We're here today to go into the vault...
where Orson Welles' last film has been kept
for over 30 years now.
Wow.
This is really amazing.
There! Peter in the car.
-Peter. Car. Jake, Peter. -Do you think that's...
The story of how we completed Orson Welles' last unfinished movie,
The Other Side of the Wind,
is nearly as complicated as the film itself.
This is what we hope not to find.
-Empty boxes. -There's plenty of that.
It's truly been a labor of love
for so many people who volunteered their time and energy
to finally bring Orson's vision to the screen.
And this is how we did it.
Fireworks, everybody. Fireworks.
For me, it all began in 1971
in Carefree, Arizona.
When I first arrived on the set
of Other Side of the Wind, t really wasn't a set, it was a house,
and Orson and Gary Graver and Oja and I,
and Polly Platt,
were all there making a movie.
But because there were only four of us,
we had to do everything.
So, this is me doing the slate
And this one is Orson and I up on the rocks
in the backyard at the Carefree house
and there's my first job on The Other Side of the Wind was
to create these dummies.
This is me...
playing one of the, uh, documentary cameramen.
I was also the accountant.
We had a bank account in Gary and my name
where I signed all the checks.
We all did everything.
We acted, we shot some of it,
we built the sets,
we were all living together, just like a family.
We called it a V.I.S.T.O.W. alert back in those days,
Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles.
Studio bus, scene four! Take one!
It was like being on a film school movie
where everybody just pitched in and did everything.
Please don't look up this way. Look at each other.
Destroy scene twenty-two, take six.
Action!
Everybody who worked on the picture
was dedicated to doing the best they could for Orson Welles.
-And rolling. -Chabrol,
one-six-six.
Take one.
People loved Orson.
He could be difficult,
but you had to love him.
No, not looking down, Larry. Looking away.
Looking away, Larry! Larry! Cut!
Orson liked to fire me,
because he usually had to have somebody to blame
when something didn't go right.
A little further forward. Keep going...
keep going... keep going...
Cut. That shot was rendered useless by Frank.
I knew that if I just went back to the hotel
that somebody would call me within the next day
and say, "Come on back."
I think he was shooting and it was lunch.
Orson just turned to me out of the blue,
there was no conversation leading up to it,
and he just turned to me and said,
"If anything ever happens to me, I want you to promise me
you'll finish the picture."
And I said, "Jesus, Orson.
Why do you say a thing like that? Nothing's gonna happen to you."
"I know.
Nothing's gonna happen.
But if it does...
I want you to promise me you'll finish the picture."
"I will, of course I will, but..."
"That's fine. We can drop the subject."
That was it.
So I never discussed it again.
I just felt I owed Orson
to make good on the promise.
I didn't think we wouldn't do it,
I just thought, "When are we gonna get it done?"
For several years after Orson passed away in 1985,
Gary Graver, Orson's longtime cinematographer
was trying to get the money to finish the film.
Then I started helping Gary
and we had all kinds of people coming in and out of the woodwork.
Most of them were scared by the chain of title.
They all felt it was too risky.
Especially because the original negative was stuck in a lab in Paris.
It was very frustrating, and we almost had the money a few times.
Almost. People were talking about it and...
it went on for years.
Years.
I first became aware of The Other Side of the Wind
in May of 2009.
It seemed like a very interesting pursuit to explore.
After Orson died,
a French judge ruled
that the negatives be locked under court order.
Nobody was able to figure out the legal wrangle in France.
I realized that whoever controlled the negative
will ultimately control the film.
Nobody had seen the negative in Paris.
Nobody knew whether it was dust or it was usable or, you know, what was there.
The French court ruled
that an agreement had to be reached with all three parties.
So, Orson's daughter Beatrice had
a claim on the rights there,
as did Oja Kodar, Orson's co-creator,
and then the Persians,
at that point operating through their French production company, Astrophore.
You had these three units that all had to come together to approve things,
in order for us to get the negative in Paris.
I always believed it would happen,
I just didn't know when.
This was Orson Welles' last movie,
the guy who made Citizen Kane.
Filip was coming at it from one way,
I was coming at it from another way,
and we decided to pool our resources
and go together and that's when everything started to happen.
However, before we got all three rights' holders
to finally sign off,
the lab in Paris where the negatives were stored went bankrupt.
And all the elements were shipped out to warehouses outside of Paris.
We were able to find all of them,
and they were scattered across a few different warehouses.
It was definitely a relief to finally see all the materials together
in one place.
