©Courtesy of Warner Home Video
Showrunner, the AI enterprise backed by Amazon, is using Fable, its artificial-intelligence technology, to reconstruct 43 minutes of lost footage from Orson Welles’s classic film The Magnificent Ambersons. The original footage was lost shortly after the movie’s release in 1942 when RKO Films deleted the material. The footage is considered by many critics to be a “holy grail.”
However, the Orson Welles estate has blasted the effort, terming it a publicity stunt, and claiming they were not consulted about the project.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Showrunner is trying to reconstruct the lost footage as part of an experiment to test its new technology that uses artificial intelligence to create complex narratives. Showrunner’s CEO Edward Saatchi was quoted as saying, “Year by year, the technology is getting closer to prompting entire films with AI.’ He believes that Showrunner’s new model is a “step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling.”
Saatchi thinks that this effort, which is part of Showrunner’s Fable project, is “possibly the end of human creativity.” The executive added, “What’s coming is a world where we’re not the only creative species, and that we will enjoy entertainment created by AIs. So, we wanted to train our AI on the greatest storyteller of the past 200 years, Orson Welles.”
According to Saatchi, “This painstaking AI reconstruction over the next two years aims to get as close as possible to Welles’ exact vision – as close as possible without finding the destroyed footage.”
Filmmaker/researcher Brian Rose, who has spent the past five years trying to assemble the 30,000 missing frames from The Magnificent Ambersons, has joined the Showrunner project. He told interviewers that only 13 of the 73 scenes in the original film were left intact: “They just radically altered the film. These changes were all made without Welles’s approval.”
This AI project, and others like it, is causing much anxiety in the creative community because of its potential effect on employment. These worries helped prompt the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes two years ago. But Saatchi thinks AI will be a “huge revenue generator” for film studios, and he believes artists like Andy Warhol and Leonardo da Vinci would have welcomed artificial intelligence.