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

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. In fact, I was baffled as to why anyone would spend time and money on something that was guaranteed to enrage 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. In any case, it helps explain why the startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi are pursuing this: it seems to stem from a genuine love for Welles and his work.

Saatchi (whose father was the founder of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency) recalled a childhood spent watching movies in a private screening room with his “movie-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 tantalizing. Welles himself claimed it was a “much better movie” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and ultimately destroyed the cut footage to make room in the vaults.

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

Saatchi is just the latest Welles enthusiast to dream of recreating the lost images. Fable is even working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who has been trying to achieve the same thing for years with animated scenes based on the film’s script and photographs, as well as Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after he screened the results for friends and family, “a lot of them were scratching their heads.”)

So while Fable uses more advanced technology – filming scenes in live action and eventually overlaying them with digital reproductions of the original actors and their voices – this project is best understood as a slicker, better-financed version of Rose’s work. It’s one fan’s attempt to get a glimpse of Welles’ vision.

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.

The company itself admits there are significant challenges, whether fixing obvious blunders, such as a two-person 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 women in the film look inappropriately happy.)

As for whether this 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., which owns the rights to the film. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that while she remains “skeptical,” she now believes that “they go 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 family friend of the Saatchis.)

But not everyone is convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, “wouldn’t have agreed to 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.”

And while I’ve grown more sympathetic to Saatchi’s goals, I still agree with Galt: At best, this project will only result in a novelty, a dream of what the film could have been.

Galt’s description of her mother’s view that “once the movie was done, it was 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 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, which separates my memories from yours, we cannot create art, desire, or feeling.”

In that light, Saatchi emphasizes that must “being a way to undo what 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 then a startup founder who claims they can make grief obsolete – or a studio executive insisting that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needed a happy ending.