They'll Love Me When I'm Dead: 'Orson Around

They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated TV-MA, for nudity and strong sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.10.20

Mention Orson Welles, and everybody — everybody — immediately thinks of Citizen Kane.

Film buffs are equally likely to cite The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight.

While Peter Bogdanovich (left, holding megaphone) waits to deliver his next line,
cinematographer Gary Graver adjusts lights according to the very precise instructions
given by Orson Welles (seated).

Baby-boomers are more apt to remember Welles’ ubiquitous TV commercials for Paul Masson — “We will sell no wine before its time” — which were parodied mercilessly by stand-up comics.

But in Hollywood, during his final few decades — Welles died on Oct. 10, 1985 — he was just as notorious for an expanding list of unfinished projects. They include:

• Don Quixote, filmed — off and on — between 1957 and ’69 (!), when production was halted after the death of star Francisco Reiguera, although Welles continued editing footage well into the 1970s;

• The Deep, based on Charles Williams’ novel Dead Calm, shot between 1966 and ’69, but left unfinished when financing evaporated, and completion was rendered impossible when star Laurence Harvey died in 1973 (Williams’ novel later was filmed by entirely different hands in 1989, with Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill); and

• The Dreamers, based on two short stories by Karen Blixen, which went no further than two 10-minute segments Welles filmed in 1979.

And one other, which has become the stuff of legend.

Documentarian Morgan Neville’s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead — a Netflix original — depicts the fascinating, frustrating and ultimately heartbreaking saga of what Welles intended as his last great film: The Other Side of the Wind.

Neville’s project also gains class and dramatic heft from Alan Cumming’s arch on-camera narration, filmed in gorgeous monochrome by cinematographer Danny Grunes.

Welles’ film was cheekily autobiographical, although he repeatedly denied as much while giving cheerful interviews during the many years that production limped along. He took a “film within a film” approach; the primary action is set during a lavish party being thrown for once-famed film director Jake Hannaford (played by John Huston), who has been struggling to complete a commercially viable feature, in order to revive his faded career.

The party sequences, which feel spontaneous and unrehearsed — but absolutely aren’t, Welles being the ultimate script control freak — are constantly intercut with sequences from Hannaford’s expressionistic movie-in-progress: an obvious satire of the overly atmospheric work of 1960s and ’70s European directors, with dollops of sex and violence (such “vulgar” touches being atypical of Hannaford’s earlier work).

Today we’d call the result a meta-mockumentary, but such terms didn’t exist when filming began in 1970. And since Neville’s documentary is a film about the making of a film, which in turn is about the making of a film, the multiple-meta result is enough to make your head spin.

(This was by no means Welles’ first fling with such experimentation. His 1955 London stage play, Moby Dick—Rehearsed, alternated between dramatic sequences from that Melville classic, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans among the mid-19th century repertory actors rehearsing the production. Although one full performance was filmed, the resulting movie is presumed lost.)

Welles also intended Wind as a satiric jab at the “old Hollywood” that was fading rapidly, as a series of young Turk filmmakers began to defy long-standing studio system control. Ergo, Hannaford is shadowed throughout the evening by up-and-coming director Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich, mirroring the mentor/protégé relationship he had with Welles); partygoers include a clearly stoned Dennis Hopper, looking like he just stepped off the set of Easy Rider.

Welles co-wrote the script with Oja Kodar, a much younger Yugoslavian actress destined to become his lover — and, after his death, the primary keeper of his artistic flame — and who plays the sexy star of Hannaford’s film.

Filming continued for most of the 1970s, with Hannaford’s celebratory party being re-shot over and over again, both because of cast changes — Bogdanovich replaced Rich Little as Otterlake, when the stand-up comic had to bow out due to previous commitments — and because Welles kept coming up with additional ideas.

It was “a circus of scattered souls,” as one participant recalled.

Huston didn’t even join the project until 1973; until then, an off-camera Welles spoke all of Hannaford’s lines while filming the individual(s) he was addressing. Once Huston arrived, he repeated all of the necessary dialog scenes in close-ups, his sequences then cut into the film-in-progress.

Neville recounts the entire saga more or less in chronological sequence, via a blend of archival interviews with Welles, and on-camera reminiscences by Bogdanovich, Kodar, Little, Cybill Shepherd, Danny Huston and others. Neville cleverly has Welles punctuate — or react to — some of their comments, via vintage clips from the director’s old film roles.

However, Neville’s failure to identify the on-camera speakers is extremely irritating. It’s essential to know who’s talking, and when, and we rarely do.

Production stalled in 1974, when funds allegedly were embezzled by one of the investors. Welles was able to start again with fresh financing supplied by a French-based Iranian syndicate led by Mehdi Bousheri, brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. Welles continued to edit the mountain of footage, but by 1979 had only roughly 40 minutes of finished film.

(You know what’s next, right?)

Then the Iranian Revolution hit.

Welles’ film was considered part of the deposed Shah’s estate — ergo, Iranian property — so Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the negatives locked in a Parisian vault … where they remained, long past Welles’ death.

And yet — despite being an entry in Simon Braund’s marvelous 2013 book, The Greatest Movies You’ll Never See — everything finally fell into place a few years later. Legal obstacles vanished, Bogdanovich obtained all footage, and he pieced The Other Side of the Wind together in what he hopes is the way Welles would have wanted it.

It, too, is available via Netflix.

But be advised: It’s aggressively weird — deliberately so — and not nearly as engaging as Neville’s documentary.