Look Glue's Talking - Hollywood's Knacker's Yard, Part 3
Sometimes they come back. No, really...
The Other Side Of The Wind (1970)
The victims John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, Orson Welles (director)
The gist An ageing director [Huston] embarks on an ambitious final project. So in now way whatsoever autobiographical, then…
The death blow In the land of the stillborn movie, George Orson Welles is king. It’s All True, Don Quixote, The Deep - the big man’s filmography is littered with uncompleted pictures. Usually, it was the drying up of funds that was Welles’ undoing. But the reason The Other Side Of The Wind fell apart was due to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Seriously. In his search for international backers, Welles had wound up borrowing money from the Shah’s brother-in-law. It might have seemed like a smart move at the time, but the upshot was he lost access to the picture following 1979’s Islamic revolution. The film then became the property of the Ayatollah Khomeini who, not being the biggest fan of western film, declined to release the footage. With the Ayatollah now dead, the film reverted to its Iranian producer who, aware they owned a significant piece of movie history, refused to hand it over to Welles’ estate.
Were we denied or saved? Cruelly denied, as was demonstrated after Netflix purchased and polished The Other Side Of The Wing. A film that ought to have received Academy Award nominations, it’s the picture that puts the top hat on the extraordinary filmmaking career of Orson Welles.
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