Real stars take drugs, lose their looks and throw tantrums. But ‘Digital Hollywood’ can now make its own stars, writes Pat Kane
SCI-FI writer William Gibson, the inventor of the term “cyberspace”, recently brought out a new novel about a digital woman – a computer-generated image – who gains an actual consciousness and wants to merge with a human admirer.
Gibson appropriated the Japanese word for idol, Idoru, to name his digital heroine. That, you might think, is science fiction. But not so fast. Down in the silicon trenches of what they’re calling Digital Hollywood, cyber-evangelist Scott Billups wants to create the first autonomous virtual idol.
In the meantime, he makes his living by computer-scanning the bodies of live Hollywood stars … and dead ones. Lurking within his apartment are two of the biggest potential idora of all: Virtual Marilyn and Virtual Marlon.
“The actual Marlon Brando was down at my house the other day,” says Billups, the chirpy man who made the dinosaurs move in Jurassic Park. His long-term project has been to create a convincing version of Marilyn Monroe – “musculature, expressions, movements, everything. We’ve researched everything, studied all the images, talked to her friends.”
That, it seems, is why Brando was visiting. “They were lovers, after all,” says Billups. “If anyone would think we’d got a virtual Marilyn right, it would be Brando.” And was he convinced? “He watched for a long time, turned to me and said, ‘Bill, you’ve got her. That’s Marilyn all right.'”
Brando has prior connections to this alchemist: Billups digitally scanned Brando’s face for an hour-long television documentary on his life, where the old star interviews a virtual version of his younger self. Billups admires Brando for his candour: “He’s the only one of the Hollywood stars whose digital impression I’ve taken who’s been prepared to go public about it. All the rest are nervous as hell that any of this gets out.”
The secret they’re hiding is what could be called the digitisation of stardom. When a performer’s characteristic expressions, gestures or postures can be turned into a scatter of pixels, a Pandora’s box of potential problems opens up. In the realm of the “synthespian” – the technical term for the virtual actor – Hollywood has never been weirder.
For example, Billups was called in by a production company a few months ago, to solve a rather thorny problem. “What happened was that Rutger Hauer had fallen into a cactus while shooting on location in a desert, and quite badly injured himself,” Billups recalls. “The producers had to get the movie finished, or the company would be screaming. So they asked me to scan Rutger and finish the rest of his movie sequences virtually – which we did.” Pause. “Film insurance companies love what I do.”
Mike Boudry, whose London-based Computer Film Company has won two Oscars for technical innovation, says his most bizarre digital repair job was in Mission: Impossible: “There was a scene where Tom Cruise was eating at a table, and a dribble of spit came down his chin. We just took it out.”
Boudry has also removed spots from cheeks and adjusted hairlines downwards. So is all this just a branch of the make-up industry? “Sometimes, yes. But in five years’ time, you will be getting virtual actors. Technically, it’s an inevitability.”
What might also make it inevitable are the escalating costs of movie-making. Insurance companies so love what people like Boudry and Billups are doing that in the future they may insist stars have themselves digitally scanned – in case sudden death, illness or even “bad attitude” makes it impossible for them to finish a movie.
This has occasioned another star-versus-studio tussle. “I’ve been told a number of heavy-hitting stars are asking for limits on the presence of digital images in their movies,” says Joseph Beard, a law professor in New York. “The law is unclear here.”
Another force favouring the synthespian is the pulling power of the classic movie idol. Remember the Forrest Gump sequences with JFK and Herbert Hoover? This was effectively digital cut-and-paste: taking existing footage and mingling it with new action. But what’s coming is something Variety magazine recently dubbed “digital grave-robbing”.
Bruce Lee is being raised from the dead. The estate of George Burns has allowed a producer to create a digital composite of the deceased comedian for a new movie. If this works, the possible combinations are rich and endless: Hugh Grant and David Niven? Geena Davis and Katharine Hepburn? Marilyn … and Marlon?
Virtual inventors are already in between the lines of Gibson’s Idoru, building screen creatures from scratch and hoping these will one day talk back to their creators.
But the rest of us may feel the same shiver that the data researcher Laney does in Gibson’s book, gazing upon a hologram of Rei Toei, the synthespian idol: “Don’t look at the idoru’s face. She is not flesh; she is information. She is the tip of an iceberg, an Antarctica, of information.”