The Other Side of the Wind

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The Other Side of the Wind
Directed by	Orson Welles
Produced by	Dominique Antoine
Written by	Orson Welles
Starring	Orson Welles Robert Aiken Stéphane Audran Peter Bogdanovich Kevin Cloud Brechner Gary Graver Claude Chabrol Howard Grossman Paul Hunt Dennis Hopper John Huston Oja Kodar
Cinematography	Gary Graver Eric Sherman
Country	France / Iran
Language	English
IMDb profile

The Other Side of the Wind is an unreleased 1972 film directed by Orson Welles and starring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper and Stéphane Audran. The film featured Huston as an ageing arthouse director with a string of commercial flops, who seeks to make one more film laden with sex and violence to revive his flagging career.

Like many of Welles' personally-funded films, the project was filmed and re-edited on and off for several years - work on the script started in the late 1960s, in 1972 Welles said that filming was "96% complete", and by 1976 it was on the brink of completion. Serious financial problems dogged the project, and Welles's use of funds from the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran came back to haunt him after the Shah was overthrown in 1979. A complex, decades-long legal battle over the ownership of the film ensued, with the original negative remaining in a vault in Paris. By 1998 all legal matters had been resolved and the Showtime cable network had guaranteed end money to complete the film, when a new lawsuit by Welles' daughter Beatrice was filed, causing Showtime to withdraw its funding. As of summer 2006, that legal dispute had been settled and the search for end money has continued.

Bogdanovich, a huge Welles aficionado and expert, announced in 2004 that he plans to restore this film and release it soon. Details of the release, however, are at best murky. The main reservation Welles fans have is that while footage for almost the entire film exists, editing it together in Welles' experimental style may prove difficult. Whilst Bogdanovich was a close friend of Welles, the only precedent for releasing an incomplete film of his was the 1993 re-edit of Don Quixote by Jesus Franco, which was very poorly received.

Welles himself completed editing 40 minutes of the film and reportedly left additional editing notes. Some edited scenes (in workprint form) can be seen in the documentary film "Orson Welles: One Man Band", which is available on DVD.

Bogdanovich states in an April 2, 2007 press report [1] that a deal to complete the film is "99.9% finished," with a theatrical release planned for late 2008.

At a March 29, 2007 appearance during the 16th Florida Film Festival, Peter Bogdanovich responded to a question about the status of the film. He announced that the four parties involved had come to an agreement earlier that week and that the film would be edited and released in the very near future.