Making a biopic is tough, especially if the subjects aren’t exactly forthcoming with details and information. For Bombshell, the filmmakers wanted to accurately recreate the Fox News offices and studios but the company wanted nothing to do with the movie since it’s a pretty damning look at the sexual harassment allegations levelled at its old CEO Roger Ailes.
The solution? Foot fetish websites.
According to Bombshell production designer Mark Ricker (via The Hollywood Reporter), Fox News weren’t willing to play ball with the movie and the production crew were forced to rely on a range of unconventional sources in order to get the details he needed, such as “moles” inside Fox News, news footage, and whatever photos and employee selfies he could find.
As for where the foot fetish stuff comes in, it turns out female Fox News hosts’ feet are very popular among certain “fans” (particularly those of Megyn Kelly, who is played by Charlize Theron in Bombshell) and photos are constantly shared to foot fetish websites.
But what the production team were more interested in were the details of the surroundings in those foot fetish photos rather than Megyn Kelly’s feet, and this all helped Mark build a pretty damn good replica of the Fox News offices.
Seems like something positive has managed to come out of Ailes’ old thing of having female Fox News hosts wear towering stiletto heels in order to entice under-educated male American viewers.
Ricker admits all those hours browsing foot fetish websites (for work of course) my fly over the heads of the audience as “Ninety-eight percent of the people who see the movie aren’t going to know what the inner offices look like, but the other 2 percent of the audience will be the ones who worked there, and they will know.”
Bombshell is probably going to get a heap of Oscar buzz for Charlize Theron’s crazy-accurate turn as Megyn Kelly, but here’s hoping Mark and his production design team get an Oscar for their work because painstakingly building an accurate set using foot fetish websites as reference points is next level dedication to your craft.
And since this is an article about foot fetishes and movies, it’d almost be wrong to not include a Quentin Tarantino joke in here so here it goes: the Bombshell production designers probably called up Quentin and the conversation something along the lines of, “Hey Quentin? Mark here. Listen, I’m doing some research for this movie I’m working on – what was the name of that website you were always talking about until I asked you to stop? Yeah, that’s the one, thanks.”
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