I've had it with Hollywood and technology

[Skanky Vamp]

You can't honestly tell me they couldn't find another friggin actor? This is just a guldang publicity stunt.

from THR:
James Dean, who died in a 1955 car crash at the age of 24, is making an unexpected return to the big screen. The cultural icon, known for Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, has been posthumously cast in the Vietnam era action-drama Finding Jack.

Directed by Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh, the project comes from the filmmakers' own recently launched production house Magic City Films, which obtained the rights to use Dean’s image from his family. Canadian VFX banner Imagine Engine will be working alongside South African VFX company MOI Worldwide to re-create what the filmmakers describe as “a realistic version of James Dean.”

Adapted by Maria Sova from Gareth Crocker’s novel, Finding Jack is based on the existence and abandonment of more than 10,000 military dogs at the end of the Vietnam War. Dean will play a character called Rogan, considered a secondary lead role. "We searched high and low for the perfect character to portray the role of Rogan, which has some extreme complex character arcs, and after months of research, we decided on James Dean," said Ernst, who also produces with Golykh for Magic City Films alongside Donald A. Barton of Artistry Media Group.

"We feel very honored that his family supports us and will take every precaution to ensure that his legacy as one of the most epic film stars to date is kept firmly intact. The family views this as his fourth movie, a movie he never got to make. We do not intend to let his fans down." While Finding Jack will be live action, The Hollywood Reporter understands that Dean’s performance will be constructed via "full body" CGI using actual footage and photos. Another actor will voice him.

 

[nightshade]

The publicity stunt worked, you now know about the movie, which given its not a big studio making it, you probably wouldn't have otherwise.

 

[Skanky Vamp]

“This opens up a whole new opportunity for many of our clients who are no longer with us,” said Mark Roesler, CEO of CMG Worldwide, which represents Dean’s family alongside more than 1,700 entertainment, sports, music, and historical personalities, including the likes of Burt Reynolds, Christopher Reeve, Ingrid Bergman, Neil Armstrong, Bette Davis, and Jack Lemmon."

Seriously. Seriously? Here's a list of all of their clients from their website.

Oh look @white avenger they have Johnny Weissmuller as a client. They could have him starring in brand new Tarzan movies.

 

[NileQT87]

This is beyond tacky. And it surely still will have some faceless actor getting no credit for being the physical double with their face replaced and probably a voice impersonator if they're not splicing together archive audio material.

I mean, it's not like pasting an 80-something Christopher Lee onto a stunt double for any scene that needed him to do anything physical as Count Dooku was done yesterday. And then there was ::cough:: the Special Edition tweaks to the last minutes of Return of the Jedi that erased a big portion of an actor's performance by pasting his head over. ::cough::

It's one thing to insert M&Ms into The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland slightly altered (I'm dating myself by even remembering that) or dropping Tom Hanks into archive footage of famous people in Forrest Gump, but a whole 'nother situation here entirely. Ditto when they make interactive duets out of archive performances of famous dead music artists, even rotoscoping them onto the American Idol stage (they've done it a lot with the likes of Elvis--though seeing 50-year-old footage of Elvis effortlessly upstaging the likes of Céline without the warbling theatrics is always priceless).

And when they did that sort of thing before, it wasn't fully a new performance. I'd assume this is very much pasting James Dean's previous performances onto a nameless person's body and pasting in dialog or impersonation. And it's probably not just a very brief scene like with dropping Hanks into footage of Nixon if this is supposed to be a major supporting character in the film. And I'm going to also assume James Dean is not actually playing James Dean, unlike most of these more tasteful or funny examples.

 

[Ethan Reigns]

This may be a publicity stunt but from the time "Tron" graced our screens in 1986, we knew the studios would use technology to fight back against the rising cost of actors and the extra expense (typically quoted as 30% of the cost of a movie) when they hire a star. I think the positive value of curiosity on the part of the audience will overcome the negative value of the actor not being "authentic". But still, if you have decided to use a dramatic actor like James Dean, you have to write a story that would be able to use his style, his delivery and his charisma, so the upshot of this is we might get better stories.

 

[white avenger]

Oh look @white avenger they have Johnny Weissmuller as a client. They could have him starring in brand new Tarzan movies.

Actually, I always thought that Ron Ely was the actor who portrayed Tarzan the closest to the image created by Burroughs. Johnny was a great swimmer, but his portrayal of Tarzan made him look like not much more than an illiterate dim witted brute.

I've been saying for years that something like this is going to happen for years. It's the next logical step for CGI, Now we can finally get that movie starring John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn as the Three Musketeers. Ain't technology great? I'm just wondering how they're gonna get a CGI image to walk up on stage and accept the Oscar for Best Actor.

Seriously, though, it's no real shock. We've already seen basically the same thing in "Jurassic World," "Avatar," "John Carter," and even "The Avengers." Having Willem Defoe actually play Tars Tarkas or Mark Ruffalo actually play the Hulk was really not much more than a formality. Workers in every other industry have been being replaced by technology since Ely Whitney first invented the cotton gin, and probably further back than that.

Maybe Scorsese was right after all. The movies are turning into not much more than side shows.

 

[thrasherpix]

Meanwhile, in China...

I liked this comment: "Soon, there will be only 2 types of news available in the world, Fake news from the USA and AI news from China." 😀

It's already happening in Japan with their vocaloids, basically holographic anime characters that put on a show for enthusiastic audiences (and there's more than that for them to make money from). They sell out concerts (and Japanese politicians have even attempted to get vocaloids to endorse them!), all without the temperamental performers trashing hotel rooms, being strung out on heroin, or the other nuisances to put up with. Or to pay live people (though I'm sure they have to pay technicians, their salaries are likely less demanding than a Hollywood star).

On a related note, I've suspected for a few years now that many Hollywood scripts, even of blockbusters, are themselves mostly computer generated (basically feed in old scripts which changes the names of characters, cities, planets, etc) and pump it out for the editors to quickly go over.