In a development that surely would have confounded Forrest Gump himself, the HBO fright series "Tales From the Crypt" is concluding its fifth season Wednesday (10:30 p.m.) with an episode starring Humphrey Bogart.
Yes, the Humphrey Bogart.In color.
Spouting lines from "Casablanca" to Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of the film's classic heroine, Ingrid Bergman.
It's no illusion, but the latest piece of special-effects wizardry from director Robert Zemeckis ("Forrest Gump" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?") and the technical geniuses at Industrial Light & Magic. They have used computer trickery to resurrect Bogey - and the guy has never looked better.
Zemeckis utilized groundbreaking "digital imagery" technology - similar to the special effects used with such marvelous results in "Gump" - to make Bogart appear as the central character in a new drama.
"We actually extracted footage of Bogart from a lot of his older movies (including "Casablanca," "The Maltese Falcon" and "Key Largo"), colorized him and changed things like where his eyes were looking because he has to be looking right at the screen," Zemeckis said.
"Then we put him in new footage with our actors. It's sort of the next step in what is possible to do with this technology."
In "Gump," of course, Zemeckis and Industrial Light & Magic partner Ken Ralston seamlessly blended Tom Hanks' character into archival footage with the likes of Presidents Kennedy and Nixon.
Ralston, who also worked on the "Tales From the Crypt" installment, found it a more challenging task to weave Bogart into scenes with Rossellini, John Lithgow and Sherilyn Fenn than to perform those feats of magic in "Forrest Gump."
"Each individual clip from each of Bogart's films had its own problems," Ralston said.
"Some of the lighting was flatter than in others. It was easier to degrade everything in `Gump' down to the level of the archival footage. Here, we had to upgrade it to match the color of the actual episode and make it more pristine looking. That's a little more problematic," he said.
The "Crypt" episode is a film noir parody titled "You, Murderer," which recounts the experiences of a criminal who undergoes plastic surgery as part of assuming a new identity and winds up looking uncannily like Bogart.
The episode is shot from the point of view of Bogart's character, who eventually is killed by Rossellini's character, then dragged around an apartment.
"Moving Bogart's eyes so he was always looking at the camera was only one of the things that made this much harder than what we did in `Gump,"' Zemeckis said.
What appear to be the arms, legs and voice of Bogart are actually those of Robert Sacchi, a Bogey look-alike who starred in the film "The Man With Bogart's Face." Viewers actually see Bogart only a few times and only in reflection, which complicated the effects still further, Zemeckis added.
"We taped a little speaker to the stomach of the camera operator, and Robert was on the other side of the set reading Bogart's lines," Zemeckis said. "It was a crazy way to make a movie.
"All of the other actors are reacting to a speaker, and the operator became a member of the cast."
For the half-hour show, Bogart's head was grafted through computerization onto Sacchi's body. Sacchi's head was pulled off of his body, frame by frame, and taken out of the shots.
"It was really like putting together a huge puzzle," Ralston explained.
"We had to isolate all of these different little pieces of body and head from each particular piece of film we had, and somehow stick them all together correctly and make it fit nice and snug."
The process of laying down the special effects took 21/2 weeks. Of course, it helped to have such a cooperative lead actor.
"Bogey was wonderful to work with," Zemeckis joked. "He took direction really well. He didn't complain once."
Added Ralston: "I guess we'll need to get a Ouija board to see if the man is really happy about all of this."
While he has served as something of a trailblazer for effects technology, Zemeckis said he understands the potential that exists to exploit it.
"I think like anything else it's really exciting now because it's fresh and it's new," Zemeckis said. "And I think as it becomes more and more commonplace, it won't be as exciting.
"The good news is, it's going to make the idea of producing images on a spectacular scale possible for just about everybody. The bad news is, is it going to be abused? And so that's why we're kind of in that place right now," he said, "not knowing what's going to happen."