Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1061972
72 CINEMONTAGE / Q4 2018 scene was, based on some of the assembled scenes that Welles had done, asking, 'What does this look like?' It didn't have any scene numbers." Instead, Welles chose scene titles that related to shooting locations, like "studio" or "bus." Murawski began work on Wind in late October, but during the preceding month and a half, he immersed himself in all things Welles and Wind, consulting interviews with the director and familiarizing himself with many drafts of the screenplay. Meanwhile, a researcher was dispatched to the University of Michigan, which maintains archives of Welles-related papers. "I said, 'Give me any versions of the script, any treatments, any memos,'" Murawski recounts. "They found a huge amount of relevant material and sent it to me." Missing in the plethora of paperwork, however, was any equivalent to the famous 58-page memo Welles penned to Universal Pictures executives after he was prevented from overseeing the completion of Touch of Evil (1958). That memo guided Walter Murch, ACE, CAS, MPSE, when he reconstituted Welles's original version of that movie in the late 1990s. But no such document existed when it came to Wind. "The problem was that Orson always thought he was just going to do everything himself," Murawski explains. "There were a lot of memos going back and forth to editors in Paris, but those memos were primarily complaining about technical things, like the leaders not being done the way he wanted them. It's not like he ever sat down and wrote: 'This is the intention of this scene.'" Early in the process, however, the post- production team was presented with the tantalizing possibility that Wind existed in a more finished state than had originally been thought. "In interviews in the late '70s, Orson was saying, 'Oh, the picture is 95 to 98 percent done; all we really need to do is cut the negative and do the sound work,'" Murawski says. What's more, editor-turned-producer Steve Ecclesine, who worked on Wind in the mid-'70s, told CineMontage that Welles had prepared two work prints. (See related article, Page 76.) For his part, Murawski remembered seeing boxes in Graver's garage containing what he assumed to be a work print. "It looked like a complete edited movie, but it turns out that it had been broken down into scenes over the years," he says. As part of the search, the editor traveled to Tacoma, Washington (home of Graver's son Sean), where a Betamax tape transfer of a work print — of sorts — was indeed located. But hopes for finding a complete version of Wind were dashed. "There was about 40 minutes of material that was pretty fine-cut," Murawski comments. "The rest of it was really rough assemblies — in the oldest, old-fashioned sense of the word. Literally, it would be four different takes of a line strung one after another. It was basically select rolls that Orson had built." In the version prepared for release by Netflix, Wind runs 122 minutes. The editor breaks down the material this way: Approximately 52 percent of the film was edited from material Welles included in select rolls, but had not been fully cut; another 28 percent consists of scenes that had been fine-cut by Welles; and 20 percent features newly cut scenes for which no reference existed. All in all, about 100 hours of footage was at Murawski's disposal. "Unfortunately, our schedule was so short that, whenever there was an assembly or a select roll done by Orson, I tried to confine myself to that as much as possible. And, if I needed other pieces, then I went into the footage." For Murawski, the best place to start was the beginning. The screenplay calls for an opening narration read by Welles, but since the director never got around to recording the lines, an alternative solution was utilized. "There was a rough version of the prologue that Gary had put together, with just his own voice narrating it," the editor says, but that wouldn't do. Bogdanovich then suggested that he recite the slightly tweaked lines — not as himself but as an aged version of his character, Otterlake. "His character is looking back years later," Murawski observes. "We recorded it for temp, but the way Peter delivered it was so emotional and heartfelt that we ended up using it in the final mix." A RUSS MEYER INFLUENCE? Then Murawski had to reckon with the first scene in the film: a bawdy film-within-the-film scene that takes place in a Turkish bath. He was not thrilled with the unedited material — "It was really grainy, rather poorly shot and didn't have a Cinematographer Gary Graver, right, with director Orson Welles, center, and camera operator Bill Weaver during production of The Other Side of the Wind in the 1970s.