When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic film “The Magnificent Ambersons” using generative AI, I doubt it. Beyond that, I’m confused as to why anyone would spend time and money on something that seems guaranteed to piss off cinephiles while offering zero commercial value.

this week, an in-depth profile of Michael Schulman in the New Yorker provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it helps explain why the startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi have kept it going: It seems to come from a genuine love of Welles and his work.

Saatchi (whose father was a founder of the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalls a childhood of watching films in a private screening room with his “movie mad” parents. He said he first saw “Ambersons” when he was twelve years old.

The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” although less popular than Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane,” remains more attractive – Welles himself claimed that it was a “better picture” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and eventually destroyed the space.

“For me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “It seems intuitive that there is a way to undo what happened.”

Saatchi is just the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who has spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the script and pictures of the movie, and with Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after she screened the results for friends and family, “a lot of them were scratching their heads.”)

So while Fable uses more advanced technology — filming live action scenes, then eventually overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices — this project is better understood as a slicker, better-funded version of Rose’s work. This is a fan’s attempt to see Welles’ perspective.

Notably, while the New Yorker article includes some clips of Rose’s animations, as well as images of Fable’s AI actors, there is no footage showing the results of Fable’s live action-AI hybrid.

By the company’s own admission, there were many challenges, whether it was fixing obvious mistakes like the two-headed version of actor Joseph Cotten, or the highly subjective task of recreating the complex beauty of the film’s cinematography. (Saatchi even describes a “happiness” problem, with AI focusing on making female characters look inappropriately happy.)

As for whether this footage will be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was “an absolute mistake” not to discuss Welles’ condition before his announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to win over the land and Warner Bros., who own the film rights. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that while she remains “sceptical,” she now believes that “they will go into this project with great respect for my father and this beautiful movie.”

Actor and biographer Simon Callow – who is currently writing the fourth book of his multi-volume Welles biography – also agreed to advise on the project, which he described as a “great idea.” (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchis.)

But not everyone is convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, actress Anne Baxter, “would never approve of that.”

“It’s not the truth,” Galt said. “It’s a creation of someone else’s reality. But it’s not the original, and he’s a purist.”

And while I have become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s goals, I still agree with Galt: At its best, this project will only result in a new, a dream of what the movie is.

I also remember a recent essay in which the writer Aaron Bady compare the AI ​​to the vampires in “Sinners.” Bady argues that when it comes to art, vampires and AI will always come up short, because “what makes art possible” is an awareness of mortality and limitations.

“If there is no death, no loss, and no space between my body and yours, separating my memories from yours, we cannot create art or desire or feeling,” he wrote.

In that light, Saatchi’s insistence that there NEED be “a way to recover what happened” feels, if not directly vampiric, then at least a little childish in the unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. It may not, perhaps, be different from a startup promoter who claims they can make grief obsolete – or a studio executive insisting that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needed a happy ending.