'Stand By Me' (Has Any Movie Ever Done This?)

Cafe Society
21

This and the previous case are pretty low-level cases of using old footage – they merely show that this person had been in movies before.

The "Murder, She Wrote’ episode I cited actually used hefty chunks of the older movie, and the surrounding story incorporated that story into its own, with the same actors playing the same characters. In neither the Columbo case nor the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane case were the inserted film clips flashbacks to the same character – they were the character being an actor in another unrelated movie.
What the OP asks about, and the examples I give are very different from this.

22

In THE LIMEY, an aging ex-con played by Terence Stamp has a lot of flashbacks to his younger days – with clips from POOR COW, the movie Stamp did decades earlier.

23

The play Sleuth has only two main characters, and Michael Caine played the younger of the two in the 1972 movie version, while playing the older of the two in the film remake 35 years later. Who knows? Maybe Jude Law will continue the pattern with the next incarnation in 2042.

24

More like, in forty years, replacing all of Sir Alec Guinness’s scenes with an older Ewan McGregor.

Sort of related: Phil Collins is currently in the process of remastering all his solo albums, and updating the cover art to show his current 60yo-ish face.

25

When the movie Blade Runner (made in 1982) was re-edited and fixed up in various ways in 2007 for the version called The Final Cut, in one scene it was necessary to shoot a brief new shot. Ben Ford, Harrison Ford’s son, who by that time was about the age of his father when he was in the film, filled in for his father. It’s a scene where you see Ford in silhouette in a bathroom. In the scene where Joanna Cassidy’s character dies from crashing through a window, a stunt double was used in the original film. She didn’t look too much like Cassidy. For The Final Cut, 25 years later they had Cassidy recreate the scene in front of a green screen. They digitally superimposed her face on the stunt double’s face.

26

Patty Duke played Helen Keller in the 1962 version of The Miracle Worker and played Anne Sullivan in the 1979 version.

27

I’ve thought that, in ten years or so, they should reshoot the epilog to Happy Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Radcliff, Watson, and Grint would all be about the age of their characters at that point. The aging they did to make the twentyish cast look sort of pushing forty wasn’t very convincing.

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Actually, it’s Benjamin Ford’s lips only, with fake scar added place right over Harrison’s to fix an ADR continuity issue in the scene in which he visits “The Egyptian” to question him about the snake scale.

29

No, in fact, while Ben Ford’s lips are indeed used to fill in for that scene at the snake seller’s, there’s also a second scene with Ben Ford. It’s the one where Rick Deckard is being shown Leon’s hotel room. In the shot where you see Deckard in silhouette looking into the bathroom, that’s Ben Ford.

30

Just as they reshot those scenes of the spaceship for Rocketship X-M, and the way Lucas retooled scenes from his original Star Wars trilogy, I’ve often thought that they should use CGI technology to improve some older films:

The Ten Commandments 91956 version). I have to agree with the commentator on the 1923 version DVD – the animated flames that form “the finger of god” and also the “Pillar of Fire” , both done as cartoon animation, look really hokey, and did even when the film was new. If they used CGI to replace those obviously cartoon elements, it’d look a helluva lot better.

I wouldn’t touch the Angel of Death effects, or the Rain of Hail, and especially not the Parting of the Red Sea. For all their now-apparent flaws, they still work.

But I would fix up the ragged-edge bluescreen/greenscreen.ChromaKey-like effects that you see when something is rapidly moved in front of such a background, as when the colored flags are waved during the “obelisk” scene.

