They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018): Orson Welles Redux

The Other Side of the Wind is Orson Welles most anticipated film – a project he conceived in the mid-1960s, began shooting in 1970 and worked on until his death in 1985. After five years of intermittent production due to financial difficulties, the principal photography was completed by 1975 – but a lawsuit and continuing problems with funding prevented him from ever finishing the film. Thirty-three years after Welles’ death and nearly fifty years after the beginning of the project, The Other Side of the Wind has finally arrived, courtesy of Netflix which provided the funding needed to put all the pieces together, and thanks to the efforts of a group of Welles admirers headed by Frank Marshall - producer of such movies as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Color Purple (1985), Back to the Future Parts I, II and III (1985 -1990), The Sixth Sense (1999) and all five movies about the character Jason Bourne from The Bourne Identity in 2002 through Jason Bourne in 2016 - and Peter Bogdanovich, a close friend of Orson Welles, a star of the new movie, and a noted director himself - The Last Picture Show (1971), Paper Moon (1973), Mask (1985), Noises Off (1992), The Great Buster (2018), and others.

The Other Side of the Wind is a fascinating movie, the subject of my next post [HERE], but the saga of Orson Welles’ struggle to make it during the last fifteen years of his life is just as interesting. That story is the subject of a terrific documentary film called They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, by another great filmmaker, the prolific documentarian Morgan Neville who in the last four years alone has released four terrific feature films: 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal (2015), Keith Richards: Under the Influence (2015) and Won’t You Be My Neighbor (2018). The title They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is based on a possibly apocryphal comment supposedly made by Welles himself.

While The Other Side of the Wind premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2018, and had its North American premier at the Telluride Film Festival the next day, September 1^st;  They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead premiered at Telluride on August 31 and at Venice the next day, September 1. Both of these movies have skipped a general theatrical release and instead went straight to streaming on Netflix beginning in November 2018.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead chronicles the convoluted path of The Other Side of the Wind from Welles’ initial conception of the project through his death, and along the way provides a brief look at Welles’ growing estrangement from Hollywood. This began with his second major feature film The Magnificent Ambersons in 1943 and culminated with A Touch of Evil in 1958. Ambersons was the follow-up to 1941’s Citizen Kane of course,  and starred Joseph Cotton, Anne Baxter and Agnes Moorehead, with Welles acting as narrator. The initial cut of the film was deemed too long at 132 minutes, but when Welles was called out of town by the US government to assist in a troubled Brazilian film project, RKO cut fifty minutes from the original and reshot some scenes, without consulting the director. It then destroyed the cut pieces to prevent Welles from reconstructing or re-editing his work. The resulting film – what we have now – is just eighty-eight minutes and still quite enjoyable, but jumpy in places and with a relatively happy ending that doesn’t fit thematically or tonally with the rest of the movie. Even with all the studio tinkering – or because of it – Ambersons was not a hit. Welles felt betrayed and refused to even watch what he felt was an abomination for the rest of his life.

Something similar happened with A Touch of Evil, a very good picture that’s especially famous for the long continuous three and a half minute tracking shot with which it starts. When the film was completed to his satisfaction, Welles left for Mexico to raise money and to work on his Don Quixote project (which was never completed). The studio demanded a few additional scenes be added and also wanted chunks of the movie cut and re-edited. Since Welles wasn’t around, they went ahead and cut out about twenty minutes without him and without a real understanding of what was intended. Welles was insulted and called this “odious”.

Fed up with studio interference with his work, and unable to get independent financing  in the US, Welles decamped to Europe for most of the 1950s and 1960s. Of the three feature films he completed in the fifties only A Touch of Evil had American financing; of the seven feature films he directed in the sixties and seventies (excluding The Other Side of the Wind) only four were finished and released. The rest were never completed or never released, primarily due to financing problems. 

This was the background against which Welles determined to make his great comeback in 1970.  By then, Hollywood was rapidly changing. The studios were weakened and new kinds of films began to hit the marketplace. Films like Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider and Mash; directors like Bob Rafelson, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Altman; along with an influx of European films and a changing culture were opening up the cinema scene.  Welles saw the opportunity but didn’t quite know how to deal with it. Age 55 in 1970, he was no longer a young whiz kid, and certainly not a part of the new generation, although many of the young directors revered him. This was his chance, he felt, to make a last great picture, a capstone to his career.

He hooked up with cinematographer-cameraman Gary Graves and together with Welles’ partner, lover and muse Oja Kodar, they began to conceive of The Other Side of the Wind. It was to be a satirical exposé about the shallow, money-driven world of Hollywood, about the last day of a storied director’s life, about art itself. It would star Welles’ good friend, the great director and sometime actor, John Huston (known for such pictures as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The African Queen (1951), and The Night of the Iguana (1964)). But try as he might, Welles once again could not secure financial backing. Whether he was seen as damaged goods, past his prime, or a difficult to work with genius; or whether his pitch for the movie or the project itself was seen as incomprehensible, the Hollywood money guys found any investment in the picture too risky. He was able to tap some foreign investors and contributed whatever he could from his own outside projects – some acting jobs, TV commercials, and such - enough to eventually get the film shot, but not enough to finish it. His final backer was a wealthy Iranian, the brother of the Shah – but then came the 1979 revolution, followed by a protracted lawsuit, disputes over ownership, the confiscation of the completed film reels, and more.  

It’s an incredible and interesting story. They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead chronicles what Orson Welles was trying to do, the cast that he assembled, his unusual methods of making an epic movie in piecemeal fashion, and the many impediments and setbacks he faced in the process. Along the way we learn much about Orson Welles himself, who is very much a presence in the documentary – through archival clips from interviews and other public appearances. It features narration by Alan Cumming and commentary by several actors and other participants in the unfinished project, people like Marshall and Bogdanovich, actor Norman Foster, actor and film historian Joseph McBride, actor Danny Huston (son of John Huston), Welles’ daughter Beatrice, and many others. There are, as you’d expect, many snippets from the movie.

As his resume suggests, Morgan Neville is a brilliant documentarian, and here he adopts a fluid, mostly linear style with lots of jump-cuts between commentary and movie scenes, along with numerous clips of Orson himself seemingly commenting on what’s going on in the film we are watching – excerpts gleaned from the many characters he played in movies throughout his career and from the many interviews he gave on talk shows, at press conferences and other public appearances. You don’t have to be a Welles aficionado to enjoy this, but if you are, you’ll find it fun to try and recall the roles or films from whence they came. The use of such interjections and other devices add rather a light touch to what might otherwise be a grim narrative.

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is quite entertaining as a stand-alone documentary feature film and well worth your time. Critics certainly like it: the movie has generated a quite favorable critical score of 81 from Metacritic.com. As I’ve noted, it is currently streaming on Netflix. It’s also a great introduction to its subject, the newly completed Welles’ opus The Other Side of the Wind, discussed HERE.

98 minutes                                          

Grade: A-

Currently streaming exclusively on Netflix