This one is a very niche documentary about the final, uncompleted film by Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind. I added this to my list thinking that it would be something like a biography of the great director, focusing on his final years. To some extent, it is but it is much more focused on the minutiae of the production process of the film itself and that turned out to be a bit too specialized for me to hold much interest in.

Orson Welles is of course the director of Citizen Kane, the film most commonly cited as the greatest ever made. Despite the critical acclaim, he has always been a Hollywood outsider and had spent decades in Europe before returning to the US to make The Other Side of the Wind, which was meant to be his big comeback. However he had troubles from the very beginning, including difficulties raising money and ended up having to made a deal with Iranians to get the cash. This documentary recounts the entire production process and since it’s difficult to know what the real truth is, allows each person involved to speak for themselves, thought the accounts often contradict one another. Other problems include changing one of the lead actors Rich Little weeks after filming started; the complexity of the project itself, which involves a film within a film and a sort of documentary around its making; and the fact that no one apart from Welles appears to understand what he was trying to do, with some of the cast and crew even suspecting that he never meant to finish it at all.

Unfortunately I think only the most dedicated of cinephiles will be very interested in the film Welles was making. Most like myself are watching this only inasmuch as it offers glimpses into the psychology of the genius filmmaker and that comprises only a small part of this documentary. The director here, Morgan Neville, who also made Won’t You Be My Neighbor, which I really liked, tries hard to keep your interest. He incorporates clips from many films that Welles himself starred in as a type of reaction shot and edits in bits of dialogue by other cast members from The Other Side of the Wind itself to refer to the real life situations they were facing. It’s amusing but I still found most of the production side material to be mostly boring. It is quite fascinating that Welles took three years to film a sex scene in a car for example, taking time off in between to do other work and raise money. But anecdotes about how Rich Little got into and then out of the project and Welles’ relationship with Oja Kodar, his mistress at the time and the female lead for the film, seem to be gossip-level fare.

I did like the parts that helps shed some light into Welles as a person. As this documentary notes, having every film compared to Citizen Kane is an impossible standard and Welles seemed to have gone out of his way to keep attempting to push the boundaries of filmmaking even late in his life. It’s funny how he keeps denying that The Other Side of the Wind is autobiographical while everyone else can see that it is, especially with regards to the relationship that he had with Peter Bogdanovich which started as a mentor-mentee type of thing that later seemed to be warped by resentment and jealousy. Also evident is how Welles, similar to other great directors like Stanley Kubrick, would mercilessly use people for his own purposes for as long as they would let him. He even had his own version of Leon Vitali, in this case cinematographer Gary Graver who beginning from when he wrote to Welles asking to work with him, seemed to devote his entire life to Welles. This documentary makes it clear that Welles could be incredibly charming and eloquent when he needed to be, but he must also have been top grade jerk in person.

As fascinating as all this is, I still can’t really recommend this to most people as most of it is about the production of The Other Side of the Wind and that honestly gets boring. I would have loved to learn all this from a feature article in a magazine but a full length documentary like this feels a little too much. I did however add Welles’ last film to my to watch list. It seems that Bogdanovich did manage to finally secure the rights to it and get it finished. It has decent reviews and even if I don’t like it, I think it would at least be very interesting.