Remember the old '70's version of King Kong? They announced they were constructing a giant, full sized animatronic King Kong for the movie. And they did, but it only appeared on screen for a few seconds and it barely moved. The other shots of King Kong were of a guy in a gorilla suit.
I was a kid when I saw it, and I only went to it because of the nude stills from the movie in Time magazine. I don't really remember, but I think I sat there like an idiot assuming I was watching the giant animatronic King Kong.
There were some fake sound movies at the beginning of the sound era. One filmmaker had a couple of actors in the projection booth of the theater dubbing their lines, trying to match to their lip movement on the screen.
Fooling the audience into thinking they're witnessing a technological marvel is as old as cinema itself.
If this CGI resurrection of James Dean goes over well, it seems like zero budget filmmakers could jump on that bandwagon. Hire a celebrity impersonator for your movie and claim or at least imply it was CGI.
"We did our own CGI James Dean, but we made him look a little different so his family can't sue," they could tell the press, "and we call him James Daen. And we hired an actor to stand in for the CGI, but only in a few shots. You'll hardly notice. The CGI cost us millions and we didn't have much left for the rest of the movie, but the chance to see a resurrected James Dean should make it well worth watching."
It used to be you didn't need a professional impersonator. You could walk down the street and see Burt Reynolds lookalikes. I knew guy who looked and sounded weirdly like Neil Diamond and two guys who looked and sounded like Emilio Esteves.
What they sound like doesn't matter. Get someone else to dub the dialog.
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