Orson Welles spent much of his later career chasing money from one country to another. He acted in other people’s films, recorded commercials, appeared on television and took narration work, then fed the proceeds back into pictures that conventional studios would not finance. That makes it easy to treat his connection with Iran as another odd episode in a long career of improvisation. It was more substantial than that. During the 1970s Welles passed through several parts of the cultural system being built around Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi: an official Iranian documentary, the country’s developing film culture, a Franco-Iranian production company, and eventually a financing arrangement that became inseparable from the long history of The Other Side of the Wind.

What makes the episode worth revisiting is what Iran was doing at the same time. Long before Iranian money reached Welles, the country had begun constructing a modern television system with conspicuous American involvement. Habib Sabet’s private television operation started broadcasting in Tehran in 1958. Sabet held the RCA franchise in Iran; Americans managed and helped staff the early station; American films and serials supplied roughly half of its initial programming. Television sets, programming, advertising and broadcasting infrastructure were arriving together.

The photograph above, generally identified as Mohammad Reza Shah visiting Sabet’s television operation, catches that transition in a single frame. The camera itself is nearly as prominent as the men standing beside it. Iran was still largely receiving the modern television system from abroad, but it would not remain simply a customer for very long.

Sabet’s son Iraj had brought a small closed-circuit television setup home from the United States. According to Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Shah saw a demonstration and encouraged Sabet to develop the idea into a real broadcasting operation. Iran lacked studios, towers and trained television personnel, so expertise was brought in from abroad and Iranians were sent overseas for training. By the end of the 1950s, Tehran had regular television broadcasting; by the following decade, the state was moving toward a national system.

This early history matters because it gives the Welles story some context. Iran’s involvement with international cinema during the 1970s did not appear from nowhere. It followed more than a decade in which the country had been deliberately acquiring the technical and institutional ability to produce its own electronic image.

Before Welles Came the Screen

Iranian television began as a private commercial enterprise rather than a government monopoly. Sabet’s Television of Iran operated with advertising, imported American entertainment and locally produced programs modeled in part on Western formats. His RCA franchise also placed him in an unusually advantageous position: the same expanding television market created demand for the receivers his business interests could supply.

The arrangement did not last indefinitely. The Pahlavi government developed National Iranian Television during the 1960s and eventually consolidated radio and television into National Iranian Radio and Television. The change was part of the broader modernization program of the period, but television had another importance. It gave the monarchy something previous Iranian governments had never possessed on this scale: a means of staging events for a national audience while simultaneously producing material that could circulate internationally.

That was the system into which Orson Welles wandered in 1971.

Welles at Persepolis

The 2,500-year celebration of the Persian monarchy at Persepolis remains one of the most visually recognizable events of the Pahlavi period. For several days in October 1971, the ruins became the setting for an enormous royal gathering attended by heads of state, kings, princes and diplomatic delegations from around the world. Whatever else the celebration was, it was designed to be photographed.

Iran’s National Film Board made an English-language documentary about the event called Flames of Persia. Macdonald Hastings wrote the text. Orson Welles supplied the narration. The surviving film is unusually valuable because this is not a later recollection of Welles’s relationship with Iran; the film itself survives, with his voice laid directly over the monarchy’s presentation of Persian history and the 1971 ceremonies.

Welles was obviously not directing Iranian policy by taking the job, nor is there evidence that he regarded the narration as some great political commitment. Paid narration was part of how he supported himself and financed his own pictures. But Flames of Persia puts him unmistakably inside the Pahlavi cultural operation before the better-known financing story began.

That timing is interesting for another reason. The official Iranian film uses Welles for what his voice could provide: gravity, history and authority. Within a few years, Welles would release a film built largely around the ease with which authority could be manufactured.

That film was F for Fake.

The Iranian Company Behind Welles

The more consequential connection came through Mehdi Boushehri, a brother-in-law of the Shah. Boushehri ran Les Films de l’Astrophore, a Paris-based company with Franco-Iranian backing. According to Josh Karp’s reconstruction of The Other Side of the Wind, Astrophore initially put about $150,000 into Welles’s project and became the crucial outside partner that allowed shooting to resume in early 1974. Karp describes the company as part of an effort associated with the Shah’s modernization program to establish relationships with prominent Western filmmakers.

The photograph above shows John Huston, Welles and Peter Bogdanovich during the long production. The three men belong to different Hollywood generations, which is important to the picture Welles was making. Huston played Jake Hannaford, an aging director who has returned to Hollywood after years abroad and is attempting to finish an experimental comeback film. Around Hannaford is a crowd of younger directors, critics, admirers and reporters, many of them carrying cameras.

Welles began shooting in 1970. He thought at various points that the production could be finished quickly. Instead, principal photography stretched into 1976. Money repeatedly ran out, Welles repeatedly found new money, and the film slowly became one of the most famous unfinished projects in cinema. Astrophore did not create those problems, but its entry changed the scale of the production and eventually created another problem: a genuine ownership dispute between Welles and the people who were paying to keep him shooting.

