Welles also received an attorney's letter from Paramount Pictures informing him that the studio owned the film rights to "Too Much Johnson", and that public presentation of his film would require payment to the studio. Welles initially planned to present the stage-and-film mix of "Too Much Johnson" at the Stony Creek Theatre in Connecticut as a pre-Broadway trial run, but discovered that the theater's ceiling was too low to allow for film projection. The show opened on August 16, 1938, without the filmed sequences. Most modern sources report that audience and critical reaction to the show was poor and caused Welles to abandon the production, but a search of press coverage at the time indicates no negative published reports and no reviews from major critics. "The Branford Review" reported that interest in the stage production was strong as it began its second week. Welles never completed editing the film component for "Too Much Johnson" and put the footage in storage. He rediscovered it three decades later at his home outside of Madrid, Spain. "I can't remember whether I had it all along and dug it out of the bottom of a trunk, or whether someone brought it to me, but there it was", he later recalled. "I screened it, and it was in perfect condition, with not a scratch on it, as though it had only been through a projector once or twice before. It had a fine quality." Welles, however, never allowed the footage to be seen publicly, stating the film would not make sense outside of the full context of the Gillette play. In August 1970, a fire broke out at Welles's villa and the only known complete print of "Too Much Johnson" was destroyed. A copy was discovered in Italy in 2008, and on August 5, 2013, the George Eastman House museum of film and photography in the U.S. announced that it had completed a long process of restoration together with "Cinemazero", the National Film Preservation Foundation, and laboratory experts in the U.S. and the Netherlands. Cinema Arts, a Pennsylvania film laboratory, performed most of the preservation work. "The next step was to begin the actual photo-chemical preservation", said Tony Delgrosso, Head of Preservation at George Eastman House. "For that we turned to a lab called Cinema Arts who are world famous for the quality of their black-and-white photo-chemical preservation and restoration." "Too Much Johnson" premiered October 9, 2013, at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival.