Ambersons "Rumor" - Complete cut supposedly destroyed, but..

[Lance Morrison]

i dont mean to go offtopic, but Glenn, what restoration was done for Greed?

[jaime marzol]

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[TheMcGuffin]

Jaime, mteal,

If there is anything i can do to help out on any of the OW restorations please let me know. I am a director and an editor (fluent on Final Cut Pro) and I have my own eqiupment as well as access to a lot more. Good luck on the projects!!

Rob

[Noel Shane]

i went to lilly first week of march, found tons of papers on the stranger... there are also papers at usc, but i don't like planes, and driving from florida to usc would suck. the 15 hr drive to lilly was bad enough.

i hope schmid and all the others that do funded reconstructions keep thinking that ambersons can't be done. mteal and me know it can.

Respectfully, if the choice is between hobbyist "reconstruction" teams who don't fully research their projects because of travel reluctance, and funded professionals, it's hard to share your hope that the latter would give up on any of these titles. But maybe I'm misreading you. Most sincere good luck, in any event.

[jaime marzol]

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[jaime marzol]

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[allegra]

Jaime,

Just a quick question about your "Stranger" reconstruction: The last time I heard from Lilly, there was a legal prohibition (from Thomas White) against their copying anything created by Welles without White's permission. Has this prohibition been removed, or were you able to get it waived?

Many thanks!

[Noel Shane]

I don't share that sentiment of funded restorations being better. schmidlin was funded, they whittled the TOE package down to nothing, and even raped the lbxing to save money.

These are two different things. By "packages", I assume you mean everything but the movie that's included on a DVD. That has nothing to do with the work Schmidlin produced, though. Regardless of which, my point about "funded" vs. "small" operations was specific to your quoted comments. Is capitalism often a faithful and humble servant to the artist and the arts? No, I agree. A fairly obvious, if cruel, fact of which movies particularly have always served to remind us.

Regarding the letterboxing, and perhaps playing catch-up with old threads is what emboldened me to press you on the research side of things (your student researcher notwithstanding -- previous comments about travel sucking were left open to interpretation), Schmidlin explained this point to you himself on this board. Well over a year later, though, you're still holding to a simplification of the story that basically stems from a personal opinion, and a somewhat arbitrary one considering that the people who actually shot the movie under Welles' direction would disagree with you. Or am I missing something?

Shouldn't it also be considered that the 35mm master and all components used to make the EVIL restoration were the legal property of Universal? I'm not sure how a restoration could have worked around the system in that case. If the resulting DVD package suffers for some as a result of capitalist-minded omissions of the "Restoring Evil" documentary (a legal quibble, wasn't it?) and alternative options for aspect ratio, differing edits and soundtracks, etc., then that seems to me to be more a home entertainment crisis than an artistic one. Likewise with REAR WINDOW -- I'm never bored when I watch it; i.e. what else is really necessary beyond the film itself? The Kane disc sucks... Well, yeah, except that it has a digital version of CITIZEN KANE on it.

I hope it's clear that I consider these relatively minor conflicts of "POV". I considered putting a smile face after "good luck" in my first post so you knew I meant it, but they make me queasy and I thought I conveyed my sincerity without the flourish. Perhaps not. I repeat my good wishes now, however, and with the added benefit of better understanding your operation. I'm sure I'll be among your customers when the debut disc is finished.

Regards,
Matthew

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Jaime: I'm really pleased to hear the details of your efforts to make reconstructed versions of THE STRANGER, JOURNEY INTO FEAR, and maybe someday THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. At one time, I did roughly similar things on old radio programs with audio tape decks, but of course what you propose is of some real possible importance.

I agree about JOURNEY INTO FEAR. As I remember it, the film should have been something over 100 minutes, with a lot more character development and sculduggery, mostly within the confines of the ship.

As for the professor at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, my reaction was the same as yours, Jaime. Thinking of the number of stills from the excised portions of AMBERSONS included by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the appendix to This Is Orson Welles, it seemed feasible that a GREED-like reconstruction might be undertaken.

[Lance, Rick Schmidlin, who produced the restoration of TOUCH OF EVIL, at the end of that project, was given 600 stills from the four hours that were cut out of the Rex Ingram edit of Erich Von Stroheim's GREED. Schmidlin used them to produce a five hour bridging of that film, for one of the cable channels. It is superb in suggesting the scope of Von Stroheim's masterpiece (much as I suppose Jaime hopes to accomplish for Welles' films). According to Schmidlin, after the reconstruction was shown on TV, only 50 copies were allowed to be struck, and there are not plans to put it on DVD in the near future.]

In any case, if 600 stills could be made to bridge a four hour loss, I argued, would not fewer than 150 do for the 45 minutes lost from AMBERSONS? It was at that point, Schmidlin himself entered the discussion, supporting my view, and adding "the story" about his hopes, within two weeks, to have something to bring to Warner Brothers on the "lost" 16mm print in Rio. The professor immediately said, "Rick! You hadn't told me about this. We shall have to discuss it at breakfast tomorrow!"

