The Other Side of the Wind

When I wrote about Orson Welles for the New York Times in 1996, I said that The Other Side of the Wind, Welles's unfinished satire of seventies Hollywood, had "returned to friendly hands and should eventually find release." This was optimistic: nearly twenty years on, the film, which Welles more or less completed shooting and edited in part, has yet to see the light of day. (Josh Karp's new book Orson Welles's Last Movie gives a lively account of its fate.) Yet a serious effort is under way to round out a crucial part of Welles's legacy: as Brooks Barnes reports in the Times, a team led by Filip Jan Rymsza, Frank Marshall, and Peter Bodganovich plans to have the film in theaters by the end of the Welles centenary year. Affonso Gonçalves has been hired as editor, and an Indiegogo fundraiser was launched last night, with the goal of raising two million dollars. As a longtime Welles obsessive, I'm uncommonly eager to see what results.