Tomorrow everything would be gone.

July 10, 1942 –
Orson Welles’s butchered masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, was released by RKO Pictures on this date.

After a disastrous preview—which took place a week after the Pearl Harbor attack—it was clear to the executives at RKO that the film was too long, too dense, and too somber. Orson Welles, however, had decamped to Brazil, where he was in the midst of working on a film called It’s All True, which was never completed. Welles had been sent there under the auspices of Nelson Rockefeller, one of RKO’s chief shareholders, to make a film intended to boost U.S.–South American wartime relations. With Welles out of the way, however, the onus of recutting and trimming the film fell on editor Robert Wise.

Like El Dorado or Shangri-La, a work print of Welles’s version supposedly exists in a vault somewhere in Brazil—tantalizingly, just out of reach. TCM has sponsored an exhaustive search of a major Brazilian film vault.

But wait: all is not lost. A Welles superfan named Brian Rose—himself an accomplished filmmaker—has used animation and countless hours of painstaking research to recreate missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons. Rose hopes eventually to share his version of The Magnificent Ambersons with other Orson Welles enthusiasts.

Edward Saatchi, CEO of Fable Studio, is going one step further. He is leading a noncommercial project that uses generative AI to reconstruct the lost 43 minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons. Using surviving scripts, stills, and live-action doubles, Saatchi’s team aims to recreate the footage originally cut and destroyed by RKO in 1942.