THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Hollywood knows AI is a profound technology bound to be transformative, and also bound to replace humans. It's all anyone can talk about in private, at parties, on location. With the town on edge, TOM DOTAN plumbs the industry's anxiety and hope

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In early October the director Timur Bekmambetov, known for films like Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, or perhaps Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, hosted a dinner party to talk about what might as well be a sci-fi logline and the only thing anyone in Hollywood can talk about at all: AI.

Bekmambetov’s house in the Los Feliz hills was such an apt setting, it was almost too on the nose. Designed by Walt Disney with architect Frank Crowhurst in the 1930s—a storybook revival manor, ivy climbing across its façade and turret—the whole place stood, like the industry itself, in a state of beautiful slow decay. As if Norma Desmond had holed up in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Before dinner a Disney historian led Bekmambetov’s guests on a tour of the home—through the mansion’s grand foyer, up a spiral staircase with handrails that certainly seemed not up to code, and finally into Disney’s original screening room, where for almost 20 years he was said to review studio dailies for movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia. Tonight a film was already cued up: a teaser for a horror flick made by Bekmambetov’s daughter, set on the property itself. In this movie the house has long been abandoned after a party decades earlier, when Disney’s rejected concept art springs to life and turns against the moviemaker and his guests.

Save the opening scene, the teaser’s effects were all done using AI, training the software on real images of Walt Disney in the public domain and inputting prompts like “Disney looking at the camera in fear.” It took Bekmambetov’s daughter a month to make it.