They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

Morgan Neville's documentary covers Orson Welles's last fifteen years and the film he could not finish. The Other Side of the Wind was scripted in the sixties, shot in the early seventies and then stuck in legal and financial limbo; Welles never got up from the editing table before his death in 1985. What makes it interesting is that it declines to present Welles as a victim. Neville shows that his own choices contributed as much as circumstance: endless reshoots, promises made to raise money, a temperament that preferred never to deliver anything finished to anyone. Peter Bogdanovich and the critic Joseph McBride are among those interviewed, and most of the material comes from archive footage shot during production. Alan Cumming narrates. It premiered at Venice and Telluride on 30 August 2018 and went to Netflix on 2 November 2018, the same day as the completed Other Side of the Wind. Who it is for: viewers interested in film history and production stories. Who it is not for: anyone unfamiliar with Welles's filmography, since the documentary assumes a good deal of context.