Orson Welles was on the line. “What are you doing Thursday?” he asked.

It was 1970, and the Citizen Kane director had called Peter Bogdanovich to ask him to appear in his latest film, The Other Side of the Wind. Yes, he knew that Bogdanovich was stretched thin. Just drop by the set on Thursday, Welles insisted. The whole movie was only going to take a few weeks to shoot — tops.

Forty eight years later, The Other Side of the Wind has finally arrived. It was shown for the first time in North America on Saturday at the Telluride Film Festival, where two new documentaries about the herculean efforts to finish the film were also screened. “It’s sad because Orson’s not here to see it,” Bogdanovich, 79, said from the stage of the Palm Theatre. “Or maybe he is.”

Cinema buffs had almost given up on The Other Side of the Wind, which Welles left unfinished upon his death in 1985. It is known as one of the most famous movies never released, held up by warring rights holders and never-ending financial troubles, including a failed funding effort by a relative of the shah of Iran.

No lesser a force than Frank Marshall, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, had been leading the salvage effort. Marshall, 71, made his name by making the impossible possible — shutting down the Las Vegas Strip to shoot Jason Bourne, staying calm the time Steven Spielberg asked him to find 10,000 additional snakes for a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, figuring out how Clint Eastwood could crash a jetliner for Sully. If he couldn’t pull the film over the finish line, who could?

Once the film’s producers finally secured firm funding — Netflix stepped up last year — they had to sort through more than 100 hours of footage (long stored in a Paris warehouse) to craft a film that Welles conceptualised as a type of collage, with some parts in colour and others in black and white, and scenes shot in various formats (35mm, 16mm, Super 8).

“No one really knew if we had enough material to put together a movie that actually made any sense,” Marshall said on Saturday.

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind, which Orson Welles directed and left unfinished upon his death in 1985. The film will finally be released in November. Photo: Netflix

The masses will soon get to decide for themselves. The Other Side of the Wind will arrive on Netflix and in a handful of theatres on November 2. So far, critics at Telluride and the Venice Film Festival, where the film had its premiere on Friday, have responded with unanimously positive reviews. The early reaction from festival-goers has been mixed, with some befuddled and bored and others enraptured — about typical for Welles, who specialised in polarising cinema.

The Other Side of the Wind reconstructs a debauched party (using footage supposedly shot by guests) held at the home of Jake Hannaford, a nonconformist film director, just before he dies. Scenes from the ageing Hannaford’s unfinished comeback film — screened at the party — are interspersed. John Huston, who died in 1987, plays Hannaford as a misogynistic, safari suit-wearing alcoholic. Bogdanovich stars as Brooks Otterlake, a young director coming into wealth and prominence. Oja Kodar, who co-wrote the screenplay with Welles, acts in the bizarre film-within-the-film.

The result is a politically incorrect fever dream that involves dwarf sidekicks, Kodar in ‘redface’ as a Native American woman, at least one orgy, a drive-in theatre, 1970s-era views of women (disposable) and inclusion (nonexistent), the mutilation of a doll, a car crash, mannequins, an ice cube, lanterns, rifles and a giant phallus built with chicken wire and perched on a sand dune, among other imagery.

“It will be interesting to see how The Other Side of the Wind is received,” Ray Kelly, who runs the site Wellesnet.com, said in an email as he monitored online reaction following the Telluride screening from his home in Massachusetts.

“Many of Welles’ finest works, including Touch of Evil and Chimes at Midnight, had their detractors when they were released. It took years before they were fully appreciated.”

The Telluride premiere was attended by a wide range of people — a 21-year-old college student, Jack Dorfman, who described himself as a Bogdanovich nut; John Bailey, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Brad Bird, the animation whiz behind Incredibles 2. Before the lights went down, the mood was upbeat, with people praising Netflix for coming to the financial rescue and Marshall, balancing himself with a cane, greeting friends in the aisles.

“I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film since I was 12 years old,” said Randy Haberkamp, 61, the academy’s managing director of preservation and foundation programs. Haberkamp said that, as a boy in Ohio, he had seen a CBS special on Welles that mentioned The Other Side of the Wind. “I remember thinking, ‘I can’t wait until it comes out,’” he said.

Afterward, however, the atmosphere was notably sombre.

Marshall, who was the film’s original production manager, and Bogdanovich returned to the stage, along with the film scholar Joseph McBride, who appears in The Other Side of the Wind as a gauche young critic. For a minute, it seemed as if emptiness had suddenly hit them: Now what? Their 48-year battle to get the film finished and seen was over.

“It’s sort of bittersweet,” Marshall said.

“It’s a sad movie, I think,” Bogdanovich said haltingly. “Not only Orson’s last movie. But it’s sort of like the end of everything. It comes across to me like the end of the world.”

-The New York Times