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There are two great "lost" movies in the annals of Hollywood filmmaking, Erich von Stroheim's Greed and Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons. Neither film is lost in a literal, vanished-and-gone sense—both are available on video, are occasionally screened in theaters, and are highly regarded by film critics (four stars apiece in Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide, for example). Rather, their tragic "lost" status stems from the fact that they exist only in truncated, bowdlerized form, having been wrested from the hands of their visionary directors by studio functionaries who were too craven and bottom-line-obsessed to cut these directors some auteurist slack. Since both films well pre-date the preservationist era of film-as-art-and-heritage—Greed was released in 1925, The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942—they have suffered the further indignity of being unreconstructible; studios back in those days didn't hang on to excised footage for the sake of future director's cuts on DVD, so the reels upon reels of nitrate film trimmed from the original versions were—depending on which movie you're talking about and which story you believe—burned, thrown in the garbage, dumped into the Pacific, or simply left to decompose in the vaults.
Of the two sagas, The Magnificent Ambersons' is the more wrenching case of what might have been. Greed, as extraordinary an achievement as it is, comes from the remote era of silent pictures, and von Stroheim's original cut exceeded seven hours—even if it could be reconstructed, it would be a chore to sit through, indigestible to all but the most dogged of cineasts. The fully realized Magnificent Ambersons, by contrast, is a more tangible piece of purported great art, a normal-length feature that, some say, would have been as good as or even better than the movie Welles made immediately before it, Citizen Kane. Chief among those taking this view was Welles himself, who in the 1970s told the director Peter Bogdanovich, his friend and sometime interlocutor, "It was a much better picture than Kane—if they'd just left it as it was." What it is—in the Turner Classic Movies version you can rent, the same version RKO Radio Pictures unenthusiastically dumped into a handful of theaters in the summer of '42—is an impressive curio, merely 88 minutes long, a nub of the two-hours-plus version Welles had in mind, with a patched-on, falsely upbeat ending that Welles's assistant director, Freddie Fleck, shot under RKO's orders while Welles was out of the country.
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To this day, 60 years after it was shot, The Magnificent Ambersons remains a rallying cry for film obsessives, the movie equivalent of the Beach Boys' aborted Smile album or Truman Capote's phantasmal complete manuscript of Answered Prayers. But unlike those tantalizingly elusive works, which only ever existed in fragments, the long version of Ambersons really was pretty much finished: Welles and his editor, Robert Wise, had assembled a 132-minute cut of the movie before the studio-ordained hacking began. It's this version, which in Welles's view required only some tweaking and burnishing in postproduction, that people are talking about when they talk about the "complete" or "original" Ambersons, and it's this version that animates the minds of the many cinephiles who hold out hope that somewhere, somehow, the excised footage still exists, waiting to be discovered and reinstated. "It is clearly the grail now," says the director William Friedkin, a card-carrying Ambersons buff. "A lot of directors I know dream of finding it—Bogdanovich, Coppola, we've all talked about it." The film preservationist James Katz, who with his business partner, Robert Harris, has restored Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and David Lean's *Lawrence of Arabia,*likes to tell the story of how he was milling through a film vault in Van Nuys, California, when the '94 Los Angeles–area earthquake struck, sending a canned print of the forgotten 60s historical epic The Royal Hunt of the Sun hurtling toward his head—"and all I could think was, If I'm gonna die, at least let it be from the missing footage from Amber-sons, not Royal Hunt of the Sun." Harris, who is also a film producer, says that in the early 90s he and Martin Scorsese seriously entertained the notion of remaking The Magnificent Ambersons to Welles's exact specifications, proposing to go even so far as to "have actors like De Niro subsume their identities to the old actors in the film, like Joseph Cotten."
That scenario never panned out, but now one not unlike it has: this January, A&E will broadcast a three-hour telefilm version of The Magnificent Ambersons, directed by Alfonso Arau (who's best known for Like Water for Chocolate) and based on Welles's original shooting script. Gene Kirkwood, one of the new film's producers, says he first came across the script 10 years ago, when he was allowed access to an old RKO storehouse on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. "I sat there and read it cover to cover," he says. "When I finished it, I thought, This is the best spec script in town!" Kirkwood arranged a meeting with Ted Hartley, the current chairman and C.E.O. of RKO, which is no longer a studio but a production company occupying a modest suite of offices in Century City. While the rights to Welles's actual movie—and to any extant bonus footage that may be gathering dust somewhere—belong to Warner Bros., corporate parent of Turner Entertainment, the most recent acquirer of RKO's frequently resold film library, the remake rights still belong to RKO. Hartley, who had himself been contemplating an Ambersons remake, enthusiastically agreed to Kirkwood's proposal.
Orson Welles, who died in 1985, would no doubt have been pleased by this turn of events, for he saw The Magnificent Ambersons as his Hollywood waterloo, the dividing line between his early boy-genius years (the "War of the Worlds" broadcast, his Mercury Theatre company, Citizen Kane) and the nomadic, semi-tragic life he led thereafter. His oft quoted epigram on the subject—"They destroyed Ambersons, and the picture itself destroyed me"—is a bit melodramatic, but it's true that the movie's ultimate failure, at a loss of $625,000, exacerbated the tensions that had already arisen from *Citizen Kane'*s substantial cost overruns, RKO's Kane-occasioned battles with William Randolph Hearst (who saw the film as an act of character assassination and tried to suppress it), and the Hollywood establishment's general resentment of Welles. RKO severed its relationship with Welles in the aftermath of Ambersons, and, with just a few exceptions, he never worked within the mainstream of the movie industry again. He was not, as he put it, "destroyed"—he would go on to make such accomplished films as *The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil,*and Chimes at Midnight—but it's fair to say that the Ambersons debacle set Welles on the path to becoming the person he's most remembered as today: the rotund raconteur of Merv Griffin appearances and Paul Masson wine commercials, an entertaining has-been, forever trying to scrounge up financing from European film companies and individual investors for some pet project that, in the end, wouldn't come off. Furthermore, the circumstances surrounding the butchery of The Magnificent Ambersons—he had already moved on to Brazil to begin work on his next film, the ill-restore his 1973 film, the ill-fated It's All True, while the editing of Ambersons was still going on in Los Angeles—launched his reputation as a filmmaker with completion anxiety, a tag that would dog him increasingly as later movies either took years to get done (Othello, Mr. Arkadin) or lay on shelves unfinished (It's All True, Don Quixote, The Other Side of the Wind). "The myth started that he couldn't finish a movie," says the director Henry Jaglom, Welles's closest confidant in his final years. "He said to me repeatedly that anything bad that happened to him in the next 30, 40 years derived from Ambersons."
And so there's an added poignancy to the A&E remake, and to the hopes and yearnings of those who believe the original version may somewhere still exist: it's about not just restoring a film but also redeeming a man. "If somebody had a sense of what was at stake, they might have secreted away a copy," says Friedkin. "Like Theo van Gogh's wife kept all of Vincent's paintings and got dealers to store them in warehouses when no one, no one, wanted to buy a van Gogh. You hope that there's a Mrs. van Gogh out there."
It was through Friedkin, more or less, that I first learned of the breadth and depth of Ambersons obsession in cinephile circles. A few years ago, while working on another story, I became acquainted with a film-restoration producer named Michael Arick, who was helping Friedkin restore his 1973 film, The Exorcist (a big success in re-release last year). Arick mentioned to me that Friedkin spoke frequently of his desire to find the missing Ambersons footage. The director has an office on the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood, a chunk of which, bounded by Gower Street and Melrose Avenue on its western and southern sides, is the former Desilu Studios lot, which, before Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball bought it in 1957, was RKO's main lot. As Arick told it, Friedkin wanted to check the old RKO/Desilu vaults at Paramount to see if there were some canisters of Ambersons film sitting around that no one had noticed before. This wasn't as unlikely a notion as it sounds: in the early 1980s, a stack of film cans marked BRAZIL was discovered in these same vaults, and turned out to contain footage Welles had shot in Brazil for the abortive It's All True project—footage that had long been presumed to have been destroyed. These materials subsequently became the centerpiece of a documentary feature released in 1993 entitled It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles.
If anyone had the pull to gain access to the vaults on the Paramount lot, it was Friedkin; his wife, Sherry Lansing, is C.E.O. of the studio. But when I called him to ask if he wanted to undertake an Ambersons search with me tagging along, he demurred. He was happy to talk about the movie, he said, but he didn't want to embark on a publicized search that would likely turn up nothing, "and end up looking like fuckin' Geraldo opening up fuckin' Al Capone's vault."
Anyway, I soon learned that there have been several Ambersons searches over the years (more on which later) and that, though nothing's been found and the trail grows ever colder, there are still people out there who believe. Among the most ardent is a man named Bill Krohn, the Hollywood correspondent for the venerable French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma and a co-writer-director-producer of the '93 version of It's All True. "Look, It's All True wasn't supposed to be there, and it was," he says. "Film history is smoke and mirrors. You just never know."
Why anyone thought The Magnificent Ambersons would have bright box-office prospects is a mystery. The basis for the movie was Booth Tarkington's 1918 novel of the same name, a nuanced, elegiac story of a genteel Indianapolis family's inability to come to grips with the societal changes wrought by the advent of the automobile; as the times pass them by, their fortune crumbles and their "magnificence" is no more. While it's rich material—indeed, the novel won Tarkington the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction—it lacked the lightning-rod immediacy of Citizen Kane's media-baron subject matter, and wasn't exactly the kind of lighthearted fare that moviegoers were clamoring for as they sought diversion from the Great Depression and the United States' recent entry into World War II. Welles, in fact, had not originally intended to make The Magnificent Ambersons his second film—it was a fallback choice. He'd planned to follow up Citizen Kane with a movie based on Arthur Calder-Marshall's 1940 novel, The Way to Santiago, an espionage thriller set in Mexico. When that project ran aground for a variety of logistical and political reasons, George Schaefer, the RKO studio chief, suggested a less ambitious espionage thriller that he already had in development, Journey into Fear. Welles agreed to this idea, but not for his next film—Journey into Fear was a basic genre picture, an insufficiently grand successor to Kane, and something more dazzling and far-reaching would have to come between the two films.
