Indiegogo campaign to finish the movie

Is Oja Kodar holding up ‘The Other Side of the Wind’?
August 10, 2015
Oja Kodar, seen here at a May 2015 Welles retrospective.
Oja Kodar, seen here at a May 2015 Welles retrospective.
By RAY KELLY

For 30 years, Oja Kodar has been given a pass by Wellesians.

Let's be honest, no one has asked tough questions about her relationship with Orson Welles – mistress, artistic collaborator and/or real-life Susan Alexander Kane? And there have been missteps in her handling of his legacy.

The late Jess Franco takes the blame for the cinematic abortion that was Don Quijote de Orson Welles. Oja, who served as associate producer and general supervisor of that 1992 mess, pocketed her check and was not pilloried by critics or Welles aficionados. Her partisans say she was in desperate need of cash to assist her family in war-torn Yugoslavia. If true, it explains her decision to sell Don Quixote, but it does not excuse her failure to better protect his most cherished project.

The kindest thing that can be said of Oja's handling of the Welles legacy is when she deposited or sold off his unfinished works and papers, she chose respected museums in the U.S. and Germany. However, save for the brief limited edition publication of two screenplays decades ago, much of Welles' unfinished works remains largely unseen by the general public, especially in the U.S., 30 years after his death.

And, now we face the sad realization that Oja may be stalling the completion of The Other Side of the Wind.

In Joseph McBride's What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, Wellesians first learned of the troubled efforts to finish TOSOTW and how Oja and Peter Bogdanovich sacked McBride, a key player in brokering a $3 million deal with Showtime to finish TOSOTW in 1999. The pact soon fell apart. In Josh Karp's Orson Welles's Last Movie, numerous individuals (investors, attorneys, executives and others) who have been involved with the project during the last 15 years all told a variation on the same tale in which Oja derailed attempts to complete the film by: reneging on agreements; pitting investors against each other; secretly shopping for better deals and shifting her allegiances at critical junctures. Oja's actions prompted an attorney for the Boushehri family, a co-owner of the film, to write in a 2007 memo: "We have been waiting for many years for her to agree to a deal... My own personal feeling is that she is incapable of making a deal with anyone... Our client has never been the problem. Kodar has been."

The past 10 months have done little to dispel the portrait drawn in those books. Here's a quick recap:

Oct. 28, 2014: Oja tells the New York Times she is granting her rights to TOSOTW, which she inherited from Welles, to producers Frank Marshall, Filip Jan Rymsza and Jens Koethner Kaul for what is believed to be a seven-figure sum.
November 5-9, 2014: Producers shop for distributors at the American Film Market in Santa Monica.
December 2014: Producers learn that distributors want to see edited TOSOTW footage from the negative before committing money. This requires producers to secure completion funds.
Feb. 27, 2015: At the Sedona International Film Festival, Rymsza, Beatrice Welles and several members of the original TOSOTW cast and crew discuss the movie's past and future.
April 21, 2015: Orson Welles's Last Movie is published, providing fans with a detailed look at the film's troubled past and Oja's role as an obstacle.
May 7, 2015: Affonso Gonçalves is tapped to edit TOSOTW. A crowdfunding campaign is launched with strong statements of support from producers, Beatrice Welles and Bogdanovich, while Oja is conspicuously absent.
May 2015: Rymsza, Marshall, Bogdanovich and Beatrice Welles drum up support for TOSOTW in interviews on television, radio, Internet and print. Oja does not participate.
May 9, 2015: Oja speaks at Woodstock, Illinois, where there is no mention of TOSOTW. A planned filming by Marshall of her talk is dropped at Oja's request. Later, a festival participant tells Wellesnet there is a dissatisfaction in Oja's camp with how producers have handled the contract.
May 13-24, 2015: Rymsza travels solo to the Cannes Film Festival to seek potential investors.
June 8, 2015: Oja is nearly silent about TOSOTW at an University of Michigan symposium with participants privately telling Wellesnetters that she did not want to discuss the movie and objected to participation by producers, which explained a last-minute cancellation by Rymsza. Oja dismissed a question about the crowdfunding effort with the conversation-stopper: "I don't believe the film will ever come out."
July 6, 2015: With $406,405 raised through crowdfunding and other funding sources identified, Rymsza tells Wellesnet the negative will soon leave Paris and editing will commence in California within two weeks.
July 2015: Oja refuses to honor the previously agreed-upon deal, accept payment and sign off on the negative's release, according to multiple sources familiar with her role in the process.
July 24, 2015: Jonathan Rosenbaum, a friend of Oja and advocate of her role in the creation of TOSOTW, tells the Italian website Quinlan that "there is also a problem of contracts that should be negotiated again." (The interview was likely conducted during the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato festival, June 24-July 7).
Today: The negative remains locked away outside Paris.
Questions posed to the producers and Oja's representative have so far gone unanswered.

