The Other Side of The Wind - Missing Elements To The Film

Missing Elements To The Film

Ten hours of raw footage exist, including multiple takes of the same scenes, but the film is missing the following elements:

• Welles never recorded the opening narration. Bogdanovich has speculated that he could do the narration instead, in character as Otterlake.
• There is one scene missing - Hannaford's car exploding as it crashes behind the cinema screen, with the explosion being unseen, but a plume of smoke rising from behind the screen. Since the Reseda drive-in theatre used has been demolished since filming in the 1970s, this would most likely need to be accomplished by a model shot.
• With 40-50 minutes of film edited by Welles, approximately 70-80 minutes still require editing. Welles consistently maintained that he did not enjoy films lasting over two hours, and most of his films were just under two hours.
• The film currently lacks a musical score.

Sifting through the ten hours of film would present less of an effort than was involved in finishing Sergei Eisenstein's incomplete ¡Que viva México! over 40 years after it was filmed, when a 90-minute feature was cut out of between 30 and 50 hours of raw footage shot by Eisenstein.