Actor Heath Ledger, whose role as a closeted cowboy in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain earned him an Oscar nomination in 2006, was found dead in his New York apartment on the very day on which the 2008 Oscar nominations were announced.  Last fall Ledger finished shooting Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight in which he played the flamboyant (and key) role of The Joker and his image and performance were an essential part of Warner Bros.' savvy viral marketing campaign for the movie, which is built around The Joker's 'Why so Serious' trope (see 'The Dark Knight Poster Revealed').  Ledger's untimely death could force Warner Bros. to retool what appears to be a very potent marketing program for The Dark Knight, which is still set to debut on July 18th.

While Ledger had finished principal photography on The Dark Knight, he was in the midst of shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for director Terry Gilliam when he died.  Former Monty Python member Gilliam has scored some signal critical (and occasionally financial) successes with films including Brazil, The Fisher King, Time Bandits and Twelve Monkeys, but he has been snakebit on occasion, most notably during the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, when in the midst of production star Jean Rochefort suffered a debilitating herniated disk and a flood damaged the set forcing the cancellation of the film, a sad saga recounted in the documentary Lost in La Mancha.