A hellraiser lives again
QUESTION Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing both appeared in Star Wars films after they had died. Which other actors have done something similar?
In ROGUE One: A Star Wars Story (2016), the filmmakers tapped into advances in digital technology to resurrect Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin, 22 years after the actor’s death.
The death of an actor during a film’s production has become an increasing problem, as so much of modern Hollywood’s output is film franchises.
The late Carrie Fisher, who died in December 2016, is a case in point.
She had completed her scenes for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which was released last year after she died, and there has been discussion about whether she will appear in Star Wars: Episode IX, due for release in 2019, where archive footage or CGI could be used.
Similarly, the death in 2013 of Paul Walker in a car crash disrupted the production of Fast & Furious 7, just two months after filming began. The studio reportedly spent an extra £30million to complete the film, using Walker’s younger brothers as stand-ins, as well as CGI.
Perhaps the best-known digital fix was Oliver Reed’s performance as Proximo in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in 2000.
Reed died of a heart attack during a drinking bout in Valletta, Malta, in a break from shooting, leaving several important scenes unfinished. So his face was mapped onto a double’s head using CGI. The process reportedly cost £2 million for just two minutes of screentime.
Then there is the case of Sir Laurence Olivier who appeared 15 years after his death as evil hologram Dr Totenkopf in 2004’s Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Jude Law.
Director Kerry Conran resurrected Sir Laurence using digitally manipulated footage culled from BBC tapes.
Heath Ledger won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of The Joker in the 2008 sequel The Dark Knight a month after he died. He was in the middle of filming Terry Gilliam’s film The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus at the time of his death, and his remaining scenes were divided among Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell.
A number of Hollywood actors have become concerned that posthumous portrayals will tarnish their legacy and have taken legal action to prevent this. Robin Williams, who committed suicide in 2014, banned any use of his image for commercial means until 2039 and blocked anyone from digitally inserting him into a movie or TV show or using a hologram.
Jared Carter, Telford, Shrops.
QUESTION Can all species of bat see?
THE old saying ‘as blind as a bat’ is a misrepresentation. The truth is that all 1,200 bat species can see. There are two categories of bats:
Megachiroptera (megabats or fruit bats) and Microchiroptera (microbats), which are believed to have evolved independently, but from a common ancestor.
The word chiroptera comes from Greek and means ‘hand-wing’, a definition that would be more easily understood if you were to see a bat’s skeleton.
Megabats are medium to large-sized bats who eat fruits and nectar, though they will sometimes consume small animals or fish. They have big eyes, as they use vision to help capture their prey. They also have a well-developed sense of smell for the same purpose.
Flying foxes, a type of fruit bat, not only see well during daylight, but can also see in colour. They rely on their daylight vision and can’t fly during moonless nights. Megabats do not tend to navigate by echolocation — the biological sonar by which they listen to the echoes of their calls in order to locate and identify objects — so their eyesight is crucial.
Only one megabat species, the Egyptian fruit bat Rousettus aegyptiacus, uses a type of echolocation — high-pitched tongue clicks — to navigate in caves.
Microbats are mostly insectivores. They account for 70 per cent of all bats and use echolocation to navigate and identify food. Their vision has been shown to be more complex than once believed.
There are two types of photoreceptor cells in the retinas of mammals: the cones, for daylight and colour vision; and the rods, for night vision.
It was thought that as microbats are mostly nocturnal, their eyes contained only rods. This is not the case and these bats can see during the day.
Moreover, vision might be used by microbats to navigate over long distances beyond the range of echolocation.
D. B. Warren, Nottingham.
QUESTION Who managed Frank Sinatra during his long career in music and movies?
ELIOT WEISMAn managed Frank — or ‘Mr S’, as he called him — from 1976 to the singer’s death in 1998.
Weisman and Sinatra had a great relationship, and the manager describes in detail the many stories from that era in the book The Way It Was: My Life With Frank Sinatra, co-written by Jennifer Valoppi and published last year.
One story recalled Frank telling Donald Trump where to go (by using a crude expression) on meeting him.
In his earlier days, Frank performed with big bands and had several managers who managed the whole band. The most prominent was Hank Sanicola, from the late Thirties to the early Sixties.
Sinatra once said Sanicola, who came from a similar Italian-American family to the singer, was ‘one of the five most important people in my life. I couldn’t have made it without him’.
In his later years, Sinatra’s big tours were managed by Jerry Weintraub, who also organised tours for Bob Dylan, neil Diamond, The Four Seasons, Led Zeppelin and ‘the King’, Elvis Presley.
Gary Litchfield, Portsmouth, Hants.
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