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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. 20th 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.
Published in General
I guess it’s been mentioned here or in Gary’s first piece on the subject but I never did forget the elimination of Trini Lopez’s role in The Dirty Dozen.
Supposedly, he had his neck broken in the parachute drop but he actually quit the film. The reasons being given for this were either he was fired over salary demands or he took the advice of Frank Sinatra and walked off the set.
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This was the first example that came to mind when I started reading the post.
There were a lot of people who were shocked when John Ritter died of a heart attack. He wasn’t old and wasn’t in terrible physical shape. Besides, he was popular in town. But when it’s time for your Appointment in Samarra, it’s time.
I get tired of politics all the time. Post like this one are a welcomed relief.
Ritter was an OK guy but Three’s Company was a cringing embarrassment…
Sometimes politics is unavoidably tangled with film and TV history, and when that’s the case, I write about it. Here’s a history of the little-remembered Disney studios strike, driven by Communists.
But if the topic doesn’t demand it, I don’t drag it in.
Immortalized by Mad Magazine in “The Dirty Dozen Rotten Eggs”. A parachute carries a note that says, “So Long, TRINI! (signed) Director, Robert Aldrich.
Better novel than Gatsby, if you ask me. More illustrative of the era, too.
This is a prompt for Clavius to give his heart disease warning.
You can be in good shape and have a blockage. If you feel tightness in your chest or a pressure that comes with exersion and lasts several minutes, go see a cardiologist or go to the ER . A stress test will tell. Many people report it as feeling like indigestion, but if it is related to exertion, it is not.
I say all of this because when I had angina, which I described above, I went to the cardiologist and ended up getting a couple of stents put in. But my main coronary artery was 95% blocked. So I could have died at any moment if an blood clot came along. Instead, I am alive today.
If my father had followed this advice, he’d be a 90 year old man. Instead he died at 73. I’m 63 today, and without care, I’d be dead too.
Sorry to be off topic, but this is important for me to proselytize.
I am not really a Sitcom kind of guy. So I wasnt watching the show he was working on at the time of his death. I do remember him fondly from 3’s Company which I saw in syndication after school.
Very important indeed, Clavius, and thanks for bringing it up!
I should point out that a completion bond doesn’t just come into effect in case of unexpected death or disaster (a hurricane wipes out the sets, as happened with Apocalypse Now; or the sets catch fire, as in The Shining; or the director and star dies in an avalanche, like Russian director Sergei Bodrov Jr.)
The more typical job of a completion bond company is to take over a production that’s been turned disastrous by management–it goes way over budget by a set percentage or predetermined amount. In some ways it’s like a company entering Chapter 11; many (not all) deals are off, and the bond company has quasi-dictatorial power to replace people. Those terms are usually very unpleasant, so recalcitrant filmmakers have incentive to stay within the bounds of normal friction with the studio. Nobody likes it when the completion bond company takes over, and that includes the company itself.
The completion bond company should have a good low budget producer/director at hand for these situations, someone like Roger Corman who can make a movie out of whatever crap they’ve already finished.
They usually do. You have good intuition into these situations, Judge. That’s just who they hire. It’s seldom as high profile as Ron Howard jetting in to take charge of a Star Wars movie. It’s more like, screw rethinking the concept; given the footage that’s already been shot, and the number of un-filmed scenes that are absolutely essential, what’s the direct path to finishing it, period? It’s like zero based budgeting: prove that you need this scene in the script. Justify every set, every extra, every technician, every can of paint.
It’s not just a case of efficiency, but of focus. Much of the excess in film production is spending on inessentials, so cutting that helps, sure. It also usually results in tightening up storylines that too often wander self-indulgently.
Some movies must make the accountants tear their hair out. We spent how many hundreds of thousands of dollars for that 26-second shot?! How many extra tickets are we going to sell because of that scene?
Enjoyed it.
Thanks, RH! Hard for me to believe that Hollywood Communists post series is almost four years ago.
Francis Coppola had to beg and plead to get Paramount to let him film the Italian scenes on location. They grudgingly let him do it, but stood firm about refusing to spend the money to recreate the Camels “smoke ring” sign in Times Square.
Sometimes it is hard to remember what we discussed pre Covid.
Sometimes when talking about pre-Covid, I sound like one of my parents recalling times before World War II. Exaggeration? Sure, to some degree, but the Covid period was long enough to feel that way.
I used “the Before Times” at work recently and got a “huh?” from my coworker.
Some people just can’t tell a joke.
This post dealt with death (I just enjoy saying that in Bela Lugosi’s voice), so I didn’t deal with the film production problems posed by off-screen but visible injuries, which run a scale from Mayim Bialik’s broken wrist up through Mark Hamill’s relatively minor facial damage from a car crash after Star Wars and before Empire, concluding with the extensive work that surgeons and film editors had to do to finish MGM’s Raintree County after Montgomery Clift got cut up going through a windshield. The Fifties were a lousy era for traffic deaths: the horsepower race was in full wing, but the roads and the drivers weren’t any better. Other than a relative handful of Fords, there were no seat belts in American-made cars.
Raintree was the toughest because there are several scenes where Clift is seen both before and after. The shots don’t cut together seamlessly. Clift doesn’t look Frankensteinian, but he looks frozen, from the stretched skin of surgery and the dazed look of being shot up with enough painkillers to work.
Or there was a shortage of tops.
That’s my go-to. The Before Times.
All good comments and advice, Clav. But now I have to be That Guy™: Ritter did not die of a heart attack, he died of an aortic dissection. The problem was that they treated him for a heart attack and by the time they figured out it was an aortic dissection, it was essentially too late. So if you go in for a heart attack and the treatment doesn’t seem to be working, make sure you or your loved ones mention the possibility of aortic dissection to the doctors. (There, did I cover well my rank pedantry over with more advice?)
Excellent advice.
Years and years ago, my great uncle was out with friends – bowling I think…
And one of his friends complained of dizziness, so they took him to the ER… and eventually saw the doctor who gave him a prescription to treat an inner ear infection. He had a massive heart attack and died in the hospital parking lot.