When a startup announced last fall that it planned to use generative AI to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic film, The Ambersons, I was skeptical. More than that, I was baffled as to why someone would spend time and money on a work that had so little commercial value but was guaranteed to infuriate moviegoers.
This week, an in-depth profile by Michael Shulman in The New Yorker tells more about the project. At least that helps explain why startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi are pursuing it. It seems to come from a genuine love for Welles and his work.
Saatchi (whose father was the founder of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled his childhood watching movies in a private screening room with his “movie buff” parents. He said he first saw “The Ambersons” when he was 12 years old.
The profile also explains why “The Ambersons” is so appealing, even though it is far less well-known than Welles’ first film, “Citizen Kane.” Welles himself claimed that the film was “much better footage” than Kane, but after disastrous test screenings, the studio cut 43 minutes of the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and ultimately scrapped the cut footage to make room in the archives.
“For me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “I instinctively knew there was some way to undo what happened.”
Mr. Saatchi is just the latest Welles fanatic to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is a collaboration with filmmaker Brian Rose, who has already spent years trying to accomplish the same thing with the film’s script and photography, as well as animated scenes based on Welles’ notes. (“A lot of people were scratching their heads,” Rose said after reviewing the results for friends and family.)
As such, although Fable uses more advanced technology, filming scenes in live action and ultimately superimposing digital recreations of the original actors and their voices, the project is best understood as a fancier, better-funded version of Rose’s work. It’s a fan’s attempt to get a glimpse of Welles’ vision.
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Notably, while the New Yorker article includes several clips of Rose’s animation and images of Fable’s AI actors, there is no footage showing the results of Fable’s live-action/AI hybrid.
As the company itself admits, there are significant challenges, whether it’s fixing obvious failures like the two-headed version of actor Joseph Cotton, or the more subjective task of recreating the complex beauty of the film’s cinematography. (Saatchi also addressed the issue of “happiness,” in which AI tends to make women in movies appear inappropriately happy.)
As for whether the footage would be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was a “complete mistake” not to speak to Wells’ estate before announcing it. Since then, he has reportedly been trying to convince both the estate and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the film, to do so. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that although she was “skeptical,” she now believes “they approach this project with great respect for my father and this beautiful film.”
Actor and biographer Simon Callow, currently writing the fourth volume of his multi-volume biography of Welles, has also agreed to advise on the project, which he described as a “brilliant idea”. (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchi family.)
But not everyone is convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, “would never have agreed to that.”
“That’s not true,” Gault said. “It was a fabrication of someone else’s truth. But it wasn’t original, and she was a purist.”
And while I’m increasingly sympathetic to Saatchi’s goals, I still agree with Galt. At its best, this project only brings novelty, a dream of what the movie could be.
In fact, Galt’s explanation of her mother’s position that “Once the movie is done, it’s done” reminded me of a recent essay by author Aaron Bady, who likened AI to the vampires in “Sinners.” Buddy argued that both vampires and AI will always be inferior when it comes to art, because “what makes art possible” is knowledge of death and limitations.
“There is no work of art without an end, no work of art without a point at which it ends (even if the world continues),” he added. “Without death, without loss, without space between my body and yours, without space between my memory and your memory, we cannot create art, desire, and emotion.”
When you think about it, Saatchi’s insistence that “there has to be some way to undo what happened” feels, if not completely vampiric, then at least a little childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. Maybe it’s not so different from a startup founder who says sadness can be made obsolete, or a studio executive who says “The Great Ambersons” needs a happy ending.
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