Old age thinking outside of the box

The chief problem about death is the fear that there may be no afterlife — a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave.

— Woody Allen

Let’s see now … there’s Land of the Living Dead, Dance of the Dead and Diary of the Dead, Night of the Dead, Day of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead ...

You had enough zombie movies already? Too bad.

Used to be that Madison Avenue advertising gurus depended on old reliables like cleavage and biceps to sell us stuff we didn’t really need. Now it looks like they’re leaning towards corpses. Yet, this new line of cadavers looks amazingly healthy. They haven’t actually made it to the silver screen yet, but they’ve appeared in TV ads. The first one was an ad for Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners that hit the airwaves a little over ten years ago. It showed Fred Astaire nimbly two-stepping across the screen with a Dirt Devil machine as a dance partner. A tiny detonation went off in the brain pans of a few couch potatoes, who murmured, “Fred Astaire … isn’t he … you know ... dead?”

Indeed he is. Has been for nearly a quarter of a century, ever since he succumbed to pneumonia in 1987. But that didn’t stop the makers of Dirt Devils from digging up old celluloid footage and using it to sell their vacuum cleaners.

The idea of images of a deceased artist being used to shill for a household appliance appalled enough Fred Astaire fans to create a backlash and the company hastily yanked the ads off the airwaves, but either we had better taste then or the Dirt Devil folks were just ahead of their time, because the grave robbers and tomb defilers are back with a vengeance. 

Exhibit A: Corbis Corporation. The Seattle-based firm, founded by Bill Gates, sells customers the rights to use photographs for advertising. One of Corbis’ best money-makers ($50 million US in 2009) is what it calls its “Classic Personalities” line. Interested in using images of Johnny Cash? Mae West? Albert Einstein?  Give Corbis a call. Corbis owns all ‘personality rights’ — another Corbis term — to those and several hundred other celebrities, all of whom happen to be both famous and dead.

It’s not just Corbis.  Dorchester Hotels has an ad campaign that features shots of Ray Charles, Greta Garbo, Peter Sellers, Albert Einstein, Grace Kelly, Noel Coward and Orson Welles, all seemingly hanging out in the lobbies or penthouses of various Dorchester hotels.

This is a profoundly creepy development, and it may get even creepier. 

Mel Smith, a former student of George Lucas, claims in a British newspaper interview that the Star Wars director is doing a little grave robbing. 

“He’s been buying up the film rights to dead movie stars in the hope of using computer trickery to put them all together in a movie,” Smith told a Daily Telegraph reporter. 

Swell. Maybe some day we’ll see Sir Laurence Olivier playing The Cisco Kid. With Sydney Greenstreet playing Pancho.

Is it just me, or is this uber-yucky? Portraying images of dead people in situations and poses that never happened is not only dishonest, it’s ghoulishly disrespectful. These people are dead, dammit! We should have the decency to let them rest in peace.

Who am I kidding? Death has not only lost its sting, it’s piling up residuals like crazy. You know how much Elvis earned in 2009? Fifty-five million. Not bad, for a guy who left the building 33 years ago. Not a patch on Michael Jackson though. He earned $275 million in the year after he stopped breathing.

Hard to say how Elvis and Michael would feel about their postmortem payouts, but there’s little doubt that Fred Astaire must be pirouetting in his grave.  During his lifetime he steadfastly refused to allow anyone to portray him in a movie biography.  “However much they offer me — and offers come all the time — I shall not sell”, he said.  “I have no particular desire to have my life misinterpreted, which it would be.”

What, dancing with a vacuum cleaner, Fred? Ya think?