A US business has bought up Monroe's brand rights in the hope of reviving her via Tron: Legacy-style technology. Will it work?
"Death," purred Gandalf, back in The Lord of the Rings, "is not the end. Death is just another path ? one that we must all take." The wizard may have said these words trying to console a scared hobbit, but he could have easily been describing a tentatively emerging Hollywood philosophy.
Toronto businessman Jamie Salter recently announced his intention to cast Marilyn Monroe in a movie. This, you may think, causes something of problem: the Hollywood icon's last completed film, The Misfits, was a flop; its star has been dead some 49 years. Yet if Slater's intentions are true, it's perhaps the first issue that matters much more than the latter.
Gandalf only got it half right. If you're jobbing Vin Diesel, life probably does end with The Fast and the Furious: Part 32. But if you're an icon such as Marilyn Monroe ? whose name and likeness Salter recently purchased via his New York-based brand-development company Authentic Brands Group for a figure believed to be around $50m (�31m)? eternal rest may have a snooze alarm.
"We're pretty comfortable that Marilyn Monroe, in the next couple of years, will be in a real feature film and be playing a part," Salter told the Toronto Star two weeks ago. "I don't know if it's a 007 movie or if it's action or it's drama but she's going to be an actress that the director chooses, no different than Kate Hudson or Meryl Streep."
Salter, who says he's "had conversations with some pretty big movie people in the last couple of months" and claims "there's definitely an interest", plans to use new technologies to create a digital avatar for Monroe ? a casting option as real to directors as anyone replying to an ad in the back of Variety. "[Dead] celebrities don't talk back," says Salter. "They don't go out on the town. They are ready to film every day."
The move is one sanctioned by the Monroe estate. Anna Strasberg ? the widow of the star's late acting coach Lee Strasberg ? is a minority partner in the venture (which also involves the global media company NECA) and it was she and her son David who approached Authentic last summer. Their hope was to bring Monroe's brand into what Salter calls "bigger categories" ? fragrance, apparel, handbags and the like. Authentic Brands also handles the posthumous brand-building of Bob Marley.
"The souvenir side of the business is not our direction," says Salter, "I don't think a shot glass is good for her image".
What Salter proposed was an acting comeback, and is now talking with the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles to make the idea of Monroe's onscreen resurrection a reality. He says the "digital media" available is incredible. Nevertheless, the evidence would suggest it may be some time before the actor slips into CGI diamante. Similar tricks were used to pair a 60-year old Jeff Bridges with his 30-year-old junior self in December's Tron: Legacy ? tricks even the film's director, Joseph Kosinski, said "weren't 100% in 100% of the shots".
Similar plans were unveiled to the Daily Mail last year by Mel Smith, who worked under George Lucas as director of the comedy flop Radioland Murders in 1994. Smith claimed the Star Wars creator was "buying up the film rights to dead movie stars in the hope of using computer trickery to put them all together in a movie. You'd have Orson Welles appear alongside today's stars." Staff at Lucasfilm were quick to deny the claims ? perhaps considering how they struggled to animate Jar Jar Binks's lips in The Phantom Menace, let alone how they might manage reviving Welles.
Despite his invested intent, in this light Salter's plans sound unfeasible ? in the short term at least. Perhaps they sound commercially risky too. Recent outings by previously bankable stars such as Tom Cruise and Jack Black have taken a fraction of what they might five years ago, while the performance of The Tourist, December's Depp/Jolie flop, is perhaps the most telling indictment of modern audiences' disinterest in stardom. What chance does Monroe stand of eliciting anything but a curious glance ? especially when her CG-eyes don't yet align?
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