To see the volume of materials.
It was a mountain of film.
Until we got into that vault,
we were kind of clueless
as far as how big the job was going to be
to try and put this all together.
Once we secured all the rights,
the negative traveled from Paris to L.A.
And then once the materials arrive in Technicolor,
we knew that now this was real
and we could get down to work.
Ooh, come in. This is negative.
This is really old stuff.
Look at that.
Once we got the negative back,
we were off to the races.
We just didn't know what we were getting into.
It was like dredging up the Titanic.
A scavenger hunt the whole way through.
We had a very old, handwritten inventory from the '70s.
There were, I believe, 1083 film elements.
Step number one was to find everything,
collect it, and then to properly inventory it.
Make sure that everything matched up with those old records.
We started to unravel and understand
exactly how the film was prepared.
Forty years in the making, this movie.
And here it all is.
We had to go back to a totally analog way of working.
That meant finding a negative cutter to reassemble the negative,
and there's no one better than Mo Henry.
Mo's been doing this for awhile.
And she's a fourth-generation negative cutter.
I'm a negative cutter
and I have been for many years.
And I'm one of a handful of people left
who do this, as far as I know.
So, like, "Something
1975,
second day sequence."
This is its own animal. It's different from anything else I've worked on.
It's a combination of many kinds of film stocks.
35, 16 mm...
lots of different items,
so we're learning as we go.
The other day I was going through a magnifying glass on this tiny film
and I saw Orson holding the slate
with his cigar in his mouth,
and it was really exciting to see. I was really jazzed about it.
Bus studio, scene 58, take two.
Jaws was the first feature I ever worked on
and it was at Universal,
and, according to my dad, at the time
they thought it was gonna be a huge bomb
so they let me practice on it.
So...
I was really impressed how beautifully kept this film was.
So, Technicolor asked that we assemble all of these rolls
in key number order
and these are the key numbers,
which is kind of hard to read.
So, I'm splicing a roll of negative
to the leader.
And then it's time for the cement.
We lock it down and wait for 30 seconds.
So, now the heat has dried the cement,
and there's the splice.
I have to do my work on these really old-fashioned machines,
but the next step is very high-tech
scanning machines.
All of the data that we've captured by hand
goes back to Technicolor,
and they take all of that information
that we did with magnifying glasses
and pencils,
and then it becomes data for their scanners.
We're kind of the bridge between the film world
and the digital world.
These 85 boxes represent
Orson's workprint.
A workprint is a copy of the original negative,
which Orson used to edit the film.
It arrived today having made its way from Zagreb, Croatia,
where it had been for quite a few years.
So we'll be slowly going through the process of inventorying this
and then ultimately
matching it back up to the negative that is already out of pallets
and, uh, sitting here behind me.
So, the workprint here has taken an interesting journey.
These were smuggled out by Orson from Paris
and taken to Rome.
And then from Rome came to L.A.,
and then Orson was editing these ultimately,
uh, here in L.A. on his Moviola.
So, this is the closest thing
that he had and had been working on for 15 years
off and on, and so, um, so this is basically, uh,
the starting point for us.
Orson once told me that the movie was going to be like a painting
with a frame around it.
And the beautiful painting in the middle
is the movie within the movie,
which is shot in gorgeous 35 mm color.
And then the frame around the picture
was gonna be this night at, uh, Jake's birthday.
And the party would then be shot by all these different cameras and formats,
and cut together in a kind of a frenzy,
while still telling the story of the evening.
-Mr. Hannaford! It's me. -Happy birthday!
Orson said,
it was gonna be made up of all these different viewpoints,
8 mm, 60 mm,
all these different cameras.
He said, "Imagine what fun it'll be editing."
Orson had, himself, edited
total of about 40, 45 minutes.
How much harm can you do to the third biggest grosser
in movie history?
So, we had an idea from what he'd cut
of how he saw the editing.
Your friend there stands to walk away with 40 million dollars.
-Yeah, and she's gonna say that I'm-- -40 million dollars?
The editing was so unique.
Nobody had ever edited in this style before Orson,
and it was a challenge to find the right editor,
somebody who understood this.
When Peter and I sat down with Bob, we knew
this is our guy.
Bob was somebody who had a connection with Gary Graver,
with the cinematographer.
Get that spook outta here.
Come on, you guy-- Hey, Mister, get outta here!
When I moved to Studio City, I became friends with Gary Graver,
who was a cinematographer. It turned out that he was living
three houses down from me.
