When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic film “The Magnificent Ambersons” using generative AI, I was skeptical. More than that, I was baffled as to why anyone would spend time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to anger cinephiles while offering negligible commercial value.
This week, an in-depth profile by the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it helps explain why the 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 advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled a childhood of watching films in a private screening room with his “film-mad” parents. He said he first saw “Ambersons” when he was twelve.
The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” though much 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, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending to ruin the film, and ultimately destroyed it.
“To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” said Saatchi. “It just seemed intuitive that there would be a way to undo what had happened.”
Saatchi is just the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who has already spent years trying to achieve the same with animated scenes based on the film’s script and photographs and on Welles’s notes. (Rose said that after he screened the results to friends and family, “many of them scratched their heads.”)
So while Fable uses more advanced technology—filming scenes in live-action, then overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices—this project is best understood as a smarter, better-financed version of Rose’s work. It’s a fan’s attempt to catch a glimpse of Welles’ vision.
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Notably, while the New Yorker article includes a few clips of Rose’s animations as well as images of Fable’s AI actors, there is no footage showing the results of Fable’s live action AI hybrid.
By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether correcting obvious blunders like a two-headed version of actor Joseph Cotten, or the more subjective task of recreating the complex beauty of the film’s cinematography. (Saatchi even described a “happiness” problem, where the AI ​​tended to make the film’s women look inappropriately happy.)
As for whether that footage will ever be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was “a total 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 that “they are going into this project with tremendous respect for my father and this beautiful film.”
Actor and biographer Simon Callow – who is currently writing the fourth book in his multi-volume Welles biography – has also agreed to advise on the project, which he described as a “great idea.” (Callow is a friend of the Saatchis.)
But not everyone has been convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, “would not have agreed with it 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 she was a purist.”
And while I’ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s goals, I still agree with Galt: at its best, this project will result in nothing more than a novelty, a dream of what the film could have been.
In fact, Galt’s description of his mother’s attitude that “when the movie’s done, it’s done,” reminded me of a recent essay in which writer Aaron Bady compared AI to the vampires in “Sinners.” Bady argued that when it comes to art, both vampires and AI will always fall short because “what makes art possible” is a knowledge of mortality and limitations.
“There is no work of art without an end, without the point where the work ends (even if the world continues),” he wrote, adding: “Without death, without loss, and without the space between my body and yours, separating my memories from yours, we cannot create art or desire or feeling.”
In that light, Saatchi insists that there bowl being “a way to undo what had happened” feels, if not outright vampiric, then at least a little childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. That might not be so different from a startup founder who claims they can make grief obsolete — or a studio executive who insists that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needed a happy ending.