No film has consistently churned out more double take worthy pieces of movie news over the past two and a half years than Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. To this point, my favorites have involved hiring a second unit to film body doubles having real sex in order to get some penetration shots to splice into the final cut and settling on O-Faces as the recurring theme for the first series of character posters. But wait! Just months before the film’s release date, a dark horse has suddenly emerged out of nowhere to steal the most absurd Nymphomaniac-related subplot crown away from the other contenders.
Apparently, Shia LaBeouf emailed producers a picture of his penis. That’s right. Let’s expand on that a little bit to make sure the full story really sinks in here. Shia LaBeouf took out a camera (maybe the one on his phone, maybe not), took off his pants and snapped a picture of his dick. Then, after deciding said picture was good enough (maybe he took multiple?), he emailed the X-rated snapshot to producers so they could look at it, I guess to make sure it was big enough or didn’t have any weird marks or something. Regardless, Anthony Weiner is out there somewhere nodding his head in approval.
I’ll let LaBeouf himself give you the background, via his interview with Zentropa Productions…
"The first info we got - and I'll never forget this because my entire team reacted with such a fear - the first request on the production end, not from Lars... was pictures of my penis... Lars goes, 'Alright... Send him the (offer) letter'. The letter was, 'Are you game?' I guess the first test was, 'Let's time how long it takes this motherfucker to send his dick over the Internet.' It was like 20 minutes. So they were like, 'All right, (the) kid's ready."
Look: there are a lot of reasons to hate LaBeouf, most of which involve him being a pretentious douche with a big mouth and plagiarism impulses, but my God, the man is wiling to try things. He just jumps into the deep end and goes for it. Want him to try acid? He’s down. Want him to email over a picture of his wang? Yeah, he’s on board, even if he doesn’t quite know what the hell you might need it for. And in an age where everyone is so fucking politically correct and unwilling to go out on a limb, that character trait is actually kind of refreshing.
That being said, if anyone asks me for pictures of my penis, I’m probably going to ask some follow-up questions.
