Orson Welles' at-long-last assembled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Venice! 122 minutes.

http://www.wellesnet.com/other-side-wind-world-premiere/

woah!

I dread this but of course I'd watch.

Have you seen the 3 minutes of the sex in the car scene that's been shown for 30 years?

excited for this

xp I remember seeing that and some of the party footage with Huston and Bogdanovich on the featurette about unfinished Welles projects on the "F for Fake" Criterion DVD. (Still wish we could've gotten "The Deep.")

I've seen the surviving workprint of The Deep. I strongly suspect it wasn't a masterpiece.

i had a bootleg dvd cut of the first 40 minutes uploaded to a torrent site by someone using a cheeky pseudonym

it was fucking awesome and i look forward to seeing the whole thing

there was supposedly other circulating footage beyond that even (courtesy of a ridiculously detailed wikipedia article i read a couple years ago) but the welles estate does a pretty good job at suppressing the distribution of the stuff that has leaked

Gonna be nothing but Huston telling dick jokes for two hours.

well, that's an ironic crack, if you know the twist ending!

added to the NYFF

https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2018/daily/orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-nyff56-special-events/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMWHBUTHmf0

Never thought I'd see a trailer much less the movie but here we are indeed.

can't watch with sound atm but christ

Plus a poster:

http://www.wellesnet.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/TOSOTW_poster.jpg

damn

haha, this is wild!

who are the other 2 faces in that poster art with Huston, Bogdo, and Oja Kodar?

can't believe this is happening

xp one is definitely Anton Chigurh, don't know about the other.

susan strasberg?

yes i think so

Likely that Robert Random guy, who I believe has the film w/in the film's sex scene with Oja. He has no credits since 1990, wonder if he'll do press?

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0709947/

I'm not sure I knew Michel Legrand was scoring this

https://thefilmstage.com/trailer/first-trailer-for-orson-welles-the-other-side-of-the-wind-previews-the-cinematic-event-of-the-year/

'His last film' seems p debatable

I mean it's marketing guff, but I don't have any major objection

likely seeing Sept 29 at NYFF

I imagine the Q&A's at these fest screenings could be quite lively for a change

Glenn Kenny: no masterpiece, but a staggering "vehicle for self-loathing"

https://www.rogerebert.com/festivals-and-awards/venice-film-festival-2018-a-star-is-born-the-other-side-of-the-wind

no masterpiece, but a staggering "vehicle for self-loathing"

my new tinder bio

Have my ticket!

Jonathan Rosenbaum weighs in on Letterboxd (5 stars):

Scary, elusive, easy to misunderstand, and radical.

so mad TIFF didn't pick this up, lots of bizarre omissions this year

as someone noted on twitter, logging it as a rewatch is a powermove

Big Crit Energy

Oh. I thought you were going to post:

As we all know, though, one way of looking at the story of “A Star Is Born”—and the new film starring Cooper and Lady Gaga in what deserves to be called a breakout performance (and I don’t really care how you think her mouth looks when she sings, buddy)

Don’t know when this gets to Seattle but next month there’s a screening of Too Much Johnson with live score from William Tyler.

too much johnson is always better than not enough johnson

I sat through the TLJ footage... there IS too much, and it's not a movie.

TMJ, rather

hmmmmmmmmmmmm

Sort of his The Last Movie crossed with Stardust Memories, with all the praise and damnation that implies.

Too much Bogdanovich (esp his fucking impressions) and film-within-the-film (tho it's very handsomely shot). Norman Foster and Lilli Palmer impress, along with Huston.

Sort of his The Last Movie crossed with Stardust Memories

That...is something. What did Kevin say, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls directed by Raul Ruiz I think.

yeah, he's on crack :)

I mean I figure it's essentially of a technical piece with F for Fake.

I'm guessing KJB and I are going to be on the same wavelength on this one.

oh do u

I rewatched Fake Friday night; it's a trifle, mostly.

Someone on the panel after the film, maybe Scorsese, pointed out that Welles' economic constraints centered his later films in the editing. Bogdanovich asked Welles why he wasn't doing sleek master shots like in the '40s, and the answer was essentially "I don't have the money and time."

e.g. this film has the usual scenes where 3 actors are in three different countries, cut together

Makes sense because Bogdanovich often talks as if in three different countries.

