Crockett Grabbe
August 1, 1999
The bill that is being debated in the California legislature to prohibit the unauthorized use of "dead icons" (images of departed celebrities) to sell products has several thorny issues tangled with it. With digital "resurrection" having come into its own, then what would fall under this class of prohibited actions?
For many years people have been using look-alikes and act-alikes for commercial promotion, and often the success of the promotion has depended on how closely the look and act is a portrayal of the celebrity. The principal difference is that now digital technology has made it no longer necessary to use such impersonation actors. I am immediately reminded from this bill of how many images of departed notaries have continually been exploited for a variety of commercial purposes. Such exploitation is by no means limited to celebrities of Hollywood, which are the focus of the California bill. In fact, the the first and foremost person this brings to my mind is that of Albert Einstein.
The term "Einstein" is, of course, a household word, often used to either praise someone's intelligence or to sarcastically belittle it. Images of Einstein have long been displayed for commercial advertising. Film studios has gone even further, making movies with a lead character portraying Albert Einstein. Furthermore, that portrayal often has little if anything to do with the real Albert Einstein. Rather, it is a fiction designed to produce a sizeable payoff from his name.
A case in point of that exploitation is the 1988 movie Young Einstein. Here "Einstein" refers to the lead character's stage name, which is "Albert Einstein". Furthermore, his comedic exploitations seem to pay lip service to exploring relativity, although anyone with a cursory knowledge of physics would recognize that it is basic idiocy. Finally, the lunacy of this portrayal by the actor Yahoo Serious (an issue in itself?) was that the "Albert Einstein" he was portraying was not German, but Australian.
Of course, Albert Einstein is not the only dead scientist demeaned by the Young Einstein movie: the other was Madame Marie Curie, the Nobel prize-winner in both physics and chemistry for her work (initially with her husband Pierre before he was killed in an accident) in isolating radium. In the film the supposed Albert Einstein travels from Australia and runs into the supposed Marie Curie, which leads to a mutual discussion with little sense, comedy, or historic reality. Not to outdo the revision of Albert Einstein's nationality, the film does a similar revision by categorizing her as French. The real Marie Curie was actually Polish.
Albert Einstein and Marie Curie did in fact meet together. Of course this was nothing like the haphazard way presented in the movie, but in the historically famous Solvay conferences attended by several leading physicists of Europe.
One question that naturally follows if the California bill, in which surviving family members would maintain the commercial interest of the dead celebrity, passes into law: could the surviving families of people like Albert Einstein use it to sue future moviemakers of exploitative films like Young Einstein. Or like the more recent I.Q., in which Walter Matthau plays Albert Einstein, who in a nonsensical plot rows his niece and her auto-mechanic boyfriend around the water in a rowboat, while telling everyone that he invented fusion-powered spacecraft? Would the makers of such movies have to "buy the families off" before making their exploits. Of course, movies like Young Einstein could very easily been altered to avoid this problem: change the name. Don't present this as the exploits of young Einstein, but of another character with these comedic exploits.
The problem is, the payoff would not be nearly as great with a movie entitled something like Young Saperstein. It would clearly be more lucrative to successfully bribe the family. After all, that's the American way -- or at least one of them.