Resurrecting forgotten movie stars

Just as Rick Rubin did it with Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, so film directors have done similar with ancient, iconic actors and bought them out of retirement for a final swan song. Richard Farnsworth died a year after starring in David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999). Harry Dean Stanton, who also acted in The Straight Story, died the same year as his last film, Lucky (in which David Lynch had a part), was released (2017). Jason Robards played a cancer patient in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and, well, died of cancer the following year (1999). Bruce Dern in Nebraska (2018) felt like a sort of Straight Story swan song road movie, but thankfully Dern is still with us aged 84.

However, Quentin Tarentino is perhaps the most Rubinesque of filmmakers, resurrecting everyone from Robert Forster and Pam Grier to David Carradine and Darryl Hannah. He even got Ennio Morricone to do his first western score in over thirty years for The Hateful Eight (2015); he would do one more film score before his death in 2020.

Technology has of course taken resurrections to new levels, with young versions of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing being animated for the recent Star Wars film Rogue One (2016).

A new James Dean film has actually been announced (he died in 1955). Finding Jack is a Vietnam-era action drama which will star a CGI James Dean, known as a digital double, though it seems to have stalled.

Humphey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe were actually the first actors to be ‘digitally duplicated’ way back in a 1987 film, Rendez-vous in Montreal. If this now looks like bad video game graphics, by 2001, Final Fantasy, the first feature film depicting realistic people using computer graphics, was released. Slightly better, but they still had a problem animating moving hair realistically. It was only a matter of time. Bill Clinton, Fred Astaire, Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn are just a few celebrities (not all dead, notice) to have been digitally cloned.

And by 2002, certain actors including Jim Carrey, Michelle Pfeiffer, Denzel Washington and Arnold Schwarzenegger had had their heads 3D laser scanned for creating digital duplicates of themselves in the future. It’s a depressing thought, really, that Arnie could still be The Terminator in 2129 (let alone 2029, the year he comes from in the original film), as well as all the timeline confusion.

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