AI Restoration of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons Sparks Controversy

Fable Studio, an Amazon-backed generative AI platform led by Edward Saatchi, is using artificial intelligence to restore lost scenes from Orson Welles' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons. The film was notoriously recut by RKO while Welles was in Brazil shooting a documentary for Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The studio cut removed much of Welles' original vision, which focused on the downfall of a wealthy family during the early automobile age. Saatchi's project uses AI to generate new scenes based on surviving scripts, photographs, and notes, with live actors overlaid with digitized voices and likenesses of the original cast. The New Yorker's Michael Schulman reported on the project, noting the irony that the film itself critiques technological change. Saatchi has expressed ambivalence, calling AI 'potentially the end of human creativity' while proceeding with the unauthorized restoration, which he is keeping in black-and-white. The effort has drawn comparisons to Ted Turner's colorization of classic films in the 1980s, which was blocked for Citizen Kane by a clause in Welles' contract.