Amazon-Backed AI Startup Aims to Recreate Lost Footage from Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons"

Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction? | TechCrunch

On Friday, a startup called Fable announced an ambitious, if head-scratching, plan to recreate the lost 43 minutes of Orson Welles' classic film "The Magnificent Ambersons." Why is a startup that bills itself as the "Netflix of AI," and that recently raised money from Amazon's Alexa Fund, talking about remaking a movie that's more than 80 years old? Well, the company has built a platform that allows users to create their own cartoons with AI prompts -- Fable is starting out with its own intellectual property, but it has ambitions to offer similar capabilities with Hollywood IP. In fact, it's already been used to create unauthorized "South Park" episodes. Now Fable is launching a new AI model that can supposedly generate long, complex narratives. Over the next two years, filmmaker Brian Rose -- who has already spent five years working to digitally reconstruct Welles' original vision -- plans to use that model to remake the lost footage from "The Magnificent Ambersons." Remarkably, Fable has not obtained the rights to the film, making this a prospective tech demo that will probably never be released to the general public. Why "Ambersons"? If you're not a Welles-loving cinephile, I'm guessing it sounds like an obscure choice for digital resurrection. Even among classic movie buffs, ""Ambersons" is overshadowed by its older, more famous sibling -- while "Citizen Kane" is often called the greatest movie ever made, his second film is remembered as a lost masterpiece that the studio took out of the director's hands, dramatically cutting it down and adding an unconvincing happy ending. The movie's reputation -- the sense of loss and what could have been -- is presumably what interested Fable and Rose. But it's worth emphasizing that the only reason we care about "The Magnificent Ambersons" today is because of Welles -- because of how it derailed his Hollywood career, and how even in its diminished form, it still reveals so much of his filmmaking genius. That makes it even more astonishing that Fable apparently failed to reach out to Welles' estate. David Reeder, who handles the estate for Welles' daughter Beatrice, described the project to Variety as an "attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles' creative genius" and said that it will amount to nothing more than "a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking [of] a creative force like Welles." Despite Reeder's criticism, he seems less upset by the idea of attempting to remake "Ambersons" and more by the fact that the estate was not "even given the courtesy of a heads up." After all, he noted, "the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands." I'm not so open-minded. Even if Welles' heirs were being consulted and compensated, I'd have zero interest in this new "Ambersons," just as I have zero interest in hearing a digital simulacrum of Welles's legendary voice being used to hawk new products. Now, Welles fans know this isn't the first time other filmmakers have tried to posthumously fix or finish his movies. But at least those attempts used footage that Welles had shot himself. Fable, meanwhile, describes the approach it plans as a hybrid of AI and traditional filmmaking -- apparently some scenes will be reshot with contemporary actors whose faces will be then swapped for digital recreations of the original cast. Despite the absurdity of announcing a project like this without the film rights or the blessing of Welles' daughter, at least Rose seems motivated by a genuine desire to honor Welles' vision. For example, in a statement about why he wants to recreate the film, Rose mourned the destruction of "a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy," with only 50 seconds of the shot remaining in the recut film. I share his sense of loss -- but I also believe this is a tragedy that AI cannot undo. No matter how convincingly Fable and Rose may be able to stitch together their own version of that tracking shot, it will be their shot, not Welles', filled with Frankensteined replicas of Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, not the actors themselves. Their final product will not be Welles' version of "The Magnificent Ambersons" that RKO destroyed more than 80 years ago. Barring a miraculous rediscovery of lost footage, that version is gone forever.

Showrunner wants to use generative AI to recreate lost footage from an Orson Welles classic

