In a very interesting story at BuzzFeed, sources claim that due to scheduling conflicts, many of the actors in the upcoming fourth season of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT were filmed in front of a green screen and then edited in during post-production. While green screen is about as common in filmmaking these days as actors themselves, it does pose a question as to the quality of what the revived series will look like on Netflix.
According to the story, some scenes involving Henry Winkler’s character don’t look edited together at all while others are blatantly not filmed with the actors together:
Rivals Lucille Bluth (Jessica Walter) and Lucille Austero (Liza Minnelli) share the screen in at least one scene in the new season, but the characters, who are shown interacting in a restaurant, were not in the same room together, according to one source.
For that scene, the source described Hurwitz reading, off camera, Walter’s parts while Minnelli filmed her lines. The footage was later combined with footage Walter filmed alone. The result, says this source, is a mixed bag.
“It does look kind of like the Austin Powers stuff — you can tell that it was green screened,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT is a brilliantly written series that benefited greatly from the improv skills of the actors in the cast. If you take that out of the equation I am sure the show will still be funny, but will it live up to the original run of episodes?
The fourth season is already taking the different approach of having each episode focus on a specific character with only Jason Bateman’s character appearing in all episodes. This green screen could be a minor effect used for scenes that absolutely could not be filmed with all actors on a particular day, but it would be even more of a loss to have an episode with Bateman, David Cross, Portia De Rossi, and no appearance by Michael Cera. The show worked when everyone appeared together and now I am getting nervous this may be a lackluster return for ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT.
All episodes of the fourth season will begin streaming on May 26th.
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