Welles's Mercury Theatre troupe had done a radio adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons for CBS in 1939, with Welles himself playing George Amberson Minafer, the spoiled third-generation scion whose rash actions hasten the demise of the Amberson dynasty. It was a terrific production (which, if you can somehow get your hands on a laser-disc player, you can hear on the special edition of The Magnificent Ambersons released by Voyager), and precisely the kind of low-budget masterstroke that led Schaefer to believe that this East Coast theater and radio prodigy was worth signing to a two-picture deal. Welles had been just 22 when he, with John Houseman, founded the Mercury Theatre in 1937. By the following year, his innovative productions of the classics had landed him on the cover of Time, and he'd persuaded CBS to give him a weekly dramatic radio series, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. Just four months into that program's run, Welles's fame grew to international proportions on account of his "War of the Worlds" broadcast hoax, which convinced a panicked U.S. citizenry that Martians were invading New Jersey. So by 1939, Schaefer was all too happy to commit to a deal in which Welles would write, direct, produce, and star in two feature films, each to be in the $300,000-to-$500,000 range. If that wasn't enough to stir resentment in Hollywood, given Welles's tender age and lack of track record as a filmmaker, then Schaefer's pledge of near-total artistic control—including the right of final cut—was. "Orson had come out with the damnedest contract that anybody ever had," says Robert Wise, who was RKO's in-house film editor during Welles's time there and went on to become the acclaimed director of West Side Story and The Sound of Music. "So there was a kind of resentment of him in town, this young genius coming from New York, going to show everyone how to make pictures. When Kane was up for all these Academy Awards—in those days they were done on the radio, out of the Biltmore Hotel downtown—every time there was an announcement of the nominees for a category, when it was Citizen Kane, there would be boos from the [industry] audience."
Citizen Kane, despite the ecstatic reviews it received, was not a financial success—it was too ahead of its time to connect with a wide commercial audience, and too technically ambitious to come in at the prescribed budget. (Its total cost was $840,000.) Furthermore, Welles had turned out just one picture in his two years under contract, having squandered much of the first year developing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness that never got off the ground. So by the time of The Magnificent Ambersons, Schaefer was no longer willing to be as indulgent as he'd been. At his urging, Welles signed a new contract specifically for Ambersons and Journey into Fear in which he yielded his right of final cut to the studio.
The Magnificent Ambersons' story, as adapted by Welles from Tarkington's novel, works on two levels: first, as a tragic tale of forbidden love, and, second, as a what-price-progress lament on how the buzzy, clamorous 20th century ran roughshod over the bucolic, leisurely 19th. The plot is set in motion when Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), an old flame of Isabel Amberson Minafer's from her youth, returns to town in 1904 as a middle-aged widower and successful automobile manufacturer. Isabel (Dolores Costello), the still-beautiful daughter of the richest man in town, Major Amberson (Richard Bennett), is married to a dull nonentity, Wilbur Minafer (Don Dillaway), with whom she has raised a holy terror of a son, George (Tim Holt). The smug, college-age George, who is inappropriately close to his mother and considers automobiles to be a loathsome fad, takes an instant dislike to Eugene, but falls for his pretty daughter, Lucy (Anne Baxter). When Wilbur Minafer dies, Eugene and Isabel rekindle their old romance. George doesn't immediately catch on, but as soon as he does—thanks to the whisperings of his father's spinster sister, Fanny Minafer (Agnes Moorehead)—he and are forced to give up their home, the grand old Amberson mansion. As George faces a life of reduced circumstances in a city where the Amberson name no longer carries any weight, he finally realizes how wrong he was to keep his mother and Eugene apart. Then, while out walking, he suffers a fateful injury when struck by, of all things, an automobile; Lucy and Eugene go to visit him in the hospital, and at last, George and Eugene, both sadder but wiser, bury the hatchet.
Welles's cast, pictured mucking around convivially in the behind-the-scenes stills that survive, was an appealingly odd mix of ace Mercury Theatre regulars (Cotten, Moorehead, and Collins, all of whom give the performances of their careers) and left-field choices, particularly where the Ambersons themselves were concerned. Though he was still in his 20s, Welles felt he was too mature-looking to play George on film, so he turned the role over, improbably, to Holt, best known for playing cowboys in B-picture Westerns and, later, for playing Humphrey Bogart's sidekick in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Bennett was a retired stage actor whom Welles had admired as a youth, and whom he'd tracked down, he later said, "out in Catalina in a little boarding house … totally forgotten by the world." Costello was a silent-film star and ex-wife of John Barrymore, whom Welles coaxed out of retirement especially for the film. The presence of Bennett and Costello—he with his white mustache and 19th-century thespian's bearing, she with her Kewpie-doll curls and milky complexion—was a bit of prescient postmodernism on Welles's part. They were living artifacts of a more graceful American past, and with their characters' deaths, two-thirds of the way into the film, so ended both the magnificence of the Ambersons and Indianapolis's age of innocence.
Schaefer's hopes for smooth sailing on the picture were borne out by the advance footage he screened on November 28, 1941, a month into the shooting schedule. Impressed by what he saw, which included the already completed Amberson-ball sequence, now renowned for its virtuosic camerawork and gorgeous mansion interiors, he made encouraging noises to Welles. Principal photography on the movie wound up on January 22, 1942. Wise, who viewed the rushes of each day's shooting as they came in—and who is, in all likelihood, the only person alive today who has seen the movie in its original form—says, "We all thought we had a smashing picture, a marvelous picture."
Even in its current, mutilated state, The Magnificent Ambersons is, in stretches and flashes, the marvelous picture Wise remembers. For starters, its relatively unmolested opening sequence is among the most enchanting ever committed to film, beginning with Welles's dulcet, radio-style narration, condensed from Tarkington's opening pages:
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-andcarriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare …
Welles's narration continues over a brisk succession of faintly mocking scenes illustrating the antiquated mores and fads of this vanished society ("Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian; the crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf, and hence was 'ready-made'"); inside of three minutes, you're fully briefed on the halcyon world you've entered. Right afterward, the plot is launched no less ingeniously, with a tricked-up interplay of narration and dialogue that's every bit as propulsive as the fake "News on the March" newsreel that opens Citizen Kane. When we learn from Welles's narrator that the townspeople hoped to live to see the day when the bratty George "would get his comeuppance," we cut immediately to a woman in the street saying, "His what?," and a man responding, "His comeuppance! Something's bound to take him down, someday, I only want to be there." Six or seven minutes in, you feel like you're watching the best, most stylish family-saga movie epic ever made. Which, perhaps, it might once have been.
The trouble with The Magnificent Ambersons began, though no one foresaw it as trouble at the time, when the State Department approached Welles in the late autumn of '41 about making a film in South America to promote goodwill among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. (With the war on, there was concern that the South American countries might ally themselves with Hitler.) The proposal was the brainchild of Nelson Rockefeller, who was not only a friend of Welles's but a major RKO share-holder and Franklin Roosevelt's coordinator of inter-American affairs. Welles, eager to oblige, had just the right idea: he had for some time been toying with the notion of making an omnibus documentary film called It's All True—indeed, it was yet another of his "in development" projects that was causing Schaefer anxiety—and he thought, Why not devote It's All True entirely to South American subjects? RKO and the State Department gave this idea their blessing, and it was decided that one segment of the film would be devoted to the annual carnival in Rio de Janeiro. There was only one problem: the carnival would be taking place in February—precisely when Welles would need to be in The Magnificent Ambersons for the Easter release date that Schaefer was counting on. So a reshuffling of plans was in order.
The reshuffling went as follows: Welles would turn over the directing chores of Journey into Fear to the actor-director Norman Foster, though he would still act in that film in a supporting role; Welles would finish as much editing and postproduction work on Ambersons as possible before departing for Brazil in early February, whereupon he would supervise further work from afar through cables and telephone calls to a designated intermediary, Mercury Theatre business manager Jack Moss; and Wise would be sent down to Brazil to screen Ambersons footage and discuss possible cuts and changes with Welles, and would implement these changes upon his return to Los Angeles. It was an insanely demanding plan for Welles, who spent much of January directing Ambersons by day, acting in Journey into Fear by night, and devoting his weekends to the preparation and broadcast of his latest CBS radio program, The Orson Welles Show—all the while contemplating the It's All True project in the back of his mind. But Welles was known for keeping several irons in the fire, constantly juggling stage productions, radio shows, lecture tours, and writing projects, and the whole scheme proved, for January at least, to be workable.
In early February, Wise hastily assembled a three-hour-long rough cut of The Magnificent Ambersons and took it to Miami, where he and Welles—passing through en route to Brazil from a State Department briefing in Washington, D.C.—set up shop in a projection room that RKO had reserved for them at Fleischer Studios, the facility where the Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor cartoons were made. For three days and nights, Welles and Wise worked around the clock on fashioning a quasi-final version of Ambersons, and Welles, in his bedraggled state, recorded the film's narration. Their work was to continue in Rio, but the U.S. government threw a wrench in their plans: due to wartime restrictions on civilian travel, Wise was denied clearance to go to Brazil. "I was all set, I had my passport and everything," he says, "and then they called and said, 'No way.'" (Welles, as a "cultural ambassador," had special dispensation.) And so, says Wise, "the last I saw of Orson for many, many years is when I saw him off on one of those old flying boats that flew down to South America one morning."
