MOST freelance journalists have tales to tell about their weirdest-ever phone interviews. One of mine was in 1997, when a Hollywood technician was telling me he’d just digitally scanned Madonna’s perfect body and Marlon Brando’s living head.

“You wouldn’t believe the people who’ve also come in,” crackled Scott Billups, all the way down the landline to Partick. “The rest of them are nervous as hell that any of this gets out.”

It was the next bit where I wondered about the crankiness of the caller. Billups’s great ambition then was to create a “virtual Marilyn ... musculature, expressions, movements, everything. We’ve researched everything, studied all the images, talked to her friends”.

Brando had apparently been round, recently, to check on his own progress – and Marilyn’s. “They were lovers, after all,” said Billups. “If anyone would think we’d got a virtual Marilyn right, it would be Brando.”

Was Brando convinced? “He watched her for a long time, turned to me and said, ‘Bill, you’ve got her. That’s Marilyn all right’.”

I duly transcribed, then filed my copy. I’d entirely forgotten about this story – until I read this week about the plans to digitally “cast” James Dean, or at least a complete computer simulation of him, as the second lead in a forthcoming war movie. Human actors will do the gesturing, moving and speaking, but their features will be overlaid with the iconic actor’s.

The Hollywood Reporter quotes the “owners” of Dean’s “likeness”, CMG Worldwide. “This opens up a whole new opportunity for many of our clients who are no longer with us,” they drool. To be precise, that’s 1700 entertainment, sports, music and historical personalities, including Burt Reynolds, Christopher Reeve, Ingrid Bergman, Neil Armstrong, Bette Davis and Jack Lemmon. The South African backers are particularly keen to digitally unearth Nelson Mandela, so they can “tell stories of cultural heritage significance”.

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A cup of tea may be in order, as you watch this particular chamber of Pandora’s Box slowly opening. Given my original story is 22 years old now, the surprise may be that it’s taken so long. Even in 1997, Billups was using CGI to digitally remove drool from Tom Cruise’s chin, or replace Rutger Hauer in a failed take (he’d been injured by falling into a cactus).

We’ve also had that creepy Tom Hanks-esque train conductor; the chocolate-bar-selling Audrey Hepburn (looking herself somewhat injection-moulded); Peter Cushing 2.0 in the recent Star Wars relaunches – and doubtless many other minor fakes and tweaks we’ll never know about.

And, of course, there’s the entire new mode of virtual acting pioneered by Andy Serkis, who has blended his physicality with virtual characters in Planet of the Apes, King Kong and notably as Gollum in the Tolkien movies.

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I’ve even found out what happened to that Brando scan. The documentary-makers of Listen To Me Marlon tracked Billups down in 2015. From old hard drives, his body data was turned into a fragmentary, glitchy simulation of the Great Mumbler’s head. Pseudo-Brando was then matched to an archive audio recording of the original, reciting (rather beautifully) the “Tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy from Macbeth.

By this point, you may be rounding up your Luddite pals, ready to bring your torches and pitchforks down upon those damned filthy computers. But hold on. Between neo-Dean as a “synthespian”, his features slavishly employed to act in what sounds like a very schlocky movie, and Brando rendered as a virtual, indeed Shakespearian ghost, we might have some real artistic choices here.

If the Dean-machine is convincing, maybe even moving, then it’s not hard to imagine what will come through the floodgates. The postmodern era, plus the ubiquity of our digital archive, has granted us an endless visual storehouse of beloved icons.

To make any of these favourite scenes come to narrative life, to open out the story behind the shot or fragment, might be an indulgence too powerful to resist. Let’s begin with virtual Marilyn. My two favourite pictures of Monroe are her reading Joyce’s Ulysses in a public park and her defiantly squiring Ella Fitzgerald into the Mocambo Bar, surrounded by anxious white faces. Imagine those scenes, the features unfreezing, beginning to emote, the icons (and the tableaux around them) coming to scripted life...

Does that feel more than faintly wrong? Literally necrophiliac: too much love for the dead and gone? I wrote a few weeks ago about Scorsese deploying CGI to help De Niro play much younger versions of himself, in the new Netflix movie The Irishman.

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We’re probably now due a rash of biopics where the latter stages of life are performed by actually crinkled mega-actors and their teen or mid-years selves by digital simulations –blending the original, a “mule” actor, and some mathematical trickery. (We should also watch for Billups’s total body scan of Madonna to make its glamazon re-entrance).

I’m never, ever surprised by the degrees to which humans use tech to play around with their own images. Since the first cave paintings we’ve used representations of ourselves to understand ourselves, others and the challenges of survival.

There is such a deep continuity between this and the most fizzing examples of our digital present. Hang around on social media such as Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok and watch how all the kids are using face- or body-morphing filters to approximate their favourite icons from their own eras of pop culture.

This is the energy of adolescence and young adulthood being tapped into. However, is there something a bit sickly about older generations (boomers and Generation X) finding solace in digitally resurrecting these icons from their fondly remembered past?

Just at the historical moment where they need their gaze to rest on the present and future – addressing the chaos and ruin they’ve caused, financially and environmentally – is this kind of simulated hyper-nostalgia precisely the worst kind of escapism? Pining stupidly, irresponsibly, for “simpler” times? (And let’s not even think about the Brexitannic marketplace for this kind of stuff... )

Yet there’s something about the glitch-Brando in the Listen To Me Marlon documentary which may make all this “vacting” (yes, it’s a word) more than just a late payday for agents and their ageing clients.

We need bold filmmakers to keep refreshing our perceptions – particularly as we try to survive an age of powerful and systematic lying. One of the great worries about this level of human simulation is the “deep fake” video – a pseudo-politician digitally crafted to make a convincing and incendiary intervention.

It’s possible the same algorithms that make these vactors will be used to detect them – but that might be well after the fact of their damage. We need intelligent cinema (or TV) that, in the manner of Spike Jones’s Her or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner: 2046, actually takes simulated selves as their theme, strengthening our scepticism at a deeper level.

By accident or design, both movies share the same kind of unbearably poignant scenes of lovemaking – where a beloved virtual personality tries desperately, temporarily to take on a sensual form for her partner.

That deep reality of human emotion and connection – the endurance of love and care, underneath all the digital chicanery – is maybe some hope of solid ground to stand on, in this bewildering imaginarium of the present and near future. Or maybe it’s just another one of our vulnerabilities for the merchants of desire to exploit.

In any case, all critical channels open. Here comes James Dean; this time, all too clean-cut.