In 1970, Orson Welles began shooting The Other Side of the Wind.
The film relates the efforts of a film director (played by John Huston) to complete his last Hollywood picture, largely set at a lavish party.
By 1972 the filming was reported by Welles as being “96% complete”, though by 1979 Welles had only edited about 40 minutes.
In that year, legal complications over the ownership of the film put the negative into a Paris vault. In 2004 director Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in the film, intended to complete the production.
On October 28, 2014, Los Angeles-based production company Royal Road Entertainment had negotiated an agreement, with the assistance of producer Frank Marshall, and would purchase the rights to complete and release The Other Side of the Wind.
Bogdanovich and Marshall planned to complete Welles’s nearly finished film in Los Angeles, aiming to have it ready for screening May 6, 2015, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth.
Royal Road Entertainment and German producer Jens Koethner Kaul acquired the rights held by Les Films de l’Astrophore and the late Mehdi Boushehri. They reached an agreement with Oja Kodar, who inherited Welles’s ownership of the film, and Beatrice Welles, manager of the Welles estate; but at the end of 2015, efforts to complete the film reached impasse.
In March 2017, Netflix acquired distribution rights to the film, and the original negative, dailies and other footage arrived in Los Angeles for post-production.
The film was completed in 2018 and premiered at the 75th Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2018.
On November 2, 2018, the film debuted in select theaters and on Netflix, forty-eight years after principal photography began.
Some footage is included in the documentaries Working with Orson Welles (1993), Orson Welles: One Man Band (1995), and most extensively They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018).