Showrunner -- the startup that wants to "revolutionize" the entertainment industry by charging people to prompt up AI-generated videos featuring copyrighted IP -- is working on a new project to restore an Orson Welles classic. On Friday, Showrunner announced that it has designed a new generative AI model that is meant to help recreate lost footage from The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles' 1942 adaptation of Booth Tarkington's 1918 novel about a family whose vast fortune is being decimated by tech-driven industrialization. Though Welles initially crafted a version of the film whose runtime clocked in at 131 minutes, RKO -- one of the project's production companies -- cut it down to 88 minutes without the director's input after he lost control of the editing process. The studio's cut went on to be nominated for four Oscars and is broadly considered to be one of Welles' best works. Welles, whom RKO accused of being difficult to work with, disowned the studio's version of the film. He reportedly later said that "they destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me." But Showrunner believes that, by using generative AI, it can bring back the lost footage and give people a chance to see The Magnificent Ambersons as Welles originally intended. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter about the new project, Showrunner co-founder Edward Saatchi admitted that while generative AI as it currently exists "can't sustain a story beyond one short episode," he is confident that "the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI." While Welles wrote detailed notes about how he wanted The Magnificent Amersons to be cut, RKO did not follow them and the studio ultimately destroyed the negatives correlating to the film's lost footage for storage reasons. Showrunner intends to work around those hurdles with a mix of AI-generated approximations of what Welles might have shot and sequences featuring live actors whose faces are manipulated with gen AI to look like members of the original film's cast. According to IndieWire, Showrunner's FILM-1 model will be used to generate keyframes for the missing footage, and set photos will be used to create the "spatial setting." To help realize the project, Showrunner has brought on Tom Clive, an AI VFX artist who specializes in face-swapping and previously worked on Alien: Romulus and Here while at Metaphysic Showrunner is also working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who previously attempted his own Ambersons restoration with hand drawn animation based on the 1942 film's shooting script and archival photographs from the original production. Speaking to NPR in 2023, Rose said that populating his recreated scenes with characters was one of the endeavor's more challenging aspects. Rose also noted that, because Warner Bros. Discovery holds the intellectual property rights to Welles' The Magnificent Amberson's, there was some uncertainty about whether he could legally release the project, and "the thought was to beg forgiveness later." Showrunner is no stranger to going the "just do it and worry about the consequences later" route. The startup previously made headlines for releasing unauthorized episodes of South Park that were created with its in-house generative AI models. The company seems to be trying to get ahead of any legal trouble by choosing not to monetize its Ambersons project. Saatchi told THR that the goal here isn't to make money off of the lost minutes of footage, but rather 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.'" He also said that Showrunner will gladly give its creation to the IP holders if they "see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context." This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from an AI-focused founder on a mission to legitimize their business and secure deals with bigger players in the entertainment game.

Amazon's 'Neflix for AI' Plans to 'Reconstruct' Lost Orson Welles Film With Slop

They're not beating the charges of having no ability to create original works. Orson Welles' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons has a complicated legacyâ€"both considered one of the greatest films of all time and a complete mess that saw the iconic director's vision stifled by his studio and the original cut destroyed. Somehow, the AI guys have decided that's their signal to get involved. According to The Hollywood Reporter, an Amazon-backed generative AI company called Showrunner, the creators of a streaming service that lets subscribers create their own episodes of shows, plan to attempt to recreate Welles' original cut of the film, which is thought to largely be lost. What happened to Welles' version of The Magnificent Ambersons is a Hollywood tragedy. His 131-minute epic and follow-up to Citizen Kane failed to resonate with test audiences, leading to the studio taking control of the edit and ultimately slashing more than 40 minutes of the film, leaving only 13 of 73 scenes untouched. To add injury to insult, the studio also burned the negatives of Welles' edit to re-use the silver and store other films. Welles kept extremely well-documented notes on the film, including diagrams of where he wanted to place the camera and how he wanted scenes to look. Welles even planned on re-shooting the ending, which the studio cut, nearly 30 years after the fact, but it never came together, according to the 1992 biography "This Is Orson Welles." Using AI to "recreate" that footage doesn't quite feel like the way to lessen the tragedy. According to THR, Showrunner plans to spend the next two years trying to reconstruct the scenes that were lost to the studio's overeager scissors. The company reportedly plans to reshoot some scenes with live actors and use AI to face-swap the original actors' appearances onto the stand-ins. That's probably better than going full AI; no one needs to see Joseph Cotten with six fingers. Showrunner is tapping Brian Rose, a filmmaker who has dedicated himself to recreating the missing frames, to lead the effort. Rose has previously used 3D modeling techniques and animation to reconstruct parts of the film and screened his artistic rendition of the film at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Now he'll be using his extensive notes for the project to re-create it with AI, despite the use of AI in film preservation and restoration remaining quite controversial. The company won't commercialize the final product because it can'tâ€"it did not obtain the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking, â€~might this have been the best film ever made in its original form,'†CEO Edward Saatchi told The Hollywood Reporter. Showrunner's effort is far from the only attempt to recover Welles' work; it's just that everyone else wants the real thing. Filmmaker Joshua Grossberg has been on a multi-year mission to track down what he believes to be the last existing copy of Welles' original edit, which has taken him to Brazil, where Welles was apparently working during the editing process. The hunt will be featured in the upcoming documentary, "The Lost Print: The Making of Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons," and while the director is being tight-lipped about what he found, he's promising to provide "some answers as to the fate of the print.†As to what Welles would think of the AI reconstruction, well, it's a bit complicated. His estate recently gave an audio company permission to recreate his iconic voice using AI to narrate stories, and the company behind the effort argued he would approve because "Orson Welles was a futurist." But Welles was also quite critical of the uninterrupted invasion of technology into our lives, narrating a 1972 documentary called "Future Shock" in which he says, "Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths." That certainly still feels relevant.

