The entire restoration cost more than $1 million. They filtered out the noise on the original track, and the audio is now in digital surround stereo, with the dialogue and the lip movements in much better synch. Then the words were dropped back in again by audio expert Ed Golya and sound engineer John Fogelson, who re-created the sound effects. Everything - dialogue, music, sound effects - was recorded on one track, and although modern digital technology allowed the restorers to isolate the dialogue, how could they recombine it with the rest? Eventually they commissioned composer and arranger Michael Pendowski to start all over again, re-recording the score with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Lyric Opera Chorus. (There is poetry in that New Jersey warehouse remember that Charles Foster Kane was headed for just such a place in search of his own childhood, the night he met Susan Alexander.) The visual print was in good condition, apart from some messy splices. The tattered 16mm prints were obviously unusable, but in a New Jersey warehouse they found a long-mislaid 35mm master negative of the movie, along with the soundtrack. And so the film remained, intriguing but imperfect, until Welles' daughter, Beatrice Welles-Smith, teamed with Chicago producers Michael Dawson and Arnie Saks and they went looking for the materials to restore the film to its vanished glory. But watching the film was distracting the dubbing was so careless that there was often no correlation between the words and the lip movements.
Welles finally pulled the whole project together, dubbing many of the voices himself. Continuity was made even more difficult because some scenes were shot on locations in two or even three different countries, a doorway in Morocco leading to a piazza in Venice. He was also handicapped by a revolving-door cast his final Desdemona, Suzanne Cloutier, was the third actress in the role. Part of his approach was born of necessity: He could not afford to record sound on many of his locations, and so he placed the camera to make the actor's lips invisible, shooting over shoulders or at oblique angles. Instead of the tame eye-level visuals of many films of Shakespeare plays, where the camera is content to watch great actors saying great words, Welles approached "Othello" as a work intended at least equally for the eye. From its opening shots, where the camera looks down on a solemn funeral procession, "Othello" exhibits Welles' flair for dramatic compositions. Even after winning the Palme d'Or at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, it failed to open in America until 1955, and since then has been seen only rarely, in shabby 16mm prints. But "Othello's" compromises were not all so happy, and the resulting film, made only a decade after the boy wonder had conquered Hollywood with " Citizen Kane," was a ragged production with a soundtrack that was badly out of synch. The result probably looks better than it would have otherwise, which is often the case with a Welles improvisation (he keeps the camera close to a flurry of blades and swordplay).
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