By RAY KELLY
There have been only a few people to share a screen card with Orson Welles: Cinematographer Gregg Toland and writer Herman Mankiewicz easily come to mind, and, now, editor Bob Murawski.
Best known for editing Sam Raimi’s blockbuster Spider-Man trilogy and his Oscar-winning work on The Hurt Locker, Murawski also has a deep appreciation for low-budget, independent 1970s fare, which made him a fitting choice to complete Orson Welles’ long-unfinished The Other Side of the Wind. (The completed film is now available on Netflix in 190 countries.)
Murawski was a friend and neighbor of Wind cinematographer Gary Graver and familiar with the movie long before he was hired last year by producers Filip Jan Rymsza and Frank Marshall and executive producer Peter Bogdanovich.
The 54-year-old Detroit native admitted the idea of completing Welles’ edit was intimidating, but he explained to Wellesnet the steps he took to prepare and the process involved in finishing The Other Side of the Wind.
Unlike the films you have worked on with directors Kathryn Bigelow or Sam Raimi, the director of The Other Side of the Wind has been dead for more than 30 years. How did you get into his head to cut his movie?
I bought every Orson Welles book I could find and I read every interview. I went to the Academy library in Los Angeles and found every article I could related to The Other Side of the Wind. I really wanted to do my homework on Orson Welles and reacquaint myself as much as possible with his movies and him ― and what he had been saying about this movie. It was an invaluable part of the process, particularly later movies like Othello, The Trial, and of course, F for Fake. I wanted to really try to understand his style and what he was going for in that period of his career. He wasn’t editing for the sake of editing. He was trying to create movement that he could no longer create with the camera because he didn’t have access to Gregg Tolland and those incredible professional crews of technicians and crane shots. He had to figure out a new way to create that feeling of movement.
I also spoke to some of his other editors ― Yves Deschamps , Steve Ecclesine, and Jonathon Braun ― to understand Orson’s way of working. Even though he viewed those guys as cutters, and not really editors and tried to diminish their involvement, they were there working with him, observing, putting things together and knowing his approach. So that also helped.
Of course, having the resource of Peter and Frank, who both worked on the movie and were there for a lot of the shoot, was great.
I understand there was 96 hours of footage shot over five and a half years. Why so much and what problems did that pose?
There was a lot of footage and he shot a lot of things. Everything Rich Little was in was part of that 96 hours and then he had to reshoot everything with Peter. (Little left the production and was replaced by Bogdanovich in the role of Brooks Otterlake.) Peter had played the original Higgam, the nerdy cineaste, and that had to be reshot as well.
There was a lot of footage, but a lot of it was the movie-within-a-movie stuff ― an exercise with Orson trying to get a proper version of shot. There were multiple shots. Also, he was dealing with a lot of non-actors, and I don’t mean that they were amateurs. You had guys like Norman Foster, who even though he was a director, was not primarily an actor. Orson would shoot a lot of takes of him to get the right performance, line reading or delivery.
So, yes there is a lot of material, but it wasn’t like it was a huge amount of unused material. When we first put together the movie, everybody, including Peter and Frank, were wondering how long it would be. We thought the first assembly could be three hours, maybe four hours. But actually when we first put everything together for a first assembly it was just under two and a half hours.
Knowing we had a manageable length in the first assembly was a relief. Yes, he shot a lot but once you start editing you can never have too much footage. It’s better to have more than less. And better to have the right piece than the wrong piece. Because Orson was so experienced as a director, he kept shooting until he got it right. If it took 10 rolls of film to get that one, good five-second shot, he did it. It was shot over a period of nearly six years and he was looking to get the perfect pieces he needed.
Was there ever an obstacle that you feared would be insurmountable at any point during post-production?
Starting out, we didn’t know if we had the whole story. Until we started putting the footage together, we weren’t even clear that he had shot everything. When he was talking about the movie, he would sort of make things up to suit his needs. We went down the rabbit hole because at one point we thought he may have edited the entire movie.
Steve Ecclesine, who worked with Orson in the mid ’70s, said that he and Orson had worked on the movie for a period of a year or so and had finished the cut. He said they had double spliced to reinforce the splicing, which was something you did in the old days when you’re done.
