When the startup announced final plans to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic “The Magnificent Ambersons” using production AI, I was skeptical. Furthermore, I was confused as to why anyone would waste time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to piss off cinephiles while offering little commercial value.
This week, an in-depth profile of New York’s Michael Schulman provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it helps explain why the original Fable and its creator Edward Saatchi are following it: It seems to have come from a genuine love of Welles and his work.
Saatchi (his father was the founder of the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalls a childhood of watching films in a secret screening room with his “movie mad” parents. He said he first saw “Ambersons” when he was twelve.
The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” although less famous than Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane,” remains impressive – Welles himself said it was a “much better picture” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous preview test, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added its happy and unsatisfying ending, and finally destroyed the background to make the film.
“For me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “It seemed reasonable that there would be a way to fix what had happened.”
Saatchi is Welles’ latest collaborator to reimagine a lost image. In fact, Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who has already spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the film’s text and images, as well as Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after he tested the results on friends and family, “many of them were scratching their heads.”)
So although Fable uses the most advanced technology – recording scenes in live action, and then finally covering them with digital reproductions of real actors and their voices – this project is best understood as a faster version, better supported by Rose’s work. An attempt by fans to see Welles’ vision.
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Notably, although the New Yorker article includes several clips of Rose’s photos, as well as photos of Fable’s AI characters, there are no photos showing the results of Fable’s live action-AI hybrid.
By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether that’s correcting obvious mistakes like the two-headed version of actor Joseph Cotten, or the more focused task of recreating the complex aesthetic of the film’s film. (Satchi even explained the problem of “happiness,” the AI tending to make the women in the film look unrealistically happy.)
As for whether the photos will ever be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was “a complete mistake” not to address Welles’ legacy before his announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to win the estate and Warner Bros., who own the rights to the film. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that although she had “doubts,” she now believes they “went into this project with great respect for my father and for this wonderful film.”
Actor and biographer Simon Callow – currently writing the fourth book in his multi-volume Welles biography – also agreed to advise on the project, which he described as “a great idea.” (Callow is a friend of the Saatchi family.)
But not everyone was convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, “wouldn’t approve of that at all.”
“It’s not true,” said Galt. “It’s someone else’s creation of reality. But it’s not the original reality, and he was a purist.”
And while I’ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s intentions, I still agree with Galt: At best, this project will only lead to something new, a dream of what the movie could have been.
In fact, Galt’s description of his mother’s position that “when the movie is done, it’s done,” reminded me of a recent story where writer Aaron Bady compared AI to vampires in “Sinners”. Bady asserted that when it comes to art, both vampires and AI will always come up short, because “what makes art possible” is the knowledge of death and limitations.
“There is no work of art without an end, except the point where 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 make art or desire or feeling.”
In that light, Saatchi’s insistence that there it should to be “some way of undoing what happened” sounds, if not downright vampiric, then at least childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. It might, perhaps, be very different from a startup founder who says he can make grief obsolete — or a studio executive who insists that “The Amazing Ambersons” needs a happy ending.
