But perhaps the buzziest Welles project here isn’t being screened. “The Other Side of the Wind,” a film that Welles had been working on but had not finished when he died in 1985, has been taken up by a few of the director’s friends in the hopes that they can piece “The Other Side of the Wind” together and have it ready for release by the end of his centennial year.
Filip Jan Rymsza, a producer based Los Angeles, signed on to the project six years ago here at Cannes, joining Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall – who were both involved in the original production of “The Other Side of the Wind” – in order to bully the project forward. One of the famous “lost masterpieces” in cinema legend and lore, “The Other Side of the Wind” has been tied up for years in a tangle of rights issues, made more complicated by the fact that the original negative was stored in France, where the director’s rights supersede everyone else’s. Rymsza, Marshall and Bogdanovich and producer Jens Koethner Kaul finally got all the rights to “The Other Side of the Wind” — more than 1,000 reels of film — last October.
“This was a six-year journey to unite the rights, to get all parties on the same page in terms of approach to the material and now the process has shifted to finding a way to do this in keeping with the way that Orson would have gone about it, which is to retain as much control as we can,” Rymsza said at beachside office earlier this week.
Welles began directing “The Other Side of the Wind” in 1970, enlisting the director John Huston as an avant-garde filmmaker named Jake Hannaford, who is trying to get a movie made within the stodgy commercial confines of Hollywood. The story, told through one night of the director’s life, involves several scenes of the director’s fictional film. The production became legendary in Hollywood annals, extending six years through financing difficulties and actors dropping in and out of the cast. (Bogdanovich, eventually wound up playing a character that had been based on him back when he was a film critic.)
Filmed on several types of film stock – including early videotape – and structurally resembling a mockumentary, “The Other Side of the Wind” is “way ahead of its time in terms of the construction,” Rymsza said. “It’s very rich thematically, and the script is brilliant. It still holds true today.”
Around 40 minutes of edited footage – the film within the film – currently exist; for guidance in editing the rest, Rymsza and his team are using two treatments and multiple versions of Welles’s script, most of which were discovered with his papers at the University of Michigan. Welles also left loose assemblies of other sequences, “so we know exactly which were the takes” he wanted to use, Rymsza said. Thanks to Bogdanovich and Welles’s Paris editors, he adds, “we know what his thought process was, how he lined up takes next to each other and cut between them.”
As tantalizing as a brand new Orson Welles film is for cineastes, Rymsza stresses that it won’t come cheap: Last year he and his co-producers partnered with crowdfunding site Indiegogo to raise $2 million to finish “The Other Side of the Wind,” and are currently at 10 percent of their goal.
Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson recently made a video encouraging people to donate, and an excerpt from Josh Karp’s book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ was published in Vanity Fair this month, stoking public interest in the original project. Now, Rymsza said, it’s time for Welles fans literally to put their money where their mouths are.
“Everybody gets bogged down and lost in the wonderful history of it,” Rymsza said, “and they forget that there’s a call to action, that we actually need this money to get this done.”