These are my friends Rose-Anne and James, waiting for me to setup lights to shoot Rose with.

An interesting night it was. James and I have been partners in crime on various projects over the course of many, many years, and our setup here with Rose was the result of a long, hot, wild evening. It started out ambitiously; at the time, as a designer for CHUM, James was tasked with all sorts of print and broadcast graphics projects, including one for Canadian network SexTV.

The goal: produce a short opening credits video introduction for a television show called Voyeur.

The idea: find a seedy 1970s-style motel room and take various still shots of a model that would be later stitched together in a pseudo stop-motion animated style video for the introduction.

James described the idea in detail to me and I knew Rose would be a perfect fit. After brief introductions, we hopped into my car, trunk brimming with photo gear, and set out on our mission to find a seedy motel room in Toronto’s southeast end. The night was hot and humid, sticky and sweaty. We stopped in to motel after motel, carefully scoping out each from the safety of the car, and sometimes venturing outside to get a better look at rooms and decor. Nothing fit the bill. We spent close to two hours, progressively driving further away from home, in search of the perfect wood-paneled motel interior. We decided to try one last place before turning back and coming up with an alternative plan. Our hopes were quickly dashed, however, when we pulled into a parking lot of a motel and saw a police car there. Thinking that this was a bad omen, I turned the car around and headed for the exit… only to have the cops pull in front of it and barricade us in the parking lot.

Uh oh.

Two cops got out and each went to opposite sides of my car. The blistering hot air poured in to the car as we rolled down the windows. Rose was sitting next to me in the passenger seat, and James was in the back. The barrage of questions began…

Where are you from? Why are you here? How do you know each other? Don’t you know how dangerous it is here? Why are you here? WHY ARE YOU HERE?

Rose was cool as a cucumber, having had a run-in or two with police on previous occasions. While I too had been questioned by cops before, I was still panicking a bit inside, though we’d done nothing wrong. Answering “why are you here?” proved more difficult than it should have. There was no easy way to explain that the two guys in the car were about to photograph a naked girl in a sleazy motel for a sex-based television network. I deftly handed the responsibility of explaining that to James, who did an admirable job — at which point they asked for his ID.

Uh oh. Now what?

The cops go back to their car to run the ID, leaving us to sit and wonder what horrible crime James has committed that will land him jail. Excruciating amounts of time go by before the cops return to the car and explain to us what’s going on. They were looking for a suspect and they had a photo. It was a white guy. Tall. Skinny. Shaved head. Named James. See photo above of James: white, tall, skinny, shaved head. Luckily not the same guy, but a close call all the same.

They let us go, but not without a stern warning, punctuated with some very colourful language, to never return to this motel. They then followed us for a couple kilometers to make sure we really were leaving.

Plan B? Go to the other end of the city where slightly less seedy motels were likely to be found. Another half-hour drive results in us being stuck in a traffic jam of epic proportions at 11pm. At this point, a good three or four hours after we started, the terrible trio admitted defeat and we sheepishly returned home.

Lo and behold — and why none of us realized it is still a mystery to this day — James had the perfect wood-paneling look already in his bedroom.

Sigh.