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.”
Why is a startup that bills itself as the “Netflix of AI,” and that recently raised money from Amazon’s Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that’s more than 80 years old?
Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts — Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP. In fact, it’s already been used to create unauthorized “South Park” episodes.
Now Fable is launching a new AI model that can supposedly generate long, complex narratives. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose — who has already spent five years working to digitally reconstruct Welles’ original vision — plans to use that model to remake the lost footage from “The Magnificent Ambersons.”
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.
Why “Ambersons”? If you’re not a Welles-loving cinephile, I’m guessing it sounds like an obscure choice for digital resurrection. Even among classic movie buffs, “”Ambersons” is overshadowed by its older, more famous sibling — while “Citizen Kane” is often called the greatest movie ever made, his second film is remembered as a lost masterpiece that the studio took out of the director’s hands, dramatically cutting it down and adding an unconvincing happy ending.
The movie’s reputation — the sense of loss and what could have been — is presumably what interested Fable and Rose. But it’s worth emphasizing that the only reason we care about “The Magnificent Ambersons” today is because of Welles — because of how it 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 to Variety as an “attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles’ creative genius” and said that 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 remake “Ambersons” and more by the fact that the estate was not “even given the courtesy of a heads up.” After all, he noted, “the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands.”