Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
73 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE visual point-of-view," he comments — but since the screenplay explicitly called for its inclusion, the decision was made for the editor to take a stab at it. "I said, 'Let me try a kooky, choppy, Russ Meyer-y version,'" he recalls. And that version — as jolting an opening to a Welles film as imaginable — is in the final cut. Wind then segues to Hannaford's story, in which the director mingles with assorted underlings and enemies, including right-hand woman Maggie Noonan (Mercedes McCambridge) and film critic Julie Rich (Susan Strasberg), on a studio soundstage. Hannaford and his crew then head to his desert mansion, where his 70th birthday is to be celebrated. "The arrival to the party was pretty much cut from scratch," Murawski explains. However, several famous scenes that follow were not only edited by Welles but also widely seen in documentaries and television programs (including the American Film Institute's 1975 tribute to the filmmaker). One such scene depicts Hannaford's assistant Billy Boyle (Norman Foster) showing rushes to studio executive Max David (Geoffrey Land, donning a hairstyle and attitude that evoke hotshot executive Robert Evans). In the version Welles put together for the AFI, the scene is interrupted by still frames and flashbulbs going off. Yet Jonathon Braun, ACE, who worked on Wind in the early 1980s and was among the film's original editors to meet with Murawski, remembers questioning the logic of including the stills and flashbulbs when cutting with Welles. "I said, 'Orson, whose point-of-view is this?'" Braun told CineMontage. "He said, 'Point-of-view?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm confused who it might be that's shooting the pictures. Is there a spy watching all this? Did some journalist sneak in?'" Braun proposed trying a more streamlined version of the scene. "I don't remember if we ever did or didn't," Braun recalls. "I remember him saying, 'You know, you're very Swiss, Jon. So precise. You always want an explanation for everything.' I remember discussing this with Bob when we met while he was finishing the film, and I was thrilled to hear he had felt the same way when he saw it. Kind of validating for me — or maybe Bob is a bit Swiss, too!" Indeed, Murawski decided to strip out the stills and flashbulbs. Some scenes were fully shot but had not been touched by Welles — not because he didn't care for them but because he was confident in the material and was saving them for later. "I think he knew he had the dramatic scenes between Huston and Bogdanovich," Murawski says. "He probably thought he could deal with those at any point because they were simple and he figured on the set that they worked okay." Other scenes simply lacked sufficient material to work as shot. For example, one scene shows budding filmmaker Jack Simon (Gregory Sierra) Ellen Segal and Bob Murawski enjoy a laugh at the bar at Musso and Frank's Grill. A scene from The Other Side of the Wind.