Cruise, Kidman and an unfortunate misunderstanding at the local chemist
- Reference: 1607933705
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/14/who_me/
- Source link:
Today's story comes from "Jack", who was tasked with IT and database support for a film and TV casting agency based in West London.
Being the 1990s, digital cameras were not quite so ubiquitous as they are today. "There was not a lot to choose from," explained Jack. "You could go 'low-end' with the Apple QuickTake range (640×480, maximum 8 photos, plastic lens and limited range) or opt for an early DSLR camera such as the Minolta RD-175 with its gigantic 1.75MP resolution."
[2]
Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise at the premiere of the movie in July, 1999
When someone said "Digital" back then, it meant photographing actors, getting films developed and scanning prints into a TIFF format file before importing into a FileMaker Pro 3 database. The result was a relational database sat on its own RAID array, rammed with thousands of TIFF images.
And, of course, someone had to traipse down to the nearest photo developing shop with hundreds of rolls of 35mm file to get the pictures developed. Those were the days, eh?
"Come 1995," said Jack, "the agency secured a contract to provide a very large number of bit-part actors and extras for Cruise/Kidman/Kubrick’s [3]Eyes Wide Shut .
"As anyone familiar with that movie
starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise and directed by Stanley Kubrick
will know, there is a substantial orgy scene, requiring a large number of naked or semi-naked men and women."Jack's role was simple. He was to sit with the agency directors and bookers while they undertook the task of choosing the nude pictures to be sent to the 2nd Assistant Director for selection. Jack then had to scan the pictures, import them and, finally, generate a glossy colour print of front and back shots as well as the person's statistics.
"Times 1000," he told us.
It took a while, but eventually each negative had been carefully cut and tagged ready to be taken to the photo developing shop (in this case a branch of UK chemist, Boots) for printing. A member of staff dropped off the negatives and reported that the process would take around two hours.
Two hours passed, and Jack and a colleague were leaving to collect the photos when "everything turned blue with police cars and vans surrounding us and several pr0n squad officers asking us to accompany them to the local police station."
They spent another two hours trying to explain to the officers that there was perfectly innocent explanation ("It's a big feature movie is it Sir? Funny how they all say that...") before eventually being forced to roll out the big guns.
"We had to do the dreaded thing and ask them to speak to the assistant director who then got them to speak to Stanley Kubrick."
Minutes later, the duo were released from custody with photos intact and a mumbled apology from the red-faced girls and boys in blue: "Tell Mr Kubrick we all loved [4]Full Metal Jacket ."
There were two outcomes to the incident. The first was that the photos ended up being delivered on time ("Shame that the movie then took another two years to complete though, as nobody could agree on the edit," observed Jack,) and the other?
"They bit the bullet and purchased a £10,000 Minolta RD-175 clone
[5]or rebrand
- the Agfa ActionCam."No doubt called 'ActionCam' since you needed both hands to hold it up… But it meant we could now take hundreds of shots at no cost, they could be imported directly to the photo storage and when FileMaker Pro 4 came out a few years later they could all be converted to JPEG."
The future had arrived.
Ever found yourself under the gimlet gaze of The Law for entirely innocent reasons? Or got up to mischief with a new-fangled bit of kit? Share your memories (but not your photos) with an email to [6]Who, Me? ®
Get our [7]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/11/shutterstock_cruise_kidman.jpg
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/
[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093058/
[5] https://www.digitalkameramuseum.de/en/cameras/item/agfa-actioncam
[6] mailto:whome@theregister.com
[7] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Hmm
For sure, but the speed of the response suggests that nobody looked though all the thousands of photos to ensure that there *weren't* any erect penises.
So Boots staff (not trained in law, but likely had an internal policy) saw photos of naked bodies that didn't look like any 'normal' Reader's Wives shots, and called the cops to be 'better safe than sorry'.
Re: Hmm
Yeah I was thinking the same thing. Added to that, if they were regularly dropping off hundreds (or even dozens) of rolls of film, you'd expect the developer to know.
It also strikes me as odd that a company would think nothing of spending an awful lot of money on film and development without either their own dark room facility, or understand the savings that would have come with an (even that expensive) digital camera.
Re: Hmm
It also strikes me as odd that a company would think nothing of spending an awful lot of money on film and development without either their own dark room facility, or understand the savings that would have come with an (even that expensive) digital camera.
Or sourced it out to a professional darkroom\processor. I know my uni had to send our film projects to a company in Detroit from Chicago. But I'm pretty sure the photog dept had their own darkroom.
It does seem odd, but then again, maybe that cost was just passed along to the customer, and even with a markup?
Develop your own and pussy!
My experience of developing your own pictures to avoid questions from grown ups was curtailed when I was spooling the film onto the development cassette in total darkness only for it to be torn from my hands and shredded by the cat. The same cat who had broken my red light I used to use by lying on it until the glass overheated and cracked. I'm surprised its ghost doesnt appear on the few pictures I bother to take these days.
We did manage to raise eyebrows at Boots one time
When we had a lot of audio and video cable to get into some outer sheaths that were almost but not quite too small for them. Some bright spark had the idea to drop into Boots and buy up their entire stock of KY Jelly...
I don't recall it working too well; I can only assume that there was some reason why we couldn't use the usual Hellerman oil and honeymoon pliers (engineers of a certain vintage will know what I mean; to anyone else who may be offended I apologise in advance).
