Royal Road Entertainment has bought the rights from its current owners after several failed attempts to bring it to life.
- Oct 30, 2014
AceShowbiz - The wait is over. Orson Welles' unfinished film "The Other Side of the Wind", which is considered the most famous movie never released, is finally on track to get a wide release.
Numerous efforts to bring the 1,083 reels of negatives to life were done before but they were marred by "legal squabbles, clashing egos, the spiriting away of a working print and, briefly, the disappearance and recovery of the reels last summer." The right holders, including Welles' daughter, kept the reels inside a warehouse in Paris but are finally letting them go.
Per NY Times, Royal Road Entertainment announced on Tuesday, October 28 that it had bought the rights from the current holders. The plan is to release the movie on May 6, in time for the 100th anniversary of Welles' birth. Royal Road will promote the movie at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, California, next month.
"This is like finding the Land of Oz or some lost tomb," said Josh Karp, the author of a book about the movie to be published next year by St. Martin's Press. "This film is art imitating life and life imitating art. It's become so mythical because of what happened with all the failures to finish it and the players involved."
"The Other Side of the Wind" is a movie within a movie about the comeback attempt of an aging, maverick director played by John Huston. Shot between 1969 and 1976, the film also stars Peter Bogdanovich as a young director.
Bogdanovich will in fact be involved in finishing the film. "We will set up a cutting room and Peter Bogdanovich and I will assemble the film," the pic's line producer Frank Marshall said. "We have notes from Orson Welles. We have scenes that weren't quite finished, and we need to add music. We will get it done. The good news is that it won't take so long because of all of the technology today."
