On Friday, a startup called Fable announced an ambitious, if head-scratching, plan to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ classic film “The Magnificent Ambersons.” This is a surprising move for a company that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI” and recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund.
The company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts. While Fable is starting with its own intellectual property, it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP. In fact, its technology has already been used to create unauthorized “South Park” episodes. Now Fable is launching a new AI model designed to generate long, complex narratives.
Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose plans to use that model to remake the lost footage. Rose has already spent five years working to digitally reconstruct Welles’ original vision. 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.
For those not familiar with film history, “The Magnificent Ambersons” may seem like an obscure choice for a digital resurrection. Even among classic movie buffs, Welles’ second film is overshadowed by its older, more famous sibling, “Citizen Kane.” While “Citizen Kane” is often called the greatest movie ever made, “Ambersons” is remembered as a lost masterpiece that the studio took out of the director’s hands. The studio dramatically cut it down and added an unconvincing happy ending.
The movie’s reputation, defined by a sense of loss and what could have been, is presumably what interested Fable and Rose. But it is worth emphasizing that the only reason we care about “The Magnificent Ambersons” today is because of Welles himself. We care because of how its handling derailed his Hollywood career, and how even in its diminished form, it still reveals so much of his filmmaking genius.
That makes it even more astonishing that Fable apparently failed to reach out to Welles’ estate. David Reeder, who handles the estate for Welles’ daughter Beatrice, described the project as an attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles’ creative genius. He said it will amount to nothing more than a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking of a creative force like Welles.
Despite Reeder’s criticism, he seems less upset by the idea of attempting to recreate “Ambersons” and more by the fact that the estate was not even given the courtesy of a heads up. He noted that the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended for voiceover work with brands. However, even if Welles’ heirs were being consulted and compensated, many would have zero interest in this new version, just as they would have no interest in hearing a digital simulacrum of Welles’s legendary voice being used to hawk new products.
Welles fans know this is not the first time other filmmakers have tried to posthumously fix or finish his movies. But at least those attempts used footage that Welles had shot himself. Fable describes its planned approach as a hybrid of AI and traditional filmmaking. Apparently some scenes will be reshot with contemporary actors whose faces will then be swapped for digital recreations of the original cast.
Despite the absurdity of announcing a project like this without the film rights or the blessing of Welles’ daughter, at least Rose seems motivated by a genuine desire to honor Welles’ vision. In a statement, Rose mourned the destruction of a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy, with only 50 seconds of the shot remaining in the recut film.
Many share that sense of loss, but also believe this is a tragedy that AI cannot undo. 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’. It will be filled with Frankensteined replicas of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, not the actors themselves. Their final product will not be Welles’ version of “The Magnificent Ambersons” that RKO destroyed more than 80 years ago. Barring a miraculous rediscovery of lost footage, that version is gone forever.