YEAH, WE'RE KIDDING, BUT HOLLYWOOD ISN'T\Rapid progress in digital technology soon could render live actors\obsolete.

Byline: Janet Weeks Daily News Staff Writer

For a movie director tired of temperamental stars, the future of films may be a dream come true.

No more actors demanding block-long trailers, showing up late or commanding $20 million a picture.

No more actors muffing lines, missing marks or mumbling about motivation.

No more actors. Period.

In the very near future, computer geeks who never studied at Juilliard or played Hamlet in the park will be creating photorealistic actors programmed to deliver perfect performances every time.

These virtual actors won't need bathroom breaks. They won't request Evian water to wash their hair and they will perform their own stunts. And what dazzling stunts those will be.

Indeed, Hollywood is in the midst of a digital revolution that soon will make it possible to do anything - anything - on screen, from synthesizing actors (called "synthespians") to perfecting the world in which they act.

While the expense of this new technology keeps it out of reach of most producers today, costs are falling. Soon, many predict, computer special-effects software will be in the hands of every filmmaker.

Already, this new computer age has led to some of the most successful movies of the decade, including "Jurassic Park," "Forrest Gump" and "Toy Story."

"I don't know if people realize the immense power being unleashed," director Robert Zemeckis, a pioneer in high-tech filmmaking, told an audience at a recent symposium exploring artists' rights in the emerging digital Hollywood. "It's a wildly exciting time," said the maker of "Forrest Gump."

To some, these technological achievements open doors to thrilling new times in cinema. Movie makers, working with PCs, will have the ability to make any fantasy appear on the screen with incredible ease and precision.

"Electronic images are so fluid and maleable," said Mark Dippe, visual effects supervisor for Marin-based Industrial Light and Magic, the special-effects powerhouse that brought dinosaurs back to life in "Jurassic Park."

Others in the film industry worry that the digital revolution is a Pandora's box.

For starters, the technology makes it possible to lift images and place them in films with seamless believability. Remember when Forrest Gump shook hands with President John F. Kennedy? Zemeckis said technology just around the corner will make that effect look hokey, just as today's computer graphics make the old painted mattes of the '40s look corny.

"We'll look back at 'Forrest Gump' and say, 'How quaint,' " Zemeckis said.

Some fear this ability to reuse images from the past - Zemeckis also put Humphrey Bogart in a "Tales From the Crypt" episode - could lead to the degradation of classic films as they are "updated" for modern audiences.

Long-dead actors could be cast in humiliating roles, their mouths manipulated to say lines they never spoke.

"One could envision a remake of 'Going My Way' in which Father O'Malley is a pedophile," lamented Joseph Beard, a St. John's University law professor and author of "Casting Call From Forest Lawn: The Digital Resurrection of Deceased Entertainers - a 21st Century Challenge for Intellectual Property Law."

Zemeckis said he could see someone getting the bright idea to change the penultimate line of "The Godfather" to one in which Michael Corleone admits he is a Mafia kingpin and apologizes to his wife - a happy ending.

"That's scary," he said. "You could change one line and get a whole different movie."

Another fear in Hollywood is that the owners of old movies may try to update them for new markets by replacing the original actors with new stars. Picture current heartthrob George Clooney replacing Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca." Or Demi Moore subbing for Vivien Leigh in "Gone With the Wind" with Bruce Willis as Rhett Butler.

The possibilities are not far-fetched, considering what Ted Turner did with the MGM library after purchasing it in the mid-1980s. Hoping to capture new audiences on its cable networks, Turner's company began "colorizing" black and white pictures, an act of cultural heresy to many in the film industry that started the artists' rights movement.

But perhaps the most interesting prospect in the digital future is the full-scale synthesizing of lifelike characters with computer-generated voices, faces and bodies. "Toy Story," the first fully computer-animated full-length movie, demonstrated how close Hollywood is coming to such a feat.

"Organic actors will have no place in the digital future," predicted Scott Billups, a computer-effects whiz who has worked on more than 200 commercials.

This year, TFX Animation in Quebec will debut "The Boxer," a computer-animated short featuring characters that look and act like humans (unlike "Toy Story" in which the children were deliberately drawn to look cartoonish).

To animate "The Boxer," real actors were fitted with dozens of motion-sensing devices. As they punched and jumped and grimaced, their movements were transmitted to a computer, which recorded and re-created them on an animated character.

Steve Williams, an animation supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, has already created a lifelike human for the screen using his computer: In the scene where the tyrannosaurus eats a lawyer in "Jurassic Park," both the lawyer and the dinosaur are fake.

Tricky stunts are faked with digital actors routinely. And sometimes images of real actors are digitally manipulated to suit a director's purpose.

The image of actor Brandon Lee, who was accidentally killed in the making of "The Crow" before filming ended, was digitally re-created to complete the movie. But technology of that sort is expensive, at least for now.

"No one is willing to put up the money to make a synthetic protagonist in a full-length film. But it's possible," Williams said. However, he added, that doesn't make it smart or good or right.

"It takes the soul out of an image," he conceded. "It's like the difference between CDs and vinyl. CDs don't have things that are wrong. Therefore, you miss a certain quality called 'slop.' "

Slopless or not, the possibility of actorless films worries Screen Actors Guild president Richard Masur.

Although he doesn't believe computers can yet create genuinely lifelike humans, he fears audiences may become so conditioned to synthespians that they no longer expect an organic quality.

"I think the ability of the Hollywood marketing machine to drive down our tastes and our ability to make judgments about quality is frightening," Masur said.

And there is still one other troubling aspect to the digital revolution: the consolidation of power.

Traditionally, filmmaking has been a collaborative effort. But in the future, a computer expert can replace a set designer, wardrobe specialist, makeup artist, animators and even actors.

Williams said the problem with relying on computer animators to create entire movies is that many do not understand the basics of good drama or comedy.

"It's eliminating a level of understanding. That's the fear of one box being an acting department, animation department, set department and art department."

On the bright side, the evolution of filmmaking software will put expensive-looking special effects within the reach of smaller-budget filmmakers who cannot afford the services of Industrial Light and Magic or Silicon Graphics.

Indeed, many smaller special-effects houses are springing up to fill computer-animation needs, including Digital Domain in Santa Monica and Buzz F/X, which has offices in Santa Monica, Montreal and New York.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

(1) Computer-based filmmaking got its biggest boost in Disney's animated hit "Toy Story," in which all visuals were created digitally. (2 -- 4) Director Robert Zemeckis, who made digital manipulation of images a cornerstone of "Forrest Gump," thinks the rapid progress of technology will soon make the film's effects seem crude. In one scene from "Gump," archival footage of someone receiving an award from President Nixon, top, was digitally cleared of the honoree, middle, for the insertion of actor Tom Hanks, bottom. (5) Courtesy of computers, Humphrey Bogart appears in a Zemeckis-helmed episode of "Tales From the Crypt." While many herald the creative possibilities of the technology, some warn that it can be abused. (6) When Brandon Lee died tragically during shooting of "The Crow," filmmakers re-created his image digitally to finish the movie. (7) no caption (Jason Alexander in movie poster for Die Hard) (8 -- color) no caption (Bruce Willis as Rhett Butler in movie poster for Gone with the Wind)