Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind by Josh Karp

Author:Josh Karp [Karp, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781250016089
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

ACT THREE

1975–1985

Who do I have to fuck to get out of this picture?

—ORSON WELLES, DURING A MOMENT OF ON-SET FRUSTRATION IN 1975

1975

He was always respectful of the crew, right up until he fired us.

—CREW MEMBER JACK EPPS JR.

The beginning of the end, as is sometimes the case, wasn’t a moment of darkness or impending doom. Rather, it was a time of hope.

It was the beginning of an end that would come neither swiftly nor in a gigantic explosion. Instead, it came gradually and continued into eternity.

The end began when a small committee from AFI met at the Beverly Hills Hotel to choose the recipient of their third Life Achievement Award. The options included everyone who wasn’t Ford or Cagney. The group chose Welles because they believed his artistry had been superlative and that with the selection, they were making a significant statement about their organization.

“It was a way of saying we were serious about this award and that it wasn’t going to be a popularity contest,” said AFI founding director George Stevens Jr. “We made the choice on the grounds that it was a choice of great integrity.”

Though the committee was pleased with its decision, others were not, including several AFI members and certain factions of the Hollywood press. Kirk Douglas was outraged, and his indignation was seconded by everyone from Henry Hathaway to columnist Marilyn Beck and one of the editors at Variety, where McBride was now a reporter. All shared the belief that Orson’s body of work boiled down to Citizen Kane and a bunch of films that might have been.

Joining the chorus of dissent was Patton producer Frank McCarthy, who expressed his feelings to the event co-chairs in a letter stating that he couldn’t understand why Welles was receiving the award, when one compared him with Darryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, and other deserving Hollywood titans.

But then there was William Wyler, a potential recipient who went out of his way to congratulate Orson, as well as many staunch defenders, including Charlton Heston and Frank Sinatra, the latter of whom acted as master of ceremonies for the February 9 award show, which aired a few days later on CBS. And of course there was Bogdanovich, who fielded the call from Stevens asking if Welles would even accept the award.

Though he was excited about the opportunity afforded by the AFI ceremony, Welles had initially been deeply conflicted when the honor had been offered the prior year. Ultimately, however, he relented when Bogdanovich assured him that Stevens’s goal was to show that Orson was still making pictures and not headed out to pasture.

Despite agreeing to the honor, Orson wasn’t cooperative. Spending nearly all of January in Europe, Welles had Bogdanovich act as his go-between with Stevens, who was growing accustomed to calls that began, “George, Orson isn’t happy.”

The biggest source of that unhappiness was the choice of film clips they’d show at the ceremony and Orson’s insistence that the only unfinished work to be shown that evening would be from The Other Side of the Wind.

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