February 9, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Michael Schulman’s “Deepfaking Orson Welles.” It’s about a fascinating attempt by a startup studio to use artificial intelligence to restore Welles’s mangled 1942 masterpiece “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Schulman talks with the key people involved in the project – Edward Saatchi and Brian Rose. He chronicles the making of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” He visits the Los Angeles set where the new A.I. scenes are being shot. And he explains the challenge of the project: 

Simply prompting the computer to suck up the existing movie and spit out new scenes would create a cold, uncanny-valley effect. A.I. tends to flatten lighting, and that would clash with Welles’s rich chiaroscuro. Then, there was what Saatchi called the “happiness” problem: left to its own guided intuition, the A.I. technology often makes characters look cheerier, especially women. Saatchi played an A.I. clip of sullen Aunt Fanny, in the grim final scene, inappropriately smirking in her rocking chair. “In terms of subtle despair, it has absolutely no idea what to do,” he said. “That’s part of why having the actor is really important.”

Schulman even participates in the process. He writes,

Saatchi gave me a preview of how it would all work. Between takes, the crew subbed me in for Pressley, putting me in a period coat and a clip-on tie, and had me blunder through one of Eugene’s lines. Two hours later, the A.I. team sent back a rough clip of Cotten doing the line—turning his head as I’d turned mine, speaking in his voice but with my delivery, even breaking into a laugh, as I had done after tripping over the words. “Usually, we’d spend a lot more time on it, but this is just to give you a feel,” Saatchi said. Still, it was pretty impressive—and disorienting.

“Deepfaking Orson Welles” is a glimpse of the future – the use of A.I. to riff on old movies. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: Three inspired lines in this week’s New Yorker:

1. Scott Shepherd plays multiple roles, but is particularly droll as Blazes Boylan, jitterbugging hornily through Dublin. – Emily Nussbaum, “Goings On: Off Broadway”

2. Several pages of beverage options include ninety varieties of whiskey, plus wine, beer, cider, and custom cocktails like the mezcal-forward P.Y.T., which, well—imagine a drinkable cigarette. – Dan Stahl, “Bar Tab: Haswell Green’s”

3. I slept with a Yale guy one block over who, with his five Yale roommates, sold semen to a sperm bank, and they pooled the profits to buy an espresso maker for six hundred dollars. – Jill Lepore, “The Chapman House”