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99 A decade into Hollywood’s digital revolution, Andrew Niccol wrote and directed S1m0ne (2002), a speculative fantasy in which film director Victor Taransky (Al Pacino) replaces a temperamental star (Winona Ryder) with a digital actor. His move saves the production. The film becomes a huge success and so does Simone, its digital star. She commands constant media attention and a huge and devoted fan base. Taransky now has a new problem—keeping Simone’s true identity secret. The public believes she is flesh and blood, and Taransky struggles to prevent the fraud that he’s perpetrated from being known. Niccol’s film is whimsical, but it expresses real anxiety and some bitterness. The movie conjures a world in which digital simulations of human beings are unperceivable as such and in which actors are replaced by computerized surrogates. The film envisions a time when filmmakers no longer need flesh-and-blood actors because digital replacements are cheaper and can be designed to have star quality. Simone represents the death of the actor and even of reality. Sitting at his computer, manipulating Simone, Taransky playfully mutters, “I am the death of real.” Simone tells an interviewer, “I relate better to people when they’re not there.” Fittingly, Simone is the invention of a mad scientist, Hank Alano (Elias Koteas), a whacko who has developed an eye tumor from staring at his computer screen too long. He bequeaths his invention to Taransky. Using the figure of Alano, the movie casts the genesis of digital images in the terms of a Frankenstein myth. Simone is the product of a lone inventor rather than decades of research pursued by many institutions, the process that actually gave us CGI. Taransky can interact with her in real time, make her speak, and move by pushing a few keys at his computer, an ease that still eludes digital animators. C H A P T E R 3  Actors and Algorithms 100 digital visual effects in cinema Feeling remorseful about his deceitful behavior, Taransky tells his ex-wife, “There’s no Simone. She’s pixels, computer code molded by me from a mathematical equation I inherited from a madman.” But Simone represents the new reality, according to Niccol. Taransky can’t walk away from her or the success she’s brought him. The film ends as he and Simone tell the media that they have decided to go into politics. The illusion and sleight-of-hand they have been practicing will be very much at home there. “The creation of realistic digital humans [is] the high watermark in computer animation.”1 So wrote Remington Scott, who supervised the motion-capture work on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). This is an oft-repeated idea (especially by advocates of motion capture), that lifelike digital humans are the Holy Grail of computer animation. Its corollary—why use actors anymore?—elicits the anxieties that S1m0ne addresses. Indeed, Pamela Wojcik writes that we now face “a crisis in the conception of acting, a crisis that is seemingly historically and technologically determined: the issue of acting in the digital age.”2 The notion that digital imaging poses crises for our understanding of cinema, however, seems to exaggerate the nature of the changes that have occurred. In his book on film acting, James Naremore writes that there is “no such thing as an uncontrived face in the movies.”3 Humphrey Bogart wore a full wig throughout Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)because his hair was thinning . John Wayne wore a toupee and was rarely photographed without it. Orson Welles regularly appeared onscreen in false noses. Nicole Kidman did likewise when playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). Charlize Theron dimmed her natural beauty to play a serial killer in Monster (2003), and many stars today require that digital intermediates be used for cosmetic purposes such as erasing skin blemishes and wrinkles. Just as faces are contrived for the camera, so, too, are bodies. Alan Ladd famously stood on boxes to be photographed with his taller co-stars. Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman are carefully framed in movies to hide their short stature from viewers. Actors provide the human element in cinema, a medium that otherwise is heavily dependent upon machinery for creating light and color and capturing images and sounds. And yet the actor’s presence is paradoxical. A viewer’s impression of wholeness—the actor as a unified being in front of the camera—and of psychological and...

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