Orson Welles and the Directors Company: a Maestro inside the New Hollywood

Abstract

While he was busy making The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles was working on finding new financial supporters that would grant him both money and real productive and creative autonomy. Among the interlocutors identified by Welles during the 1970s, the research ignored the interest shown by The Directors Company, a New Hollywood production company, little known to the general public due to its very short life cycle, but which, at the at the same time, was able to create some of the most original films of the period, such as Paper Moon  (1973) by Peter Bogdanovich or The Conversation (1974) by Francis Ford Coppola. Thanks to the rediscovery of the Welles archive inside Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, it is now possible to consult a series of documents capable to show the relationship between the director of Citizen Kane (1941) and one of the most original companies of the New Hollywood. It is a completely new series of letters, written after an unknown screening of F for Fake, which demonstrate, through the highly original perspective of Orson Welles, how close was the possibility that New Hollywood could produce The Other Side of the Wind. Some unpublished letters from the Welles fund of the National Cinema Museum in Turin highlight the relationship between Welles and the Directors Company, in relation to the troubled production of The Other Side of the Wind.