A new ver­sion of The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons restores Welles’ vision

At the tail end of last year, we pub­lished a rank­ing of every fea­ture film direct­ed by Orson Welles. Top of the pile was The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons, which tells the sto­ry of an aris­to­crat­ic Mid­west­ern fam­i­ly who strug­gle to main­tain their lofty social posi­tion amid the rapid changes of the late 19^th cen­tu­ry. Yet despite its ele­vat­ed stand­ing among con­tem­po­rary reap­praisals of Welles’ work, Amber­sons is among the most noto­ri­ous ​‘what ifs’ in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma thanks to its trou­bled pro­duc­tion history.

With his fol­low-up to Cit­i­zen Kane, Welles intend­ed to prove that he was no one-hit wun­derkind. But RKO reject­ed his vision, deem­ing it unpalat­able to a gen­er­al audi­ence. Fol­low­ing a cou­ple of inaus­pi­cious test screen­ings, the stu­dio reshot sev­er­al key scenes in Welles’ absence and enlist­ed Robert Wise to over­see an exten­sive re-edit, final­ly releas­ing a trimmed down, decid­ed­ly breezi­er cut of the film in July 1942 to mixed reviews.

The film’s rep­u­ta­tion may have grown over time, but Welles was bad­ly wound­ed by the expe­ri­ence; his career recov­ered, but he arguably nev­er again reached the artis­tic pomp of Kane. Now, almost 80 years on, The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons is being restored to its full 132-minute glo­ry.

Over the past two years, film­mak­er Bri­an Rose has been qui­et­ly recon­struct­ing the film using sur­viv­ing footage, frame enlarge­ments, archival inter­views and var­i­ous oth­er doc­u­ments includ­ing Booth Tarkington’s source nov­el and Welles’ own script. ​“What is unusu­al about Amber­sons is how well doc­u­ment­ed it is,” Rose tells LWLies. ​“There exists a cut­ting script which record­ed the pre­cise dura­tions of every shot, as well as descrip­tions of cam­era place­ment and move­ment, the actions of the actors, their dia­logue, and music cues. One can read it and know, for exam­ple, that between two sur­viv­ing shots of char­ac­ters in con­ver­sa­tion there was an addi­tion­al 15-sec­ond shot con­tain­ing a cut line of dialogue.”

There have been numer­ous attempts to sal­vage Amber­sons over the years, most notably by Roger Ryan who Rose cites as an inspi­ra­tion hav­ing first viewed his rework­ing dur­ing a sem­i­nar on Welles at South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty back in 2008. But as Rose points out, most recon­struc­tions rely on still frames from a film’s pro­duc­tion; George Cukor’s A Star is Born, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Tod Browning’s Lon­don After Mid­night were all restored this way. So what hap­pens when the footage no longer exists, and what makes Rose’s project any dif­fer­ent to those that have come before it?

“The pre­vi­ous efforts at a recon­struc­tion were work­ing with­in the lim­its of the tech­nol­o­gy that was avail­able at the time,” Rose says. ​“They could pan and scan and zoom in on pho­tos and artist ren­der­ings, and use actors to read the miss­ing dia­logue but that was it. You couldn’t con­vey the dynam­ics of the scenes, what the cam­era was doing, how the action was framed. You can’t con­vey the silence that per­me­ates the film, which serves as a cru­cial ele­ment in a sto­ry con­cerned with the break­down of com­mu­ni­ty and relationships.”

After exten­sive­ly study­ing the orig­i­nal mate­ri­als, Rose realised that it was pos­si­ble to not only accu­rate­ly recre­ate the sets but also to pop­u­late them with the prin­ci­ple char­ac­ters and light them just as cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Stan­ley Cortez would have done. His secret weapon was ani­ma­tion. Hav­ing com­plet­ed the bulk of his research, Rose began ren­der­ing the sets in 3D using com­put­er ani­ma­tion soft­ware onto a dig­i­tal scan of a print he owns, lat­er adding the actors using a tech­nique com­mon­ly referred to as a pen­cil test or ani­mat­ic, and pro­vid­ing his own voiceover to fill in the miss­ing dialogue.

“Around 45 min­utes of miss­ing footage had to be recre­at­ed from scratch,” explains Rose, ​“and to this end the entire third floor of the Amber­son man­sion, as well as size­able por­tions of the first and sec­ond floors, were rebuilt and lit, with pre­cise cam­era moves and hand-drawn char­ac­ters fill­ing the scenes in close har­mo­ny to the doc­u­ment­ed orig­i­nal. I am now hav­ing schol­ars and Welles author­i­ties exam­ine my work, to check for errors or mis­takes, which I will then cor­rect before begin­ning the work of refin­ing the ani­ma­tion and bring­ing the recon­struc­tion to a com­plet­ed form.”

Rose likens the entire process to the Japan­ese art of kintsu­gi, where repairs are incor­po­rat­ed into the ​“life” of an object so that the work can be appre­ci­at­ed as a whole with­out eras­ing the evi­dence of its his­to­ry. As such, while the first draft is very much a work in progress (pic­ture a seam­less, sophis­ti­cat­ed ani­mat­ed sto­ry­board), it is nonethe­less fas­ci­nat­ing to see the high degree of fideli­ty Rose has been able to achieve thus far. It’s not sim­ply a case of fill­ing in the gaps but restor­ing part of the essen­tial fab­ric of the film.

Though he still has some way to go, Rose hopes that his com­plet­ed recon­struc­tion will be the most impor­tant Welles’ project since The Oth­er Side of the Wind. To that end, he’s keen to secure dis­tri­b­u­tion so that the wider film-lov­ing pub­lic, not just the Welles die-hards, will be able to expe­ri­ence The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons in its entire­ty – the way it was intend­ed. ​“I want to boost the pro­file and the inher­ent val­ue of this film,” he says, ​“which has for a long time been regard­ed as a stepchild to Cit­i­zen Kane, and described in one way or anoth­er with words of damn­ing praise like ​‘flawed mas­ter­piece’. I hope that this recon­struc­tion will once and for all remove the ​‘flawed’ from that description.”

Fol­low the jour­ney of Rose’s recon­struc­tion at amber​son​pro​ject​.com