The local celebration of the Orson Welles Centennial rolls on. First came the screening of the master's Othello, Oliver Parker's fictional biopic Fade to Black and a panel discussion about the late Welles at April's Newport Beach Film Festival. Then, in June, the festival announced it was teaming with filmmakers and friends of Orson Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall to finish The Other Side of the Wind, Welles' final movie. The celebrating shifts to Orange Friday night, when there will be a screening of This is Orson Welles and a panel discussion featuring that documentary's filmmakers, Julia N Clara Kuperberg, Bogdanovich, filmmaker Henry Jaglom and more experts on all things Orson.
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Newport Beach Film Festival Honors Orson Welles' Centennial
Newport Beach Fest, Frank Marshall and Peter Bogdanovich Team to Finish Orson Welles Film
Organized by Harry Ufland–a Chapman University faculty member who for years was a William Morris agent for the likes of Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Ridley Scott and Harvey Keitel–the program in the Dodge film school's Folino Theater features a panel assembled by the Kuperburgs, whose This is Orson Welles recently premiered at Cannes.
Here is the trailer:
Other panelists include former LA Weekly film reviewer F.X Feeney, film historian Joe McBride (whose books include the biography Orson Welles) and veteran actor Peter Jason, whose long imdb listing includes Welles' The Other Side of the Wind.
The fun begins at 7 p.m., and seating is first come, first served.
Meanwhile, the Orson Welles Centennial celebrating does not end at Chapman U, as the OC Film Fiesta at the Frida Cinema in downtown Santa Ana Oct. 9-18 includes tribute screenings of Touch of Evil and the 4K restoration of The Third Man. Keep checking ocfilmfiesta.org for more details.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.