Poor Dennis Hopper, he's trying to finish his 2nd directorial effort (THE LAST MOVIE) when lo and behold Orson Welles dials him up to play a cameo in his LAST FILM. The notoriously
"never" finished "The Other Side of the Wind." When the producers finally collected the hundreds of hours of raw footage to be edited into something ... anything ... they found among
the remnants a bunch of reels with close-ups of Dennis Hopper and a strangely familiar voice in the background. Yes, they decided they wouldn't just restore one film, but BOTH.
The footage for TOSOTW finally hit arthouse theaters in 2018 at a trim 2hrs 2min. Then they set to work on this investigation of Dennis Hopper's living situation "in the mountains" and what his thoughts were on politics, fascism, communism, guns and his regular visits from the FBI. And what his relationship to the legit & tabloid media had come to. For some reason, Orson had taken the time to "investigate" various media reports about Hopper and then, in a semi-friendly way, turn the tables on him.
HOPPER/WELLES in subsequently his final film and TPSOTW his penultimate. H/W clocks in at a bloated 2 hrs 10 min, but if U consider yourself any kind of a cinephile, any kind of a Hopper or Welles fan, U MUST ACQUIRE this film the minute it goes DVD.
It's a perfect example of the "Cat & Mouse genre" with Orson as the big fat cat who cooks Hopper some pasta and serves it up along with a few glasses of wine and then Welles nearly guts Hopper like the squirming, non-committal spineless "mouse" he really is. EASY RIDER had come out the year before and pundits were saying Hopper-the-Director had issued in a 'New Wave of American cinema', and Welles sought to prove it was media BS by taking the "artist" Hopper to task.
Orson is so sincere and innocent as he lays out his Q&A, at first! However, after nearly an hour of convivial "chatting" the audience begins to realize that this is no intellectual convo, but a full-blown interrogation. There's nothing I could say or repeat from the film that would make any sense taken out of context so you must seek it out on your own.
HOPPER/WELLES just finished a short theatrical run in NYC and may be headed elsewhere. Keep your eyes peeled for it. You won't regret it.
One warning: there is a lot of inept hand-held photography during the interview, jump-cuts are avoided by amateurishly cutting to "slates" (Scene #this, Take #whatever). The photography is B&W and horribly grainy due to the low-lighting. The sound quality is not much better because Orson isn't miked or boomed in and his vocals are sometimes lost in the cavernous room. Best to get it on DVD and hope the dialogue has been captioned in. Now you know why it's getting a "C-" on the IMDb rating board.
Technically imperfect as it is, it's still a MUST-SEE for a any true fans of cinema just to hear Orson pontificate about the difference between Cinema Magic and the Director as God. That's worth the price of admission alone.
