Wells, of course, had long since been put out to pasture by 1970 when he began making the other side of the wind, which is a movie that sought to comment directly, and I think ambiguously or ambivalently or contradictory on the changes that hit Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was largely self-funded by Wells. It shot with an all-volunteer crew between

1970 and 1976 and was still being edited for many years after. So its production more or less

spanned the entire New Hollywood movement. Had it actually been released at the end of the 1970s,

it would have been around the time that

movies like Jaws and Star Wars were famously ushering in the next era of Hollywood.

I have a question about Wells' response to the new Hollywood. I mean, you've pointed out that he

was a skeptic of it. He was a little bit cynical about it. He didn't like the idea,

it seems that these kind of older, popular directors, you know, your Howard Hawks is, I mean,

not just that they were retiring in the literal sense, but that they were sort of their

sensibility, which had been a very sort of popular one. You know, it was being replaced by,

you know, something that thought of itself

more consciously is art. I mean, I found an old article of his from a publication called Look,

published in 1970, in which he's talking about the New Hollywood trend to deify the director.

And he compares, you know, this sort of proliferation of shots of directors on cranes.

He says it reminds him of Mussolini on his balcony. That's funny. Which for all those listening,

you know, who know anything about Orson Wells. And to me as well, you know, it seems like a bit of

an odd remark coming from someone like him who is clearly one of the original otours. So I don't know,

can you make any sense of that for us? I think we're hitting at one of the central contradictions

in Wells's work and life, which makes much of his work interesting. In his films, he's a

critic of power, but he also loves powerful men. A criticism that you could level at Citizen Kane is that it's

a critique of a William Randolph Hearst-type figure that can't see beyond that kind of figure. It's

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