They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

Orson Welles

Orson Welles on the set

Orson Welles on the set with Peter Bogdanovich

Orson Welles on the set with Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston

Orson Welles on the set

Orson Welles with John Huston

Left to right, John Huston, Orson Welles, and Peter Bogdanovich

Left to right, Peter Bogdanovich in shadows, Orson Welles, and John Huston

Left to right, Dennis Hopper, John Ford, and John Huston

Left to right, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, and John Huston

Left to right, Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich, Oja Kodar, and Gary Graver

THEY’LL LOVE ME WHEN I’M DEAD               B                    

USA  (98 mi)  2018  d:  Morgan Neville

Struck by the inventiveness of Welles’ own F for Fake (1973), where the director felt he was creating not so much a documentary but a “new kind of film,” Neville modeled this documentary on that film.  Made by the director of 2013 Top Ten List # 8 20 Feet from Stardom, this is equally as entertaining, released on Netflix as an accompaniment to the long unfinished work of Welles, The Other Side of the Wind (2018), which is a histrionic look at what might have been, as it was left to others, namely editor Bob Murawski, to finish what amounted to 100 hours of unedited film and the result is impressive, though likely too avant-garde for a commercial audience and hardly a masterwork worthy of being called a Welles film.  This moody hodgepodge of self-reflective commentary is at the heart of Welles’ film, which is itself an autobiographical documentary on the difficulties of making of a film, largely improvised, shot over five years, where the mirror reflections of what transpired in Welles’ own life trying to complete the film are simply remarkable, as he was never able to complete the film due to a lack of funding, as it completely dried up after the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, as the primary financier was the Shah’s brother in law, a Paris-based Iranian production operated by Mehdi Boushehri, with the new Iranian regime headed by Ayatollah Khomeini impounding the film along with all assets of the previous regime, and when brought to French court, they ruled that the film was owned by the producer, not the director, and impounded the original negative of the film, locked in a vault, completely inaccessible to Welles during his lifetime (though he smuggled out a print), dying in 1985 prior to completing the film.  When his estranged widow Paola Mori died the following year, the Welles estate was turned over to his daughter Beatrice Welles, and it was up to her to untangle the legal shenanigans that took more than two decades.  Making matters even more difficult, Welles left the controlling rights of all his unfinished film projects to Oja Kodar, his longtime companion, mistress and collaborator who co-wrote and co-starred in The Other Side of the Wind.  The contentious relationship between Oja Kodar and Beatrice Welles (who believed Kodar destroyed her mother’s marriage), each supposedly speaking for the true motives of the infamous director, led to a stalemate and power struggle that prevented any restoration and distribution of the film until Netflix got involved as late as 2017, with the original prints shipped from Paris to Los Angeles for a final restoration more than forty years after the shooting stopped, hiring a post-production team that included Bob Murawski as editor, Scott Millan as sound mixer, and Mo Henry as negative cutter.  Welles himself is seen waxing eloquently about the art of making movies, inspired by his belief in “divine accidents” that inevitably occur, claiming it is the director’s role to manage these unintended consequences.  Welles on camera is always viewed as a larger-than-life, Falstaff-like Shakespearean character with that deep resonant bass voice, a consummate showman, continually hyping a sales pitch for his latest idea or movie, all designed to promote interest in his latest project. 

