My initial reaction to the announcement last autumn that a startup intended to reconstruct lost segments of Orson Welles’ seminal film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” using generative AI was one of profound skepticism. Beyond that, I found myself perplexed by the rationale behind investing considerable resources into a venture that seemed destined to provoke outrage among cinephiles while offering negligible commercial returns.
This week, an exhaustive profile by Michael Schulman in The New Yorker shed further light on the initiative. If nothing else, the article clarifies why the startup Fable and its founder, Edward Saatchi, are pursuing this ambitious project: it appears to stem from a profound admiration for Welles and his cinematic legacy.
Saatchi, whose father co-founded the renowned advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, recounted a childhood immersed in film, watching movies in a private screening room with his "movie mad" parents. He first encountered "Ambersons" at the age of twelve.
The profile also elucidates why "Ambersons," despite being overshadowed by Welles’ debut masterpiece "Citizen Kane," continues to captivate. Welles himself once declared it a "much better picture" than "Kane." However, following a disastrous preview screening, the studio drastically cut 43 minutes, appended an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and ultimately destroyed the excised footage to create space in its archives.
“To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi stated. “It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”
Saatchi is not the first Welles enthusiast to envision the recreation of this lost footage. In fact, Fable is collaborating with filmmaker Brian Rose, who previously dedicated years to achieving the same goal through animated scenes derived from the film’s script, archival photographs, and Welles’ personal notes. (Rose admitted that after screening his results for friends and family, “a lot of them were scratching their heads.”)
Therefore, while Fable employs more advanced technology—filming live-action scenes and subsequently overlaying them with digital reconstructions of the original actors and their voices—this project is best understood as a more substantially funded and sophisticated iteration of Rose’s original endeavor. It represents a fan’s earnest attempt to offer a glimpse into Welles’ intended vision.
Notably, although The New Yorker article features some clips of Rose’s animations and images of Fable’s AI-generated actors, it does not include any actual footage showcasing the results of Fable’s live-action-AI hybrid.
By the company’s own admission, significant hurdles persist. These range from correcting glaring errors, such as a two-headed rendition of actor Joseph Cotten, to the more nuanced challenge of faithfully replicating the rich lighting and intricate shadow play characteristic of Welles’ original cinematography. (Saatchi even highlighted a “happiness” problem, where the AI tended to depict female characters with an inappropriately cheerful demeanor.)
Regarding the potential public release of this footage, Saatchi conceded it was “a total mistake” not to engage with Welles’ estate prior to his initial announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to secure the approval of both the estate and Warner Bros., the rights holder of the film. Welles’ daughter, Beatrice, informed Schulman that while she remains “skeptical,” she now believes “they are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie.”
The esteemed actor and biographer Simon Callow, who is currently authoring the fourth volume of his multi-book Welles biography, has also agreed to advise the project, deeming it a “great idea.” (Callow is a long-standing family friend of the Saatchis.)
However, not everyone has been swayed. Melissa Galt stated that her mother, the actress Anne Baxter, “would not have agreed with that at all.”
“It’s not the truth,” Galt asserted. “It’s a creation of someone else’s truth. But it’s not the original, and she was a purist.”
While my empathy for Saatchi’s objectives has grown, I was simultaneously reminded of a recent essay by writer Aaron Bady, who likened AI to the vampires in "Sinners." Bady contended that, in the realm of art, both vampires and AI ultimately fall short, because the profound understanding of mortality and inherent limitations is “what makes art possible.”
“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 feeling,” Bady penned.
Through this lens, Saatchi’s unwavering conviction that “it just seemed intuitive that there would be some way to undo what had happened” feels, if not overtly vampiric, then at least somewhat naive in its reluctance to accept the permanence of certain losses. It might not, perhaps, be so far removed from a studio executive’s insistence that “The Magnificent Ambersons” required a happy ending.
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