Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
82 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2018 new footage, but it was incidental — rather than essential — to the overall film. "It was basically the last gasps," he explains. "It was the last pieces that he wanted to finish up." The editor didn't re-work scenes that had already been fine-cut, but he worked with Welles on fine-tuning those that needed further attention. One memorable scene on which the pair labored was from Hannaford's film- in-progress, a deliriously trippy scene set in the bathroom stall of a nightclub and featuring a rain-soaked appearance by Kodar. The scene consisted of material shot in multiple locations, with years between the shoots. "We were intercutting this scene that had been shot four, five times — once in London, once in New Mexico, once in LA," Ecclesine recalls. "It's just going by boom, boom, boom. There are 500 edits." (The post-production team that assembled Wind in 2018 was unable to find an edited version of this scene, so it was reconstructed from scratch.) Ecclesine also remembers Welles having prepared two work prints for Wind. "I cut one together," he claims. "We had to go down to the lab and look at it on a double-system projector, so you had to take all of the single guillotine splices and you had to double-reinforce them because you couldn't feed a single spliced 35mm print through a double-system projector. You had to have tape on both sides of every cut, so I had to go through the whole thing and basically double-splice the entire film." Murawski and the post-production team never found a complete, edited cut of Wind; perhaps it has been lost, or maybe Welles undid his own work as the years marched on. According to Josh Karp's definitive book Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of 'The Other Side of the Wind' (2015), the negative ended up in Paris, due to disputes between Welles and an Iranian production company — but the director was able to toil away on the work print. In fact, in the early 1980s, Welles was embarking on a major effort to revisit Wind. Material from multiple unfinished films was being shipped to his then residence at 1717 N. Stanley Avenue in Los Angeles. There, scenes were to be catalogued and organized by his current — and final — editor, Jonathon Braun, ACE. Later an Emmy-nominated editor who specializes in reality television, he parlayed a friendship with Welles' longtime producer, Alessandro Tasca, into a gig working with the filmmaker starting in 1982. Assigned by Tasca to pick up from the lab and put together the dailies from Welles' unfinished Isak Dinesen adaptation The Dreamers (1982), Braun proceeded to prepare a kind of initial cut of the scenes. "In those days, the picture and soundtrack needed to be synched together first before editing, and it was not uncommon for the editor to do a rough assembly based on script notes, which I happened to find in the film boxes as well," he explains to CineMontage. "Tasca called me later and said, 'What the hell did you do? I only asked you to sync the dailies. Nobody has ever edited Mr. Welles' material without him being there!' Luckily, Orson liked what I did." Having hit it off with Welles, the young editor was given the responsibility of setting up an editing studio in the Stanley guesthouse and sorting through the director's myriad projects. "As I found stuff, I would watch stuff," Braun remembers. "I started watching The Other Side of the Wind. I saw John Huston, who I was a big fan of. And I saw Peter Bogdanovich, who I was also a big fan of. The more I watched it, the more I said, 'Oh, there's something in here. This is fascinating.'" Braun encountered material that took a variety of forms: Some scenes were Jonathon Braun today.