Even taking the forthcoming release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince into account, I’ve backed The Dark Knight to emerge as Warner Bros‘ most profitable film of 2008. The recent death of Heath Ledger has only strengthened this belief, because rightly or wrongly, this tragic event will bring an even bigger audience. Yet this so-called “ghoul factor” is not a new phenomenon, and this week I’ll be looking at its enduring presence in the world of film.
Even back in 1974, the “ghoul factor” was parodied in the opening song of Brian De Palma’s bizarro rock opera Phantom of the Paradise. The song “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” (which bears no relation to the plot of the film) is about a young man who needs to raise money for his sister’s much-needed operation. (If you’ve ever seen the film itself, then you may wonder, as I do, why Swan has to steal Leach’s cantata if The Juicy Fruits already had dynamite A material such as this!) . So he records an album and kills himself to ensure that the publicity will achieve massive sales. And it does.
The death of Ledger was met with an industry-wide period of mourning, but the first trailers of The Dark Knight, which had been eagerly anticipated (helped in no small part by the studio’s innovative viral marketing strategies), experienced a major spike following his passing. According to his family, Ledger was very happy with his work as The Joker, so at the very least it’s nice to know that it will reach an even larger audience than expected.
Putting aside for a moment the tragedy of a young man’s death, though, at least the studio don’t have the additional hurdle of finishing the film without one of its main actors, as filming had already wrapped (although they may still have to be creative in post-production). Not so for Ledger’s other project - the heftily titled Terry Gilliam film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which still had a significant amount of filming to complete. A little after the news of Ledger’s death broke, I for one fully expected Gilliam’s film to be shut down by the studio - not least because it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened to the man, as evidenced in the excellent documentary Lost in La Mancha, which chronicles the tribulations of making his unfinished film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
As you may have read by now, Gilliam’s plan is to supplement Ledger’s role with three other actors (Colin Farrell, Jude Law and Johnny Depp - now all listed as officially attached to the project), by way of the character falling through an enchanted mirror and taking on other forms. This is, admittedly a fairly old school approach - but as Gilliam’s film is a magic fantasy it probably won’t feel as contrived as it could have done.
The act of having to replace a lead actor who has died during filming is not a new one, and various techniques have been employed to overcome the hurdle - some more sophisticated than others, the most novel of which must be Fred Olen Ray’s intriguing concept of filming lots of random scenes of the actor John Carradine, which were then placed (often quite unsubtly) in several films after his death. That’s a bit extreme, though, and usually the solutions are more likely one of the following:
The Matrix Trilogy had to recast two roles - one was The Oracle, played by Gloria Foster in the first two films, and Mary Alice in the third (as well as the videogame, Enter the Matrix). As she was something of a fantastic character, this was appropriate. The second was Zee, originally intended to be played by Aaliyah before her death in a plane crash in August 2001, the role eventually went Nona Gaye, the daughter of Marvin.
Gladiator utilised advances in CGI to weave Oliver Reed’s character Proximo into a worthwhile plot, if not as complete a storyline as was intended. Prior to this, digital compositing techniques were famously used in two 1994 movies to being their lead actors back to life one last time.
Arguably, the most famous example of the ghoul factor at work is The Crow. A tragic, yet remarkably convoluted fire-arms accident during filming led to Brandon Lee (whose father, Bruce Lee, also had a film completed after his own death - in the shape of Game of Death) dying from a gunshot wound. The film was finished by simplifying the plot, removing the Skull Cowboy as well as use of a body double - most noticeable in the scenes in which Eric Draven returns to his old apartment, and through digital compositing: scenes of Lee from elsewhere in the film were laid over empty background plates of some of the sets - and on one occasion, a lightning flash reveals Lee’s face superimposed on a body double - all of which was incredibly sophisticated work for the time.
The other example is John Candy’s final screen appearance in Wagons East! which was in production when he died of a heart attack in his sleep. I always considered this film to be one of those which needed to be finished using various tricks - however in researching this blog I have read that the film-makers claim that Candy had finished all of his filming and that at no point was any trickery used to finish the film, although some beg to differ.
As rough as that looks, it’s still lightyears away from Jean Harlow being replaced by look-and-soundalikes in 1937’s Saratoga, and a marked improvement on Ed Wood’s 1959 nonsense-fest Plan 9 from Outer Space, which saw Bela Lugosi replaced by a much taller man who had to keep his face covered with a cape.
You may think that laughable, but as we wrap up, spare a thought for Donald Pleasence. In 1996, he appeared in his final film, which - perhaps fittingly - was one of seemingly several thousand low-budget Italian horror flicks he did. It went by the name of Fatal Frames (not to be confused with Fatal Frame), the final shot of which is an actor in a phone booth, wearing a Donald Pleasence mask while a soundalike voiceover tells whoever is on the line that he has to leave, so he can (in a line to make genre fans cringe) be back home in time for Halloween.
And that, my friends, was 37 years after Plan 9.
