Last night I read Alex Ross‘s 9.26 New Yorker essay about the long and arduous crusade to assemble and release Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind=. It was comforting to read that someone from a reputable, major-league print publication had finally pointed the finger at the chief culprit behind the endless delays that afflicted this endeavor — Welles’ longtime girlfriend and Other Side of the Wind costar Oja Kodar.
Ross: “When Welles fans discuss the fate of Wind, the name Oja Kodar inevitably surfaces, often in an unflattering light. A Croatian sculptor and actress, she co-wrote the script, had a lead role in the film, and — as the Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has established — directed three scenes of the film-within-the-film.
“Kodar has been accused of holding up efforts to complete it, whether because of excessive demands or on account of a psychological block against seeing it finished. Yet she has artistic as well as legal authority over the work. In 2015, she made a rare public appearance at a Welles festival in Woodstock, Illinois. (The town was formerly the site of the Todd School for Boys, where Welles’s theatrical career began.) In an interview with Rosenbaum, Kodar made clear her profound attachment to Wind.
“Now in her late seventies, she is a charismatic woman who speaks in a mixture of poetic flights and pungent aphorisms.”
I haven’t seen Ryan Suffern‘s A Final Cut for Orson: 40 years In The Making, which tells the story of the assembling and completion of Welles film. I have no idea if Kodar’s influence upon this effort has been discussed or even alluded to in Suffern’s 38-minute film, but I’ll be interested to see what’s what. Has anyone seen it? Can anyone shed light?
Here are two articles that I posted, in 2015 and 2016, about Kodar’s role in the process.
