{"id":15598,"date":"2011-08-09T07:03:32","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T12:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/?p=15598"},"modified":"2011-08-09T07:06:21","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T12:06:21","slug":"missing-movies-on-the-shelf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmbuffonline.com\/FBOLNewsreel\/wordpress\/2011\/08\/09\/missing-movies-on-the-shelf\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing Movies: On The Shelf"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week\u2019s twin announcements that Kenneth Lonergan\u2019s film Margaret would see release<\/a> after some six years of post-production hassles and law suits and the discovery<\/a> of some of Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s earliest film work brought to mind the number of films that are missing or just plain unavailable for viewing today. Over the next several weeks and perhaps even months, we\u2019re going to take a look at a number of these films and why they are unavailable today. Today, we\u2019ll take a look at three films that have been shot, but never released to be seen by the general public. Instead they remain sitting, waiting on a shelf somewhere for whatever issues that have prevented their release to be finally resolved. We have previous discussed perhaps the most famous of these shelved films, Jerry Lewis\u2019s clown in a concentration camp story The Day The Clown Cried<\/strong>, at length here<\/a>. But here are three other films that have never officially been released.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A Woman Of The Sea<\/strong> (Directed by Josef Von Sternberg) \u2013 Chaplin produced this film as a starring vehicle for his former leading lady Edna Purviance, hiring the recently emigrated German director Von Sternberg after being impressed Von Sternberg\u2019s 1924 experimental film The Salvation Hunters<\/strong>. The film shot for three months, including 12 days of location work in Montery and Carmel California. Due to problems encountered with the production of his own starring vehicle, The Circus<\/strong>, also in production at the same time, Chaplin was unable to give too much attention to what Von Sternberg was doing. When he saw the final cut of the film, Chaplin deemed it unreleasable. The few of Chaplin\u2019s associates who had the opportunity to screen the film have reportedly concurred with his assessment. The film sat on a shelf until 1933 when it was reportedly destroyed as part of a deal with the US Internal Revenue Service. There was some indication that a copy may have survived in Chaplin\u2019s archives for a few years afterwards, though there is no print in the archives currently.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s story has a decades-later postscript. In 2006, a cache of over 50 previously unseen stills were discovered being held by Purviance\u2019s relatives. (The actress had died in 1958. A Woman Of The Sea<\/strong> was her last film.) The photos were combined with some also discovered production material and published in 2008 under the title of the film\u2019s production title The Sea Gull<\/strong>. The book is available through a website<\/a> dedicated to actress run by her family.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Other Side Of The Wind<\/strong> (Directed by Orson Welles) – Although Orson Welles is responsible for one of the greatest American films, the director often encountered problems realizing film projects later in life and The Other Side Of The Wind<\/strong> is perhaps the most notorious due to how close to completion it is rumored to be.<\/p>\n

In some ways the film is similar to\u00a0Citizen Kane<\/strong> in that it opens with the lead character\u2019s death, in this case filmmaker Jake Hannaford (John Huston) and tells the man\u2019s story through a series of flashbacks. But where Kane was based on newspaper mogul William Randolph Hurst, his protagonist here was actually based on Ernest Hemingway. And here, the flashbacks take the form of video and film footage shoot by journalists visiting the set of his most recent film and by guests at his 70th birthday party. The film also stars Susan Strasberg and had appearances by Dennis Hopper, Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom and Claude Chabrol.<\/p>\n

As was the case with many of Welles later productions, filming was done in fits and starts between 1969 and 1976 as financing became available. The monetary woes on this film were further complicated by a European investor in the film who embezzled some $250,000 from an Iranian investment group headed by Mehdi Bouscheri, the brother-in-law of the Shah who had put up much of the money for the production. This lead to a deterioration of the relationship between Welles and the Iranians who refused to pay Welles to edit the film and tried to reduce Welles\u2019 share of any potential profits. Welles tried to drum up other sources of financing but was mostly unsuccessful. He did some editing on his own in-between the acting jobs he needed to take to pay the bills and by 1979 he had approximately 40 minutes edited.<\/p>\n

Welles passed away in 1985 with the film not much further towards completion than it was in 1979. Although his will gave ownership and artistic control to all of his unfinished projects, including The Other Side Of The Wind<\/strong>, to his longtime mistress and collaborator Oja Kodar, Welles\u2019s daughter Beatrice, from his marriage to Paola Mori, has made numerous, unsuccessful legal attempts to claim the film as her own. More recently, Welles\u2019 friend and biographer director Peter Bogdanovich has stated that much of the legal quagmire that the film had been stuck in has been cleared up and that he hopes to finish the editing of the film based on extensive notes left behind by the director. While we\u2019re waiting for that to actually happen, we do have a couple of scenes that Welles had roughly assembled and which he screened in February 1975 when he received an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. A couple of additional edited scenes have been released as part of documentaries on Welles. They offer a fascinating glimpse at a movie we may never see. (The second clip below, which is a scene from the finm-within-the-film directed by Huston’s character may be NSFW as it features Kodar and Bob Random having sex in a station wagon driven by actor Robert Aiken.)<\/p>\n