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What a weird investigation though. Sounds like they could have solved it by asking the photographer first, which they eventually did: > Finally, Spark contacte
by boulos 1y ago
What a weird investigation though. Sounds like they could have solved it by asking the photographer first, which they eventually did:
> Finally, Spark contacted Murray Close, the photographer who took the picture of Jack Nicholson that was inserted into the original image.
> The photographer revealed that "there was no such thing as the Warner Brothers photo archive [and] that was a complete mistake."
> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.
> The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine's Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.
- frereubu 1y agoI wonder if the "investigators" were subconsciously not that interested in actually solving the mystery, but were just enjoying the process. Can't remember what it was I was reading recently, but there was a character who deliberately did things the hard way, or in a convoluted way, because it satisfied something inside of him. Edit: It was this article about an orchid collector: https://www.susanorlean.com/articles/orchid_fever.html https://www.susanorlean.com/articles/orchid_fever.html
- notarobot123 1y agoAnyone who falls in love with Haskell can probably relate.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- e_y_ 1y agoHave you seen Adaptation (2002)? It has a wildly meta, fictionalized/comedic portrayal of Susan Orlean's book and the creative process of screenplay writing
- frereubu 1y agoYeah, such a great film.
- pierrec 1y agoSounds like a typical investigation to me. You go down a few rabbit holes which turn out to be dead ends, and eventually realize the solution was right under your nose this whole time (this may sound familiar if you've done enough debugging as well). I also suspect the solution wasn't as obvious as the article makes it seem. For sure it should be framed more as a group effort, but that's just the writing style being weird.
- actuallyalys 1y agoDepending on how work was divided up, it doesn’t seem like the photographer of Jack Nicholson would necessarily know where the image Nicholson was superimposed on came from, so I don’t blame them for not checking with him first.
- Al898989 1y agoNot quite as it was reported. First, the photo was said to be in the Warner Bros archive - repeatedly, including by Lee Unkrich, the doyen of Shining research - and my multiple attempts to find it failed. That was because it never existed... It had been said by the woman who did the retouching, so you'd expect her to know, but in fact, she didn't. Murray Close didn't take the photo, he took the photo of Jack Nicholson, so no reason at first to assume he knew. It's also difficult to contact such people - he's now a very successful photographer - and it took emails, messages to his instagram, his website, to get a reply to something I'm sure he thought was 45 year old trivia.
- boulos 1y agoThanks for replying! That's a good reason. Reporting is always hard, and of course, many things appear obvious in hindsight!