The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  III The Other Side of the Wind

  At the time of Welles’s death, The Other Side of the Wind was more nearly complete than most of Welles’s late films. Like Don Quixote, it was in production for over a decade, delayed by Welles’s search for money and by what one of his actors, Paul Stewart, has called a “need for perfection.” Derived from an earlier script by Welles titled The Savage Beasts, which was about bullfighting, it was transformed into a story about modern-day Hollywood, where an aging director, played by John Huston, attempts to film what turns out to be his last feature. Joseph McBride, who acted in the picture and was present from the first day of shooting, published in American Film magazine an account of Welles’s complex narrative, and he is worth quoting in detail:

  The Other Side of the Wind . . . chronicles the return of Huston’s character, Jake Hannaford, from years of retirement to direct a “with-it” low-budget film full of nudity, arcane symbolism, and radical-chic violence. The loose story format allows Welles wide-ranging latitude to satirize both the contemporary Hollywood scene and the grand but antiquated postures of Hannaford and his stooges, whose social views verge on the fascistic. . . .

  His framing device in Wind is a huge birthday party being given for Hannaford by the character played by Lilli Palmer. The media are there in force, represented by journalists and critics, and by several television and documentary crews with 16mm and Super-8 equipment. The footage shot by these crews is being blown up for incorporation into the film, and Welles has kept a deliberately haphazard look to all of the party footage, giving it the semblance of cinéma vérité. His own crew operates the cameras at the party, and thus appears in the film. . . .

  Despite being a movie director with traces of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Huston himself recognizable in his personality (not to mention Welles, who named the character Jake because Frank Sinatra used to call him that), Hannaford, Welles says, is really based on Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had an edgy acquaintance. . . . In the film, Hannaford is revealed as a “closet” homosexual who develops an intense attachment for his young leading man, John Dale, played by TV actor Bob Random (who comments, “My entire function in the film is to provide silent visual accompaniment for voice-overs”). Hannaford has always been a Don Juan, with a penchant for seducing his leading men’s girlfriends, but in old age the mask starts to slip away, and he is smitten with the leading man. After Dale spurns Hannaford—who has come to assume a godlike tyranny over the younger man—the old director drunkenly drives off in a sports car he was planning to give Dale, and it crashes. The film follows Welles’s favorite narrative structure of starting at the end, with some ironic and portentous narration, and then flashing back to the party. It all occurs on the night of July 2, not coincidentally the date of Hemingway’s suicide.

  McBride notes that the film resembles Welles’s previous work in that it shows “a legendary man being swallowed up in his self-created image and ultimately being destroyed by it.” But McBride’s own description of the plot suggests that Hannaford is destroyed not so much by his image as by the frustrated, displaced sexuality that lies behind the image. Like Kane, and like most of the other Welles protagonists, Hannaford is driven to assert mastery and power because he has an unconscious guilt. Hannaford’s homosexuality takes its place beside Kane’s oedipal fixation, Arkadin’s incestuous love for his daughter, Quinlan’s paranoia, and Mr. Clay’s impotence; all of these shameful truths are barely hidden when the characters try to play god (or, in some cases, when they try to emulate weakling fathers), and when the secrets are revealed, death or suicide results. Thus when Welles told Richard Wilson that The Other Side of the Wind would be an “attack on machoism,” he was only making explicit a theme he had been dealing with all along: the psychoanalysis of male hubris.

