On Friday, a startup called Fable announced something ambitious. If I turned my head over, I planned to recreate the lost 43-minute Orson Welles classic film, The Magnificent Ambersons.
Why are startups charging “AI Netflix” and are talking about a remake of the film, which was first released in 1942, recently attracting money from Amazon’s Alexa funds?
Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own comics using AI prompts. Fable starts with its own intellectual property, but has the ambition to offer similar capabilities on Hollywood IP. In fact, it is already being used to create fraudulent “South Park” episodes.
Now, Fable is launching a new AI model that appears to be able to generate long, complex narratives. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose has already spent five years working to digitally reconstruct Wells’ original vision, but will use that model to recreate lost footage from “The Magnificent Amberson.”
Surprisingly, Fable has not acquired the rights to the film, which is probably a future tech demo that will never be released to the public.
Why “Amberson”? If you’re not a Cinephile who loves Wells, I think it sounds like an obscure choice for a digital revival.
Even among classic film enthusiasts, Wells’ second film is covered by older, more famous siblings. “Citizen Kane” is often referred to as a great film ever made, but “Ambersons” is remembered as a lost masterpiece where the studio takes it out of the director’s hands and dramatically cuts it down, adding an unconvincing happy ending.
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The film’s reputation – the sense of loss and what happened – is probably something that interests Fable and Rose. However, it is worth highlighting that the only reason to bother today’s “magnificent Amberson” is for Wells. It reveals how he derailed his Hollywood career, and even in that form, many of his filmmaking geniuses.
That makes it even more surprising that the f story clearly did not reach out to Wells’ real estate. David Leader, who handles the real estate of Wells’ daughter Beatrice, described the project as “an attempt to create publicity on Wells’s creative genius back,” explains the diversity, saying, “The Creative Power of Wells (“
Despite the criticism of the leader, he doesn’t seem too angry at the idea of trying to replicate things like “Amberson”; After all, he said, “The real estate has adopted AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands.”
I’m not that open-minded. Even if Welles’ heirs are consulted and compensated, they will not be interested in this new “Ambersons.”
Now Wells fans know that this is not the first time any other filmmaker has tried to correct or finish his film after death. But at least those attempts used footage of Wells shooting himself. Meanwhile, Fable describes the planned approach as a hybrid of AI and traditional filmmaking. Obviously, some scenes are reshotted along with modern actors whose faces are then swapped for digital recreation of the original cast.
Despite the absurdity of presenting such projects without film rights or the blessing of Wells’ daughter, Rose appears at least motivated by a true desire to honor Wells’ vision. For example, in a statement about why he wants to recreate the film, Rose lamented the destruction of “a camera shot of long, uninterrupted movements of four minutes, where losses are tragic.”
I share his sense of loss, but I think this is also a tragedy that AI can’t revert.
No matter how convincingly the F-Speak and Rose could connect their own versions of that chase shot, but it would be their shot rather than their shot filled with replicas of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead’s Frankenstein. Their final product is not a version of Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons,” which RKO destroyed over 80 years ago. Apart from the miraculous rediscovery of the lost footage, that version is forever gone.