Closely following Welles's instructions from notes he'd taken during their Miami work sessions, Wise beavered away on a master version of Ambersons, informing Welles, in a letter dated February 21, of minor revisions he'd made, plans for new line dubbings by the actors, and the imminent completion of the film's music by "Benny," the renowned composer Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Taxi Driver). On March 11, Wise sent a 132-minute composite print (a print with picture and soundtrack synchronized) to Rio for Welles to review. This is the version that scholars and Wellesophiles consider to be the "real" Magnificent Ambersons.
Curiously enough, the first blow against this version was dealt not by RKO but by Welles himself. Before he'd even received the composite print, he impulsively ordered Wise to cut 22 minutes from the middle of the film, mostly scenes concerning George Minafer's efforts to keep his mother and Eugene apart. Wise complied, and on March 17, 1942, The Magnificent Ambersons, in this form, had its first preview screening, in the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona. Sneak previews are a notoriously unreliable gauge of a film's worth and potential for success, and RKO did The Magnificent Ambersons a particular disservice by previewing it before an audience composed mostly of escapism-hungry teenagers, who had come to see the movie at the top of the bill, The Fleet's In, a featherlight wartime musical starring William Holden and Dorothy Lamour.
The preview, attended by Wise, Moss, Schaefer, and some other RKO executives, went horribly: "the worst I've ever experienced," says Wise. Seventy-two of the 125 comment cards turned in by the audience were negative, and among the comments were "The worst picture I ever saw," "It stinks," "People like to laff, not be bored to death," and "I could not understand it. Too many plots." Although these critiques were slightly mitigated by the occasional eloquent, favorable assessment—one viewer wrote, "Exceedingly good picture. Photography rivaled that of superb Citizen Kane.… Too bad audience was so unappreciative"—Wise and his compatriots could not ignore the sense of restlessness in the crowd and the waves of sarcastic laughter that erupted during the film's serious scenes, particularly those involving Agnes Moorehead's flitty, frequently hysterical Aunt Fanny character.
Schaefer was devastated, writing to Welles, "Never in all my experience in the industry have I taken so much punishment or suffered as I did at the Pomona preview. In my 28 years in the business, I have never been present in a theater where the audience acted in such a manner.… The picture was too slow, heavy, and topped off with somber music, never did register." But while Welles's 22-minute cut no doubt robbed the movie of some of its dramatic momentum, Schaefer, in entrusting The Magnificent Ambersons' fate to a bunch of callow high schoolers, showed some questionable judgment of his own. As Welles later remarked in one of his taped conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, collected in the 1992 book This Is Orson Welles, "There'd been no preview of Kane. Think what would have happened to Kane if there had been one!" And as Henry Jaglom says today, "If I'd gone to the theater to see a Dorothy Lamour movie, I'd have hated Ambersons, too!"
The next preview was scheduled for two days later, in the more sophisticated climes of Pasadena. Wise, to his credit, reinstated Welles's cut, trimming other, less crucial scenes instead, and this time the movie received a considerably more favorable response. But Schaefer, still shaken by the Pomona experience and antsy about the $1-million-plus he'd invested in the film— after initially approving an $800,000 budget—already envisioned failure. It was on March 21 that he poured his heart out to Welles in the letter quoted above, adding, "In all our initial discussions, you stressed low costs … and on our first two pictures, we have an investment of $2,000,000. We will not make a dollar on Citizen Kane … [and] the final results on Ambersons is [sic] still to be told, but it looks 'red.' … Orson Welles has got to do something commercial. We have got to get away from 'arty' pictures and get back to earth."
Welles was devastated by Schaefer's letter, and pressed for RKO to somehow get Wise down to Brazil. This, however, still proved unfeasible, and RKO, acting within its legal rights, took control of cutting the film, relying on a makeshift committee of Wise, Moss, and Joseph Cotten to fashion yet another, much shorter version of Ambersons. (Cotten, as dear a friend to Welles as his Citizen Kane character, Jed Leland, was to Charles Foster Kane, was mortified by the compromised position he was in, writing guiltily to Welles, "Nobody in the Mercury is trying in any way to take advantage of your absence.") Welles, correctly deducing that the film was slipping away from him, tried to reassert his control by sending painstakingly lengthy cables to Moss detailing every last change and edit he wanted made. (The telephone proved to be unreliable, given the primitiveness of intercontinental connections back then.) But these were effectively stabs in the dark—Welles had no way of knowing how well or how poorly his changes would work if implemented. Not that they would get implemented, anyway. In mid-April, Schaefer gave Wise full authority to whip the film into releasable shape (though his hoped-for Easter release date was no longer a possibility), and on April 20, Freddie Fleck, Welles's assistant director, shot a new, improbably tidy ending to the picture to replace the existing one.
Welles's ending was his most radical departure from the Tarkington novel, a total invention that saw Eugene, after checking in on the injured George in the hospital (a moment seen in neither the release version nor the lost version), visiting Aunt Fanny at the shabby boardinghouse where she'd taken up residence. It was Welles's favorite scene in the entire movie. As he later described it to Bogdanovich, it sounds wonderfully atmospheric and emotionally devastating: "all these awful old people roosting in this sort of half old folk's home, half boarding house," eavesdropping and getting in the way of Eugene and Fanny, two holdovers from a more dignified era. Fanny had always been jealous of Eugene's attentions to her sister-in-law, but now, Welles explained, "there's just nothing left between them at all. Everything is over—her feelings and her world and his world; everything is buried under the parking lots and the cars. That's what it was all about—the deterioration of personality, the way people diminish with age, and particularly with impecunious old age. The end of the communication between people, as well as the end of an era." And an appropriately weighty end to a movie that begins so forcefully.
The ending that Fleck shot—rather artlessly, with lighting and camerawork that bear no resemblance to the rest of the picture—shows Eugene and Fanny meeting in a hospital corridor after the former has just visited George. "How is Georgie?" Fanny asks. "He's going to be allll right!" says Eugene, sounding rather like Robert Young at the end of a Marcus Welby episode. They talk some more, then drift out of frame, smiling, arm in arm, as saccharine music (not by Herrmann) swells on the soundtrack. It's like having Oskar Schindler wake up at the last moment to realize that all this Holocaust business was just a bad dream.
In May, an 87-minute version of Ambersons using this ending was previewed in Long Beach, California, to much better audience response, and in June, after a bit more tinkering, Schaefer cleared a final version for release. Its 88 minutes included not only Fleck's ending but new continuity scenes shot by Wise (his first stab at directing, he says), and even by Moss, the Mercury business manager. Gone were all the scenes that carried heavy inferences of the Oedipal relationship between George and Isabel, and most of the scenes underscoring the town's transformation into a city and the Amberson family's desperate attempts to stave off its decline. (In the script, the Major starts selling lots on the mansion's grounds to developers, who begin excavations for apartment houses.) As such, the movie lost much of its complexity and resonance, becoming more about the basic mechanics of its plot than the greater themes that had drawn Welles to Tarkington's novel in the first place. Another casualty of the severe editing was the film's greatest technical accomplishment, the ball sequence, which included a continuous, carefully choreographed crane shot that wended up the three floors of the Amberson mansion to the ballroom at the top, with various characters moving in and out of the frame as the camera wove around them. To pick up the pace, this shot had a chunk removed from its middle, diluting its rapturous effect. (This would happen to Welles all over again in 1958, when Universal fiddled with *Touch of Evil'*s famous long opening shot; fortunately, a 1998 restoration put that right.) The 132-minute version of The Magnificent Ambersons that Welles and Wise had shaped in Miami was never shown publicly.
Wise, who is now 87, the same age Welles would have turned this May, says he never had any sense that he was desecrating a great work of art by editing down and reshaping the film. "I just knew that we had a sick picture and it needed a doctor," he says. While he grants that "it was a better film in its full length," he maintains that his actions were simply a pragmatic response to the movie's being overlong and ill-suited to its era. "If it had come out a year before or even six months before the war started, it might have had a different reaction," he says. "But by the time the picture came out for previews, you know, guys were going off to training camp and women were working in the aircraft factories. They just didn't have many interests or concerns about the problems of the Amberson family and Indianapolis at the turn of the century." Besides, he adds, "I think the [edited] film is now something of a classic in its own right. It's still considered quite a classic film, isn't it?"
A soft-spoken man of mild temperament, Wise is the last person you'd suspect of pulling Machiavellian power plays, and he seemed genuinely pained in a post-Pomona letter he sent to Welles, writing, "It's so damn hard to put on paper in cold type the many times you die through the showing." But Welles never forgave him—Jaglom remembers Welles referring to "the traitorous cables from Bob Wise"—and it's certainly true that a pragmatic, go-along-toget-along type like Wise was not the ideal person to defend the interests of an art-orbust iconoclast like Welles. As for Welles's seemingly loyal Mercury lieutenant, Jack Moss, director Cy Endfield (Zulu, The Sound of Fury) had some surprising things to say about him in a 1992 interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum of Film Comment. End-field, as a young man on the make in early 1942, had wangled a low-level job with the Mercury operation because he was good at magic tricks, a passion of Welles's, and Moss wanted a tutor to teach him some tricks that would impress the boss upon his return from Brazil. As such, Endfield was present in Moss's RKO office throughout the Ambersons–It's All True period, and even got to see the original version of the former. "I was waiting for another round of the Citizen Kane experience," he told Rosenbaum, "and instead I saw a very lyrical, gently persuasive film of a completely different succession of energies." Endfield was less enamored, though, of what he witnessed as things started to go bad:
A telephone with a private line had been installed in Moss's office in the Mercury bungalow that had a number known only to Orson in Brazil. For the first few days, he had a few discussions with Orson and tried to placate him: then they had started arguing because there were more changes than Orson was prepared to acknowledge. After a few days of this, the phone was just allowed to ring and ring. I conducted many magic lessons with Moss when the phone was ringing uninterruptedly for hours at a time. I saw Jack enter carrying 35- and 40 -page cables that had arrived from Brazil; he'd riffle through the cables, say, "This is what Orson wants us to do today," and then, without bothering to read them, toss them into the wastebasket. I was particularly dismayed by the enthusiasm with which the mice played while the cat was away.
