Hollywood Dilemmas
The time has changed. When Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, she had just resumed filming "Something's Got to Give" alongside Dean Martin, after a series of setbacks: absence, illness and even being fired.
The film could not be finished; a special edition was only used for the 2001 documentary "Marilyn: The Final Days", which also exposes the actress's tribulations, such as her problems with drugs - she died of an overdose of barbiturates - and alcohol, her depressions and adventures loving.
Martial arts star Bruce Lee died in 1973 after ingesting a headache medicine before the filming of "Game of Death" was finished.
The film - whose title in Spanish is, paradoxically, "The Game of Death" - was left unfinished and was recently completed with the use of a double, montages, and shadows and was released in 1978, but it only has 20 minutes with the presence of Read. It should be noted that the special effects then were not as good as they are now.
As if it were a family curse, Lee's son, Brandon, was killed on the set of "The Raven" in 1993, when he was shot with a prop gun that mistakenly contained a live bullet. The film was finished with the use of double and available digital effects.
Another actor who died in 1993 was River Phoenix, of an overdose, with only three weeks left to finish shooting "Dark Blood."
It took 19 years for it to be released at some film festivals after director George Sluizer overcame some legal hurdles with the deceased's family and completed it with the use of photos and his own voice to give it some coherence.
Use imagination
When Heath Ledger died in 2009, intoxicated by a combination of prescription pills, much was said about the void he left in the promotion of the movie "The Dark Knight", a sequel to "Batman Begins".
He was the center of attention in the advertising campaign and, in fact, he won several posthumous awards for his performance, including the Golden Globe and the Oscar.
But filming had already finished, unlike "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," a fantasy written and directed by Terry Gilliam, a former member of the British comedy troupe Monty Python.
Gilliam has always been a director with a lot of imagination and decided to end the filming of "Parnassus" by replacing Ledger with three other actors in three different sequences and in keeping with the fantastic nature of the work.
Thus, every time he crossed a magic mirror, Ledger's Tony multiplied, incarnated by Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, who donated their fees to the daughter he orphaned, Matilda.
Oliver Reed died while filming "Gladiator" in 1999, with little left to do. The solution was to rewrite part of the script to include already filmed sequences of the actor, with the use of a double in the longer shots, which was later digitally replaced.
It's not for nothing that special effects supervisor Rob Harvey won an Oscar for his work.
"When he passed away we had to make sense of the whole ending of the movie," he says. "It's a very strange thing, particularly back then, when the technology wasn't really there... It was a clever manipulation of directing and writing; we tried to do it in the best possible taste."
John Candy suffered a fatal heart attack in Durango, Mexico, in 1994, with only a couple of "Wagons East!" sequences to finish, complete with double and special effects.
