I knew Gloria was trouble the first time I laid eyes on her. She was spread
across the battered leather recliner in my office like it belonged to a
movie producer, and she was giving me the whole casting couch come-on. The
sob story she told me didn't make sense, but I let her talk. She was some
actress, only this wasn't really her natural role. I had her figured for
faithful wife, not good girl gone bad. Turned out she was really doing bad
girl gone worse. I took the case, something about finding her friend. The
twenty in my pocket burned all the way to the bar. The bourbon it bought
burned all the way home.
I only have the one room, and most of my life is in the office, but even the
bourbon couldn't convince me that I'd left it quite such a mess. I don't
know what I expected to see when I flicked on the light switch, but I guess
Gloria handcuffed on my bed wasn't top of the list. She must have headed
here right after leaving my office, place to hide she said. Hadn't fooled
the hard boys any, they knew I'd be straight to the bottle. She said they
figured I'd already got it, because she'd been to my office yesterday, even
though I wasn't there she'd stayed for ten minutes, maybe I would have
showed. This was going to be a long, hard, nasty case.
Hywel's note: this was a completely experimental shoot, and I figured if I
got three useable shots from the whole set it would have been fun to try. I
just wanted to try to reproduce some of the complex feel of Film Noir, and
particularly the portraits of Film Noir stars like Veronica Lake taken by
Horst P. Horst. I thought I'd just about got the lighting sussed, but I
needed a model who would really understand what I was after and who could
really try for the look. There wasn't really even a choice to make: Kate's
name was all over this set. It got better- she'd been doing Film Noir at
college! Off she went, figured out how the did the make-up, how the look
worked, the whole shebang! That such an experimental set turned out so well
I attribute in equal parts to luck with the lighting and luck in finding
such a brilliant model. Thanks Kate you're one in a million!
I've played around with these more than usual in post processing, and some
of them are probably a bit over-sharp and hence not as flattering as they
could be. Still, I hope you'll agree they are out of the ordinary and very
eye-catching.
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