“This is like finding the Land of Oz or some lost tomb,” said Josh Karp, the author of a book about the movie to be published next year by St. Martin’s Press. “This film is art imitating life and life imitating art. It’s become so mythical because of what happened with all the failures to finish it and the players involved.”
Royal Road, which has produced several foreign independent movies, spent five years chasing after the rights. It had to negotiate a détente among the rights holders: Welles’s longtime companion and collaborator, Oja Kodar; his daughter and sole heir, Beatrice Welles; and an Iranian-French production company, L’Astrophore.
During the last 15 years of his life, Welles, who died in 1985, worked obsessively on the film, which chronicles a temperamental film director — much like him — who is battling with the Hollywood establishment to finish an iconoclastic work. The supporting cast included Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, who basically played himself, a young up-and-coming director.
via Orson Welles’s Last Film May Finally Be Released – NYTimes.com.
Journalist Josh Karp retells this wild story in the supremely entertaining Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind, an early contender for this year’s best book about Hollywood…
Add an array of great stories (some more familiar than others, but all told with gusto), including the first meeting between Hemingway and Welles in 1937, when they insulted each other, fought and then collapsed in laughter at the idiocy of their macho bravado, sealing a friendship that lasted until Hemingway’s suicide in 1961…
The author has a way with words, likening Welles on set to the Wizard of Oz, “both real and fake at the same time.” But there’s substance here, too: Karp smartly puts Welles’ lost project in the context of its time, casting a sideways glance at the pivotal era of great young American auteurs that was the 1970s…
via Orson Welles’s Last Movie: Book Review – Hollywood Reporter.
Click on any of the excerpts to pre-order the book, it will be released April 21st.
