In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957–58 to make Touch of Evil–one of the many films a Hollywood studio took away from him–Orson Welles (1915–1985) came home to Hollywood to make his last feature, The Other Side of the Wind. Funding the production largely from his own pocket and shooting entirely outside the system, the fragmented filming finally wrapped in 1976. Thirty years on, the movie, infamously, remains unedited and unreleased, bound up by bad luck, personal feuds and byzantine legal tangles that saw the negatives actually physically locked out of reach in a vault in Paris for decades.

In the intervening years, as scratched and smuggled clips and script extracts have leaked out, Welles' final film's legend has grown. Shot on the run around L.A. and in Arizona, with a reportedly dazzling central performance from John Huston, the movie tells a story that strangely parallels its own making: the doomed tale of an embattled, aging, old-school director, trying to make a film to compete with the sex-and-symbolism flicks of the young guns of the New Hollywood of the early 1970s. A movie about making movies, it has become the Holy Grail of Welles' career, his Rosebud–perhaps the slyest, most mystifyingly revealing statement he ever committed to celluloid.

Welles spent the last decade of his life fighting to have his film released. Twenty-one years after his death, that fight goes on.