The Cinémathèque française still holds material documenting this period: contracts, correspondence and production records associated with Astrophore and The Other Side of the Wind. Its own history of the archive describes the film as produced in part by the Iranian company and notes that Boushehri remained connected to Astrophore after the Iranian Revolution.

Iran’s place in the story is therefore not conjectural. It is in the paperwork.

F for Fake and the Iranian Connection

The Astrophore relationship also touches F for Fake, although the details have frequently been simplified. Cannes now lists the 1973 film as a production of France, Iran and Germany and names Les Films de l’Astrophore as the production company. MoMA likewise catalogs it as France/Iran/West Germany.

There is an important qualification. Dominique Antoine, who ran Astrophore’s Paris office, later said that Astrophore had not financed the making of the film from the beginning. Her account was that the company and Janus acquired the completed picture in July 1974. That fits the broader chronology: Astrophore first encountered Welles because he was searching for help finishing The Other Side of the Wind, and the relationship expanded from there.

That distinction actually makes the history more interesting. Astrophore was not merely a bag of Iranian money that happened to land on Welles’s desk. It was attempting to assemble a film operation, buying finished material as well as financing production and cultivating established international directors.

And the film it acquired from Welles was about forgery.

F for Fake begins with the art forger Elmyr de Hory and the people who authenticated, sold and collected works attributed to famous painters. Welles then folds Clifford Irving into the film. Irving had written about de Hory, but while Welles was assembling his movie, Irving became the center of an even more spectacular fraud: the supposed authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes.

The Hughes story is not an incidental joke in F for Fake. It sharpens the entire film.

Howard Hughes Without Howard Hughes

Clifford Irving’s scheme depended on an unusual fact about Hughes. By the early 1970s, one of the most famous businessmen in the world was also one of the least accessible. Hughes rarely appeared publicly. He communicated through intermediaries, lawyers, telephone calls and corporate organizations. Enormous economic activity took place under his name while the actual man remained largely out of view.

Irving exploited the gap.

He claimed that Hughes had secretly authorized him to write an autobiography. The claim was believable enough to fool major publishing interests for a time because Hughes’s seclusion made direct verification difficult. The fraud finally collapsed, but only after demonstrating how much of a powerful person’s public identity could be constructed out of documents and trusted intermediaries.

That is Clifford Irving facing the press during the Hughes affair. The photograph could almost be a still from Welles’s film: microphones crowd the frame, reporters demand a version of events, and the entire story revolves around a man who is conspicuously absent.

Welles did not need to invent a metaphor. Hughes had already become one.

The larger Hughes business world makes that especially useful. By this period the Hughes name was attached to aviation, real estate, hotels, technology and a web of corporations. The point is not that those enterprises secretly connect the Shah to Welles. There is no documentary basis for making that leap. The more interesting comparison is that Hughes had become an early example of a person whose institutional presence greatly exceeded his physical presence.

A name could move money, control property, direct employees and occupy headlines while the man himself remained somewhere else.

Irving discovered that such a man could be counterfeited.

Welles made a movie about why.

The Man and the Machinery Around Him

Welles had been circling that problem for most of his career. Citizen Kane opens with a newsreel that reduces a complicated life to a clean public narrative. The rest of the film spends its running time showing how little that narrative settles. Mr. Arkadin reconstructs a wealthy and elusive man through other people’s stories. The War of the Worlds had already shown Welles how the language of a familiar communications system could give fiction the force of an event.

By F for Fake, he no longer bothered hiding the machinery. He sits in front of the viewer as editor, magician and narrator, cutting between evidence and invention. Cannes describes the film in exactly those terms: Welles working between truth and lies, using editing to destabilize the distinction between the two.

That makes his Iranian work more curious than it first appears. In Flames of Persia, Welles supplies the authoritative voice for a monarchy presenting its history to the world. In F for Fake, he demonstrates how much authority depends upon presentation.

There is no evidence that one was intended as commentary on the other. They simply occupy the same period in his life.

The coincidence is enough.

A Film Surrounded by Cameras

The Other Side of the Wind took the subject in another direction. Jake Hannaford’s birthday party is crowded with people filming him. Welles mixes black-and-white and color, 8mm, 16mm and 35mm material, professional photography and the rougher visual language of documentary footage. Hannaford never settles into a single image because nearly everybody around him possesses a different piece of him.

That formal structure became eerily similar to the circumstances under which the real film was being made.

Welles needed Astrophore’s money. Astrophore wanted a film it could eventually release. As production dragged on, distrust increased. According to Karp, Welles came to fear that Astrophore might seize creative control, while the company had increasingly obvious reasons to worry that its investment might never produce a completed picture.

Neither side needed to be secretly plotting anything for the relationship to break down. It was an old Welles problem in a new form: somebody else owned enough of the machinery required to complete his work that authorship and ownership were no longer the same thing.

