Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
70 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2018 The plot was provocative on its own, but equally scintillating was the style Welles was considering. "You hear conversations taped as interviews, and you see quite different scenes going on at the same time," Welles explained to Bogdanovich. "People are writing a book about [Hannaford] — different books. Documentaries…still pictures, film, tapes." Welles said that "all this raw material" would be woven into The Other Side of the Wind — as would dailies from what is intended to be Hannaford's current project: a sexy, surreal and sometimes incomprehensible film called (of course) The Other Side of the Wind. Footage was shot in multiple formats. "You can imagine how daring the cutting can be," Welles told Bogdanovich, "and how much fun." Yet, for Welles, editing The Other Side of the Wind did not go as planned. Financed through an unusual array of sources, including an Iranian production company, the film was shot in short bursts from 1970 to 1976, and post-production proceeded intermittently in Paris, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Due to a hornet's nest of legal and practical problems, the film never made its way out of the cutting room; Welles was unable to wrap up post- production. When the iconic director of Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) died in 1985, the film was stranded in an unfinished, unreleased limbo. Thirty-two years later, however, an editor was given the chance to experience the joys and challenges Welles anticipated in cutting Wind. Last fall, Bob Murawski, ACE, was hired to put the long-delayed film into working order. In this effort, he was joined by music editor Ellen Segal, MPSE, and a sound crew. On November 2, following its enthusiastic reception at September's Venice Film Festival and elsewhere, The Other Side of the Wind was released by Netflix in theatres and via streaming on November 2. Yet Murawski — officially credited as co-editor with Welles — was not tasked with imitating the director's style, at least not as audiences have come to know it. Indeed, for this film Welles had forsaken the carefully composed, deep-focus style that was his trademark. In a 1982 interview with the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, Welles agreed with journalist Bill Krohn, who said that the director's style in Wind was "completely masked by two, as it were, borrowed styles" — that is, the documentary footage depicting Hannaford and the selections from Hannaford's work-in-progress. "It's supposed to be the style of the character played by Huston," Welles told Krohn, referring to the latter footage. "And it's quite a good style. I've never had the guts to use it; it's so outrageously self- indulgent. It was fun to make part of a movie that was not supposed to be mine." Consequently, Murawski did not feel the pressure of working in the manner of the master. "Orson always talked about how he was wearing masks," Murawski told CineMontage. "He said that this movie was not even directed by him. He also said, on the one hand, that he's wearing the mask of a documentary filmmaker. And then, when he's making the art movie, he's wearing the mask of Jake Hannaford — making a movie in the style of a director like Michelangelo Antonioni." In dealing with the material, Murawski had to set aside some of his own tastes, too. "I'm always trying to figure out how not to cut," Murawski explains. "I like to follow the economical way George Tomasini would cut the Hitchcock movies, with real super-efficiency. But here was a movie where Welles seemed to want to edit as much as possible. As I was editing, I felt like I was wearing the mask of somebody other than myself as well." A WELLESIAN DESTINY Murawski is widely admired for working on such films as the Spider-Man trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007) and The Hurt Locker (2008), for which he shared an Oscar with his wife, Chris Innis, ACE. In some ways, though, he had been preparing to work on The Other Side of the Wind for decades. The Michigan native began his picture editing career with Danger Zone III: Steel Horse War (1990). As unlikely as it sounds, the low-budget biker movie A scene from The Other Side of the Wind.