Dave Kehr's blog (where you'll find some of the best discussions about film on the web) is sub-titled "reports from the lost continent of cinephilia." As far as I'm concerned, the Holy Grail of the lost continent of cinephilia is the vanished footage from Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons." (You know the legend: The studio re-shot and re-cut the film to make the ending more, uh, "upbeat" while Welles was off in Rio shooting Carnival footage for "It's All True." The discarded portions of Welles' "Ambersons" were lost -- possibly dumped into the ocean.) Well...
At MUBI, Doug Dibbern has composed a magnificent meditations called "Cinephilia, the Science of Hope, and the Sacred Ground beneath the Grapeland Heights Police Substation in Miami, Florida" in which he fantasizes about obscure objects of desire -- movies seen and unseen (and perhaps unseeable) -- including the lost "Ambersons."
Dibbern begins with Dario Argento fantasies and works his way to Ambersons and a police station in Florida:
["Ambersons" editor Robert] Wise met Welles in Miami on February 5, 1942, at the cartoon studio that the Fleischer Brothers had built a few years earlier to escape their union troubles in New York. They spent the day together watching a rough cut (without music or sound effects and missing some scenes) and recording Welles's beguiling voice-over narration ("George Amberson Minafer walked homeward slowly through what seemed to be the strange streets of a strange city. For the town was growing... and changing. It was heaving up in the middle incredibly. It was spreading incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky."). In March, RKO shipped Welles (now in Rio) a new 110-minute version of the film that incorporated all the changes he'd made with Wise a month earlier. It seems that this cut was the same version that was previewed in Pomona to famously negative reviews (though Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out that while the majority of that audience's preview cards were negative, some people in the theater that night wrote that the movie was "an exceedingly good picture," "the best the cinema has yet offered," "a masterpiece," and "the best picture I have ever seen."). The unruly teenage audience unnerved George Schaefer. Meanwhile, Robert Wise was unexpectedly unable to overcome State Department restrictions on wartime travel to meet Welles in Brazil. A pall had settled over the earth. If one stopped at the corner of Sunset and Vine and listened carefully, one could hear them: a flock of invisible vultures the size of battleships hovering over Los Angeles, circling in an infinitesimal descent. The mutilation of the movie that Welles later claimed was better than "Citizen Kane" had officially begun.
The print that RKO sent Welles in Rio may be the closest thing to a definitive version of the movie that ever existed (Wise also assembled a 132-minute version for a later preview in Pasadena, which many scholars seems to think would have been the better film). The Rio print had all of Welles's corrections to the version he'd seen in Miami, including all the sound effects, his narration, and Bernard Herrmann's score. For those scholars and cinephiles who still believe that the original film may turn up one day, it is this Rio print that offers the last, best hope.
But Dibbern has imagined another scenario in which Welles has an epiphany and buries the cut footage on the grounds of the Fleischer animation studio. In Dibbern's version:
He leaped into the projection booth, grabbed the 35mm canisters, and climbed down a spiral staircase that descended into the basement. And there, beneath the rooms where men were touching up sketches of Popeye as he dragged Olive Oyl from Bluto's clutches, Orson Welles bent over and dug. With his hands he dug. On his knees he dug. There, in a shallow hole, he buried "The Magnificent Ambersons." [...]
Welles always intended to return and dig the film up, of course. The Fleischer Studios broke up soon after he and Wise were there and the building was sold off. After Howard Hughes dissolved RKO, Welles almost made the journey, but the disputes over the ownership rights to various arms of the company frightened him off. Then, years later, the legal battles over "The Other Side of the Wind" convinced him that the movie was better off where he'd left it.
I've found the old Fleischer Studio's address. Yes, the building is still there. In 2007, Miami-Dade County turned it into a police station. You can find it on Google Maps. Sometimes late at night when I'm feeling the chill of the world, I stare at the image of the Miami Police Grapeland Heights Substation and feel calm. My rational mind knows that the story I've concocted is false, but my heart tells me that The Magnificent Ambersons is still buried there. Its presence there gives me hope. Welles never went back, but even on his deathbed he knew that someday, maybe hundreds of years hence, "The Magnificent Ambersons" would find its way back to us. I believe it, too.
