Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1250007089
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the summer of 1970 legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe and decided it was time to make a comeback movie. Coincidentally it was the story of a legendary self-destructive director who returns to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe. Welles swore it wasn't autobiographical.
The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day, and Welles planned to shoot it in eight weeks. It took twelve years and remains unreleased and largely unseen. Orson Welles's Last Movie by Josh Karp is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of the bizarre, hilarious and remarkable making of what has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen." Funded by the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law, and based on a script that Welles rewrote every night for years, a final attempt to one-up his own best-work. It's almost impossible to tell if art is imitating life or vice versa in the film. It's a production best encompassed by its star, John Huston, who described the making of the film as "an adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing."
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (BFI Film Classics)
Death Wish (Deep Focus, Book 2)
The Heist Film: Stealing with Style (Short Cuts)
Odd Man Out (BFI Film Classics)
Double Indemnity (BFI Film Classics)
Movie Love: Complete Reviews 1988-1991
Welles, who was working the camera. After Welles instructs Huston to drive both fast and recklessly along a canal, Huston makes the same confession as the one he made after driving the wrong way on the highway—namely that he’d barely driven in thirty years. Hearing this Little asked to be let out of the car. Attempting to calm him, Huston explained that if god forbid they did drive into the canal, having Welles in the backseat would take them down so rapidly that they would be quickly put out of
FBI visiting his house. Probably still editing The Last Movie when he shot his scenes in November 1970, the disoriented Hopper is strangely compelling and captures the essence of all that he embodied, talking about how the idea of “a god-director” (later he says, “I’m still confused about the area of the magician as director”) is “a very dangerous area”; then he unknowingly points to a theme at the heart of The Other Side of the Wind when he says, “The whole thing becomes a movie in front of
turn-of-the-century midwestern family that loses everything when it fails to acknowledge the changes in society represented by the automobile. A bittersweet and nostalgic look at a lost era, not so unlike the one in which his father thrived, Ambersons was a richly textured masterpiece that some thought was better than Kane. If only Orson had been allowed to finish it. Instead, after faring poorly at two previews in Pomona (at which many audience members said it was a remarkable film), spooked RKO
paying for good wine, rich meals, and huge cigars by performing his act as a connoisseur and bon vivant. And ultimately it would be his physical stature that many took as a reflection of his excess. To the world he seemed satiated, overstuffed, and anything but hungry. But in 1970, Orson was more than hungry; he was ravenous. Underneath the image, the myths, and the big body, he was starving both to live and to make movies. And the movie he was starving to make was The Other Side of the Wind,
necessarily incurred on behalf of the film.” After the financial breakdown, the audit assessed that the film had no current value, as it was incomplete and work seemed to have stopped after Welles rejected Astrophore’s contract proposals. Thus, for Boushehri to recoup any of his investment, the movie would have to be completed and released, which meant spending more money, an unlikely proposition given Welles’s current relationship with his backers. Meanwhile, Astrophore’s ace in the hole was
