Blogs in Focus: Editors Blog

After yesterday's footage of Orson Welles performing magic on I Love Lucy, we move ahead to Welles' great unfinished opus The Other Side of the Wind.

The clip below, posted online just a month ago, is of an unrestrained improvisation session from 1971 involving directors Paul Mazursky and Henry Jaglom, with a quick burst of Dennis Hopper in the middle. The portion of The Other Side of the Wind from which this comes is described in Welles' script thusly: "CUT TO: SERIES OF SHORT SCENES (IMPROVISED) Between various types...including some celebrities." Welles pitted these real-life directors against each other as filmmakers debating the relative merits of the film's main character, Jake Hannaford, but seemed to favor chaos over coherence, as Mazursky recalls:

"So then, after every ten minutes – they were all ten minute single takes – Welles would say, 'Cut, and don't say a word, it's a masterpiece!' Then he'd laugh, 'Ha, ha, ha.' So throughout the night he kept giving me more and more brandy and I got so drunk, by the end of the night I didn't know where I was!"

The cast featured a large number of directors and in addition to Mazursky, Jaglom and Hopper The Other Side of the Wind featured appearances by Curtis Harrington, Peter Bogdanovich and Claude Chabrol while John Huston played the lead role of Hannaford. Welles claimed that Ernest Hemingway (who Huston resembled) was the major inspiration for Hannaford and actively refuted the idea that the role was autobiographical: "Orson would say, 'It's not me, so never talk about him as being Orson Welles, but just refer to him as Jake,' and then he'd laugh, 'Ha, ha, ha,'" remembers Mazursky. Nevertheless, it is very obvious that Hannaford – the great but unappreciated auteur returning from self-imposed exile in Europe to make his last bid for mainstream success – is, at the very least, Welles' alter ego.

While shooting the scene below, Welles fed Hannaford's lines to Mazursky and Jaglom because Huston was not available that day. The film was self-funded by Welles, meaning that it was shot sporadically whenever there was enough money and enough of the right people were around. This was Welles' shooting method on all of his final films and as a result none of them were completed, though The Other Side of the Wind has come close at a number of points. Just over a year ago, Bogdanovich – who has been a champion for the film – reported that the film was being edited and a deal to release it in late 2008 was "99.9% finished;" in March of this year, though, he said that there was still a year's worth of work to be done.

Welles aficionados have speculated that the appearance of these scenes online could indicate that The Other Side of the Wind is nearing completion. Given that fans have been waiting 36 years already, we can but hope that their suspicions are well-founded.