Orson Welles’s posthumously finished The Other Side of the Wind is a meta-masterpiece.
ORSON WELLES FAMOUSLY hated it when critics tried to draw clean lines between his work and his tempestuous inner life, but here goes, anyway: It wasn’t mere bad luck that he died with his self-eviscerating/self-aggrandizing semi autobiographical summing up, The Other Side of the Wind, in fragments. It was destiny— another, more cosmic, summing up. It was How It Had to Be.
The movie that arrives on November 2 (in theaters and on Netflix, which coughed up the bucks to pry loose the estimated 100 hours of footage from interested parties) is a jaw-dropping bombardment—a teeming, fractured faux documentary of the last day (principally, a 70th-birthday party at an actress’s desert estate) in the life of a madly self-indulgent director, J. J. “Jake” Hannaford (John Huston), intercut with scenes from the film he’s working on and will never have the money to finish, also called The Other Side of the Wind and meant (by Welles, not Jake) as a parody of Antonioni’s lush sex-and-alienation epics.
This story is from the October 29, 2018 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the October 29, 2018 edition of New York magazine.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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