{"id":138210,"date":"2025-09-07T00:07:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T00:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/138210\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T00:07:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T00:07:06","slug":"why-is-an-amazon-backed-ai-startup-making-orson-welles-fan-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/138210\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Friday, a startup called Fable announced<\/a> an ambitious, if head-scratching, plan to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles\u2019 classic film \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why is a startup that bills itself as the \u201cNetflix of AI,\u201d and that recently raised money from Amazon\u2019s Alexa Fund<\/a>, talking about remaking a movie that was first released in 1942?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts \u2014 Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP<\/a>. In fact, it\u2019s already been used to create unauthorized \u201cSouth Park\u201d episodes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now Fable is launching a new AI model that can supposedly generate long, complex narratives. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose \u2014 who has already spent five years<\/a> working to digitally reconstruct Welles\u2019 original vision \u2014 plans to use that model to remake the lost footage from \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remarkably, Fable has not obtained the rights to the film, making this a prospective tech demo that will probably never be released to the general public.<\/p>\n

Why \u201cAmbersons\u201d? If you\u2019re not a Welles-loving cinephile, I\u2019m guessing it sounds like an obscure choice for digital resurrection.<\/p>\n

Even among classic movie buffs, Welles\u2019 second film is overshadowed by its older, more famous sibling. While \u201cCitizen Kane\u201d is often called the greatest movie ever made, \u201cAmbersons\u201d is remembered as a lost masterpiece<\/a> that the studio took out of the director\u2019s hands, dramatically cutting it down and adding an unconvincing happy ending.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The movie\u2019s reputation \u2014 the sense of loss and what could have been \u2014 is presumably what interested Fable and Rose. But it\u2019s worth emphasizing that the only reason we care about \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons\u201d today is because of Welles \u2014 because of how it derailed his Hollywood career, and how even in its diminished form, it still reveals so much of his filmmaking genius.<\/p>\n

That makes it even more astonishing that Fable apparently failed to reach out to Welles\u2019 estate. David Reeder, who handles the estate for Welles\u2019 daughter Beatrice, described the project to Variety<\/a> as an \u201cattempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles\u2019 creative genius\u201d and said that it will amount to nothing more than \u201ca purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking [of] a creative force like Welles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite Reeder\u2019s criticism, he seems less upset by the idea of attempting to recreate \u201cAmbersons\u201d and more by the fact that the estate was not \u201ceven given the courtesy of a heads up.\u201d After all, he noted, \u201cthe estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not so open-minded. Even if Welles\u2019 heirs were being consulted and compensated, I\u2019d have zero interest in this new \u201cAmbersons,\u201d just as I have zero interest in hearing a digital simulacrum of Welles\u2019s legendary voice being used to hawk new products.<\/p>\n

Now, Welles fans know this isn\u2019t the first time other filmmakers have tried to posthumously fix<\/a> or finish<\/a> his movies. But at least those attempts used footage that Welles had shot himself. Fable, meanwhile, describes its planned approach as a hybrid of AI and traditional filmmaking \u2014 apparently some scenes will be reshot with contemporary actors whose faces will be then swapped for digital recreations of the original cast.<\/p>\n

Despite the absurdity of announcing a project like this without the film rights or the blessing of Welles\u2019 daughter, at least Rose seems motivated by a genuine desire to honor Welles\u2019 vision. For example, in a statement about why he wants to recreate the film<\/a>, Rose mourned the destruction of \u201ca four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,\u201d with only 50 seconds of the shot remaining in the recut film.<\/p>\n

I share his sense of loss \u2014 but I also believe this is a tragedy that AI cannot undo.<\/p>\n

No matter how convincingly Fable and Rose may be able to stitch together their own version of that tracking shot, it will be their shot, not Welles\u2019, filled with Frankensteined replicas of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, not the actors themselves. Their final product will not be Welles\u2019 version of \u201cThe Magnificent Ambersons\u201d that RKO destroyed more than 80 years ago. Barring a miraculous rediscovery of lost footage<\/a>, that version is gone forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday, a startup called Fable announced an ambitious, if head-scratching, plan to recreate the lost 43 minutes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,34475,86335],"class_list":{"0":"post-138210","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-fable","10":"tag-magnificent-ambersons"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}