The Hunt for Red October – good Cold War action film, based on Tom Clancy’s first bestseller, suffers from extremely cartoony effects work. It’d be 1,000 percent better if those shots of torpedos and depth charges were redone in modern, realistic-looking CGI. They can also clean up that scene at the end when they’re sailing the sub into the river in New England, and the background is “bleeding” through Sean Connery’s head.
The Last Starfighter – I’m a little torn about this one, because the crudeness of the early CGI is part of the film’s charm. On the other hand, it’s obviously not really what they were hoping for. I’ve seen some of the renders they did of the Gunstars for still images, and they looked gorgeous – only they didn’t look like that in the finished film. I can only conclude that they had to cut corners and use less rendering time for the bulk of the film, with the results that Centauri’s Space Car, the Gun Stars, the Headquarters, the asteroid, and all the alien ships look more like cartoons than real things. If it were reone in modern CGI it’s be much closer to what they really wanted.
The Incredible Shrinking Man – another 1950s flick, this one was one of the best of the “B” movies. That classification indicates the sort of budget they wer given, not the quality of the film. They did a good job in most of the scenes, but in others the small budget shows – as when a midget-sized hero crosses a street, and the crude halo around his image broadcasts that this is an effect gone bad. I’d clean up the scenes like this where they fell short of their ideal, and leave the others alone.

31

That’s an excellent episode.

When Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond watches herself in old movies, she watches Queen Kelly, a film that was made in the 1929, but was unreleased at the time that Sunset Boulevard was made. Queen Kelly was finally released in 1985.

There might be a contractual issue with cutting an actor like Richard Dreyfuss out of a movie. Unlike an unknown person, Dreyfuss may have residuals, and get a percentage every time the film plays on TV or sells a DVD, or something. And he might even sue if he were cut out of a highly rated movie. I think it would be a real problem to mess with Dreyfuss’s career.

And then there’s paying Wil Wheaton for it. The movie no longer has a production budget. Unless there’s going to be a re-release in conjunction with this, so that there is a budget to pay Wheaton, all the crew involved, and the CGI necessary, I don’t think that it’s doable.

32

THe Last Starfighter should just be remade. Seems like a great example of a movie that is very 80s, yet probably would be better with a modern treatment.

33

I know it’s a typo, but this made me think of an alternate reality in which Adam Sandler replaced Alan Rickman as Snape for the final film.

34

Yeah, but maybe Dreyfuss wouldn’t mind as long as the original version wasn’t being replaced in any way. Like I said, maybe just include it as a bonus on a new Blu-Ray edition.

Also, I honestly don’t think there would be much money involved. If I’m remembering correctly, there are really only two ‘modern day’ scenes in the original movie - Dreyfuss sitting in a truck and Dreyfuss sitting at a computer. Those scenes (and the narration) could probably be refilmed and recorded with Wheaton in an afternoon.

I’m not sure why you think any expensive CGI would be involved.

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The ending would be less frustrating too IMHO (He just turns off his computer after typing a complete novel?), because many modern computers can indeed be set to save your documents automatically, like when using Google Docs.

36

The Last Starfighter could be “remade” via a canonical sequel. Have Alex Rogan be the new Centauri, putting out video games across the world (or galaxy) to recruit new Starfighters for the oncoming war with the Ko-Dan Armada. It would be, at least for the first third, broadly a similar plot of small-town kid (a girl this time, maybe, or a bunch of co-op players) who gets the opportunity, but this time with less reluctance, and then go epic with the storyline.

37

Only somewhat related to the OP, but there was an episode of Magnum P.I.(Lest We Forget) where:

38

Heck, let’s take the grown-up Wil Wheaton and put him into the TNG episode “Hide and Q”, displacing William A. Wallace, and see if Geordi is still impressed.

39

Here’s an older thread in which we discuss things like this:

I gave an example there of Susan Sarandon and her daughter Eva Amurri Martino being used as the older and younger version of a character in a movie. Another example with the same actresses is the movie That’s My Boy. A third example with the same actresses is the mini-series The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe.

40

What first came to mind when I first read the OP was that Dreyfuss would have one heck of a lock on getting major amounts of money in a court case for something like breech of contract. He had signed a contract to do the part. He is identified with the part. It was originally advertised under his name. It is essentially the same film with only him being absent, not a new film at all.