Hunt for lost 'Magnificent Ambersons' footage in Brazil

[RayKelly]

The French newspaper Le Monde has published an update on the search for Orson Welles' fabled original cut of "The Magnificent Ambersons." They interview Josh Grossberg, who was the sources of much of the material in the April 2000 Vanity Fair article.

http://www.wellesnet.com/lost-magnifice ... ns-search/

[smartone]

could someone post and translate the complete article here ?

[RayKelly]

could someone post and translate the complete article here ?

I translated the article with Google Chrome and summarized the key points, retaining all the quotes related to the hunt in Brazil.
Le Monde has a pay wall and I am uncomfortable with circumventing it and running their entire copy here for free — given the financial challenges newspapers face today.

[RayKelly]

Spent time talking with Josh Grossberg, who has been interested in the fate of the Brazil print of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS for more than 25 years.
He was hoping to chase down leads and shoot a documentary in Brazil this summer, but the COVID-10 pandemic got in the way. However, he plans to make the trek later this year.
You can watch a "sizzle reel" of his project and my interview with him at
https://www.wellesnet.com/hunt-lost-magnificent-ambersons-cut/

[Le Chiffre]

Nice presentation. Best of luck to him and his team. If someone can find the complete METROPOLIS, why not the complete AMBERSONS?

[tonyw]

My Thoughts exactly. Though much as I like METROPOLIS, I wish it had been AMBERSONS they discovered.

[RayKelly]

Writing in Italy's largest daily newspaper, la Repubblica, on July 4, Alberto Anile (Orson Welles in Italy) has an interview with Josh Grossberg on his hunt for the lost cut of The Magnificent Ambersons.

[NoFake]

Looks like you have to subscribe to access it. Is there a member who does, and who could summarize it?

[tonyw]

Also spinning off from "Is there a Doctor in the House?" since it is presumably in Italian, "Is there a Translator in the House?"

[NoFake]

As a complete translation wouldn't be necessary (a summary would probably suffice), if there's no one who is fluently bilingual, perhaps someone who's familiar enough with the language could use an Italian-English dictionary to give an idea of the interview's high points.

[Honest Iago]

I don't have access to the article, but if there is someone who does, and can send it to me, then I can translate it.

[Steve Paradis]

As a complete translation wouldn't be necessary (a summary would probably suffice), if there's no one who is fluently bilingual, perhaps someone who's familiar enough with the language could use an Italian-English dictionary to give an idea of the interview's high points.

Here's the link, I think.
https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblic ... ref=search

And here's the machine translation, which has its own odd charm.

The history of cinema is full of hidden treasures that resurface in the most unexpected places. The only complete copy of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, vintage 1928, was found in 81 in a psychiatric hospital, the first version of Cassavetes' Shadows (1959) was rescued in 2003 among the abandoned objects in New York subway. Important titles are missing: Hitchcock's second film (The Mountain Eagle), a comedy with Laurel & Hardy (Hats Off) and one by Chaplin (Her friend the bandit), the full version (nine hours!) Of Greed by von Stroheim. But the holy grail of cinephiles is Amberson Pride in the version prepared by Orson Welles before Rko reworked it. Despite the research of many, including Welles himself, the film never came up; now the initiative of an intrepid American filmmaker, Josh Grossberg, is rekindling hopes.

Pride of the Ambersons is Welles' second film, made immediately after the Fourth Estate, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington published in 1918 (it only arrived in Italy in 2005, for Fandango, with a magnificent translation and a bad cover) . It is a sumptuous fresco of America between the last lights of the great aristocratic families and the first shadows of the new entrepreneurial class devoted to consumption and pollution. The events of a spoiled scion, who prevents his mother from rebuilding a life by condemning everyone to unhappiness, darken in sync with an America that was turning gray with greed and car exhaust fumes: a fake elegy of the beautiful bygone days, which Welles made even more black and disturbing than in the book.
Filming began in late October 1941. A few weeks later - it was the first twist - the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. America enters the war and Roosevelt hires Welles to prepare a project to strengthen ties with Latin and South America. Welles completes filming of Ambersons, hands over the direction of Terror on the Black Sea (made at the same time) to his friend Norman Foster and leaves for Rio de Janeiro, waiting for Robert Wise, editor of the Ambersons and future director, to join him to perfect the final edition. But the war imposes an embargo on flights and Wise remains in the US; at least he manages to send him the version prepared so far, lasting 131 minutes, together with some alternative materials.

