Adaptation history Welles first adapted
The Magnificent Ambersons for a one-hour radio drama performed October 29, 1939, by his
Mercury Players on
The Campbell Playhouse, with Orson Welles portraying George Minafer, and providing narration. While Welles supplied narration to the film adaptation, Ray Collins was the only actor from the radio production to appear in the film.
Production history The Magnificent Ambersons was in production October 28, 1941 – January 22, 1942, at RKO's Gower Street studios in Los Angeles. The set for the Amberson mansion was constructed like a real house, but it had walls that could be rolled back, raised, or lowered to allow the camera to appear to pass through them in a continuous take. The film was budgeted at $853,950 but this went over during the shoot and ultimately exceeded $1 million. In a 1973 interview with
Dick Cavett, Moorehead recalled the arduous work involved before filming her climactic scene where she sinks against the unheated boiler. In rehearsal, Welles told Moorehead (who was still a novice to film acting) to "play it like a little girl," a characterization which went against what Moorehead had prepared. Then Welles told her to play "like an insane woman." Following that, Welles told her to play it "like she's absolutely inebriated." Then he said to play with "an absolutely vacuous mind." Moorehead was thinking to herself, "What in the world does he want?" She did the scene 11 times, each with a different characterization. For the twelfth time, Welles told Moorehead: "Now play it." After those rehearsals, her playing the scene had "a little bit of the hysteria, it had a little bit of the insanity, it had a little bit of the little girl…. [H]e had mixed it all up in my mind so that the characterization that I played had a little bit of all of these; and it was terribly exciting." Moorehead continued reflecting on Welles's directorial abilities: "He never directed obviously; he always directed in some strange oblique way where you thought 'Well, that isn't right at all.' But if you put your career or the role in his hands he loved to mold you the way he wanted and it was always much better than you could do yourself. He was the most exciting director that you could possibly imagine." The original rough cut of the film was 131 minutes in length. Welles felt that the film needed to be shortened and, after receiving a mixed response from a March 17 preview audience in
Pomona, film editor
Robert Wise removed several minutes from it. The film was previewed again, but the audience's response did not improve. Because Welles had conceded his original contractual right to the final cut (in a negotiation with RKO over a film which he was obliged to direct but never did), RKO took over editing once Welles had delivered a first cut. RKO deleted more than 40 additional minutes and reshot the ending in late April and early May, in changes directed by assistant director
Fred Fleck, Robert Wise, and
Jack Moss, the business manager of Welles's
Mercury Theatre. The retakes replaced Welles's original ending with a happier one that broke significantly with the film's elegiac tone. The reshot ending is the same as in the novel. Welles did not approve of the cuts, but because he was simultaneously working in Brazil on ''
It's All True'' for RKO—
Nelson Rockefeller had personally asked him to make a film in Latin America as part of the wartime
Good Neighbor policy "Of course I expected that there would be an uproar about a picture which, by any ordinary American standards, was much darker than anybody was making pictures," Welles told biographer Barbara Leaming: There was just a built-in dread of the downbeat movie, and I knew I'd have that to face, but I thought I had a movie so good—I was absolutely certain of its value, much more than of
Kane… It's a tremendous preparation for the boardinghouse… and the terrible walk of George Minafer when he gets his comeuppance. And without that, there wasn't any plot. It's all about some rich people fighting in their house. Welles said he would not have gone to South America without the studio's guarantee that he could finish editing
The Magnificent Ambersons there. "And they absolutely betrayed me and never gave me a shot at it. You know, all I could do was send wires… But I couldn't walk out on a job which had diplomatic overtones. I was representing America in Brazil, you see. I was a prisoner of the Good Neighbor Policy. That's what made it such a nightmare. I couldn't walk out on
Mr. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy with the biggest single thing that they'd done on the cultural level, and simply walk away. And I couldn't get my film in my hands." Due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, their arrival in Brazil was postponed until 2022. As of April 2024, Grossberg continued to search for the film. Filmmaker Brian Rose revealed in January 2021 he hoped to restore the original version of the film by use of animation, but his plan did not have the backing of the rights holder. In the 2020s, Edward Saatchi, through his studio Fable, initiated an experimental project to reconstruct the approximately forty-three minutes of
The Magnificent Ambersons that were cut and destroyed by RKO in 1942, using artificial intelligence trained on surviving scripts, production materials and the existing film. The project, intended as a noncommercial, academic exercise, aims to approximate Orson Welles’s original vision, though it has raised legal and ethical questions regarding authorship and creative restoration. The film features what could be considered an
in-joke: news of the increase in automobile accidents is featured prominently on the front page of the
Indianapolis Daily Inquirer, part of the fictional chain of newspapers owned by mogul
Charles Foster Kane in
Citizen Kane. Also appearing on the front page is the column "Stage News", by the fictional writer
Jed Leland, with a photo of
Joseph Cotten, who portrayed Leland in the earlier film.
Budget The budget for
The Magnificent Ambersons was set at $853,950, roughly the final cost of
Citizen Kane. During shooting the film went over budget by 19 percent ($159,810), bringing the cost of the Welles cut to $1,013,760. RKO's subsequent changes cost $104,164. The total cost of the motion picture was $1,117,924.
Spoken credits The Magnificent Ambersons is one of the earliest films in movie history in which nearly all the credits are spoken by an off-screen voice and not shown printed onscreen (a technique used before only by the French director and player
Sacha Guitry for his 1936 film
Confessions of a Cheat). The only credits shown onscreen are the RKO logo, "A Mercury Production by Orson Welles", and the film's title, shown at the beginning of the picture. At the end of the film, Welles's voice announces all the main credits. Each actor in the film is shown as Welles announces his or her name. As he speaks each technical credit, a machine is shown performing that function. "I got a lot of hell because of that," Welles later said of his verbal sign-off. "People think it's egotistic. The truth is, I was just speaking to a public who knew me from
the radio in a way they were used to hearing on our shows. In those days we had an enormous public — in the millions — who heard us every week, so it didn't seem pompous to end a movie in our radio style."
Welles's 1970s revisit In conversations (1969–75) with
Peter Bogdanovich compiled in
This Is Orson Welles, Welles confirmed that he had planned to reshoot the ending of
The Magnificent Ambersons with the principal cast members who were still living: ==Release==