[QUOTE=appleciders]
I’ll second Kizarvexius here- it’s really not easy. I just finished a run of Arsenic and Old Lace (A college production, which is not much above a high school one) where I was Mr. Spenalzo (the second body in the windowseat) and it’s hard to be carried, dropped, picked up, and finally dumped into a windowseat without moving a muscle. The actors even tossed me a little too far one night and I missed the windowseat entirely, which is great comedy but a nice bump on the back of my head, too.
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Mr. Spenalzo (IIRC) doesn’t have any lines, and he’s carried through the window while the set is dark. Couldn’t they have used a weighted mannequin? Of course, now that I think about it, every production of Arsenic and Old Lace I’ve ever seen has used actors to play the dead bodies.
Some years back, when the show was revived on Broadway, the curtain call included a parade of old men representing the never seen collection of dead bodies from the cellar. For at least one performance, all thirteen of the dead old men were played by serving U.S. congressmen and/or senators.
[QUOTE=The Octagon]
In Six Feet Under (show about a funeral home), I believe they actually manufactured the corpses. Lord knows how; it was one of the extras on the DVDs I didn’t have the stomach to watch.
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I read somewhere that they spent upwards of a million bucks on some of the corpses. Very lucrative if you’re a makeup artist.
Oh! You mean manufactured from foam and plastic and such. I was thinking of the age-old method of “manufacturing corpses”, and had to wonder how they get away with it. The raw materials aren’t rare, but there are other problems with the process.
[QUOTE=Greg Charles]
With the popularity of crime and hospital shows, there is now a huge demand for actors and actresses that can play corpses convincingly. That’s not easy. One twitch and the illusion is gone. (Assuming they aren’t actually dead. Some people would do anything to break into show business.) So, are there corpse acting classes now to go with stage fighting, etc. Are there actors who specialize in playing corpses?
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I think I remember hearing that there are actually classes on how to play a corpse. Maybe I saw it on one of the DVD sets of CSI.
[QUOTE=Duckster]
If you play a person dead by drowning, does that make you a marine corpse?
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On Law & Order, people often seem to leave their victims in Central Park, leading to cops finding corpses in copses.
[QUOTE=DeadlyAccurate]
I think I remember hearing that there are actually classes on how to play a corpse. Maybe I saw it on one of the DVD sets of CSI.
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Wouldn’t suprise me. Professional models are often trained to hold an exact pose for extended periods of time (more useful for arts like drawing and painting than photography, of course). Similar training would easily be used for training someone to make like a corpse.
An extremely bad corpse actor actually spoiled an episode of Hetty Wainthropp for me.
In this episode, a man and his mother have an argument, during which he knocks her down and she hits her head. The man then leaves his presumably dead Mum sitting in the rocking chair in her room for somebody else to find while he runs off.
Throughout the story, there were shots of the old lady sitting in her chair… obviously breathing, eyelids twitching, even swallowing at one point. And I thought: she isn’t dead! She’s only concussed and she’s going to come to, get up, and scare the crap out of the young couple the son has left at the house to find her. But as it turned out, no, she wasn’t. She was meant to be dead all along and the actress was giving an incredibly bad performance as a corpse.
