There has been great debate about whether there is any meaning behind the
title of Orson Welles’s last film, “The Other Side Of The Wind.” Welles claimed
that he didn’t have the “foggiest” idea of what it signified, if anything at
all.
I think Welles was being his usual evasive self, but for the first time it was a self-conscious kind of elusiveness. He was, after all, making the film
during a period when he was trying to regain a footing in the American film
industry, which had also, at the exact same time, taken a hard left toward
“youth movies” — movies made by, and about, young people. This was a revolution
inspired by the profitable B-movies of the mid- to late-1960s, which then
received mainstream blessing by the success of “Easy Rider,” in 1969. Welles, maverick he may have been, was 55 years old when he started "The Other Side Of The Wind" in 1970.
All of this — Welles’s own outsider status, the fringe nature of the
production of “The Other Side of the Wind” itself, and the experimental
techniques that Welles hoped to bring to this production, indicate that he
wanted to make something completely un-Hollywood-like; that is, everything that
is the opposite of a movie like “Gone With The Wind.”
GWTW may not be the
greatest movie ever made but, as many have said, it is probably the single greatest
example of a Hollywood studio picture. GWTW was created by the establishment,
produced in luxury with a great deal of money, sparkled with movie stars, built by craftsmen
and technicians and which would then be sold to the public
by highly paid publicity agents. It is the ne plus ultra of Hollywood films
Welles, with his own movie, was the exact opposite of “Gone With The Wind,”
a completely different kind of movie. There was no money, no structure, no schedule. There had been
movies made about making movies before “The Other Side Of The Wind,” but they
were always about Hollywood movies, not the ones made by the renegades.
Welles, had he gotten his movie finished on time, would have been the
first to show the other side of that polished, monied moviemaking process.