Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1250007089
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the summer of 1970 legendary but self-destructive director Orson Welles returned to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe and decided it was time to make a comeback movie. Coincidentally it was the story of a legendary self-destructive director who returns to Hollywood from years of self-imposed exile in Europe. Welles swore it wasn't autobiographical.
The Other Side of the Wind was supposed to take place during a single day, and Welles planned to shoot it in eight weeks. It took twelve years and remains unreleased and largely unseen. Orson Welles's Last Movie by Josh Karp is a fast-paced, behind-the-scenes account of the bizarre, hilarious and remarkable making of what has been called "the greatest home movie that no one has ever seen." Funded by the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law, and based on a script that Welles rewrote every night for years, a final attempt to one-up his own best-work. It's almost impossible to tell if art is imitating life or vice versa in the film. It's a production best encompassed by its star, John Huston, who described the making of the film as "an adventure shared by desperate men that finally came to nothing."
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www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/1404733/Daughter-and-lover-fight-over-unreleased-Orson-Welles-film.html. “should be shown”: McBride, What Ever Happened, p. 214. “I’m still working with Orson”: Ibid. “I used to think”: Sean Graver, AI, 11/15/11. “Everyone was always in service of the project”: Ibid. “To his death, I believe”: Ibid. “the work of a genius”: Tim Carroll, “Awesome Welles,” Sunday Times (UK), February 13, 2005. “a creator at least twenty years”: Ibid. “a
look that said, Am I seriously lifting the great genius of American cinema into the trunk of a car? he finished the job and never came back. But then there were those such as Jacobson, who once received an early Sunday morning call from a moaning Welles, who sounded as if he might be near death because he’d run out of some important medication that needed to be filled immediately. Driving across Los Angeles intent on saving Orson’s life, Jacobson arrived to find a seemingly healthy Orson who
beginning of an end that would come neither swiftly nor in a gigantic explosion. Instead, it came gradually and continued into eternity. The end began when a small committee from AFI met at the Beverly Hills Hotel to choose the recipient of their third Life Achievement Award. The options included everyone who wasn’t Ford or Cagney. The group chose Welles because they believed his artistry had been superlative and that with the selection, they were making a significant statement about their
Merv Griffin Show. Introduced by Griffin as someone who “captures our attention with every word he speaks,” Welles emerged from behind the curtain, walking with a cane, looking both sage and wan. The pair discussed the women in Welles’s life and moved on to modern television and his career, during which Welles described being a “star” in Dublin at sixteen and how he was an old pro by age twenty-two. Summing it up, he told Griffin, “I had a tremendous streak of luck; I really think it has
was provide the information and show the audience that man is unknowable and complicated, made up of polar opposites, and ultimately good, bad, and everything in between. Though Kane may be the most complete film ever made, its opening literally overflows with symbols of incompletion, beginning with a leading shot of Xanadu, Kane’s unfinished mansion—and then leads us further into a tangled web. As Jedediah Leland said, Kane was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own; and it is