Credit: Far Out
It’s well known that making a Hollywood film can be a long and arduous process. From securing actors and overcoming on-set problems to the painstaking editing process, countless obstacles can delay a production. But which film spent the longest time in development before finally making it to the big screen?
Well, the answer is the 2018 satirical drama The Other Side of the Wind, directed, co-written, co-produced and co-edited by none other than the legendary filmmaker Orson Welles. The film was eventually released after an amazing 48 years in development.
The Other Side of the Wind had been intended by Welles to be his Hollywood comeback. Filming began in 1970 but faced an on/off schedule throughout the 1970s and early part of the 1980s, worsened by the fact that several legal and financial issues arose surrounding the film during that period.
Welles, of course, died in 1985, but several figures in the film industry contributed to finally completing the project. It stars John Huston, Bob Random, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg and Oja Kodar and tells of the last day in the life of a Hollywood film director (played by Huston) as he screens his final movie at a party.
The film is told in a documentary style with rapid cuts between the perspectives of the journalists at the party. Welles had told Peter Bogdanovich of his intentions with the style, “I’m going to use several voices to tell the story. You hear conversations taped as interviews, and you see quite different scenes going on at the same time.”
He went on: “People are writing a book about him – different books. Documentaries… still pictures, films, tapes. All these witnesses… The movie’s going to be made up of all this raw material. You can imagine how daring the cutting can be and how much fun.”
Why did The Other Side of the Wind take 48 years to make?
The extraordinary delay was never the result of a single catastrophic setback. Instead, The Other Side of the Wind became trapped in a perfect storm of financial uncertainty, changing ownership rights and the uniquely uncompromising way Welles worked. The director regularly financed productions himself, shooting whenever money became available before pausing again for months or even years. By the time legal disputes over the negative and funding began to mount, the film had become one of cinema’s most infamous unfinished projects, with each passing year making its eventual completion seem even less likely.
Welles had first conceived of the idea in the mid-1960s, but by the time initial production began in the 1970s, Welles faced problems such as a huge tax bill, the alleged embezzlement of one of his investors and a lack of funding, all of which contributed to the frequent halting of production.
Principal photography was said to have eventually been completed at the beginning of 1976, but legal issues again with Welles’ investors meant that the film was not going to be completed any time soon. Eventually, Welles died in 1985, and Oja Kodar and Gary Graver, Welles’ cinematographer, tried to clear up the legal issues so a final cut could be made.
Several famous directors, including Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, were all offered the chance to work on the movie, but they all turned it down under the assumption it would not be well received by a mass audience.
You can see why so many directors gave it a wide berth. Finishing somebody else’s film is difficult enough, but finishing an Orson Welles film is another kettle of fish entirely. Every edit, every transition and every scene left hanging between reels became a judgment call, with nobody able to ask the one person whose opinion actually mattered. Whoever eventually stepped in had to strike an almost impossible balance, staying faithful to Welles’ vision without accidentally making the film feel like their own.
Eventually, the issues with the investors were solved, most significantly with Mehdi Boushehri, who had been concerned about making his investment back. He realised that the best chance he had was to have the film released. Many of the investors had blocked the completion of the movie on the grounds that it would not make any money back. With Boushehri’s blessing, the film moved ahead.
In 2010, Peter Bogdanovich explained that the film was nearly completed, but the legal issues of “who owned what” still left its release in doubt. “We’ve looked at the footage, and it’s great,” he said. “There are a few scenes that Orson already cut together, and then for the scenes that I cut, he had picked takes but just hadn’t assembled them. I don’t think any of us will know what it is until it’s done. I don’t know when it will come out, but I think one day it will.”
The film was finally completed in the mid-2010s and was released in 2018. Check the trailer out below.
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