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 PARIS — For more than four decades, Hollywood insiders, financiers and dreamers have been obsessed by the quest to recover “The Other Side of the Wind,” the unfinished last film of Orson Welles. Cinema buffs consider it the most famous movie never released, an epic work by one of the great filmmakers. 
 
 Endless legal battles among the rights holders, including Welles’s daughter, kept the 1,083 reels of negatives inside a warehouse in a gritty suburb of Paris despite numerous efforts to complete the film — a movie within a movie about the comeback attempt of an aging, maverick director played by John Huston. 
 
 The quest may be over. A Los Angeles production company, Royal Road Entertainment, said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with the sometimes-warring parties to buy the rights. The producers say they aim to have it ready for a screening in time for May 6, the 100th anniversary of Welles’s birth, and to promote its distribution at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif., next month. 
 
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 It is the latest event in a saga marked by legal squabbles, clashing egos, the spiriting away of a working print and, briefly, the disappearance and recovery of the reels last summer after a storage company went bankrupt. 
 
 “This is like finding the Land of Oz or some lost tomb,” said Josh Karp, the author of a book about the movie to be published next year by St. Martin’s Press. “This film is art imitating life and life imitating art. It’s become so mythical because of what happened with all the failures to finish it and the players involved.” 
 
 Royal Road, which has produced several foreign independent movies, spent five years chasing after the rights. It had to negotiate a détente among the rights holders: Welles’s longtime companion and collaborator, Oja Kodar; his daughter and sole heir, Beatrice Welles; and an Iranian-French production company, L’Astrophore. 
 
 During the last 15 years of his life, Welles, who died in 1985, worked obsessively on the film, which chronicles a temperamental film director — much like him — who is battling with the Hollywood establishment to finish an iconoclastic work. The supporting cast included Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, who basically played himself, a young up-and-coming director. 
 
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 Welles financed the movie by taking on television roles and by tapping investors. One of them was Mehdi Bushehri, brother-in-law of the shah of Iran and an investor in Astrophore. He later clashed with Welles over spending and took control of the negative reels in France, which is why they remained in the suburban Paris warehouse. 
 
 Welles left behind a roughly 45-minute edited work print. Mysteriously, he managed to smuggle it out of Paris in 1975 in a van and he shipped it to California. Ms. Kodar said she has it now in Primosten, on the Adriatic coast in Croatia, where she lives. 
 
 “I am going to sign the contract,” Ms. Kodar, 73, said in a telephone interview from there on Tuesday. “The catalyst is the hundred-year anniversary and everybody is moving in a kind of wave. When I finally see it on the screen, then I will tell you that the film is done.” 
 
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 For decades, others tried to acquire rights to complete the film, including Mr. Bogdanovich, Showtime and Gary Graver, the director’s final cinematographer. But those efforts failed because they were unable to strike a common deal among the rights holders, who favored different approaches to the finished product. French laws protecting artists’ rights gave Beatrice Welles — as the direct descendant — sole legal control over the reels. She had blocked their removal from storage. 
 
 “It’s hard to say why it’s coming together now except that everybody realizes that the longer we wait the less people will be around to know Orson’s wishes,” said Frank Marshall, 68, who was a line producer on “The Other Side of the Wind.” “Everybody recognizes that it’s the last chance.” Mr. Marshall — who was also a producer for Steven Spielberg — tried for years with Mr. Bogdanovich to get the picture completed. 
 
 In 2012, Mr. Marshall joined with Filip Jan Rymsza, of Royal Road, to approach Ms. Welles in Sedona, Ariz., and Ms. Kodar, who also acted in the film. 
 
 “They figured out a way to get everybody involved,” said Mr. Karp, the author. “Their effort is incredible. The last few years of this have been so fraught with so many deals that didn’t happen because people screwed up in the last minute.” 
 
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 Ms. Welles, who manages the Welles estate, said a visit by Mr. Rymsza and Mr. Marshall was the key. 
 
 “It took the right people to come along,” she said. “They wanted to talk to me and did not want any outsiders. Until now this movie has been under lock and key under French law. I had the good fortune to be able to protect it. When we talked, we laughed and joked. It was just this amazing rapport. What came through to me was their true love of art.” 
 