AI firm plans to reconstruct lost footage from Orson Welles' masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons

Film-making studio Fable has announced it will attempt to recreate the 43 minutes cut from the auteur's 1942 film using AI An AI company is to reconstruct the missing portions of Orson Welles' legendary mutilated masterwork The Magnificent Ambersons, it has been announced. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Showrunner platform is planning to use its AI tools to assist in a recreation of the lost 43 minutes of Welles' 1942 film, removed and subsequently destroyed by Hollywood studio RKO. Edward Saatchi, CEO of interactive AI film-making studio Fable, which operates Showrunner, said in a statement to IndieWire: "We're starting with Orson Welles because he is the greatest storyteller of the last 200 years ... So many people are rightly skeptical of AI's impact on cinema - but we hope that this gives people a sense of a positive contribution that AI can make for storytelling." Reports suggest that Showrunner is partnering with film-maker Brian Rose, who has been working since 2019 on an attempt to reconstruct the missing portions using animated sequences, as well as VFX expert Tom Clive. Welles started production in 1942 on The Magnificent Ambersons, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's celebrated novel about a midwestern family in decline, as a follow-up to his Oscar-winning debut Citizen Kane. Welles had previously adapted the novel in 1939 as a radio drama. But some footage of the finished film was removed after it tested poorly with audiences before its release, with Welles giving up final-cut rights as a result of negotiations with the studio. Welles also travelled to Brazil during the film's editing process to start work on the unfinished production It's All True, later saying RKO "absolutely betrayed me" by re-editing The Magnificent Ambersons' final section and shooting a new ending. The master negatives of the removed footage were later destroyed to free up storage space. A number of attempts have been made to restore or reconstruct the film. A working print was sent to Welles in Brazil but is presumed lost, with film-maker Joshua Grossberg leading a search to try to locate it. In 2005 a reconstruction using still photographs premiered at the Locarno film festival. However, Saatchi told the Hollywood Reporter that Showrunner does not hold any rights to The Magnificent Ambersons, so any resulting footage is unlikely to be seen outside scholarly or demonstration contexts. "The goal isn't to commercialise 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?'"