  Clearly The Other Side of the Wind is a more complex, ambitious treatment of this theme than The Immortal Story, although McBride reports that it was referred to by Welles’s intimates as “the greatest home movie ever made.” What gives it an extra dimension and a special fascination for buffs is that in many respects it is a film à clef. Despite the fact that Welles himself does not appear, the characters are based almost perversely on his friends and enemies. Peter Bogdanovich, for example, has a major role as a successful young director named Brooks Otterlake, who once idolized Hannaford but has now far surpassed him at the box office. (The Otterlake role, according to McBride, was created after shooting had begun, when Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show became a success.) Howard Grossman, a Bogdanovich assistant, has taken on the role of contemptible film historian Charles Higgam (a reference to Charles Higham, the critic who had accused Welles of “a fear of completion”), and Susan Strasberg plays a bitchy critic who is supposed to remind us of Pauline Kael. Tonio Selwart, a little-known German actor, resembles John Houseman, and a whole gallery of Welles’s companions from the Mercury Theatre—including Edmond O’Brien, Norman Foster, Mercedes McCambridge, Benny Rubin, Paul Stewart, and Richard Wilson—are cast in minor roles. Of all the players, however, it is John Huston who is the most interesting, partly because his career had so many parallels with Welles’s own. The two men directed their first film within months of each other in 1941, they developed reputations as Hollywood rebels, they became world travelers and bon vivants who lived mainly in Europe after the forties, and of course they collaborated many times. In addition, Huston brings to the Hannaford part an authentic macho image, the feeling of a rather courtly tough guy, so his appearances remind us of Welles without actually resembling him.

  As a movie about movies, The Other Side of the Wind is arguably most impressive at the level of style. More than Citizen Kane, which began with an expressionist sequence and then cut to a newsreel, this film is structured around the varieties of cinematic “perception.” Super-8 and 16mm footage is intercut with 35mm color, and moving pictures are interrupted with still photographs. The camera, which Welles was fond of calling an “infernal machine,” becomes a sort of menacing, omnivorous narrator, always reminding us of its presence, so we see much of Hannaford’s story as if it were a public event being covered by newsmen and paparazzi. Within the fictional world, the characters are often aware that they are being photographed and have picked up the habit of performing even when they seem oblivious to their surroundings. Thus Hollywood is turned into pure celluloid; “reality” is shown in the process of being altered by film, as opposed to being filtered through it, and Welles appears to be making one of his more pessimistic movies. He envisages a decadent world made from a babel of cinematic “languages” that deny any ultimate truth behind the image; as a humanist, he instinctively recoils from such a prospect and equates it with death.

  One of the striking features of the project is its interweaving of two narratives in two radically different film styles. The first, dealing with Hannaford’s late-life comeback and birthday party, uses a mélange of techniques associated with “observational” documentary plus still-photo inserts and interviews with Hannaford concerning his Hollywood memories and current plans. The second, representing the project Hannaford is working on, is a big-screen art film shot in color, titled The Other Side of the Wind. The ontological status of this film is somewhat ambiguous. Welles’s screenplay opens with the death of Hannaford in a car crash, and Welles as narrator tells us that the “unfinished motion picture” is part of the testimony concerning his death. “It has been left just as it was when they screened it—on the last day of his life” (Drössler, Unknown Orson Welles, 66). An early treatment by Welles, dated 1970 or 1971, describes it as “an erotic fable about two young people,” but also notes, “We never actually see [Hannaford] shooting it. . . . We do, however, sometimes hear him directing the action. . . . We see his film as it exists in his own mind” (Peter Bogdanovich papers, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana). Whatever the case, it is both symptomatic of the 1970s and a reflection of Hannaford’s sexual obsessions. In stylistic terms it resembles Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, Blow
Up, and Zabriskie Point. The action is enigmatic, humorless, and almost silent. Everything centers on a beautiful woman named Carla (Oja Kodar), described in the treatment as a “red, Red Indian,” who might be a political activist and who seems to be involved in the kind of mysterious activity we associate with a thriller. Carla is both object and enabler of Hannaford’s sexual fantasies. He never gives her the opportunity to speak, and during the sex scenes we hear his offscreen voice urging her on.

  The two styles of the film as a whole are very far from what we normally associate with Welles. In his late work he began to react against his growing reputation as an auteur, eschewing the warped space, shadows, and halls of mirrors in his previous work. Here, as in F for Fake, he creates a postmodern film that tends to put style in quotation marks. He also creates an explicitly sexual film, moving into territory with which he had little previous experience and attributing the results to the fictional director Jake Hannaford. Joseph McBride has argued that one of the most impressive moments in The Other Side of the Wind is a seven-minute sequence in which Carla straddles a young man in a moving car during a rainstorm and gradually reaches orgasm. Rapidly edited and cleverly lit by photographer Gary Graver (who, before working with Welles, had photographed soft-core porn), it is supposedly the art of Hannaford, not Welles.

