Midnight' was rescued from oblivion in 2016 and 'The Other Side of the Wind' reconstructed last year, a feat I thought impossible, no one mentions that Welles' 'Don Quixote' may be undergoing something similar. Lawsuits in Italy have restored much of the raw footage to the hands of Oja Kodar, the woman who collaborated with Welles for nearly 20 years. She tried to rescue the film once before, in a terrible version edited (mutilated) by Jess Franco, an exploitation director with over 200 credits to his name, many of them X rated. Then again, Gary Graver, Welles' dedicated Sancho Panza for the last fifteen years of his life, had to resort to directing nearly 100 such films himself to make a living around Orson's schedule.
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