The New York Times-20080125-Actor-s Death May Mean Film-s End

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Actor's Death May Mean Film's End

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Heath Ledger's death has created an enormous marketing challenge for Warner Brothers in promoting its Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, in which he plays the Joker. But that is nothing next to the predicament confronting Terry Gilliam, who was less than halfway through directing his next film when Mr. Ledger, one of its stars, was found dead in a New York apartment on Tuesday.

Mr. Gilliam's $30 million morality tale, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, stars Christopher Plummer as the title character, the leader of a traveling theater troupe that tempts its audiences with the chance to transcend mundane reality by passing through a magical mirror into a fantastic universe of limitless imagination, according to an official synopsis. Mr. Ledger played a troupe member who romances the character's daughter.

The earthbound exterior portions of the film were shot on location in England in December and January, said Graham Smith, who served as a publicist for the film up to its London wrap last weekend. The production was then set to shift to Vancouver, British Columbia, where the fantastical portions of the action were to be shot using special effects on a soundstage.

Mr. Ledger's death leaves the producers with few desirable options: recast and reshoot, rewrite and adjust, or abandon the project altogether. Mr. Gilliam wrote the movie with Charles McKeown, his collaborator on Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). (Mr. Gilliam has been famously plagued by production problems: his movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was abandoned after a flood and a $15 million insurance payout.)

Joanne Camacho, an insurance broker on Imaginarium, declined to comment Thursday. But Brian Kingman, managing director of Aon/Albert G. Ruben Insurance Services, a leading entertainment insurance underwriter, said that only 18 days of filming had been completed on the film, suggesting that about $14 million had been spent, and that Mr. Ledger had been named an essential element under the film's cast-insurance policy.

That means the producers would have the right to abandon the film and recoup their spending on the project before his death. Producers always try to complete the movie, Mr. Kingman said. The question is, can it be? They'll have to analyze what's been shot, what additional shots are needed, and can the missing scenes be doubled?

He speculated that it might cost $10 million to reshoot Mr. Ledger's scenes with another actor, but said the producers might not want to if they financed the movie based on his box-office appeal. (The film does not yet have a domestic distributor.)

Calls and e-mail messages to William Vince, one of the producers, were not returned. A woman answering calls at the movie's production office declined to comment, saying, We don't know what's happening; nobody's told us anything.

Hollywood has not seen a high-profile star's death in the middle of a movie in some time. When Brandon Lee was killed in 1993 on the set of The Crow, Mr. Kingman said, the filmmakers were very clever and creative and completed the movie with a double, and that movie turned out to be successful enough to entice people to do a sequel. (It made more than $50 million at the domestic box office.) River Phoenix died of an overdose in 1993, halfway through making Dark Blood, which was abandoned. John Candy died in 1994 with a third of his scenes left in Wagons East, which was finished after the insurance company paid a reported $15 million settlement.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Heath Ledger on the set of Terry Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. (PHOTOGRAPH BY IAN LAWRENCE/SPLASH NEWS)