Welles Exploring New Hollywood Production Opportunities: Sex and Nudity in The Other Side of the Wind

Abstract

In November 1968, Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), created the Rating System so that theater owners could indicate to families which films were suitable for children. New and talented young producers such as Bert Schneider took great advantage of the new opportunities this system offered. Orson Welles, still self-exiled in Europe, himself wanted to take advantage of the changed climate in Hollywood. Thanks to the support of his new partner, Oja Kodar, Orson Welles decided that his films would explore sexuality in a more explicit way. Nudity, corporeity, and sex (though already appearing in his previous films) are copiously dealt with in The Other Side of the Wind, whose initial conception and realization was largely due to Oja Kodar. One of the film’s most iconic sequences, the “car sex scene”, features well-known Wellesian techniques as applied to the depiction of dominant female sexuality.