Actors that play historical figures based on their look (Diana, Mandela, Lincoln)

The main context WSC wants us to understand is that with the invention of the cameras in the 1800’s, we can know how things really looked like, and not by inaccurate sketches. That means that producers who make a series about something after the invention of the camera now needs to build more realistic sets that fit the hundreds of thousands of images that character was in, and make it much more accurate to the history the cameras have captured, and not the history their imagination may have – it limits their vision. Therefore we have three historical figures that a lot of actors that pretty much look like them play in some forms of media.

Princess Diana

Diana’s real story goes like this - in 1981 she married prince, now king Charles III, and was a princess for only 15 years, as she broke up with him. Then she went to do a lot of charity work, being one of the more important women at the time, and also dating British-Pakistani surgeon Hasnat Khan and Egyptian film producer Dodi Fayed, then she died in a car accident, being remembered as the most generous princesses, heck - even people in the world. From when she was married to this day, there are still media projects surrounding Diana or the royal family, in which producers need to find actors that look like her to play as Diana. The article says that the latest one is Pablo Larrain’s Spencer - a movie about princess Diana and her getting further away from the wealthy life of the royal family. There, Kristen Stewart plays Diana. In reality, the latest one is the new Diana Spencer in Netflix’s “the crown” - Elizabeth Debicki. She was the successor of Emma Corrin, the actress who played Diana in the other four seasons. Jenna De Waal plays in the broadway production Diana: The Musical - just like hamilton but with Diana, and made by David Bryan and Joe DiPietro. In the trilogy of movies Harry & Meghan, consisting of Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance, Harry & Meghan: Becoming Royal, and Harry & Meghan: Escaping the Palace, Bonnie Sopper played Diana as a side character. In the biographical drama Diana, covering Diana’s last years. Naomi Watts played her. This was based on the book Diana: Her Last Love, and this project got negative reviews. In the movie William and Catherine: A Royal Romance, the original version of Harry and Meghan: A Royal Romance, Lesley Harcourt plays Diana as a side character. Princess in Love, a film based on a book by the same name by Anna Pasternak, focused on the love between princess Diana and Charles. The actor was Julie Cox. From here on these are projects that were aired when Diana was still alive. The Women of Windsor follows the women of Windsor, and Diana is played by Nicola Formbly. In 1992 Andrew Morton released a biography about Diana called Diana: Her True Story, covering her life before and when she was a part of the royal family, and the UK made a tv film based on it, starring Serena Scott Thomas. Last, but not least, the oldest Diana actress is Catherine Oxenberg in a CBS released biographical tv movie of the royals called The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana. It was released only one year after they married. Oxenberg is also the only one who played Diana in 2 different projects, also in 1992 ABC drama Charles and Diana: Unhappily Ever After, which was about the collapse of their marriage. Oxenberg is also the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. Note that the characteristics of all actors portraying Princess Diana in films are white, blonde, thin, and look like the same person when with makeup.

Nelson Mandela

So there was apartheid in South Africa in the 20th century. Mandela was a black activist against the white supremacy, and he was accused of sabotage because of one of his campaigns against the government in the Rivonia trial, and so got to serve in prison for 24 years. Then when he got out he was the leader of all of the black people and became the first president of South Africa. The first actor WSC doesn’t tell you about is Danny Glover in 1987, when Mandela was still in prison, in the tv movie ‘Mandela’, where we see Mandela as a black activist. Then, WSC doesn’t tell you that Mandela played himself in a cameo for Malcom X in 1992. The first one WSC actually tells us about is Sidney Poitier, co-starring as Mandela in the tv movie “Mandela and de Klerk”, with de Klerk, the white president who stopped the apartheid so he’s good too. I have a quizlet on it just like with Diana and Lincoln, so I’ll skip all of the not interesting ones but note all are black men. The latest Mandela actor is Laurence Fishburne in 2017 making the tv series Madiba. WSC however gives us an article from 2013 that tells us Idris Elba was the last one in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Abraham Lincoln

16th president of the US, he ended slavery and the civil war. First one to play him was Joseph Henabery, when he played in Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth in “The Birth of a Nation” - an action film. The last Lincoln actor is Graham Sibley in the 2022 mini series Abraham Lincoln.

Color Blind Casting

A new “woke” way of casting actors to forms of media such as movies and musicals consisting of characters who already have a history, like how the musical made by Lin Manuel Miranda, Hamilton, is a one talking about the birth of the USA with founding fathers characters. This way is based on a casting that has nothing to do with the actor’s race. He can play superman if he’s white, black, mexican, caribbean,
arabic etc. Just like Jason Mamoa, a Hawwaian actor was casted to play aquaman although he was white in the comics. Just like the black actress Jodie Turner-Smith would play Anne Boleyn, queen of England between 1533-1536. Just like Scarlett Johansson and Emma Stone play characters of Asian descent.

