“Our clients want to protect these valuable
intellectual property rights and the memories
that they have of their loved ones,” said Mark
Roesler, CEO of CMG Worldwide, the legal and
licensing company that has long owned the
title to Dean’s likeness. “We have to trust them.
... They want to see that their loved one’s image
and memory continues to live on.”
Dean is an obvious candidate for revival with
his embodiment-of-Hollywood image and the
brevity of his life and career — he died at 24
and made just three films: “East of Eden,” “Rebel
Without a Cause” and “Giant.”
Roesler and Cloyd have not obtained the rights
from Warner Bros. to use footage from those
films, but they have a large trove of photos and
Dean’s dozens of TV roles.
“There are thousands of images that we do have
to work with,” Cloyd said. “What we typically do
is we take all those images and videos and we
run them through machine learning to create
that asset.”
That will be added to the work of a stand-in
actor using motion-capture technology as
commonly done now with CGI characters, along
with the overdubbed voice of another actor.
The announcement of the role last year caused
a quick backlash, with responses like that of
“Captain America” star Chris Evans on Twitter:
“Maybe we can get a computer to paint us a
new Picasso. Or write a couple new John Lennon
tunes. The complete lack of understanding here
is shameful.”
“I think there’s definitely something cynical
and what feels like a little bit distasteful about
bringing especially long-dead actors back to life,”