11/16/18: WELLES' LAST WORD

“Or so the story goes,” he claims, attempting to reconstruct an image or an idea which has been lost. The man is named Brooks Otterlake, and in the opening vignettes of The Other Side of the Wind, the late Orson Welles’ notoriously unfinished film, he gives a brief voiceover, hazily recalling in the setup what has possibly happened, and what we may see in the following two hours because of it. Fitting, as the entire saga of how the film was saved, labored upon, and released through Netflix after closing production forty-two years ago is itself a towering kind of reconstruction: attempting to complete and honor the vision of one of cinema’s greatest artists in history, and the scaffolding he left behind.  After Welles’ death in 1985, the movie and its parts had a most rocky trajectory, one that included the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, sections of footage being lost, and a heap of estate-asset balderdash (or so the story goes). The conflict itself contextualizes the miracle that a streaming service in the Bay Area could hunt for a film in the way that those in the Bay Area centuries ago did for gold.

       And gold it has certainly been seen as. Upon the most recent revival efforts, headed by Welles’ close friend Peter Bogdanovich (who acts in the piece, and provides that opening narration) and producer Filip Jan Rymsza, the momentum had finally started to surface, and through crowdfunding platforms such as Indiegogo, and numerous clamors by filmmakers-turned-activists, the movie’s final parts began to take shape. Surviving cast and crew gave their notes and recollections, Academy-Award winning mixers, editors, and production specialists were assembled, and Michel Legrand, a legendary jazz composer known for his work on the French New Wave films of the 1960s, was hired, based upon a single note Welles gave way back when about the possibility of a jazz score.                                        

       The movie’s existence incites more than just mere appreciation; it’s a testament to the love of those who fought for it. As ephemeral  as the medium of film may itself seem, the methodology of how to resurrect it is becoming swifter. In Welles’ time, he needed a fortune to maintain his work and keep it alive -- now, we are seeing regular people donate a coffee-cup price to an online campaign and altogether yielding an unfinished film to reach completion. The technologies are indeed changing -- not just of how we make movies, but of how we save them. So, then, it is only natural that the question then shifts to what we choose to save, and why we may choose it. It’s the question that binds us to why we watch movies in the first place, and what strange human component it must be that implores us, urges us, to remember movies, and to want to keep them alive.

       The finished film itself, though a miracle, is read best as most expected it would be: an experimental vision, an abridged depiction of a story without any real end; a half-genius, half-frustrating collage rather than a traditional three-act bravura. It is often far from easily digestible, partly due to the inevitable incoherence of the pieces picked up over many years, but also partly to odd coincidence -- who knew a script about an unfinished film made by a dying Hollywood legend would turn into exactly that? The autobiographical pieces are certainly present, as Welles tells the story of an American expatriate director returning to Hollywood for a comeback (though I can’t imagine anyone, including Welles, considered him needing a comeback), but it’s more of the uncontrolled that sticks. Likely most notable of these oddities is the director’s death at seventy years old from a car crash in the film -- indeed, Welles was seventy himself when his own fate was decided in fall of 1985 from a heart attack.

       Are these oddities, spooky as they may be, really all that haunting? Orson Welles, as a director, lived between the smoke and mirrors. Before he even set near a film camera, he rose to national notoriety in 1938 for the War of the Worlds radio drama, said to have sparked hysteria and widespread panic from audiences who didn’t realize the recording was fictional. He continued this thematic tightrope in his film career, employing innovative technical schematics to match his cunning misdirection, a quality that would lead to his final completed film, F for Fake (1973). A film about magic and misconception, surely, but more directly aimed at raising an impending question for the growing television-avid and film-consuming world: what is real life, what is a movie, and how are they different? Why are they different?

       And after all, what is the point of completely separating the two?

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