The ignominy of the whole situation was compounded by Schaefer's ouster as RKO studio chief at the beginning of the summer of 1942—his undoing attributable, in part, to his financially unsuccessful gamble on Welles. In July, Schaefer's successor, Charles Koerner, ordered the Mercury Theatre staff off the RKO lot and pulled the plug on the floundering It's All True project, effectively sacking Welles from RKO in the process. That same month, the Koerner regime, lacking any confidence in The Magnificent Ambersons, opened it without fanfare in two theaters in Los Angeles, on a double bill with the Lupe Velez comedy Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost—an even more incongruous pairing than the Dorothy Lamour one.
After playing at a handful of movie houses around the country, Welles's picture died a quick box-office death. Later that year, on December 10, Koerner authorized James Wilkinson, the head of the editing department, to tell RKO's back-lot managers, who had been complaining of a shortage of storage space, that they could destroy various materials that were no longer of any use to the studio—including all the negatives from The Magnificent Ambersons.
Peter Bogdanovich, who was very close to Welles from the late 1960s through the mid-70s, and who for a time even let Welles bunk in his Bel Air home, remembers an incident that took place in the early 70s when he and his then girlfriend, Cy-bill Shepherd, paid a visit to Welles and his companion, a Croatian actress named Oja Kodar, in Welles's bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "Orson had this habit—you'd be having a conversation, and food would be there and whatever, and he sat rather near the TV with the clicker," he says. "So he was clicking it and watching it go, with the sound turned down a bit. I had my eye half on the TV, and there was a flash of Ambersons that I caught. He was off it almost before I could see it, because he obviously recognized it before I did. But I still saw it, and I said, 'Oh, that was Ambersons!' And Oja said, 'Oh, really? I've never seen it.' [Mimicking Welles's stentorian boom:] 'Well, you're not going to see it now!' And Cybill said, 'Oh, I want to see it.' We all said, 'Let's see a little bit.' And Orson said no. And then everybody said, 'Oh, please?' So Orson flipped to the channel and walked out of the room in a huff.
"So then we all said, 'Orson, come back, we'll turn it off.' [Wellesian boom again:] 'No, it's all right, I'll suffer!' So we watched it for a while. And then Oja, who was sitting furthest forward, kind of gestured to me. I looked back, and Orson was leaning in the doorway, watching. And as I remember, he came in and sat down. Nobody said anything. He just came in and sat down rather close to the set and watched for a while, not too long. I couldn't really see him—his back was to me. But I looked over at Oja at one point, who could see him because she was sitting on the other side of the room, and she looked at me and gestured like this. [Bogdanovich runs a finger down his cheek from his eye, indicating tears.] And I said, 'Maybe we shouldn't watch this anymore.' And we turned it off, and Orson left the room for a while and then came back."
This incident went undiscussed for a few days, until Bogdanovich summoned the nerve to say, "You were very upset watching Ambersons the other day, weren't you?"
"Well, I was upset," Bogdanovich remembers Welles saying, "but not because of the cutting. That just makes me furious. Don't you see? It was because it's the past. It's over."
Several years later, Henry Jaglom, who had taken over Bogdanovich's role as Welles's protégé and confidant, had a similar experience. "I actually made him watch the movie," Jaglom says. "Around '80, '81, Ambersons was going to be on uninterrupted on a thing we had in Los Angeles called the Z Channel, an early form of cable. There were no VCRs and rentals then, so it was an event. It was coming on at 10 at night. I called to tell him to come over, and he kept saying he wouldn't watch it, he wouldn't watch it, until at the last minute he said he'd watch it. So we watched it. He was upset at the very beginning, but once we got into it, he was having a very good time, saying, 'This is pretty good!' He kept a running commentary going the whole time—where they cut this, how he should have done that. But at a certain point, about 20 minutes before it ended, he grabbed the clicker and turned it off. I said, 'What are you doing?' And he said, 'From here on it becomes their movie—it becomes bullshit.'"
Welles never stopped thinking about the possibility that he could save The Magnificent Ambersons. At one point in the late 60s he seriously considered rounding up the principal actors who were still alive—Cotten, Holt, Baxter, and Moorehead (who was then slumming as Endora on TV's Bewitched)—and shooting a new ending to replace the one Freddie Fleck had concocted: an epilogue in which the actors, with no makeup, in their naturally aged states, would depict what had become of their characters 20 years down the line. Cotten was apparently game, and Welles hoped for a new theatrical release and new audience for his movie. "But it never happened—he couldn't get the rights," Bogdanovich says.
Both Bogdanovich and Jaglom pulled whatever strings they could to get various vaults checked for missing Ambersons footage. "Every time I had something to do with Desilu, which was still Desilu then, and then Paramount, I would ask," says Bogdanovich. The closest he ever got was when he found a cutting continuity—a screenplay-style transcription on paper of what appears on the screen—for the 132-minute version that Wise sent to Brazil on March 12, 1942. Bogdanovich also found photographs—"not stills, but actual frame enlargements"—of many of the deleted scenes. These materials form the basis for the most complete scholarly work on the movie, Robert L. Carringer's The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction (University of California Press, 1993), which painstakingly details the movie as Welles envisioned it.
Another person who looked into the Ambersons situation was David Shepard, a pioneer of film preservation and the restorer of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and various Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton shorts. He took his shot in the 1960s, but was dissuaded early in his search by Helen Gregg Seitz, an RKO old-timer, now dead, whose tenure at the company dated all the way back to the days of RKO's corporate predecessor, a silent-picture outfit called FBO. "Helen managed RKO's editorial department for many years, scheduling editors and laboratory work and so on," he says. "And she told me, 'Don't bother.' The standard practice back then was, negatives were disposed of after six months. She said she would have remembered if The Magnificent Ambersons had been handled any differently than any other film. And she was the kind of lady who probably remembered what she had for breakfast every day of her life."
The last, best hope for discovering the missing footage in Welles's lifetime came in the person of Fred Chandler, an employee in Paramount's postproduction department. It had been Chandler who made the much-ballyhooed discovery of the missing It's All True footage in the early 80s; a young Welles aficionado, he came upon a bunch of cans in the Paramount vaults labeled BRAZIL, unspooled the film inside one of them, and recognized what he saw—frames depicting fishermen floating on a homemade raft— to be the "Four Men on a Raft" segment (about four poor fishermen who sailed all the way from northern Brazil to Rio to plead for workers' rights) of Welles's long-lost South American movie. A couple of years earlier, Chandler had made Welles's acquaintance when he presented the director with another of his finds, a virgin print (never run on a projector) of Welles's 1962 film, The Trial, which he'd salvaged from the garbage. The appreciative Welles enlisted Chandler to do some archival work on his behalf, and, as Chandler puts it, "he put a bug in my ear that if ever a search for Ambersons was done, he would have to know about it."
The hoped-for opportunity arose in 1984, when the lab where Paramount got its film developed, Movielab, went out of business. This necessitated the return to Paramount of some 80,000 cans of film negative that Movielab had been storing for years. More important for Welles's purposes, this influx of new material into Paramount's vaults meant that everything already in the vaults had to be examined and catalogued, to see what should be kept, what should be moved elsewhere, and what should be thrown out. "My job was to check all the cans and see what was inside them," says Chandler, who is now a senior vice president of postproduction at Fox. "I had the whole inventory of RKO and Paramount at my fingertips."
Alas, he found nothing. "And I had five or six people checking every can," he says. He even, through discreet inquiries, located a woman, by then retired, who had worked in the stock-film library throughout the RKO and Desilu regimes, and who claimed to have destroyed the negatives of The Magnificent Ambersons herself. "Her name was Hazel something—I don't remember what," Chandler says. "She was afraid to talk about it. She was very guarded, an old, retired lady. She just said, 'I was given a directive. I took the negative and incinerated it.'" This would make sense: making a few discreet inquiries myself, I learned that the head of RKO's stock-film library in the Ambersons era was a woman named Hazel Marshall. David Shepard knew her many years ago, and he says it's entirely plausible that she would have incinerated the negative; studios in those days often burned unneeded nitrate film to salvage the silver in the emulsion. (Although there's also a persistent rumor, which I was unable to verify, that Desilu indiscriminately dumped loads of RKO materials, including Ambersons footage, into the Santa Monica Bay upon its acquisition of the studio's lot in the 1950s. Say it ain't so, Lucy!)
Welles got the bad news from Chandler just a year before his 1985 death. "I would never have given Orson that answer—that it was all gone—unless I was pretty sure it was all gone," Chandler says. "I had to look him in the eye and tell him. He broke down and cried in front of me. He said it was the worst thing that had happened to him in his life."
In Chandler's view, there's no point in conducting a search like the one I'd wanted to embark on with Friedkin, "because I already did it. And it's all moved now." The only chance for The Magnificent Ambersons' survival in its original form, he says, is "some crazy happenstance," such as the footage's languishing somewhere in a mislabeled can, or in the possession of someone who doesn't know what he has.
But there's actually one other chance: that the composite print Wise sent to Welles in Brazil has somehow survived. "Nobody's been able to track it down," says Wise, who has no recollection of the print's ever being returned to RKO. "And as the house editor," he says, "I probably would have received it."
