2) Bruce Lee – Game of Death
In 1972, Bruce Lee started a passion project – a martial arts movie called Game of Death that he would write, direct, produce and star in. Sadly, he died at the young age of 32 before filming had completed.
Eventually, in 1978, a new version of the movie was recut and completed with various methods used to cover up the loss of Lee. Stock footage from his early work was spliced in, body doubles were filmed with wide shots or in poor lighting and in one scene, a cardboard cut-out of Lee’s head was pasted onto a mirror. Finally, in a strangely macabre move, footage from Lee’s actual funeral was incorporated into the film – including a shot of his real-life corpse in an open-topped casket.
While these techniques were far away from the towering technical achievements in modern examples, they were really the first of their kind as this was the first time an actor had been resurrected with camera trickery in a major sense.