A Few Things Needed For Ambersons

[jaime e marzol]

michael:
thanks for the kind words. there are 2 of us. mteal, myself, and so far the major that runs the ambersons website has contributed material, has looked at different versions, has offered good words, and opinions.

sure, i can send you a copy. and you can repay me by mailing a copy of your copy to the next guy that wants a copy. that would be cool with me. i'm making a copy for harvey, and i have to copy a few other things i need to copy, no problem to make an extra copy to send you.

send address to cinema_vortex@yahoo.com

for any one trying to figure out software, there is a great site, www.vtc.com. video tutorials of all types of software. i learned premiere there and now i'm learning after effects. you can buy the tapes or watch them on line for $25 a month. that's what i do. reading out of software books never makes sense till you've messed with the software first. and that is what the videos do. you watch a guy use it and explain it.

i'm not a partner or spokesman for them. it's just very cool to learn fast, and the videos worked for me.

[Cole]

Jaime,

Do you really think using photographs would have slowed things down too much? I don’t think it would work if the photographs were shown perfectly still, but if they were displayed in motion, with zooms and pans, I think it would look pretty good. They do it all the time in those documentaries on PBS. It would work at least where there are surviving photographs of the missing scenes.

And what are you two doing for voices? I suspect that would be almost the hardest part of trying to recreate the experience of watching the original film. I’ve wondered before if the movie could have been resurrected somewhat with the photographs of the missing scenes, and Welles’s own voice narrating the scenes instead of having new people fill in for the voices of the original actors. With his wonderful voice and his boundless creativity, you think he could have put together a reasonably decent substitute for the original. Maybe I’m way off here.

[jaime e marzol]

cole:
that's exactly what i'm doing with photographs. zooming, panning, etc. what i don't want to do is zoom and pan on storyboards. i'd rather use parts of other films, phonied up stillls, etc. i was going to get a robotic arm to move the photos around, as rick schmidlin did on GREED, but i discovered After Effects, and i think that is a better way to go, for now anyway. this copy we are working on now is the skeleton that the final will be built from, so when we move to making the final copy we know the shape of things, and where we need to go. this is a sort of, 'getting aquainted copy'.

i also toyed with the idea of not using ANY original maaterial to
reconstruct the missing scenes, no photographs, no story boards, but using an artist to create all original pannels to tape. this idea i still find interesting. it would certainly give continuity to the missing scenes. if you know any artists, i would love to try this approach.

THE READING:
soon as my editing computer was built the very first project i put in it was AMBERSONS. i was going to show the missing scenes as scrolling text over washed out copies of storyboards, but the reading was overwhelming. i had contact with mteal, he mailed me a copy of a restoration he had slashed together with 2 vcrs and the laser disc, which is the same way that i had done my first restoration.

i'm watching mteal's tape, and it's good! when it comes to the scene where isabel mopes around her room looking at eugene's letter, and we hear eugene reading it, there was another voice doing the reading, not the eugene's. i e-mailed mteal and asked where that reading came from. he said he did it. that was it; no more scrolling text. mteal had been
promoted, with no pay, to the lofty position of reader, official historian, and slash editor.

one of the first things the major asked when he saw his first drafft was, "who is doing the reading?" that in my mind
confirmed that my first impression was right.

as you can imagine we have made several drafts, and as we move further into the project, mteal is getting more of the flavor of what the original was, and my skills are getting better at piecing the visuals together.

and we really appreciate all this interest. it really adds a sense of worth to the lonely job of putting this stuff together, because it is incredibly time consuming.

[mteal]

Jaime,
Thanks for the compliment about my reading of Eugene's letter to Isabel. Obviously though, we will eventually want to try and figure out a way to seperate Joseph Cotton's voice from Roy Webb's icky hackwork in order to fit it back over Bernard Hermann's original music for this scene. I'm confident that, with your growing computer skills, this will be feasible. Your idea of using an artist to create the missing scenes (for example, animation or paintings) would be the ideal solution, but we would probably need to interest someone with some deep pockets in order to finance that. Hopefully when we get finished, that will happen. In the meantime, I think we're making good progress with our limited resources.

