19-02-2016, 12:10 PM
Quote:that Ambersons cut must be on the seabed somewhere.
Since I'm between multimedia jobs here in Melbourne I was debating setting up a (cheap! - but genuine) Kickstarter or GoFundMe to fly to Brazil, take up lodgings for a month there, and search for it. It's unlikely that I will for the moment due to work and health reasons, but there was a lead.
From Simon Callow's Hello Americans:
Quote:'A curious postcript to the Brazilian adventure is a persistent rumour that the copy of The Magnificent Ambersons - the answer print that RKO had shipped out to him in Rio - is still there. David Kamp in the magazine Vanity Fair traced its progress through the man who was the head of Cinedia, Adhemar Gonzaga, a film collector 'before it was common to be so'. Gonzaga got to know Welles, of course, in 1942. When Welles left, Gonzaga wired RKO to ask what he should do with the copy. They telegraphed him, telling him to destroy it; he duly replied: PRINT DESTROYED. But was it? Gonzaga's daughter, now head of Cinedia, has searched for it but found nothing, though she points out that it may be in there somewhere, mis-filed. Josh Greenberg went to Brazil in 1994 and 1996 and found nothing, but he did meet a man who claimed to have seen it in the nineteen-sixties, after which it disappeared. 'We pursued some leads, even talking about tracking it through gypsies,' says Greenberg, 'but after that we kind of ran out of leads.'
Alice Gonzaga is active on Facebook. It could be done, but I did note a forum post from some guy in Brazil who told the forum "No, it's not at Cinedia", without explaining how or why he was sure. Kermode found the missing scenes from Ken Russell's THE DEVILS after he went to a Warner vault and physically searched for them himself, so stranger things have happened. If any one movie would be enough to make someone try the attempt, it's that one.