With the overwhelming success of CITIZEN KANE (1941), many regarding it as the greatest film ever made, Welles was quickly blindsided by the Hollywood power elite who managed to get him sent out of the country as a goodwill ambassador to Brazil at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and a principal stockholder in RKO Radio Pictures, shooting a documentary there which produced the beautifully unfinished film IT’S ALL TRUE (1943).  While out of the country his next film was sabotaged, THE MAGNIFICENT ANDERSONS (1942), with the studio heads thinking the ending was too downbeat, so they destroyed the final prints and brought in the actors to reshoot the ending, with the lost footage still the stuff of legends, one of the colossal betrayals in Hollywood history, as no one will ever see the final vision conceived by the artist himself.  This betrayal destroyed whatever future Welles had in Hollywood and was a blow from which he never recovered, exiled to Europe in order to procure financing for his films in the 50’s and 60’s, as money completely dried up in the United States, so it was this film project that lured him back to Los Angeles, spending the last 15 years of his life there obsessed with the making of this film, confident it would resurrect his career and lead to a breakthrough, finally achieving the success he felt he deserved after all these years.  But that envisioned Hollywood ending was not to be, as evidenced by the heartbreak that followed what he thought was a door opening when he was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the American Film Institute in 1975, basking in the limelight of a room filled with stars and the Hollywood elite, receiving a standing ovation, screening two scenes from the film, all but imploring this august group for money to complete the film, but no one offered a penny.  It’s easily the saddest moment of the film, especially since he grew so euphoric at the prospect of a successful return.  The hypocrisy, of course, is that they’d recognize him with an award while still refusing to offer him work, continuing a pattern that existed for thirty years.  Similarly, the ultimate irony is that the prestigiously elite team of Hollywood specialists required to restore this film forty years after his death is way more extravagant than Welles would have required to finish the film himself.  It’s likely sometime late in life that he was alleged to have spoken the words of the film title as a befitting epitaph, as it’s completely in character with his morbid humor.  The clips of Welles that are splintered throughout the film are deliciously revealing, as he’s so in command of being in front of a camera, like a youthfully exuberant ham that never knows when to stop ogling for more laughs, but it shows just how comfortable he is in his own skin.  Revealing more about Welles than any other documentary, this also shows how much we miss him, as he remains curious and constantly inventive, seemingly with so much to offer, yet his life was filled with such disappointment, which may explain why he ballooned in weight in his final years, where the sad and pathetic reality is that his regular source of income was largely accumulated by becoming a pitchman for a variety of TV commercials.         

When Welles concocted his plan to return to America in 1970, Hollywood was changing, as the power of the studios was dissipating and it was becoming a youth market targeting the younger generation, with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969),  Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Last Movie (1971), or McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a time when Welles was viewed with reverence in Europe and by this new generation, described as “somewhere between a Zen master and God,” where he should have been welcomed like a conquering hero, as John Huston was with THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), yet he never completed another picture.  At the time he was living in the Beverly Hills Hotel, which was not concealed from the public, so up and coming cinematographer Gary Graver enthusiastically gave him a call expressing a desire to work with him.  Using a montage of his own collected films, Neville amusingly reassembles his telephone response, giving it a dramatic life or death urgency, testing the young cameraman in his hotel suite, agreeing on the spot to work with him, as he had a reputation for working fast and cheap, which turned into a Mephistophelean deal with the devil, with Graver having no life of his own after that, working with Welles for the next 15 years (the only person to work for both Welles and Ed Wood), ruining his family life by literally being worked to the ground for no pay, going to desperate measures, working in the porn industry under an assumed alias to earn a living, where in a hilarious moment Welles is seen ingeniously helping edit a porn film in order to get Graver back working for him.  Another interesting tidbit is Welles working with the comic impressionist Rich Little on his own television program, becoming enamored with his talent, an odd couple, to be sure, offering him a role in the film that was later filled by American director Peter Bogdanovich, as Little had a small window of opportunity to shoot with no possibility of working beyond a cutoff date, as he had touring commitments.  Welles took a gamble and nearly completed what he needed, but fell short, having to toss all that footage and start all over again with Bogdanovich.  That was really the beginning of the end on this project, as things started taking a turn for the worse.  This documentary, however, is unique in showing plenty of footage of Rich Little on the set that is not present in the film.  Bogdanovich, interestingly, does several impressions of Rich Little doing an impression.  Welles’ connection to Bogdanovich mirrors his own career, as Bogdanovich was the wonder boy whose first film was the highly acclaimed The Last Picture Show (1971), discovering a young 19-year old Cybill Shepherd, having an affair with her, with Welles curiously casting a young teenage blond in his own film meant to resemble her, Cathy Lucas as Mavis Henscher, though embraced by the aging director John Huston who lasciviously takes her under his wing.  Bogdanovich went on to have plenty of success before his career mysteriously fizzled out, exactly like Welles, and hasn’t had a hit movie in decades, though he recently completed a documentary on Buster Keaton, The Great Buster (2018).  It’s sadly curious that in the decade of making this film, both Huston and Bogdanovich were lauded by Hollywood for their work, but Welles was routinely ignored, becoming so desperate for an editing machine that he literally moved into Bogdanovich’s editing studio in the basement of his home, not for three weeks, as was expected, but for three years, happening during a particularly difficult turn in Bogdanovich’s career, becoming a huge strain on their friendship.  Interesting that Bogdanovich began as a young cinephile enthusiast idolizing Welles, recalling the morning Welles called telling him to meet on a roadway next to a runway at the Los Angeles airport, doing Jerry Lewis impressions for him during the shoot, then successfully directing his own films, with Welles moving into his own house in no hurry to move on.  Believing he was creating a masterpiece, though “maybe it’s just people talking about a movie,” the painful legacy of Welles’ film is beautifully detailed in this film, which is easier to follow and arguably much more enjoyable to watch than the doomed picture Welles shot.      

