Jess Franco “finished” Orson Welles incomplete version of Don Quixote. Jess signed the voucher for the film because Orson Welles couldn’t get backing for movies with his own name (too great a risk of overruns).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote_(unfinished_film)
Principal photography was between 1957 and 1969; while test footage was filmed as early as 1955, second-unit photography was done as late as 1972, and Welles was working on the film on and off until his death in 1985.
“I once had a finished version where the Don and Sancho go to the Moon, but then [the United States] went to the Moon, which ruined it, so I scrapped ten reels [100 minutes].”
At the time of his death, he was still discussing doing more filming for Don Quixote, and had produced over 1,000 pages of script for the project.
Irigoyen and Franco faced several problems in putting the Welles footage together. Welles had worked in three different formats – 35mm, 16mm and Super 16mm – which created inconsistent visual quality. The wildly varying storage conditions of this footage had further exacerbated the variable visual quality. The lack of a screenplay also hampered efforts. Welles recorded less than an hour’s soundtrack where he read a narration and provided dialogue for the main characters, but the rest of the footage was silent. A new script was created by Franco and voiceover actors were brought in to fill the silence left by Welles’ incomplete work, although their impressions of Welles’ narration and Welles’ Quixote/Sancho Panza voices were far from convincing, especially when intercut with the original recordings.[15] Joseph McBride refers to the soundtrack of Franco’s version as “an off-putting melange of dubbed voices.”[20] A further controversy was the inclusion by Franco of footage of Welles filming in Spain, taken from a documentary he had made on Spain in the 1960s. Welles had not intended to appear in the film himself, other than in its framing scenes as the narrator, and yet the Irigoyen/Franco film features several scenes with Quixote and Sancho Panza on Spanish streets, with Welles apparently looking on. Additionally, Franco inserts a windmill scene into the film, even though Welles had not filmed one or ever intended to film one - the scene relies on footage of Quixote charging across plains, interspersed with windmill images (which were not filmed by Welles), zooms and jump cuts.
Furthermore, Welles feared a repetition of the experience of having the film re-edited by someone else (as had happened to him on The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin and Touch of Evil), so he divided up all the reels of film for Don Quixote and deliberately mislabelled many of them, telling Mauro Bonanni, “If someone finds them, they mustn’t understand the sequence, because only I know that.”
Cool info. Thanks!