“They destroyed Ambersons, and it destroyed me,” Orson Welles said, lamenting RKO’s decision to chop up his 1942 adaptation of the Booth Tarkington novel The Magnificent Ambersons. The studio cut significant footage from the movie and changed the ending, and though some hold out hope that an original print was secreted to South America and survives today, no film cans have ever surfaced.

In an April 12, 1942 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article published three months before the company released the mutilated version, Welles told a story about the lengths he’d gone to make a work as great as Citizen Kane. He claimed that in order to get a shot no one had been able to previously master, he hired a circus strongman named Badajoz as a freelance cameraman.