Netflix Will Finish and Distribute the Last Orson Welles Movie

Orson Welles is back, and he’s got what very well could be one last masterpiece in him. Or at least, we sure hope he does. The filmmaker has been dead for over three decades and only just now has Netflix agreed to distribute and finance the completion of The Other Side of the Wind, a drama about the last night before a great filmmaker’s death, which was filmed throughout half of the 1970s.

Few directors ever achieve the amount of acclaim that Orson Welles has received for films like Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight and particularly Citizen Kane, the 1941 film that is still considered by many to be the best movie ever made. But even fewer directors ever had such a catastrophic string of bad luck. Orson Welles spent the majority of his career struggling to get his movies made, shooting them piecemeal over the course of multiple years, and fighting with studios over edits made to his movies without his consent.

Lots of Orson Welles movies still remain unfinished, like his adaptation of Charles Williams’ Dead Calm (which was eventually adapted into a thriller starring Nicole Kidman) or his ambitious production of Don Quixote. But none of those ill-fated projects came closer to completion than The Other Side of the Wind, a drama Welles co-wrote, starred in and directed between 1970 and 1976. Orson Welles completed principle photography – no small feat for the director, in those days – and edited together approximately 40 minutes before legal issues left the film incomplete until Welles’ death in 1986.

Also: Ten Years Later, Zack Snyder’s ‘300’ is Uglier Than Ever

Since then Orson Welles’ friend, fellow filmmaker and The Other Side of the Wind star Peter Bogdanovich has tried to complete the motion picture but it’s been over three decades and, until now, audiences seemed no closer to finishing it. Even an ambitious Indiegogo campaign to raise $1 million for the project stalled out at only $406,605.

Releasing The Other Side of the Wind via Netflix is good news for Orson Welles fans. The company has been branching out in increasingly daring creative directions and with its vast streaming distribution network has little to lose by pouring a few million dollars into the completion and restoration of a potential classic. What’s more, millions more people are likely to watch The Other Side of the Wind as a Netflix premiere than were ever likely to venture out to independent theaters to catch a glimpse of this intriguing piece of Hollywood history.

Then again, given the history of Orson Welles’s movies, this could all still fall through somehow and nobody would be surprised. Let’s hope for the best. Even though Welles has been dead for many years he’s still in need of a lucky break.

Ten Classic Movie Remakes That Time Forgot:

Top Photo: Apic/Getty Images

William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.