Free screening in Santa Monica next week, capping a week of (not free) double features.

Manohla Dargis' qualified endorsement today is roughly in line with my feelings. Michael Phillips is correct that it's a "ghostly affair."

https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-other-side-of-the-wind/critic-reviews

I liked Odie Henderson's too (though I think Welles finecut the Hannaford sexploitation segments):

https://www.laweekly.com/movies/the-other-side-of-the-wind-9830972

I am obviously v excited to see this but not surprised that the editing would not be up to Welles' standards, editing being one of his greatest talents

xp Odie is a friend, but I could give two shits about what Joe Schmo thinks about Welles' long-lost project

well yeah

I don't know how detailed Welles' notes on his intended edits were, but as I noted in Scorsese's observation above it seems the budget/resource limitations of the shooting dictated a staccato editing rhythm (which was only true of early Welles in certain sequences... here it's pretty much start to finish).

yeah, makes sense. F for Fake is like that too

Which is among the best-edited movies ever, or thereabouts.

yeah I love it

Touch of Evil is playing at the Castro next wednesday and would be super-hard for me to get to but I am sorely tempted... I actually just watched in on netflix a couple weeks ago and at the time I thought to myself how great it would be to see it on the big screen and so

I am still gobsmacked by any accusations of greatness leveled at F for Fake, after rewatching it just before Other Side.

for once he doesn't bother trying to convey anything with any emotional weight or resonance and just focuses on one of the things he does best - a series of dazzling tricks. sometimes that's enough.

and it's funny!

Yes, to all of that.

Even though I remember resonance alongside the rest.

Frauds like the French guy and Clifford Irving just don't interest me. The Chartes cathedral scene is brilliant, I'll give ya that. (for the voiceover and the writing as well as that soft hazy image)

and nobody fell for the Oja-Picasso thing the first time, did they? Maybe Merv Griffin.

btw in THIS film, Manohla Dargis otm on how Oja is seen/employed.

That she got away with the line about Oja's ass surprised me.

F is For Fake delivers on what the title promises: a sleigh of hand, a delicious legerdemain. It needn't be overpraise.

Joseph McBride weighs in on some Oja-related authorship issues

http://www.wellesnet.com/authorship-other-side-wind/

Gosh -- still processing this after one viewing but, if anything, the hippie hangout/reatroom/night sex drive sequence is remarkable, paychedelic filmmaking. Bravo, Orson, Graver and co.

on Netflix

Also, the accompanying documentary is really good. And sad. And funny.

finally got around to giving this a watch. it's hilarious and trashy and pathetic. it's not a Great Film but i'm not interested in the whole Great Film mythos around welles. it's also very different in substance (though not spirit) from the 40 minutes of rough footage i saw, which barely glanced at the topic of welles' gay panic (not sure of the provenance, perhaps mcbride-era?)

the one thing i liked least about this edit - i wasn't a fan of most of the music, though the shitty blue cheer jam was spot-on and fantastic.

welles' gay panic

he doesn't seem to have been particularly panicked about it afaict. He loved to insinuate he'd had gay relationships.

this is my planned election-night viewing btw

Welles and Kodar's last script The Big Brass Ring finally makes the homo subtexts the text.

Two of Welles' key theatre mentors, Micheál Mac Liammóir (who played Iago in his Othello) and Hilton Edwards, were a gay couple; they founded the Gate Theatre in Dublin. I don't think there's much if any gay panic on Welles' part in Other Side -- he intended it partly as a critique of machismo.

btw I'd refer you to that Wellesnet piece above -- McBride says the "car sex" sequence was shaved down to 4.5 minutes from 7 for the official release. So much for honoring OW's intentions, eh? You'll have to wait for the disc to see the whole thing.

It certainly felt like seven, in the best sense.

Welles also intimated that Houseman was in love with him, and he did what he could do encourage it.

