Orson Welles alleged "Last Movie"....

the heretofore uncompleted "The Other Side of the Wind" Has finally be finished and dropped onto Netflix. Its currently playing in New York and Los Angeles, we may get it here in due course. I am legitimately conflicted as to this project, a longtime labor of love from Welles' proteges Peter Bogdanovich among others, I am never sure if the director's intentions are being honored when other's finish the film. The very act of finishing a film, especially from a chronic auteur like Welles strongly compromises it's innate status as a "Film" Directed By "Orson Welles". Ironically Welles himself ruminated on the complicated issue of "artistic provenance" in his 1973 film "F for Fake", ostensively a discursive look at Art Forger Elmyr De Hory among other fakers of note (including Welles himself). On the other hand, just the mere fact that Bogdanovich & Co even finished the damn thing and rendered up a comprehensive film at all is an achievement. I myself sat not one hundred feet away from Stefan Droessler the curator of the Munich Film Museum and the legatees of Welles' personal film collection who told an audience at Harvard that owing to the highly idiosyncratic editing, "The Other Side of the Wind" could never be completed. Welles' personal story is a "cautionary tale" that could easily be summarized as "how to do everything wrong and still somehow make movies". That part of his biography, the endless conflicts with studios and backers, I think sadly obscures his role as a still vibrant film educator, the man literally revised his style several times over the course of his career and made each revision work like gangbusters. A close study of his feature films, a bare fourteen or so (the number may grow, who knows?)is a complete film education unto itself. Which brings me to my own personal utopian vision as "Welles as Film Educator to the World", why not declare his unfinished "Don Quixote" adaptation a public domain property, digitally scan in all the exposed footage into a database and allow everyone a chance to collaborate with Orson Welles and complete "theirs and his" own version of said film? Well, we all know the answer to that, you can't make money off of that utopian vision(at least the people who own the unfinished film itself, several persons and institutions are in play) and if "The Other Side of the Wind" makes money, count on it, Welles other unfinished films (there are at least three more lying around) will be put in play. Which is the final irony, only long after his death, is Orson Welles making money for the studios in Hollywood.