Pop Culture 101 - THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

The Magnificent Ambersons has become one of the great lost films in Hollywood history. To this day there are people who firmly believe that Orson Welles's original cut of the film exists somewhere.

While working for Desilu Productions, which had bought the old RKO lot, director Peter Bogdanovich discovered a cutting continuity for the film's 132-minute version along with stills from many of the cut scenes. This became the basis for Robert L. Carringer's The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction, published in 1993.

The last best hope for finding a print of the film¿s original version is the print sent to Welles while he was in Brazil. Although there are legal records indicating that it was destroyed in the mid-`40s, film scholar Josh Grossberg, who tried to locate it, spoke with a man in Brazil who claimed to have found it in a mislabeled film can in the '60s, only to have the material go missing after he had screened it.

In the early '90s, film preservationist Robert Harris and director Martin Scorsese tried to work out a way to re-shoot the footage cut from the film with contemporary actors impersonating the original cast members.

Director Wes Anderson has cited The Magnificent Ambersons as a direct influence on his own tale of tangled family relationships, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

In 2002, the A&E network premiered a three-hour version of The Magnificent Ambersons based on Welles's original shooting script, which producer Gene Kirkwood had discovered in the RKO storehouse ten years earlier. Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate-- 1992) directed a cast that included Madeleine Stowe, Bruce Greenwood, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Jennifer Tilly. The program was not well received critically.

by Frank Miller