Michael’s Photo Opportunity

Recently the UK newspaper, ‘The Mail’, published an article about Brett Ratner’s book ‘Hilhaven Lodge’, which reveals a collection of untouched, honest images of many world renowned celebrities, as you’ve never seen them before. The images have been captured by a 50’s photo booth, which is part of Brett Ratner’s personal memorabilia, located at his home Hilhaven Lodge. The most influential celebrity he has encaptured on film is Michael.

Brett Ratner states in the article that everyone photographed enjoys their images of the photo booth as it has; “An amazing lens that gives the pictures a great contrast, so they are always really good.

Also, “Brett Ratner is something of a partying Peter Pan.” But who is the celebrity he enjoys being in the company of most? Yep you got it in one … Michael!

“Michael’s a very good friend of mine, and I have hundreds of photo strips of him. But the ones in the book were taken the first time he used the photo booth. It wasn’t long after I had moved in and I still didn’t have much furniture in my bedroom, so everyone would hang out there. I was sitting in my room with a friend when the buzzer at the gate went. I didn’t look to see who it was and just buzzed them right in. Minutes later, Michael came bounding up to my room in one of his funny military uniforms and my friend was utterly speechless. In my bedroom I had this other great machine, a Scrobe-32-reels of film in it with classics such as Neil Sedaka singing, ‘Calendar Girl’ and some of my favourite directs playing all the films. The production values on there are archaic but fabulous.

So then we went down to the disco to play records and we walked past the photo booth. Michael jumped right in. I loved the frame where he sticks out his tongue out. No one has ever seen Michael like that before. You could take just that one frame and blow it up and it would make a fabulous picture.

Michael makes me laugh the most out of all my friends. He’s a real practical joker, always throwing water balloons.”

Source: The Mail on Sunday Magazine & MJWN