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Review: New book on unfinished movie a must-read for Orson Welles fans (Includes first-hand account)

While studios keep on green-lighting Adam Sandler vehicles and half-baked sequels today, Welles struggled for decades to get his visions onscreen in the forms he wanted. There are still many reels of footage for unfinished projects that have been sitting in storage for decades – including what might have been an ambitious adaptation of Don Quixote – and even the released movies are technically unfinished, because of either studio interference or lack of resources, and sometimes difficult to see. Even his 1965 classic Chimes at Midnight is still unavailable on DVD in North America. Not the ideal way to treat one of cinema’s bona fide masters.

“Though so many are now considered masterpieces, every Welles film after Kane came with a back story explaining what might have happened if Orson had been given adequate funding and support,” writes U.S. journalist and author Josh Karp in his enlightening new book, Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, which chronicles one of Welles’ most notorious unfinished works. “Each challenge was just another mountain he needed to scale in order to achieve a compromised version of his art.”

That’s why it’s hard to be a Welles fan without feeling cruelly cheated by history, without a profound sense of dissatisfaction. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) is frustrating to watch because it’s not hard to imagine how powerful and complex it must have been in its original form, rather than as the choppy mess that RKO Studios threw together. Welles’ 1952 adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello is really the shadow of a great film: the vision is there, but the execution often isn’t. And The Other Side of the Wind, which Welles shot on and off from 1970 to 1976, had the promise of being a serious rival to Kane, at least thematically – but the complete film has never been assembled into a final form, let alone released.

Karp’s book may be the first thorough history of the production of Wind, and while some of the stories sound slightly exaggerated or apocryphal, it’s still a feast for Welles aficionados eager to uncover the mystery of what went on during those six years. “The reasons you’ve not seen this film are wide-ranging and bizarre,” writes Karp. “They involve everything from the Iranian Revolution and runaway egos to greed, petty long-held grudges, bad accounting… self-destructive behaviour and an ever-expanding list of individuals who believed they had a… right to the film itself.”

All this chaos over an incomplete, low-budget art-house production about the seventieth birthday party of a fictional movie director, Jake Hannaford. A filmmaking and adventuring legend, played by actual filmmaking and adventuring legend John Huston, the macho Hannaford was inspired mostly by Ernest Hemingway, with whom Welles had a ridiculous fistfight in the 1930s. The twist of Wind, meant to be revealed at the beginning (à la Kane), is that Hannaford dies at the end of the day in a mysterious car crash that may or may not be a suicide. Among the many party guests: John Dale (Bob Random), the handsome star of Hannaford’s new film (which Welles intended as a cruel parody of Michelangelo Antonioni’s work); Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich, who replaced Rich Little), Hannaford’s protégé; Charles Pister (Joseph McBride), a socially awkward cinephile; and Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg, who replaced Bogdanovich’s wife, Polly Platt), a bitchy, pretentious film critic that was a thinly disguised caricature of Pauline Kael. (Kael had recently authored the controversial essay “Raising Kane”, which questioned Welles’ authorship of the Kane screenplay, and Welles was a tad bitter. “A rat of a woman,” Welles called Riche.)

Welles was an endless source of stories – both as an accomplished raconteur himself and as a subject of Hollywood gossip – so it’s only natural that Orson Welles’s Last Movie contains loads of bizarre and funny anecdotes. Among them is the account of how cinematographer Gary Graver came to work on Wind. A lifelong Welles fan, Graver found out Welles was in Hollywood preparing a new film and, on a whim, cold-called him from the fabled Schwab’s pharmacy on Sunset Boulevard. He hired Graver instantly because, according to Welles, no film technician had phoned up and asked to work with him since Gregg Toland, the cinematographer for Kane.

But Graver almost regretted the new partnership during the first interview when, completely out of nowhere, Welles suddenly threw him onto the ground and pinned him there. It turned out that Welles was merely trying to hide them both from Rosemary’s Baby star Ruth Gordon, who was passing by a window. “If she’d seen me,” Welles told Graver afterwards, “she’d have come in here and talked and talked and talked…”

(Side note: I saw Graver speak at an introduction to a screening of Welles’ rarely seen documentary Filming Othello in Toronto back in 2000. I had no idea until reading this book that he’d died of cancer in 2006.)

Also amusing is the time that Welles introduced Little to Huston, who’d never heard of the famed Canadian celebrity impersonator. “He’s probably the world’s greatest impressionist,” Welles said to Huston – who thought Welles meant that Little was a visual artist.

“I have a lot of paintings, and that’s one of my hobbies,” Huston told Little. “I’m thrilled.”

Orson Welles’s Last Movie isn’t without its moments of pathos as well – including the cruel way Welles treated Bogdanovich, who idolized the old master. It was uncomfortably clear that Otterlake had been inspired by Bogdanovich himself, particularly in the character’s mentoring relationship with Hannaford, and Welles eventually dismissed Bogdanovich from his life in a way that paralleled how Hannaford betrays Otterlake in Wind. Another moment tinged with bitter irony is Welles’ reluctant acceptance of a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute in 1975 – in the end, pitiful compensation from a town that wanted to honour Welles, but wouldn’t dare support his art financially.

Of course the book is also an intimate look at the middle-aged Welles, as an artist and as a larger-than-life personality. In Karp’s telling, Welles is both the daring godfather of indie filmmaking and a flamboyant, self-destructive eccentric. He shows Welles as a man of endless appetites and random verbal abuse, of overconfidence and bad instincts for money, of undeniable brilliance and crippling loneliness.

“To the crew, Orson was like the Wizard of Oz,” Karp describes, “both a gigantic, omnipotent force who infused the set with electricity from the moment he arrived, and also a mere mortal, prone to outbursts and childish emotions when things didn’t go his way.”

And what of Karp’s main subject, The Other Side of the Wind? Like many of Welles’ post-Kane films, it’s a mess and a masterpiece at the same time. Or at least that’s the impression you get. Orson Welles’s Last Movie can’t emulate the experience of watching a film that may never be completed or released (although a recent Indiegogo campaign gave it another shot), but it sure whets your appetite for it.

“It’s about a bastard director. It’s about us, John,” Welles reportedly told Huston about the movie. As one of the greatest bastard directors of all time, he must have known his subject well.

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