Is RKO at Last Making Its Amends?

It has been called one of Hollywood’s great tragedies, a testament to the studio system’s disdain for true cinematic artistry.

Fresh on the heels of his 1941 masterpiece “Citizen Kane,” young director Orson Welles set to work on his next project, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” an RKO Pictures turn-of-the-century drama filmed in black-and-white about a prosperous Midwestern family whose fortunes decline with the arrival of the automobile and changing economic times.

Had it turned out differently, some believe, “The Magnificent Ambersons” might well have rivaled “Citizen Kane” in brilliance, but it was not to be.

While Welles was in South America working on another project, RKO’s bosses, alarmed by the largely negative response from a rowdy preview audience, ordered the film re-cut, adding new scenes written and shot by others. Although the final version is, in many respects, visually striking, the alterations make the film seem disconnected and choppy and the ending oddly optimistic. The studio later destroyed the extracted footage.

Now Oscar-nominated director Herbert Ross (“The Turning Point”), veteran producer Gene Kirkwood, an Italian production company that wants to establish itself in American entertainment and a reborn RKO are about to answer the lingering question, “What if?”

They have dug into the RKO archives and pulled out Welles’ original 165-page screenplay and will begin principal photography in Ireland this summer on a four-hour television drama of “The Magnificent Ambersons.”

“It’s a wonderful screenplay,” Ross said. “Orson was a genius, [but] I don’t think Orson ever got to make the movie he had in his mind--and we certainly never got to see the movie he had in his mind.”

Ross said, however, that he has no plans to make a shot-by-shot remake, as Universal Pictures did in 1998 when it remade Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, “Psycho.”

“I think that’s pretty defeating for a director,” Ross said. “Since [Welles] did so well, why reproduce faces frame by frame? It doesn’t make sense.”

Ross said that in addition to the film’s being a “sort of homage to Welles,” he wants to “realize the material as I believe he would have wanted to.”

Ross said he not only wants to restore some of the scenes cut from Welles’ film, but he also wants to tap more fully into the book upon which the film was based, Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1918 novel. He hopes to expand, for example, on the Oedipal complex inherent in the relationship between mother and son in Welles’ film. One other major difference: Ross’ film will be shot in color.

*

The project might never have gotten off the ground had it not been for Kirkwood, a colorful Bronx-born filmmaker who spent his early career as an actor, palling around with yet-to-be-discovered talents like Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel.

Kirkwood said he ran across “The Magnificent Ambersons” about 10 years ago when he was searching the RKO library.

“I was going through all their great writers, from Dalton Trumbo to [Clifford] Odets to [William] Faulkner. I remember reading it in the office and then, driving home, I had to pull over to the side of the road and finish the script. I really loved it. Maybe it was the magic of reading Orson, but when you read scripts today, you just don’t read that type of dialogue.”

The producer knew he needed a financier willing to put up sufficient cash for a script requiring nearly 50 speaking parts and a 12-week shooting schedule.

Kirkwood, who executive-produced Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” and co-produced such films as “Ironweed” and “Gorky Park,” eventually found his financier in Guido DeAngelis, who, with his brother Maurizio, owns a Rome-based production company called the DeAngelis Group. The firm has been around for about 16 years, producing television programming in Europe.

“[Guido] said, ‘What do you need to make it?’ ” Kirkwood recalled. “I said, ‘About $12 million.’ And they put it up.” Kirkwood and his partner, Norman Stephens, will produce the miniseries; DeAngelis and Ted Hartley, chairman and CEO of RKO Pictures Inc., will be executive producers. Casting is underway.

Hartley said the project is being bankrolled by Europeans because it was deemed too risky by U.S. distributors.

“The American cable and television networks were afraid to tackle Orson Welles,” Hartley said. “They said, ‘I don’t think we want to touch this. It’s too controversial. We don’t want to be criticized.’

“What we are doing is not taking Orson Welles the director and redoing him; we are taking Orson Welles the screenwriter and the great, wonderful [Tarkington] novel and bringing a great story of that period to modern sensibilities,” Hartley said.

*

Onetime dancer and choreographer Ross made his feature directing debut with “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” in 1969 and earned a reputation as a “women’s director” with Barbra Streisand in “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “Funny Lady,” Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine in “The Turning Point” (which garnered 11 Oscar nominations, including best picture and director) and the 1995 film “Boys on the Side.”

“I haven’t done a picture since ‘Boys on the Side,’ ” Ross said. “That was a movie and a script that I liked and respected a lot. After that, I resolved not to do just anything, which I may have been guilty of in the past. I was holding out for a worthy project. Years have passed, and out of the blue came this screenplay, which was Orson’s screenplay.”

Kirkwood said they chose to film in Dublin because the Emerald Isle retains much of the rustic look of late 19th century-early 20th century American Midwest with its narrow roads and stately manors.

The producer noted that one scene he hopes to capture more vividly than the original did is the town’s first accident involving a car and a buggy.

“I want a horrendous traffic accident,” Kirkwood said. “I want it snowing and I want the car coming around the bend and I want him to hit the horse and push the horse right on top of the buggy, and there’s two babies and a mother in there. It was the beginning of the age before Ralph Nader--not safe at any speed.”

The project comes at a time of renewed interest in Welles by Hollywood. Recent Welles-related productions include “The Big Brass Ring,” based on a Welles script on Showtime; HBO’s Golden Globe-winning “RKO 281,” about the making of “Citizen Kane”; the Tim Robbins-directed feature “Cradle Will Rock,” about a musical Welles directed in the 1930s; and a tribute to Welles’ TV work being mounted by the Museum of Television & Radio.

“The Magnificent Ambersons,” released in 1942, spans the period between 1873 and 1912 and centers on an aristocratic Indianapolis family that is unable to adapt to the societal changes brought about by the invention of the automobile.

It begins with Welles’ own distinctive narration of Tarkington’s prose:

“The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet--and everybody knew everybody else’s family horse-and-carriage.”

Conflict arises when the arrogant son, George (Tim Holt), becomes intensely jealous after his beautiful widowed mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello), resumes a courtship with a former suitor named Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), an enterprising early car maker who, after two decades, returns to his hometown with a grown daughter named Lucy (Anne Baxter).

*

The film contains many memorable images, particularly a ballroom scene at the Ambersons’ richly decorated mansion, with couples gracefully gliding across the floor under crystal chandeliers.

After shooting wrapped, Welles was commissioned by the U.S. government to make a documentary in South America and chose to leave post-production chores to others.

Disaster struck when RKO previewed the film in Pomona. Author Robert L. Carringer, in his 1993 book “The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction,” picks up the story:

“A raucous, largely teenage audience had just been treated to a rousing wartime musical. Now they found themselves confronted with a complex, slow-paced and generally downbeat period drama.” At that point, the author noted, RKO reluctantly decided to take whatever action was necessary to make the movie more palatable to a mass audience.

The original cut had run 131 minutes, 45 seconds, Carringer noted, but the re-cut version ran 88 minutes, 10 seconds.

“The short version received a perfunctory release,” Carringer wrote, “and the picture was retired to the vaults showing a loss of $625,000,” roughly 75% of the total cost of “Citizen Kane.”

Welles’ verdict?

“They destroyed ‘Ambersons,’ ” the great director said in a BBC interview, “and it destroyed me.” *