This website was not my idea. Honest. I started chasing down Prochnow movies as a form of stress therapy and enjoyed them so much that I sent out e-mails about them, and (I still don't understand this) started getting lots of e-mails back about them. Many were unprovoked. Most notably some of that poetry. Ye gods!
You can blame the website on Rob and Carl - Rob for saying he hoped I was saving all this stuff because it ought to be published (well, of course I was saving it), and Carl for saying repeatedly that it ought to go on the net. We all work at the same place, though we're scattered among several different departments. I don't know what this is doing for anyone else, but to me there's nothing quite as envigorating as receiving a dull work-related e-mail with the phrase "Jürgen knee-deep in the Amazon River, spanking an anaconda" at the bottom of it.
The pictures were a necessity. Websites need graphics, and while there was considerable discussion about fancy backgrounds, clip art and rotating widgets, there was really only one viable option as far as the approach was concerned: use the movies themselves.
After I got the new CPU with the video board (thanks, Marv!), I locked myself in the house to play with the thing and get all this stuff done. I'm off work as I write this, and I sure will be glad to get back to the office and have a rest... if Marv and Dave haven't killed the parsers while I've been gone and I don't have six hundred e-mails from Linda asking what the hell happened to her data.
Lots of people kindly kept me in touch with the next best thing to reality by e-mailing me often, and also kindly did not slay me for e-mailing lots of Prochnow pictures to them. Although a couple of them threatened to.
I also got many heartfelt thanks from a whole lot of people and numerous requests for more pictures. They love Jürgen out there.
About five days into the project someone asked what it felt like, making pictures of Jürgen Prochnow for hours on end. I sent back a perfectly rational explanation of what I was doing and how far I'd gotten. Four days later I sent this during the photographing of DAS BOOT:
"I just finished the first cassette, so there's still an hour and a half left to go... and I never thought I'd say this, but I'm sick to death of looking at Jürgen Prochnow. (Well, dammit, half the movie is closeups of him. I hate Wolfgang Petersen's guts.)"
They called me a blasphemer for that, but they forgave me after I got the one of Jürgen trying to choke the life out of Madonna.
Sometimes I listened to the dialog while going through the films on the computer, but most often I turned the sound off, put a CD on the stereo, hit the "repeat" button, and left it to play over... and over ... and over... and over. I rarely even changed the CD from one day to the next (I don't have a fancy player - it can only handle one measly disc), and as far as I'm concerned Jürgen's official theme music is now either Louis Gottschalk's "La Jota Aragonesa" or Adeline Shepherd's "Pickles and Peppers," whichever Jürgen prefers. And if Jürgen doesn't like either one, that's okay. Neither do I any more.
Do I have any regrets? Absolutely. Once when I was about to do a film that Jürgen wasn't in very much, I did something I still can't believe: turned the sound off and put a Jürgen video on the television, thinking I was going to watch it during the non-Prochnow portions of the tape I was looking at on the computer.
Lest you think this is leading up to a "too much Jürgen" crack, it isn't. I did get sick of it at one point, but I kept going and developed immunity. After what I've been through, my whole house could be wallpapered with Jürgen pictures and it wouldn't do a thing to me one way or the other.
But as it turned out, the movie I was working on kept me too busy to watch television. I only looked up once during the whole thing to see what was going on... and when I did see it, the thought that popped into my head was, "Oh, that damn shirt!"
And that's what I regret: losing my innocence. I'll never again be able to watch a Prochnow movie in quite the same way I used to, and I'll miss that.
The hardest movie to do - not counting fiddling around with color problems - was THE MAN INSIDE. There are so many terrific shots in it that not being able to use all of them really smarts.
The nicest surprise was ROBIN HOOD: THE MOVIE. I had no idea that one was going to yield such good photos.
The biggest blast to take photos from was probably INTERCEPTOR. That film is a monument to the art of Jürgenism. Whoever did his hair and dressed him in purple and black deserves a 21-gun salute.
And my guilty favorite for Jürgen photos?...TRIGGER FAST.
Just shoot me.
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