Archival research has turned up an especially interesting detail from the Astrophore negotiations. An October 1973 agreement required some shooting to take place in Iran, and a surviving script revision replaced a reference to Bolivia with Iran. The proposed Iranian filming never became the center of the picture we know today, but the paperwork shows how directly Astrophore’s involvement could affect the production itself.

This was not an abstract Iranian association. Iran nearly entered the movie geographically as well as financially.

1979 Did Not Begin the Trouble

The Iranian Revolution is often used as a convenient explanation for why The Other Side of the Wind remained unfinished, but the chronology is messier. Welles and Astrophore were already fighting about money, editing and control years before the Shah left Iran. The production had been unstable from the beginning.

The Revolution nevertheless changed the legal landscape surrounding Astrophore and the Iranian stake in the picture. After Welles died in 1985, the unfinished film remained divided among multiple parties. For decades, negotiations to finish it repeatedly stalled over rights and ownership. The partial interests associated with Astrophore and the late Boushehri still had to be dealt with when producers finally assembled the agreements necessary to complete the movie.

That long legal afterlife is one of the more remarkable things about the whole story. The political order that helped create Astrophore disappeared in 1979. Welles died six years later. Boushehri also passed out of the story. The film negative remained.

In 2017 the surviving Other Side of the Wind material was finally moved from France to Los Angeles for scanning and completion. The footage included 35mm, 16mm and 8mm elements, the very jumble of formats Welles had deliberately used to build the picture.

The finished film appeared in 2018.

From RCA Television to a Netflix Welles Film

The technological distance between 1958 and 2018 is almost as interesting as the political history.

At the beginning of the story, Habib Sabet is introducing commercial television to Tehran. American personnel are helping operate the station. RCA equipment and receivers belong to the business environment around it. Imported American programs fill part of the schedule. Iran is receiving an electronic media system whose basic standards and much of whose content come from elsewhere.

Twenty years later, Iranian money has moved to the opposite side of the screen. Astrophore is purchasing films, negotiating with Orson Welles and financing international production.

Then that world collapses.

Four decades after Welles started The Other Side of the Wind, Netflix provides the final distribution platform for a reconstruction made from film that had spent years trapped in European storage and legal negotiations.

There is no straight corporate line from RCA to Netflix, and pretending otherwise would weaken the history. What exists is a much broader technological progression. The screen moves from scarce national infrastructure to something nearly ubiquitous. The argument over who controls the image survives every change in the machinery.

That is a much more Wellesian ending anyway.

Why the Iranian Episode Matters

Iran is often reduced in Western accounts of Welles to the money that got stuck in the unfinished movie. That misses most of what makes the episode useful.

Welles’s Iranian relationship began while the Pahlavi state was investing heavily in the international presentation of Iran. He narrated Flames of Persia. The Shah’s brother-in-law operated a Franco-Iranian film company that sought relationships with Western directors. That company financed The Other Side of the Wind and later acquired F for Fake. Astrophore survived the Revolution and remained tied to both films through their archival and legal histories.

Seen against the earlier television history, the sequence becomes clearer. Iran had spent the late 1950s and 1960s acquiring the equipment and expertise required to transmit images. By the 1970s, Iranian institutions and investors were trying to participate in the production of internationally circulating images themselves.

Welles happened to arrive during that transition.

And he arrived with exactly the wrong—or perhaps exactly the right—set of artistic obsessions.

His films kept returning to men surrounded by institutions, to unreliable witnesses, to images that claimed authority, to ownership separated from authorship, and to the possibility that a representation might eventually become more durable than the person represented.

The Iranian monarchy was using cinema to attach the modern Pahlavi state to a 2,500-year imperial history. Howard Hughes had become so remote that another man could briefly manufacture a substitute version of him. Jake Hannaford was torn apart by the cameras pointed at him. Welles himself spent years unable to finish a film partly because the physical negative and the legal right to use it were no longer entirely under his control.

None of those stories is identical. They do not need to be forced into a single conspiracy to belong beside one another.

They belong together because they were all dealing with the same new condition: power had learned to exist through media.

The Film That Outlived the Court

That may be the most fitting way to look at The Other Side of the Wind. It was not really “the Shah’s movie,” and describing it literally that way would distort who made it. It was Orson Welles’s film. But a piece of the Pahlavi world became embedded in it through Boushehri and Astrophore, just as Welles’s voice had earlier become embedded in the official film of Persepolis.

The court at Persepolis is gone. The monarchy is gone. The companies changed hands. Welles is gone. The original financiers are gone. Even the television technology Iran was racing to construct in the 1950s and 1960s now looks antique.

The films remain.

That is the part of the story Welles probably would have appreciated. The temporary things—governments, contracts, reputations, fortunes—eventually disappear. What survives is the recorded image, detached from the circumstances that created it and ready to be interpreted again by people who were never there.

For a few years in the 1970s, Orson Welles and the Pahlavi state crossed paths inside that new machinery. Iran wanted to show the world an image of itself. Welles had already spent most of his career warning that an image can have a life very different from whatever stood in front of the camera.

In this case, the image outlived nearly everyone who owned a piece of it.