Sammy grabbed the hard drive for him. “Thanks,” he said before tossing it carelessly onto the counter. He sat back down and continued drinking his coffee. The poorly paid production assistant stared at Sammy with wide eyes, shocked that we weren’t getting started right away. Very few people realize how quickly a team of professional colourists can colour a film. It only takes a day or two with a few highly trained individuals. But productions allocate weeks for the process, assuming each little clip has to be meticulously tinkered with.
The production assistant backed out of the office and began his long trek back down the forty flights of stairs. And God bless his soul.
“What’s this movie called?” Alex asked.
Sammy read the label on the hard drive box. “Dearly Beloved,” he said. “My guess is a rom-com.”
“Or just a rom,” said Alex. “They always want the same thing for roms: overexposed, desaturated, blues in the shadows, pinks in the highlights.”
“Sounds about right,” Sammy said.
I pulled out my phone to search the title of the movie, to see who the stars were—to see if there was anyone worth spending hours scouring the large hard drive for a nip slip shot. And there was one actress, second-billed, who could have been very valuable if there was any sort of wardrobe malfunction on set: Vanessa Klein.
She was a rising star, only twenty-one years old. She hadn’t been in anything huge yet, but a film she’d done recently had gotten some Oscar buzz. Most importantly, she was gorgeous, with big shining eyes and a cute little ski-jump nose. Her hair was long and curly like a country music star, and she had the classic Hollywood smile—a smile that marked her for inevitable fame.
While the guys were talking, I searched to see if she’d ever done any nude scenes in movies. As soon as an actress does a nude scene, nude photos are suddenly worthless. People want to see new material—not something they can get in HD on Netflix or Amazon Prime. But Vanessa Klein had never been nude on camera, and she had no nip slips to speak of on any of the gossip websites. She was clean and tidy, still extremely valuable as far as I was concerned.
“I may as well get started on getting things organized,” I said, grabbing the hard drive and starting towards my colouring suite.
“Oh look at you, go-getter on a Monday morning,” said Sammy with a chuckle.
“I would be in a perky mood all the time too if my uncle gave me a million dollars,” Alex said, rolling his eyes.
I just smiled and slipped into the edit suite, ready to find my next big paycheque.
First, I did a bit of actual work, setting up the files and the folders and getting everything properly imported from Avid, the program in which the film had been cut. I went through and labelled the files as necessary, just in case one of the other guys came in and looked over my shoulder. I didn’t want anyone to come in and see that I’d gotten nothing done after an hour in the colouring suite.
Once I had a believable amount of work done, I scrubbed through the timeline, to see what kind of wardrobes Vanessa and the other actresses wore in the film. There was nothing particularly racy—a few shorter skirts and a cute red bodycon dress. There was a sex scene that couldn’t have been more PG-13, shot in slow motion, lit as a silhouette, about as cliché as you can imagine. And Vanessa was wearing a shirt in the scene, so there wasn’t even a nipple silhouette to work with.
But I was determined to find something.
I exited Davinci and found myself searching through the massive hard drive. Sometimes they gave us hard drives with everything on them—not just footage, but pre-production materials as well. And this drive was no different. I found a folder labelled ‘Pre-Production Costumes’. And in that folder there were multiple other folders, all named after the characters in the movie. I found Vanessa’s folder, labelled ‘Christine Costumes’. The folder was filled with pictures of Vanessa standing in some chick’s apartment, wearing various different outfits—the same outfits that appeared in the film.
One time I found a picture of a famous actress wearing a slightly see-through white tank top in a costumes folder. I sold that photo for five thousand dollars—not a ton of money, but enough for my bathroom renovation.
But none of Vanessa’s pre-production costume pictures were worth anything to me: no nipples or slits or even any side-boob. I had to keep looking.
Alex came into the suite to check on me. “How does the movie look? Should I bring my kids to see it, or is it a piece of crap?” I quickly closed the folders and reopened Davinci.
“It looks okay. About what you would expect,” I said.
He leaned over my shoulder and looked at the screen. I scrubbed him through the timeline.
“Ah, classic slow motion sex scene,” he said. “And they’ve got the rain machine on full-blast for the flashback scenes. Nothing too original, eh?”
“Nothing terribly original, no,” I said. My heart fluttered as I noticed I’d left a folder open. The tab was still showing at the bottom of my screen, with the label ‘Christine Costumes’. I wanted to quickly close it, but I knew if I scrolled my cursor over to it, Alex would definitely notice. So I remained still. “What’s that?” he said.
“What’s what?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat.”
“Down at the bottom.”
He pointed down and my heart started pounding hard into my ribcage. We weren’t supposed to go perusing through the hard drives. There were no set rules against it, but it was just common sense: our job was to colour the film and then be done with it. If Alex saw that I was snooping around, he might realize that I was the one leaking photos to the press.
“That button there. It’s like a circle around a play icon. Is that new?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s to render out a clip. It’s new with the latest update.” My heart finally began to relax.
“Oh, that’s useful. Is there a hotkey for it, too?”
“Yeah. I think it’s shift, control, and R.”
“That’s great news. Good stuff. Alright, well, keep up the good work. Let me know if you need a coffee or anything.”
“Would you get me one if I said I needed one?” I asked.
He shook his head and laughed. “No,” he said. “But you’re still welcome to let me know.” He left the room, leaving me alone with that hard drive, and plenty of folders to continue searching through.
CHAPTER III
It was after lunch when I decided to get all of my real work done. I worked quickly and cut a few corners that no one would ever notice. At 4:00 PM, when Alex came in to ask if the hard drive was ready for him, I told him it wouldn’t be ready until the morning, even though it was perfectly ready in its current state.