The Other Side of the Wind

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND            B                    

France  Iran  USA  (122 mi)  2018  d:  Orson Welles            Unfinished by the director

The great danger for any artist is to find himself comfortable.  It’s his duty to find the point of maximum discomfort, to search it out.

―Orson Welles, from Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, by Josh Karp, 2015

The final film by Orson Welles, something of a satirized critique of Hollywood that plays fast and loose as an autobiographical portrait as well, with sharply pointed language that is menacing and venomous, like a poison pill or “fuck you” to the industry, meant to cause a major stir, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1985, and was actually completed by others from the assembled 100 hours of footage left unedited (completed by producers Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski), reminiscent of Mozart’s Requiem or Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, among the many unfinished works completed by students or devotees of the original artists.  Actually the film this most resembles is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s INFERNO (L’Enfer), a dizzying 2009 reconstruction by directors Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea from 13 hours of unfinished footage shot by Clouzot in 1964, as it reveals the same manic hysteria using kinetic energy with lights pulsating on and off continually altering the experimental 60’s look of the screen.  Similarly, Welles (only 55 at the time) made a conscious effort to relate to the youth movement of the early 70’s, much like Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) that was filmed about the same time, thinking this would be a way to resurrect his career and break back into Hollywood notoriety, which was undergoing its own strange transformation away from major studios, obsessed with the radical ideas of the French New Wave at the time.  Welles actually began shooting in August 1970, completing the principal photography more than five years later in January 1976, undergoing a myriad of financial difficulties that were never resolved, with projects that were always on the brink of collapse until Netflix got involved forty years later to distribute the picture, which ironically will likely be seen by more viewers on television than any of his films were ever viewed in theaters, where viewers can clearly see the remarkable footage Welles completed, editing only about a third of the film himself, the wildly pretentious film-within-the-film comprising an Adam and Eve scenario starring a mostly naked Oja Kodar (real name Olga Palinkaš, a Croatian actress that became the director’s lover in the latter stages of his life, though he remained married to his third wife, Paola Mori), who winds up in a 60’s psychedelic nightclub drenched from pouring rain, followed by Bob Random as John Dale, a motorcyclist who takes an interest in the girl, both eventually thrust into the front seat of a car dripping wet where she seduces him in short order (like a praying mantis) set to the rhythm of the wiper blades before being thrown out of the car, wandering around an abandoned back lot of a studio, playing a game of hide and seek, which according to the making of the film documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018), was actually intended to mock the style of a European art film.  Both paw at each other and eventually become naked and exposed, yet neither one utters a single word, inhabiting what resembles an apocalyptic end of the world setting, almost as if they are the last two people on earth, naked and distrustful, yet strangely, while curious about her, she’s always the aggressor (with suggestions that he might be gay), with Eve eventually laughing at him, inducing a castration complex with her menacing use of scissors, driving him away in fear and confusion.  Of course the big joke is how would the world procreate under this scenario?      

