Scott Simmon’s Reconstruction of Orson Welles’s Unfinished Too Much Johnson (1938) Now Online

 Lost for 75 years, the unfinished movies planned by Orson Welles for the Mercury Theatre’s 1938 production of Too Much Johnson are now online at the National Film Preservation Foundation’s website, along with Scott Simmon’s “reimagining” of how the films might have been put together had they been completed.  Simmon’s edit premiered at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles in May.  Welles’s 66-minute work print and the new 34-minute edit are both available for free streaming and downloading, alongside Simmon’s essays about them, at: www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/lost-and-found-mercury-theater-films   Among reviews of the online presentation are these: Leonard Maltin’s Movie Crazy and Noel Murray in The Dissolve: http://thedissolve.com/news/3028-the-long-lost-orson-welles-filmtheater-project-too/