Big News!
Story from London Times, 5/9/05:
The resurrections of Orson Welles
From Dalya Alberge in Venice
A collaboration with John Huston will finally arrive on screen after epic legal battle
AN UNSEEN masterpiece by two giants of the cinema, Orson Welles and John Huston, could be released for the first time next year — 30 years after it was filmed.
The Other Side of the Wind, in which Welles directed Huston playing an unpleasant film director, has languished in a bank vault since 1976.
A complex legal wrangle involving the original investors, friends and family is nearing a resolution, two decades after both legendary filmmakers died.
Huston’s son, Danny, told The Times yesterday: “I’ve seen the footage. It’s absolutely fascinating.” His father directed classics including The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, but had begun his film career as an actor and returned to it in the 1960s.
Welles made Citizen Kane and also starred in The Third Man. His innovative cinematographic and sound techniques continue to influence filmmakers worldwide.
The Other Side of the Wind was their second collaboration — the first was Moby Dick, in which Huston directed Welles — and was intended to be Welles’s last major directorial effort. He died in 1985, followed by Huston two years later.
The reason the film has never been released, Danny Huston said, is that “no one can figure out who owns it”.
As a result, it has been stuck in legal limbo. A tussle over the rights is said to have involved Mehdi Bouscheri, a relative of the Shah of Iran, Oja Kodar, a Croatian actress and Welles’s companion, and Beatrice, his daughter.
Welles and Kodar had invested around $1 million in the project and a similar sum came from Bouscheri’s company, l’Astrophore. Reports suggest that when $250,000 was embezzled by an investor, Bouscheri agreed to make up the difference if l’Astrophore received an 80 per cent stake in the film.
A row flared up and a Paris court ordered the two parties to sort out the details themselves. Welles repeatedly flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Paris but failed to resolve the dispute.
It is believed that an agreement to release the film is now close.
Welles, who had edited 50 minutes of the film, asked his close friend, Peter Bogdanovich, the actor and director who starred in it, to finish the film should anything happen to him. He gave him extensive editing notes.
With Kodar, who also appeared in the film, Bogdanovich has fulfilled that promise.
The Other Side of the Wind has been described as a complicated exercise in film-making, a film within a film that traces the last 24 hours in the life of Jake Hannaford, a director who is past his prime.
Bogdanovich plays Brooks Otterlake, Hannaford’s former protégé, whose own success has eclipsed the veteran director’s.
When Welles was asked by Huston about its story, he reportedly said: “It’s about a bastard director who’s full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”
Mr Huston spoke to The Times yesterday before the premiere of his latest film, The Constant Gardener, at the Venice International Film Festival. It co-stars Ralph Fiennes and will open The Times bfi London Film Festival on October 19.
Link to original: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-10889-1765086,00.html