When the Star Dies Suddenly

I wrote an earlier Hollywood R> post, When the Star Gets Fired. When a high-profile firing happens, it’s bad, it’s a big deal, but it’s rarely much of a surprise. Studios have a much tougher time dealing with unexpected situations where the pink slip of termination has been abruptly sent by the Almighty Himself, with a total lack of regard for the almighty production schedule. When it happens to a star in the middle of making a movie, a studio has to make some very hard, unpleasant financial choices, and quickly.

If the movie is nearly finished, some tricks and cuts will usually get them to the finish line. With a film that’s more like 70% complete, it might be possible, using real filmmaking ingenuity. On the other hand, if the movie has barely started filming, the easy, sensible call is to bail out now, shut down production, file an insurance claim, and absorb some losses. It’s the cases in-between that are tough judgment calls. Costs are accruing at a rate of millions of dollars per week, whether the cameras roll or not. An expensive picture that’s only 40% complete is agony to walk away from, but you have no real choice, even if it contains Marilyn Monroe’s one, never-to-be-seen-till-now nude scene, in sparkling color and glorious CinemaScope.

The sudden death of an actor, however sad for the family and friends of the deceased, is obviously not as tricky a management problem if it happens between films, or between episodes of a TV show. If the actor was elderly, like Nancy Marchand on The Sopranos, a discreet off-camera death for the character is possible. It’s harder to deal with when for some reason or another the death is notorious: NewsRadio’s Phil Hartman, murdered; Freddie Prinze, suicide; Jon-Erik Hexum, reckless use of firearms.

A TV show has options: recast the same role, or introduce a new character who essentially absorbs the old one’s place in the cast. This is especially true of secondary characters. A popular film series can survive the recasting of Dumbledore, provided it happens between films. Losing the star in the middle of a major film production is a disaster.

Motion picture production relies on insurance, including something called a completion bond, essentially a high deductible specialized insurance policy, tailored to each film. Since that bonding company is potentially on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, they are empowered to do medical exams and drug tests, even ones that are much more rigorous and intrusive than a studio could demand directly. These little-known, third-party companies are secretive and seldom have to explain themselves. If a movie can’t get “bonded” for any reason, it doesn’t get made.

When something catastrophic happens to a movie in production, it’s not unlike a covered auto accident; the insurance company takes possession of the wreck and has broad legal powers to “total it”, paying the claim in full, or it can try to salvage what it can. It’s much the same in Hollywood. The insurers may eat the loss (even the insurers have layers of re-insurance), or they may elect to live up to the meaning of the words “completion bond”, spending money to finish the film and turn it over to a distributor. It depends on the specific deal.

One of the most well-known cases of a film’s actor dying before completion was Giant, a 1956 epic of Texas history, starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean, who had a brief, dazzling career. When Dean was killed in a car accident in September, 1955, his part in the main filming of Giant was complete, but respected director George Stevens (D Day to Berlin, Shane, The Greatest Story Ever Told) had expected a few retakes, and some routine dubbing was needed to replace unclear sound. Stevens worked with the editors to find shots of James Dean where they could overlay the voice of actor Nick Adams, a friend of Dean’s with a similar-sounding voice.

The ill-fated Marilyn Monroe picture referred to earlier was 1962’s Something’s Got to Give, a remake of 1940’s My Favorite Wife, a screwball comedy starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. Something’s Got to Give was a doomed film shoot. Zonked-out Marilyn erratically staggered through it, and sensitive “women’s director” George Cukor struggled through it, until Monroe died of an overdose of sleeping pills. After shutting down production, the studio wisely shelved the project.

The script was quickly reworked for Doris Day and James Garner under the new title of Move Over, Darling. On YouTube, you can compare three actors playing the same lawyer role in a courtroom comedy scene—Cary Grant, Dean Martin, and James Garner. 20^th Century Fox would later rework some of the footage of the abandoned film into a glossy theatrical documentary about Monroe’s career, though the infamous nude scene, teased by still photos in Playboy, was held back for many years.

