When tele­vi­sion mogul Ted Turn­er died ear­li­er this month, it gave cinephiles occa­sion to remem­ber his brief but high-pro­file for­ay into col­oriza­tion. In the mid-nine­teen-eight­ies, he com­mis­sioned for broad­cast col­orized ver­sions of more than 100 clas­sic movies, from The Trea­sure of the Sier­ra Madre to It’s a Won­der­ful Life to Casablan­ca. It was only thanks to a clause spec­i­fy­ing a black-and-white pic­ture in Orson Welles’ con­tract with RKO that Cit­i­zen Kane nev­er got the full Turn­er treat­ment. That bless­ed­ly failed project is now being invoked again in com­par­i­son with the start­up Fable Stu­dio’s enter­prise, under­way even now, of using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to restore Welles’ sopho­more fea­ture The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons, which was noto­ri­ous­ly muti­lat­ed by the stu­dio before its release in 1942. The recut hap­pened in Welles’ absence. After the attack on Pearl Har­bor, he received what sounds like some­thing more than a request from Nel­son Rock­e­feller, then the government’s Coor­di­na­tor of Inter-Amer­i­can Affairs, to go to Brazil and shoot a doc­u­men­tary about Car­ni­val in the inter­est of “Pan-Amer­i­can uni­ty.” Due to a dis­as­trous test screen­ing, as Welles explains in the …