"gay panic" maybe isn't the word but there's something definitely self-lacerating about his approach to the topic, well, ok, those were the times he lived in and maybe he couldn't have been any different. the scene between hannaford and john dale's teacher is still extremely brutal, they both come off as essentially kevin spaceys.

i'm pretty sure i've seen the seven minute car sex sequence. it's a great scene and i should probably watch it again (honestly i'd like to see a compilation of just the footage from hannaford's film-within-a-film) but i don't think any of welles' work within this period should be considered sacrosanct and unalterable.

That sequence was, of course, shot over 3 years in his driveway (and a couple other locations).

I scribbled a couple things about it.

have you ever seen that cable movie someone made of Big Brass Ring? Not sposed to be much.

oh it's awful -- nothing survived

so i did rewatch the rough footage comp. the whole thing is in 4:3, which doesn't do the film-within-a-film any favors. the editing in the scene where billy tries to explain the film to the studio bigwig comes across as much choppier. the scene also runs continuously, gives it a much different feel. it's also longer, with both more argument regarding the film and scenes of for instance dale trying and failing to start his motorcycle numerous times. the car sex scene does run a full seven minutes, but to my mind does contain the essence of the sequence. there's less tension-building foreplay, sure, but the overall sense is still conveyed from what's left, particularly given the presence of the preceding bathroom orgy (previously unknown footage, revelatory to me) in the finished film. the windstorm on the backlot comes across much differently in this comp than it does in the film - it's more truncated, ending with kodar's character stabbing the fabric around the pillar. i sort of like its abruptness, it again has a much different feel, but the full sequence with the inflatable penises and all that is probably better-accomplished.

anyway, it probably didn't _need_ to be finished, but i'm glad it was. it's better for being completed. i'm glad that it was done in a way that was faithful to the spirit of welles and kodar's work.

i should also mention that bogdanovich's introduction is, obviously, a completely redone version of the original intro, which places the events of that evening as "last summer". aside from the time difference the intro is not significantly rewritten, though the accompanying footage is much changed. the scene with billy and the studio bigwig also has some weird snapshot effects at the beginning which i don't remember being present in the final version.

watched last night, agree w the consensus that seems to be forming around this - a lot of interesting stuff, but not a classic or fully-formed work by any means. It's one of those things where you get a sense of the material chafing at its constraints, the stitching shows and it gets a little shapeless. Bogdanovich def gets annoying. Still, some great sequences and ideas shine through.

for all it's meta-narrative conceits and internal references, it's kind of remarkable how *little* like Welles the Jake Hannaford character is. Welles was not this macho showman universally hailed for making stars out of actors or with particularly intense relationships w younger actors afaict, and he certainly wouldn't have made anything quite like the film-within-a-film shown here, which (as others have noted) is closer to something like Zabriskie Point or one of the "acid westerns" than anything in Welles' ouevre. Welles loved dialogue too much, for one thing.

Hannaford seems more like a mashup of Hemingway and John Ford than being a Welles stand-in.

Still Bogdo said when he did his last scene with Hannaford (he played it with Welles beyond the frame, not Huston), Orson's only direction was "It's us."

well the on-screen relationship between Hannaford and Ottersley does seem like the Welles/Bogdo relationship.

But yeah Hannaford seems more like Hemingway or Ford and maybe a little bit of Peckinpah...? Have to say a bunch of the overlapping dialogue/party scenes and general anti-Hollywood snarkiness made me think of Altman too

The lead actor in the movie-in-a-movie was hawt, such a passive object of desire

...and he unmistakably looked like the lead in Zabriskie Point.

I think filmmakers who were Welles' '40s/50s contemporaries would've been more on his mind (though he was much closer to Altman's age than Ford's). No shortage of old macho directors though, eg Raoul Walsh. And, uh, Huston:

http://fightland.vice.com/blog/the-time-john-huston-threw-down-with-errol-flynn

The lead actor

how can you forget such an awesome name as BOB RANDOM

btw Bob Random says Oja Kodar didn't direct shit.

like we're going to take the word of some random

really enjoying the accompanying doc, christ Orson was a good interview

i'll be seeing that Sunday at MoMA; was worried about the chilly NYT (?) review that said TOO MUCH BOGDANOVICH

eh I'd say it has the appropriate amount of Bogdo

between OW's centennial and this film, i'm a bit tired of his voice. Rick Moranis could do a great Pontificating Peter lampoon, I bet (but only 50,000 cineastes would get the joke).

