Well, I’m a little less angry about the “Magnificent Ambersons” AI project.

When a startup announced its plans last fall to recreate lost footage from the Orson Welles classic “The Magnificent Ambersons” using generative AI, I was skeptical. What’s more, I was confused as to why anyone would spend time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to piss off cinephiles while offering negligible commercial value.

this week, An in-depth profile by The New Yorker’s Michael Shulman Provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it helps explain why startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi went for it: it seems to come from a genuine love for Wells and his work.

Saatchi (whose father was the founder of the advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi) recalls his childhood watching films in a private screening room with his “film-obsessed” parents. He said he first saw Amberson when he was 12 years old.

The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” although far less well-known than Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane,” remains so exciting — Welles himself claimed it was “a much better picture” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous premiere, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added a surprising and unconvincing happy ending, and eventually destroyed the cut footage to make room in its vaults.

“For me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “It seemed self-evident that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”

Saatchi is just the latest Welsh fan to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is working with director Brian Rose, who has actually spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the film’s screenplay and photographs, and on Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after checking out the results for friends and family, “many of them were scratching their heads.”)

So, while Fable uses more advanced technology — filming live-action scenes, then eventually overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices — this project is best understood as a sleeker, better-financed version of Rose’s work. It’s a fan’s attempt at a glimpse into Willis’ vision.

Notably, although the New Yorker article includes some clips from Rose’s animation, as well as images of Fable’s AI actors, there is no footage showing the results of Fable’s hybrid live-action AI.

By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether it’s fixing blunders like the double-headed version of actor Joseph Cotten, or the more subjective task of recreating the rich lighting and shadows found in Welles’ shots. (Saatchi even described a “happiness” problem, where the AI ​​tends to make female characters seem inappropriately happy.)

As for whether or not this footage will be released to the public, Saatchi admitted that it was a “total mistake” not to speak to Willis’ estate before his announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to win over both the company and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the film. Willis’ daughter Beatrice told Shulman that she was still skeptical, but now believed that they would go into this project with great respect for my father and this beautiful film.

Actor and biographer Simon Callow – who is currently writing the fourth book in a multi-volume biography of Welles – has also agreed to advise 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, “would not have approved of it at all.”

“That’s not the truth,” Galt said. “It’s a creation of someone else’s reality. But it’s not the original, it was pure.”

And although I’ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s aims, I still agree with Galt: at its best, this project would only serve as a novelty, a dream of what film could have been.

I also remembered a recent article by Aaron Badey Comparing artificial intelligence to vampires in the movie “Sinners”. Buddy said that when it comes to art, vampires and artificial intelligence will always fail, because “what makes art possible” is the knowledge of mortality and limitations.

“Without death, without loss, without the distance between my body and yours, which separates my memories from yours, we cannot make art, desire, or feeling,” he wrote.

In light of this, Saatchi insists that there is He should Some Way to Undo What’s Done seems, if not quite vampiric, then at least a little childish in his unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. Maybe it’s no different A startup founder claims he can make sadness obsolete — or a studio executive insisting that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needs a happy ending.