A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making

We're here today to go into the vault...

where Orson Welles' last film has been kept

for over 30 years now.

Wow.

This is really amazing.

There! Peter in the car.

-Peter. Car. Jake, Peter. -Do you think that's...

The story of how we completed Orson Welles' last unfinished movie,

The Other Side of the Wind,

is nearly as complicated as the film itself.

This is what we hope not to find.

-Empty boxes. -There's plenty of that.

It's truly been a labor of love

for so many people who volunteered their time and energy

to finally bring Orson's vision to the screen.

And this is how we did it.

Fireworks, everybody. Fireworks.

For me, it all began in 1971

in Carefree, Arizona.

When I first arrived on the set

of Other Side of the Wind, t really wasn't a set, it was a house,

and Orson and Gary Graver and Oja and I,

and Polly Platt,

were all there making a movie.

But because there were only four of us,

we had to do everything.

So, this is me doing the slate

And this one is Orson and I up on the rocks

in the backyard at the Carefree house

and there's my first job on The Other Side of the Wind was

to create these dummies.

This is me...

playing one of the, uh, documentary cameramen.

I was also the accountant.

We had a bank account in Gary and my name

where I signed all the checks.

We all did everything.

We acted, we shot some of it,

we built the sets,

we were all living together, just like a family.

We called it a V.I.S.T.O.W. alert back in those days,

Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles.

Studio bus, scene four! Take one!

It was like being on a film school movie

where everybody just pitched in and did everything.

Please don't look up this way. Look at each other.

Destroy scene twenty-two, take six.

Action!

Everybody who worked on the picture

was dedicated to doing the best they could for Orson Welles.

-And rolling. -Chabrol,

one-six-six.

Take one.

People loved Orson.

He could be difficult,

but you had to love him.

No, not looking down, Larry. Looking away.

Looking away, Larry! Larry! Cut!

Orson liked to fire me,

because he usually had to have somebody to blame

when something didn't go right.

A little further forward. Keep going...

keep going... keep going...

Cut. That shot was rendered useless by Frank.

I knew that if I just went back to the hotel

that somebody would call me within the next day

and say, "Come on back."

I think he was shooting and it was lunch.

Orson just turned to me out of the blue,

there was no conversation leading up to it,

and he just turned to me and said,

"If anything ever happens to me, I want you to promise me

you'll finish the picture."

And I said, "Jesus, Orson.

Why do you say a thing like that? Nothing's gonna happen to you."

"I know.

Nothing's gonna happen.

But if it does...

I want you to promise me you'll finish the picture."

"I will, of course I will, but..."

"That's fine. We can drop the subject."

That was it.

So I never discussed it again.

I just felt I owed Orson

to make good on the promise.

I didn't think we wouldn't do it,

I just thought, "When are we gonna get it done?"

For several years after Orson passed away in 1985,

Gary Graver, Orson's longtime cinematographer

was trying to get the money to finish the film.

Then I started helping Gary

and we had all kinds of people coming in and out of the woodwork.

Most of them were scared by the chain of title.

They all felt it was too risky.

Especially because the original negative was stuck in a lab in Paris.

It was very frustrating, and we almost had the money a few times.

Almost. People were talking about it and...

it went on for years.

Years.

I first became aware of The Other Side of the Wind

in May of 2009.

It seemed like a very interesting pursuit to explore.

After Orson died,

a French judge ruled

that the negatives be locked under court order.

Nobody was able to figure out the legal wrangle in France.

I realized that whoever controlled the negative

will ultimately control the film.

Nobody had seen the negative in Paris.

Nobody knew whether it was dust or it was usable or, you know, what was there.

The French court ruled

that an agreement had to be reached with all three parties.

So, Orson's daughter Beatrice had

a claim on the rights there,

as did Oja Kodar, Orson's co-creator,

and then the Persians,

at that point operating through their French production company, Astrophore.

You had these three units that all had to come together to approve things,

in order for us to get the negative in Paris.

I always believed it would happen,

I just didn't know when.

This was Orson Welles' last movie,

the guy who made Citizen Kane.

Filip was coming at it from one way,

I was coming at it from another way,

and we decided to pool our resources

and go together and that's when everything started to happen.

However, before we got all three rights' holders

to finally sign off,

the lab in Paris where the negatives were stored went bankrupt.

And all the elements were shipped out to warehouses outside of Paris.

We were able to find all of them,

and they were scattered across a few different warehouses.

It was definitely a relief to finally see all the materials together

in one place.

To see the volume of materials.

It was a mountain of film.

Until we got into that vault,

we were kind of clueless

as far as how big the job was going to be

to try and put this all together.

Once we secured all the rights,

the negative traveled from Paris to L.A.

And then once the materials arrive in Technicolor,

we knew that now this was real

and we could get down to work.

Ooh, come in. This is negative.

This is really old stuff.

Look at that.

Once we got the negative back,

we were off to the races.

We just didn't know what we were getting into.

It was like dredging up the Titanic.

A scavenger hunt the whole way through.

We had a very old, handwritten inventory from the '70s.

There were, I believe, 1083 film elements.

Step number one was to find everything,

collect it, and then to properly inventory it.

Make sure that everything matched up with those old records.

We started to unravel and understand

exactly how the film was prepared.

Forty years in the making, this movie.

And here it all is.

We had to go back to a totally analog way of working.

That meant finding a negative cutter to reassemble the negative,

and there's no one better than Mo Henry.

Mo's been doing this for awhile.

And she's a fourth-generation negative cutter.

I'm a negative cutter

and I have been for many years.

And I'm one of a handful of people left

who do this, as far as I know.

So, like, "Something

1975,

second day sequence."

This is its own animal. It's different from anything else I've worked on.

It's a combination of many kinds of film stocks.

35, 16 mm...

lots of different items,

so we're learning as we go.

The other day I was going through a magnifying glass on this tiny film

and I saw Orson holding the slate

with his cigar in his mouth,

and it was really exciting to see. I was really jazzed about it.

Bus studio, scene 58, take two.

Jaws was the first feature I ever worked on

and it was at Universal,

and, according to my dad, at the time

they thought it was gonna be a huge bomb

so they let me practice on it.

So...

I was really impressed how beautifully kept this film was.

So, Technicolor asked that we assemble all of these rolls

in key number order

and these are the key numbers,

which is kind of hard to read.

So, I'm splicing a roll of negative

to the leader.

And then it's time for the cement.

We lock it down and wait for 30 seconds.