Orson Welles

A new lawsuit reveals the behind-the-scenes battle over the rights to get a TV show based on the Orson Welles classic on television.

1,083 reels of old film represent one of the great Holy Grails of movie history. They’re the unassembled components of The Other Side of the Wind, the final unfinished project of director Orson Welles. Shot over the course of many years in the 1970s, and starring a cast that included directors John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich, The Other Side of the Wind was a complex tale about an aging movie director attempting to mount a career comeback. (Surely the story had no personal resonance for Welles whatsoever.) Financial and legal troubles mounted, and Welles was unable to complete the film before he passed away in 1985. For decades, those 1,083 reels sat in a French film lab, waiting for the right team to come along and do something with them.

Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.

The Twilight Zone has long-etched its own particular place in pop-culture history, but did you know CBS had to cancel it three separate times? Or that Orson Welles was deemed too expensive to narrate? Unlock this door with the key of imagination, as, the 27th episode of ‘You Think You Know TV?’ moves into a land of both shadow and substance, of frightful facts and ideas from The Twilight Zone!

For fifty years Sight and Sound's critic poll crowned 'Citizen Kane' the number one film of all time. Their polling- which is done every decade - has had fluctuations elsewhere, but 'Kane' stayed on top for half a century. Until today, when it went to second place behind Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo.'