For those who have not closely followed the Wellesnet Message Board in recent weeks, you might have missed that an effort is underway to reconstruct Orson Welles’ original vision for The Magnificent Ambersons.
There have been noble efforts in the past, most notably those of Roger Ryan and a second project headed by Mike Teal and Jaime Marzol.
Now, Brian Rose (CineCraft) is taking on the challenge of undoing a 77-year-old cinematic injustice.
While Ryan, Teal and Marzol have all used frame enlargements for the missing scenes, Rose is pursuing an entirely different approach.
“My project uses animation to fill in the gaps, and actors to read the lost dialog. Also restored is Bernard Herrmann’s score. The animation is a bit stylized, meant to evoke the hand drawn storyboards, while also highlighting the absence of the lost footage,” Rose tells Wellesnet in a post on its Facebook page. “For this project, I’m using my personal print of the film, scanned in 4K. I’ve not done a restoration or color grading, so the footage is flat. And I’ve not recorded the actors yet so the inserted voices are my own, and not a very good match.”
He has posted on Vimeo Scene 3_B_3 with the Major and Jack Amberson — both as it exists in the edited RKO release, and how it would have played in the original cut, with restored dialogue and music.
Like previous efforts to reconstruct The Magnificent Ambersons, Roses’s work is not backed by the current rights holder, Warner Home Video, which has licensed the home video release of the 1942 film to The Criterion Collection. (Wellesnet unsuccessfully lobbied Criterion to include the Ryan reconstruction as an extra with the Blu-ray release last fall.)
Welles was working in Brazil on the ill-fated It’s All True documentary when RKO recut Ambersons without his involvement.
Following two previews, a 131-minute cut was chopped down to 88 minutes and a new ending shot for the film.
Sadly, the original elements were destroyed by RKO and no copy of Welles’ longer cut is believed to still exist.
Some frame enlargements from the longer cut exist, and a few seconds of cut footage can be glimpsed in the original trailer.
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