Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?
The only way I could see this being wrong is if they then processes the voice of this different person to make it sound more like Scarlett.
Making the voice similar enough that the public will associate it with the recognition and popularity of the movie is obviously capitalizing on the movie, including Johansson's performance. If they did that intentionally, they owe Johansson (and the movie studio) recompense for that. And Altman's tweet rather obviously shows it can at the very least be argued that such intent was present.
> Let’s say I want to shoot a movie. Id love to have Scarlett star in it. But I can’t afford her, so I hire some b actress that kind of looks like her. What’s wrong with that?
Depends on intent. If that's all you do, then fine. But if you dress your movie up to heavily imply it's a sequel to a movie with Johansson in it, and put the actual name of your "B actress" down in the fine print(1), and then tweet the name of the Johansson movie when yours is released... Do you think movie makers get away with shit like that? Or that they should?
What is it about this that you don't understand? Do you genuinely not see that those are two different things, distinguished by intent? Or did you just not know that intent is often a rather vital part of whether something is legal or not?
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(1): Or omit it altogether, like this allegedly-existing Sky voice actress is still (last I read, before the weekend) anonymous.
