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Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

What a weird investigation though. Sounds like they could have solved it by asking the photographer first, which they eventually did:

> Finally, Spark contacted Murray Close, the photographer who took the picture of Jack Nicholson that was inserted into the original image.

> The photographer revealed that "there was no such thing as the Warner Brothers photo archive [and] that was a complete mistake."

> Instead, Close had sourced the original photo from the BBC Hulton Photo Library in London, now part of Getty Images.

> The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine's Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.

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Sounds like a typical investigation to me. You go down a few rabbit holes which turn out to be dead ends, and eventually realize the solution was right under your nose this whole time (this may sound familiar if you've done enough debugging as well). I also suspect the solution wasn't as obvious as the article makes it seem. For sure it should be framed more as a group effort, but that's just the writing style being weird.

Depending on how work was divided up, it doesn’t seem like the photographer of Jack Nicholson would necessarily know where the image Nicholson was superimposed on came from, so I don’t blame them for not checking with him first.

Not quite as it was reported. First, the photo was said to be in the Warner Bros archive - repeatedly, including by Lee Unkrich, the doyen of Shining research - and my multiple attempts to find it failed. That was because it never existed... It had been said by the woman who did the retouching, so you'd expect her to know, but in fact, she didn't. Murray Close didn't take the photo, he took the photo of Jack Nicholson, so no reason at first to assume he knew. It's also difficult to contact such people - he's now a very successful photographer - and it took emails, messages to his instagram, his website, to get a reply to something I'm sure he thought was 45 year old trivia.

Thanks for replying! That's a good reason. Reporting is always hard, and of course, many things appear obvious in hindsight!

I wonder if the "investigators" were subconsciously not that interested in actually solving the mystery, but were just enjoying the process. Can't remember what it was I was reading recently, but there was a character who deliberately did things the hard way, or in a convoluted way, because it satisfied something inside of him.

Edit: It was this article about an orchid collector: https://www.susanorlean.com/articles/orchid_fever.html

Anyone who falls in love with Haskell can probably relate.

Have you seen Adaptation (2002)? It has a wildly meta, fictionalized/comedic portrayal of Susan Orlean's book and the creative process of screenplay writing

Yeah, such a great film.

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