One of the most legendary flops in Hollywood history, which 1942 Orson Welles drama told the story of a spoiled rich kid who gets his comeuppance in the end?

It was intended to be the triumphant follow-up to Welles's 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. The young auteur had a massive $1 million budget, courtesy of RKO Studios, to make his adaptation of Booth Tarkington's 1918 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Magnificent Ambersons. Shooting finished $200,000 over budget and two weeks behind schedule. Then came the preview screening. As studio president George Schaefer wrote to Welles (who'd taken off for Brazil to begin another project), "Never in all my experience in the industry have I taken so much punishment or suffered as I did at the Pomona preview." With Welles at a safe distance and scrambling to cut their anticipated losses, RKO made the extraordinary decision to cut the final 50 minutes of the film and replace it with a happy ending (one which Welles would later describe as having "been edited by a lawnmower"). The film lost $600,000 anyway. Welles never recovered from the fiasco or the betrayal.

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