{"id":288037,"date":"2026-02-09T00:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T00:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/288037\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T00:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T00:18:08","slug":"okay-im-slightly-less-mad-about-that-magnificent-ambersons-ai-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/288037\/","title":{"rendered":"Okay, I\u2019m slightly less mad about that \u2018Magnificent Ambersons\u2019 AI project"},"content":{"rendered":"

When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles\u2019 classic film \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons\u201d using generative AI, I was skeptical<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

This week, an in-depth profile by the New Yorker\u2019s Michael Schulman<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Saatchi (whose father was a founder of advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled a childhood of watching films in a private screening room with his \u201cmovie mad\u201d parents. He said he first saw \u201cAmbersons\u201d when he was twelve.<\/p>\n

The profile also explains why \u201cAmbersons,\u201d while much less famous than Welles\u2019 first film \u201cCitizen Kane,\u201d remains so tantalizing \u2014 Welles himself claimed it was a \u201cmuch better picture\u201d than \u201cKane,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,\u201d Saatchi said. \u201cIt just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saatchi is only the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who already spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the movie\u2019s script and photographs, and on Welles\u2019 notes. (Rose said that after he screened the results for friends and family, \u201ca lot of them were scratching their heads.\u201d)<\/p>\n

So while Fable is using more advanced technology \u2014 filming scenes in live action, then eventually overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices \u2014 this project is best understood as a slicker, better-funded version of Rose\u2019s work. It\u2019s a fan\u2019s attempt to glimpse Welles\u2019 vision.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Notably, while the New Yorker article includes a few clips of Rose\u2019s animations, as well as images of Fable\u2019s AI actors, there\u2019s no footage showing the results of Fable\u2019s live action-AI hybrid.<\/p>\n

By the company\u2019s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether that\u2019s fixing obvious blunders like a two-headed version of the actor Joseph Cotten, or the more subjective task of recreating the complex beauty of the film\u2019s cinematography. (Saatchi even described a \u201chappiness\u201d problem, with the AI tending to make the film\u2019s women look inappropriately happy.)<\/p>\n

As for whether this footage will ever be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was \u201ca total mistake\u201d not to speak to Welles\u2019 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\u2019 daughter Beatrice told Schulman that while she remains \u201cskeptical,\u201d she now believes \u201cthey are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

The actor and biographer Simon Callow \u2014 who\u2019s currently writing the fourth book in his multi-volume Welles biography \u2014 has also agreed to advise the project, which he described as a \u201cgreat idea.\u201d (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchis.)<\/p>\n

But not everyone has been convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, the actress Anne Baxter, would \u201cnot have agreed with that at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not the truth,\u201d Galt said. \u201cIt\u2019s a creation of someone else\u2019s truth. But it\u2019s not the original, and she was a purist.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while I\u2019ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi\u2019s aims, I still agree with Galt: At its best, this project will only result in a novelty, a dream of what the movie might have been.<\/p>\n

In fact, Galt\u2019s description of her mother\u2019s position that \u201conce the movie was done, it was done,\u201d reminded me of a recent essay in which the writer Aaron Bady compared AI to the vampires in \u201cSinners.\u201d<\/a> Bady argued that when it comes to art, both vampires and AI will always come up short, because \u201cwhat makes art possible\u201d is a knowledge of mortality and limitations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no work of art without an ending, without the point at which the work ends (even if the world continues),\u201d he wrote, adding, \u201cWithout 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that light, Saatchi\u2019s insistence that there must be \u201csome way to undo what had happened\u201d feels, if not outright vampiric, then at least a little childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. It may not, perhaps, be all that different from a startup founder claiming they can make grief obsolete<\/a> \u2014 or a studio executive insisting that \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons\u201d needed a happy ending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles\u2019 classic film \u201cThe Magnificent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,138209,5641,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-288037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-edward-saatchi","12":"tag-fable","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}