The Other Side of the Wind is one of the great Holy Grails of film history and if you were to turn your back on it, you would be no better than those studio pudding brains who butchered another Welles film, The Magnificent Ambersons, and then disposed of the deleted footage.
Do not even get me started on Touch of Evil.
Okay, here's the pitch...
Thirty years after he died, Orson Welles is still struggling to get his final film, The Other Side of the Wind, completed due to a persistent ailment that plagued him throughout his long career - a lack of funding.
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Orson Welles (seated centre) on the set of The Other Side of the Wind. There is a great Vanity Fair article about the making of the film (from which I also stole this picture).
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However, now that the rights issues surrounding the film (which had previously halted the film's completion) have been addressed, the only obstacle that remains is the is $2,000,000 sum required to complete the project.
Luckily for Orson, we now have a little something called crowdfunding, if only it has existed when he was still active...
Not only do I feel obligated to support this project as one of the great missing pieces of film history, but the intriguing person who was Orson Welles made of my most beloved films, no, not Citizen Kane, I am referring to F for Fake, without a doubt one of the finest and most challenging documentaries ever made.
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| I have pledged $10 towards the project's $2,000,000 goal. |
While $2,000,000 is quite a large ask for a film crowdfunding project, I am confident (and I have watched a lot of film crowdfunding projects fail and succeed) that The Other Side of the Wind will reach its goal; purely because it has such a vibrant legacy and stream of celebrity endorsement attached to it.
Edgar Wright is right, listen to him!
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| Probably the one good thing Brett Ratner has ever done. |
I am always amazed (and sickened) by the amount of cinephiles I talk to who say how much they love film history, the grand figures of cinema and how they themselves would like to get involved... and then they pass on contributing a small sum to a crowdfunding project such as this.
However, at the end of the day a contribution of $10, $5, hell even $1 is hardly going to rob you of your pension... but it might just validate your status as an active cinephile who really does care about cinema.
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His name is Peter so he must know what he is talking about.
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