Everyone knows Orson Welles best for his directorial debut, Citizen Kane. Though Welles had dabbled in some film work and shorts before Kane‘s debut, few of those early works have seen the light of the day. Perhaps Welles’s most famous lost work is Too Much Johnson, a series of vignettes originally designed to screen alongside a stage play of the same name. The play never took off, and Welles never finished editing Johnson, leaving it to languish in a box somewhere for decades.
You probably know where this is going. Last week, a pristine copy of Too Much Johnson was found in Italy, and a restoration is already in progress. It seems that every year, another landmark film is being uncovered, whether it’s an extended copy of Metropolis or a missing Hitchcock. Finding an old Orson Welles film is easily on par with these other discoveries; we can’t wait to see the apparently unusual film once it premieres in October.