Read the entire piece here.
(tip: Matt Zoller Seitz)
19 Comments
I still remember the first time i saw Ambersons in a Welles/Renoir film class. that very same week i also saw for the first time Chimes at Midnight and Grand Illusion and Rules. man, there isn't much i wouldnt give to have those feelings again. Thanks for pointing this out. it's nice to think that maybe somewhere out there a more complete version of the film still exists to be found.
"Some movies were better than I expected, some worse, but let’s be clear: I’m not talking about the experience of watching a movie and being disappointed. I’m talking about the notion that when you see a movie that you loved but hadn’t yet seen, you’ve erased an aspect of your identity that once nourished you. Each of those four movies either fulfilled or frustrated my expectations, but by seeing them I diminished myself as a human being. There was a void now where once those movies used to breathe."
That's a very dangerous way of being a film fan. I don't feel you should have that strong of a connection to a film BEFORE having seen it. Yes, it's understandable that there are some films in which you will create an idea of what it will be like before seeing it, and that you may think you will love a film before you actually see it.
But Kerr is not merely in love with these films but obsessed with them. And obsession is a dangerous path in any area of life. See the documentary Cinemania as evidence of what obsessing over films can lead to.
Maybe someone will invent a machine that be hooked up to Robert Wise's brain and extract the memory of watching the original cut, then convert it into digital images and sound.
You never know.
The reality of the lost footage of "Ambersons" creates the kind of exquisite pain only a ravaged cine-geek can feel, especially when viewing the film itself and seeing the film almost literally disassemble itself before our eyes.
I hope it's not hundreds of years before this footage is found - I'm 33 and hope within my lifetime I'm able to treat myself to this pleasure. I've kind of grown into a masochistic love with what we are able to have in "Ambersons", so viewing a complete film would be an odd experience for sure!
I'm right with every tormented word of Dibbern's fantasy, but beware we aren't heading down the road of Scottie in "Vertigo" - chasing an elusive fantasy that, if the most perfected realization of our dream comes forth in the form of a rusty, dented tin can, we aren't left with the crushing, overwhelmed sensation that "The Magnificent Ambersons" is still incomplete...
This is fascinating, Jim, but one should be thankful for small mercies.
Think of all the films that are lost (Murnau's FOUR DEVILS for example), the silent films that are shorn of original soundtracks or indeed the films that never were - for which scripts are written and ideas created but which were never given the green light.
It's sad how one's (unique) vision may be walled in or even crushed by others. Needless to say there may have been films 'improved' by such interference.
To think, how they never made a movie of "Napoleon."
At least we have Kubrick's screenplay and pre-production research available. But that's hardly a movie, is it?
There is one strand of hope to which we can all cling: it is known that a workprint of Welle's version was sent to him in South America. What happened to this print is the subject of conjecture.
Considering the miraculous recovery of "Metropolis" it could be just as possible the fabled workprint is in an archive somewhere as well.
Unfortunately, many of the archives are understaffed, underfunded, and chock full of cans of film that would have to be examined. IN the case of Metropolis, despite suspicions they had the long cut, it was literally YEARS before anyone was able to get access to the print to view it. It is rather a mess!
But there is hope, however slim!
Having learned the story of the lost footage before having seen the film, I still can't bring myself to watch Ambersons. I hold out hope that the footage will be found and I'll be able to see it as Welles intended.
Heartbreaking.
Both on and off topic, there's an awesome short story that was published on the Asimov's Science Fiction website a few years ago called "Impossible Dreams" that imagines a video store where you can get every movie never available, including The Magnificent Ambersons, David Lynch's Return of the Jedi, Casablanca starring George Raft, and more.
It's offline now, but the Wayback Machine has it still: http://web.archive.org/web/20070422075939/http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0704/Impossibledreams.shtml
I really enjoyed reading this story when I finally got around to it. I just hope Pete and Ally don't wind up discovering that they have, um, incompatible equipment.
