Current:Home > MarketsAn Orson Welles film was horribly edited — will cinematic justice finally be done? -WealthRise Academy
An Orson Welles film was horribly edited — will cinematic justice finally be done?
View
Date:2025-04-18 08:25:58
One of the greatest American directors of the 20th century is known for only a few films.
After Orson Welles made his masterpiece Citizen Kane in 1941, he fought bitterly with the studios that released his subsequent films — often after they bowdlerized Welles' work. Films such as The Lady from Shanghai and The Magnificent Ambersons were drastically changed and cut, altering the auteur's vision.
Now, a Welles superfan named Brian Rose — himself an accomplished filmmaker — has used animation and countless hours of painstaking research to recreate missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons.
Welles started filming what was intended to be his second masterpiece in 1941, hot from the success of Citizen Kane. The movie is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington.
Welles, who had already adapted the novel for radio, wanted to tell a timeless story about Americans buffeted by unsettling new technology and economic decline through the fortunes of a small town's richest family. He was given a princely budget and built an entire mansion with moveable walls for filming. But costs kept mounting and RKO studio executives disliked the film's dark take on American aristocracy, especially in the jingoistic era before World War II.
"The studio took his 131-minute version of The Magnificent Ambersons. They cut it down to 88 minutes," says Ray Kelly, who runs the Orson Welles fansite Wellesnet. "Not only that, they took out the ending, which was rather bleak, and replaced it with a very Hollywood happy ending that doesn't seem to fit the mood of the film in total."
All in all, Kelly says, only 13 scenes out of 73 were left untouched. And despite all the studio's re-editing and the unconvincing happy ending, The Magnificent Ambersons was still a massive flop. RKO burned its silver nitrate negatives to salvage the silver and make space to store other movies.
"So Welles' version has been lost to history," Kelly says.
Not so fast, says filmmaker Brian Rose. "Fortunately, the film is remarkably well-documented for a film that was so badly altered," he says. "There is quite a lot that can be inferred from the surviving materials."
So that's what he's doing, using animation and voice actors to fill the gaps.
Rose is not the first to attempt to reconstruct The Magnificent Ambersons. Several other Welles enthusiasts have attempted to correct what Kelly calls "the challenge of undoing a cinematic injustice" through various means. But none have used animation.
"A lot of it was based on photographs and on diagrams of camera placements and descriptions of scenes," Rose explains. Plus, new technology.
"Basically, in a 3D environment, I rebuilt all the sets from diagrams and photographs," he continues. "The challenge was populating them with characters. I took for inspiration the original storyboards, which were hand-drawn pencil and charcoal, very ethereal looking, kind of like the world of the Ambersons. They feel like there's a haze over them. So even when I do take the artistic license of creating these scenes in animation, they still are referencing they still draw a reference to Welles' original artistic vision."
There is also a bit of a haze over this project regarding intellectual property rights and how legal it is to be animating this fan version of The Magnificent Ambersons. "The thought was to beg forgiveness later," Rose admits.
The filmmaker is not going to get rich with this passion project. Indeed, he's sunk a considerable amount of his own resources into what he hopes is a respectful and scholarly transformational work.
Rose hopes to eventually share his version of The Magnificent Ambersons with other Orson Welles fanatics. A screening is planned as part of a series at the Free Library of Philadelphia. And he'd love for it to be packaged as part of a Criterion Collection edition. In the era of TikTok, it's an homage to a wounded film.
Edited by Ciera Crawford
Produced by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
veryGood! (7529)
Related
- IRS recovers $4.7 billion in back taxes and braces for cuts with Trump and GOP in power
- Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among 6 nations to join China and Russia in BRICS economic bloc
- Trey Lance trade fits: Which NFL teams make sense as landing spot for 49ers QB?
- Shortage of common antibiotic used to treat kids' infections frustrates parents
- DeepSeek: Did a little known Chinese startup cause a 'Sputnik moment' for AI?
- NFL preseason games Saturday: TV, times, matchups, streaming, more
- Transgender woman in New York reaches landmark settlement with county jail after great discrimination
- Man dies after NYPD sergeant hurls cooler, knocks him off motorbike; officer suspended
- Paula Abdul settles lawsuit with former 'So You Think You Can Dance' co
- Cardinals add another quarterback, acquire Josh Dobbs in trade with Browns
Ranking
- Hackers hit Rhode Island benefits system in major cyberattack. Personal data could be released soon
- Fire at a Texas prison forces inmates to evacuate, but no injuries are reported
- Jury awards $3.75M to protester hit by hard-foam projectiles fired by Los Angeles police in 2020
- As Companies Eye Massive Lithium Deposits in California’s Salton Sea, Locals Anticipate a Mixed Bag
- A South Texas lawmaker’s 15
- Flash mob robbery hits Los Angeles mall as retail theft task force announces arrests
- 3 men exonerated in NYC after case reviews spotlighted false confessions in 1990s
- Maui has released the names of 388 people still missing after deadly wildfire
Recommendation
Military service academies see drop in reported sexual assaults after alarming surge
John Stamos Shares Nude Photo to Celebrate His 60th Birthday in Must-See Thirst Trap
Sea level changes could drastically affect Calif. beaches by the end of the century
Ramaswamy faces curiosity and skepticism in Iowa after center-stage performance in GOP debate
Biden administration makes final diplomatic push for stability across a turbulent Mideast
Wells Fargo not working? Bank confirms 'intermittent issues'
60 years ago in Baltimore, a child's carousel ride marked the end of a civil rights journey
NASCAR at Daytona summer 2023: Start time, TV, streaming, lineup for Coke Zero Sugar 400