The news has not been good for actors and actresses recently. This week Forbes and MSNBC both listed acting as a pursuit that is going the way of typesetters and elevator operators. Their days, according to these media outlets and the raw statistics, are numbered.
Will the curtain actually fall on this industry? Only time will tell. But new technologies are beginning to make an actor unnecessary in films. And local and regional productions of films, commercials and even plays are on the downswing as technology continues to change the way we entertain ourselves.
You can already see the writing on the wall. If you watched Tron: Legacy last year, you saw a 35 year old version of Jeff Bridges on screen. The only problem is Jeff is 60. Through the magic performance-capture, Jeff did his thing on screen, only to have his entire being re-edited into a younger version of himself, one that doesn’t even exist.
On the one side, this is totally cool technology. On the other, it should be frightening to any actor or actress. Just look what they did to Elvis on American Idol a couple years back, a foreshadowing of our future filled with dead actors and actors with dead careers.
We can all blame Peter Jackson who made Lord of the Rings. He perfected this technology to create Gollum. All an actor (any actor) has to do is put on a body suit with markers covering it and their face. They do their little acting gig in a room known as a “volume” where multiple cameras pick up their movements and feed them into a computer. The computer does all the heavy lifting, translating the data into anything the director wants. For example, Andy Serkis played a chimpanzee in Rise of the Planet of the Apes last year and he’s making three more movies now.
Andy’s resume of films isn’t impressive, at least not as a real actor. But as a “placeholder” in film, you’ll soon see him as Gollum again in the upcoming The Hobbit. No, you won’t recognize him on the street. He’s pretty average in the looks and talent department.
And there lies the problem with the concept. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, we had the likes of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn and a cavalcade of other bigger than life stars.
Now, through the miracle of this technology, Andy can come back as one of these people, their likeness digitized and morphed over Andy’s shapeless, bodysuited body.
I can see it now. A remake of Gone With the Wind shot entirely in the “volume” with Andy playing both Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Everything, right down to Mammy and Tara, will be digitized, twirled around in a computer and spit back out for future generations to see.
Won’t happen you say? Why would any studio pay Tom Cruise millions of dollars when they can hire Andy for scale, throw him in a suit and layer Tom over him. Pay Tom once for image capture, then put him out to pasture. If you don’t believe the possibilities of all this, Tom had to take a substantial pay cut to be in Mission: Impossible 4.
Now, Tom’s not exactly a huge box office draw these days. That Scientology whack job stuff kind of hampered his career a bit. And he’s getting a bit old to play a sexy lead spy kind of guy.
Well aren’t we all. But the writing seems to be on the wall. Filming on location isn’t really necessary these days, nor is massive sets or thousands of extras. For the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory they only hired one Oompa Loompa. If you search around the Internet these days, you’ll see that stars are beginning to take big pay cuts just to be in a movie?
Why? Though film budgets continue to soar, the money is all going into the technology. Post production is where it’s at these days. While actor’s careers are dying on the vine, the industry is clamoring for more directors and animators. Actors need not apply.
Thankfully, Indiana Jones seems safe. Even though Steven Spielberg fell in love with performance-capture in making Tintin (starring Andy Serkis by the way), he says he won’t turn a 70 year old Harrison Ford into a young Indiana, even though he can.
Spielberg pledged: “If there’s an ‘Indy V,’ I’m not sure when or if there will be, but if there is an ‘Indy V,’ Harrison has to be the age that he is when we make the picture,” said Spielberg. “He’s going to have to play that age, and we’ll write that into the script.”
Thankfully, some things are sacred, at least for now.
I find it all a bit creepy. The reason is simple, too. Human performance by its nature is imperfect. That’s what makes it indelibly human. Anything generated by a computer, whether it’s a CGI of the New York skyline, a bunch of Zeros dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor or that horrendous gaggle of single-faced Oompa Loompas, looks strange to our eyes. Computer generated images are perfect and our minds are not only used to seeing imperfection, but demand them. That’s one of the reasons why we can detect small changes in our world – the imperfections are what guide us.
No matter how good the technology has gotten (and I work in it daily), I can still instantly see anything on the screen, in print or on the Internet that has been created or manipulated by a computer. It’s almost instantaneous for me as it is too perfect.
I really hope the day never comes that actors are replaced by technology. For as long as we’ve been on this earth, we have been acting our stories. It is part of what makes us the more evolved of the species… our ability to tell stories.
Don’t believe me? Imagine if Kurt Russell really had been cast as Han Solo? Or Cindy Williams of Laverne and Shirley fame as Princess Leia? Or Andy Serkis as a digitized Mark Hamill playing Luke Skywalker? I rest my case.
Out on the Treasure Coast, learning my lines as best I can for the small part I play in this world of ours,
– Robb