They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

Dir: Morgan Neville

2018

****

I would personally argue that the best film about the making of The Other Side of the Wind is The Other Side of the Wind but it is such a unique and infamous project that it certainly deserved a companion piece. Morgan Neville’s They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, a documentary that chronicles the near 50 year journey the film has taken from conception to completion, is a concise and interesting look at the people involved, the subject explored and why it was that it took so long for the film to see the light of day. A film like this doesn’t need to be a masterpiece, it just simply needed plenty of archive footage, some key interviewees and a narrator. I’m not sure Alan Cummings was the best narrator and I’m not sure his style added anything but on the whole the film ticks all the right boxes. The film had a troubled production history. Like many of Welles' personally funded films, The Other Side of the Wind was filmed and edited on-and-off for several years. The project evolved from an idea Welles had in 1961 after the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. Welles had known Hemingway since the 1930s and was inspired to write a screenplay about an aging macho bullfight enthusiast who is fond of a young bullfighter. Nothing came of the project for a while, but work on the script resumed in Spain in 1966, just after Welles had completed Chimes at Midnight. Early drafts were entitled Sacred Beasts and turned the older bullfight enthusiast into a film director. At a 1966 banquet to raise funds for the project, Welles told a group of prospective financiers: “Our story is about a pseudo-Hemingway, a movie director. So the central figure ... you can barely see through the hair on his chest; who was frightened by Hemingway at birth. He's a tough movie director who has killed three or four extras on every picture ... but is full of charm. Everybody thinks he's great. In our story he's riding around following a bullfighter, and living through him ... but he's become obsessed by this young man who has become ... his own dream of himself. He's been rejected by all his old friends. He's finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur ... a fellow who lives off other people's danger and death.” In an interview, Peter Bogdanovich reveals that Welles described the film's unconventional style by saying “I'm going to use several voices to tell the story. You hear conversations taped as interviews, and you see quite different scenes going on at the same time. People are writing a book about him—different books. Documentaries ... still pictures, films, tapes. All these witnesses ... The movie's going to be made up of all this raw material. You can imagine how daring the cutting can be, and how much fun.” He suggested that he has four working screenplays but most of the film would be ad-libbed. There would be a film within the film, making this film a film within a film within a film. In 1972, Welles said that filming was "96% complete," (which seems to have been an exaggeration, since many of the film's key scenes were not shot until 1973–75—although it was literally true that The Other Side of the Wind, the film-within-the-film, was complete by that stage) and in January 1976 the last scene of principal photography was completed. When Welles moved back to the United States in the late 1960s, the script's setting changed to Hollywood and second-unit photography started in August 1970. Principal photography in 1970–71 focused on the film-within-a-film. Welles was initially unsure who to cast as the film director and whether to play the role himself, finally settling in 1974 on his friend the actor-director John Huston. The few party scenes shot before 1974 were shot without Huston, and often contained just one side of a conversation, with Huston's side of the conversation filmed several years later and intended to be edited into the earlier footage. Filming then ground to a halt late in 1971 when the U.S. government decided that Welles' European company was a holding company, not a production company, and retrospectively presented him with a large tax bill. Welles had to work on numerous other projects to pay off this debt, and filming could not resume until 1973. During that time, Welles acted in a number of other projects to raise funds, and secured further financing in France, Iran and Spain. Some scenes were shot intermittently in 1973, as and when cast were available (as with Lilli Palmer's scenes, all shot in Spain without any other cast present); but the film's main production block did not begin until early 1974, when major shooting of the party happened in Arizona. Filming resumed for an intensive four months of production in January to April 1974, when most of the party scenes were shot, but principal photography was undermined by serious financial problems, including embezzlement by one of the investors, who fled with much of the film's budget – although he denies this in the documentary. Meanwhile, on account of the foul weather, Orson had decided