First and foremost, I wanted to work on the movie because Gary was my friend,
and I really knew how much it meant to him.
Like the way Gary wanted to
get the movie done because of Orson,
in a way I almost wanted to get the movie done for Gary.
Cut!
For me, just getting started,
I really wanted to do as much research as possible.
Reading like every book on Orson I could find,
and the earliest versions of all the scripts and treatments and everything,
as well as, like, letters that he was writing to the editors
he was working with in Paris...
Just to really kinda get into his head and see
where he was coming from in that time period.
I mean, it's forensics.
You go back and you try to make sense of
why did he leave things the way that he left them.
Mr. Hannaford?
Old friends are old...
and that's the trauma.
We started our editorial process
by digitizing the scenes Orson had cut himself.
Then we strung them together and sat down and watched it.
Picking up from where he left off,
I mean, he left us with a mess.
Hi, Matt.
Remember me?
Billy Boyle.
That is one crazy movie.
-Well yeah, it's several crazy movies. -Several.
It just-- it really feels disjointed.
It's confusing. Yeah.
It was just like--
it seemed like such a mess, so unclear.
And like everybody, I was like, "Is there even a movie here?"
-You see the movie itself. -Yeah.
You see the movie, yes, that they're making, yes.
The whole thing becomes a movie
in front of that camera.
There were no scene numbers, and not only that,
but in some cases Orson reshot scenes.
He blew it. Must be all that candy he eats.
Me?
That felt really odd to me, like...
It's all this kind of, like, transitional scenes
that I don't even think we really need.
Yeah, I think we have to stay on point as much as we can.
At the end of the day when I started cutting the movie, I just said,
"I just wanna do what's best for the movie
and let's just try to make it."
Everything that Orson had fine cut,
we used those as anchor points.
And luckily those scenes appear throughout the entire film.
That, to us, was the framework.
We tried to emulate that style and that rhythm.
And then, scenes that were looser assemblies
or just string-outs of shots...
Zimmie? We oughta have a drink with Zimmie.
We oughta have a drink with Zimmie.
Orson would take one line
and maybe have three different versions of it,
one after the other,
and then obvi-- He was gonna pick one of those.
Nobody in the plural.
And then who in the particular?
Mr. Otterlake, for instance? Mr. Otterlake, for instance?
Well, it turns out one of our biggest challenges
was how to start the movie.
The first line in the script
is O.W. voiceover.
Orson intended to narrate the opening.
He never did the voiceover. Unfortunately, we don't have it.
But the information that he wrote for that introduction
was very important to tell the audience.
We thought of just skipping it, but we couldn't
because it sets everything up.
So, Peter came up with this great idea.
I said, "Well, I can do it as Brooks Otterlake.
I can do it as my-- as my character."
"That's the car,
or what was left of it after the accident.
if it was an accident."
So, I basically used Orson's words,
I added about a paragraph
to explain who I was
and why I was doing this.
"My name is Brooks Otterlake.
For years I personally didn't want this document shown
because, frankly,
I didn't like the way I came off in the piece."
I had a feeling I could hear him laughing
when I said the line about,
"I didn't like the way I came out in it."
But this rough magic, he here abjures.
Take back that last. It doesn't fit.
What does "abjure" mean?
-You went to Harvard. -Give up.
Is that a suggestion?
Abjure. He knows what it means.
It's odd to see myself in my thirties acting,
and, uh, in an Orson Welles film.
Never.
That scene...
in the car where I said to him...
What did I do wrong, Daddy?
Huston wasn't there.
It was Orson I was playing it to.
His direction to me was,
"It's us."
Our revels...
now are ended.
You bet your sweet cheeks.
This is a quarter inch full-track.
Uh, it was originally recorded on a Nagra.
The sound rolls consist of the daily production sound
that were recorded each day. That's why they call them dailies.
Dawn, take six.
-Quiet. -Quiet!
Action!
Many happy returns.
Wonderful, now look back at him.
Same look again, just be looking at John.
Without the frown, though. Relax totally.
Relax your face. Sad, empty. Empty.
Now, say, "Many happy returns," so I hardly hear you.
Many happy returns.
Because Orson wasn't around for me to interact with,
hearing his direction on the sound recordings was pretty invaluable.
You pronounced it too carefully.
Many happy returns.
For instance, directing Norman Foster,
who was not primarily an actor, he was primarily a director,
was super-important in trying to figure out
how he was trying to focus the performance.
Don't move your head or anything. Just let it come out of you.
It was great to be able to get a insight into what he was trying to do.
