just keep playing the game, bro
On Orson Welles, studio politics, real cancel culture, dumb rich guys, movie magic, artistic flair, fascists, The Magnificent Ambersons...
History has this way of flattening its most fascinating characters into a list of accolades and accomplishments. Take someone like like Orson Welles. I mean, what do you really know about him? You probably know his infamous broadcast of War on the Worlds, how it tricked some listeners into believing an alien invasion was really happening. And you probably know his first film Citizen Kane — how it’s recognized as one of the greatest films ever made, revolutionizing the medium and influencing generations of filmmakers for a century.
But if I asked you to name his second film, the movie he allegedly poured his whole essence, his very soul, into could you?
It’s called The Magnificent Ambersons and here’s what Welles said about it a decade later: “They destroyed Ambersons and the picture itself destroyed me.”
“They” is the old movie studio RKO Pictures, who notoriously cut and reshot a different ending for Ambersons without the knowledge or approval of Welles. Why? Because in their estimation, Ambersons was depressing as hell, too tragic for American audiences in 1942, after the country had just entered WWII. So they shot a happy, feel-good ending instead. The movie bombed anyway and Welles’s contract with RKO was terminated. And you may be tempted to think — oh, here is another case of art vs. commerce, the artist unable to submit their vision to the necessity of business.
But this is not that kind of story. This is a story about power and about misunderstanding and ignoring the rules of the game.
First, you have to understand what a unique position Welles was in — so unique, in fact, that no director, no artist, has been granted the same level of power before or since in Hollywood. Before joining Hollywood, Welles was a theater star, the head of his own troupe called the Mercury Theater, renowned for reinventing existing material in innovative ways — for Macbeth, he transported the action from the Scottish Highlands to a fictional Caribbean island, and recruited an entirely Black cast (in 1936!). Voodoo MacBeth, it was called.
But his biggest trick was his production of Julius Caesar the next year. He stripped the stage of all sets and decoration and with the costumes and avant-garde lighting summoned the sensibility of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. “He staged it like a political melodrama that happened the night before,” said Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna the Poet in the play.
For that he landed on the cover of TIME, back when that meant something, and Hollywood came calling. Welles denied them. They offered more money and he denied them again. “I didn’t want money, I wanted authority,” Welles said. “So I asked the impossible hoping to be left alone. At the end of a year’s negotations, I got the impossible.”
At only 23 years old, Welles was given complete creative control to direct three pictures with exclusive say to the final cut of each film. So total was his power that RKO Pictures studio executives were BANNED from the editing room and daily rush screenings (the piece of film shown at the end of a day’s work). Only when the movie was ready for release could they watch it. Not so secretly, RKO sent spies to set to understand where their money going.
But he lost that power on his second film. He lost it because Citizen Kane evoked the wrath of William Randolph Hearst, presumably who the film was based on. (More likely, it was a composite of historical figures, including Samuel Insull and Robert McCormick, Welles himself, and so on.) Without ever watching the movie (!), Hearst ran the largest smear campaign in film history. He banned all mention of Welles and his movie from his national syndicate of newspapers and periodicals. The only mention of Welles in a Hearst product was from Louella Parsons, Hearst’s most vicious gossip columnist, who dug up every scrap of dirt on Welles and spread nasty rumors about him. Hearst also banned, for a time, any mention or advertisement for any movie made by RKO Pictures. He then ordered movie theaters under his conglomerate not to show Citizen Kane under any circumstance; another chain of 500 theaters also refused to screen Kane for fear of invoking Hearst’s wrath.
Cancel culture ain’t got nothing on Hearst, boy.
But despite massive critical acclaim — “it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood,” wrote the New York Times in 1941 — Citizen Kane was a commercial disappointment. To convince RKO to make his next movie, Welles gave up his right to final cut, believing the studio would still honor his artistic vision. It was one in a series of moves that Welles would rue until his death. “My regrets are as countless as the sands of the desert,” he later said.
Production wrapped in early 1942 and with editor Robert Wise Welles developed a 132-minute preview cut. Welles knew the film needed work but didn’t stick around to oversee its post-production. Instead, he flew to Brazil, appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador by RKO chairman Nelson Rockefeller to film a documentary on the Rio Carnival as part of FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy.
What a fool, you may think, finish the job. But remember, this is smack in the black heart of WWII, world peace and order hanging precariously in the balance, and Nazi associates are slowly infiltrating and proliferating across South America in aim of global domination. Welles considered it his duty to do his part.