to abandon Spain for Arizona, where John Huston and a host of other faithfuls joined him. There had been talk for years of a production swindler who continued his game of collecting cash from the Iranians who, having heard only from him, still did not know that anything was wrong with the production and its costs. In 2008, film scholars Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas identified Spanish producer Andres Vicente Gómez (who collected a Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 1994) as the alleged embezzler, and they date his withdrawal from the project to 1974. Gómez first met Welles in Spain in 1972, during the making of  Treasure Island, in which they were both involved. Gómez then negotiated Welles' deal with the Iranian-owned, Paris-based "Les Films de l'Astrophore", the first product of which was the 1973 film F for Fake, followed by The Other Side of the Wind. As well as the accusation of embezzlement, Welles also had this to say of Gómez: "My Spanish producer never paid my hotel bill for the three months that he kept me waiting in Madrid for the money for The Other Side of the Wind. So I'm scared to death to be in Madrid. I know they're going to come after me with that bill." Gómez responded to these accusations in a 2001 memoir: “Regarding the end of my relationship with Orson Welles some lies were told, although he assured me they did not come from him. [A point contradicted by the extensively quoted Leaming account above, which showed the accusations came from an interview with Welles himself; as well as the quote about the hotel bill, which comes from a subsequently emerged (in 2013) audio tape of Welles.] Accordingly, I don't want to go into that matter. I don't deem it relevant to mention the details of our split considering that our relationship was always polite and amicable and we had wonderful moments and experiences together. However, I must make it clear that if I abandoned the project, I didn't do so for financial reasons. My agreement with Welles, written and signed by him, envisaged my work as a producer, not an investor. ... Certain people who were close to Welles and part of his inner circle - the same ones who are spoiling his works and making a living from them—tried to justify his difficulties by linking them to the fact that I pulled out. They have even gone so far as to say that I had pocketed some of the Iranian money which in fact never existed, beyond the funds that were spent appropriately.” Gómez says in the documentary, "I read he blamed me because of the finance fiasco, which is totally untrue. I made a settlement with him, there was no complaint, there was no anything. If it was true, why didn't they make any claim from me, you know?" He’s actually quite convincing but Josh Karp's 2015 book on the making of the film cited several pieces of documentary proof which support the original allegation: There are two sets of documents that support this version of events. The first is an August 1974 legal agreement dissolving Orson's partnership with everyone but Astrophore which specifies that Gómez's company "failed to" provide its own investment of $150,000 and also had failed to open a production account as it had been obligated to do under a 1973 agreement. Additionally, it claims that the producer's company had misappropriated a whole or substantial part of the money received from Astrophore. In 1976 and 1977, Boushehri had Coopers and Lybrand audit both Astrophore and the production of The Wind. In each report the auditors stated that Avenel [Welles and Kodar's production company] had signed an August 3, 1973, agreement with the producer's company and with Astrophore under which Orson and Oja's interest in the film was $750,000, while the Iranians and the man's production company were each obligated to provide $150,000 toward completion of the movie. The audits repeat the accusation that the producer misappropriated money he was supposed to transmit from Astrophore to Orson. None of this is particularly interesting but it is a valuable lesson to any wannabe film maker. Essentially a classic film has been put on hold all these years to the detriment of cinema. Watching the great film maker beg for money in further attempts to raise money to complete the project is painful, as Peter Bogdanovich describes all these many years later. In February 1975, Welles was awarded an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award, and used the star-studded ceremony as an opportunity to pitch for funding to complete the film. (With a touch of irony, one of the scenes he showed his audience featured Hannaford screening a rough cut of his latest film to a studio boss, in a bid for "end money" to complete his picture.) Sure enough, one producer made what Welles later called a "wonderful offer", but Antoine turned it down on the assumption that an even better offer would arrive. No such offer came, and Welles later bitterly regretted the refusal, commenting before his death that if he'd accepted it "the picture would have been finished now and released." Welles estimated that the editing of the film in a distinctive