Hopper/Welles

For several years in the 70's, Orson Welles worked on a picture to make a comeback. That picture was The Other Side Of The Wind, Like all Welles projects, it was an extremely heady concept, being largely unscripted, about a director hosting a party for friends for a screening of his big comeback film. The friends are all actors and directors from Hollywood, playing themselves. The director is old Hollywood royalty (played by old movie star/director John Huston), and he's trying to come back in the face of New Hollywood's revolution. Occasionally, there are glimpses of his movie, which is shot like a European art house movie. Both the movie and the movie within the movie have a mocking, satirical tone, making fun both of the old guard and the new wave of directors challenging the establishment. It was an ambitious project that Welles didn't live to see get finished. Hopper/Welles is from that cinematic experiment. Two hours of unfiltered, direct conversation between a director of yore and the revolutionary young director here to broom him into the dustbin of history. The conversation wanders in and out of topics at will: the art of film making, if the director is a magician or a god, does an artist have a duty to speak to their politics, sex, Elvis Presley, how personal history might shape one's art, and more. It is both a pleasant conversation and a lively debate between two people in the same business, but separated by age and experience, Welles (in his character from Other Side, which is really just himself under a different name) challenging Hopper on a number of topics. And Welles is never seen, not even by accident. The camera is always on Hopper. It is a fascinating discussion amid a polite generational clash, the wily, intellectual Welles trying to antagonize Hopper, who is far too chill (and possibly overwhelmed?) to be so. It would make for a fascinating podcast, listening to a master of the craft and the hot, young, rising star debate a number of topics. But as a movie? It's awfully hard to stay locked in on two hours of grainy, black-and-white footage that are only focused on one man sitting in a chair (with occasional shots of the boom mic operator or, of all people, The Price Is Right's Janice Pennington, being in charge of the clapperboard). This is the kind of movie you can have going in the background while you play a game on your phone or fold the laundry or some other task, because visually, there is nothing to offer here. Nothing. And even then, this is a hard recommendation to anybody outside of two camps: the deepest of cinematic geeks, or Welles completionists. The discussion can be somewhat dry at times, Welles can come off a bit patronizing and rude, while Hopper gets aloof and defensive. And honestly, the novelty of this meeting of directorial generations can only carry the day so long before the luster wears off and it's just "old man badgers young man about the generation gap". If you're a child of someone, and we all are, then you've lived this discussion a hundred times. If you're a parent, you've lived both sides of it. It just has a natural limit to its own value. That makes Hopper/Welles a curiosity more than anything else. It feels like a DVD extra -- a really cool one -- that somehow escaped containment and became its own thing. There is historical value in this, for sure, and on a meeting-of-the-minds debate, it can be fascinating to experience. I'm glad it got released and is available for those who want to see it. I just have trouble imagining who those people would be.