Amazon-backed AI firm is trying to recreate a lost Hollywood masterpiece

An AI firm is looking to recreate the lost footage of an Orson Welles film. Credit: Central Press/Getty Images An Amazon-backed AI firm is looking to recreate the lost footage of a Hollywood masterpiece. The Hollywood Reporter published a detailed look at the efforts from the firm Showrunner to use generative artificial intelligence to reconstruct the missing 43 minutes -- footage that was burned by studio execs -- from the 1942 Orson Welles film The Magnificent Ambersons. Wrote the Reporter: "Showrunner's endeavor will deploy a fusion of AI and traditional film techniques to reconstruct the lost footage. This includes shooting some sequences with live actors, with plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie. Extensively archived set photos from the film will serve as the foundation for re-creating the scenes." Showrunner has said it will not commercialize the end results because it doesn't have the rights to the Welles film. The Welles estate publicly disapproved of the project, while also noting that it does allow the use of AI for voiceover commercial enterprises. "In general, the estate has embraced AI technology to create a voice model intended to be used for VO work with brands. That said, this attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles' creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren't even given the courtesy of a heads up," a spokesperson for the estate told Variety. "While AI is inevitable, it still cannot replace the creative instincts resident in the human mind, which means this effort to make Ambersons whole will be a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles." The Magnificent Ambersons was Welles' follow-up to Citizen Kane, widely considered one of the best films ever made. An NPR story from 2023 noted that the studio cut Ambersons down from 131 minutes to just 88 minutes, leaving just 13 of 73 total scenes untouched. Those lost minutes have become a focal point for film buffs who wish to see the film as Welles intended. Now, it seems we may have a version of it -- created by AI, not Welles himself.

Amazon Startup Announces Plans to "Finish" Orson Welles' Lost Film With 43 Minutes of AI-Generated Footage

Image by Universal Pictures / De Carvalho Collection / Getty / Futurism Recently, a minor miracle was achieved in the world of film preservation. A long-lost version of "A Better Tomorrow II" (1987), John Woo's sequel to his heroic bloodshed classic "A Better Tomorrow" (1986), was discovered and is now slated to be released to the public. For nearly 40 years, Woo's preferred cut of the Hong Kong action movie had been considered destroyed. When it was being made, the studio demanded that Woo's workprint, which ran nearly three hours, be pared down to less than two, and he only had a week to deliver. Woo begrudgingly went to work on editing down one half, and his producer Tsui Hark -- himself a director of numerous Hong Kong classics -- the other. Woo never even saw the theatrical cut until opening night, and he's since disowned the movie except for its explosive final gunfight. It's still a stunning picture, but it's clearly the work of two clashing creative forces cobbling something together under an absurd deadline. Action junkies have had to live with the fact that they'd never get to see it as Woo intended it -- until, that is, film restorers dug deeper and discovered that the workprint was languishing in an archive this whole time, overlooked because it was mislabeled as an English release of the movie. Now, a seminal piece in action cinema history will finally see the light of day, lovingly restored. Soon, a lost classic of American cinema may soon see release, too: the original version of Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons" (1942), the director's follow-up to "Citizen Kane" (1941), probably one of the best movies ever made. Except, instead of actually showing audiences lost footage, the Amazon-backed startup Showrunner and app says it'll recreate the footage with the help of AI, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "The goal isn't to commercialize the 43 minutes," said CEO Edward Saatchi, whose app was behind those AI-generated imitations of "South Park," 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?'" Like Woo, Welles wasn't allowed to release his own version of "Ambersons." Behind his back, the studio slashed forty-plus minutes from the film and savagely burned all the remaining reels. To add insult to injury, it slapped on a happy ending, tapping Welles' assistant director to whip it up while he was out of the country. It's still considered a masterpiece despite that drama, but the experience was harrowing for Welles. "They destroyed 'Ambersons,'" he once said, "and it destroyed me." So, to be clear, the missing footage has been obliterated (although one man is hunting for a mythical extant copy in Brazil.) As far as we know, there's nothing to restore. But Brian Rose, a filmmaker working with Showrunner, is reconstructing the lost scenes based off the script and whatever remains in the movie. And luckily, Welles was extremely particular in how he wanted to set up his scenes and kept meticulous notes, which are still surviving. Much of Rose's reconstruction involves actually shooting scenes in physical sets that have been physically recreated, and trying to emulate Welles iconic camera movements. "There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy," Rose said in a statement, per the Hollywood Reporter. But in what sounds like a recipe for an onscreen nightmare, Rose says he's using AI to transfer the faces and poses of the original cast onto the new actors. Now AI in this context is pretty nebulous -- is it generative AI, or is it more like an algorithm that helps map the faces? Perhaps this gives us a clue: the VFX artist Tom Clive, an "expert on face-swapping and de-aging," according to THR, is joining Showrunner. Regardless, it doesn't bode well. The recent "Alien" sequel "Alien: Romulus" used generative AI to recreate the voice of the late British actor Ian Holm, who portrayed the android Ash in the original film, alongside animatronics and heaps of CGI to recreate his face. The end result was a ghoulish and uncanny caricature that sparked loads of backlash. What would Welles himself think of all this? It's impossible to say, because he's been dead for 40 years (though his estate signed a deal this year allowing a storytelling app to recreate his voice with AI.) But as evidenced by his iconic 1973 docudrama "F for Fake," he was fascinated by the relationship between authenticity and forgery, so he probably would have had expansive thoughts on the whole thing. Showrunner won't be able to commercialize the AI-assisted Welles restoration/recreation, since it doesn't own the rights. But this will only be the beginning of its AI efforts in film, with its CEO Saatchi envisioning it as one day being the "Netflix of AI," he told THR, where users -- yes, users, not filmgoers or audience members -- can interact with and make their own fan fiction-esque versions of what they're watching. "Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI," Saatchi told THR. "Today, AI can't sustain a story beyond one short episode," he admitted, but said his company is a "step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling."