Separate and apart from this more poetic sequence is a longer fake documentary that is a parody on the making of a film, always surrounded by a multitude of cameras from which this footage is presumably drawn, like found footage, using a cinéma vérité style at a posh desert estate (that happens to be right next door to the resort that blew up in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point) that is largely a frenetic party sequence in honor of an esteemed legendary director, John Huston as Jake Hannaford, arrogant and pompous, where he may as well be the voice of God, a precursor to his role as Noah Cross, a major, behind-the-scenes powerbroker in CHINATOWN (1974), drinking heavily celebrating his 70th birthday, showing what turns out to be the last day of his life, only to end in a James Dean style car crash that opens the film while driving a Porsche convertible that may have been a suicide, totally intoxicated, with his last film unfinished, the money gone, and having driven away his lead male star.  It’s a bombardment of images filled with plenty of chatter about the film and its lack of funding, according to Welles, “maybe it’s just people talking about a movie,” with party attendees divided by rank and social standing, depending on their importance to the director, including colleagues and friends in the business, crew members, students, groupies, sycophants, and hangers-on, with Peter Bogdanovich playing a rich Hollywood director named Brooks Otterlake, “the human tape recorder,” who fawns after the director, apparently knowing everything there is to know about him, having attempted to interview him for five years, collecting anecdotes and snippets of recorded information, but Hannaford is an evasive and elusive subject, not really wanting his story told, so what is revealed may be a complete and utter fabrication.  Who knows?  Lilli Palmer, the love interest in Body and Soul (1947), is worth mentioning as Zarah Valeska, the owner of the house where they have the party, an aging film star who maintains her foreign accent and demure looks, perhaps a tribute to Marlene Dietrich, having made an earlier picture together with Hannaford, exuding sophistication and charm, showing an intellect that is altogether lacking in this picture, as all the men are for the most part infantile caricatures, represented by a giant phallic symbol near the end of the picture that simply goes limp.  Susan Strasberg plays Julie Rich, a harsh movie critic modeled after Pauline Kael, who has no love for this director (as evidenced by her blistering nearly book-length essay on Welles from 1971, Raising Kane—I | The New Yorker, actually accusing him of not writing the film, along with other flamboyant suggestions that would later prove erroneous on multiple counts, ultimately exposed as more opinion than fact in The Making of Citizen Kane, a book by Robert L. Carringer released in October 1996, but nonetheless damaged the reputation of Welles at the time), making a speech near the end that all but declares him an old-fashioned misogynist whose primary interest is sleeping with the girls on the set, including the lead actress as well as wives of various friends, allowing him free access to indulge in his sexual pleasures, where it plays out very much like a Harvey Weinstein character, whose lust for power is the real motivating drive for getting into the business. 

Certainly the most controversial and perhaps the real surprise is the relationship Hannaford has with his lead actor John Dale, as he humiliates him during the filming and literally drives him off the set, leaving the picture unfinished.  Damned by his own behavior, much of this is based upon the director’s insinuations that John Dale is little more than a “faggot,” (harsh, to be sure, and a homophobic slur, but the precise word used in the film and a sign of the times), which suggests he was driven to ridicule him on the set.  This is a side of Welles that we’ve never seen before in his films.  Welles, like Huston, were followers of the Hemingway school of machismo, drinking whisky and smoking cigars, with a love for bullfights and shooting guns, where retreating to the bordello seems like a natural place for them to be, where they can tell stories about all their exploits with women, empowered by a lustful masculinity that mirrors their artistic accomplishments, preening like peacocks in the vanity of their success, where they love to be in the center of the spotlight, willing to take the plunge, with ambitions like the kings of old, ruling over their territory with autocratic scrutiny.  These men hate to be criticized, or be described as feeble or weak, yet their drive to reject and demean homosexuality is like a curse, with suggestions that it’s suppressed homosexual oglings from the director himself, who is described at one point as “a big pink lobster,” leaving a sizable open wound still bleeding.  The blatant sexism and homophobia are not only evident, but part of what drives the business, obscuring truth through exaggerated Hollywood storytelling and myth, where one constantly questions what’s behind the mask, as there are always damaging rumors and insinuations hurled with an intent to ruin reputations.  How much of this is Welles is hard to tell, but this does offer a searing critique of the director himself, filled with the self-loathing bitterness of a domineering artist, mindful of all the accumulated disappointments, suddenly unleashed as a wounded, alcohol-driven, and unapologetic soul driving the film into the ground, seeking approval of the young while destroying them in the same process.  Add to this the leering effect of men in a dark screening room watching a naked woman onscreen, and it all gets fairly primitive very fast.  Ironically, the cinematographer for the film, Gary Graver, who immersed himself into this experience with Welles over a 6-year period, eventually went on to become an award-winning adult film director of porn films, making as many as 135 features, as he needed a more reliable source of income.  So there is that, a kind of sexist, back-alley consciousness about sexuality that runs throughout this picture, a new wrinkle, as the more prudish Welles was loathe to film sex scenes throughout his career.   

