Avoiding the Orson Welles problem

Pretty much every year, a movie gets released that’s been sitting on the shelf for a long time. The ones that were shot and maybe debuted at film festivals in, say, 2015, then tried to find a distributor for a couple years, are not so difficult to subsume into the field of 2018 releases, in terms of ranking them on year-end lists.

The ones that stretch that timeline out to closer to a decade? You really have to agonize over them. I didn’t like including All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, a 2006 film that only finally got a U.S. release seven years later, in my 2013 year-end rankings. But I did it.

When The Other Side of the Wind debuted on Netflix a couple months ago, 48 years after Orson Welles began shooting it, I had to draw the line.

The fact that there was a whole separate documentary about the making of it, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, which is properly a 2018 release, made it easier to just slough off the whole thing to 2019.

I love Orson Welles, and in December alone saw another movie he directed (Othello) as well as revisited one he appeared in (The Muppet Movie). But I did not see the one he directed for six years on and off in the 1970s and left incomplete at his death in 1985. I didn’t want to include it with my 2018 movies but also didn’t want to not include it. Easiest solution to that is just not to see it. Not yet, anyway.

This is occurring to me today not only because I’m in the final stages of preparing my own year-end rankings (just 11 more days now), but also because I’m reviewing a list of critics top ten lists on Metacritic, partly out of general interest and partly to make sure I see as much as I can before I finish mine. Of 318 lists Metacritic examined, Wind came in 28^th on their scoring system, which awards three points for a first-place ranking, two for a second place, one point for anywhere between 3^rd and 10^th and then a half point for any appearance on an additional 11 through 20 offered by the critic. This ties it with Minding the Gap and First Man to round out the top 30, and it’s one of only five films on the list I haven’t seen, two of which I will not be able to see before my rankings close.

So I’ve actually got quite good coverage of critically acclaimed 2018 films, which is part of the reason I’m not feeling the same mad rush to squeeze in viewings before January 22^nd, and am making some time in my schedule for rewatches. But of those three in the top 30 that I can still see if I choose, The Other Side of the Wind is the only one I will intentionally decline to view.

On the one hand I think my reasoning is sound. This is a movie that was made in the 1970s. It may not have been edited until 2018, and I think there’s some new voiceover if I remember correctly (though I’ve tried not to read too much about it). But it just doesn’t feel like it should go shoulder to shoulder with movies like Eighth Grade and Love, Simon, the stars of whom were not even born when Welles shot his last Wind footage. In fact, the star of Eighth Grade would not be born for another 27 years.

On the other hand, the movie could not have been ranked in any other year. No one saw it until 2018. Even with All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, it might have been possible for me to rank it in 2006 if I’d gone to the right festivals or lived in the right countries. Not the case with The Other Side of the Wind.

And my general overriding principle is that every movie deserves at least one year in which it has the opportunity to be ranked. Some get two possible years, such as Paddington 2, which came out in Australia at the end of 2017 but didn’t take the cinematic world by storm until its 2018 U.S. release. I didn’t see it in the theater so I’m choosing to rank it with 2018. But no movie should have no years, which is what gives me such headaches about Wind.  

What year the footage was shot in is rendered less of an important factor when you consider documentaries containing archival footage. One interesting 2018 example of that is They Shall Not Grow Old, the film consisting entirely of World War I footage painstakingly colorized by a team led by Peter Jackson. Sounds really great and I wish I’d taken the opportunity to see it. (Technically I still have that opportunity, as it’s still playing at a theater near me, but it’s gone well past the two-week period I could see it with my critics card, and I guess my desire doesn’t rise to the level of paying $20 for it.) There’s no doubt this is a 2018 film and I would have ranked it with this year’s films if I’d seen it.

Yet the case of The Other Side of the Wind feels different. It feels more like a corpse shocked back into twitchy life by some really powerful electrical currents. It feels like something that was never meant to exist, but did because some good people saw the chance to bring us an artist’s vision, and some not-as-good people saw a chance to make money on it. But many of those who have seen it – those not ranking it in their top ten, anyway – have described it as a weird kind of incomplete experiment, less a film than a collection of disjointed thoughts. Which is to be expected.

I have no doubt that if The Other Side of the Wind had been completed by Welles, it would look significantly different than what we’ve gotten. Since he obviously had a fraught relationship with what he’d shot, there was a good chance he would have thrown out some or even most of it. I appreciate that I will get to see what he shot when I do watch it, but I can’t agree with the argument that this is Welles’ film as he intended it to be seen – if anyone’s making that argument. It’s more akin to an old silent film uncovered in a basement than an actual new release and meaningful part of the 2018 film landscape.

So I might watch The Other Side of the Wind as soon as next month. I kind of can’t wait, actually. But by waiting, then I won’t have to torture myself with whether I made the right decision to rank it or not rank it. It’ll just join the ever-increasing body of Films That Did Not Come Out This Year, and I will appreciate its merits or lack thereof in that context.