  But even though Welles avoids a stylistic signature and tries to distance himself by associating Hannaford with Hemingway, he remains a structuring absence and behind-the-scenes presence. His film is populated by old actors who once worked with him and is full of inside jokes aimed at people he resents. Like Citizen Kane, it begins with the central character’s death and views his life through multiple lenses. Even the theme of latent or closeted homosexuality is Wellesian. That theme appears as early as Bright Lucifer and Citizen Kane; hovers in the background of The Lady from Shanghai, Othello, The Immortal Story, and F for Fake; and surfaces explicitly in the screenplay for The Big Brass Ring. Furthermore, the biographical connections between Welles and Hannaford are obvious. In the early treatment Welles offers this description of the character, who signs himself in movie credits as “J. J. Hannaford III”:

  In Hollywood’s Golden Age . . . Hannaford was rated well below such names as Capra, Cukor, Lubitch [sic], McCarey and Ford. . . . For most of his long working life he was regarded by the Industry as not much more than a gifted, difficult, and uncomfortably intelligent maverick. His true importance has been acknowledged by critics and film historians only recently. The change began on the other side of the Atlantic. The sort of European sensibility which, two generations earlier, had called America’s attention to the genius of its own jazz music, began in the late fifties to proclaim the high significance of J. J. Hannaford. . . . This took a while to spread, but today he’s counted, more or less officially, among the six greatest living directors. Some people would make that twelve. Quite a few would give him first position. (Peter Bogdanovich papers, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana)

  Like Welles, Hannaford is beginning to enjoy new importance because of the spread of French auteurism to America. Young filmmakers want to emulate him (just as they do Welles), and a great age of cinephilia has dawned. “The kids are digging film today as film was never dug before,” Welles writes in his treatment. “Godard is God. There are a few select arch-angels.” All this has attracted media attention to the old director, making him a hot new property, enabling him to find the initial backing for a new film, and turning his birthday party into a swarm of cameras, critics, old cronies, adoring but nerdy fans, and ambitious representatives of the new Hollywood.

  In February 1975, when Welles decided to show two excerpts from The Other Side of the Wind before the American Film Institute, he added still another level of significance to the images, turning the televised “Life Achievement Award” ceremony into a frame for the sequences he had shot. The institute’s award, of which he was the third recipient, is to some extent a public relations device, enabling the AFI to gather dozens of celebrities in one place and obtain prime-time coverage; Welles, however, was a slightly controversial candidate for the show. A week before the broadcast, syndicated columnist Marilyn Beck publicly chided the institute for selecting Welles and wrote that she was not alone in feeling he had wasted his talents. By contrast, the two previous awards had gone to John Ford and James Cagney—authentically successful American folk heroes whose achievements could be wrapped in the flag; in fact the Ford ceremony was attended by the then president of the United States, and Ford’s last public act was to stand before television cameras and shout, in an aging voice, “God bless Richard Nixon!” Thus, even though the Welles program was hosted by such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson, it seemed much less a major public event.

  In this somewhat cloudy, dubious atmosphere, Welles decided to make a pitch for his work in progress. To advertise himself, he exhibited two excerpts from The Other Side of the Wind that are critical of Hollywood and the “great man” myth that the AFI had assembled to honor. Reminding the audience of his habit of paying for his own movies out of his acting jobs, and describing himself as a “neighborhood grocery in an age of supermarkets,” Welles first showed a highly satiric piece of film depicting the Hollywood celebration in honor of Jake Hannaford; he followed this episode with a scene in which one of Hannaford’s henchmen tries to interest a big studio boss in financing a picture. Taken together, these excerpts were one of the most interesting examples of Pirandellian theatrics in Welles’s career.