BTW, have you seen the Major's Ambersons site lately? He's made some nice additions to it.

[Cole]

I think what the two of you are doing sounds great. I asked about the photographs of the missing scenes thinking that there were good shots of most everything that was ultimately deleted from the film. Apparently I’m wrong about that. Whether you fill in the gaps with animation, shots from other films, I guess that would depend a lot on the quality of the material you’re able to find or put together.

Is Mteal reading directly from the missing dialog (presumably adding “Fanny said,” “George responded,” etc.) or are you doing a lot of paraphrasing? And no doubt inserting in the deleted parts of the original Herrmann score must enhance the experience quite a bit.

[jaime e marzol]

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

mteal, you never cease to amaze me. you wrote:

"Obviously though, we will eventually want to try and figure out a way to seperate Joseph Cotton's voice from Roy Webb's icky hackwork in order to fit it back over Bernard Hermann's original music for this scene."

i never knew about this. yes, no problem to do.

i was also impressed that you knew where the herrmann score was sped up, where it was replaced. all this herrmann stuff is incredible. like the haunting major's theme! i don't think that is in release print is it?

what we really need now is suggestions of films where we might find a headstone, match cut 6 months later, headstone overgrown.

there are also some scenes by the cold boiler that present an interesting problem. was the dialogue toned down, or just the performance of welles' dialogue, meaning the characters read same dialogue but less hysterical?

--- nah, don't need deep pockets to get an artist. just have to find an artist that is great, and that will work for free because he is passionate about the fim. i think an artist employing one look, one style, might make the restoration more compact, with a more definate tone, not the patchwork of sources that we are working with now.

charcoal on textured paper, dark, bold lines would be ideal.

or we can do the home invasion i suggested some months back on peter bogdanovich's house. we'll storm in and threaten to shoot him in the foot if he doesen't hand over the ambersons stills he has.

legend has it that he has about 300 stills from missing scenes that richard wilson gave him.

[mteal]

Cole,
Yes, I'm reading the dialogue directly from Carringer's Ambersons book. One of the revelations I've found in doing so is how well Hermann's original music for the missing scenes went with the missing dialogue (as the BFI Ambersons book says, "like a duet"). Also for surviving dialogue too. For example, the Major's theme that Jaime just alluded to was from the carriage ride between Jack and The Major ("This town seems to rolling right over that heart you just mentioned, Jack"). That scene was originally longer and had background music that was very effective. I added the original music from the CD of Hermann's original music score to the scene and the transformation was fascinating.

Jaime,
I'm skeptical about that Bogdanovich collection. I would think he would have put them all in TIOW. If not, maybe we can just woo him with glowing praises for Cat's Meow. We do have just about everything we need photo-wise from Lilly though, thanks to major amberson.
That charcoal drawing idea is a very good one. My Aunt, an amatuer artist, did one for me from an Othello still a couple of years ago. It looks beautiful, but it took her a long time. I couldn't trouble her for any more, but I'll send a picture of it so you can see what I'm talking about.

[jaime e marzol]

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

the major and jack's buggy ride with added dialogue, that haunting theme, the major near death, head swaying to the shakes of the carrige, just incredible, very poignant.

[jaime marzol]

new request for ambersons reco:
i realized it's impossible to think back on films we have seen and remember what can fit into ambersons. scouring my brain (didn't take long, like reformating a small hard drive) for turn-of-the-century films that take place in the mid west, i could only think of one, WILD REIVERS, or THE REIVERS, with steve mcqueen. does any one have a copy of this film?

in the near future if any of our members see a film that matches the ambersons time and place, please post it here.

scenes to be done next:
the stable scene
sleigh ride
wilbur's grave
georgie runs out the back door of the kitchen

the dinner scene is set up with an exterior shot of a bustling little town i took from meet me in st. louis, works great; time is moving on outside the mansion, ambersons stuck in time inside the mansion.

