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Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons” has suffered enough. 83 years ago, when RKO exercised their right to reedit Welles’ 131-minute cut while the director was in Brazil making the movie “It’s All True” to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, the studio slashed what might’ve been a masterpiece superior to “Citizen Kane” down to 88 minutes. While there is greatness in the truncated cut, it’s also plagued by tonal whiplash and a happy ending that betrays Welles’ much darker vision (which was in keeping with the Booth Tarkington novel on which the film is based). Worst of all, if the 131-minute print that was sent to Welles in Brazil is never discovered (which, even with search efforts funded by TCM, seems increasingly likely with each passing year), it’s the only version of the movie we’ll ever have because RKO destroyed all of the extra footage it had in its vaults.
It’s a cinematic tragedy, one that will be receiving a cruel new chapter as the AI company Showrunner prepares to use the environmentally ruinous and artistically fraudulent technology to approximate Welles’ vision. We obviously can’t say for sure how Welles would’ve felt about this endeavor, but I’m guessing the man who once angrily told director Henry Jaglom, upon learning that media mogul Ted Turner had plans to colorize “Citizen Kane,” to not “let [Turner] deface my movie with his crayons,” would’ve loathed the idea.
Given that Showrunner’s undertaking is a research project that will not be shown to the public, it can proceed with legal impunity. It’s working with Brian Rose, who, for years, has been attempting to reconstruct Welles’ cut by using physical means like charcoal drawings and miniature set models. It’s disappointing that Rose would participate in this bad-faith exercise, but he wouldn’t be the first person of seeming principle who’s taken the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to AI. Also in the mix is Tom Clive, a digital artist who used AI to help Robert Zemeckis realize his underrated “Here” (though, when I discovered AI had been used on the film late last year, my desire to defend it evaporated).
When this project was announced last week, it was unsurprisingly met with howls of protest from film critics and historians the world over. Nevertheless, it’s worth asking: Considering that Showrunner has the full script as well as production sketches, frame enlargements, and other notes generated by Welles himself, could it get within the ballpark of delivering the holy grail of moviegoers’ dreams?
The material exists to reconstruct The Magnificent Ambersons – at least on paper
The best tool available to Showrunner may very well be Robert L. Carringer’s meticulous, exhaustively researched book “The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction.” The author had enough material at his disposal to spark the reader’s imagination, but, though no fault of his own, his work only exacerbates the fury we feel at having been denied Welles’ vision. It gets you just close enough.
In a statement issued to IndieWire last week, Showrunner CEO Edward Saatchi smugly suggested that Welles would’ve been onboard because AI is to the future of human existence what the invention of the automobile, which hastens the wealthy Amberson family’s downfall, was for the world in the early 20th century. In pushing this notion, he quoted the film’s protagonist, Eugene Morgan (played by Joseph Cotten), who had this to say about the advent of the automobile age:
“With all their speed forward, they may be a step backward in civilization. May be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of the men’s souls, I’m not sure. But automobiles have come, and almost all outwards things will be different because of what they bring.”
We’ve seen people driven to murder and suicide via AI, artists’ works ripped-off wholesale without their permission, and Google’s search engine transformed into a peddler of inaccurate information. Obviously, the inference here is that AI has arrived and isn’t going away, but I’m not throwing in the towel just yet. When more people have their lives inconvenienced by the resource-gobbling data centers popping up all over the world, they might just rebel against this invasive technology.
Orson Welles is an un-duplicable genius
As for using AI to cobble together Welles’ original vision of “The Magnificent Ambersons,” there are myriad obstacles here. The face replacement technology Showrunner is ballyhooing will likely be as hideous as the enhancements made to the Sphere presentation of “The Wizard of Oz.” There is simply no way to capture the soul of actors like Cotten, Agnes Moorhead, Tim Holt, and Anne Baxter. Their performances were expertly coaxed from them by Welles, an incomparable director of actors (just read how he got a transcendent moment out of Moorehead). And then there is the editing. Yes, they have a load of notes and other resources to pore over, but they don’t have Welles, who was an inveterate tinkerer once he got in the editing room. There were almost certainly changes he would’ve made that no one could’ve anticipated because Welles was a one-of-a-kind genius.
Showrunner’s foolish enterprise is already morally repugnant given that it’s AI, but I find it especially insulting that it thinks it can train this technology to create like Welles. Even if it arrives at something halfway watchable, this is folly. Art is a human pursuit. As Steven Soderbergh remarked back in 2023, “AI has no life experience. It’s never been hungover. It’s never made a meal for anybody it loved. It’s never been scared walking home late at night. It’s never felt insecure because somebody that it went to high school with 20 years ago has become incredibly successful.”
Amen. And it’ll never, ever be Orson Welles because we’ll never see the likes of that dazzling mind again.
