posted April 30, 2008 03:42 AM                    

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Roger: You may be quite right, and Baesen was of somewhat the same opinion about William Friedkin's remarks on THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and IT'S ALL TRUE. I can only report what I heard and saw. He was talking about essentially "lost films," not alternate versions.

Friedkin, dressed rather casually, obviously pleased at the large, friendly crowd at the Castro on a Monday evening, ranged widely in his address, often scarcely allowing the on-stage interviewer a question. He paced about from one side of the stage to the other, tip-toeing around the organ pit, complaining jocularly about the lack of a follow spot. He was obviously proud of the job which had been done by the Warner Brothers' restoration team on his film retrospective, prliminary to a DVD set release (mentioned in the chat referred to here a couple of times).

Quite early, after praising DVD departments in general, and specifically, behind the scenes "assistant producers" who love films to the extent of not following orders for their destruction, he launched into his tale of the rescued version of Orson Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, in support of his thesis; quickly appending that IT'S ALL TRUE had been similarly discovered and subsequently released. He said these preservations were possible because someone in lower management had not destroyed the negatives as ordered but placed them in cans marked "Welles Films," which sat on shelves in film vaults for decades.

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