[mteal]

Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch takes place in 1914 Texas, and the opening shoot-em-up takes place in a town. Maybe we can show Eugene holding flowers for Isabel, and getting blown away by William Holden.

Seriously, I'm going to check Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, which has a ballroom scene in it that might be of use. I was also going to ask if anyone knew how the song "On Yonder Rock Reclining" went (a tune that Isabel whistles during the missing porch scene). Incredibly, I just found the sheet music online. Is there ANYTHING you can't find on the web these days? In addition to soliciting Bogdanovich for photos, maybe we should also contact Robert Wise to see if he might have taken any little TMA snippets home with him during the massacre.

Speaking of Wise, how's this for irony: at a friend's house recently, I watched parts of the new DVD of Wise's director's cut of Star Trek I. Among the extras were original TV commercials for the film, narrated by none other then...Orson Welles.

[jaime marzol]

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

very funny, when i said to myself, 'movies from the turn of the century', WILD BUNCH is the first film that came into my mind, then like you i laughed. that visual of the mexican general in that early automobile, in that setting, is very memorable. if the times were represented right in both movies, the general's car in WILD BUNCH is from about the time of the factory visit in AMBERSONS.

[mteal]

In that case, we might be able to use the sound from the general's car. Of course, Welles himself plays a Mapache type general in Blood and Guns (aka Tepepa). I think he also has a car - I'll check.

As for Wilbur's tombstone, doesn't the opening scene of Night of the Living Dead take place in a cemetery? Maybe we can show Wilbur rising out of the grave like a zombie. Just a thought. Hey, that reminds me: we should check Val Lewton's horror movies for RKO too, since they were made around the same time with some of the same crew. Might be stuff in there.

[ChristopherBanks]

What about those RKO movies from that same period that someone mentioned use the mansion set?

Also - obviously it is the intention to remove the last two scenes, but what about the other reshot material? The George/Isabel letter bedroom scene? Eugene being turned away for a second time?

[mteal]

The only studio-reshot scene that may have to be retained is Fanny's breakdown at the boiler. It would be futile to try and recreate Agnes Morehead's intensity. The other two scenes you just mentioned are being replaced by recreations of the original scenes. The scene where Eugene gets turned away from seeing the dying Isabel was redone by the studio in order to make Eugene seem less passive and more "assertive". But it creates more confusion because Jack helps turn Eugene away. In the original, Major Amberson asks to see his daughter as the family gathers outside her room. When the doctor in the background motions for him to come in, the major goes to the background as Fanny tells George that Eugene has arrived. George tells Fanny to send him away. This whole scene was in one deep focus shot, reminiscent of Kane. This is one of the missing scenes where Jaime's computer skills and cut-out technique can be most effective.

The scene between George and Isabel will have to be recreated and the dialogue read by me (for now). It's a very sensitive scene and reading it is far from a perfect solution, but it has to be done in order to better grasp the ambiguous nature of their relationship. Besides, this series of scenes in it's original form contained some of Hermann's most exquisite music. Restoring as much of Hermann's work as possible is a very high priority.

[jaime marzol]

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

using the sound of the general's car would be great, we'd see the still of eugene in the old car traveling across the screen, and we'd hear the sound of the general's car mixed in with the sound of whooping mexican rebels, and frightened horses getting out of the path of the car.

wilbur climbing out of the grave is too funny, i'm still laughing at the cheesey visual this could be.

the boiler room scene will not be a problem, since we can't do anything with it.

chris:
one of those films was CAT PEOPLE. there was a ban on building materials because of the war so new sets could not be built. the sap walks simone simone simone home, they enter a brownstone, and the ambersons staircase is inside. they covered it by having the sap say, "never surprises me what you find in these brownstones."