Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

A.I. re-creations of the "Magnificent Ambersons" stars Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Dolores Costello, and Tim Holt. Edward Saatchi first saw "The Magnificent Ambersons," Orson Welles's mangled masterpiece from 1942, when he was twelve years old, in the private screening room of his family's crenellated mansion, in West Sussex. Saatchi's parents had already shown him and his brother "Citizen Kane." But "Ambersons," Welles's follow-up film, about a wealthy Midwestern clan brought low, came with a bewitching backstory: R.K.O. had ripped the movie from the director's hands, slashed forty-three minutes, tacked on a happy ending, and destroyed the excised footage in order to free up vault space, leaving decades' worth of cinephiles to obsess over what might have been. Part of this outcome was the result of studio treachery, but Welles, owing to some combination of hubris and distraction, had let his film slip from his grasp. Saatchi recalled, "Around the family dinner table, that was always such a big topic: How much was Welles responsible for this? Mum was always quite tough on him." Saatchi's father, Maurice, a baron also known as Lord Saatchi, is one of two Iraqi British brothers who founded the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, in 1970, which led their family to become one of the richest in the U.K. Edward's mother, Josephine Hart, who died in 2011, was an Irish writer best known for her erotic thriller "Damage," which was adapted into a film by Louis Malle. Edward, born in 1985, grew up in London and at the sprawling country estate, surrounded by palatial gardens and classical statuary. He described his parents as "movie mad." The actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, a Saatchi family friend, recalled, "They had a cinema of their own inside the house, and it was a ritual of theirs every week to watch a film together." Aside from old movies, Edward was obsessed with "Star Trek"--especially the Holodeck, a device that conjured simulated 3-D worlds populated by characters who could interact with the members of the Starship Enterprise. That kind of wizardry didn't exist in the real world, at least not yet. But the young prince of the Saatchi castle had faith that someday it would, and that it could bring the original "Ambersons" back from oblivion. "To me, this is the lost holy grail of cinema," Saatchi told me recently, like Charles Foster Kane murmuring about Rosebud. "It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened."