We’ve all seen them: Will Bloom (Billy Crudup)'s high school graduation picture on the wall in Big Fish, Melanie Ralston (Bridget Fonda)'s “roller girl” picture on top of the TV from when she was 14 in Jackie Brown.
In both of these examples (and countless others), we see pictures of the characters dated several years before the movie takes place (not to mention all the yearbook pictures we see).
But it’s always made me wonder: Do actors ever bring pictures of their own childhood to use in films? One the one hand, it seems impractical to ask Albert Finney to dig up pictures from his past. On the other hand, it seems cheaper than either faking the pictures now, or hiring younger lookalikes.
No cites available right now, but I know that quite a few movies and TV shows have used pictures of the actors when they were younger. They have gotten them from the actors or their families.
There’s a scene in Ghost World where Thora Birch’s Enid character is looking through a photo album she let Becky borrow. I believe those are real pictures of Thora Birch when she was younger.
In Contact there’s a shot somewhere of Ellie’s graduation picture. In reality it was Jodie Foster’s graduation picture from Yale, I think (or was it Harvard that she went to?).
I have this vague memory of seeing a “making of” special for some movie where in passing the director mentioned that his production staff had used a de-aging program (like what cops do to predict what missing children look like when older but in reverse) and Photoshop to create pictures of the leads together as children and younger adults. Can’t remember the movie or the director, how’s that for vague?
On an episode of Babylon 5, wherein the Earth news agency did a piece on the life of President Sheridan, they used several old photos of Bruce Boxlightner, and boy did they stick out like beaten-to-a-bloody-pulp thumbs! I recall a black and white Olan Mills shot of Boxlightner as a grade schooler circa 1960 with a little buzz cut and a very period shirt, Boxlightner on horseback from about 1970 with bell-bottom jeans, a t-shirt and long hair parted in the middle falling past his shoulders, etc.
Earlier in the series they had used photos of his and Half-Pint’s wedding (when she played his “deceased” wife) with the background blurred/painted over.
I know that in Quantum Leap they used pictures of Dean Stockwell (who played Al) when he was younger, for more than one episode. Of course they had a lot of pictures to choose from, since Stockwell was a child star (and also worked as a young adult/adult).
There’s a not-so-good movie with Jamie Gertz and Martha Plimpton (well, it’s not a bad movie, but it’s more of a disease-of-the-week TV sorta thing). I think it’s called Silence Like Glass in which they are both cancer patients in a hospital. Plimpton refers often to her boyfriend who does NOT make an appearance in the film, and at one point shows Gertz a photo. It was a picture of Plimpton and River Phoenix, her then-boyfriend in real-life.
In the film K-PAX, there is a shot of the Kevin Spacey character’s high school yearbook, and it’s really Kevin’s high school graduation photo that is used.
In In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood plays a Secret Service agent who was on duty the day Kennedy was shot. The movie features newspaper clippings of the scene, including Eastwood. The image of Eastwood in the newspaper photos was taken from Dirty Harry (or one of the sequels).
Huh. If you look at the young adult Dean Stockwell image gallery you’ll see this image: http://members.tripod.com/dean_stockwell2/images/mia.jpg (copy and paste it into browser window, I don’t think Tripod allows direct links). This is a picture from Quantum Leap. That’s one of the ones I was thinking of.
This is slightly different, but in the 1999 film The Limey, there are flashbacks of Terence Stamp’s character which are actually scenes from the 1967 film Poor Cow which Stamp was in.
In his last movie, Terrible Joe Moran, James Cagney played an aging former boxer. In a scene where he was supposedly watching a film of one of his fights, they used footage of a fight scene from an earlier movie where a young Cagney played a boxer.
In Big Fish, sure (It happened to be the movie in the DVD player when I started the thread). After I hit “submit,” I thought that may not have been the best choice.
