The French newspaper Le Monde has published an update on the hunt for Orson Welles’ fabled original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.
Le Monde interviewed Josh Grossberg, who began his quest for the lost Ambersons footage when he was a 21-year-old film student at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1995 — and not given up. He hopes to find backing to continue searching Brazilian film collections.
Grossberg was able to confirm that RKO Pictures destroyed the negative and the longer print after it cut the 131 minute preview copy to 88 minutes and tacked on a happy ending back in 1942. (His search in the late 1990s was previously detailed in the Vanity Fair article Magnificent Obsession in April 2000.)
The only hope of finding the lost footage rests in the materials sent to Welles when he was filming It’s All True in Brazil.
“The lost copy of The Magnificent Ambersons remains the greatest mystery in the history of cinema,” Grossberg told Le Monde. “How was it possible not to go to Brazil to exhume it?”
He traveled to in Rio in Christmas 1995, and returned in 1997, and again a year later.
His investigation brought him to the movie studio, Cinédia, which was owned by Brazilian film pioneer Adhemar Gonzaga. Welles had befriended Gonzaga and left The Magnificent Ambersons footage with him when he returned to the United States on Aug. 22, 1942. Later, Gonzaga sent a telegram to RKO to ask officials what he should do with the copy. He was told to destroy it, an order that the owner of Cinedia Studios claimed to have executed in a reply telegram.
“How can you imagine that a film buff and a film collector like Gonzaga could destroy such a copy?,” Grossberg told Le Monde. “That does not hold water.”
(Editor’s note: RKO instructed Cinédia to junk all of the 35mm reels shipped to Welles: 24 reels of Ambersons — 14 reels constituting the 131 minute initial fine edit and 10 reels of alternate editing choices — plus 10 reels of Journey Into Fear, possibly the entirety of the 90 minute preview cut.)
Michel De Esprito, a former archivist at Cinédia, assured Grossberg he had seen film cans bearing Welles name in the 1960s. A few weeks later, they were gone.
It was a period when Cinedia was getting rid of its archives, often to sell to collectors. Esprito also suggested that these boxes could have been stolen.
Grossberg contacted Gonzaga’s daughter, Alice, who had never heard of the lost The Magnificent Ambersons. She asked her team to look in the warehouses to see if the reels were still there, but they were not.
He has been working since then to identify the different collectors who bought films from the Cinedia warehouses and whether they, or their heirs, are in possession of the lost footage.
“Cinedia warehouses have since become a bank. It’s a fact that collectors got their hands on films, which was the only way to save them,” Grossberg said. “Of the four names of collectors indicated by Alice Gonzaga, Grossberg succeeded in contacting just one, but it was a dead end.
Today, more than 20 years after his first trip, Grossberg keeps the identity of the other three collectors secret, waiting for a later trip. He is hoping to obtain a research grant or the interest of a broadcaster who would accompany in the production of a documentary entitled The Legend of the Lost Copy.
“You know, I’ve heard terrible stories about the destiny of this copy,” Grossberg told Le Monde. “It is said that Alice Gonzaga organized parties at her house and that she used falling movies to light her barbecue. Can you imagine if the existence of The Magnificent Ambersons ended like this? ”
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