Jumping back and forth between black and white and color, using different looking film stocks, working without a script, certainly one uncomfortable aspect is turning Welles’ final film into what resembles a New Wave Jean-Luc Godard style production, filled with an extensive use of bold jump cuts, where few shots last more than a few seconds, with dialogue continually moving in and out of audio range, much of it overlapping, where it becomes a smorgasbord of sounds, with faces appearing and then disappearing, giving viewers a you-are-there effect, becoming a dizzyingly weird myriad of kaleidoscopic images and ideas all mixed together, remarkably inventive in spots, where the abstract experimentation is daring and ostentatious, but mostly it comes across as a complete mess, where the final hour in particular veers off the rails, lost in its own impending sense of doom.  Unlike the crisp newsroom dialogue in CITIZEN KANE (1941) that you couldn’t take your eyes off of, much of what is discussed here is utterly forgettable, frantically paced but poorly presented, mostly thrown into the face of the audience where it becomes mindlessly tedious, much of it little more than gossip, yet that may have been intentional to reveal a vacuous industry of inflated egos and an endless parade of blowhards, where enough of that Welles imprint is felt throughout to make this essential viewing.  According to editor Bob Murawski from an article in indieWIRE, ‘The Other Side of the Wind’: How to Salvage an Unfinished Orson Welles Movie Without Orson Welles:

[Welles] was really trying to create movement through rapid editing.  He was at a point in his career where he no longer had access to sophisticated equipment like cranes and dollies as he did when he was working on big studio movies.  Nor was he working with experienced, professional film crews who would be able to execute the kind of complicated, sophisticated, virtuosic shots he was famous for.  Think of the opening shot from “Touch of Evil.”  Completely impossible under these circumstances.  So he devised a new technique for creating that hyperkinetic sense of movement.

In addition, the nature of how the party sequence was actually filmed, using a mixture of film formats, made it that much more difficult for Welles to finish the editing:

This would not be that much of a problem today, since everything would simply get transferred and then edited on a digital system like the Avid.  But when this movie was shot, that technology didn’t exist, so all the smaller formats first needed to be optically “blown up” to 35mm before Orson could edit them.  Something that created an entire layer of cost and complexity.  To me, it’s not surprising that he was unable to complete the editing of the movie.  It was too logistically difficult.

While the frenzied pace is meant to emulate the free-spirited inhibitions of jazz, there’s a jazzy musical soundtrack by Michel Legrand that is initially excellent, muted and highly atmospheric over the opening credits, capturing that solitary mood, like something you listen to at 3 o’clock in the morning, with another beautiful swaying theme playing over an Adam and Eve close-up, but it becomes less pronounced over time, taken over by a symphony of voices at the party drowning out one another.  Welles himself had a complicated relationship with Hollywood and the film industry, rejected and betrayed early on, though he was viewed as a genius by the rest of the world, exiled to Europe, unable to procure funds in America, and all but forgotten in the latter stages of his career, but he was still working, writing a script along with Oja Kodar that was often dropped in favor of improvisation, creating something out of nothing, where this was an attempt to create an autobiographical view of Welles’ world of making movies, exploring his own personal obsessions, viewed as a has-been, aiming for a comeback, shot over a period of years on a shoestring budget, becoming yet another project doomed to failure.  Like all Welles films, however, this will be analyzed and scrutinized and re-evaluated by film historians for years to come.        

From Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, a book written by Josh Karp, published in 2015:

The film is a fragment, composed of brilliance and madness; finely honed and wildly disorganized; meticulously edited but ultimately unfinished.  The movie is a shot at perfection in a world where the director can no longer control his muse and is left to stumble about in a maze composed of his own art and creativity.  It’s a world that shows Welles at his best and worst, bringing together his polar opposites—but unable or unwilling to recognize that his art and life have become one and the same.