Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Art and Craft of Interviewing
- I Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style
- 1 Angel in Exile: Allan Dwan
- 2 “An Unhappy Happy End”: Douglas Sirk
- 3 Somebody Up There Likes Me: Robert Wise
- 4 “The Greatest Movie the World Has Never Seen”: Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride on Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind
- 5 “Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth”: Clint Eastwood
- II Tickets to the Dark Side: Festival Favorites
- III Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers
- IV Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs
- V Women in Revolt: Artist-Activists
- VI The Canon: Brilliance without Borders
- Contributor Biographies
4 - “The Greatest Movie the World Has Never Seen”: Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride on Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind
from I - Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Art and Craft of Interviewing
- I Going Hollywood: Masters of Studio Style
- 1 Angel in Exile: Allan Dwan
- 2 “An Unhappy Happy End”: Douglas Sirk
- 3 Somebody Up There Likes Me: Robert Wise
- 4 “The Greatest Movie the World Has Never Seen”: Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride on Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind
- 5 “Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth”: Clint Eastwood
- II Tickets to the Dark Side: Festival Favorites
- III Blows Against the Empire: Indie Godfathers
- IV Edgeplay: Avant-Garde Auteurs
- V Women in Revolt: Artist-Activists
- VI The Canon: Brilliance without Borders
- Contributor Biographies
Summary
In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957–58 to make Touch of Evil–one of the many films a Hollywood studio took away from him–Orson Welles (1915–1985) came home to Hollywood to make his last feature, The Other Side of the Wind. Funding the production largely from his own pocket and shooting entirely outside the system, the fragmented filming finally wrapped in 1976. Thirty years on, the movie, infamously, remains unedited and unreleased, bound up by bad luck, personal feuds and byzantine legal tangles that saw the negatives actually physically locked out of reach in a vault in Paris for decades.
In the intervening years, as scratched and smuggled clips and script extracts have leaked out, Welles' final film's legend has grown. Shot on the run around L.A. and in Arizona, with a reportedly dazzling central performance from John Huston, the movie tells a story that strangely parallels its own making: the doomed tale of an embattled, aging, old-school director, trying to make a film to compete with the sex-and-symbolism flicks of the young guns of the New Hollywood of the early 1970s. A movie about making movies, it has become the Holy Grail of Welles' career, his Rosebud–perhaps the slyest, most mystifyingly revealing statement he ever committed to celluloid.
Welles spent the last decade of his life fighting to have his film released. Twenty-one years after his death, that fight goes on.
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- Information
- Action! , pp. 65 - 88Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009