Portman stole credit for work she didn't do to get an Oscar she didn't deserve
Years ago, after the release of the movie The King And I, the movie studio tried to keep it secret that Marni Nixon had dubbed the singing for Deborah Kerr. The threatened Nixon. If anyone found out, she would never work in Hollywood again. So Kerr herself gave an interview and revealed that Marni Nixon had done the singing. She wanted her to get credit for the work she had done.
Then we have Natalie Portman.
Portman, in interviews about the movie Black Swan, talked on and on about her suffering as she allegedly learned ballet.
In fact, it was all lies--part of a campaign to get Portman an Oscar she didn't deserve.
It's now been revealed that the only shots of Portman "dancing" were the close-ups showing only her face and arms.
According to Entertainment Weekly:
Last year, Portman admitted to reporters that she did have a double, but "only for for the complicated turning stuff."The ballerina who served as a dancing double for Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winnning role in Black Swan tells EW she has been the victim of a “cover-up” to mislead the public about how much dancing Portman actually did in the film. “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist who performed many of the film’s complicated dance sequences, allowing Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body. “All the other shots are me.”
Lane’s claim follows a March 23 L.A. Times article in which Portman’s fiancé and Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied said Lane’s work in the film was far less significant. “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”
Lane disagrees. “The shots that are just her face with arms, those shots are definitely Natalie,” she says. “But that doesn’t show the actual dancing.” Lane admits that she was never promised a particular title for her six weeks of work on the film, though she was disappointed to see that she is credited only as as “Hand Model,” “Stunt Double,” and “Lady in the Lane” (a brief walk-on role).
Lane also says that Black Swan producer Ari Handel specifically told her not to talk about her work to the press, even though she claims there was no such stipulation in her contract. “They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”
Reps for Portman, Fox Searchlight, and Handel have yet to provide comments on the matter.
Lane is barely seen in promotional materials for the movie, including a VFX reel posted by studio Fox Searchlight that appears to show all the digital alterations made to key dance sequences. An unverified version of that reel, leaked to YouTube, seems to shows how digital face replacement was used to put Portman’s head on Lane’s body. (The clip was included in a blog post by Dance Magazine‘s Wendy Perron, who wrote about Lane’s story earlier this month.)
According to Lane, Portman’s dramatic transformation into a ballerina — a narrative firmly at the center of her successful Oscar campaign — wasn’t as impressive as the public was led to believe. “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane.
Portman stole credit for work she didn't do in order to get an Oscar she didn't deserve.
Portman has a history of taking credit for other people's work. Alan Dershowitz gave her credit for being one of the "researchers" on his explicitly racist book The Case for Israel-----a book which Norman Finkelstein exposed as having been largely plagiarized from a book called From Times Immemorial which was itself exposed as a fraud. (From Times Immemorial was supposedly written by Joan Peters, but Noam Chomsky has concluded that it has no single author and was most likely the work of an Israeli intelligence agency.)
