A Few Things Needed For Ambersons

[jaime marzol]

We need a couple of things for the Mom’s Kitchen Restoration of AMBERSONS. if any of you, with your vast kowledge of film could help, would be great.

I was able to use parts of MEET ME IN ST LOUIS to patch up the ball scene; fanny dancing with uncle jack is actually judy garland and some old coot, with a pixilate effect so we see the big details but not the small ones. I also found a shot that i can use as a wide shot of the amberson’s mansion at night with the porchlights on. it’s close enough to being like a part of the film that no pixilate filter is needed. We need other moments like this from other films that can be used to keep things moving instead of using static shots of story boards. storyboards, original or not, slow things down.

for eugene’s first walk through town we need a scene in a film that shows a dandy, politely making his way down the street of an early turn of the century small town.

Does any one know a film that has what we need for wilbur’s grave scene: it’s the comon thing to show a fancy monument type head stone with flowers. Then cut to 6 months later and the grave is ignored, grass is overgrown. I can put wilbur’s name on the headstone with photoshop and premiere. Perhaps in a hammer film?

This is a tough one: shots of an early 19th century car chugging down the street, and it has the right look to fit in ambersons.

The next scene that will be done is wilbur and lucy after the ball on the ride home, and in the stable. if any one knows the stable scene from carringer book and can suggest a film that can be used to supplement this.

What the ‘borrowed’ scenes need to work is that they are not framed in mediun close, or close shots. Ambersons is almost all full shots.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Jaime,
I admire your valiant attempts to reconstruct Ambersons with limited resources. I'd like to see what you come up with. Seriously.
I suppose if we wait another 60 years, they'll take another run at Ambersons and maybe get it right this time.
In The Bride of Frankenstein, the monster -- going down in flames -- yells to his 'betrothed': "We belong dead."
I'm starting to think that maybe "Ambersons belong unfinished." Unless there is a master copy of the original in a private collection somewhere, in Brazil or Florida.
Perhaps the incompleteness of Ambersons adds to its cachet. It's a cinematic ruin, evidence of a lost civilization, when giants made movies.
Watching the truncated Ambersons is like looking at an old defaced Greek statue with the nose missing and all the painted colors gone, and seeing the artistry still lurking there.
Or gazing upon the ruins of the once great Middle Eastern city of Petra and imagining what the place looked like at the summit of its glory in 250 B.C.
Crazy thoughts brought on by the heat, no doubt.
Cheers.
Harv

[jaime marzol]

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harvey, yes, watching ambersons 'as is' is like looking at a defaced statue.

11 years ago after i got the carringer book, hacked it up, did a slash edit rearrangement of the scenes with 2 vcrs and watched it reading the missing scenes out of folders i was hooked. didn't watch it again for years till i could watch is right.

i'll send you a copy of restoration. you will see as you get further into the tape how the restoration efforts come more and more together. this last attempt i used cutouts and motion feature to tell the story. works well i think. it tells the story.

no matter how much you know about what was taken out, it's incredible watching the narrative, if not the visual, evolve. the effect multipies itself when you see the scenes where they were meant to be. even the score is truncated. and in some cases sped up.

right now waiting for feedback from mteal and the major, their copies are in the mail. it's up to the last ball scene. what i'll do is wait till we get to the sleigh ride scene to send you a copy. 2 or 3 weeks max.

send me address

cinema_vortex@yahoo.com

[jaime marzol]

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harvey:
no master copy of ambersons in florida. wise met welles here with one copy, they did welles voice over at fleischer's animation studio, then wise flew back with it.

for many years i had hoped a copy would turn up in brazil. bogdanovich asked richard wilson about this, and wilson said not likely. every copy they received, after viewing and taking notes, according to legalities, had to be taken outside, torched, and witnessed. and this is what they did.

it's all very sad.

recently i saw A STAR IS BORN reconstruction, and i thought it was a valiant, but terribly failed effort. this ambersons thing is working out much better than that.

this project has been consuming. the most radical editing that i had to do was in the opening, the rest, so far, has been recreating scenes that don't exist, and rearanging footage. the opening, from when the horse drawn streetcar exits frame, to when eugene arrives at the mansion, i had to do a lot of work on. i heard that opening monologue so many times, and every time it becomes more poignant, and just made me feel more determined to keep going with it, even though the possibilities of getting this project out are small.

most of the restoration is being done in adobe premiere. then i got adobe after effects because premiere is more for editing. well, after effects i just realised a few days ago is not the perfect software for what i'm doing, it's great, and is aabsulutely needed for some parts. so i got lightwave, which is a bitching, 3D modeling program. is anybody familiar with lightwave? or after effects for that matter.

i have mastered premiere through video tutorials, now i'm searching for video tutorials for after effects, and lightwave. once i master those, if i get a reverb, i can master the world.

mteal is doing an excellent job doing the reading. the original idea was to have scrolling text but the reading got overwhelming. he also is incredibly knowledgable and knows everything the ambersons needs to return to welles ambersons. even the music cues he knows where they belong, and at what speed they need to be played. he's also done some incredible editing with 2 vcrs! he sends me that on tape then i use that as a map to recreate it in adobe premiere. (premiere has been the work horse of this project)

last week the major e-mailed me that he's going to try his hand at directing the stable scene, i should have that shortly, then we'll move on to the sleigh ride scene. what was taken out of that is one of the most heart breaking parts of the film.

also the ball restoration has taken on an incredible texture with what we put back in. you have georgie striding around the ball acting like a creep, then we put back in scenes of adults confirming that georgie is a creep, and how he's going to get it. it's incredible how it's coming together. that scene where georgie sees guys at the ball from a club he used to belong to but he's not into that type of thing anymore? right before ball, is the FOTA scene! the narrative is tremendous. all we are trying to do is represent the missing chunks with graphic segments that are not boring to look at, and so far it's developing nicely.