You are right, Jaime, it is probably a story, but it is not JUST a story. But, say, if it is a story, what a screenplay it would make, in itself!

Well, good luck, Jaime. Anything I could do to help is also at your service.

I seem to have at least stirred up some discussion here.

See ya, fellas.

Glenn Anders

[jaime marzol]

ALLEGRA:
there is a 10 page limit per screenplay on anything authored by welles. copyrights only cover creative writiting. shooting schedules, scene breakdowns, daily sheets, and continuities all discribe what is being shot, and belong to the owner of the paper, in the case of THE STRANGER, the lilly library, and their terms are friendly, and very affordable.

[Jeff Wilson]

The debate over the "butchering" of the Touch of Evil DVD is old, but let's not put words into people's mouths. I see nowhere that Rick Schmidlin backtracked from his assertions that the film was made to be shown theatrically at 1.85:1. He cited initial screenings, that Welles was present at, the camera negative itself, as well as documents from the production and the camera operator and cinematographer. This is not material to be blown off, and to assume that Welles, a master filmmaker, made a film he knew would be screened at 1.85 for 1.33, thus artistically compromising its theatrical run, is silly. To say it isn't opinion but aesthetics is also silly, because aesthetic beauty IS an opinion. It is not a factual thing to be measured. The DVD is hardly unwatchable, in my opinion. The situation also isn't helped by people having seen the film countless times in a full frame format.

[jaime marzol]

yes, i agree

[Noel Shane]

[Jaime quotes in bold...]

IF you love a film and opt to purchase the 30 buck special edition...

...then you should be satisfied with the film itself, and you are buying more than just gold lettering -- in most serious current examples, anyway. You are paying at least for a new transfer and, often, a new restored print/negative. The latter should always be supported (unless possibly you have a particular grievance, as you clearly do with EVIL). Besides, "extras" shouldn't really make or break a decision to buy or watch a DVD in the strata of Hitchcock or Welles: I'm interested in the films.

Incidentally, if the choice of extras falls between Heston and film professors, I think I just hit eject either way and go get some fresh air, but that's a personal issue with me possibly.

schmid should have known better, and he should have fought for it, that is why he was getting paid... universal did not want to spend an extra $500 to get it right. ...had the TOE restoration been done by a small outfit, not an outfit with budgets, CEOs. and 500 more films waiting to be released, it would have been a better product.

Just so we don't lump everyone together into one big conglomeration of rapists and beancounters, for a closing statement in my would-be defense of 'the funded' I would offer this excerpt from the June issue of American Cinematographer on the SUNRISE restoration:

Whereas most film preservationists' work ends with the creation of a new print, [Schawn Belston, director of film preservation at Fox] and [Michael Pogorzelski, AMPAS Film Archive director] were able to personally supervise the video transfer of Sunrise, thereby ensuring that home-video audiences would see the same film they had created in the lab. Pogorzelski, who calls the opportunity to supervise a video transfer "extremely rare" in his line of work, observes, "...one thing that's a little hard to keep control over with the studios is the video transfer and the DVD and TV versions. At almost every studio, the home-video department is an entity unto itself, and it goes to the beat of its own drum; it's therefore hard for us to keep a hand on what the film looks and sounds like in its home-video incarnation. It's painful when you have a print that you've done all this work on, and then the DVD doesn't look remotely like what you did."

In other words, folks in Schmidlin's line will often run up against a wall no matter how passionate they are (kind of a theme in this forum). Quite honestly, I can't imagine anyone putting up with the headaches and potential heartaches of the field who wasn't extremely passionate about a specific film or film in general, such as yourself. As easy as it is to throw stones at the studio as well, I don't think $500 had much to do with anything. I don't know if it's been posted here before, but there was a nice, concise account of the process EVIL underwent in a journal called Millimeter in 1998: http://industryclick.com/magazin....e=print

Reading that, it's hard to imagine corners that were cut in the restoration, and it strikes me as a little ridiculous to suggest that an operation without a budget would have been preferable. I understand the sentiment, but the reality of it is so much more complicated.

Matthew

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Mathew: My reaction to the article you cite, besides admiration, is to wonder if modern production companies are any more careful with current work than Universal was in 1958. Or in 50 years, will some other group of movie fans be lamenting the foolishness of the moguls of today. They seem to make the same kind of mistake again and again. Only the subjects and the specific processes change.

Glenn.

[Noel Shane]

That's pretty hard to imagine. If they screw the filmmaker today, it's by not letting him/her get it on film in the first place. Anything that's cut from a theatrical release is expected to appear on the DVD, which the studios actually like because it motivates the home video sales. "Director's cuts" now are just contractual agreements; get a cut in under a certain running time for the release knowing that you can have YOUR version on the DVD.

That's why the real crime of AMBERSONS, for instance, isn't the mutilation in the editing and the shooting of replacement scenes behind Welles' back. The crime is the destruction of the cut footage. If you had a time machine, you wouldn't go back and assassinate the executives at RKO. You'd go back and tell Robert Wise to smuggle out all that negative. Get it to safety.