Orson Welles had a legendary falling out with studio execs over his 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons, and now an artificial intelligence company wants to make things right. However, the estate of the late director wants no part of what's planned, reports Variety. Showrunner, a tech platform that bills itself as the "Netflix of AI," plans to reconstruct about 40 minutes of the film that were destroyed by RKO Pictures, per NBC News. Welles had been shut out of the editing process, and the studio made big changes, including a happier ending to the released version.
While the footage is gone, Welles' notes and other written directions remain. Not good enough, says the estate's David Reeder. "This kind of assembly based on scripts, storyboards, and notes cannot possibly capture the unique innovation that embodied Welles' work," he says. "For all that AI is, it cannot yet get inside the creative mind of a human being." The Hollywood Reporter notes that Showrunner does not have the rights to the film and thus has no current plans to release the project when completed.
"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?'" asks Edward Saatchi, CEO of Showrunner parent Fable Studio. The THR story provides a sense of what Showrunner wants to accomplish:
- "There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy," says filmmaker Brian Rose, who is involved in the project. "The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut."
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