AS ALWAYS, LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY IMITATES ARTHUR C. CLARKE:

One aspect of the movies that won’t change in the next century is subject matter. There is no reason to believe that the traditional film genres won’t be as popular forty years from now as they were in the 1930s and 1940s. Love stories, science fiction, teenage comedies, war films, sweeping adventures, and rugged Westerns will be among the most successful movies of 2019. [On this, Clarke was slightly off; if only today’s Hollywood proffered that much variety. — Ed]

However, new technologies will make possible a different approach to the traditional themes. Computer-graphic techniques will enable producers to re-create electronically the voices and physical appearances of great movie stars from the past A new movie featuring a cast of Hollywood hall-of-famers — Jimmy Stewart, Greta Garbo, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe — isn’t just possible, it is probable once computer synthesis techniques are perfected.

Computer graphics hold myriad implications for the movies of the twenty-first century It will be more practical and cost effective to design sets and synthesize almost any location on Earth or off using computers. Special effects that now require models and miniatures can be replaced by digital picture-making. Animation, once the most visually exciting area of film, today has, except for an occasional Disney film, almost vanished. Computer graphics will cut the cost of animation in the next century, and cartoons featuring solid-looking, three-dimensional characters will breathe new life into this art form.

—An excerpt from the chapter in Clarke’s 1986 book Arthur C. Clarke’s July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century titled “A Night at the Movies,” quoted at Ed Driscoll.com in 2015, when the makers of Fast & Furious 7 digitally recreated franchise co-star Paul Walker, who had died (grimly enough) in a car crash midway through that film’s production.

We’re told that we can judge a society by how it treats its animals, and its prisoners, but what if we can judge it, too, by how it treats its celebrities (who are, in some respects, a hybrid of both)? The modern famous are, paradoxically, rare and ubiquitous. There has only been and ever will be one Sinatra, one Marilyn—and yet there they are, too, over on that shower curtain, and this cookie jar, revered banalities.

To staunch this eventuality, some celebrities have wisely arranged their estates to prevent posthumous commodification and “cyberslavery”; Robin Williams thought to block “anyone from digitally inserting him into a movie or TV scene or using a hologram, as was done with rapper Tupac Shakur at Southern California’s Coachella music festival in 2012—16 years after his murder.”

Would that others had done likewise. (I’m looking at you, Joe Strummer—but note: A mere 10 years ago, this sick campaign cost Saatchi its Doc Martens account, and they weren’t even legally in the wrong. Would the same happen today?)

But it’s disconcerting that human beings have to undertake such rearguard measures at all.

—“No Peace in the Uncanny Valley”, Kathy Shaidle, Taki’s Magazine, January 10th, 2017.

This ABC News clip – really an infomercial for Disney’s latest product, as the newsreader explains at the end of the segment – explains how the Rogue One producers digitally recreated the late Peter Cushing, and created the visage of Carrie Fisher in 1977:

As Clarke predicted three decades ago, expect much more of this technique in the years to come.

And presumably, in the music business as well.