For the longest time, we were trying to find this finished movie. Then, there was an interview with Orson from the late 1970s where he said the movie was 95 to 98 percent finished. “All I need to do is cut the negative and do the sound,” he said. I think he was just saying that to make it sound like the movie was more finished that it was.
But as we start to get into it and finding the edited footage and putting everything together, we realized he probably edited less than one third of the movie. And 50 percent was a long assembly of the best takes strung together with multiple readings of the same line strung one after another. It was his way of cutting the material down to make it more manageable. It was an assembly to work from. And then (the remainder) had never been even cut at all. It had never been edited, period.
So trying to figure out what he had done, and what he hadn’t done, was a tough process. Obviously, if he had cut the entire film that would be aces. Over a period of several weeks, it became apparent he had not edited that much of it, but he had shot pretty much everything.
Then, the biggest obstacle for us became the sound. Even though we had the negative of the picture, most of the original production sound with the actors, the quarter-inch tapes, were lost. All we had was the chopped up rough work picture that Orson was editing from. It was many generations away from the original source. It was chopped up and full of splices.
When he was editing the work picture, he did not care about the dialogue. We did preserve the original performances as much as possible. We tried to piece it together from alternate takes and then use the ADR, or soundalikes, as the last possible resort because we wanted to preserve the original performance.
Of course, we had Danny Huston, who can do a great impersonation of his dad, but it does not have the same whiskey and cigar resonance.
There were a lot of technical issues, but they were not insurmountable. It required a lot of hard work from a lot of people.
Looking at the finished film, it is difficult to tell which scenes were edited by you, and which were edited by Welles. What are some of the scenes he cut? Did he edit more of the film-within-the-film than the party scenes, or was it an even mix?
I’m glad it’s hard for you to tell. That makes me feel like I did my job!
Surprisingly, most of the editing work Orson and his previous editors did was on the film-within-the-film material. With the exception of the nightclub scene, which we edited from scratch, and some of the film that plays on the screen at the drive-in, it was all edited by Orson. Which is pretty interesting, since he had started out parodying these kind of artsy European movies, but ended up shooting many, many hours of footage and spending the the most time editing them. I’m sure some of it was at Oja’s prompting, but I’m guessing as he began shooting this material he came to really enjoy creating shots and sequences that existed sheerly on an artistic, visual level, unencumbered by character or narrative. He must have found this extremely liberating.
As for the party, he did edit the famous scene of Hannaford’s arrival, of course. And the long, uncomfortable dialogue scene between Hannaford and Burroughs was completely cut by Orson.
Some of the big multi character party scenes, like the “Gospel According to Jake” scene, were worked on quite a bit. I would call them rough cuts. I had to fine cut them and incorporate additional material that Orson shot in 1975. And there were select rolls for many of the other party scenes, where Orson had gone through all the dailies and picked his favorite two or three takes of each line and bit. But there was also a lot that had never been edited at all.
Were there things in the workprint that you could not locate on the negative?
There actually were just a few things, like the scene where George Jessel introduces Jake’s birthday party and calls him “the Ernest Hemingway of the cinema, the Murnau of the American motion picture.” We never found the negative for that. We were able to clean up the work picture. Because of the documentary style of the party scene, it didn’t matter if the work picture quality didn’t match the negative as much because it was intentionally supposed to look like it was from different formats and emulsions and styles of filmmaking.
There were a few shots in the film-within-the-film where John Dale is walking around the abandoned MGM lot where we did not find the original negative. Some things that were in Orson’s assembly we could not find the negative. So, I had to swap out different pieces. Fortunately, there was a huge amount of material and a lot of equally great stuff. I would say 99 percent of (the finished film) is from the original negative. It had been stored in a vault in Paris all these years and was pristine. It was remarkably free of problems and issues.
What was Industrial Light & Magic’s contribution to the finished film?
Orson never shot the dummies being shot. Of course, we had all the footage of Jake and Oja shooting the dummies, but not the dummies taking the actual impact. So ILM built new versions of the John Dale dummies and shot those against a green screen and then composited them on footage from the Carefree, Arizona shoot.
They composited the fireworks into the sky. We had shots of the midgets carrying around boxes of fireworks and the characters reacting to the fireworks, but we did not have the footage of the actual fireworks occurring. So we were able to find a plate of the house with a nice amount sky that they we could put the fireworks into.
