Has Anyone Ever Done This? (Making Movies With Star Lookalikes)?

[kaylasdad99]

@BrotherCadfael

I think it was Herschel Bernardi who said that an acting career has five stages:

Stage 1: “Who is Herschel Bernardi?”

Stage 2: “Get me Herschel Bernardi!”

Stage 3: "Get me a Herschel Bernardi!

Stage 4: “Get me a young Herschel Bernardi!”

Stage 5: “Who is Herschel Bernardi?”

Stage 6: “Sorry, Charlie.”

[Horatio_Hellpop]

@Andy_L

Slight hijack: Allow me to be the first to mention “Bowfinger” which is about a producer who does something much like this (along with some other amusing fraud).

And let me be the first to mention Beatlemania and Skeet Ulrich.

[Little_Nemo]

Do the names Coy and Vance Duke ring any bells?

[Intergalactic_Gladiator]

Or how about Crispin Glover in Back to the Future II?

Crispin Glover

[Wendell_Wagner]

. . . who was already mentioned in post #12.

[Andy_L]

@Krokodil

And let me be the first to mention Beatlemania and Skeet Ulrich.

Huh. They fooled me - I assumed Skeet was related to Robert Ulrich.

[Eureka]

@Little_Nemo

Do the names Coy and Vance Duke ring any bells?

Yes, yes they do.

I’d never heard of them before this past week, but someone somewhere else on line linked to a youtube video featuring them in cartoon form.

[BigT]

It only works if the audience knows it’s fake, both in music and in movies.

[The_Other_Waldo_Pepper]

@Eats_Crayons

Post-Back to the Future sequels, and the ensuing law suit, SAG in fact made it a rule that you can’t impersonate another performer with the intention of misleading the audience (as in using prosthetics to make it look like Crispin Glover was still playing George McFly).

I wonder exactly how that was worded; anyone remember how Gene Hackman refused to reshoot various stuff for SUPERMAN II, at which point they promptly swapped in a body double and just staged the remaining shots to show Lex from behind?

[deadindays]

BRUCE LEE! After his death we were given Bruce Li, Bruce Ly, Bruce Lei, etc.

[42fish]

@ralph124c

This has been done in the music world-hire studio musicians to sing /record hit songs by real stars. How about the movies?
Suppose you (movie producer) balk at paying Brad Pitt his demanded $12 million-so your talent scouts find a competent actor who looks like Pitt.
The guy wil work for $200,000.
Obviously, you can save a lot of money-so you give the guy a new stage name-say, Bradley Pitte.
Could you get away with this?

I realize I’m fighting the hypothetical here, but if you only have $200,000 budgeted for your lead actor, why are you talking to Brad Pitt’s agents in the first place?

[CalMeacham]

Hollywood loves doing this. Consider the movie Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. It’s an incredibly awful movie, but if you try to watch it you’ll notice that it has very little Bela Lugosi (or gorillas) and a lot of what appears to be Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Only it isn’t Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin – it’s Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo looking and acting an awful lot like Martin and Lewis.

Sammy Petrillo

Duke Mitchell

[SpoilerVirgin]

Old Navy is currently running a commercial that has been dubbed “Kim Fauxdashian”, although the actress insists that she was not hired for her resemblance to Kim.

Of course, this is not a movie, but then again, Kim is not exactly a movie star.

For the record, when I first saw the commercial, I spent a few minutes trying to figure out whether it really was Kim Kardashian.