Many happy returns.
-I heard you-- -Cut! That was beautiful.
Okay, let's get to the movie, shall we?
Once we had an assembly,
I believe it was just shy of three hours,
we needed to, at that point, reference that back
to over one hundred hours of original negative scans.
We were so lucky to find Video Gorillas.
We're really a kind of virtual technology company,
and this is our office in Studio City,
in my garage.
Computer vision basically is artificial intelligence
that focuses on imagery.
It's the same kind of technology that's used with autonomous vehicles,
and it's used to compare the different frames
and to create the end conform.
If you look at this image right here,
there are a number of different interest points,
and it doesn't matter that the reference cut was cropped.
Those interest points are the same between these two things,
and that's what the algorithm does.
It's able to match those interest point, and then basically determine
a confidence that, "Yes, this is the same frame."
From a technical standpoint,
we haven't worked with this much footage before.
It was something that actually forced us to innovate.
There were 282.000 frames in the reference cut that we received,
and we were looking at basically eight million frames.
There were two trillion frame compares.
On average, we were comparing 12 million frames, per second.
That process took about two and a half days of machine time.
If a human being were to do it,
it would probably take, uh, eight, nine months to do.
We often wondered how Orson, you know, could have finished this film.
In a way, technology has caught up with the movie,
because I think a lot of these problems were insurmountable
even 10 or 15 years ago.
What if, Jane Fonda?
I don't think we could've ever finished the movie
if we were only working on film
It was kind of meant to be
that it took this long, because now we have the ability
to put it all together and make it work.
Orson probably would've finished the movie
if he had been working on the Avid back in those days,
To be able to edit digitally, where you can mix up all the formats,
build select rolls or do whatever you wanna do
and immediately always have access to your material.
It would've been a huge boon for him.
We're working with ILM on a visual effects element shoot.
These are shots that Orson didn't get a chance to shoot.
Orson always intended to get these shots of the dummies exploding,
but we never had the expertise or the money to do them.
So, I called my good friend John Knoll
who's been up at ILM for over thirty years and he's a genius
at figuring out this kinda stuff.
And John said,
"Look, I- I'll do anything to work on this movie.
When do I get a chance to collaborate with Orson Welles?"
This very site is a very first stage and model shop
for Industrial Light and Magic in Northern California
where they started work on Empire Strikes Back.
It's probably been about over 400 movies that have passed through this facility
since 1978.
We're shootin' five dummies.
These little guys have just enough kick
to get through the dummy's face.
It's fun. We build things and blow 'em up.
That's the fun part about the job.
Roll camera.
-Ready to go hot. -OK, we're live.
Okay, go hot.
-Hot. -And action!
Ready and action!
-What the hell are we doing? -We're having a party.
-Okay, good. Cut. -And cut!
Thank you very much. Do we have that?
Once we had an assembly of the film,
we realized that the film would greatly benefit
from a score, something that would actually bind it.
The first person who was brought up was Michel Legrand.
We felt that we should go to Michel first because
he'd worked with Orson, so he knew him.
-Let me introduce you to Michel Legrand. -Michel, how are you?
-Peter. -Peter, very nice meeting you.
-Nice to meet you. -Very happy to see you.
I first met Michel at the spotting session that we had.
He'd just gotten off the plane from Paris, and he wanted to come in
and just watch the film.
My dreams are...
to have music everywhere in the movie,
from beginning to end.
I would love to have the hook...
We're in Malmedy, Belgium, just outside of Brussels.
We are here recording the orchestral part
of Michel Legrand's score.
This process has been somewhat unorthodox for us.
Michel's been writing for the past few months,
and this is the very first time we're hearing
any of the music he's written.
This score is super important,
because it'll sort of glue the movie together
and give it a little more of a through line.
He really got the film within the film
and what it should be as far as musically goes
and was quite unique in the instruments that he used.
He really brought
this unique, avant-garde almost, um, music to it.
It's a very traditional score, but it's also very cutting edge,
because it's mixing a lot of elements of orchestra, jazz,
big band, a lot of stand up bass.
And really outrageous percussion.
It's kind of dissonant sounds.
Just to create a really cool tapestry of sound.
We're here today at Studio Guillaume Tell in the heart of Paris.
We're moving on to traditional Big Band style arrangement.
In the annotated script, there was mention of jazz,
specifically New Orleans jazz.
Jazz is a integral part of Michel Legrand's score.
Michel has a jazz background.
Orson Welles always wanted a jazz score for this movie.
