Vanity Fair - Hollywood Stories

T here are two great lost movies in the annals of Hollywood filmmaking, Erich von Stroheims Greed and Orson Welless The Magnificent Ambersons. Neither film is lost in a literal, vanished-and-gone senseboth are available on video, are occasionally screened in theaters, and are highly regarded by film critics (four stars apiece in Leonard Maltins Movie & Video Guide, for example). Rather, their tragic lost status stems from the fact that they exist only in truncated, bowdlerized form, having been wrested from the hands of their visionary directors by studio functionaries who were too craven and bottom-line-obsessed to cut these directors some auteurist slack. Since both films well pre-date the preservationist era of film-as-art-and-heritageGreed was released in 1925, The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942they have suffered the further indignity of being unreconstructible; studios back in those days didnt hang on to excised footage for the sake of future directors cuts on DVD, so the reels upon reels of nitrate film trimmed from the original versions weredepending on which movie youre talking about and which story you believeburned, thrown in the garbage, dumped into the Pacific, or simply left to decompose in the vaults.

Of the two sagas, The Magnificent Ambersons is the more wrenching case of what might have been. Greed, as extraordinary an achievement as it is, comes from the remote era of silent pictures, and von Stroheims original cut exceeded seven hourseven if it could be reconstructed, it would be a chore to sit through, indigestible to all but the most dogged of cineasts. The fully realized Magnificent Ambersons, by contrast, is a more tangible piece of purported great art, a normal-length feature that, some say, would have been as good as or even better than the movie Welles made immediately before it, Citizen Kane. Chief among those taking this view was Welles himself, who in the 1970s told the director Peter Bogdanovich, his friend and sometime interlocutor, It was a much better picture than Kaneif theyd just left it as it was. What it isin the Turner Classic Movies version you can rent, the same version RKO Radio Pictures unenthusiastically dumped into a handful of theaters in the summer of 42is an impressive curio, merely 88 minutes long, a nub of the two-hours-plus version Welles had in mind, with a patched-on, falsely upbeat ending that Welless assistant director, Freddie Fleck, shot under RKOs orders while Welles was out of the country.

To this day, 60 years after it was shot, The Magnificent Ambersons remains a rallying cry for film obsessives, the movie equivalent of the Beach Boys aborted Smile album or Truman Capotes phantasmal complete manuscript of Answered Prayers. But unlike those tantalizingly elusive works, which only ever existed in fragments, the long version of Ambersons really was pretty much finished: Welles and his editor, Robert Wise, had assembled a 132-minute cut of the movie before the studio-ordained hacking began. Its this version, which in Welless view required only some tweaking and burnishing in postproduction, that people are talking about when they talk about the complete or original Ambersons, and its this version that animates the minds of the many cinephiles who hold out hope that somewhere, somehow, the excised footage still exists, waiting to be discovered and reinstated. It is clearly the grail now, says the director William Friedkin, a card-carrying Ambersons buff. A lot of directors I know dream of finding itBogdanovich, Coppola, weve all talked about it. The film preservationist James Katz, who with his business partner, Robert Harris, has restored Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo and David Leans Lawrence of Arabia,likes to tell the story of how he was milling through a film vault in Van Nuys, California, when the 94 Los Angelesarea earthquake struck, sending a canned print of the forgotten 60s historical epic The Royal Hunt of the Sun hurtling toward his headand all I could think was, If Im gonna die, at least let it be from the missing footage from Amber-sons, not Royal Hunt of the Sun. Harris, who is also a film producer, says that in the early 90s he and Martin Scorsese seriously entertained the notion of remaking The Magnificent Ambersons to Welless exact specifications, proposing to go even so far as to have actors like De Niro subsume their identities to the old actors in the film, like Joseph Cotten.

That scenario never panned out, but now one not unlike it has: this January, A&E will broadcast a three-hour telefilm version of The Magnificent Ambersons, directed by Alfonso Arau (whos best known for Like Water for Chocolate) and based on Welless original shooting script. Gene Kirkwood, one of the new films producers, says he first came across the script 10 years ago, when he was allowed access to an old RKO storehouse on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. I sat there and read it cover to cover, he says. When I finished it, I thought, This is the best spec script in town! Kirkwood arranged a meeting with Ted Hartley, the current chairman and C.E.O. of RKO, which is no longer a studio but a production company occupying a modest suite of offices in Century City. While the rights to Welless actual movieand to any extant bonus footage that may be gathering dust somewherebelong to Warner Bros., corporate parent of Turner Entertainment, the most recent acquirer of RKOs frequently resold film library, the remake rights still belong to RKO. Hartley, who had himself been contemplating an Ambersons remake, enthusiastically agreed to Kirkwoods proposal.

O rson Welles, who died in 1985, would no doubt have been pleased by this turn of events, for he saw The Magnificent Ambersons as his Hollywood waterloo, the dividing line between his early boy-genius years (the War of the Worlds broadcast, his Mercury Theatre company, Citizen Kane) and the nomadic, semi-tragic life he led thereafter. His oft quoted epigram on the subjectThey destroyed Ambersons, and the picture itself destroyed meis a bit melodramatic, but its true that the movies ultimate failure, at a loss of $625,000, exacerbated the tensions that had already arisen from Citizen Kanes substantial cost overruns, RKOs Kane-occasioned battles with William Randolph Hearst (who saw the film as an act of character assassination and tried to suppress it), and the Hollywood establishments general resentment of Welles. RKO severed its relationship with Welles in the aftermath of Ambersons, and, with just a few exceptions, he never worked within the mainstream of the movie industry again. He was not, as he put it, destroyedhe would go on to make such accomplished films as