Fable, the AI startup backed by major investors, is pushing ahead with its controversial plan to recreate 43 minutes of lost footage from Orson Welles' 1942 masterpiece "The Magnificent Ambersons" using generative AI. The project, which drew skepticism when announced last fall, now has the cautious blessing of Welles' estate and backing from a prominent biographer—but critics still argue that recreating the destroyed scenes fundamentally misunderstands what makes art meaningful. As TechCrunch reporter Anthony Ha puts it, the initiative raises fundamental questions about AI's role in preserving versus distorting creative legacy.
When Fable founder Edward Saatchi announced plans last fall to resurrect lost scenes from Orson Welles' "The Magnificent Ambersons," the reaction from film purists was swift and brutal. But a new profile in The New Yorker reveals a more complex story—one driven by genuine cinephilia rather than Silicon Valley hubris, even as it raises uncomfortable questions about AI's expanding reach into creative preservation.
Saatchi, whose father co-founded the legendary advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, grew up in a "movie mad" household with a private screening room. He first watched "Ambersons" at age twelve, and the film's tragic history has haunted him ever since. After a disastrous preview screening in 1942, RKO Pictures slashed 43 minutes from Welles' cut, tacked on an unconvincing happy ending, and eventually destroyed the excised footage to free up vault space. Welles himself called it "a much better picture" than "Citizen Kane."
"To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema," Saatchi told The New Yorker. "It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened."
That intuition led Fable to partner with filmmaker Brian Rose, who'd already spent years attempting a similar restoration using animated scenes based on Welles' script, photographs, and production notes. Rose's earlier attempt didn't exactly wow audiences—he admitted friends and family "were scratching their heads" after viewing it. approach is more ambitious: filming live-action scenes, then overlaying them with AI-generated recreations of the original actors and their voices.
