Flashback Friday - Aloha Halo

Since I'm temping at Universal today, it only seems appropriate to share a Universal story.

While in my working days, I sat in the corner cube near a small lobby and a hallway (where strangers were always getting lost and asking me for directions...yep! strangers like Michael Vartan and Vince Vaughn. It was actually fun to sit there) So one day, in walked Mr. Halo. He came and sat in my lobby, just chilling. So I sat down next to him to find out the details of his crazy get-up and take a stupid picture, of course: For those females reading, HALO is a popular video game, or at least it was a few years ago. And what video game shouldn't be made into a movie these days? Hmmm.

So on this day, CAA decided to shop it's HALO script to all the movie studios at the same time, giving every studio a fair chance at it (aka: create a buzz, start a bidding war, and sell for big money) To up the excitement, CAA hired a bunch of guys dressed in these HALO outfits to be official script messengers. In costume, our HALO man handed the script to a Uni Exec who had to read it right then (normally we take a day or so to read and cover material). No photocopies could be made and HALO man had to sit and wait in the lobby till all interested Execs were done reading the script, and then return to CAA headquarters with the goods. Hollywood is hilarious and far too self-congratulatory for it's own good.

But here's where the story gets interesting (to me at least...)

So I chatted with Mr. HALO for a bit and then took the following picture, capturing all his alluring green goodness. My mantra paid off: ALWAYS have your camera on-hand!

I then emailed the picture to a few other assistants around the office, just for fun. One of the guy assistants thought it was hilarious (as any post- frat boy would) and decided to email it to some of his industry friends (other assistants at other studios/agencies) and eventually, the picture ended up on defamer.com. We all had a good laugh about it. My little picture from my little camera had made it on a public website!

Well, the next day as we sauntered into work and grabbed the morning trade magazines for our bosses, guess what was on the front page of Variety magazine?? (not the actual cover from that day)

My HALO picture! Right there on their front page story. Hilarious! Not as exciting as having my own face in Variety but it was just weird to think that something from my dumb camera made it through the information superhighway and onto some Variety editor's desk. Funny.
Friends at work told me I needed royalty rights for use of my image. I didn't really care. Mostly I thought it was a funny story. But after much proding from other assistants, I gave Variety a call about the picture. They acted aloof about it all and then compromised by saying they'd print my name in Variety the next day, citing me as Photographer of the picture.

So there you go. A stupid and fun story from my days working in the biz. Funny adendum to it all...Universal ended up buying the script. That's right folks. Can't wait till it comes out, right?? For the first year of ownership we were not allowed to refer to the project as HALO but had to call it "Alaho" for secret security purposes. Hey Hollywood, you're not as important as you think you are. But then again, you may be thinking the same thing about my stupid little tale...