During the fall of 2021, filmmaker Joshua Grossberg and his team searched Brazil over a six-week period for a copy of the fabled, lost longer cut of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.
The team tracked down leads on the whereabouts of the footage as part of their upcoming TCM documentary The Lost Print: The Making of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons. The filmmakers combed through various archives, interviewed collectors and pieced together the puzzle that may reveal the existence or ultimate fate of the missing print.
At the time, Grossberg told Wellesnet he planned to return to South America to resume work on the project. That time is at hand.
“We are filming in São Paulo next week and that will wrap up production for the most part,” Grossberg told Wellesnet today. “And we are excited to finish post production, most likely by end of summer.”
The documentary will detail the hunt for the print and the story of Welles’ fall from grace in Hollywood.
If a copy of the 131-minute rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons somehow still exists, the print would likely be in Brazil.
With editing underway on Ambersons, RKO ordered Welles to Brazil in February 1942 to direct the ill-fated It’s All True. According to RKO memos and cables, two groupings of Ambersons footage (14 reels and another 10), as well as 10 reels of Journey Into Fear, were shipped to Brazil so Welles could finish editing the film. However, after a test audience reacted badly at a preview, RKO ordered a happier ending to be shot in Welles’ absence and cut the movie down to 88 minutes.
The excised footage and outtakes stored in RKO’s vault in Southern California were subsequently destroyed.
More than two years after Welles left Brazil, RKO instructed Cinedia Studios in Rio de Janiero, which Welles used as a base in 1942, to junk the reels of The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey Into Fear left behind. Cinedia owner Adhemar Gonzaga, a cineaste and film collector, notified RKO he had followed their orders.
During a trip to Brazil a quarter of a century ago, Grossberg met Michel do Esprito Santo, an archivist and film collector, who claimed to have seen a Welles print in a film can at Cinedia, though he could not confirm it was The Magnificent Ambersons. The archivist searched for it later, but it was gone — possibly trashed or sold to a private collector.
Grossberg has been tracking down collectors and searching archives in South America.
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