Controversial “Holy Grail” Project to Restore Classic Movie Using AI

We’re going out on a limb here, but if you had to pick someone to restore a classic Orson Welles movie, an AI startup using an Amazon-backed generative platform probably wouldn’t be your first choice. Yet that’s what’s been happening at Fable, thanks to its founder, Edward Saatchi.

Fable launched the project last year, using Showrunner’s generative AI to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ film The Magnificent Ambersons, which explores the declining fortunes of a wealthy 19th-century Midwestern family. Studio RKO famously made heavy cuts to the movie before its original release in 1942, added a happy ending, and destroyed the cut footage.

These were unfortunate decisions that scuppered Welles’s original vision, but this isn’t the first attempt to restore the movie to what it might have been. Filmmaker Brian Rose, who previously recreated lost footage from The Magnificent Ambersons with animated scenes, is also on board Saatchi’s project.

Saatchi’s motivation does seem to stem from a genuine passion for Welles’ work. “To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi told The New Yorker of the ongoing project, which layers AI over live-action footage. “It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”

Notably, Fable’s restored version of The Magnificent Ambersons was originally thought to be an internal project because the company didn’t even have the rights to the movie. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking, ‘Might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’” Saatchi mused last September, but he has reportedly since been making behind-the-scenes moves to convince the Welles estate and Warner Bros. that it could go further.

Welles’ daughter, Beatrice, who formerly worked with filmmaker Filip Jan Rymsza and producer Frank Marshall to edit and release her father’s unfinished final film, The Other Side of the Wind, admits she remains skeptical, but says, “They are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie.”

Your mileage may vary on whether you personally think the juice is worth the squeeze.

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