Bill Krohn, as part of the team that put together It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles, spent a lot of time poring over RKO documents and interviewing Brazilians who remembered Welles, and has his own ideas about what may have happened. Welles, he explains, used a Rio film studio called Cinedia as his base of operations for It's All True. Cinedia was owned by a man named Adhemar Gonzaga. Gonzaga was not only a director and producer of repute, but one of the pioneers of Brazilian cinema and a man who held a prescient view of film as art; he collected films before it was common to do so, and even founded a highfalutin Brazilian film journal not unlike France's Cahiers du Cinéma. Naturally, he also became friendly with Welles during the latter's time in Brazil.
As Krohn tells it, when RKO pulled the plug on It's All True and Welles eventually returned to the United States, he left the composite print of Ambersons behind at Cinedia—in other words, in Gonzaga's custody. Gonzaga cabled RKO, inquiring as to what he was supposed to do with the print. RKO, according to Krohn, responded that the print should be destroyed. "So Gonzaga cabled to RKO, PRINT DESTROYED," says Krohn. "But do you believe it? He's a film collector! I would bet dollars to doughnuts that his memo to RKO was not true."
Krohn tells this story from memory, since he doesn't have any copies of the correspondence in question. I tried to track down the cables he describes through Turner Entertainment, which now owns all of RKO's business correspondence from that era, but Turner's attorneys informed me in a letter that I would not be allowed access to the RKO documents "due to legal and practical considerations." However, when I ran Krohn's account past the most thoroughgoing of Ambersons experts, Robert Carringer, the author of The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction, he said that it was more or less correct, though he doesn't share Krohn's hope that the Brazilian print might still exist. Carringer provided me with copies of the pertinent RKO documents he came across in his research: an exchange of letters between the studio's New York and Hollywood offices in which the print-service department (in New York) twice asks the editing department (in Hollywood) what the "Brazilian office" is supposed to do with the prints of The Magnificent Ambersonsand Journey into Fear it has in its possession. Intriguingly, this correspondence takes place during the months of December 1944 and January 1945—which means that, at the very least, the Brazilian print of Ambersons survived a good two years longer than any American print of the full-length version did. Eventually, the Hollywood office tells the New York office to "instruct the Brazilian office to junk" the Welles material. There's no smoking-gun cable from Gonzaga, Cinedia, or any other Brazilian entity confirming that the deed had been done, but Carringer, for one, accepts RKO-Hollywood's edict as the final word. In his book, he states unequivocally, "The duplicate print sent to Welles in South America was deemed useless and was also destroyed."
Krohn, nevertheless, is confident of the print's existence, if not its condition, saying, "There are eight cans of brown sludge marked AMBERSONS somewhere in Brazil." Actually, says David Shepard, it's not a foregone conclusion that nitrate film from 60 years ago would have decomposed by now. "If it's been kept where other film is stored, in a place that's not too hot or humid, no question it could survive," he says. "I've got an original print of the 1903 Great Train Robbery, and it's fine."
So the question is, if the print was indeed saved by Gonzaga, where would it be? Cinedia is still in operation (though it's since moved to a different location in Rio), and it's now run by Gonzaga's daughter, Alice Gonzaga. With the help of Catherine Benamou, a professor of film at the University of Michigan who is fluent in Portuguese and was the chief researcher on the '93 It's All True project, I was able to ask Alice Gonzaga,in writing, if she knew anything about such a print's existence. Responding by E-mail, she said that she didn't. Her staff had looked into the matter, and found nothing—"so we should presume that [my father] complied with RKO's request, since this print of The Magnificent Ambersons never became part of our film archive." However, Gonzaga noted that Cinedia's recordkeeping was patchy during the Ambersons–It's All True period, making it "quite probable that a lot of information" concerning Welles and RKO was lost. She also allowed that "you never know what can happen in this line of work," and mentioned that, a few years ago, a student at Northwestern University named Josh Grossberg had made an inquiry similar to mine.
Krohn had also heard of Grossberg. In the mid-1990s, the student had sought out Krohn's help in producing a documentary, never realized, called Legend of the Lost Print. On his own, Grossberg had made two trips to Brazil in '94 and '96 to investigate the possible whereabouts of the composite print of The Magnificent Ambersons. Grossberg is now a New York–based entertainment reporter for the E! Online Web site and an aspiring filmmaker. He says that while in Brazil he was introduced to a man named Michel De Esprito, who had worked in the archives of Cinedia in the 1950s and 60s, and who claimed that Welles's print still existed in that era. "He swears that he saw an original print of Ambersons in a can, mislabeled," says Grossberg. "I think he actually projected it. But when he returned a few weeks later to look at the film more intently, it was moved away." De Esprito raised a number of possibilities as to what might have happened to the print—it could have been destroyed, pilfered, or transferred to a private collector. "We pursued some leads, even talking about tracking it through Gypsies," says Grossberg, who has not abandoned hope that the print exists. "But after that, we kind of ran out of leads."
If you've spent any amount of time immersed in the Ambersons saga, you begin to imagine, and even dream, that you've screened the movie's missing parts. So it was jarring for me to watch one of the scenes cut from the 132-minute version—of George brooding in a sitting room while Isabel merrily waits for Eugene to collect her, unaware that he has already called and George has rudely sent him away—and not have to shake myself from my reverie. Isabel was being played by Madeleine Stowe. George was being played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, best known for his portrayal of a David Bowie–like figure in the glam-rock movie Velvet Goldmine. And the scene was being shot not on RKO's secondary lot in Culver City in autumn 1941 but in a huge mansion called Killruddery in County Wicklow, Ireland, where I was allowed to observe some of the A&E remake-in-progress in autumn 2000.
The new, $16 million production of The Magnificent Ambersons had taken over the grounds of the estate, as well as a large lot in industrial northern Dublin where a breathtaking replica of turn-of-the-century downtown Indianapolis had been built, the better to illustrate Welles's lost theme of the town's urbanization. The director, Alfonso Arau, also spoke of reviving Welles's cherished boardinghouse scene, as well as "all the Oedipus, all the Freudian content" that was muted the first time around. His words on that last point were borne out by the lingering hand grasps and longing looks between Stowe and Rhys-Meyers as they went through their paces. (Bruce Greenwood, who played John F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days, takes over for Joseph Cotten as Eugene; James Cromwell, Farmer Hogget in Babe, is Major Amberson; Jennifer Tilly is Aunt Fanny; and Gretchen Mol is Lucy Morgan.)
But, for all the reinstatement of flourishes and ideas dear to Welles, the TV film's participants stressed that they were not doing a faithful, frame-by-frame remake of the uncut Magnificent Ambersons. "I love Citizen Kane, but I'm not crazy about The Magnificent Ambersons," Arau told me. "I think in many ways it's old-fashioned. It would be a romantic thought that Orson Welles is sitting on a cloud, applauding me, but I'm not motivated by that at all. The challenge I have is not to follow his act."
Cromwell, his whiskers grown out to Reconstruction length to play the Major, went even further. "I think Welles knew he had a bad film," he said. "It's a horrendous film! It was horrendous before the edit! As a follow-up to a film that essentially rewrote all the rules? C'mon! I just don't believe the performers are compelling. There's no magic between Costello and Cotten. It looks like a second-rate Hollywood period melodrama. I think Welles knew he didn't have anything. Even before he finished the film, he splits? I think he was scared shitless to fight with RKO." (Bear in mind that Cromwell played William Randolph Hearst in RKO 281, HBO's 1999 movie about the making of Citizen Kane, and could still have been carrying around some osmotic antipathy toward Welles.)
Arau and Cromwell had raised the two thoughts most heretical to members of the Ambersons cult: (a) that Welles's movie was never that good in the first place, and (b) that Welles himself is ultimately to blame for what happened to it. The first thought is simply a matter of taste; I disagree with it for the most part, and suspect that The Magnificent Ambersons was indeed a great film in its 132-minute incarnation. (My only major qualm is with the performance of Holt. His crude, braying line readings are intermittently effective in conveying what a heel George is, but his one-dimensionality ultimately doesn't do justice to what is, on paper, a complex role.)
As for the second thought, it's one of the great debates of film scholarship: was Welles his own worst enemy? In the case of The Magnificent Ambersons, many people think so. It's often alleged that Welles effectively abdicated responsibility for the picture once he got to South America because he was having too good a time drinking rum, taking Brazilian lovelies to bed, and in general gorging on Latin America's rich pageant. "I think, someplace down the line, he got tired of dealing with [Ambersons]," says Wise. "He loved the partying, he loved the women, and he kind of forgot about the film, lost interest. It was pretty much 'You take care of this, Bob. I have other things to do.'"
Carringer, too, targets Welles, stating in his book that he "must bear the ultimate responsibility for the film's undoing." But he takes a stranger tack, arguing that Welles was subconsciously uneasy about The Magnificent Ambersons from the get-go because its Oedipal themes resonated a little too closely to home, uncomfortably mirroring his own obsession with his mother. This, says Carringer, explains why Welles cast Holt rather than himself in the George role, why he made George more unsympathetic in the screenplay than he is in the novel (a major turnoff for those preview audiences), and why, when the State Department beckoned, Welles jumped at the chance to skedaddle rather than face the task of finishing a troubling and troubled film.
Carringer makes the most of his theory, citing Citizen Kane's theme of "maternal rejection" and Tarkington's deliberate borrowings from Hamlet, but it's all too speculative for me to buy, and I don't think Wise is on the mark, either. Welles's long, meticulous, occasionally desperate-sounding cables from Brazil (some of which I was able to see at U.C.L.A.'s Arts Library, which allows limited access to its RKO Radio Pictures Archive) belie the idea that he was disengaged from the editing process, and his desire to do his patriotic duty for the State Department seemed sincere enough. "He felt he was doing a very good thing for the war effort," says Jaglom. "He said, 'Can you imagine me not wanting to be present and in control of the editing of my own movie?'"
