Bogdanovich: He also shot on the MGM lot, but MGM never knew. I’d arranged for his crew to shoot on the back lot, but I didn’t say that it was Orson Welles. I said it was a UCLA college student crew, and Orson hid down below in the car, so he could get into MGM without being recognised. Every time a security guard or someone passed by, he’d hide. And they shot for about 24 hours, they didn’t take a break, they just kept shooting because they knew they couldn’t be there again, and they had to be careful so no one ever knew it was Orson Welles. That’s gone now. That whole lot is gone.

In 1970, Orson Welles came back to Hollywood to shoot his last feature. The Other Side of the Wind was shot outside the system, with his own money, using a young crew and starring friends like Peter Bogdanovich, John Huston and Joseph McBride. It took seven years to shoot.

“30 years on, the movie, infamously, remains unedited and unreleased, bound up by bad luck, personal feuds and byzantine legal tangles that saw the negatives actually physically locked out of reach in a vault in Paris for decades.”

By 1999, the film was close to resurrection at the hands of Gary Graver, the young cinematographer seen with Welles in the photo above, and the actress and co-writer Oja Kodar:

“And in a 1999 interview with Kodar, printed in 2001:

“The film is practically finished, with 50 minutes edited by Welles and the rest ready to be edited. All is the footage is in good shape and secure, controlled by Gary Graver and myself. And I believe that what has happened here (unfinished Welles retrospective in Munich) will help to convince our respective financial backers to find an arrangement. They want to do that, and it is simply a question of knowing who gets what. Our Iranian co-producer dreamed of getting a fortune with the last film of Orson Welles. Like many others, he was overcome by the name of Welles, without taking into account that this name will not bring in millions. I would like that to be true, as I have financial interest in the film, but he needs to reduce his claims and I have hope that it can be released soon.”"

But they were too optimistic – Graver died in 2006, without finishing the project.

The whole story of the production is poignant, funny, inspiring and defiant. Thus are the gods brought down by the mud people.

Gary Graver, Welles and Oja Kodar on the same shoot – possibly years later.

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