Amazon-backed studio reviving Orson Welles' lost masterpiece with AI

AI hopes to solve the biggest enigma of Hollywood lore, but it will not be commercialized. The influx of AI into the filmmaking process has raised alarms, but some also see it as an inevitable trend. Netflix has already started using AI in its films and TV shows, while other studios are experimenting with AI-powered storytelling. The latest AI move takes a stab at reviving the "mutilated" classic that is Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. What's happening? Just over a year ago, Amazon invested in a company named Fable, which calls itself the "Netflix of AI" and is led by Edward Saatchi, a former senior executive at Meta's Oculus division. Saatchi recently appeared in a CNBC interview and announced plans to rescue the lost footage from Welles' highly-regarded film. Discussing the AI tech stack and his company's work, Saatchi mentioned that "it's potentially the end of human creativity." When the film was released in 1942, roughly 43 minutes of the original footage shot by Welles were trimmed and destroyed, replaced by a happier ending version, which was not approved by Welles. "The Magnificent Ambersons, unlocks for us, live action," Saatchi said during the interview, adding that his firm will use AI to bring the lost footage back to life. Recommended Videos The lost footage, which has an altogether different ending to the film, was never recovered. "They destroyed Ambersons and it destroyed me," Welles later said. In 2021, Turner Classic Movies joined hands with filmmaker Joshua Grossberg for a documentary titled The Search for the Lost Print: The Making of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Does a lost masterpiece need AI? In 2023, another filmmaker, Brian Rose, reconstructed and animated some of the lost material using the surviving screenplay and storyboard portions of the original cut. The original version shot by Welles, often referred to as the "Holy Grail of cinema," remains an enigma to date. Rose will now be helping Fable reconstruct the lost footage using traditional filmmaking techniques and AI processing. Archived pictures will be used as a starting material by Fable, with subsequent plans of "shooting some sequences with live actors, with plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie," per The Hollywood Reporter. The AI-generated version of the film created by Fable won't be commercialized because the company has yet to receive official rights from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. The late legend's estate, however, is not too happy about Fable's move. "This attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles' creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren't even given the courtesy of a heads up," it was quoted as saying by Variety, adding that they retain the rights to AI video likeness and weren't informed by Fable about their plans.

AI Will Be Used to 'Reconstruct' Lost Orson Welles Film 'The Magnificent Ambersons' - Decrypt

