The director of Citizen Kane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch Of Evil never finished his final film, The Other Side of the Wind. But in an event that’s been put off for over 40 years, Orson Welles’ The Other Side Of The Wind will finally premiere at the Venice Film Festival and the New York Film Festival before it hits selected cinemas, and Netflix, on Friday, November 2.
Directed by Welles and produced by Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza, The Other Side Of The Wind is a satire of both the classic studio system and the “New Hollywood that was shaking things up”, framed as a mockumentary that incorporates a film-within-a-film satirising Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura , La Notte, L’Eclisse, Blowup).
The Other Side Of The Wind centers on grizzled director J.J. “Jake” Hannaford (John Huston), the “Hemingway of directors,” according to the trailer. He has been playing god for so long, some people can’t tell them apart. Surrounded by fans and skeptics, he returns to Los Angeles after years in self-exile in Europe with plans to complete work on his own innovative comeback movie. Welles, as ever, loved to make movies about great and incomparable men that were actually all about him.
“Beset by financial issues, the production ultimately stretched years and gained notoriety, never to be completed or released,” reads the official synopsis. “More than a thousand reels of film negatives languished in a Paris vault until March of 2017.”
Producers Frank Marshall (who was Welles’s production manager during the initial shoot, before co-founding Amblin with Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy), and Filip Jan Rymsza reassembled a technical team, including Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski, and spearheaded efforts to complete the film. The Other Side Of The Wind features a new score by Oscar-winning composer Michel Legrand. Welles’s last artistic testament “is a time capsule of a now-distant era in moviemaking as well as the long-awaited ‘new’ work from an indisputable master,” reads the press statement.
You can watch the trailer here: