48 YEARS IN THE MAKING, ORSON WELLES’S LAST FILM IS FINALLY RELEASED

The Other Side of the Wind, long considered one of the most famous films never released, arrives on Netflix this November.

Craig Hubert

Orson Welles on set of The Other Side Of The Wind

In the beginning of 1970, Orson Welles returned to the United States. It had been 29 years since Citizen Kane was released in theaters, and much of his work in the interim was plagued with issues: squabbles with producers, lack of funding, bad press. Films were left unfinished or altered without his consent. He had spent most of the previous decade in Europe, the second of two exiles from the United States that, while productive, helped perpetuate a fall-from-grace narrative in the popular press that mirrored his most famous screen character. “I drag my myth around with me,” he told the critic Kenneth Tynan in a 1967 interview.

Welles still drags around that myth 33 years after his death. Nowhere is this more evident than in the controversy surrounding The Other Side of the Wind, the filmmaker’s most notorious unfinished project. After decades of legal complications and various attempts at completion, the film will finally reach the public, following a series of festival screenings — it premiered at Telluride in August, and will be presented at the New York Film Festival later this month — via Netflix, which provided last-minute funding and will add the film to its streaming service starting November 2.

Welles began shooting Other Wind — its abbreviated clapboard title during production — in August 1970, not long after his return to the United States. Its origins date back to a confrontation with Ernest Hemingway over a decade prior. Welles was hired to record the narration, written by Hemingway, for Joris Ivens’s documentary The Spanish Earth. During a preliminary meeting, Welles suggested some changes. The novelist made a homophobic remark, which led to a fist fight. “Oh, Mr. Hemingway, you think because you’re so big and strong and have hair on your chest,” the writer Joseph McBride, in his book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?,  quotes Welles as replying in mock-mochismo defense.

Although he would have kinder words to say about Hemingway later in life, Welles used the encounter as inspiration for the protagonist of Other Wind. The film revolves around the debauched 70th birthday party of the gruff, hard-drinking Jake Hannaford (John Huston), a veteran director working on a project that mirrors the pretensions of the then-burgeoning, auteur-influenced New Hollywood. Shadowed by a parade of followers — young filmmakers, photographers, reporters, producers — Hannaford struggles to raise money for his flashy, gratuitous-sex-laden film. But attempts to screen finished sections keep comically failing, and Hannaford, who also harbors unrequited feelings for the film’s male lead, seems to descend into mental collapse……………

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