The end product will not be commercially released, as Showrunner doesn't hold the rights to the original film. AI firm Showrunner plans to "reconstruct" 43 missing minutes of footage from Orson Welles' 1942 classic "The Magnificent Ambersons" using artificial intelligence. Per a report in trade paper The Hollywood Reporter, Showrunner will use a combination of AI tools and conventional filmmaking techniques to assemble its interpretation of the missing footage, using archived set photos as the basis for the scenes. Although it plans to spend the next two years working on the project, Showrunner will be unable to commercialize it, since it has not obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. Instead, Showrunner CEO Edward Saatchi said, the AI reconstruction is an "academic" effort: "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?" Filmmaker Brian Rose, who has spearheaded efforts to reconstruct "The Magnificent Ambersons," will collaborate with Showrunner on the project. Rose has previously used archival records, voice actors and animation to approximate the framing and timing of Welles' original 131-minute cut of the film. The new version will incorporate live footage shot with new actors, using AI deepfake technology to preserve the original cast's likenesses. Decrypt has reached out to Showrunner for comment, and will update this article should they respond. The follow-up to Welles' 1941 feature "Citizen Kane," which has topped multiple polls as the greatest film ever made, "The Magnificent Ambersons" was edited down by RKO Studios from its original 131-minute cut to a mere 87 minutes, with a newly shot happy ending tacked on against the director's wishes. "They destroyed 'Ambersons' and it destroyed me," Welles said in an interview with the BBC. While the director made extensive notes on his preferred cut, the film's negatives were destroyed in order to free up space in RKO's vault, while a rough cut of the film sent to Welles in Brazil was subsequently lost -- becoming something of a holy grail for cinephiles. "My whole third act is lost because of all the hysterical tinkering that went on," Welles told filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich years later. This isn't the first posthumous attempt to reconstruct a Welles classic. In 1998, "Apocalypse Now" editor Walter Murch used a 58-page memo penned by Welles to create a "restored" version of his 1958 film "Touch of Evil." And in 2018, Netflix funded a restoration of Welles' long-lost film "The Other Side of the Wind," the footage for which had languished in a vault for years due to a legal dispute. Welles' voice, meanwhile, has been digitally recreated using AI to serve as a narrator for "location-based storytelling app" Storyrabbit. Backed by Amazon's Alexa Fund, Showrunner bills itself as the "Netflix of AI." Its generative storytelling platform enables users to create episodes of animated shows using prompts or photos. Speaking to Decrypt at the time of its launch, Showrunner founder Edward Saatchi argued that the generative content is "a whole new artistic medium." Its effort to interpret Welles' missing footage for "The Magnificent Ambersons" is a stepping stone to creating long-form stories using AI, Saatchi told The Hollywood Reporter. "Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI," he said. Although today's AI models "can't sustain a story beyond one short episode," he added, Storyteller is a "step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling."

AI firm plans to reconstruct 'lost' footage from Orson Welles' 'The Magnificent Ambersons'

Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead in "The Magnificent Ambersons."Jerry Tavin / Courtesy Everett Collection Showrunner, a technology platform that dubs itself the "Netflix of AI," plans to use artificial intelligence to reconstruct 43 minutes of excised footage from Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," a sweeping family drama that was famously butchered by studio executives. Edward Saatchi, CEO of the Amazon-backed firm Showrunner, confirmed the plans in an interview with CNBC on Friday morning. Saatchi described "The Magnificent Ambersons" as a "ruined masterpiece," adding that "using AI to reconstruct it" is a way to bring the film "back to life." The plans come as generative artificial intelligence tools threaten to dramatically upend the way films and television shows are typically made, sending waves of anxiety through Hollywood and other creative industries. "Ambersons" would not be the first celluloid classic to get the AI treatment. In recent weeks, an AI-altered version of "The Wizard of Oz" on display at the Sphere in Las Vegas has stoked both curiosity and revulsion -- especially from filmworld purists. "I think that what's coming is a world where we're not the only creative species, and that we will enjoy entertainment created by AIs," Saatchi told the hosts of CNBC's "Squawk Box." "We wanted to try our AI on the greatest storyteller of the last 200 years: Orson Welles." "The Magnificent Ambersons" was released in July 1942 after a pitched battle between Welles and executives at RKO Pictures. Welles -- who enjoyed "final cut" privilege on his previous project, the revolutionary "Citizen Kane" -- got kicked out of the editing room during the post-production of "Ambersons." The studio snipped off an hour of footage, slapped on a more cheerful ending and released a slight 88-minute cut into theaters. "Ambersons" drew largely positive reviews and nabbed a best picture nomination at the Academy Awards, but Welles long insisted the theatrical edition did not fulfill his creative vision. "They destroyed 'Ambersons,' and it destroyed me," Welles was once quoted as saying. Welles' original, more melancholy 132-minute cut took on mythic stature among cinephiles. The late director William Friedkin ("The Exorcist"), for example, referred to Welles' intended version as the "Holy Grail of cinema." "Ambersons," adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Booth Tarkington, coincidentally centers on another period of immense technological change in America. It chronicles the declining fortunes of an affluent Midwestern family amid the arrival of the country's automotive boom. Showrunner is reportedly working on the AI-enabled "Ambersons" with Brian Rose, a filmmaker who has spent half a decade digitally rebuilding sets based on some 30,000 missing frames from "Ambersons." "There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy," Rose said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. "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," Rose added. "Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut." In response to Showrunner's announcement, some X users expressed skepticism or outright hostility. "Can't wait to see what Joseph Cotten looks like with six fingers!" film critic Sean Burns posted on X, referring to the star of "Ambersons" and a common AI glitch that inserts extra hands or limbs into images of human beings. Showrunner's edition of "Ambersons" will not be commercialized because the company does not hold the rights, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The rights are held by the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which controls the RKO library. Saatchi did not immediately respond to NBC News' request for comment. Welles, who died in 1985 at age 70, left behind a variety of unrealized or incomplete projects -- including "The Other Side of the Wind," an experimental Hollywood satire that was largely shot in the early 1970s and completed in the 2010s. Netflix distributed the restored film in 2018.

