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Q4 2018

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75 Q4 2018 / CINEMONTAGE Hannaford's house. "There is a line in the film about a mariachi band, a jazz band and a gypsy violin — and they're all supposed to be playing at the party," Segal explains. The music editor quickly realized that Welles' wishes, if carried out exactly, would overwhelm the dialogue in those scenes. "The film is complicated enough without music — just trying to figure out where you are and what it is — that to add multiple layers of different styles of music would not have made it flow as well," she says. So, instead of a cacophony of music, Segal settled on a single style. "The style that played under dialogue the best was a jazz piano trio that could be in the background," she relates. "We could bring it up, we could echo it, we could play it from different parts of the house, and the conversation would still go on." A score was commissioned by French composer Michel Legrand, who, decades earlier, Welles had hired to write the music for his film F for Fake (1973). "Welles had told Michel that he wanted him to score The Other Side of the Wind also," Segal says. "Michel came in for the spotting session, and he immediately wanted to sit down and just watch the movie. His whole concept was that he wanted to write a requiem for the film." Legrand asked Segal to fly to France to work alongside him as they prepped for scoring. At the composer's chateau, she worked with him for four days. "Every morning, we would go over his material and we would work with his scores," the music editor remembers. "Michel has never gone into the digital age because he doesn't need to, but I needed to transfer his tempos and his measure metering into a digital format so that, when we recorded the orchestra into ProTools, we would have the correct bars, beats and tempos." This past March, when Legrand was hospitalized with pneumonia, she stepped in to produce the recording of the score in Paris and Malmedy, Belgium. "We had a responsibility to get this done," Segal stresses. "For the last three days before scoring, I barely slept." The music editor describes Legrand's score, especially the sections composed for the film- within-the-film, as a departure for the composer. "Michel has a very beautiful and passionate scoring sound," she comments. "This was a very different style, and very cool. He was another facet of himself. It is very avant-garde: a lot of percussion and movement within the percussion and the orchestra." In the end, about 50 percent of Legrand's music was used in the final film, as score and source — a decision related in part to producer Bogdanovich's strong preference for using source music in his films. "Orson asked Peter to make sure the film got finished," Segal explains. "Peter doesn't really use score in any of his movies, so we had to decide how best to integrate Michel's music for the film." (The full score is set to be released on a CD co-produced by Segal and Legrand.) For one scene with Hannaford and Otterlake — edited during Welles' lifetime and seen on his AFI tribute — the director had put music to picture; he had selected an instrumental recording of Cole Porter's "It's De-Lovely." "Welles had decided it was too slow," Segal observes, "so he sped it up" — which rendered the recording difficult to listen to. "Michel actually came up with a great original piece that we used instead." Like Legrand, then, Murawski and Segal felt free to supplement Welles' vision with their own. "Orson would say that in the editing room he was the enemy of the film and he wanted to be as tough as possible," Murawski reflects. "Knowing how Orson felt about the editing process was very liberating. We didn't have to take everything that he had cut as gospel. And I know it's probably going to be controversial to people who have seen those scenes — 'Well, how dare you re-cut the master!' "But," he adds, "I think Orson would've been the first guy to do it." f A scene from The Other Side of the Wind.

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