 In the middle of this month, Mr. Rymsza saw the reels for the first time, marked in neat handwriting with the name of the film. “I was relieved to see it was in such good condition — no mold or any degradation and the materials were in their original boxes,” he said. 
 
 Mr. Rymsza, 36, said he was being backed by a private equity investor whom he declined to name. The Americas Film Conservancy, a nonprofit organization, also helped finance the effort to locate the reels, he said. 
 
 With the signing of the agreement, the next step is to ship the reels to Los Angeles, where veterans from the original project will carry on the next phase. 
 
 “We will set up a cutting room and Peter Bogdanovich and I will assemble the film,” Mr. Marshall said. “We have notes from Orson Welles. We have scenes that weren’t quite finished, and we need to add music. We will get it done. The good news is that it won’t take so long because of all of the technology today.” 
 
 Mr. Marshall and other participants in the film, like Mr. Bogdanovich, savor the memories of Welles’s low budget, guerrilla style, shooting available actors from Arizona to Spain. 
 
 They filmed in color and black and white and in 35 millimeter, 16 millimeter and Super 8 formats. The young crew would sneak into a movie lot or a California drive-in, posing as university film students if anyone demanded production permits, Mr. Marshall recalled. He said he often invoked the famous Welles name to requisition props like a human skeleton or a Porsche. Welles supplied his own Oscar statuette, won for “Citizen Kane,” for his main character to brandish on film. 
 
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 The origins of the script date back to a tense encounter in 1937 between Ernest Hemingway and a young Welles. 
 
 In interviews, Welles described a whiskey-drinking Hemingway taunting him as one of those “effeminate boys of the theater.” When Welles mocked him back, Hemingway threw a chair and they scuffled — settling it with a toast that led to an on-again, off-again friendship. 
 
 The main character’s life has echoes in Hemingway’s: his father’s suicide, the day of his death, his love of Spain, his name (Jake, like the protagonist in “The Sun Also Rises”). And Welles explores the last day of the fictional director’s life before he dies in a car crash that could be an accident or a suicide. 
 
 Mr. Bogdanovich said he is ready to carry out a pledge he once made to Welles in the 1970s. “He just turned to me rather casually during lunch and said, ‘I want you to promise that you will finish the picture if anything happens to me.’ I was shocked and said, ‘Nothing is going to happen to you.’ ” 
 
 The challenge now is to follow Welles’s unique style. “He did some very complicated editing before it was taken away from him,” Mr. Bogdanovich said. “I don’t even know if I can approximate that kind of cutting because it is very fragmented and idiosyncratic. All we can do is the best we can, using the script, his notes and what he has left.” ||||| Orson Welles' final film, which has remained unfinished for decades, could hit theaters in time for the 100th anniversary of the filmmaker's birth next May. 
 
 Royal Road Entertainment has secured the rights to The Other Side of the Wind, The New York Times is reporting. The Los Angeles-based production company plans on bringing it to the American Film Market next month to promote distribution for the film. 
 
 See more Hollywood's 100 Favorite Films 
 
 Welles never completed his film, which (quite fittingly) tells the story of a director attempting to finish a masterpiece while clashing with the Hollywood system. The film stars John Huston, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich. 
 
 The rights to the film have been tied up in legal battles among Welles's daughter Beatrice Welles, his collaborator Oja Kodar and Iranian-French production company L'Astrophore. Welles spent the final fifteen years of his life on the project, up until his death in 1985. He left behind roughly 45 minutes of edited film. 
 
 Royal Road hopes to release the film timed to the May 6, 2015, anniversary of Welles' birth. 
 
 Also read Orson Welles' Camera, Scripts, 'Citizen Kane' Memorabilia Up for Auction 
 
 Email: Aaron.Couch@THR.com 
 
 Twitter: @AaronCouch ||||| Nearly 30 years after his death, Orson Welles' never-finished movie The Other Side of the Wind will finally be completed and shown in theaters. 
 
