philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes

Amazon-backed firm Showrunner, led by Edward Saatchi, is using the film as a test case for how Hollywood can overhaul production. The results won't be commercialized — the tech giant hasn't obtained rights from Warner Bros. or Concord. ...

Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons. ...

The effort won’t be commercialized because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it,” Saatchi says. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’” ...

The Magnificent Ambersons was filmed in 1941 at RKO’s Gower Street Studios, now Sunset Gower Studios, in Los Angeles. The original cut was 131 minutes long, but Welles had conceded the right to the final cut. And once RKO took over editing, it deleted almost a third of the negatives for the film without the director’s approval to free vault space. That footage was never found. ...

“There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,” Rose said in a statement. “The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/orson-welles-lost-movie-ai-1236361881/