Brandon Lee's death during filming of The Crow left the producers with two options: close down or salvage what they had. They chose to finish the film with a double, using digital technology to put Lee's face on the stand-in's body. Here's how some productions coped with the death of a star in lower-tech times. *Saratoga (1937, MGM/UA) This horse-racing romance almost didn't get out of the starting gate when Jean Harlow died of kidney failure six weeks into production. MGM hired starlet Mary Dees, who bore a superficial resemblance to Harlow, to stand in for her, hiding her face behind such props as binoculars and an enormous hat, and had radio actress Paula Winslowe dub in her voice.
*My Son John (1952, not available) When Robert Walker overdosed on medically administered sedatives before wrapping this melodrama, the filmmakers incorporated outtakes from Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 Strangers on a Train (in which Walker played the heavy) to complete a death scene at the Lincoln Memorial.
*Giant (1956, Warner) Though James Dean had shot all of his scenes before dying in a car crash, his big drunken banquet speech turned out to be unintelligible because of a technical glitch. Actor Nick Adams rerecorded the speech, attaining a Dean-like mumble by loading his mouth with chewing gum.
*Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959, Nostalgia) Bela Lugosi died of a heart attack soon after filming of this sci-fi cheapie began. Unfazed, director Edward Wood Jr. brought in Thomas R. Mason, a chiropodist who was a head taller than Lugosi, cleverly concealing his face with a cape.
*Game of Death (1978, FoxVideo) Bruce Lee's death in 1973 from a cerebral edema forced this chopsocky flick to shut down for three years. With Lee's ascendance to cultdom, the producers expanded what was mostly fight footage into a cash cow. They hired one double for fighting, another for emoting, and disguised them with camera angles, sunglasses, gauze bandages, and-at one point-a beard.
*Brainstorm (1983, MGM/UA) The studio tried to scuttle this project (against director Douglas Trumbull's wishes) after Natalie Wood drowned. Trumbull finished this proto- virtual-reality thriller without a double and without redubbing, by reverting to an earlier script that gave less screen time to Wood's character.
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