I did it his way.

Oh my. Last night we watched a rather bland made for television biopic about the life of Frank Sinatra. It was on some sort of true stories cable channel -- the type of channel that's sandwiched between the 24 hour Dana Delaney network and the really bad 1980s romance/drama channel.

Despite the fact that my brows were furrowed with frustration over the odd casting choices, I found myself sitting through a full hour and a half of the movie -- all the way from "washed-up, broke and in love with Ava -- Sinatra" to "That's Life Frank."

It was during the course of the movie that I began formulating a good justification for human cloning.

You know, this is just the sort of thing I usually think about while watching television.

Anyway, I figured that if there was ever a real need for cloning, it would be in the entertainment business -- or more specifically, the biopic entertainment buisness.

Why? Well, the main reason that the Sinatra film was so horrible was that no one looked liked they were even meant to resemble their real-life counterparts.

In all fairness, the backs of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were passable -- squint hard enough and you'd think you're in Hyannis Port.

But really, were the producers on some sort of mission to find the chubbiest, non-Italian "Dean Martin" in all of Hollywood?

Or perhaps, they just wasted all the casting cash on their firecracker of a Sammy Davis Jr., who in my opinion, uttered the best line in the whole film.

"They'll all say, 'there goes the cat with the glass eye!'"

Back to cloning. Now, how inhumane would it be to set up some sort of dead celebrities amusement park? In exchange for room and board, the celebrity clones agree to film real-time biopics. It would be a way for the clones to keep their DNA buddy's memory alive while entertaining the masses.

You see, we all win.

Comments

[Mena]

And no, I really don't advocate cloning celebrities.

[Jeff]

Why can't our society just let our celebrities die au naturale like the rest of us?

I know you didn't mean advocate cloning celebs, but this is a voice for a more open view of casting non-traditional faces and bodies in traditional (and celeb) roles. Of course, I don't mean for that to be taken to the extreme (as in, what if they cast an Afro-American as Sinatra and a white guy as Sammy --with our without a real glass eye).

One trouble I have with these "biopics" is that I'm always looking at how closely the actor resembles the subject of the film rather than the content of their lives, etc.

[Ed]

Concerning Frank Sinatra, it could be much worse.

[Joe]

There really is a Frank Sinatra Center for Cloning and Reproductive Research in Boulder, Colo. In fact they had a fund raiser in December with Nancy Sinatra plugging her new album, B.B. King was there and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb gave a speach about old blue eyes.