The film series is the largest in the added material, comprising ca. 3 linear feet of scripts, drafts, correspondence, articles and clippings, promotional materials, and photographs. Films represented include both those directed by Welles and those directed by others in which he acted or participated. The series is arranged chronologically by film, dated according to their first public showing or general release date. Unfinished or unreleased projects are identified with an approximate date range of the years in the work took place.
The material related to the earliest films from the 1940s and 1950s consists primarily of photographs. Later unfinished films of particular interest include The Deep, Because of the Cats, The Other Side of the Wind, Crazy Weather, Assassin/The Safe House, The Other Man, The Dreamers, Big Brass Ring, and King Lear. Also included is articles, promotional materials, correspondence, and photographs from Don Quixote, filmed on and off from the late 1950's to the early 1970s. Materials are primarily related to the version which was released in 1992 after a the footage was edited and finished by director Jesus Franco, but the photographs are from the original filming.
As with drafts in the earlier accessions, Welles typically worked on scripts in sections, producing successive drafts which he then amended. The collection preserves many pages of these working drafts, which sometimes also include Welles's typed or written notes about the story and characters, along with messages to and from his typists. Minimal reorganization of the papers was done in order to preserve evidence of the process, and there are many files of "drafts" which may contain repetitions and out-of-sequence pages, filed as they were found. As Welles often worked by inserting new pages into older drafts or blending together several different versions of a scene, page numbers may not follow a logical sequence. In many cases no information about the script material was recorded before it was filed away, so dating the drafts is difficult. The dates assigned to this material are approximate.
Because of the lack of identifying information on some of the material, a miscellaneous sub-series is included at the end of the series, which includes unidentified photographs and drafts of scripts.
