When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic “The Magnificent Ambersons” using genetic artificial intelligence, I was skeptical. More than that, I was left baffled as to why anyone would spend time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to enrage cinephiles while offering negligible commercial value.
this week, an in-depth profile by Michael Schulman of the New Yorker; provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it explains why startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi are pursuing it: It seems to come from a genuine love of Welles and his work.
Saatchi (whose father was the founder of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled his childhood watching films in a private screening room with his “film-crazy” parents. He said he first saw “Ambersons” when he was twelve.
The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” though far less famous than Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane,” remains so enticing — Welles himself claimed it was “a much better picture” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending in space, and made it its space happy ending.
“For me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” said Saatchi. “It just seemed intuitive that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”
Saatchi is just the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost material. In fact, Fable is working with director Brian Rose, who has already spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the film’s script and stills and Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after reviewing the results for friends and family, “a lot of them scratched their heads.”)
So while Fable uses more advanced technology—shooting scenes in live action, then overlaying them with digital representations of the original actors and their voices—this project is best understood as a slimmer, better-financed version of Rose’s work. It’s a fan’s attempt to see Welles’ vision.
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Notably, while the New Yorker article includes some clips of Rose’s animations, as well as images of Fable’s AI actors, there is no footage showing the results of the live-action Fable-AI hybrid.
By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether it’s fixing obvious mistakes like a two-headed version of actor Joseph Cotten, or the more subjective task of recreating the film’s intricate beauty. (Saatchi even described a “happiness” problem, with the AI tending to make the women in the film look inappropriately happy.)
As for whether that video will ever be made public, Saatchi admitted it was “an absolute mistake” not to speak to Welles’ estate before his announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to win over both the estate and Warner Bros., who own the rights to the film. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that while she remains “skeptical,” she now believes “they will go into this project with a tremendous amount of respect for my father and this beautiful film.”
Actor and biographer Simon Callow – who is currently writing the fourth book in his multi-volume biography of Welles – has also agreed to advise on the project, which he described as a “wonderful idea”. (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchis.)
But not everyone is convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, “wouldn’t agree with that at all.”
“That’s not the truth,” Galt said. “It’s a creation of someone else’s truth. But it’s not the original, and he was a purist.”
And while I’ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s goals, I still agree with Galt: At best, this project will only lead to an innovation, a dream of what the film could have been.
In fact, Galt’s description of her mother’s position that “when the movie’s over, it’s done,” reminded me of a recent essay in which author Aaron Bady compared AI to vampires in “Sinners.” Bady argued that when it comes to art, both vampires and AI will always come up short because “what makes art possible” is the knowledge of mortality and limitations.
“There is no work of art without an end, without the point at which the work ends (even if the world goes on),” he wrote, adding: “Without death, without loss, and without the space between my body and yours, separating my memories from yours, we cannot make art or desire or emotion.”
In this light, Saatchi’s insistence that there is must to be “some way of undoing what had happened” feels, if not downright vampiric, then at least a little childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. Maybe it’s not that different from that a startup founder who claims he can make grief obsolete — or a studio executive who insisted that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needed a happy ending.
