Citizen Orson

Abstract This chapter details the long history of Orson Welles’s last, posthumously released film, The Other Side of the Wind. It starts with Welles taking over a documentary movie made by Legrand’s friend Francis Reichenbach and transforming it into F for Fake, for which Legrand creates the soundtrack. Legrand sketches Welles’s iconic, ironic persona: “What strikes me is the degree to which Orson has become a Wellesian character.” Welles dies in 1985, before completing his last project, but in 2010 Legrand is approached by a producer about creating the music for that resurrected project, The Other Side of the Wind, because in a notebook about the project from the early 1970s, Welles had written “Call Legrand for the music.” Seven years later, Legrand finally sees the assembled film and starts writing the score. The sense of responsibility weighs heavily on him: “With each chord, each modulation, each inversion, I wonder how Orson—who was such a control freak when it came to his movies—would have reacted.”