When it comes to TCM, you also of course have the introductions, sharing tidbits, trivia, and lore around the movies that you're about to see. Originally this was my hero Robert Osborne doing the intros, but in the years that followed TCM becoming more of a cult following, others were added to the arsenal, and since Osborne's death, their leader is Ben Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz, the nephew of Oscar-winning director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and grandson of Citizen Kane scribe Herman Mankiewicz (profiled in the Oscar-winning Mank), is the most famous of the presenters, and is the narrator on both of TCM's podcasts, Talking Pictures and The Plot Thickens (both of which I've listened to every episode, and if you knew how picky I am about my podcasts, you'd understand what a compliment that is). Mankiewicz is synonymous in my house with TCM, and as a result held in very high regard himself.
So imagine my utter horror when I saw a piece that Mankiewicz recently did for CBS This Morning (here's a link if you're curious) where the TCM host went to the Las Vegas Sphere, the gigantic, surreal glowing orb that has gained status in the past couple of years as the most recent pop culture landmark in the American atlas. Initially it made sense to have Mankiewicz doing a piece about the Sphere hosting a screening of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. The event has 4-dimensional elements, including a simulation of the famous tornado at the start of the film, capitalizing on the recent 4DX trend. It's tacky, but it's harmless...I'd go if that was all there was.
But as the clip continues, you see exactly how The Wizard of Oz, a movie that was not made for a gigantic domed screen like this, is adapted, and it made my blood stop. In order to make it big enough, the filmmakers extended the screen, creating scenes not seen on the original movie, through AI technology. You see them take the grain out of Judy Garland's face, extending Oz into a blasphemously large bit of extended CGI, taking a film that was once a towering depiction of cutting-edge technology in 1939 turn into a screen saver. You also see them use AI to create actual performances. In one clip, actor Charley Grapewin (who played Uncle Henry in the movie) is superimposed into scenes the actor is out of frame, to protect "story continuity," creating the actor from pixels.
CBS and the Sphere knew what they were doing having Mankiewicz use his reputation to provide cover for this piece (and this event). I texted my brother "this is the equivalent of having Marilynne Robinson do an ad for ChatGPT." Few people are more synonymous with film preservation and protecting the memory of Classical Hollywood pictures in the same way as Mankiewicz. They even tried to get ahead of some of the criticism that started to pour out online by having Garland's daughter Lorna Luft say her "mom would approve of this"...but it's hard not to be mortified that Mankiewicz would lend his name to such a horrendous bastardization of the movie-watching experience.
AI is new technology, but it's pretty clear that when it comes to the arts, it's at best creating soulless facsimiles and frequently going into territory of ghoulish cruelty & grave-robbing. The screenshots that we see look awful. Mankiewicz unconvincingly calls it "dazzling" but if you look at it, it looks like actor Ray Bolger is trapped in a screensaver, all of the beauty of the original sucked out to create a sea of glossy, flat color. We hear from Luft, but let's be honest-Luft was a child when her mom died...is it appropriate to assume she can speak for her mother, someone she never even knew as an adult, and what she would've wanted, given Garland died almost 60 years ago? There's no attempt to talk to Grapewin's family about what he would've wanted, having his performance created from thin air & using his likeness without his approval...given he died in 1956, it's unlikely that if his children are still alive that they would've even known their father as an adult (I can't find any evidence that Grapewin had children, so it's possible no one even bothered to ask his family if they were okay with this). Either way, Garland & Grapewin have no consent over what's happening here...they don't get to choose what happens to their bodies, and they're being used for profit. It feels rough and uncomfortable to frame it that way, but it's true-when dead actors are used for their performances, they essentially are being made to do things they had no choice to do...in a society that talks a lot about valuing consent, this is a situation where consent was clearly not given, and no amount of family members giving the thumbs up is ever going to convince me this isn't morally repugnant.
Which brings me back to Ben Mankiewicz, a man I went into this really admiring, but come out utterly stunned he would put his name and reputation on this endeavor. TCM is supposed to be celebrating cinema, about giving it a place in modern culture. It's not about ripping and shredding up the work of the actors like Garland & Grapewin who made Classical Hollywood so special, just to make another buck that they'll never see.
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