To trace the history of Orson Welles’s final film for her front-page article on Wednesday, a picture that Hollywood buffs consider the most famous movie never released, Doreen Carvajal interviewed the many interested parties, including the movie’s actors and Welles’s heir. When she found herself in a Parisian warehouse amid thousands of Welles’s negatives, she realized that the rumor that the film might finally be finished by the spring of 2015, after more than four decades, could be true.
When I first got a call this month from a publicist about a new deal to complete Orson Welles’s last movie, my first reaction was doubt and then curiosity. “The Other Side of the Wind” is a holy grail of a movie that Hollywood insiders have chased since the negatives were locked up in storage in legal limbo more than four decades ago in France.
The back story of this almost mythical film featured so many intriguing elements. The idea for the film started with Welles’s early brawl with Hemingway, which inspired the macho director played by John Huston in the movie. Then there were legal quarrels involving the shah of Iran’s brother-in-law and Welles’s longtime companion, Oja Kodar, an exotic dark-haired beauty who played a role in a movie within the movie, much of it partially nude.
Given that tangled history, I angled to talk to key rights holders of the film, trying to make sure that they really had reached an agreement. I asked for documents and signatures. I also sought to see the negatives for myself, a vital sign that warring parties had finally reached détente and allowed access to the materials. I worked on the story intermittently for about two weeks, worried it would leak out, while writing other stories about a burst of museum openings and arts events in Paris.
One of the producers on the project invited me to meet him at a storage center on the eastern outskirts of Paris. It was an unfamiliar neighborhood for me and a long walk from the Metro to the street address. At first I could not find it within a row of blocky apartment buildings and industrial warehouses.
That’s because the reels were stacked behind an unmarked, gray metal door topped with an old air-conditioner. There was no number or company name, just graffiti on one of the walls. Once inside — after a call from my dying telephone for aid — I was amazed at how spartan the setting was for such coveted negatives. Stacks of reels were loaded on pallets. A list of scenes lay on a table: “Birthday Surprise Master,” “Billy Projection.”
But the defining Rosebud moment for me came when storage employees with gloved hands unspooled a reel of negatives in the light of a small editing table. The negatives glowed a warm golden color with the flickering face of Lilli Palmer, shot by Welles on one of his trips to his beloved Spain. I felt reassured; they really did have it.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether the Los Angeles production company Royal Road Entertainment and veteran Hollywood insiders like the director Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall — both involved with Welles in the original movie — are able to complete it, true to Welles’s idiosyncratic style mixing camera formats and color and black-and-white footage.
Personally, I am curious to see how this all ends. Will they get their final cut to Cannes by the 100-year anniversary of Welles’s birthday next year? As Orson Welles himself said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”