9. Orson Welles (Writes His Own Epitaph With The Other Side of the Wind)
Orson Welles, the great American cinema genius, had become a legend by the 1970s - but arguably for the worst reasons possible, as an artist whose time had passed. Welles was venerated by a whole generation of directors and film scholars, but that didn't seem to make it any easier for him to actually
make movies; the will was still there - as evidenced by the number of fascinating projects he began in his latter years - but the money and support were not - as evidenced by the scattered remains of abandoned films he left behind, projects unfinished or lost in complex legal negotiations. Perhaps the most frustrating of Welles' "lost films" is The Other Side of the Wind. Welles shot about 90% of the film between 1969 and 1976, rewriting and recasting as he went along, slowly gathering together footage, and eventually even putting together a rough cut in the early 1990s to try to attract investors. Welles had always claimed the film's main character - macho film director Jake Hannaford, making an "art" film in the hopes of saving his career - was intended to be a Hemingway analogue, a bullfighter out of time...but it's not difficult to see parallels between the character and Welles himself, at that moment in his waning career. Hannaford's young protege, highly successful director Brooke Otterlake, was played by Peter Bogdanovich, who was well known (and sorta criticized) for being Welles' "young protege" and acolyte, in the early '70s; film critic Joseph McBride, who wrote a biography of Welles, played an obnoxious reporter questioning Hannaford about his films; Susan Strasberg played another film critic clearly modeled after Pauline Kael, the famous film critic who'd pissed Welles off with her dismissal of his contributions to the script of Citizen Kane. Even in summary form, it's hard not to look at The Other Side of the Wind as Welles' melancholy summation of his place in the Hollywood establishment: an aging director trying to make a new hit by "getting with it", finding that the Hollywood establishment has passed him by. Here's hoping the complex legal issues plaguing the film (Wind was partially bankrolled by the brother of the Shah of Iran) will clear up someday soon so this forgotten masterpiece can
finally be seen. Oh, and having mentioned Huston...