The story utilizes a film-within-a-film narrative which follows the last day in the life of an aging Hollywood film director (Huston) as he hosts a screening party for his unfinished latest project.

The Other Side of the Wind had its world premiere at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2018, and was released on November 2, 2018 by Netflix to critical praise, accompanied by a documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead.

At the time of Hannaford's birthday party, this film (titled The Other Side of the Wind) has been left unfinished after its star stormed off the set, for reasons not immediately apparent to the audience.

A screening of some incomprehensible parts of Hannaford's unfinished film takes place, in order to attract "end money" from studio boss Max David.

Many journalists attending the party brandish cameras and ask invasive questions, eventually querying Hannaford's sexuality and whether he has long been a closeted homosexual, in spite of his macho public persona.

Other cast members who died before the film's 2018 release included Huston, Strasberg, Palmer, O'Brien, McCambridge, Mitchell, Stewart, Selwart, Tobin, Carroll, Rubin, Mazursky, Hopper, Harrington, Chabrol, Audran, Jessel, Rossitto, Wilson, and Graver.

Other directors who performed in The Other Side of the Wind included Claude Chabrol, Norman Foster, Gary Graver, Curtis Harrington, Dennis Hopper, Henry Jaglom and Paul Mazursky, mostly playing Hannaford's entourage of journalists and young filmmakers.

Further party scenes were shot in Bogdanovich's own Beverly Hills house, which Welles stayed in for over two years in 1974–1976, after the film's financial problems meant that the crew could no longer go on renting the Arizona studio and mansion.

Not until afterward did Orson discover that the Iranians had indeed been giving the Spaniard the promised money, which had come from Iran in cash, and that, instead of bringing it to Spain, the sly fellow was pocketing it.

[19] A July 1986 article in American Cinematographer also corroborates this story, describing Antoine's arrival in Arizona on the set at Southwestern Studios late at night.

"[21] This story is further corroborated by Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote in November 1997 of the production, "another producer ran back to Europe with $250,000 of Orson's money and never was heard from again (although I recently saw the person on TV accepting an Oscar for coproducing the Best Foreign Film of the year)".

[22] In 2008, film scholars Jean-Pierre Berthomé and François Thomas identified Spanish producer Andrés Vicente Gómez (who collected a Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 1994) as the alleged embezzler, and they date his withdrawal from the project to 1974.

"[25] Gómez responded to these accusations in a 2001 memoir, subsequently reproduced on his company website: Regarding the end of my relationship with Orson Welles some lies were told, although he assured me they did not come from him.

Accordingly, in 1974 Welles moved into Bogdanovich's Beverly Hills mansion, where he lived on and off for the next few years, and where he intermittently shot more party scenes, until principal photography finally wrapped in January 1976.

(With a touch of irony, one of the scenes he showed his audience featured Boyle screening a rough cut of Hannaford's latest film to a studio boss, in a bid for "end money" to complete his picture.)

However, he had also left various other assets, from his house in Los Angeles to the full ownership and artistic control of all his unfinished film projects, to his long-time companion, mistress and collaborator Oja Kodar, who co-wrote and co-starred in The Other Side of the Wind.

These included John Huston (who was by then terminally ill with emphysema and was unable to breathe without oxygen tubes), Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood and George Lucas.

Horowitz Hunt LLC eventually began negotiations with Oja Kodar to acquire her rights, but they were unsuccessful in coming to terms with Kodar, when Beatrice Welles put an injunction on access to the negative stored at the LTC Film Vault in Paris, by proclaiming an inheritance claim, thus preventing the opening of the Paris vault containing the full 96 hours of original negatives, some of which had not even been seen by Welles in his lifetime.

Though there had been roadblocks with Beatrice, Boushehri, Hunt, and the innumerable factors that seemed to curse the deal, it seemed that Oja had been the biggest obstacle of all preventing the completion of The Other Side of the Wind.

Rymsza owned the Los Angeles-based production company Royal Road Entertainment, and had become aware of the film's existence in 2009, being increasingly motivated to try and engineer its release.

[51] Royal Road Entertainment and German producer Jens Koethner Kaul acquired the rights held by Les Films de l'Astrophore and the late Mehdi Boushehri.

[64][7] In November 2017, it was reported that various members had been hired to the post-production team, including Bob Murawski as editor, Scott Millan as sound mixer, and Mo Henry as negative cutter.

[1] The Herculean efforts to edit the 16mm and 35mm footage, match the workprint materials to the original negative and undertake much-needed ADR and sound restoration is detailed in the documentary short A Final Cut for Orson.

[72] As a member of the cast, film historian Joseph McBride saw the rushes, and later saw a two-hour rough cut assembled by Gary Graver in the late 1990s to attract potential investors.

Little or nothing happens in these sequences except for Oja mysteriously wandering seminude around picturesque locales and Bob Random doggedly roaring his motorcycle through expressionistically lit landscapes.

The footage is beautifully shot, and there is some stunning photographic magic, such as a sequence filmed among the skyscrapers of Century City with the two characters' images vanishing into ten mirrors arranged invisibly among the stone steps and glass columns of the coldly geometrical modern office buildings ...

However, in the rough cut assembled by Graver to show potential investors, the film-within-the-film sequences not only interrupt the narrative but also go on at such length that they lose their satirical point, becoming exasperating examples of what Welles was trying to spoof.

Rian Johnson told Vanity Fair in April 2018 he had seen a 117-minute edit – minus its Michel Legrand score – twice, including a screening in Santa Monica, California, on January 16, 2018, with Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne and other VIPs, who "were all gobsmacked".

The website's critic consensus reads: "A satisfying must-watch for diehard cineastes, The Other Side of the Wind offers the opportunity to witness a long-lost chapter in a brilliant filmmaker's career.

[81] In 2020, Rymsza and Murawski assembled Hopper / Welles, a 129-minute film composed of largely unseen outtakes from The Other Side of the Wind shot in November 1970 in Los Angeles.