The Other Side of The Wind - Plot

Plot

The film features John Huston as Jake Hannaford, an aging Hollywood director modeled on Ernest Hemingway. The film opens with narration over the wreckage of Hannaford's crashed car, casting doubt as to whether the crash which killed him on his 70th birthday was really an accident. The narrator sets the tone for the film by telling us "This was put together from many sources — from all that footage shot by the TV and documentary film-makers — and also the students, critics and young directors who happened to bring sixteen and eight millimeter cameras to his birthday party..."

Just before his death, Hannaford was trying to revive his flagging career by making a "hip, with-it" film in the style of Antonioni, laden with gratuitous sex scenes and violence, with mixed results. At the time of Hannaford's party, this film (The Other Side of the Wind) has been left unfinished after its star stormed off the set, for reasons not immediately apparent to the audience. The film includes extensive excerpts of this film-within-a-film, as well as excerpts of a documentary on Hannaford's life.

After the titles, we see a screening of some incomprehensible parts of Hannaford's unfinished experimental film. The screening is being held to attract "end money" from clearly-unimpressed studio boss Max David (Geoffrey Land). Hannaford himself is absent, and a loyal member of his entourage, the aging former child star Billy Boyle (Norman Foster) makes an inept attempt to describe what the film is about. David asks, "Jake is just making this up as he goes along, isn't he?" After an awkward pause, Boyle can only reply, "He's done it before."

Intercut with this scene, we see various groups setting out for Hannaford's 70th birthday party at his Arizona ranch, including Hannaford and his young protégé Brooks Otterlake (played by Peter Bogdanovich), a young, commercially successful director who has a talent for mimicking well-known celebrities. (Bogdanovich, then a successful young director, also has a talent for mimicry.) One of the people they share their car with is the obnoxious cineaste reporter Mr. Pister (Joseph McBride), whose flurry of intrusive questions culminates in, "Mr. Hannaford, in the body of your film work, how significantly would you relate the trauma of your father's suicide?" and he is thrown out of Hannaford's car.

Stranded in the desert, Pister hitches a lift on a bus that is taking crew and reporters to Hannaford's birthday party. Although there are many journalists in the bus, they are also carrying several dozen life-size clay dolls of Hannaford's leading man, taken from the set of the unfinished film. The scene is indicative of the experimental nature of the picture, and includes much overlapping dialogue: a tape recorder belonging to reporter Juliette Riche (Susan Strasberg) playing back Hannaford's voice, while a member of Hannaford's entourage Pat (Edmond O'Brien) reads out an authoritarian anti-hippy diatribe of Hannaford's, fellow reporter Pister struggles to thread the tape back onto his reel-to-reel tape recorder, and at the same time, film footage of the scene is rapidly intercut with footage from Hannaford's film.

Further scenes depict the festivities at Hannaford's party, including fireworks, assorted midgets, and a musical number with John Carroll leading a rendition of "The Glow-Worm."

Many of the journalists attending are all brandishing cameras, and the film follows the perspectives of individual journalists as they follow Hannaford everywhere, even to the toilet, asking personal questions. In the second half of the film they begin querying Hannaford's sexuality and whether he has long been a closet homosexual, in spite of his macho public persona. Each camera's footage is displayed in a distinctive style, representing the perspectives of different directors and cameramen.

Throughout the film, there is rapid inter-cutting between simultaneous conversations at Hannaford's party, so that the viewer hears a few lines of dialogue from one conversation, switches to another conversation, then another, before returning to more of the original conversation. (A similar technique was used in the 1998 restoration of Welles' Touch of Evil.)

Several party guests comment on the conspicuous absence of John Dale (played by Bob Random), Hannaford's androgynous-looking, leather-clad leading man in his last film, whom Hannaford first discovered when Dale was attempting suicide by jumping into the Pacific Ocean off the Mexican coast.

Meanwhile, guests are shown more scenes from the film in the private cinema Hannaford has at the ranch.

The scenes of the film-within-the-film intercut throughout the film include:

• A scene set in a Turkish bath, which plays over the opening titles.
• John Dale's onscreen character pursuing "The red, red Indian" (Oja Kodar) on his motorcycle, with increasing ambiguity as to which of them is pursuing the other. These scenes involve extensive use of flat landscapes and plains; and tall, high-rise glass skyscrapers, the mirrors and windows of which form various optical illusions reminiscent of the 'hall of mirrors' scene in Welles' earlier The Lady from Shanghai. (This is mixed in with the sound of the audience responding unenthusiastically.)
• A graphic sex scene between Random and Kodar in a station wagon being driven through heavy rain, culminating in the driver of the car (Robert Aiken) throwing Kodar out.
• A sexual dream sequence involving Kodar walking at least partially nude in front of a giant black phallus. (Commentary from Huston can be heard through this.) This short scene was directed by Kodar.
• The violent death of John Dale's character in the film-within-the-film.
• A graphic sex scene between Random and Kodar, filmed from below, looking through the bedsprings in the style of Russ Meyer. The scene takes place on a rusting bed in a deserted movie lot. Throughout this scene, Hannaford provides increasingly voyeuristic and intrusive/abusive off-screen direction, prompting an enraged and humiliated John Dale to storm off the set.

As the party continues, Hannaford gets progressively drunker. He is washing his face in the bathroom when he tearfully breaks down in front of Otterlake, asking for the young director's help to revive his flagging career, and desperately trying to sober up before returning to the screening of his still-unfinished film.

A power cut in the middle of Hannaford's party interrupts the screening mid-way. The party continues by lantern-light, and eventually reconvenes to an empty drive-in cinema, where the last portion of Hannaford's film is screened.

Later in the film, Dale arrives at the party. At one point, a drunken Hannaford makes a pass at Dale, and is rebuffed. Hannaford has a history of seducing the wife or girlfriend of each of his leading men, but maintains a strong attraction to the leading men themselves. Hannaford then uses a rifle from his Indian trophy room to shoot several life-sized clay dolls of Dale. This is paralleled by a subplot about the unnamed actress playing "The red red Indian" seducing Dale at Hannaford's party and being rebuffed, leading to her shooting at him towards the end of the film. Dale is no longer alive by the end of the film.

Having relocated to the drive-in cinema, intrusive journalist Juliette Riche asked Hannaford the most explicit questions of all about his sexuality. At this moment, Billy Boyle stops the film cameras, although with the soundtrack still running, and through a montage of still photos, we gather that Hannaford violently assaults Riche.

The film's final scene features Hannaford's sports car - which he had originally bought as a present for Dale - crashing into the screen of the drive-in cinema, killing him. At the time, the screen had been projecting the end of Hannaford's new film, and the sun sets behind it. It is left ambiguous whether his death was the result of drunk driving or suicide.

A monologue from Hannaford is heard in voice-over during the final scene:

Remember those Berbers - up in the Atlas? They wouldn't let us point a camera at 'em. They're certain that it...dries up something. The old eye, y'know, behind the magic box. Could be it's an evil eye at that...Medusa's...Who knows, maybe you can stare too hard at something. Huh? Drain out the virtue; suck out the living juice...You shoot the great places and the pretty people - all those girls and boys...shoot 'em dead...

The film concludes as Hannaford's voice says, "Cut!"