  Neither of the bits of film are in the style normally associated with Orson Welles, although they have a grotesque, somewhat frenzied quality that recalls his earlier work. The first is shot in color, with bumpy, handheld cameras, using zoom lenses to capture occasional close-ups, jump cuts to shatter the action, and overlapping speeches to give the illusion of unmanipulated reality. The setting is Jake Hannaford’s birthday party. The director, followed by his entourage and a bewildering crowd of photographers who might well be shooting this very footage, moves slowly through the night air toward a California-style house; meanwhile we hear a cocktail-party piano playing “It’s De-Lovely” and a smattering of applause for the guest of honor. Drink in hand, Hannaford turns and gives a weary smile to the people waiting to receive him, his face caught in the painful glare of movie lights. He walks forward carefully, with a graceful, loping stride, while various figures gather around. Suddenly a man in an orange shirt runs frantically from behind the crowd of photographers, shouting, “Mr. Hannaford! Mr. Hannaford!” As one of Jake’s cronies (Benny Rubin) raises an arm and yells, “Happy birthday, Jake,” the running man circles in front of Hannaford and offers to shake his hand. “Mr. Hannaford,” he says with great earnestness, “I’m Marvin P. Fassbender.” “Of course you are,” Hannaford says, like a doctor trying to reassure a mental patient, and then continues moving toward the house.

  Everyone on the lawn seems to start and pause along with Hannaford, sucked along in the wake of celebrity. After a moment Hannaford stops at a doorway and turns to look behind, the camera zooming in for a close-up of his pained, slightly open-mouthed expression. A reverse angle shows a line of photographers, lights, and sound equipment scurrying forward en masse. Glancing to his left and then his right, Hannaford sees that he is flanked by more photographers moving their equipment toward him, knocking one another down in an attempt to gain a position in the front row. Defensively, he breaks out in a huge smile, providing a photo opportunity and forcing the crowd to halt for a good shot. In close-up we see the intently serious face of a young girl in rimless glasses holding lights aloft.

  We now cut to the interior of the house, with the party in progress. The action appears to have been shot casually, using multiple handheld cameras, but behind the apparent randomness there is a careful plan whereby figures move in and out of range at the proper dramatic moments. The scene opens with Brooks Otterlake casually waving aside a reporter with a gesture of noblesse oblige: “This is Mr. Hannaford’s night,” he says. “Le
t’s save the questions for him, okay?” As the scene develops, however, it becomes clear that Hannaford is a relative bystander, with Otterlake claiming the center of attention in the room. Thus when the young director moves out of view, one of the reporters walks into the frame and asks, “You two are very close, aren’t you?” “Yes, I’d like to ask you about that,” a woman’s voice says, and the camera pans to find the Susan Strasberg character seated on a desktop, brandishing a cigarette. “Come on, Otterlake,” she says, hopping off her perch and crossing the room. “Why do you think you have to be as rude as he is?” “As rude as you are,” Otterlake answers. “In print, anyway.”

  The director and the critic begin circling each other like prizefighters, moving cautiously in deference to each other’s power; meanwhile Hannaford stands on the sidelines with the rest of the crowd, reacting occasionally. “She wasn’t that kind to me in her review,” Otterlake says, raising his voice so that he can be heard by everyone. “Not that you did me much harm.” Suddenly he breaks into a Cagney imitation to disguise a boast: “I mean, how can you do much harm to the third biggest grosser in movie history?” Hannaford now interrupts with mock awe: “Do you really make that much? How marvelous!” “Yes!” Strasberg chimes in, ostensibly speaking to Hannaford but really aiming the remark at Otterlake. “Did you know that when his own production company goes public that your friend there stands to walk away with forty million dollars?” The camera quickly pans with Otterlake as he crosses to Hannaford and attempts to soothe him with flattery. “Yes, and she’s going to keep on writing that I stole everything from you, Skipper. I’m never gonna walk away from that.” Hannaford looks around in apparent innocence. “It’s all right to borrow from each other,” he says. “What we must never do is borrow from ourselves.”