Trivia / The Magnificent Ambersons

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $1.1 million. Box office, $1 million (domestic rentals). Recorded loss, $620,000. Orson Welles had surrendered his final cut privileges to RKO, who promptly re-edited the film when he was away filming a documentary in Brazil. Over an hour's worth of footage was excised and later destroyed to bring the film down from over two hours to 88 minutes. Bernard Herrmann's score was also re-cut against his will and he promptly took his name off the finished film. Welles's reputation was ran through a shredder and he spent the rest of his life doing smaller budgeted films. Even in its edited state, it ranks with Kane as one of Welles's masterpieces.
• Creator Killer: The Magnificent Ambersons, far more than Citizen Kane, ruined Orson Welles' Hollywood career. While Kane had been controversial, it was at least well-liked and admired as a brilliant first film, and it did have a smooth production. Ambersons, however, had a Troubled Production and led to a lot of Poor Communication Kills. While Welles would periodically make some genre pictures to get a foot back in Hollywood, he never regained Auteur License and eventually went to Europe to work as an independent filmmaker on smaller budgets and unstable conditions.
• Executive Meddling: One of the most notorious cases in film history. It's pretty much a tragedy all around.
  • Welles was initially contracted to do a two-picture deal for RKO Pictures with full Auteur License and Protection from Editors. After the controversy and failure of Citizen Kane, Welles chose Ambersons (which he had already adapted for Radio) as his next project. As a token of good faith, Welles surrendered final cut on the film, believing that it was far less topical than Kane and unlikely to cause controversy. Production ran into problems since Gregg Toland, Welles' collaborator on Kane, had to do another film, forcing him to work with Stanley Cortez (a great DP in his own right but at the time a little slower and less experimental than Toland). The collaboration did not work out and the film became delayed. Then Welles was contracted to shoot a documentary in Brazil.
  • Welles' initial cut was submitted to a preview at Pomona (thanks to the trouble the studio went through with Kane). The audience was shown the film at the bottom half of a family musical, and they ended up laughing at it. Editor (and later director) Robert Wise stated that it was the worst preview he ever saw and called it a "disaster" (however cards from the previews showed that at least 10% of the audiences liked the film^note Previews likewise were not seen as a universal barometer at the time; famously, Darryl F Zanuck, after a bad preview of The Grapes of Wrath, insisted that the film be released anyway and it became a hit.). Historian Robert Carringer argued that Welles shares partial blame for this preview's failure, since before the preview he himself had ordered a "big cut" that removed a big section of the film, namely when George bars Eugene from seeing his mother. Being the dramatic and emotional center, the film's rhythm was upset by its absence, at least according to Carringer's study of the shooting script.
  • There was a second preview at Pasadena which was based on reactions to earlier previews. Wise even restored scenes which Welles cut for the first preview. This played much better. However, RKO didn't want to take a chance and cut nearly a hour's footage (131 minutes to 88 minutes), reshot several scenes and added a new ending. Wise spent years insisting that his cut was superior, but Welles regarded it as a travesty and Bernard Herrmann was likewise appalled at his musical score being cut, asking for his name to be taken off from the credits. In the end RKO burned the footage to save vault space, despite producer David O. Selznick's suggestion to send it to the Museum of Modern Art, since he felt it was a masterpiece.
  • Overall the production suffered from Poor Communication Kills. Carringer points out that Welles was very well shepherded and protected during the making of Kane by producers like John Houseman (with whom Welles had a falling out) and also George Schaffer (the embattled studio chief of RKO who gave Welles his contract). When he made Ambersons, in the wake of the controversy of Kane, Welles had to finally confront normal studio politics which he didn't deal with previously, and his youth and lack of experience in the same played a part in the film getting out of his hand, while Schaffer in turn was facing an internal coup over his support for Welles.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Neither RKO nor Warner ever sold this movie on DVD until 2011, during the 70th anniversary of Citizen Kane.
• Missing Episode: The original cut, as well as the hour or so raw footage that was excised for the final release, is lost forever - and we do mean forever; the excised footage was rendered for the silver nitrate. It's been said that Welles received a copy of the original cut, but where it is right now, if it actually happened, is anybody's guess.
• Playing Against Type: Prolific Western star Tim Holt as George.
• Reality Subtext: Robert Carringer in his "The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction" argues that this was a very personal film for Welles.
  • Welles' own father was an automobile investor and had a troubled marriage with his wife, with young Welles torn between his mother who was cultured and fascinated by art and literature and inculcated the same values to her son, and had a reputation as someone who married beneath her, while her father was a bohemian would-be entrepreneur who was a hustler and apparently engaged in infidelities. He argues that Welles saw George Minafer as a darker version of the young Welles and the relationship between Minafer's mother and Eugene Morgan as a version of his parents' romance. Minafer as a Spoiled Brat too tied to his parents to cut loose, is the kind of person Welles could have been had Welles not been shephered by Richard Hill, his mentor and became a prodigious artist.
  • Welles was aware of the personal connection to the story so much so that he would boast that Booth Tarkington, who he had met as a young man, based Minafer on him, which Carringer considers classic projection. He also notes that Welles felt guilty about the personal nature which is why he cast Tim Holt to play George Minafer rather than cast himself in the role. Carringer also argues, controversially, that it is out of guilt for this personal nature, that Welles asked Robert Wise to cut the dramatic centerpoint of the film, George preventing Eugene from meeting Isabelle, for the Pomona preview which Carringer argued upset the film's rhythm greatly.