Re: We did manage to raise eyebrows at Boots one time
I once raised my eyebrow... I was at supermarket\pharmacy in Chicago, and the two women and a gentleman behind me were buying mineral oil enemas and bourbon.... at 2 in the afternoon?
Re: We did manage to raise eyebrows at Boots one time
Hopefully the plan wasn't to find out if they blend ...
Re: We did manage to raise eyebrows at Boots one time
Cable pulling lube and KY aren't interchangeable ... For one thing, KY is water based, and you probably don't want that in your electrical equipment. Horses for courses & all that.
As a side note, soap isn't a lubricant. It's a surfactant. You kiddies reading this might want to learn the difference before you do yourself an injury. Or worse, injure somebody else.
By 1995 ...
... even Apple was selling digital cameras. There was a choice of prosumer gear that was perfectly capable of taking that kind of headshot, and professionals were already using them for test shots like those described. Granted, film was still better resolution than digital, and a primadonna like Kubrick might have insisted on it, but the writing was certainly on the wall.
not me, but an admiral's daughter once had a spot of bother with the filth
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/julia-somerville-defends-innocent-family-photos-1538516.html
Yeah, the witch hunt had already started by then. There was a time when a child with no clothes on could be an expression of innocence, if they were clearly not being abused. (Although Lewis Carroll [1]ran into some trouble on that score.) Now it's automatically a crime. I even have photos of myself as a baby that could threaten my liberty, should the wrong people see them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#Controversies_and_mysteries
The over-reaching long arm of the law
I had a friend who was a bus driver. One day he found a carrier bag containing 'recreational drugs' a careless passenger had left behind. Told to follow company procedures when he was back at the depot he dutifully trudged off to the local police station in his lunch break to hand them in.
Where they held him for hours while giving him the third degree. The very obvious defence that "no dealer in their right mind would hand in their own drugs" cut no ice.
He was eventually released and, having lost a driver for an entire shift, company policy changed and the police were never bothered over dodgy finds ever again.
Re: The over-reaching long arm of the law
He was eventually released and, having lost a driver for an entire shift, company policy changed and the police were never bothered over dodgy finds ever again.
Which was exactly what the police wanted, crime rates going down (or at least the official statistics) and they aren't bothered by this kind of nonsense they can't do anything about anyway.
Re: The over-reaching long arm of the law
Maybe he should have phoned ahead. "I'm a bus driver, found some drugs, wanna share?"
great story
But more of an On Call than Who Me.
3 times I've felt the long arm
Twice for "cycling furiously" while overtaking the lines of nearly static cars on my 7 mile cycle into Polytechnic - no way was I doing over 30 in the face of oncoming, free flowing, traffic, but I think I was stopped just because it pissed off the car drivers too much. (There was a guy in an L reg, black, BMW who would often open his drivers car door a couple of inches when he saw cyclists overtaking. Not enough to hit us, but we had to slow down.)
The other in the 1990's when my works was hit by a virus and I had a number of Peers, MP's and minor royals in my email address book. Special Branch wanted to know why I was attacking Parliament - apparently it went straight through their defences. My company owner came to my defence, saying that they had been fighting the virus the previous week while I was on vacation and had forgotten to put a note on my computer to tell me not to turn it on when I returned. (3 hours interrogation for me, and 3 for the company owner, and then without a further word "you are free to go".)
How often a simple Post-It note could have saved a disaster?
Re: 3 times I've felt the long arm
A post it note is never ever read until the important work is done. It would have been ignored until the machine had been turned on and many emails read and sent. If you want someone to not turn a machine on then put a bullet in it.
Re: 3 times I've felt the long arm
"BMW who would often open his drivers car door a couple of inches when he saw cyclists overtaking"
I used to ride my motorbike between two lanes of stationary traffic in rush hour. In a queue of a few hundred cars, one driver had deliberately positioned his car tight to those in the adjacent lane, to try to block bikers from getting past him. He didn't half blare his horn when his wing mirror snapped. ;-)
Many moons ago, maybe 1983 ...
... bright and early one fine morning I was on the roof of the old Ford Aerospace Building One on Fabian in Palo Alto, trying to re-align a new laser network link to a building across Hwy 101. I got tackled by a couple largish MPs ... Seems that some military big-wigs were about to arrive to inspect one of our satellites (a work in progress), and the two security guys heard someone talk about "jake's up on the roof with the laser, that should sort 'em out". Myself and the two talking about me were detained, taken to a small room & questioned. Seems the security detail wasn't all that versed in the power output of a 5mW HeNe laser, in their tiny little brains we were conspiring to roast the brass.
We had the last laugh. The laser link was part of the demo that the brass was there to observe. We were "rescued" from the grilling after about an hour, and allowed to get on with it. The security guys got a very public dressing-down from a rather technologically cluefull Colonel (in full dress) for wasting his time ... After we concluded the demo, the Colonel sent the security guys to get pizza for lunch and sat & ate with us, discussing the ins & outs of "modern" wireless (laser) networking.
Pics or it never happened?
Paris icon obviously.......
Hmm
Except those would have been entirely legal, consenting adults and all that. In the 90's only erect penises, penetration shots, children or animals would have got you put away. These days not even the erections or penetration. This was a significant over-reaction by the pointy heads. Inventing their own laws.
As a rule I always let the company know if I'm taking nudes to be developed or printed. It gives them an opportunity to pass on this job, or keep it away from any school leavers. (Yes, I'd have loved to see them when I was 16 but the law disagrees.) My local independent doesn't turn a hair though, seen it all over the decades. I take it as a badge of honour on the rare occasions that I manage to surprise her.