Madeleine Stowe |
HOLLYWOOD - The star of the remake of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, which supposedly employed Welles' original script and shooting
notes, has expressed her dismay over the outcome of the project.
Madeleine Stowe (The Last of the Mohicans, The General's
Daughter), who portrays Isabel Amberson Minafer in the three-part
miniseries due to air on the A&E channel in January, told today's
Calgary Sun: "It is the best screenplay I have ever read. I was
so thrilled to be part of this great project, but what happened was a
disaster."
In the interview, Stowe seemed to accuse Mexican director
Alfonso Arau (Like Water for Chocolate, A Walk in the Clouds) of
reworking Welles' script. "Arau didn't want to discuss his vision with
the actors, nor did he want any input from any of us about our
characters. All he wanted to talk about was incest. It was 12 weeks of
agony. We had a chance to make cinema history and, because of Arau, we
botched it."
Ironically, in his own time, Welles had accused executives
of RKO of botching his original version of Ambersons, based on
the novel by Booth Tarkington, by drastically cutting his film.
Arau had
said earlier that he intended to be faithful to Welles' script, telling
one interviewer, "We couldn't take the risk of spending millions on
trying to better something that couldn't be bettered."
But Stowe told
the Sun: "It breaks my heart that we didn't do the material
justice." A message posted today on a website devoted to
Welles' films <http://www.wellesnet.com/News.htm> claims that the
new film is only "loosely based" on the original screenplay and lists
numerous alterations -- and even the elimination of scenes that were
included in the original RKO release.