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Fable Studio Plans To Finish Orson Welles Movie With AI
The Generated Ambersons // Image courtesy of IFC Center // Illustration by Kate Walker
AI startup Fable Studio announced plans to recreate the missing — and potentially destroyed — 43 minutes of Orson Welles’ second film, The Magnificent Ambersons.
The Big Picture: Fable — the company behind Showrunner, its self-dubbed “Netflix of AI” — appears to be finishing Ambersons as a controversial stunt to grab studio attention… part of a broader push to court studios into licensing its titles for user-generated content on its platform.
Behind The Scenes: The Magnificent Ambersons was originally a 131-minute film, but RKO Radio Pictures, unhappy with it, cut the third act and released a trimmed 88-minute version — something Welles remained livid about for the rest of his life.
The cut footage was thought to be lost forever… until now. Or at least, that’s how Fable would pitch it.
It plans on using a mix of its Showrunner AI system and live-action production to recreate the missing footage over the next two years.
For scenes involving human actors, Fable “plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie,” per THR.
The studio is partnering with face-swapping expert Tom Clive (formerly of Metaphysic, which built the AI for Robert Zemeckis’ Here) and filmmaker Brian Rose (who has spent the past five years recreating the lost Ambersons footage with 3D models).
Final Cut: Fable CEO Edward Saatchi said the company has no intentions of commercializing the finished product, since it doesn’t have the rights from Warner Bros. or Concord… and it’s doubtful they’ll ever be licensed.
That’s especially true after the Welles estate — despite previously allowing Welles’ voice to be deepfaked for some commercial uses — slammed the endeavor as “a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles.” Ouch.
Coming Soon: While the commercial prospects for the finished AI-generated The Magnificent Ambersons are slim, expect studios to be quietly watching to see if it can even be done… and how they can apply a similar model to their own films.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited, Polled, and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.