Welles will say: «I was so sure of the value of the film, which I considered superior even to the Fourth Estate, that I had no doubts that it would prevail over the usual fear of the film industry towards the" dark "film». Wrong calculation: after a disastrous preview in Pomona, California, in a cinema full of bored kids, Rko decides to proceed with cuts and remakes. Stuck in Brazil, Welles tries to oppose but the telephone connections are very precarious and many of his kilometer cables end up in the trash. In an attempt to save what can be saved, Wise and the actors of the film agree to collaborate in the massacre: the film is lost by three quarters of an hour, a masterful sequence shot is cut in two, several scenes (including the finale) are laced and less gloomy shape. At the box office it will go bad anyway. From here begins the legend of Welles' unreliability, author of incomplete or indigestible projects. "The studio destroyed the Ambersons and that movie destroyed me," he summarizes years later. Over time, many reels of the Brazilian project, It's all true, which Rko did not want to complete, were found, but nothing of the first Amberson, apart from the letters with which the producers, anxious to make room in the warehouses, had ordered the destruction of old materials.

Here Josh Grossberg enters the scene, bewitched as a student by the vision of Infernal Quinlan, who has been looking for the first, longer Amberson for years. According to him, a copy still exists, and it is the one sent by Wise to Brazil. "I can't believe a Brazilian obeyed RKO's directives to send the film back to Los Angeles just to have it thrown away," says Grossberg. "It is more likely that the film remained for years in the Cineteca di Rio, at Cinedia Studios, collecting dust among many other pizzas." Grossberg's is more than a hypothesis. "In the mid-nineties, when I went to Brazil for the first time, Michel De Esprito, an old archivist at Cinedia, told me he still saw some pizzas belonging to Welles at the end of the fifties". Then they disappeared from that warehouse, perhaps stolen. “If that copy ended up in a private collection, the collector's heirs may not have even noticed that it's a Welles film. Both because in Brazil the film was called Soberba, "superb", and because Welles is not part of the cast ».

Grossberg is now preparing a new expedition to hunt for the lost film. He has identified three families of collectors and the heirs of people who worked with Welles, and is preparing to interview them for a documentary, The Search for the Lost Print, which will tell about Grossberg's own research, however it will end - but always with the hope that ends triumphantly. The project is to shoot an abundant month in Brazil and a couple of weeks in the US, with a budget of $ 400,000. It would already be in Rio if Covid-19 hadn't arrived in the meantime - and it's another hunchback of fate.

But why in 78 years no American had yet attempted the Brazilian track? “The story of the lost copy is known only to supercinephiles and Welles fans. And then in the US the devotion to the art of cinema is not like that in Europe or even in Brazil: unfortunately the videogame industry bills three times that of the film industry here ». Grossberg awaits the end of the epidemic and meanwhile widens the range of producers: "Whoever finds that copy will change the course of the history of cinema, restoring an imperfect masterpiece to its former glory, as well as to the original vision of its author".

[NoFake]

Thanks so much, Steve.

Most of it is so skillfully rendered, it makes the sometimes glaring errors ("Pride of the Ambersons"? An unintentional thanks to Mank? ) even more noticeable (and at times delightfully humorous). No, machines will not replace us. (At least, not yet. )

[Steve Paradis]

Thanks so much, Steve.

Most of it is so skillfully rendered, it makes the sometimes glaring errors ("Pride of the Ambersons"? An unintentional thanks to Mank? ) even more noticeable (and at times delightfully humorous). No, machines will not replace us. (At least, not yet. )

I saw Infernal Quinlan and heard a roar of laughter from beyond: Why didn't I think of that?

[JMcBride]

"Pizzas" meaning platters of film?