HAVE GIGABYTES, WILL ACT

By BRUCE HANDY

Is there any other industry besides the movies where so much rides on assets as evanescent as star quality? This is why genuine movie stars are both fawned over and loathed by their employers, and why they are paid so very, very much. But what if modern special-effects technicians, many of whom tend to be young men with few material needs beyond limitless supplies of caffeine and tapes of old John Woo movies, could be paid much, much less to create actors who would give infinitely malleable performances while never demanding gross points or throwing hissies? Or take it a step further: What if Marilyn Monroe, say, could be digitally returned from the dead--and without the neuroses? Is this ghoulish? Something akin to playing God? Well, maybe. And maybe Marilyn could have made Striptease a hit.

Artists in all media know that a touch of imperfection--a barely missed beat, Streisand's nose--can breathe life into a work. But perfectibility is the Promethean temptation of Hollywood's computer-graphics revolution, which is giving movies a glossy hyperreality unseen since the heyday of the studio system while distracting us from their essential soullessness. And if the computer's single greatest achievement to date has been the astonishingly life-like dinosaurs of the astonishingly lifeless Jurassic Park and The Lost World, creating digital humans of similar believability remains the industry's Holy Grail.

Not that computers aren't already used to enhance performances, smoothing out crow's-feet here, filling in a depleted hairline there, even, as one London-based f/x man described it to the Guardian, removing "a dribble of spit" from Tom Cruise's chin for a scene in Mission: Impossible. But this is mere tweakery. A Japanese company has created a digital teen idol, Kyoko Date, who performs in music videos. "She," however, is based on the anatomical parts of various real girls. Dennis Muren, who has won eight Oscars as the senior visual-effects supervisor at George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, estimates that it would still take a couple of years of R. and D.--and more money, he says, than it would be worth--to create a fully realized, ready-for-its-close-up human from digital scratch. But that day is surely coming. Computer graphics--CG, in industry shorthand--have already been used to create loosely rendered virtual stunt people suitable for brief action sequences. The buzz has it that James Cameron's forthcoming Titanic will represent a leap forward with its use of CG extras, detailed down to the misty breath they exhale in the cold night air, although one source who has seen completed footage from the film says the overall effect is less impressive as a visual than as a because-they-can declaration. Why not, when you've got a budget currently estimated at over $200 million?

Digital goofing with old clips has given John Wayne and Fred Astaire the opportunity to sell Coors beer and Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners on TV despite being dead. A more disturbing prospect is represented by a film called Everything's George, which begins shooting this week. It will star George Burns, who is also dead but will nevertheless appear, as himself, with the blessing of his estate. "Five weeks after he died, we already had the rights," boasts producer Paul Greenberg. The screenplay posits Burns as a recent arrival in heaven, a Level One angel desperate to reunite with his wife Gracie Allen, who preceded him to heaven way back when and is now a Level Six angel. The only way Burns can make Level Six himself is by returning to Earth, coming to a mortal's aid and thereby earning his wings. Frank Capra is not coming back to direct. Nor is Marshall Herff Applewhite.

As for Burns, the filmmakers have commissioned a clay model of the comic's head, accurate down to "every blemish, wart and liver spot," as Greenberg puts it. The head will then be scanned into a computer and brought to life with what is known as motion-capture technology, using data from sensors that have been attached to an actor--in this case the old impressionist Frank Gorshin, who will give Burns' performance. No doubt this production will be watched closely by the effects industry, as well as by Rich Little's agent. Greenberg is promising pretty grand results: "Someone with a trained eye might say there's something not quite human about it. But the average layman will watch it and say, 'Wow! George Burns is alive!'" Either that or "Yikes!"

When it comes to playing God, of course, cloning the images of hapless dead celebrities is not in the same league as mucking with actual genes. But the question of CG humans does allow designers to muse like college freshmen about the nature of reality and still call it work. For instance, effects artists can give you long disquisitions on skin, its subtle sheen, the complexity of pores. To a computer, it's the little things that are most confusing about humanity. "The closer you get to reality, the harder it is to make something look real," explains Muren. "When it's a ways away from reality you kind of respect it; it has its own integrity, like a kids' drawing or an Impressionist painting. But the more realistic it tries to get, the faker and faker it can tend to get." Which, nicely put, is the dilemma of contemporary moviemaking.