A lot of these cues with the three-man trio
are supposed to be a band playing
somewhere at the party off-camera,
you know, providing entertainment for the party guests.
It's a really unusual score for a super unusual movie.
Sound is always important in a movie,
but in this movie it was crucial.
This is far bigger of a concern than the film.
This is gonna be one of the first shooting days, that's when they started.
A challenge came up in that we realized
we didn't have the original quarter-inch sound
from all the production period in 1974,
which is really the whole base of the party scene.
That meant going back to second or third generation source.
Not having the quarter inch tapes has really been a nightmare for us.
So it's been a Herculean job for the sound team.
We have a normal process here when we make the movies,
but all of that was out the window on this one.
Just go right ahead and talk, Mr. Hannaford.
Don't mind us.
The first time I heard any of the film, I couldn't understand...
...85 percent of what was being said.
I couldn't track the story because of that.
You heard him. Let's get him out here.
And it seemed like this was going to be overwhelming.
Mr. Hannaford, is the camera eye a reflection of reality?
The dialogue was always the centerpiece, because this is a dialogue driven movie.
So we had to go and dig very deep with our softwares
and try to clean up that dialogue.
Hey, you, Pocahontas!
Daniel Saxlid has done an amazing job
so that the dialogue is audible.
To listen to it in the beginning and listen to it now,
it's like two different movies.
-What're you doin' Billy, smoking? -What does it look like?
You know, what you do in a normal movie is,
when you have a line
that's got problems,
uh, you do ADR, but obviously
most of our actors are gone.
The old man is a destroyer.
What are you gonna use if you don't have the actor to replace their voice?
You have to use voice-alikes.
Does it matter? What'd you say?
We had Anna Mackenzie, who brought in perfect sound-alikes,
and Daniel tried to use as little as he could of it,
sometimes he replaced a word, sometimes half a line,
and used sound technology to blend it to make it work.
He wouldn't know his cineaste from a hole in the ground.
No, probably a midget with a grudge.
Danny Huston was really the star of the show when it came to ADR.
He wouldn't know his cineaste from a hole in the ground.
No, probably a midget with a grudge.
Probably a midget with a grudge.
Uh, one more time please so I could hear it.
What was strange was to see my father projected on the screen.
And then, um, say the words.
Putting a little extra zing in the 'ol lobster's claw, Brooksie.
And then see my father speak them back to me.
Putting a little extra zing in the 'ol lobster's claw, Brooksie.
Do the same for you. We, Imitation Hannafords,
have got to stick together.
The sound that we emit from our mouths
is not dissimilar.
And one that, uh, I can kind of fall into
quite easily.
I just think of my father
and I can find the "ah-has", and "action",
"cut".
What a party that was.
Well, I remember a doctor asking my father
how many cigars he smoked
and his resp- his reply was, "As many as I can."
Don't be pompous, Brooksie.
You made his company all that loot.
It's quite magical
just connecting with his voice, and it just
brought him back to life.
Don't give up the ship. Eh, Brooksie?
That's the car. What was left of it after the accident.
If it was an accident.
Everybody who's worked on this film
was dedicated to Orson.
And we were all doing it for him.
Mr. Hannaford, is the camera eye a reflection of reality
or is reality a reflection of the camera eye?
For me, when I look back it's--
I was learning how to be a producer,
because I was solving problems, I was getting the film made,
and I was servicing the vision of the director.
It just brings back really good memories of being there and...
and how exciting and creative
and inspiring it was to be there with Orson.
Orson has been a part of my life for such a long time,
that he'll always be a part of my life.
I refer to him often, I quote him often,
I miss him often.
He's not somebody you get over.
Or you don't wanna get over him. You wish he was around.
Darling, this marvelous bash you're giving him,
and if I understand, your whole idea was to get
Jake Hannaford in touch with the new generation.
Hopefully Orson will be happy wherever he is
knowing that the movie's done and, um,
that we all worked and tried to make it as good as we could do it.
Honestly, it's gonna take a little bit of time
for this to settle in.
Very curious to see the film with an audience,
to see it with people who have no idea who Orson Welles is.
To see them introduced
to a master's final film, but also to his body of work.
I feel like this movie needs to be seen,
because it's Orson's sort of last thoughts.
Before any of you creeps could put this stuff together,
we'll have our own movie.
A real movie!
When I see the film, I'm struck again by Orson's
being so far ahead of his time.
He's so far ahead of his time, that 50 years after the picture was made,
he's still ahead of his time.