More likely, Welles, who was still just 26 in early 1942, was vainglorious and naïve enough to think he could do it all—The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, It's All True, and as many Brazilian girls as possible. He was, lest it be forgotten, a boy wonder, accustomed to getting done what men twice his age couldn't, and to being allowed a degree of control unknown to any other director. Precocious enough to make Citizen Kane, he was also callow enough to think he could maintain authorial control over Ambersons from a distance, and he paid for this mistake with his job, his film, and his place in Hollywood.
Carringer says that Richard Wilson, Welles's longtime right-hand man in the Mercury Theatre, once told him, "Orson never cared about Ambersons until the auteur stuff started in the 60s and 70s and people started talking about Ambersons as a great film." This statement could well be true. But it still doesn't mean Welles was insincere or fraudulently revisionist in his later bitterness over what had happened to his movie, nor does it mean he was crying crocodile tears in front of Peter Bogdanovich and Fred Chandler. The passing of time often brings with it a sad dawning, a belated understanding of the worth of something that's not there anymore. Was this not, after all, the very message imparted by The Magnificent Ambersons?


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It's not too late to be a part of the Archives Leadership Institute Practices Workshop and Alumni Reception during the SAA Annual Meeting! You can still take advantage of the opportunity to reconnect, refocus, and recharge with fellow ALI alumni. Please see below for details about the Reception/Dinner and the Practices Workshop. For any questions, please contact Sasha Griffin at firstname.lastname@example.com.
The Alumni Reception and Dinner
Please join us at the Archives Leadership Institute Alumni Reception to meet the 2014 cohort and to reconnect with ALI alumni over dinner and drinks.
When: Saturday, August 16, 4:00 - 7:00 PM
Where: Bistro Bistro, 1727 Connecticut Avenue NW in the Dupont Circle area
Who: All ALI Alumni and current year cohort
Cost: $40 per person, cash bar available
Register: SAA Annual Meeting Registration Form or through the SAA Bookstore <http://saa.archivists.org/store/archives-leadership-institute-reception-and-dinner/3920/>.
The ALI Practices Workshop
Please join us for the 2014 ALI Practices Workshop, led by ALI Facilitator Luther Snow. The workshop will focus on applying leadership strategies to real world projects in order to recharge and reconnect ALI leaders.
When: Sunday, August 17, 9:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Where: Howard University School of Law Library, 2929 Van Ness St., N.W., Room LL-101
Who: All ALI Alumni and current year cohort
Cost: $50 per person, waived for ALI14 cohort
Register: SAA Annual Meeting Registration Form or by calling SAA Service Center at 866-722-7858

subset: commoncrawl


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Somewhere amid all of the glitz and glamour of the Los Angeles scene lies the somewhat bizarre world of Frutron and Kimmy Kim. It's a world where wedgies are doled out as freely as candy, Fruity Pebbles are used at bath salts and cheeseburgers replace silicon implants.
Collectively, they are known as Hollywood is Hard, an alternate reality web show about two girls who navigate through the cartoon world of Hollywood.
With nearly one million views on You Tube, these ladies really know how to tickle the funny bone. And although their subject matter sometimes crosses the line between the risqué and the extreme, you'd be hard pressed to find two women who are as funny and open about their "pseudo-lives" as Frutron and Kimmy Kim.
I sat down (with my underwear facing away from her or course) with Frutron and got the inside scoop on these wedgie giving, wiener lovin', Fruity Pebble bathing beauties as she share the secrets behind Hollywood is Hard. During the course of our conversation, Frutron (the nerdy one who refuses to reveal her real name) informed me that there has been talk of the wedgie videos going away, much to the chagrin of this reporter. This would be a tragedy of epic proportions.
What's your story?
FT: I would like to say that I was homeless and sleeping in my car and ran into all of this success but none of that's true. The truth is, I went to high school in San Francisco and went to art school at the same time. Originally, I thought I wanted to draw comic books, but a year into that I began thinking that comic books just weren't cool and that I'd never make money drawing (of course, now comic books ARE cool). And although I didn't pursue drawing, I can storyboard really well which helps with our production.
What brought you to LA?
FT: I wanted to become an actor and was doing commercials; going back and forth between San Francisco and LA. for auditions. A few years ago, I decided to leave my safety net and move here.
I've never been a person who was passionate about being a "SERIOUS" actor, but always loved comedy and dreamed of being on Saturday Night Live or MAD TV.
How did you meet Kimmy Kim?
FT: Kimmy Kim and I would see each other in passing while going on auditions. At certain points in our lives, we both had similar looks and knew each other from acting jobs. I always thought she was funny but never thought I'd actually be working with her.
One night, we ended up being at a writing session together that one of our mutual friends had set up. We were both at a point in our careers where we wanted to do something where we were in control. I'm not sure how it is for men, but as a lady you really risk a lot by doing movies that turn out to not be the type of movie you thought it was going to be. You don't want to have to say, "Oh, GREAT! Now I'm a Sci-fi lesbian space alien in a shit movie!" [laughs]
The other thing is, we both wanted to do something for our career instead of waiting around for some asshole who's going to want a blow job to give us a part in some shitty movie. Honestly dude, I'm horrible at giving them so it wouldn't get me a movie part anyway. I'm terrible in the sack so I don't have that going for me. [laughs]
Our really good friend, Andrew Bentler, who's the most amazingly talented editor actually knew both of us separately. He was the one who suggested that Kimmy Kim and I should do something together. And once she and I got together, we both found out we were on the same page.
Wedgie of Death
FT: I have to tell you, 'Wieners' is my favorite episode. When I watch it, it's not even like watching us.
Fruity Pebbles Bath Time
How do you come up with ideas?
FT: It's all about what goes on in our daily lives. For instance, one day Kimmy Kim texted me and said (jokingly) "Frutron? I want to get a boob job." And then I said, "You should stuff cheeseburgers in your bra!" And that would become an episode.
That's how it usually starts. We start off with an idea and then everyone puts in stuff. We'll all write together and then Andrew is just fantastic about taking those ideas and turning them into a story. Basically, we take shit that happens in our lives and then horrifically exaggerate what actually happens.
For more on Frutron, Kimmy Kim and Hollywood is Hard Click Here


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With the return of cool autumn weather, our thoughts turn to warm, comforting foods. But cold-weather cooking needn't be dull. This year, take your menu cues from restaurant and cooking trends to create fun fall foods your entire family will enjoy.
Here are some popular restaurant ingredients and cooking methods to inspire your home-cooked meals this season:
Look for locally sourced meats. Locally sourced meats and seafood were cited as the No. 1 trend in restaurants, according to the National Restaurant Association (NRA) annual survey of professional chefs. Visit your neighborhood butcher or the locally grown section at your grocer for the freshest cuts and catches for meals with the fullest flavor, from slow-roasted beef to hearty stews and creamy seafood chowders.
Be adventurous with veggies. Everyday green vegetables are popping up on menus in new ways, putting a fresh twist on old standbys. Brussels sprouts, once thought to be needlessly bland, are the latest "it" vegetable, taking on a new personality when sauteed or seared to bring out a nutty flavor. Also enjoying a new place in the sun is kale- – stir-fried, steamed, sauteed, baked or even added to a soup or stew for crunch – kale can add tasty, unexpected texture and flavor to a meal. Tools such as Calphalon Contemporary Nonstick Cookware make these veggies a snap to prepare, thanks to a multi-layer non-stick cooking surface and hard-anodized construction that ensures lasting, easy release, even heat distribution and new dishwasher-safe cleanup. The line includes everything from saute pans to stock pots so simmering, pan-searing, poaching, frying or stewing your favorite fall comfort foods is easier than ever.
Hit the fall farmers market. The popularity of farmers markets continues to grow as more Americans seek out fresh fruits and vegetables – so much so that the number of farmers markets has grown by 150 percent in the last 10 years, according to the National Farmers Market Coalition. Farmers markets are no longer just a summertime tradition either. Even in cooler climates, local farmers markets extend into November. Stroll through your local market to pick up in-season produce. In addition to brussels sprouts and kale, look for fresh-picked acorn and butternut squash, pumpkins, cranberries, artichokes and mushrooms.
Preserve nature's bounty. Americans' hunger for preserving seasonal freshness is a contributing factor in the returning popularity of home pickling and canning. In fact, pickling is among the top five food preparation methods cited by the NRA chef survey. Pickled products are also showing up in artisan specialty shops and grocery stores, with varieties extending beyond the standard to include pickled cauliflower, cucumbers, carrots and more. Home canning is also seeing an uptick as the desire for homemade freshness continues. For tips on food preservation, check out the National Center for Home Food Preservation.
Crunch into the newest apple varieties. It seems every year that new varieties of apples are popping up, ready to be added to your favorite recipes. SnapDragon and Ruby Frost are just two of the new varieties this fall, while heirloom apples are also enjoying the limelight. Whether your family loves apple cobbler and pie, or just can't get through the season without a homemade caramel apple, follow your whims and try out-of-the-ordinary apple varieties in your own recipes.
Serve soups with twist. What would autumn be without a savory soup simmering on the stove? This season, rev up your soup repertoire and try something new. Bring interesting flavors home by combining autumn's produce with a bit of spice. Curried Butternut Squash and Apple Soup makes the most of in-season squash and apples with the added kick of fresh ginger, curry powder, ground cinnamon and cayenne pepper. Top with a dollop of thick, creamy yogurt.
So go ahead – experiment this season with new ingredients and techniques – and help your family "fall into" a flavorful fall. For more cooking ideas and recipes, visit calphalon.com.
