By Rob Fagin
FURIOUS FINISH
L to R: Paul Walker and Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious 6
T
he Fast and the Furious series has
become a hugely reliable cash cow
franchise over the past fourteen
years, revving up its seventh installment
with an awesomely silly pulp title,
Furious 7, debuting on April 3. With an
ensemble cast featuring Vin Diesel, Paul
Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle
Rodriquez, Jordana Brewster and Tyrese
Gibson (not to mention the addition of
12 illinoisentertainer.com april 2015
Jason Statham) the movie will continue
its box office winning streak. But there is
no question that watching this film will
likely give audiences a bit of an eerie, bittersweet feeling.
When series co-star Paul Walker died
halfway through filming, the production
was immediately halted. Almost as
quickly, producers began discussions on
how to pursue the completion of the proj-
ect without one of their lead actors.
Would it be more respectful or offensive
to write Walker's character out of the picture altogether? Should they rewrite
around what the actor had already shot
and fill in blanks with CGI?
Walker, a lesser-known but much
loved actor with an adventurous
onscreen charisma, died at age 40 when
the car he was a passenger in crashed into
a concrete lamppost at nearly one hundred miles per hour, leaving behind his
13 year old daughter and a devastated
cast and fan base. Ultimately, producers
decided to continue filming using a combination of CGI, existing footage and
Walker’s own brothers as physical standins to complete his scenes. Walker will be
featured in the film, of course, and the
franchise will continue with Walker's
character being retired. But, Walker isn’t
the first actor to have passed away during
production, nor the first to have a film
released posthumously. Here are two
notable ones to consider.
First up:
The Deer Hunter (182 minutes)
Director - Michael Cimino, 1978
"I knew it was you, Fredo," goes the
wildly electric film quote. "You broke my
heart." The power of this famous line
comes not only from the terrifyingly
volatile emotion of Al Pacino's Michael
Corleone but also from the profound
depths of the fearful weakness and
bruised love in Fredo's eyes - a man
whose earnest aspirations are forever
doomed to drown in cesspools of sleaze.
John Cazale brought all this to heaving
life in a performance that helped define
the scorching tragedy of The Godfather
saga.
Fredo, of course, is one of the most
recognizable characters in movie history,
but the actor behind him is much less so,
and the sad reason for this is that Cazale's
six-year film career was cut short by terminal lung cancer. The most jaw-dropping piece of trivia about his career is that
all five of the films he performed in were
nominated for Best Picture Oscars (three
of which won the award, while one of
them actually lost to another of his
movies the same year, 1974, when The
Godfather, Part II beat The Conversation).
His final performance was in Michael
Cimino's angry and frightening Vietnam
War epic, The Deer Hunter. He plays Stan,
a man whose old friends have just
returned from the war with horrific physical and mental wounds. Stan cannot
quite comprehend what his friends have
been through, nor why things can't pick
up where they left off. Again, he is a supporting character, but a crucial one who
gets under your skin. If you haven't seen
this one yet, get ready for one of the most
gut-wrenchingly intense experiences in
film history.
During the filming of this monster,
Cazale was losing ground to his cancer.
The director knew it, hid it, and filmed
his scenes first. Cazale died after his
scenes were done, but the film had yet to
be completed. Besides being in a devoted
romantic relationship with co-star Meryl
Streep at the time, he had been close
friends and acting partners for years with
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