and experimental style would take approximately one year of full-time work (which was how long he had spent on the experimental, rapidly cut editing of his previous completed film, F for Fake – like F for Fake, the film would have averaged approximately one edit per second, and would have lasted around half an hour longer). A change of management at the Iranian production company in 1975 resulted in tensions between Welles and the backers. The new management saw Welles as a liability, and refused to pay him to edit the film. The company made several attempts to reduce Welles' share of the film profits from 50% to 20%, and crucially, attempted to remove his artistic control over the film's final cut. Welles made numerous attempts to seek further financial backing to pay him to complete the editing full-time, but no such funding materialised, and so Welles only edited the film piecemeal in his spare time over the next decade, between other acting assignments which the heavily indebted actor-director needed to support himself. By 1979, forty minutes of the film had been edited by Welles. But in that year, the film experienced serious legal and financial complications. Welles' use of funds from Mehdi Boushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, became troublesome after the Shah was overthrown. A complex, decades-long legal battle over the ownership of the film ensued, with the original negative remaining in a vault in Paris. At first, the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini had the film impounded along with all assets of the previous regime. When they deemed the negative worthless, there was extensive litigation as to the ownership of the film. By 1998, many of the legal matters had been resolved and the Showtime cable network had guaranteed "end money" to complete the film. However, continuing legal complications in the Welles estate and a lawsuit by Welles' daughter, Beatrice Welles, caused the project to be suspended. When Welles died in 1985 he had left many of his assets to his estranged widow Paola Mori, and after her death in 1986, these were inherited by their daughter Beatrice Welles. However, he had also left various other assets, from his house in Los Angeles to the full ownership and artistic control of all his unfinished film projects, to his longtime companion, mistress and collaborator Oja Kodar, who co-wrote and co-starred in The Other Side of the Wind. Since 1992, Beatrice Welles has claimed in various courts that under California law, she had ownership of all of Orson Welles' completed and incomplete pictures (including those which he did not own the rights of himself in his own life), and The Other Side of the Wind has been heavily affected by this litigation. Beatrice Welles, rather unsurprisingly, features fleetingly in the documentary. Since then directors such as Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood and George Lucas had been approached to see if they would be interested in trying to get the film released and working on it if they succeeded. Lucas reportedly claimed to be baffled by the footage, saying he didn't know what to do with it, and that it was too avant-garde for a commercial audience. Kodar subsequently accused both Eastwood and Stone of plagiarism from the film, citing Eastwood's performance in White Hunter Black Heart (1990) as a copy of John Huston's, including one line of dialogue ("I'm Marvin P. Fassbender." "Of course you are."), and Stone's adoption of the film's distinctive rapidly cut editing and camera style for his films JFK (1991), Nixon (1995) and Natural Born Killers (1994). The film was passed around a lot during the 90s and 00s with many people getting involved but it was really saved when on October 28, 2014, Royal Road Entertainment announced that it had negotiated an agreement and would purchase the rights to complete and release The Other Side of the Wind. Bogdanovich would oversee completion of the 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' ownership of the film, and Beatrice Welles, manager of the Welles estate. On May 1, 2015, it was disclosed that the film was far from completed. Post-production was to be funded by pre-selling distribution rights, but in December some potential distributors asked to see edited footage from the negative, not the worn workprint. "People want to help us, but they have a business decision to make," producer Frank Marshall told The New York Times. "They would first like to see an edited sequence, and I think that is a fair request. A Crowdfunding drive was launched in 2015 and the money was finally secure. Nothing is really said of the crowdfunding side of things, I was one of many funders who still haven’t received any perks and have received just 4 updates in 4 years. It feels like history repeating itself. Netflix secured the final film and had this documentary made to go with it. I’m sore about having nothing to show for helping fund it but it is a great film and it is right that it is finally out there. The companion documentary is either interesting or boring really, totally down to how the viewer feels about the main film.