They’re not beating the charges of having no ability to create original works.
Orson Welles’ 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons has a complicated legacy—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.
