Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece

Nearly a century ago, R.K.O. Pictures took the hatchet to Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, a move the acclaimed filmmaker credited with ruining his career. Since then, select fans have attempted to reconstruct Welles’s original, pitting their efforts against a lost masterpiece’s mythological status. The most recent, and perhaps most ambitious, fan is Edward Saatchi, scion of a wealthy advertising baron, who plans to reshoot cut scenes with a cadre of actors, “then overlay the footage with the digitized voices and likenesses of the long-dead cast members.” Saatchi, whose voice Michael Schulman likens to that of “a Bond villain,” admits that he’s “doing something that’s maybe going to undermine this art form that I love.” Maybe, indeed! It’s a project that would’ve fascinated Welles himself.

Saatchi admitted that there are “ethical issues” with manipulating dead actors. “I can’t come up with any reasonable defense for driving the performance of someone who’s not here,” he told me. “It’s just the only way to bring to life Welles’s vision.” I spoke to Melissa Galt, a business coach and the daughter of Anne Baxter, who was eighteen when she played an ingénue in “Ambersons.” Galt hadn’t heard about Saatchi’s project, but she was wary. “Mother would not have agreed with that at all,” Galt said. “It’s not the truth. It’s a creation of someone else’s truth. But it’s not the original, and she was a purist.” (By contrast, Galt’s great-grandfather Frank Lloyd Wright had often embraced new technologies, so she was more open to A.I. riffing on his work.) She remembered that her mother had objected to her old films being colorized: “Once the movie was done, it was done.”