(ILM did) all of the shots of the (Hannaford) movie on screens in the various screening rooms: The studio screening room where Billy is showing the movie to the Robert Evans’ character, Max David; Jake’s screening room; and finally the shots of the movie at the drive-in theater – compositing the footage from Hannaford’s The Other Side of the Wind film into all of those movie screens.
Didn’t ILM create the long shot of the drive-in movie theater because the Reseda Drive-in had been demolished in the late 1970s?
We did not create the drive-in, we ended up finding stock footage. We bought stock footage. I knew about a movie called Drive-in made in 1975 and that is where the bulk of the footage came from. A couple of the other shots were stock footage from a Charles Bronson movie, “St. Ives.” They were all from the exact period, so the cars and everything matched. One of them may have been actually shot at the same drive-in that Orson had shot at.
What was Frank, Filip and Peter’s role in determining how the picture was shaped?
They worked in the capacity like any producers worked – or even more so the way I would work with the director.
We started out reviewing the Showtime cut of the movie. Showtime had put together sort of an assembly of all the (workprint) material they had. Some of it was stuff that Orson had shot, some was assemblies. It was very frustrating to work from because it was not in any sequential order.
So I just said. “Look you guys, why don’t I take a couple of weeks to put everything together in sequential script order and then we will start from there.” So I put things together as much as I could. I edited as much stuff as I could. So we had an assembly that was much like any other movie you would work on. It was rough first assembly. Then, I would go through it and build scenes.
We would meet once a week, maybe on a Friday afternoon, and review the material I had ben editing the way you would work with any director or producers. They would look at the scene I put together and everyone commented. And I continued to hunt for better versions of shots. That was a little different from normal.
Normally, with a first assembly you have everything in, but because of the disorganization of this material, it required a lot of finding things on my part. I was finding things we didn’t know existed and going through the material and reviewing it at the same time. It was constantly evolving. Even at the end, when we were working on the sound, I was still finding material, better versions of things or lines.
There was a rough cut screened in Santa Monica for VIPs in January and shown to film scholars Joseph McBride and Jonathan Rosenbaum for their feedback. Later, a cut was shown to Oja Kodar. What input did you get from any of these people that changed things or gave you pause.
Joe and Jonathan were very encouraged and very encouraging. They really felt it was true to what Orson would’ve wanted to do. They knew the movie and the exploration of the themes that they thought were important. We discussed a few things. We really wanted to get their opinions because they are two guys who were very familiar with Orson Welles’ entire career.
Oja was a little more specific. As predicted, she wanted to have more film-within-a-film material in. There were a few things that she thought Orson would have wanted in there. For instance, the car in the rain scene ended with John being thrown out of the car and the car driving off. Oja said there was a shot of John Dale walking in the rain coming across a mill, and then a house. When he goes inside the house, it is still raining inside the house because it is not a real house, it’s part of a movie set. She felt it was something Orson would have wanted. So, I went back, found the footage, and put it in the movie. She mostly felt we should play the film-within-the-film scenes much longer and there are scenes we put back in and debated.
And she had a great idea. In the scene with the giant phallus, she remembered a version where her character stabs the phallus and it deflates. We went back and looked at all the assemblies and it was never really shot like that. It was more like the phallus collapsed and then she got on top and start stabbing it. But I figured out a way to reconstruct it based on that idea where she would stab it and it deflated. I felt it was a good idea, even though that was not the way it was shot. It works great and it was done at her prompting. She was very supportive and surprisingly did not have a lot of notes.
What will you take away from editing The Other Side of the Wind?
Orson Welles was still relevant at the very end of his career. He was a guy who started off with an incredible bang with Citizen Kane. Even though it was his first film, he had been working for so long on stage and radio that he was a fully formed storyteller.
But even at the end of his career, when people had written him off as a gadfly who appeared on talk shows and wine commercials, he was still an incredibly vibrant filmmaker who never stopped.
People will discover he was a guy who never left his career as a filmmaker. He was still a filmmaker exploring the boundaries of cinema and pushing himself to create things that were cutting edge and that no one else was doing.
I am super impressed that he created something over 45 years ago that still feels fresh and contemporary. I always knew he was a great filmmaker, but now I have even more respect.
It was incredible to be able to work on a movie with Orson Welles.
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