Color Conscious Casting

A way of casting actors to forms of medias such as movies and musicals consisting of characters who already have a history, and in this way producers take into consideration that not everything in the past was perfect and equal, but still casting people of color as historical characters, but only if these historical characters have a meaning in their life that could be put well into context with black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) actors. For example, in the movie The Great Gatsby the jewish character Meyer Wolfsheim, a character that denied acceptance by the aristocracy on the basis of his birth, could have been played by an actor of color and it would enhance the idea that the existing discriminatory structures of America prevent social mobility. Also, in Hamilton Lin Manuel Miranda tells us that he casted black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) actors for the key roles, because he saw that Hamilton came to be secretary of treasury beginning from the lowest place, as an immigrant, and it seemed to him like other immigrants who start too in that low point. This reasoning is enough to make the casting color conscious, and not color blind like how Hamilton wants to sell itself.

Criticism on Hamilton black actors playing as their own historical oppressors

So there is a Harvard student called Emi P. Cummings, and she argues that the way Miranda casted Hamilton is racist. How? Because he casted (color consciously) black actors to play some key roles, and these people the black actors play once owned a lot of slaves, so Miranda is for some reason abusing them by making them do this shameful thing, and so it’s racist of Miranda to do such a horrendous thing. Also there’s a 45 page essay on why Hamilton encourages presentism. You can understand by yourself that it encourages presentism because the fact we cast BIPOC actors make our history interpreted by more modern values. The whole meaning of color conscious casting.

The Mountaintop

A play originally made by Katori Hall, a black playwright, which is a fictional story on Martin Luther King’s interactions with Camae, a mysterious young woman in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, at the night before he was assassinated in Memphis. That play got to be a very rich Broadway production, and so Kent State University wanted to make the play with a director of their own, Michael Oatman, a black guy too. Although this guy has a different, controversial vision. He thinks that because Martin Luther King thought that race doesn’t change anything, he wants to see if the audience will be the same when who plays Luther King is a black actor or a white actor. And so Michael had 6 plays, 3 of them with a black actor and the other 3 with a white actor playing King, an actor called Robert Branch, who had so much passion for the role that he played in all 6 that now turned to 8 plays. Katori Hall was upset by this, as this wasn’t what her vision was at all, and went to the media to try and blow it up. At the end there were 8 plays in which only 6 people left, and at the end Hall decided to create a law that if castings are not of black people, the director should approach with her permission. This is too, a color conscious casting, as there is reasoning behind the casting of a white person as a black person who strives for no race differences (socially at least). Just like Hamilton but instead of black playing white, it’s white playing black.

Brief History of Black and White Photography

It all started in 1826 when French scientist Joseph Nicephore created by exposing a plate covered with asphalt aka bitumen in a camera obscura, which is a dark box with lens that project an outside image to the opposite side of the chamber, and by doing that for several hours he had the view from his balcony printed by the method I just explained.
A few years later another French scientist, Louis Daguerre, invented another way to capture an image, which was also the first public method, called the daguerreotype method. By using polished silver plated copper, it makes the surface light sensitive and then exposes it to the camera for as long as needed, and the plate would subsequently undergo mercury fuming and chemical treatment before being rinsed, dried, and then sealed behind protective glass. Because the method was shorter than the last one, it let cameras capture more precise pictures, such as people portraits. Then English photographer Richard Leach Maddox invented the dry-plate, also known as the gelatin process, which didn't make exposed plates to have to be wet, making it much easier to produce pictures. It wasn’t effective until George Eastman from New York developed a machine for producing these plates, and then it blew up big time. Four years later the flexible roll film was made by Eastman, and four years later he made the Kodak camera, with a preloaded 100-exposure roll! Now people use it a lot. One of them was a teen from San Francisco called Ansel Adams, who captured beautiful USA views, and so made the genre of beautiful views in Instagram. Although he was amateur, he is considered one of the most skilled photographers at the time. Then in 1925 Oscar Barnack developed the Leica, a camera that is lighter, with a 35mm film, that Thomas Eddison invented. In 1935 Kodak made the Kodachrome, which was the first color-reversal film, a type of photographic film that produces a positive image on the film itself, which can be viewed directly, and in normal English it means it was the first camera to capture colored photos.

