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.