Orson Welles' Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes

Fox, Skip Bayless Settle Sexual Misconduct Lawsuit From Hairstylist Since the rise of generative artificial intelligence in 2022, the technology has mostly been plugged into parts of the production pipeline as far as its deployment in Hollywood. Think visual effects, dubbing and storyboarding. As it stands, it's mostly thought of as a tool to streamline certain processes and cut costs. But others have their sights set on completely overhauling the entertainment industry's use of AI. At the forefront: Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons. Amazon-backed Showrunnner announced on Friday a new AI model designed to generate long, complex narratives -- ultimately building toward feature film length, live action films -- for its platform completely dedicated to AI content that allows users to create their own episodes of TV shows with a prompt of just a couple of words. Over the next two years, it'll be utilized to recreate Welles' follow-up to Citizen Kane, a chunk of which was lost after studio executives burned the footage. The endeavor marks the tech's further encroachment onto Hollywood as it eyes the exploitation of AI tools embroiled in controversy over the possibility they were created using copyrighted materials from creators they could eventually displace. CEO Edward Saatchi ultimately envisions Showrunner as the "Netflix of AI" in which users can interact with and make fan fiction-esque versions of the intellectual property they're watching. "Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI," Saatchi says. "Today, AI can't sustain a story beyond one short episode" but his company's technology is a "step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling." The effort won't be commercialized because Showrunner hasn't obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they "see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it," Saatchi says. "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?'" The Magnificent Ambersons was filmed in 1941 at RKO's Gower Street Studios, now Sunset Gower Studios, in Los Angeles. The original cut was 131 minutes long, but Welles had conceded the right to the final cut. And once RKO took over editing, it deleted almost a third of the negatives for the film without the director's approval to free vault space. That footage was never found. At the time, the film was screened for critics and The Hollywood Reporter's review in July 1942 hailed the feature as "a screen offering of magnificent artistic merits," noting that the 87-minute cut "is far from easy to summarize in ordinary catchline phrases." For RKO, "Orson Welles is worth his weight in gold," the paper said. Showrunner's endeavor will deploy a fusion of AI and traditional film techniques to reconstruct the lost footage. This includes shooting some sequences with live actors, with plans to use face and pose transfer techniques with AI tools to preserve the likenesses of the original actors in the movie. Extensively archived set photos from the film will serve as the foundation for recreating the scenes. Helping to spearhead the project is Brian Rose, a filmmaker who's spent the last five years recreating 30,000 missing frames from the movie. He's rebuilt the physical sets in 3D models, using them to pinpoint camera movements to match with the script, set photos, and archive materials. By his thinking, he's reconstructed the framing and timing of each scene, which will serve as the foundation for the recreation. "There was for example a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy," Rose said in a statement. "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." Tom Clive, a VFX expert on faceswapping and de-aging who previously worked for Metaphysic and recently joined Showrunner, will also be assisting.