[ChristopherBanks]

What about the story of the man who worked at Cinedia in the sixties and had claimed to have seen the rough cut?

[jaime marzol]

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cbanks, that's funny. i always wonder how this type of information survives all these years. where did you read about this guy?

i wish it were true, but with my research on it i would not be placing any bets that a rouge copy of AMBERSONS will turn up. unfortunately all the ends seem pretty well tied on what happened to the copies floating around. and back then copies were on film, very expensive to make, doubtfull they would run off a dozen copies of the film for the involved parties to look at. they worked from one copy, and the next edit was hacked out of the rejected edit.

but this is only my opinion. would be excellent to be proven wrong in the near future.

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

this guy is probably going to pop out of nowhere, someday. as a nobody, and say "i found it i found it. the rest of the welles movie amberson's. hey everybody look what i found."

then he'll be a famous all over the f**king world.

except in my book of course.

bye now

[ChristopherBanks]

It was in the Vanity Fair Ambersons article.

Apparently it was mislabelled, and a few weeks later when he returned to see it again it had vanished.

[jaime marzol]

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i have that vanity fair article, i didn't read that far, will check it out. that certainly is an interesting scenario, a misslabeled print floating around. look at all the footage from IT'S ALL TRUE that survived. sat in a vault for years and no one knew what it was, it just took the right guy to look at it and realize what it was.

the few shots of color footage that appear in the documentary IT'S ALL TRUE, are incredible, innovative, radical, nothing short of breath taking. it's such a terrible loss that welles had such a difficult time working with the people who owned the tools. had he been in his 20's in the hollywood of the early 70's it would have been a different world for him.

[ChristopherBanks]

In some ways, though, the Hollywood of the 70s would not have existed as we know it if Welles' work from thirty years earlier hadn't made such an influential impact on the auteurs that emerged during that period...

[jaime marzol]

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absolutely. i think right from kane through chimes, and f for fake, the filmmakers that worked found their way to his work directly, or through another director. certainly changed the medium. too bad he was not able to thrive and create much more than he did.

[mteal]

Jaime,
You're right about the Star Is Born restoration. The missing scenes don't make any impression because they didn't attempt to do anything with them visually, which is what makes your work on computer so important.
You say every copy of Ambersons sent to Brazil had to be burned with witnesses. That is sad. Reminds me of Rosebud going up in flames. I even keep having this vision of the last copy of the original version burning to the same climactic Kane music.

Harvey,
Your analogy of Ambersons as an old Greek statue with the nose missing and painted colors gone is a good one, but I would add some graffiti to the statue to represent the scenes RKO rescripted and refilmed. I can think of another analogy too, from another film, The Fountainhead. More specifically, the scene towards the beginning of the film where Gary Cooper as Howard Rourke presents his model for a new building to a committee of financiers, who then present their rediculous alterations to it ("The middle of the road! Why take chances when you can stay in the middle?!").

The "mom's kitchen" restoration Jaime and I have been working on is recently complete in rough draft form, with Jaime coming up with some wonderful effects on computer that remind me of Georgio Moroder's 1984 recreation of the missing scenes from Lang's Metropolis. In some ways tho, I prefer to think of what we're doing as more a documentary then a restoration; a documentary designed to show the extent to which the film was altered from it's original form by RKO, thereby giving something of an idea of what Welles' original intentions were. The Magnificent Ambersons deserves no less.

[jaime marzol]

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yes, it is more documentary than restoration. what schmidlin did with TOUCH OF EVIL is more properly called a restoration.

in a very few instances we are doing a restoration when we re-edit footage, but for the most part we are trying to find some way to represent missing scenes so the viewer can experience the original narrative intended. as it stands it's just narratively limp, visually startling.

and it's not that difficult to do. even with our first tape which was just rearanged footage and storyboards with massive amounts of reading it took me on the journey. anything we do can't be worse than storyboards and reading, so we are in good company with moving cut-outs a la monty python.

mteal, that was poignant, the sled and what it meant, being compared to the burning footage of the ambersons.

and harvey is close to mark with the statue comment. isn't there a soot covered statue in the sleigh scene, right before the iris?

[mteal]

Yes, in the original script they drive past a soot-covered statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom (as opposed to her Greek counterpart, Athena - interesting). The satue was not in the original version of the film, however. They drove past soot-covered fences instead. I have no idea why Welles made the change.

[Michael]

jaime marzol,

Let me add my compliments to your Ambersons efforts. I am greatly impressed with your tenacity & persistance! Thanks in advance for all you're doing.'

I too would like to get a copy from you if possible. I guess when you're done with the Sleigh ride scene. I'm a theatre director and would be happy to give you my perspective on it, if you wish. Either way, I'd love to see your efforts.