Off Screen

SOME PEOPLE call it Hollyweird, some call it La-La Land.

The capital of cinema culture is a strange place alright. The last time I was there, I was on the set of a Keith Richards video. The director, possibly thinking only a mutant could make Keith look human, wanted a three legged dog to stand in front of the rock legend while he mimed. But where the hell do you find a three legged dog? The production company called up Critters, who specialise in providing animals to the film world. "No problem," said Critters, "which particular leg do you want missing?"

Which hasn't really got anything to do with anything, except to demonstrate that it's a sick city. And it doesn't get much sicker than this. Brandon Lee, having been shot and killed during a filming accident, is being brought back to life to complete the movie.

In March this year, Lee was drawing to the end of an arduous shoot on horror thriller The Crow. In the first of too many tragic ironies, Lee played a man who is brutally murdered by a gang of drug dealers but comes back from the dead to avenge himself. While filming flashbacks of the murder scene, Lee was shot with a prop-gun that had a live bullet lodged in the barrel. Instead of falling forward, as rehearsed, Lee doubled over and collapsed backwards to the floor, groaning and writhing. Assuming he was improvising, the other actors continued the scene and it wasn't until the director yelled 'Cut!' that anybody realised there was a problem. Lee died in hospital the next day.

The accident appears to have been the result of cost-cutting, overwork and the ignoring of recognised safety guidelines. District Attorney Jerry Spivey announced that he was considering bringing charges of criminal negligence against the production company. But meanwhile, Twentieth Century Fox had a film to somehow finish, and a $12 million investment hanging in the balance. There was talk of shooting a couple of filler scenes with a double until someone hit on the bright idea of using the techniques pioneered on Jurassic Park.

No, I'm not talking about creating a DNA clone of the deceased actor from the blood he spilled on the studio floor. Instead they will use state of the art computer programmes to generate a walking, talking (if not quite living) image of Mr Lee. Hey, it worked for the dinosaurs, and they'd been extinct for 65 million years.

But if they can create a computer generated actor, what does

that imply for the future of the film industry? Computers don't demand huge fees, require trailers or throw tantrums (like Tom Cruise, for instance, who, while filming A Few Good Men, insisted that no one knock on his trailer door; if anyone from the film crew wanted to contact him, they had to fax him first). So why not just dispense with actors altogether.

Hollywood-based computer graphics consultants Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak have copyrighted the term 'synthespians' to describe a computer actor. And since one of the things that you can obviously do with a synthespian is bring him back to life there is already speculation about future movies starring such deceased stars as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley and Cary Grant. Humphrey Bogart actually crops up for a cameo in one scene of The Last Action Hero and Platoon producer Arnold Kopelson has already had talks with several companies about making a movie with . . . John Wayne! Not even cancer could keep him down! He's back from the dead! And this time he's really mad!!!!!

Coca-cola used a host of dead stars in a recent advertisement, although this was done through electronic manipulation of existing footage. But the new technology would allow these same stars to appear in new and original stories, possibly opposite the stars of today. James Dean could continue his career from where it was so rudely cut short, with Julia Roberts as his love interest and Morrissey as his slavering sidekick in Rebel Without A Pulse. Marilyn Monroe could appear as Madonna's bosom body in Some Like 'Em Cold. And if Brandon Lee's The Crow is a posthumous hit they could bring him back again for a sequel.

Of course, it has disturbing implications for the stars of today, who may find themselves undercut by synthespians. And who actually owns the copyright on the dead? If James Dean were alive, would he have allowed his image to be used to advertise Nat West banks? Would Humphrey Bogart, never a man to mince his words or mix his drinks, have been prepared to advertise Coca-cola? And what is to stop these electronic actors revealing all in some grave-digging pornography? Cary Grant and Randolph Scott could be made to confirm all those rumours in lurid colour.

Steven Spielberg has pressed for legislation to protect movies from what he describes as 'electronic vandalism', but, having brought animals back from extinction in Jurassic Park, he accepts that computers are set to change films forever. "When the time comes where it will be more cost effective to create the sets in a computer as opposed to building the Roman Forum," he said recently, "that's a day I will rue and mourn. And that day is coming. I'll move into the technology along with everybody else, because that technique will be the only way film-makers with big imaginations will be able to afford them."

Maybe if they do bring Big John back he'll sort these philistines out.