The Other Side of the Wind

Now, at long last, I understand why Orson Welles was hanging around with Henry Jaglom. Welles last movie appearance before his death was in Jaglom's Someone to Love, which, like The Other Side of the Wind, was a scripted mockumentary.

I had heard about The Other Side of the Wind, for years. It was produced for the most part with Welles' own money, and like other movies he bankrolled himself, production dragged on for years. He started in 1970, filmed off and on for a few years then post production went on until hid death in 1985.

It's always strange seeing sex and nude scenes in a movie made by a director from an earlier era. There was Stanley Donen's Blame It on Rio, Sydney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. The Other Side of the Wind has a nude sex scene in the back of a moving car (someone else was driving). But Welles was just 55 when he began filming this movie. He was only 70 when he died. He was so young when he made Citizen Kane.

There was an Iranian investor in the movie, and I read somewhere that the movie was locked away in a vault in Iran. Turns out it was in a film lab in France. All Netflix had to do was pay the bill to get it out and finish post production on it.

Starring John Huston, with directors Peter Bogdanovich, Claud Chabrol, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazurzky, and Dennis Hopper. With Oja Kodar, Susan Strasberg, Edmond O'Brien, George Jessel, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Random, Gregory Sierra. And I didn't recognize him, but recently disgraced CBS chairman Les Moonves was in there somewhere.

The main audience for the movie is cineastes. But it's on Netflix. It wouldn't be bad if they mixed it in and promoted it with their other movies.

In the '70's, Roger Corman's company started distributing foreign films. He promoted them much more aggressively than other American distributors. If a theater wanted to book Big Bad Mama 2, they would have to show Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut as well. He was first distributor to get an Ingmar Bergman movie shown in a drive-in theater which pleased Bergman. Woody Allen saw his first Bergman movie in the early '50's because it had a naked lady.

Welles said that he thought his other mockumentary F for Fake would be a huge hit with a mass audience. That's what he was going for. The man didn't film a sex scene in the back of a speeding Mustang to appeal to the art house crowd.