The Other Side of the Wind

The Other Side of the Wind is an unfinished film directed by Orson Welles and starring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper and Oja Kodar. The film features Huston as an aging Hollywood director modeled on Ernest Hemingway, who is trying to make a hip, with-it film in the early seventies, laden with sex and violence, to revive his flagging career. Like many of Welles's personally funded films, the project was filmed and edited on-and-off... more

The Other Side of the Wind is an unfinished film directed by Orson Welles and starring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper and Oja Kodar. The film features Huston as an aging Hollywood director modeled on Ernest Hemingway, who is trying to make a hip, with-it film in the early seventies, laden with sex and violence, to revive his flagging career. Like many of Welles's personally funded films, the project was filmed and 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 in 1976 he said it was on the brink of completion. By 1979, 40 minutes of the film had been edited by Welles. But in that year, the film experienced serious legal and financial complications. 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 that year. A complex, decades-long legal battle over the ownership of the film ensued, with the original negative... less