Spider Pit from King Kong. That's my holy grail.
There is hope. They just found the 18 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey that Kubrick cut after the disasterous preview it had in a salt mine. We may never see it...and Kubrick cut it because he considered it...at the last...superfluous. But, it was found.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for Ambersons but it seems like we may finally get to see The Other Side of the WInd:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/23/orson-welles-last-film-release
I second the recommendation of the short story "Impossible Dreams" that deals in part with the lost version of Ambersons. It's available in print in the collection "Hart & Boot & Other Stories" by Tim Pratt.
I remember finally seeing Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" almost a year ago in the comfort of my home, and amazed by the first half of the film, I no doubtedly declared this film better than "Citizen Kane".
But then I got to the final act of the film, and that is where everything fell apart. The noticable change in mood and how the delicate and steady rythmn of the film was interrupted and forever altered to give the film a more "upbeat" ending.
There was no way this film could have had a happy ending, but there it was. I began looking up what had happened to the original film and discovered what the studio had done, how Robert Wise was part of the re-editing process and of how Welles never spoke to him again.
I still hope and dream that all the rumors are true -- that Welles had been sent the original film when he was in Brazil, and that he hid it from the studio. One day, maybe like "Metropolis", this footage may be found in my lifetime...
Anyone know where I could find the lost original ending to The Shining?
Unless the footage does turn up, the next best thing would be if someone were to do a shot-for-shot remake (a la Gus Van Sant and "Psycho") -- and then film the original ending and the missing scenes from the screenplay in (an attempt at) Welles' style. (I haven't seen Alfonso Arau's 2002 film, but it sounds like that doesn't count. Among other things, I read that he did veer off from the original screenplay).
It would be essential that the look of the film, especially the cinematography, were as close to the original as possible. Still, it shouldn't be a copy -- the actors shouldn't be chosen because they look the most like Cotten, Moorehead, Holt et al., and they shouldn't just mimic them. There should be some freedom there, but still that they should act in a way that is consistent with Welles' style, and with the general tone of the original scenes.
For the missing scenes, the filmmakers could study other Welles films, especially the ones of that period ("Kane," "The Stranger," "Lady for Shanghai") to find similar scenes to apply the technique used to the missing parts. If the missing scenes were variations on earlier scenes, it would be especially important to look for similar relationships between scenes from other Welles films (such as how he related the different scenes in the newspaper office in "Citizen Kane.") It would take a great director to attempt this, who is secure with his or her own body of work -- but still who would want to stick their neck out? Also, what studio would back it?
But hopefully, whatever the result, if it was done in an earnest way, as a labor of love, it should be admired at least as a noble attempt to somehow restore something that has been lost. Well, I'm just indulging in some fantastic imaginings. But, going with that -- it would be beautifully ironic if someone did this, considering that Welles made "F is for Fake." Wasn't one of the questions that Welles raised is that if one emulates a master (even if it is an out-and-out forgery, which this wouldn't be), and it is good enough that it can compare to that of the original master -- is it any less valid as art? (Speaking of "F is for Fake" -- the ultimate twist would have have been if it had turned out that Welles wasn't the director, just the front man who narrated it and signed his name, so to speak, as the director in the credits!)
I am also thinking of how Michael Haneke remade "Funny Games," with the same set design, music, editing and shots, except in English. As he put it, the dramaturgy was essentially the same, but the difference was with the actors and their performances. I've seen both films, and think that they stand on their own. I know that Jim was very critical of the remake, but if I recall correctly, it was more on moral grounds. (Actually, I wouldn't watch either film now - since for personal reasons my feelings about violence in movies has changed since I saw those films -- but that's beside the point). But I cite the example of those films to show that a director filming "Magnificent Ambersons" could follow the dramaturgy of the original, and create something that wasn't meant to eclipse the original, but could still stand as a worthy companion work (like it was somehow born out of the original, as its inspiration). Well, again, this is all just a big what-if.
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