![]() WELLES: (As narrator) The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. (SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS") NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: "The Magnificent Ambersons" is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports that an Orson Welles superfan is using animation to conjure up the director's lost vision. Welles later said, they destroyed "Ambersons," and it destroyed me. Welles followed it up with another potential classic, "The Magnificent Ambersons." The studio, RKO, didn't think so. SCHMITZ: Of course, that is "Citizen Kane," the 1941 classic, his best-known film. ORSON WELLES: (As Charles Foster Kane) Rosebud. We have an update on one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century, Orson Welles. In the era of TikTok, it's an homage to a wounded film. And he'd love for it to be packaged as part of a Criterion Collection edition. A screening is planned as part of a series at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Rose hopes to eventually share his version of The Magnificent Ambersons with other Orson Welles fanatics. Indeed, he's sunk a considerable amount of his own resources into what he hopes is a respectful and scholarly transformational work. The filmmaker is not going to get rich with this passion project. ![]() "The thought was to beg forgiveness later," Rose admits. There is also a bit of a haze over this project regarding intellectual property rights and how legal it is to be animating this fan version of The Magnificent Ambersons. So even when I do take the artistic license of creating these scenes in animation, they still are referencing they still draw a reference to Welles' original artistic vision." I took for inspiration the original storyboards, which were hand-drawn pencil and charcoal, very ethereal looking, kind of like the world of the Ambersons. "The challenge was populating them with characters. ![]() "Basically, in a 3D environment, I rebuilt all the sets from diagrams and photographs," he continues. "A lot of it was based on photographs and on diagrams of camera placements and descriptions of scenes," Rose explains. Several other Welles enthusiasts have attempted to correct what Kelly calls "the challenge of undoing a cinematic injustice" through various means. Rose is not the first to attempt to reconstruct The Magnificent Ambersons. So that's what he's doing, using animation and voice actors to fill the gaps. ![]() "There is quite a lot that can be inferred from the surviving materials." "Fortunately, the film is remarkably well-documented for a film that was so badly altered," he says. "So Welles' version has been lost to history," Kelly says. RKO burned its silver nitrate negatives to salvage the silver and make space to store other movies. And despite all the studio's re-editing and the unconvincing happy ending, The Magnificent Ambersons was still a massive flop. "Not only that, they took out the ending, which was rather bleak, and replaced it with a very Hollywood happy ending that doesn't seem to fit the mood of the film in total."Īll in all, Kelly says, only 13 scenes out of 73 were left untouched. They cut it down to 88 minutes," says Ray Kelly, who runs the Orson Welles fansite Wellesnet. "The studio took his 131-minute version of The Magnificent Ambersons. But costs kept mounting and RKO studio executives disliked the film's dark take on American aristocracy, especially in the jingoistic era before World War II. He was given a princely budget and built an entire mansion with moveable walls for filming. Welles, who had already adapted the novel for radio, wanted to tell a timeless story about Americans buffeted by unsettling new technology and economic decline through the fortunes of a small town's richest family. The movie is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington. Welles started filming what was intended to be his second masterpiece in 1941, hot from the success of Citizen Kane. Now, a Welles superfan named Brian Rose - himself an accomplished filmmaker - has used animation and countless hours of painstaking research to recreate missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons. Films such as The Lady from Shanghai and The Magnificent Ambersons were drastically changed and cut, altering the auteur's vision. One of the greatest American directors of the 20th century is known for only a few films.Īfter Orson Welles made his masterpiece Citizen Kane in 1941, he fought bitterly with the studios that released his subsequent films - often after they bowdlerized Welles' work.
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