check this out citizen kane check this out - citizen kane check this out citizen kane

[jaime marzol]

..............

well, on 2 web pages that i go to, the news spots that are always reserved for news on iraq, that decaprio guy, or wynona ryder, mention welles' daughter suing for the film. i guess that makes it official now.

that warners reaction was odd. "we've always had a good working relationship with beatrice, i'm sure we can resolve this amicably." that doesn't sound like they are sure she has no ground to stand on.

[Jeff Wilson]

It should be noted that the RKO reaction was conciliatory; Warners' may be different, depending on their attitude toward defending their properties. I'm sure if this were Disney, for example, they'd fight to the bitter end. But Warner may just just give her the go-away money too.

[dmolson]

Well, let's all save our sheckles for the 2004 re-release of Citizen Kane on DVD, a brightly scrubbed video presentation with a new soundtrack -- Beatrice's compositions, as produced by David Foster...

[jaime marzol]

she might visit here undercover. don't give her any ideas.

i saw no reason to rerecord the othello sound track other than for the press. if they wanted stereo, i have this bogus feature on my surround sound unit, it says simulated stereo. i can make fats waller sound hi fi. it's not a big deal to make mono sound like stereo.

having that antiseptic digital score under a deliberately archaic, barbaric looking film just doesn't jive.

[Jeff Wilson]

The sad thing is, she could have released the film as it was, with minimal clean-up, strike new prints, and claim that she had rescued it from oblivion and people still would have been wowed, given the film's relative obscurity in America before then. And she could have saved some cash for more lawsuits.

[dmolson]

I hope a possible result isn't a scenario that I fear the most: Beatrice's litigation just puts Warners' eventual plan to release The Magnificient Ambersons (of which there has been no announcement yet) on the farthest backburner they can find -- since if they may lose the property or piece of profits from its dvd release, why would they invest in it?
It could just end up in a long, winding legal maze that wastes more time and leaves fewer fans in its wake. And Beatrice's track record has been spotty when it comes to delivering to her father's fans completed pieces of his legacy.
Personally, I think we've got a better chance of seeing a premium TMA release through our own Dr. Marzol, who has toiled so hard on it that OW himself would be grateful, no doubt...

[Welles Fan]

I agree that "more Beatrice" = "less good Welles on video".

This reminds me of the problem of Chaplin's films reverting to the Chaplin Estate. Over the years, some beautifully remastered Chaplin films have appeared on VHS, LaserDisc and DVD. Now that the Estate owns the rights to them all, Chaplin is going out of print. The Image DVDs are out of the catalog, and when they return, they will apparently not return in the remastered versions on the Fox LDs and Image DVDs.

For instance, Chaplins longer short films with First National (The Pilgrim, The Idle Class, Shoulder Arms, A Dog's Life) will only be available in the slowed-down versions supervised by Chaplin in 1960's as "The Chaplin Revue" (Chaplin had some of the frames repeated to slow down the action and make them more "realistic" looking to modern audiences. The result is a collection of draggy, jerky films that cease to be funny). Also, Killiam's restoration of the original Gold Rush with intertitles and a piano score will no longer be sold, and only Chaplin's 1942 re-issue with sound, narration (and cuts) will be available.

I expect the Estate does not want to share any potential royalties with the people who did the resorations of the films in the 90's, so they are using the versions that are owned by them outright. I fear that Beatrice owning Kane and Ambersons would result in a similar situation as the Chaplins, or at least of Othello, so I am not real jazzed about this. If, as Jeff says, they pay her a royalty, I agree w/dmolson that it will shove Amvbersons even further back on the schedule.

[colwood]

(I don't want to go off topic of Welles, so I'll be brief.)

I think you may be mistaken Welles Fan, but what the Chaplin Estate is doing may not be as bad as what many of us fear Beatrice will end up doing.

If memory serves correct, the Chaplin Estate is working with, or possibly sold the rights to, the Roy Export Company on Chaplin's feature films. The announced plan is to release them through MK2 (a WB unit?) as remastered DVD versions with some extras and each accompanied by a related documentary. The first title released was the Great Dictator in France. It included the "Tramp and the Dictator" documentary that aired on TCM last fall. The Region 1 US version is supposed to be released sometime this summer. All his features will gradually follow and I heard somewhere that when the Gold Rush is released, it will include both the 1925 silent and the 1942 narrated versions. Of course how these "remasterd" versions will compare to the already released versions on VHS, DVD, and LD, I am not sure.

Of course, if I am mistaken on the above information, I stand corrected.

[Welles Fan]

I finally stumbled over the news about Chaplin's films that I mentioned earlier. It was from alt.movies.silent, and was a post by David Shepherd, who did the restoration work on the Chaplin: A Legacy of Laughter laserdisc series for Fox. These versions were later ported over to the Image DVDs, which are now out of print. You can read the sad news about the upcoming fate of these films here.