Besides, Welles held a personal allegiance to FDR (he helped write jokes and speeches for him and publicly supported him on the campaign trail). That’s because, perhaps more than any artist, Welles was the beneficiary of FDR’s Works Progress Administration in the 1930s — New Deal legislation that funded public works (like roads and buildings) and various art projects. That money supported the production of Welles’ early theater work — with Welles himself supplying the rest of the necessary funding through his $1,500 a week radio earnings. “Roosevelt once said that I was the only operator in history who ever illegally siphoned money into a Washington project,” Welles said.
Shortly after, management at RKO also shifted. Welles’ biggest supporters like Rockefeller departed the company, leaving him in the crosshairs of two executives — George Schaefer and Charles Koerner. Recall that insane contract Welles received to join Hollywood? Well, many industry folks resented, even hated, Welles for it, and few drew his ire more than Koerner. Already pissed that Welles had gone $200,000 over budget and months over schedule, the execs demanded Welles recut and trim Ambersons from its 132-minute run time.
But Welles refused. “The film should be released my way or not at all,” he wrote in a memo.
So RKO staged a preview screening of Ambersons, practically designed to fail. For its preview audience RKO paired Ambersons — a sullen picture about the slow demise of a small-town Midwestern bourgeois family and the death of a certain version of the American Dream — as the second half of a double feature with the saccharine Betty Hutton musical Fleet’s In, full of dancing sailors and lovely dames.
Out of 113 audience member reactions for Ambersons, 61 came back negative:
I don’t see why in times of trouble, bloodshed and hate, movie producers have to add to it by making dreary pictures.
Too morose.
Too much gloom.
Too many weird camera shots.
Orson Welles must have been frighted when young. He’s so morbid.
RKO was hurting financially and needed to make a return on their investment quick. So the executives worked with Robert Wise to rapidly produce something they could sell to audiences. His control slipping and thousands of miles away, Welles desperately tried to steer the process, all while shooting his Carnival documentary. But his efforts were to no avail. Instead, another smear campaign was leveled at him, this time by RKO — rumors that Welles was constantly drunk in Brazil and sleeping around with local women on the studio’s dime, all the footage he shot useless.
“The reaction was he’s just shooting a bunch of jigaboos jumping up and down,” Welles said. In reality, he was showing crowds of black and white people getting along, joyous in song and dance, a sadly dangerous message for a studio to promote in 1940s America.
Eventually, RKO cut over 40 minutes of the film and shot a new ending — a tacky, feel-good scene that reassured audiences the Ambersons lived happily ever after. The movie lost major money at the box office and RKO used it all as an excuse to terminate its contract with Welles, permanently shelving his Carnival documentary, too. Welles was never given major funding for his movies again by Hollywood and instead had to reinvent himself as the prototype of the modern indie filmmaker, once again too ahead of his time for his own good.
But what’s most upsetting about all this, why director Peter Bogdanovich labels this “the greatest artistic tragedy in the movies,” is the reaction Ambersons received in a less-publicized second screening. This time, there was no double feature, and the movie screened as Welles originally intended.
Out of 85 audience reactions, 67 were positive, full of ringing endorsements:
Definitely 10 times better than Citizen Kane.
Yes, I think it was the best picture I have ever seen.
No word at my command can express the emotion that this story has aroused in me.
Orson Welles is the most tremendous director of the day. This is by far one of the finest pictures I have ever seen.
Perhaps most painfully, RKO erased the 45 minutes of the original film stock from its archives to free up space, eliminating any possible restoration or director’s cut.
What remains of the film illustrates its potential greatness. The opening act is some of the most tremendous storytelling I have ever seen and has gone on to influence contemporary filmmakers like Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums does not exist without The Magnificent Ambersons). There is loads Welles could’ve done differently — he could’ve collaborated with execs more, done more to reduce the target on his back, been more corporate, buttoned-up. But that insolence, that true artistic flair so sorely missing in 21st century corporate art, is partly why I love him.
“Are you ever afraid that you in a sense attempted and tried too much?” a BBC interviewer asked Welles over a decade later. “You’ve done radio and films and —”
“I don’t think I’ve attempted enough and I don’t think anybody does,” he said. “I think it’s an age of terrible specialization. I think everybody has many more capacities than they have the gall to try out. I regret how little adventuring I’ve done, not how much.”
It’s true Welles faced massive obstacles his whole career. As Roger Ebert once wrote, “Orson Welles can make better movies than most directors with one hand tied behind his back. His problem, of course, is that for 35 years the hand has remained tied.” Still, he never stopped trying and, more importantly, he never allowed that playful trickster inside him to die — that devilish entrance in 1949’s The Third Man and his whole magician’s act in 1973’s F is For Fake is proof of that.
And maybe it really is that simple, sometimes. When the world keeps knocking you down, just keep playing the game, bro. You only lose if you quit.