Curried Butternut Squash and Apple Soup
Servings: Serves 4
Prep time: Less than 30 minutes
Cook time: Less than 60 minutes
1/2 cup butter
1 cup onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon fresh ginger, minced
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 pounds butternut squash, peeled, seeded and coarsely chopped
4 cups chicken or vegetable broth
1 Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored and chopped
1 tablespoon port wine (optional)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup plain yogurt (optional)
Pinch each of ground cinnamon and cayenne pepper
Heat butter in a Calphalon Contemporary Nonstick 8-qt Stock Pot or 5-qt Dutch oven over medium heat. Add onion and saute until softened, about 8-10 minutes.-Add garlic, ginger and curry powder and cook for 1 minute while constantly stirring.
Add squash, vegetable broth and apple to the stock pot. Cover and cook until the squash is soft, about 20-25 minutes. Add the port and turn the heat off.
Cool soup slightly; carefully puree soup with an immersion blender or in batches using a blender or food processor. Reheat the soup in the stock pot and season to taste with salt and pepper.
Ladle into soup bowls. Garnish each bowl with a dollop (or swirl) of yogurt and a pinch of cinnamon and/or cayenne pepper, if desired. Serve immediately.


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Two high-profile incidents on Australian subways show the country continues to deal with deep racial tensions.
1) This incident was blamed on drunkeness, but it's still deeply disturbing.
2) In this incident, a female governmental employee refuses to give up her seat and turns it into a racist hate attack.


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Erick Erickson: Why Christmas falls on Dec. 25
One of the most popular theories and commonly taught explanations for why Christmas is on Dec. 25 is because the early church placed Christian holidays at times of Roman celebration to co-opt the local pagan festivals.
Christians placed Christmas on Dec. 25 to co-opt Saturnalia, the mid-winter festival, or possibly the Festival of the Unconquered Sun — Sol Invictus. The theory went that Christians could get the heathen to convert by co-opting their own holidays.
There is one problem — it sounds more convincing than it is. These theories did not start growing until the 12th century and only became popular once comparative religion became trendy after the 18th century. Going back to the earliest Christian church finds evidence that Christmas, though not initially celebrated, had started being commemorated well before the Feast of the Unconquered Sun's creation for entirely Christian reasons.
In Egypt, less than 300 years after Christ's death, some Christians celebrated his birth in the spring. As the Biblical Archeology Society has noted, the earliest references to Christmas come at about 200 A.D., at a time Christians were not incorporating other religious traditions into their own. By 300 A.D., many Christians were celebrating his birth around Dec. 25. Within 100 years, Christmas was on the calendar record. Christians looked to December because the early church was far more interested in Jesus's death. His death and resurrection is what matters to the Gospel, and that was the date the early church focused on.
"Around 200 A.D., Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan in the year Jesus died was the equivalent to March 25 in the Roman calendar," said Andrew McGowan last year at the Biblical Archaeology Society. That would be the day of Crucifixion. The math from there is rather simple. Nine months later would be Dec. 25. Early church history held as fact that the prophets and martyrs of the church were conceived on the day they died. So if Christ died on March 25, it was also the anniversary of his conception.
But there are three final points. One can look at all of this and conclude the church fathers got it wrong. But the real question is whether they themselves thought they got it wrong. They were pretty sure they were right. The earliest Christians refused to celebrate birthdays, but by 300 A.D., there was growing evidence the Church had noted Christ's birthday around Dec. 25.
Second, some of the earliest traditions of the early Church held that Christ was born on what would be a Wednesday. This year, we too will celebrate Christ's birth on a Wednesday.
Finally, the date of Christ's birth is not important. What is important is that he is.
Erick Erickson is the editor-in-chief of RedState.com and a syndicated columnist.


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One of my favourite cities in the world has been Stockholm, ever since I first visited it in 2000. Since that first visit, I have lived there for three years working and studying and my last visit there was in 2010. While there are many places and things I like about the city, this post is about the six places of art in this city that are special to me.
- Waldemarsudde
Prins Eugen, who was himself a landscape artist, left his home Waldemarsudde and his collection to the Swedish state in his will. Therefore, since 1948, the place has been open to the public. The building was built in early 20th century as a residence for the prince. He soon added a gallery as an extension to the house, as he needed space for his expanding art collection. At the time of his death, his collection included 3,200 of Prins Eugen's work and around 3,500 works by other artists.
I first visited the lovely home and art museum in Djurgården on a lovely excursion organized by my university, KTH. I fell in love with the house and its park overlooking the lake so much so that I brought my mother here for her birthday. The aesthetically pleasing landscaped gardens has several famous sculptures including Carl Milles' Archer and an Alexis Rudier cast of Rodin's The Thinker.
This beautiful art museum is a not-to-be-missed gem by the visitor to Stockholm city. There is a restaurant and cafe, the Prince's Kitchen, within its premises.
2. Millesgården
Nearly around the same time that Prins Eugen moved into his newly built home, Waldemarsudde in Djurgården, the artist couple Carl and Olga Milles bought their property on the island of Lidingö. Over the next several decades, Carl Milles designed his gardens and added his fascinating sculptures to the landscape.
The visit to Millesgården was also a special treat organized by my university.
More than the house itself, I liked the gardens and my favourite was this little piece of sculpture on a low wall. A tiny stone carving of a wooden bench on which a couple are huddled together from the the cold. If you peeped across the bench, you would see a man sleeping on the other side. The sleeping man is supposed to be the artist, Carl Milles himself, and represented his time in Paris as a struggling artist.
3. Monument honouring Raoul Wallenberg
During my initial months in Stockholm, my parents and I stayed in Lidingö for a short while. While walking with my mother across the city hall park, I came across a monument which called out to me from the first time I saw it. It was that of a man handing out documents, with his hands clasped at the back, and hands reaching out from the ground for those documents. Seeing that sculpture by Willy Gordon began my fascination with the story of Raoul Wallenberg's life. As a Swedish diplomat in Budapest during World War II, he is credited with saving the lives of about 100,000 Hungarian Jews, before he disappeared in January 1945. I admired his initiative, courage and commitment, despite knowing that he would be targeted eventually.
4. Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan
Not just because it was one of the universities I studied at, I also like it very much because it is aesthetically pleasing. The main campus building in Ostermalm was built in the early 20th century and features work by prominent Swedish sculptors such as Carl Milles and Ivar Johnsson. The borggården (courtyard) is particularly lovely during summer.
5. National Museum
The museum was built in 1866 and is currently closed for renovation. For one of my mother's birthdays, I had planned a day trip to this national museum. My mother used to enjoy painting a lot but at some point, had stopped her painting. After her visit here, she was re-inspired so much so that she not only resumed her painting, our apartment and my sisters' houses were soon filled with her artwork.
6. University of Stockholm
The campus at Frescati is located within a beautiful area and includes the Bergius Botanical gardens. Walking around the campus, taking in the sculptures by Marianne and Sivert Lindblom among others, is a treat.
Which of these special six places would you want to visit? If you have already visited some or all of them, how was your experience?
To view this article in the GPSmyCity app, please follow this link on your iPhone or iPad.
[I am linking this post to Wanderful Wednesday , City Tripping #51 and The Weekly Postcard]


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Snake Door Hanger
This craft is simple and versatile. It can be used for different Bible stories. It can be used for:
- The fall of man. (Genesis 3)
- When Paul was bitten by the viper. (Acts 28:3-5)
- Moses and the bronze snake. (Numbers 21:8-9)
- Aaron's rod becomes a snake. (Exodus 7:8-13)
- God providing through prayer. (Luke 11:1-13)
- John The Baptist calling the Pharisees brood of vipers. (Matthew 3:7)
- Jesus calling the Pharisees snakes and vipers. (Matthew 23:33)
- Print the template on card stock. (Template)
- Color and cut out all of the pieces.
- Glue on the half circles, if using.
- Turn the piece around and cut of any excess half circle.
If you use this craft for the story of the bronze snake, tape the finished craft on a wooden broom handle.


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"What did you do at school today?"
"What did you do at grandma's house?"
"Nothing? Are you sure? I mean, you spent the night there. And she took you out to dinner. And she took you to a festival. And she sent me photos of you at 10 PM last night still awake and eating chocolate-chip ice cream with sprinkles on top—which reminds me, I fired your grandmother and am looking for a replacement grandmother, but we can discuss that later. So think about it again. What did you do at grandma's house?"
Long pause.
This holds true for my oldest two daughters who, amazingly, have greatly improved their math skills, science skills, reading skills and monkey-bar swinging skills, all while doing "Nothing" during school hours and who nearly always come home with giant smiles on their faces after spending a day with their (former) grandparents doing "Nothing." But not so much for my youngest daughter.
Our youngest daughter is still a full-time member with our sitter. Most days, for approximately 8 hours, she molds Play-Doh, naps and asks our sitter to help her "find her baby" which she seems to lose on a regular basis. (NOTE: I would not recommend hiring our youngest to babysit your kids). But I look forward to picking her up from our wonderful sitter the most, not because she still runs and gives me a giant hug (which I love) or because she smells like Cheez-Its (which I also love). It's because when I ask her, "What did you do today?" she doesn't say "Nothing." Instead, she gives me The Bite Report.
The Bite Report is a daily record of who bit whom (and who didn't bite whom) at the sitter's house. She delivers it as if she were Secretary of State, standing on the floor of the Capitol building, recounting the key moments of the day that need to be logged into the national register. Here is an example of a typical Bite Report, though please keep in mind that the names have been changed to protect the innocent (and for my own personal amusement).
"What'd did you do today?" I ask.
"2Pac didn't bite anyone today!" she says, as if this were my only concern in life.
"Oh no?"
"Nope. He didn't."
"That's great!"
"Beyonce didn't bite anyone either!"
"That's also excellent news!"
"My baby doll did bite me, though, so I had to put her in timeout."
"Your baby doll bit you?"
"Yes, but after timeout she didn't anymore."
"Thank goodness."
