![]() A pirate crew is aboard– Lascars, Malays, Mexicans… picked up in odd corners of the world on JAKE’s far wanderings. Hannaford’s yacht, according to a fragment with the page number “6”, is shown off the coast of Monaco at sunset: “A sombre, villainous-looking deckhand is caressing a guitar. The Sacred Beasts begins with a prologue on Hannaford’s yacht before moving for its first act to a hotel near the Cannes Film Festival. The other fragments can be found among miscellaneous undated draft pages for Other Wind in box three. Unless otherwise noted, the script pages below can be found in the folder “Old Wind Scripts & Treatment” in box six of the University of Michigan’s Welles-Kodar Collection. The fragments will be quoted extensively, not only to reconstruct the narrative, but also to show how much of this script was recycled for Other Wind. Hannaford, including moments where cameras are not present. ![]() Of note is that, while the screenplay occasionally has the characters being trailed by cameras, it does not seem to have the “found footage” narrative device that Other Wind uses, nor any film-within-the-film element there is only the dramatic story of the fall of director J.J. Though the fragments are frustratingly-incomplete (especially with page numbers that seem random without a complete draft available), a narrative can be reconstructed based on the available material. These fragments include draft pages of individual scenes (sometimes paginated without respect to any others) and pieces of longer drafts in which the page numbers have obviously gone through a wide variety of revisions for example, one page has a typed number of 105 but a penciled-in number of 59. The extensive Welles-Kodar collection at the University of Michigan includes fragments of various drafts of this screenplay alongside almost all of the script material for The Other Side of the Wind. The first screenplay written for this story was The Sacred Beasts, sometime in the mid-to-late 1960s. Orson Welles painting of a matador created in Malaga, Spain in 1962. Eventually, Welles changed the location as his mind drifted away from bullfighting: not from Spain to the US, but instead to the French Riviera during the Cannes Film Festival. Similar vaguely-homoerotic traits were seen by critics in other prominent directors of the time, including Howard Hawks, a friend of both Hemingway and Ford, and the comparatively-younger Nicholas Ray, who forever stamped James Dean with the image of the Rebel Without a Cause, Jim Stark. Of course, this he deeply-suppressed, as has been amply documented in Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford, though he catapulted people like John Wayne and Henry Fonda to stardom. An Irish-born, macho, distinctly-American filmmaker, Ford also had a homoerotic attraction to men. This shift was fueled perhaps by the fact that one of Hemingway’s friends was a famous film director whom Welles considered his main influence – John Ford. Welles’s story was largely inspired by his fascination and repulsion of writer Ernest Hemingway, a bullfight enthusiast and famous macho whose suicide hinted at a darker, more-vulnerable person beneath the hardened surface.Īs Welles turned the story over in his head, the focus shifted more and more towards cinema. ![]() But gradually, he destroys the young man, revealing his perverse desire to feed off others’ misery, and alienates his friends and admirers in the process. ![]() He puts him in his next film and coaxes him into being a bullfighter, hoping to turn him into the ideal man he always aspired to be. However, rather than admit his feelings for the younger man and sacrifice his machismo, he decides to mentor the young man. The old director falls in love with an actor much younger than himself. (In outtakes from the movie, featured at the end of Morgan Neville’s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Welles explains his backup plan to convert the movie into a documentary about its own making, should the film lose interest for an audience.) Even then, the story was about a film director, an old American bullfight enthusiast and “macho” whose chest hair might as well be heavy brush. Welles largely outlined this version of the story in a 1963 Albert Maysles film Orson Welles in Spain, which can be found on YouTube. Orson Welles’s last completed film, The Other Side of the Wind, began as a story set not near Hollywood in the U.S., but instead around the bullfighting rings of Spain. ![]()
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