An Amazon-backed artificial intelligence company will attempt to reconstruct the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons as a test case of AI’s ability to edit, rewrite, and overhaul a movie after it has already been filmed.
Fable Studio’s Showrunner, backed with an investment from Amazon, made its announcement today at the Venice Film Festival. This upcoming version of The Magnificent Ambersons is not intended for commercial use, and Showrunner did not license the rights from Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the RKO Pictures release.
Showrunner is working with Brian Rose, who has spent the last five years trying to recreate the missing scenes with charcoal drawings based on storyboards, surviving frame enlargements and screenplay drafts. Showrunner expects to work with Rose on the project over the next two years.
“After more than five years of work meticulously researching and reconstructing every frame of The Magnificent Ambersons, I am partnering with (Fable co-founder) Edward Saatchi and Fable Studio to do what was long thought impossible: to create a photo-realistic restoration of this film. To use technology in service to art and a legend’s legacy,” Rose said in a statement posted on Instagram. “Rest assured, I am working closely, in deep collaborative partnership with Fable, to make sure all the knowledge and research I have undertaken will be used to create something that is precise, exacting, and honors Orson Welles and his great masterpiece.”
He added, “Just as when sound, color, widescreen, and digital all emerged, this new technology will no doubt provoke controversy and concern. It has already. My goal now, is to devote the same energy that carried this project the last five years, to showing how AI can be a tremendous force for achieving what was, just a few years ago, seemingly impossible.”
In a statement to Variety, the Welles estate complained it had not been consulted, adding it has embraced AI technology to create a Wellesian voice model intended to be used for commercial work. “This attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren’t even given the courtesy of a heads up. While AI is inevitable, it still cannot replace the creative instincts resident in the human mind, which means this effort to make Ambersons whole will be a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles.”
It is worth noting that while the estate controls the rights to Welles’ likeness it has no stake in The Magnificent Ambersons – one of the few films he directed but did not appear on camera.
Welles lost control over the final shaping his sophomore film in 1942.
With editing underway on The Magnificent Ambersons, RKO Pictures ordered Welles to Brazil in February 1942 to direct the ill-fated It’s All True. According to RKO memos and cables, two groupings of Ambersons footage (14 reels and another 10), as well as 10 reels of Journey Into Fear, were shipped to Brazil so Welles could finish editing the film. However, after a test audience reacted badly at a preview, RKO ordered a happier ending to be shot in Welles’ absence and drastically cut the movie down to 88 minutes.
The excised footage and outtakes stored in RKO’s vault in Southern California were subsequently destroyed.
“They destroyed Ambersons,” Welles would say in a BBC interview four decades later, “and the picture itself destroyed me; I didn’t get a job as a director for years afterwards.”
More than two years after Welles left Brazil, RKO instructed Cinedia Studios in Rio de Janiero, which Welles used as a base in 1942, to junk the reels of The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey Into Fear left behind. Cinedia owner Adhemar Gonzaga, a cineaste and film collector, notified RKO he had followed their orders.
Documentary filmmaker Joshua Grossberg has speculated the footage might have survived and led a hunt for it in Brazil. His efforts will be chronicled in an upcoming documentary, The Lost Print: The Making of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.
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