Those 43 minutes have become something of a white whale among cinephiles and film historians. TCM even sponsored a quest to Brazil to find a reel that might have retained the footage in 2021. (It didn’t pan out.) Showrunner CEO Edward Saatchi wants to skip all those steps. “For FILM-1, which will unlock longer-form live-action stories on the Showrunner platform, we’re starting with Orson Welles because he is the greatest storyteller of the last 200 years,” he said of the company’s new model. “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.”
If Saatchi’s use of the phrase “rightly skeptical” gave you a sense that he has a healthy dose of humility about this project, you can dispel that notion. “Perhaps in its reconstructed form, we will all say, in the words of an audience card at the disastrous preview in Pomona that ended the film’s chances: ‘I think that this is the best picture that I have ever seen,'” he said. He’s also asking cynics to consider the fact that Ambersons is about “a family dynasty that failed to adapt to the rise of new technology and the invention of the automobile at the dawn of the 20th century,” per IndieWire‘s description.
Thankfully, the company isn’t planning to transform the film’s actors into its preferred cartoon blobs. With an assist from Brian Rose, a Welles fan who’s spent the past five years attempting to recreate the film through charcoal drawings, physical set models, and recovered screenplay drafts, and Tom Clive, an AI and digital artist on Robert Zemeckis’ Here, Showrunner will use model motion and trajectory control to imagine how Welles’ camera might have moved. Set photos will help generate the spatial setting, and the original star’s faces will be transposed onto live actors.Â
Saatchi does acknowledge that his FILM-1 model “is a step toward a scary, strange future of generative storytelling.” At the same time, he has a quote from Ambersons‘ protagonist Eugene Morgan for any detractors worried about Welles’ work being run through the slop machine: “With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization. It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring.” Hopefully this change isn’t one that would have destroyed Welles even more than the film being cut up in the first place.Â
