The negative was tucked away in a vault in a suburb of Paris, like a Picasso rolled up in the closet, as one of its rescuers likes to say. In March 2017, the reels were wrapped and boxed onto eight pallets, shipped to Los Angeles, inventoried and scanned at the Technicolor offices in Hollywood, and assembled by a white-gloved negative cutter in Burbank. By December, the prized, contentious piece of cinematic history was coming back to life in a squat concrete office building on L.A.’s Westside, a few doors down from the company that produces America’s Funniest Home Videos.

The workaday postproduction office would be one of the final stops on the long, strange journey of the most famous movie never released: Orson Welles’s unfinished final opus, The Other Side of the Wind. Precisely what to do with it has preoccupied Welles’s friends, heirs, lovers, creditors, and admirers ever since the director died at his home in the Hollywood foothills in 1985, hunched over his typewriter.

Thanks to the commitment of a small band of Welles-ites and financing from a $100 billion streaming company whose technology Welles could never have imagined, the movie’s story will soon have an audience in theaters and through Netflix, which also plans to debut its documentary about Welles and The Other Side of the Wind, tentatively titled They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead and directed by Morgan Neville, and is working to make more of Welles’s oeuvre available to its subscribers. But if something hits a snag between now and the fall, it would be just one more hurdle in a near-50-year obstacle course, including a dashed plan to show the film at this month’s Cannes Film Festival.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do after the movie comes out,” says Jurassic World and Bourne Identity producer Frank Marshall, 71, who was a production manager on the 1970s set of The Other Side of the Wind and has shepherded the completion of the project with Peter Bogdanovich and a Polish-born producer named Filip Jan Rymsza. “It seems like I’ve worked on this every month for the last 40 years.”

The Other Side of the Wind is straddling the movie industry’s analog and digital eras to an extreme. To finish the picture, the producers are relying on the last generation in Hollywood who know how to cut and handle actual film. To finance and exhibit it, they have turned to the most modern of entertainment companies, a streaming service. “This feels like a place where we can help from a pure cinephile perspective,” says Ian Bricke, Netflix’s director of content acquisition. “This seemed like an opportunity to use our scale and our audience to get Orson Welles into 115-million-plus households.”

In The Other Side of the Wind, Welles grapples with Hollywood’s hypermasculine, put-up-your-dukes past, his protagonist a hard-drinking, game-hunting director played by the very embodiment of the man’s-man auteur, John Huston. Filming off and on from 1970 to 1976, Welles was attempting to make sense of a model of American manhood that still haunts us today, in the form of Joe Biden and Donald Trump taunting each other about a hypothetical brawl, in “locker-room talk” and Harvey Weinstein. In one scene, Huston’s character, Jake Hannaford, humiliates a Native American actress by calling her “Pocahontas,” a reference that seems to eerily predict Trump’s identical taunts of Senator Elizabeth Warren more than 40 years later. “When he was forced to summarize the film, Orson said it was about the death of the American macho, about seeing that mask slip away,” Rymsza says.

Breaking out of traditional models of masculinity is a concept Welles had been toying with for much of his career. In Citizen Kane he reveals how egomaniacal businessman Charles Foster Kane’s pursuit of the American male’s markers of happiness—wealth and success—leaves him empty and alone. Tellingly, Trump has said Citizen Kane is his favorite film, for what seem to be all the wrong reasons. When filmmaker Errol Morris asked Trump what advice he’d give to Charles Foster Kane, he said, “Get yourself a different woman.” Interviews with Welles, particularly toward the end of his life, indicate that he spent a lot of time contemplating the limitations of the tough-guy persona. “Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him,” Welles told Henry Jaglom in the 1980s, according to Jaglom’s 2013 book, My Lunches with Orson. “I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can’t admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.”