16 years ago I came upon a fascinating passage in the third paragraph in Wikipedia’s Raymond Massey page. It said that sometime in the early 1920s Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926), “heard Massey perform and was struck by the close similarity of Massey’s speaking voice to that of his father.”
I quoted this passage in a 2.25.06 HE post that mentioned the possible casting of Liam Neeson as Lincoln in a then-forthcoming biopic, which was first reported in early ’05. (Yes, the same Steven Spielberg-directed, Tony Kushner-authored biopic that Daniel Day Lewis wound up starring in seven years later.)
Alas, this passage is no longer in Massey’s Wikibio, which obviously suggests that the sourcing was deemed suspicious or questionable and therefore deleted. Too bad.
But let’s imagine that there was credible reason to believe that Massey did sound something like Lincoln, and that a documentarian had decided to make a Lincoln doc based solely on his letters, and that the filmmaker had decided, a la Morgan Neville and Anthony Bourdain, to digitally reconstitute and re-assemble Massey’s voice for the doc’s many narrative passages.
If, once again, historians had located persuasive testimony that Lincoln’s voice resembled Massey’s or vice versa, I would be delighted and fascinated to watch this theoretical Lincoln documentary. On a certain level it would probably seem amazing or astonishing to hear “Massey” do Lincoln. And yet the same “deepfake” or A.I. voicing technology that Mark Harris, Roger Friedman, David Friend and others have bemoaned in the case of Neville’s Roadrunner would be responsible for this.
It’s all a matter of perspective and what people are ethically accustomed to.
Incidentally: In August ’07 I mentioned an idea for “a weird-thoughtful comedy from director Mike Binder about Lincoln being somehow brought back to life by an electric charge of some kind or another, and grappling with life in 2007. I’m not kidding, and I think it’s an excellent concept. But what would you call it? Remancipator?
“My first thought was ‘cool…Abe’s back’ but then I thought a bit more about this. A great legend of the 19th Century comes face to face with the mind-blowing and the tragic aspects of what this country has become is…not funny. A man from a world of sabers, horse and buggies, hoop skirts and top hats encountering obese people and SUVs everywhere, McMansions, global warming, George Bush, celebrity meltdowns, junk food, etc.? That’s a kind of horror film.
“But the more I thought about it, the funnier it became. A fish-out-of-water piece with all kinds of strange cultural undercurrents. Lincoln driving a car, visiting Banana Republic, taking a Pilates class, dealing with an iPhone, etc. He can’t meet a nice bank teller and fall in love like Malcolm McDowell‘s H.G. Wells did in Time After Time? What would be do with himself? Become a politician? An art dealer? A horse breeder?