• Screwed by the Network: Welles' original cut of the film was over two hours and featured a different ending but the studio took it out of his hands.
• Troubled Production: Though still regarded as a classic, the film is held up as an example of how Executive Meddling can ruin a film beyond all recognition. Welles later said, "They destroyed Ambersons, and 'it' destroyed me."
  • Production itself finished two weeks behind schedule and over $200,000 over budget. The director of photography for Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland, was unavailable, and Welles had a less fruitful relationship with his replacement, Stanley Cortez. Full sets were designed and built for every scene in the film, even the very briefest; as a result, the ratio of set cost to total production budget was higher than it was for Gone with the Wind. Though the film is set in Indianapolis, it was filmed in and around Los Angeles, which meant the studio had to get creative for winter scenes; it took twelve days to perfect the snow effects, and once they began shooting, the cameras and other equipment kept breaking down in the cold. Many cast and crew members (with the notable exception of Welles) came down with head colds as a result. The noisy cameras and cranes also ruined sound recording, forcing the cast to re-dub all of their dialogue at a total cost of $25,000 (more than three times the dubbing budget) as Welles rebuffed suggestions that the equipment noise be sorted out at the source.
  • But worse was to come in post-production; Welles had to leave for Brazil at RKO shareholder Nelson Rockefeller's behest to shoot an anthology film called It's All True to promote the Good Neighbor Policy for US-South American relations.^note  It's All True was ultimately left unfinished after RKO pulled the plug on production, with some of the film re-used by stock footage libraries and over 200,000 feet, mostly from the Welles-helmed segment "Carnaval", thrown into the Pacific Ocean in the 1960s/1970s. The film's editor, Robert Wise, edited the film from Welles' notes and sent him a 132-minute rough cut; Welles sent back instructions to cut a further 22 minutes.^note  Film historians note that among the scenes Welles ordered cut were a pivotal scene in which George prohibits Eugene from seeing Isabel, Eugene's former sweetheart and George's mother, when she is on her deathbed, and point to this as evidence that Welles didn't always know best when it came to his own films. As for the rough cut, it is sometimes claimed that it is still in Brazil somewhere, but if this is true, it has never been found. The 110-minute version was given a disastrous test screening in Pomona in front of an audience of mostly teenagers who had come to see the musical The Fleet's In; the audience laughed during the dramatic scenes, especially those featuring Agnes Moorehead in her Oscar-nominated performance as Fanny, and said on their comment cards that they found the film too depressing, especially the ending in which Eugene visits a now withdrawn Fanny in a crowded boarding house that is revealed in the final shot to be the former Amberson mansion (though 10% of the comment cards were positive; one praised the film and said it was too bad the audience was so unappreciative). RKO chief George Schaefer described it as the worst preview screening he had attended in 28 years in the film business.
  • A second screening in Pasadena (with Welles' 22 minutes of cuts restored by Wise and smaller cuts made elsewhere to make up the difference) was much more well-received by the audience, but panic had already set in at RKO, who decreed that the film would have to be re-cut. Unfortunately for Welles, he was still in Brazil, and as he had ceded control over editing as a gesture of good faith during his contract negotiations with RKO, the editing process was delegated to a team led by Wise, studio exec Jack Moss, and Joseph Cotten, with Wise ultimately handling the lion's share of re-cutting the existing footage and re-shooting scenes (including the new happy ending) to smooth over the changes. Welles was horrified when he heard the film was being re-cut in his absence and begged RKO to send Wise to Brazil with the film so that they could re-cut it together, but wartime travel restrictions made this impossible. A direct line to Welles' hotel room in Rio de Janeiro was put into Moss' office, but Cy Endfield later recalled that Moss wouldn't answer his phone when it rang in case it was Welles with more instructions, and when Welles tried sending lengthy telegrams, Moss threw them away without reading them.
  • All told, between 40 and 50 minutes of Welles' version of the film were cut.^note  Producer Bryan Foy is rumoured to have said that if they had to cut 40 minutes, they should just throw the footage in the air and then grab all but 40 minutes. Worse, the cut footage was destroyed, ostensibly to free up space in the RKO vault, but it is speculated that the true reason was to keep Welles from restoring the cuts upon his return. The changes did nothing to save the film at the box office, where it posted a $600,000 loss (a fortune for a small studio such as RKO). Bernard Herrmann was so angered at the cuts to his score for the film that he had his credit removed under threat of legal action. Welles was even more disgusted, describing the film as having been "edited by a lawnmower", and fell out with Cotten and Wise as a result of their roles in the film's butchery, although he forgave Cotten a few years later after the latter wrote him several letters of apology, and he reconciled with Wise while accepting a DGA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984.^note  Sources differ on Welles' views on the film later in life. He was reputed to have watched the film in a hotel room with friends in the 1970s, and said that while he didn't like the ending, he thought it was still a good film; on the other hand, director Henry Jaglom (a protégé of Welles) said he persuaded him to watch a commercial-free broadcast on cable in the 1980s, and that while Welles was fascinated for the first hour, he then switched off the set and said, "From here on it becomes their movie."
• What Could Have Been: In The '60s and The '70s, Orson Welles tried to interest studios in funding him for a project that would reshoot all the missing footage with surviving cast and crew. Welles believed that with make-up and the right sets, he could seamlessly match new footage with the existing cut. He also tried to attract attention for a full remake with a new cast, based on his script but again found no takers.

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