5. Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind

Orson Welles is regarded by many as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, and his debut Citizen Kane is widely considered to be the best film ever made. Welles’ career was fraught with a number of forgotten and abandoned projects, and at the time of his death in 1985 he was in the middle of work on two films. The most of famous of these was The Other Side of the Wind, a film starring Dennis Hopper and John Huston that Welles had been working on since the late sixties. The movie was nearly complete in 1979, but Welles ran into huge financial and legal complications that halted production. The biggest of these was that the film’s major financial backer, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran, pulled funding after the Shah was overthrown and exiled from the country. This led to a years-long controversy over ownership of The Other Side of the Wind, and the film was never finished. In the years since Welles’ death, there have been a number of attempts to edit and release the film, and recent rumors suggest that a version of it may debut in 2010.