The recent Hollywood Issue of Vanity Fair features a long story by Josh Karp on Orson Welles’s Quixotic quest to finish The Other Side of the Wind, referred to ever after as his lost masterpiece.

A great deal more insider detail on Wind can also be found in the recent UIP release, The Magic World of Orson Welles, James Naremore’s examination of the director’s career and itself a film studies classic.

The Karp article offers the usual hilarious/bizarre anecdotes we expect of any piece of writing on Welles. Like the chair fight with Ernest Hemingway.

It was May 1937 and Welles entered a Manhattan recording studio to narrate a Spanish Civil War documentary whose script had been written by Ernest Hemingway—who happened to be in the sound booth when Orson arrived.

Only 22, Orson was not yet the Orson Welles, but he was on his way as a talented voice actor earning $1,000 a week during the Depression and a Broadway wunderkind who’d had the audacity to stage an all-black Macbeth.

Looking at Hemingway’s script, Welles suggested a few changes, as he recalled to a reporter decades later. Wouldn’t it be better, for instance, to eliminate the line “Here are the faces of men who are close to death,” and simply let those faces speak for themselves?

Hemingway was outraged that anyone would dare tamper with his words and went after Orson, implying that the actor was “some kind of faggot.” Welles responded by hitting Hemingway the best way he knew how. If Papa wanted a faggot, Orson would give him one.

“Mr. Hemingway, how strong you are!” Welles said, camping it up with a swishy lisp. “How big you are!”

Grabbing a chair, Hemingway attacked Orson, who picked up a chair of his own, sparking a cinematic brawl between two of the great creative geniuses of the 20th century, who duked it out while images of war flickered on a screen behind them.