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"A Desperate Venture Shared by Desperate Men"
With their part in the legal untanglement, restoration, editing and post-production of the last Orson Welles film The Other Side of the Wind, Netflix decided that they'd better increase their investment by simultaneously making a documentary on the making of the film—a story that is as fascinating and convoluted as the film itself (how could it not be with Welles as the central figure?). It might also be useful as a as testimony and evidence for a tale that might not be believed. Titled They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, it documents Welles' idea for the film from its inspiration through the chaotic filming some ten years later, through the complications about rights that prevented Welles from completing it in his lifetime, and ultimately covers the efforts by die-hard associates and completists to make it happen 33 years after the director's death. Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville (who made 20 Feet from Stardom, Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal, and the recent Won't You Be My Neighbor?) has done a nearly encyclopedic job of gathering together archive footage, out-takes, interviews with survivors of the project, and bits and pieces to tell a great deal of the story—without some of the more head-scratching intricacies—and keeps it wildly entertaining...and properly melancholy, as well. Just like Welles might have done it.
Cinematographer Gary Gravers' audition—filming Orson |
The film starts with an informal interview of Welles, where he speculates about the possibility of making "a film without controls"—"All my films have been controlled. I'd like to make a film as IF it were a documentary and all the actors improvise"—the idea being to get that one thing that Welles prized above other in his films—"the divine accidents," where the movie gods conspired to drop opportunity in your lap to photograph them and be praised for your brilliance, when it was merely happenstance taken advantage of.
At the end of the interview, he mugs at the camera, shrugging his shoulders, as if to say "I dunno, I'm making this stuff up as I go..."
"The movie director must always remain a slightly ambiguous figure, after all, because so much of what he signs his name to came from elsewhere, so many of his best things are merely accidents over which he presides. Or the good fortune he receives. Or the grace.""This is Orson Welles" p. 259 Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich; ©1998 Da Capo Press
There is also that too many people asked him "what did you do after Citizen Kane?" and he had the hope that, in coming back to Hollywood, after a self-imposed exile during the McCarthy years, he was seeing kids with far less experience making movies and enjoying success—"I've lived too long not to make a successful picture."
He'd been kicking around an idea, partially inspired by an encounter with Hemingway, partially bitterness at his own circumstances, partially autobiographical, partially not, about making a movie about an old time Hollywood director (he chose John Huston to play the part) who is making an artsy movie of the type Antonioni was making at the time and trying to get funding from the studios, who are dubious at his age, dubious that there's no script, and just aren't interested. The movie juxtaposes "found footage" of the director's birthday party by (and for) his sycophants, juxtaposed with sequences from the film. That's a nutshell take on it (there'll be a review next week), but the making of it was chaotic, willfully so, in order to capture the energy and dangerousness of a Maysles Brothers film.
Huston and Little at the beginning of filming |
Bogdanovich's nebbishy cineaste at the beginning of filming |
And Graver never left, devoting his life to filming Welles' many a-borning projects and, after Welles' death in 1985, to trying to resolve the conflicts that prevented completion of The Other Side of the Wind, until his own death in 2006.
Welles' partner, Oja Kodar, and Gary Graver. |
It's a maze of cul-de-sacs, but Neville manages to make a great through-line of the history of the film—now that there IS a film, one that actually has an ending. And the way he weaves in all the archive footage is close to masterful. It's quite the juggling act, even if the star of the piece is killed off mid-way in the story.
Alan Cummings narrates |
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