Okay, I’m slightly less mad about that ‘Magnificent Ambersons’ AI project

Source: TechCrunch

The New Yorker Profile

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 why anyone would spend time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to outrage 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. 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 co‑founded the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled a childhood of watching films in a private screening room with his “movie‑mad” parents. He first saw Ambersons when he was twelve.

The profile also explains why Ambersons, while much less famous than Welles’ first film Citizen Kane, remains so tantalizing. 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, and eventually destroyed the excised footage to make space in its vaults.

“To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”

The Fable Project

Saatchi is only the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost footage. Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who already spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the movie’s script, photographs, and Welles’ notes. Rose said that after he screened the results for friends and family, “a lot of them were scratching their heads.”

While Rose’s work consists of animated reconstructions, Fable is using more advanced technology—filming scenes in live action and eventually overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices. The project can be understood as a slicker, better‑funded version of Rose’s effort, a fan’s attempt to glimpse Welles’ original vision.

Technical and Artistic Challenges

The New Yorker article includes a few clips of Rose’s animations and images of Fable’s AI actors, but no footage showing the results of Fable’s live‑action/AI hybrid. By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges:

• Obvious blunders – e.g., a two‑headed version of actor Joseph Cotten.
• Cinematography – recreating the complex beauty of the original film’s visual style.
• Emotional tone – Saatchi described a “happiness” problem, with the AI tending to make women characters look inappropriately happy.

Saatchi admitted it was “a total mistake” not to speak to Welles’ estate before his announcement. He is reportedly working to win over both the estate and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the film. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told 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.”

Actor and biographer Simon Callow, currently writing the fourth volume of his multi‑volume Welles biography, has agreed to advise the project, describing it as a “great idea.” (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchis.)

Reception and Criticism

Not everyone is convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, would “not have agreed with that at all.”

“It’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.”

Galt’s description of her mother’s position—that “once the movie was done, it was done”—echoes a recent essay by writer Aaron Bady, who 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 ending, without the point at which the work ends (even if the world continues). 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.”

In that light, Saatchi’s insistence that there must be “some 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. It may not be all that different from a startup founder claiming they can make grief obsolete—or a studio executive insisting that The Magnificent Ambersons needed a happy ending.