The Other Side of the Other Side

No Hollywood auteur casts a longer shadow than the late, great director/actor/writer Orson Welles. His movies are spoken of with a reverence that borders on the obnoxious. His larger than life persona (and waistline) became the stuff of late-night talkshow and wine commercial legend. But during his lifetime, Welles' movie-making career suffered from extended bouts of un-studio cinematic ventures that ended in box office failure. "When's he gonna top Citizen Kane?" echoed through the head offices of Hollywood until he became a misunderstood genius who couldn't secure a sheckle to create his art.

By the end of his life, Welles failed to finish several movies- one of which was The Other Side of the Wind which was in production/legal purgatory from 1970 to well past the maestro's death in 1985.  But thanks to Netflix's deep pockets and urge to be taken seriously as a film studio, a team of editors using Welles' scripts and editing notes was able to put together the Welles film that almost wasn't over 40 years years after it was started.

Wind takes place on the final night of the life of  revered/despised director Jake Hannaford (a thinly-veiled version of Welles played with gruff relish by director and Welles pal John Huston.) Hannaford's latest movie is in big trouble, and the desert screening party that is planned to help him get the movie some much-needed buzz (and funding) quickly devolves into a drunken morass full of cameras, critics, directors, dummies, and midgets.

Intertwined with the party dementia, the film-within-a-film unspools in a riot of '70's counter-culture color and quick takes. Seemingly without plot, a nude-most-of-the-time woman (Welles muse Oja Kodar) is followed by a not-nude-enough  man (Robert Random) through a variety of abandoned MGM sets. (One of them is the train set Fred Astaire reminisces in front of in That's Entertainment! (1974).) The movie screening concludes at a drive-in movie theater where Hannaford leaves the assembled Hollywood menagerie to drive into the sunrise for the last time.

If this plot summary sounds befuddling, don't worry! Along with the film, Netflix has produced a documentary about the making of Wind called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018). Filled with footage of Welles and many of those who worked on the film, I found that They'll Love Me helped turn Wind from a middling experimental film into a fascinating peek inside the impish mind of Welles.

What immediately made my little film nerd antennae jump while watching Wind was seeing wunderkind filmmaker and cineaste Peter Bogdanovich playing wunderkind filmmaker and cineaste Brooks Otterlake. Otterlake is a preening sycophant who loves to show off by doing imitations of his favorite Hollywood idols and yes-anding and speaking for Hannaford at every opportunity. So basically, Bogdanovich isn't acting. Welles was filming their friendship.

So why then, does the relationship between acolyte and mentor in the film combust in an outburst of spite and cruelty? The dynamic of the student that becomes too much like the teacher for the teacher's liking is not new in storytelling- but Welles is either prescient or sending Bogdanovich a message. In They'll Love Me, Bogdanovich cries as he speaks about the very public break between him and Welles that happened a couple years after the filming of Wind. Bogdanovich blames Welles' belittling of him on The Tonight Show with new friend Burt Reynolds cackling along. Other theories abound, but either way, art became life.

Welles is no more kind to Bogdanovich's then girlfriend Cybill Shepherd. Despite the fact that Welles was living in Bogdanovich's house with Shepherd, in Wind he gives Hannaford a young, blond, dim-witted girlfriend allegedly to express his opinion of Bogdanovich's younger movie star paramour. Even for the mercurial Welles, it's a mean touch to a movie whose fictional characters are all unflattering stand-ins for a coterie of Hollywood notables- a who's who of people Welles felt betrayed him. At it's heart, Wind is an arsenic-laced break-up letter to Hollywood signed, "Fuck you, Orson. P.S. Fuck you some more."

From that perspective- it makes Wind worth watching.