I like Neville's doc more than Other Side, don't @ me.

I like the doc because it has air of Welles' voice.

A lot of, rather

the footage of Jeanne Moreau chatting w/ OW made me wonder how much they discussed Antonioni.

nice to have that Huston-Rich Little 'impressionist' story immortalized

the footage of Jeanne Moreau chatting w/ OW made me wonder how much they discussed Antonioni.

no

You can see it here: Old time actors and directors that you were surprised to find out were married to each other once upon a time

I’ll save you one click: https://handkeonline.onb.ac.at/sites/handkeonline.at/files/styles/fullscreen/public/images/pool/sph-lw-s69-1.jpg?itok=18mynEyj

Genuine wow @ that.

It continues to fascinate

Unfortunately it did force me to wiki Handke and discover he is a complete arse these days and has been for some decades.

Ha, that’s true, although I did enjoy seeing him tear into Ian Buruma at MoMA a few years back.

In They'll Love Me, that Tonight Show clip of OW and Burt Reynolds bashing Bogdanovich, and the story of the two letters, are perhaps the last word on the Welles-Bogdo relationship.

"I'm Marvin P. Fassbender."

"Of course you are."

(that actor is in a bunch of John Carpenter films, it seems)

I like Neville's doc more than Other Side, don't @ me.

I think I may have too, tbh? although there was some incredibly stupid stuff in it - Alan Cummings, Star Wars footage etc

god I wanted to hurl a film reel at Cummings' neck

yeah, I docked it a notch for onscreen emceeing

I think Star Wars bringing an end to the New Hollywood, and Orson's imagined window of opportunity, is legit.

oh I think the underlying point is accurate and fine, using cutesy editing of Star Wars footage as an allegory of Orson's struggles was just going too far with it.

hey it's Netflix! i saw it at MoMA with a Neville Q&A after, and there was inevitable discussion of the similarities btwn Welles and Fred Rogers...

...

They were mavericks!

In case you didn't know, Neville did the Mr Rogers doc, which looks poised to win the Oscar and many other awards.

yeah I know, I haven't bothered with it

Suicide AND Yes - two of my fave ever groups - onnthe soundtrack made this much better in my eyea than it probably actually is. Still, a very good docu ( Cumming notwithstanding) and I like how low key Bogdo was in this. A bit too much Rich Little for me. Could never stand him even as a kid in the 70s when he was fuckin' EVERYWHERE on network TV.

but his experience with this film is pretty amazing, moreso when he wasn't really an actor!

Given that so much of the cast is dead, he was worth including.

Gary Graver, the DP, is sort of the tragic supporting player in the story -- Joe Calleia to Orson's Quinlan.

for me rich little is an absolutely essential part of the story, moreso given that he's not in the finished film

I agree that he was an essential part. I don't deny that. Still...a little Little goes a long way with me.

I wasn't really sure what to make of this on the whole, but it was kind of uncomfortable and a tough watch for me in a way I don't generally associate with Welles, partly I'm sure because Peter Bogdanovich makes my skin crawl and the men in this in general were disturbing/scary to me.

Just saw the Neville doc... So Welles liked to eat Fudgesicles and drink Fresca, I guess that was eye-opening

And eat giant bags of Fritos.

they didnt hit that stuff real hard

nothing about him setting the record at Pink's Hot Dogs

It also does not really go into the huge chunk of TOSOTW's funds that went toward catering.

I can't see the movie ever being completed decades later had they kept Rich Little. Orson's interest in him reminds me of David Lynch's inexplicable fascination w/ the YouTube funny accents guy he cast in Twin Peaks: The Return.

Found this intermittently interesting but mostly tedious. Too much of the party and not enough of the film, or the relationship between Huston and his male lead. The scene with the English teacher was intense.

I'll watch the doc next.

I won't say the doc is "better" than TOSOTW but it didn't bore in patches.

Finally watched this, a year after the hype. Really liked it, not a lot to say that hasn't been said. It is REALLY funny.

In all of the film-within-a-film footage I was waiting for the Pink Floyd soundtrack from Barbet Schroeder's "More" to kick in.