Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Investigative Reporting

I watched The Kids Are All Right last night and was reminded once again, of my crush on Annette Bening (I have even chopped off my hair like hers, on occasion).

Mr. C and I have often chatted about how much she resembles the Columbia Pictures logo, so I thought it was time to engage in a little investigative reporting.

The hypothesis: Columbia adopted Annette Bening's face for its logo in 1993.

The sniff: Bening's star illuminated particularly brightly just before 1993, with leads in The Grifters, Regarding Henry, and Bugsy.  Plus she had married Warren Beatty in 1992, which was kind of like claiming a torch (as in the logo).

Bening and Clyde?

The minimum info necessary to write this blog post:  Some external source that links Bening with the Columbia logo.

The research:  Columbia used a model, Jenny Joseph, for its 1992 logo: 


But Columbia's face was a computer composite.  Kind of like when ELLE ran a cover of its "perfect beauty" back in the 1990s, which was a computer-generated face.  Could Annette's features be part of this composite?

The findings: Apparently my hypothesis is an urban legend.  The 2000 film What Planet Are You From starring Bening and Garry Shandling riffed on this myth by superimposing Bening's face on the Columbia logo.  (I think I've even seen this film.)

But still: that "composite" description nags.  I'm not sure my investigative report is completely closed.  What do gentle readers think?

2 comments:

Academic Writer (a.k.a. A-Dubs) said...

I hadn't thought about it until now, but I'm leaning toward your composite theory (see what I did there?).

Also, I'll fight you for my lovely Annette.

Rabbi said...

Annette Bening? I thought she was Connie Nielsen, a friend of mine told me that she was Diane Lane (but I don't agree), check out Connie, here is a pic: http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsN/tve33777-25923-983.jpg