Now before anyone gets all judgmental and says, "How could you send your kids to a place where kids are biting other kids?" I say to you with a very well thought-out and reasoned response: "Because it's close to work." Also all the kids are two-years-old and younger and very rarely does anyone actually bite anyone, but my daughter has committed to memory the handful of times it's happened (though, like any good celebrity Tweet-Gone-Wrong cover-up, she manages to omit her own biting offenses from the record books).
I used to find it a bit concerning that this was the No. 1 news story from her day, but thanks to the lack of activity—and reporting—from my older kids, I find The Bite Report to be as fascinating as TMZ. In fact, I've attempted to start an underground gambling ring with my wife based off The Bite Report.
"I'll bet you $5 that Shakira is the first biter today!"
"I'm not gambling," said my wife. "I've only ever gambled once and don't want to do it again."
"What happened, did you lose?"
She paused as she stared directly at me, taking in the fact that I was wearing cut-off jeans, hadn't shaved for days and had spent the previous 30 minutes telling her all the fun facts I learned about the boy-band One Direction on Wikipedia.
"The jury is still out."
I know The Bite Report has a shelf life, as these kids grow and mature and do other things, like tackle each other. But in a world where big kids are too tired to tell you what's happening in their lives, it's still nice to know that every day I can count on one constant report that's cute and sweet and will forever remind me that, once upon a time, my daughter liked to tell me about her day.
Also, if you'd like to receive The Bite Report, please follow me @BrianKlems. And if you're currently looking for a new gig and are of grandmotherly-age, I know of a family that's hiring.
Oh Boy, You're Having a Girl
(A Dad's Survival Guide to Raising Daughters)
* Subscribe to The Life of Dad via email or RSS feed!
* Also, follow me on Twitter @BrianKlems. I promise to occasionally say funny things.


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ECM Records
ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) is one of the most legendary Jazz (and classical) labels out there. Founded by Manfred Eicher back in 1969, it really has been able to tailor a very specific profile.
Having world class artists like Keith Jarrett obviously helped, but today you could really argue that ECM has a kind of "house" sound. The immediately recognizable abstract, typically dark album covers make ECM very distinctive.
And we are not only talking about Jazz, the album has done some fantastic classical (and contemporary classical) recordings as well, e.g. with the fantastic Andras Schiff.
You will find quite a number of ECM albums on my blog (just enter ECM in the free text search on the sidebar), or check out my 25 Essential Jazz albums, which features 2 ECM albums.
I personally see the major arrival of streaming with two different viewpoints.
From a consumer perspective, the possibility to access music for a "flat rate" in an unlimited way is just fantastic. The big platforms such as Spotify offer more than 30M titles. Remember the old days when there were record stores, and having more than 250 albums was considered a huge library (not surprising, given that one would have spent typically more than $3,000-5,000 to assemble such a physical treasure). Today, $120 per year gets you full access. I've personally joined the streaming bandwagon quite late, only about 2 years ago (around the time when I started this blog).
Streaming for me now is a fantastic tool to discover new music. All new albums just show up online, and you can sample as much as you want.
Now, what are the downsides?
First of all, streaming really made the concept of an "album" pretty redundant. Admittedly, the iTunes story that for the first time allowed the purchase of individual "songs" (which is by the way a completely inappropriate name for a piece of classical music, I prefer the term "Track"), but basically, since Spotify the album has often been replaced by individualized playlists.
True, the concept of a "mix tape" (remember those) pre-dates the idea of a playlist, but these were pretty hard work to get done.
Now, is the demise of the album a bad thing? Maybe not. In Jazz, suprisingly, the album still seems to be highly relevant, and in classical music the "album" concept never made a lot of sense anyhow, forcing the record companies to sometimes randomly bundle classical works just to fill the 70+ minutes of capacity. I have more versions e.g. of the Academic Festival Overture that I care for, as this was (to this day, see here) a typical "filler" piece.
Secondly, streaming typically means compressed sound quality. The MP3 standard invented to squeeze more music into less memory space is also pretty much universal now these days for streaming, which means quite a lot of musical information simply gets thrown out. This doesn't matter if you listen with $5 Apple earbuds, but if you have a good music system, you will be missing out. To this day, there are only two streaming services, Qobuz (France) and TIDAL (US), that stream in lossless CD quality or even higher (MQA for Tidal, up to 24/192 for Qobuz). Unfortunately, except for some hifi nerds like me, nobody cares about this any more, therefore, both TIDAL and Qobuz still are losing money.
Thirdly, and much more important, it is still very much unclear how artists are supposed to live of streaming. Artists, depending on the streaming service, get amounts in the cent range of even less per play. That may be ok if you're called Beyonce or Taylor Swift, but for a small Jazz or classical artist, the revenues generated here are literally just peanuts, and much less attractive than selling albums.
Therefore, on top of my spend for the streaming service of choice (Qobuz in my case), I also tend to purchase those albums that I really care about to support the artist, and you really should do as well, if you want the artist to survice and continue to create the beautiful music we all crave.
In summary, I can understand why ECM (like some other labels, e.g. Hyperion) decided for years not to make their content available for streaming. Well, they've finally changed their mind, citing as the main reason the fact that the first priority is that the music should be heard.
Well, we can all agree on that, but let's not forget, artists need to make a living!
Manu Katché: Neighbourhood (ECM 2005)
After this very long parenthesis, let's use this occasion to dig a bit into the ECM back catalogue.
And let's start with an excellent Jazz album by French drummer Manu Katché, Neighbourhood.,
Katché (with origins in France and the Ivory Coast) actually isn't your typical Jazz drummer. He is an outstanding studio musician that has played a lot of pop/rock as well.
The first time I ever saw him was admittedly in a much more "low-brow" context, when I was watching Nouvelle Star, the French version of Pop Idol / American Idol on French television.
But this album is 100% Jazz. You would have thought so when you look at the line-up: Tomasz Stanko! Jan Garbarek! Marcin Wasilewski! Slawomir Kurkiewicz! (for one of my favorite albums of the two latter, check out my post about My Top 10 Jazz Covers of Pop Songs).
It starts extremely strong, with November 99, my favorite song of the album. Wasilewski starts a dreamy piano improvisation, when Katché joins him, followed by Kurkiewicz on bass. You immediately get in the fantastic slow groove that makes this song so hypnotic. I can listen to this song over and over again, and never get tired. Stanko (trumpet) and Garbarek (saxophone) don't even feature on this song, it is a pure trio performance (maybe that's why I like it so much…).
The horns only get to join in track number 2, Number One. You'll immediately recognize the signature Garbarek sound (e.g. from the great Keith Jarrett album My Song, see also here). Stanko joins later. And again, in this song, Katchés nearly hypnotic drive is really what makes this album so special.
Another favorite of mine is the ballad February Sun, where Stanko sounds better than Chet Baker.
Overall, a highly enjoyable album. Check it out (and buy it if you like it!)
My rating: 4 stars (the opening track is 5 stars to me)


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With a modern take on the classic lockback design, this knife has contoured handle for easy handling and fits perfectly on a key chain. Bantams are available in a variety of handle patterns! Made in the USA of USA and Imported Parts
- Blade Shape: Drop Point
- Blade Length: 1 7/8″(4.8 cm)
- Weight: .6 oz. (17.1 g)
- Handle: INJECTION-MOLDED
- Carry System: Key Chain
- Origin: Made in the USA
This is Buck's standard blade material because it approaches the wear resistance of high carbon alloys while delivering the corrosion resistance of chromium stainless steels. Add our exclusive heat-treat process and you have a very user-friendly combination of superior corrosion resistance with excellent strength for wear resistance and durability. You also have a blade that is easy to resharpen. For best performance we harden to a Rockwell hardness of Rc 58.
This blade is full bellied with a strong, thick point for heavier tasks. It can also be used as a general work knife. The top of the blade drops down toward the tip, which minimizes accidental puncturing while skinning. The drop point blade is strong and very versatile.


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US President Donald Trump fired the biggest shot yet in the global trade war by imposing tariffs on $US34 billion ($46 billion) of Chinese imports. China immediately said it would be forced to retaliate.
The duties on Chinese goods started at 12:01 am Friday in Washington (2:01 pm AEST), which was just after midday in China. Another $US16 billion of goods could follow in two weeks, Trump earlier told reporters, before suggesting the final total could eventually reach $US550 billion, a figure that exceeds all of US goods imports from China in 2017.
US customs officials will begin collecting an additional 25 per cent tariff on imports from China of goods ranging from farming plows to semiconductors and airplane parts. China's officials have previously said they would respond by imposing higher levies on goods ranging from American soybeans to pork, which may in turn prompt Trump to raise trade barriers even higher.


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Design submitted by Lloyd (Australia) & Peter (UK)
Lloyd & Peter say: We thought it would be amusing to create a watch that doesn't actually display the time or date. That's why this concept design is called "Timeout".
Both the time and date are deduced by determining which one of the 10 digits (0-10) is missing from each of the 4 ring-shaped displays. So, for example, if the 4 missing digits, reading from top to bottom, are 1, 2, 4 and 7, the time would be 12:47. If you need to know the time or date in a hurry, just press the quick reveal button and it will immediately appear in the 4 circles at the centre of the rings.
A fun feature of this design is that the colour of the rings can be changed to suit your mood. This could be done manually or via a shuffle mode which would change the colour of the display randomly after a duration of time.
This watch is USB rechargeable and the design is available in a fun selection of different colours. The facia that frames the circular displays could also be interchangeable adding to the customisation.
This design would appeal to anyone who likes numbers, modern quirky things, creativity and thinking "outside the box". The narrow proportions and slim line form will hopefully appeal to the wider audience and suit the majority of wrist sizes.
It stands out because of its unique modern design and original way of telling the time. This design is also based on LCD technology giving it a hint of viability.