The Other Side of the Wind

Orson Welles, who has been dead for over thirty years, had a new film come out this year. The Other Side of the Wind, which he never finished, was made from 1962 until 1976, and Welles continued to work on it until his death. Several attempts were made to finish the film, but in 2014 the rights were purchased and Peter Bogdonovich, who stars in the film, and Frank Marshall oversaw production. The upshot--it's terrific.

A satire of the motion picture business, John Huston stars as a Hemingway-esque (or more likely a Huston-esque) director. He has been working on a film called The Other Side of the Wind, and on the night of his seventieth birthday, has a party thrown in his honor where the completed portions of the film will be shown. Shot in a mock-umentary style, as if pieced together from different video cameras (kind of like the way they use to put disposable cameras on each table at a wedding), the film switches from black and white to color and has many different film stocks.

The film that Huston is making is pretentious twaddle, or at least I think it's supposed to be. It features his discovery, John Dale (Bob Random), whom he rescued from suicide in the Pacific ocean off the coast of Mexico, and an actress affectionately dubbed Pocahontas, who spends most of the film completely nude. Its like a parody of Antonioni. The actress is played by Oja Kodar, who was Welles' paramour. I must say, for a very old, very fat man, he must have had a way with women, because she was about twenty-five years younger than him and gorgeous.

The film-within-the film has parallels to Welles' film. At one point Random quits the film. He is filming a sex scene with Kodar and Huston goads him on, but when she starts cutting his hair he bolts. I wonder if this is a reference to Samson and Delilah. Welles also lost his leading man. Huston's acolyte, a young director who has become hugely successful, was to be played by Rich Little (!), but Little quit, and Bogdonavich, who was an acolyte of Welles, played the lead. He even does some impersonations.

The Other Side of the Wind is rich in scathing comedy. Huston is surrounded by yes-men, but there also those who tell him the bitter truth. His assistant, Norman Foster, an old man and former child actor, is supposed to bring a Hollywood big shot (modeled on Robert Evans) to the party, but doesn't (Huston needs his investment money), and is belittled by Huston, while Cameron Mitchell plays the makeup man, who Huston fires from every picture. One of Huston's cronies is played by Stafford Repp, who every one my age knew as Chief O'Hara on TV's Batman.

There are also film academics at the party, who follow Huston around and ask questions like, "Does the lens of a camera reflect reality, or does reality reflect the lens of a camera?" A film critic, Susan Strasberg (said to be patterned after Pauline Kael) is at the party, trying to get answers to difficult questions. Over everything hangs a suspicion of homosexuality--Huston is accused of not being nearly as manly as he acts, and an old teacher of Random's reveals that the young man was a victim of a pederast.

While some of the dialogue is incredibly arch (not that many people, even film people, speak in such beautifully constructed sentences) but I think that's intended. This is a hyper-real film, a representation of what it's like to be in Hollywood, but at a hugely exaggerated scale. It's as if the entire world of film had been boiled down into one party--the old Hollywood, represented by Huston, and the new Hollywood, represented by Bogdonovich.

There are many wonderful lines in the movie, but I think my favorite is a man on a bullhorn, shepherding guests on to vehicles to take them to the party out in the desert. "Crew, jazz musicians and midgets to the blue chartered bus." Yes, The Other Side of the Wind even has midgets.