Wellesians can speculate on Oja's motives. Among the theories: She wants a guarantee the film-within-a-film sequences starring her will be as prominent as she would wish; once TOSOTW is released, she ceases to be a player, and she loves the game far more than she cares to admit; or she is simply hoping to wring as much money out the producers as possible, even if her behavior is counterproductive and self-defeating. One onlooker quipped, "Who would have thought it would be easier dealing with the Iranian royal family than Oja Kodar?"

Robert Random and Oja Kodar in a scene from "The Other Side of the Wind."
Robert Random and Oja Kodar in The Other Side of the Wind.
Obviously, Marshall, Rymsza and Kaul could abandon TOSOTW as others have, but so far they haven't.

They are apparently still trying to find a way to work this out. Certainly, everyone with a serious interest in Welles and his work hopes a reasonable deal can be reached without further delay. Given Welles' importance to modern cinema and the effort he and others put into making the film, it would be a sin to allow the film to remain unfinished – especially since he made it clear to friends that he wanted this film completed.

With a chill between Oja and producers taking place behind the scenes, doubts were raised publicly by some Oja partisans over the qualifications of the production team.

Let's settle that here. There are no two established filmmakers more familiar with the material that needs to be edited than Marshall, the original line producer during the 1970s shoot and now a successful Hollywood producer (The Color Purple, Jurassic World), and TOSOTW co-star Peter Bogdanovich, a successful director (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon) and devoted Welles disciple. And while Rymsza and Kaul may not have been part of the original crew, they have worked tirelessly over the years to complete Welles' last movie.

Whom else could we trust to complete TOSOTW? Cinematographer Gary Graver and star John Huston are sadly no longer with us. Certainly not Oja, given her track record with Don Quixote, directing the amateurish Jaded or "co-directing" the uneven documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band.

In a less complicated world, Affonso Gonçalves would have already been weeks into editing TOSOTW, but the 1,083 reels remain locked away outside Paris, pending the resolution of an impasse between Oja and producers.

All of this is very troubling, but at least it is comforting to know there are people committed to completing TOSOTW and honoring Orson Welles' legacy – let's hope Oja is one of them.

POSTSCRIPT: Filip Jan Rymsza confirmed to Hollywood Elsewhere the day after publication of this article that editing on "The Other Side of the Wind" will not commence until an addendum to last October’s agreement with Oja Kodar is signed by her legal representative, possibly at the end of August. In a blog post and comments written in response to this article, actor Erik Van Beuzekom and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum said Oja complained in May she had not yet been paid. It is unknown if that statement is accurate or if there were contractual conditions she did not meet. Further, it does not explain why she would refuse to accept payment in July and release the negative. Van Beuzekom noted that Oja's niece instructed Woodstock festival organizer Michael Dawson to tell Frank Marshall's film crew that they were not welcome. Rosenbaum described Oja as woman who is "emotionally traumatized by decades of labor, effort, and negotiations" with an "aversion for the world of show-biz and the media." He noted that Marshall "could pay for the film's completion in a second but is interested only in acquiring a percentage of the film's future profits." The argument makes little sense. Marshall made his money producing the blockbuster "Indiana Jones," "Back To The Future" and "Bourne" franchises and Welles' films have not performed well at the box office. Speaking at Chapman University on Sept. 11, Peter Bogdanovich confirmed that Oja has been holding up the project and stands to receive $1.4 million if a deal is completed.

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