Photos Made By Potato Scratch

Almost 30 years before Kodachrome, two French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, introduced the first method for color photographs. The process called autochrome involved covering a glass plate with a thin wash of tiny potato starch grains dyed red green and blue, creating a filter, and putting on it a layer of emulsion. Then flipping the plate and exposing it to light, resulting in an image that could be developed into a transparency. Now when we’re done with the science stuff for this term, the method became popular in Paris, and also in the USA. The first natural color photo appeared in the National Geographic magazine, and it was an autochrome of a flower garden in Belgium. They have a big collection of autochrome photographs, and one of their archivists is called “Bill Bonner”. When the Kodachrome came, the autochrome lost its love from the people.

Free Web Based AI Powered Photo Colorizer

There is colorization, when making with brushes black and white pictures with brushes colored pictures. Then a French artist Emil Wallner created at Google ‘Pallete’, an AI that was based on Dall E’s text to image AI process, but now it catches a black and white image and colors it. It became popular first at reddit from Wallner coloring Gustav Klimt’s faculty paintings, paintings whose colors were damaged. This is a clear reference to “past has a version control”. Wallner studied older technologies of colorization to make his AI achieve more accurate results.

AI can’t color photos accurately

The main argument against AI colorizing photos is that it can’t be accurate, because for each shade of grey in the old photos there are three totally different colors, that only a brain using logic can easily understand what color it is. Also it steals the job of colorizers, such as Jordan Lloyd. AI can’t use too much logic, such as searching in google maps what similar things are in the same place as the picture, and inferring the color of the same object and just like that solving the puzzle. Jason Antic, creator of the AI DeOldify, says that in the scenarios where the AI needs to infer what color is an object, and these are no easy things like sky is blue – they just take a random guess. Also Emil Wallner is in the article, defending the AI saying that it still has a good future against luddites.

Actors Putting Effort on Mimicking every single detail of their historical counterparts

So there are two examples of actors that put so much effort on their historical role to make it as accurate as possible, by even mimicking the historical figure’s gestures, pauses and comportment. They got to know how that historical counterpart sounded from old tapes and since the invention of the phonograph, right after Lincoln died (that’s why we can’t find out what his voice sounded like). First example talks about Maryill Streep, the actress that plays UK Prime Minister Maragaret Thatcher in the film “The Iron Lady”, and because she was dead, Streep listened to a lot of her old tapes to mimic her - and so with some makeup she was literally her. Then the second example is about Austin Butler who played Elvis in the movie “Elvis”, and he was so hard working to achieve the Elvis Presley voice, that his voice in real life has changed too, and the voice that was once open, is now deep, like Elvis’. He is now still popular because he can’t get rid of the voice.

Bas Uterwijk

An artist from Amsterdam that creates pictures of people who are originally made in a form of painting with the usage of deep learning AI and 3d modeling. Like seeing the real Mona Lisa in the same position but from a realistic camera rather than a painting. It uses ‘deep learning’ to create realistic photos of famous figures, such as the George Washington portrait. Bas Uterwikj is the guy’s real name too. It now can also create realistic photos of sculptures.

Ötzi the Iceman

It is an archeological finding of a mummy from the Copper Age, over 5300 years ago. The analysis found that Otzi was crossing Tisenjoch, a mountain in Italy, specifically in Val Senales Valley/ Schnalstal, where he was murdered and preserved naturally in ice. Therefore he is older than the Egyptian pyramids, not being homo sapiens but Neolithic. He was using copper tools (copper age smh). Since 1998, he has been exhibited at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, Italy, inside a cold cell that can be viewed through a small window. His mummy was captured by an AI to create a more photorealistic picture of what he looked like when he was alive. Otzi was discovered by two hiker bros, Erika and Helmut Simon.

For All Mankind

A television series that combines original footage and historically inaccurate archival footage to create a world in which a few differences in the cold war were made for the USSR’s good and the US’ bad, such as Reagan winning over ford in the Republican primaries, the USSR getting first to the moon and putting more effort on the race, leading to the USSR being more aggressive in general, leading to them being brave enough not to leave Afghanistan. The series was created by Ronald D. Moore, and in it there is an alternative reality where the USA and USSR kept spending money on space, and actually advancing human technology. Therefore it's science fiction.

Quality of verisimilitude

Something the WSC just referenced in the same dot of For All Mankind, and what it means specifically in fiction, is the extent of which the story feels like something that could actually happen. In the context of For All Mankind, we can see that because Ronald Reagan got the role of president, as a not so direct result the USSR decides to not leave Afghanistan. This seems reasonable, because if Reagan would have really got elected the USSR would really be brave enough to do that stuff. Generally talks about if the consequences of an alternative reality would have really happened in that alternative reality.