 German producer Jens Koethner Kaul and Filip Jan Rymsza of Royal Road Entertainment have teamed with producer Frank Marshall (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future), who was a line producer on The Other Side of the Wind in the early 1970s, to complete the film. Rymsza and Kaul secured the partial ownership rights held by the Paris film company Les Films de l'Astrophore and the late Mehdi Boushehri, brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran. An agreement was also reached with Welles' longtime companion Oja Kodar, who inherited the late director's ownership. 
 
 In recent months, the filmmakers have met with Welles' youngest daughter, Beatrice, who heads the Estate of Orson Welles, and detailed their plans. 
 
 The producers will seek a distributor at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif., next month. 
 
 The definitive look at the decades-long delay in bringing The Other Side of the Wind to theaters and the recent negotiations to complete it are laid out in Josh Karp's upcoming book Orson Welles's Last Movie. 
 
 Welles, who revolutionized filmmaking in 1941 with Citizen Kane, struggled to complete The Other Side of the Wind before his death in May 1985, but was stymied by problems ranging from financing to the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Repeated announcements that the film's completion was at hand have tantalized and frustrated Welles' fans for decades. 
 
 News of the impending completion of the film drew cheers from Welles aficionados, notably film historian and author Joseph McBride, who acted in The Other Side of the Wind and authored three books on the late director including "What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career." 
 
 "Kudos to all involved who have brought The Other Side of the Wind to this step of nearing fruition," McBride said. "Maybe now I won't have to buy a walker to get to the premiere, as I used to think I would have to do, but instead can march in to enjoy the film with the rest of you (knock wood)." 
 
 The Other Side of the Wind takes place at the 70th birthday party of legendary movie director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), who is struggling to make a commercial comeback at a time when the studio system has been replaced by the New Hollywood. The party is attended by young directors, like Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich), hangers-on, critics and movies freaks – many of whom are not so subtly patterned after people in Welles' life. Hannaford dies at the conclusion of the party and his final hours are told in a collage of still photos, and 8mm, 16mm and 35mm color and black-and-white film shot at the party, along with scenes from his unfinished comeback movie. 
 
 Welles had edited about 40 minutes of the film and a work print exists in Los Angeles. The film negative has been stored in Paris. 
 
 "Welles has always astonished us and broken new ground. The ground he started to break in 1970 when he began filming 'Other Wind' is finally bearing fruit. The world will no doubt be challenged and astonished anew when it sees this ambitious, bold, hilarious, and melancholy late film of his, too long locked away in a vault and subjected to legal and financial wrangling. The Other Side of the Wind is Welles' Tempest, and though his revels now are ended, his career is not. He will continue to influence new generations with this "new" work – and his work is always new," McBride said. 
 
 The film was shot by the late Gary Graver between 1970 and 1976. 
 
 In addition to Huston, Bogdanovich, McBride and Kodar, the film co-stars Susan Strasberg, Norman Foster, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Mercedes McCambridge, Edmond O'Brien, Robert Random and Lilli Palmer.
– When Orson Welles died in 1985, he left behind a film he'd been fighting to finish for 15 years. But The Other Side of the Wind never saw the light of day, and it has since become a bit of an obsession for movie buffs, who "consider it the most famous movie never released," the New York Times reports. Now, after decades of attempts by others to grab rights to the film, LA production company Royal Road Entertainment says it has an agreement to buy those rights—and producers plan to have the film ready for screening by May 6, which would be Welles' 100th birthday. As for the plot? It "(quite fittingly) tells the story of a director attempting to finish a masterpiece while clashing with the Hollywood system," according to the Hollywood Reporter. Welles ran into problems, including financing struggles (he took on TV roles to help and also gathered investors) and even the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Republican reports. One of the aforementioned investors was Mehdi Bushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, and when he and Welles fought over spending, Bushehri took control of the 1,083 negative reels. The reels then stayed stashed in a Paris-area warehouse for years (and were lost briefly when the storage company went bankrupt last summer). But Welles did manage to get a 45-minute edited work print to California in 1975. Now Royal Road—which had to negotiate for the rights with Welles' daughter, his longtime companion, and a production company—will assemble the film from the negative reels with the help of Peter Bogdanovich, who stars in it, as well as notes Welles left behind. Click for the full story, or check out more of the best films that never got made.