Natalie Wood was the star of MGM’s Brainstorm, special effects wizard Doug Trumbull’s brash, imaginative bid for directorial greatness. At the end of November 1981, during a weekend break from filming, a little more than midway through production, she drowned under still-unclear circumstances. The office of the district attorney had one set of questions about Natalie Wood’s death to work through. Director Trumbull had his own complex, thorny judgment calls to make. His film and his career were at stake.

Was it possible to complete the film? An interesting public split emerged. MGM believed Brainstorm wasn’t going to be a sure winner even if completed, and welcomed the opportunity to recover the $11 million spent to date as an insurance claim. But the insurer, Lloyds of London, said “Not so fast.” They were won over by Doug Trumbull’s presentation, and insisted that MGM permit them to finance the finishing of Brainstorm. In this unique deal, instead of making a payout of $11 million, the insurance company put in $6 million of completion money and became MGM’s partner.

Now it was all up to Trumbull to deliver somehow. This was 1982 by now. Computer generated imagery was still in its infancy. Despite Trumbull’s tech reputation, there wasn’t much that early Eighties technology could do to bring Natalie Wood back to life. It was up to the editors.

Some of Wood’s unfilmed scenes could be dispensed with, or altered so she was no longer in them. Others were stitched together from bits and pieces of other scenes that had already been shot. Natalie Wood’s sister Lana stood in for her in some long shots and side shots, and read lines of dialog that would be used as voiceover for a montage of shots of Natalie. Trumbull did the sensible thing of using a dramatically effective shot of Wood to help make the ending feel like a satisfying conclusion. But the audience senses that it’s a stretch, even if it doesn’t know why, and Brainstorm’s box office, though no disaster was unimpressive.

Nearly twenty years later, Oliver Reed died during the making of Gladiator. The filmmakers’ situation wasn’t as dire as Doug Trumbull’s jigsaw puzzle completing Brainstorm, though it also wasn’t as relatively easy as the simple dubbing and editing job that confronted the crew of Giant. Reed still had scenes to shoot. Ridley Scott was able to get around having him in a couple of them. Only two “hard points” of exposition remained to be covered.

One of them used old school editing technique. Instead of explaining something, Reed’s character now listened impassively, “reacting” to what someone else is telling him. I put “reacting” in quotes because it’s actually a leftover shot of the actor from a different scene. Simple.

But the second key missing scene was tougher; it needed Oliver Reed and it couldn’t be gotten around. Fortunately, the Nineties had brought CGI to a high level; Gladiator’s spectacular aerial views of Rome couldn’t have been done otherwise. In 2000, though, it hadn’t yet been used much on realistic-looking human faces. Digitally pasting Reed’s face on a different actor was still new technique a quarter century ago, and Scott was careful not to push his luck. Reed’s character is seen through iron bars, a subtle trick that helps literally obscure the limits of turn-of-the-century digital visual magic.

In the 21st century, filmmakers have continuously perfected these new creative tools. When Paul Walker died in 2013 during the filming of Furious 7, the producers used the complete suite of special visual effects created during and since Gladiator to finish the film with facial CGI and body doubles. The magic worked, and in the years to come it’ll no doubt work better still.

Only a fool would bet against the progress of special effects. But in the movies, as everywhere else, one thing won’t change: death never takes a holiday.

Or will it? For decades before it was even remotely possible, Hollywood futurists have debated the possibility of Synthespians, completely believable recreations of deceased actors. This goes beyond the impressive de-aging and re-animating processes that have become commonplace. It could mean that Harrison Ford, for example, would never need to leave the screen. Long after shuffling off, “he” could continue to act in films for centuries to come, co-starring with any actor of any time period.

For the foreseeable future though, as long as matinees have idols and idols are mortal, film producers midway through big projects will still dread a 4 am call from the hospital, reminding them that Someone far above the studio chiefs still, as always, retains the right to Final Cut.

 

Possible comments:

In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when there were only two large bonding agencies, they silently stopped approving gay actors, even though they tested negative, for fear of AIDS-related payouts. Since AIDS is a slow killer, not a fast and sudden one, this made little legal sense for denying what amounted to a three-month insurance policy. The uproar threatened the secure, profitable niche they occupied in the film industry, so the completion bond companies hastily backed down.