“Okay, then I’m going to head home for the night. Don’t stay up too late. It’s just a crappy romance movie—no need to get too crazy with the labels.”
“Alright—have a good night,” I said. And once he was gone and the floor was empty save for me and that hard drive, I got started on the real search. I had to download the program that allowed me to view the RAW unedited footage. I had to download it freshly with every new hard drive, and then I had to delete it before letting anyone use the computer in the colouring suite. I couldn’t let my co-workers know that I was secretly watching clips that weren’t in the movie.
I made myself a nice, strong pot of coffee and I settled in, ready to spend the whole night. It took a long time to go through all of those clips, sometimes scrubbing through a single frame at a time, trying to see if there was a clear frame in between a leg cross. It was tedious work, but sometimes it paid off bigly. Sometimes a long night in that dark colouring suite was worth one hundred thousand dollars.
I focussed my energy on the scenes where Vanessa was wearing short skirts. Her tops were never too revealing, and I could see that the sound guys had her mic clipped to her shirt and not her bra. Sometimes when they clipped the microphones to the bra, they would have to adjust the bra from time to time, and sometimes th
ose adjustments happened while the camera was rolling. But I wasn’t so lucky this time.
There was one scene that particularly caught my interest: a simple scene with Vanessa running up a flight of stairs, away from the bad guy. In the scene, she stumbled halfway up. There were twelve takes of the low-angle shot, taken from the bottom of the steps. I scrubbed through each and every take. And it was on the twelfth take where I caught a glimmer of flesh tone between her lovely smooth legs.
I paused the footage and used the arrow keys on my keyboard to move one frame at a time. I had the footage zoomed in as much as I could. With 6K resolution, you can zoom in almost 10x before you start seeing pixilation.
She was wearing red panties, and she had a great ass. As she went to do her mid-steps tumble, her skirt floated upwards, showing off her whole tush. The shot was probably worth five thousand dollars, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk my position for a measly five thousand dollars. I wasn’t hurting for cash.
So I kept scrubbing forward. That skirt continued to flutter up, and then her legs parted as she went to catch herself from falling. I was still staring at that perfect ass—her asshole only being covered by the tiniest strip of red lace. I just wanted to bury my face between those glorious cheeks. I wanted to press my tongue into that asshole and make her squirm.
And then I went ahead three more frames and noticed a bit of flesh that seemed out of place. Slipping out from the side of her red panties was what looked like a cock. But it couldn’t have been a cock. It must have been some strange artifacting between frames. Surely Vanessa Klein didn’t have a cock.
I went two frames ahead, and then I got a perfect, clear shot of Vanessa Klein bent over, legs spread, and her cock free from the grasp of her red lacy panties. Her cock hung out one side of that thin red strip and one of her balls hung out the other side. But was it a prosthetic? Could it have been fake? I’d heard of actresses wearing prosthetic cocks before, in order to get into a certain kind of character. But Vanessa wasn’t playing some masculine tomboy. She was supposed to be some hopeless romantic, nail-painting girly girl.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It simply couldn’t be true.
I remembered there was a beach scene in the film, and in the scene Vanessa was wearing a tight one-piece. I quickly pulled up the footage from that scene and started digging. And it only too thirty minutes before I found a shot of her adjusting her package in her one-piece, shifting her bulge down between her legs. And there were a few more shots where a bit of a bulge was clear when zoomed in nearly ten times. I’d never seen a woman with a bulge like that—so it must have been true: Vanessa Klein had a cock.
I stood up and stepped back from my computer. My heart was pounding. If this was true, then that clip of the cock-slip was probably worth more than any other clip I’d ever sold. But if it wasn’t true, I was potentially playing a dangerous game. If she was just wearing a prosthetic for some strange reason, I didn’t want to start spreading false rumours.
I went to the Internet and searched for scenes from other Vanessa Klein movies. I found a bathing suit scene from a movie she did when she was eighteen. I watched the scene carefully, zooming in as much as I could (which wasn’t much, as the scene was only in 1080p). But even without the magic of 6K footage, I could see a bit of a bulge—a bulge that shouldn’t exist on a woman. So then I searched ‘Is Vanessa Klein transgender?’ but my search turned up nothing—not even ramblings on any conspiracy websites. This was big news—the biggest news I’d ever had.
I saved the video clip of the cock-slip to a thumb drive and I slipped that drive into my pocket. Then I deleted the RAW footage program and I closed down all of the folders I had open in my long night’s search. I had what I needed. I just wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it yet.
I couldn’t just send it to some dirty website. This wasn’t just a nip slip or even an upskirt shot—this was a big deal. This leak would surely change Vanessa’s life. A good chunk of her fan base would turn on her—many people still weren’t down with the whole transgender thing. She would be hounded on the streets by paparazzi. There were probably directors who would choose not to work with her.
But her secret was bound to be revealed sooner or later, was it not? She couldn’t live in the limelight forever trying to hide a bulge like that. And if it was going to inevitably be revealed anyway, why shouldn’t I go ahead and make a hundred thousand dollars or so?
That night I e-mailed a few of my secret contacts. “If I told you that I had proof that a very famous actress is actually a man, how much would you pay for that proof?” I made sure not to mention any names—not even the smallest hint.
I heard back from one of my contacts that night, around 3:00 AM. “That depends on how famous this actress is,” they said.
“Top fifteen on IMDb,” I said.
“If the proof is good, and it’s fresh news, we could pay you one-fifty.” He was talking in thousands. My stomach fluttered. A part of me was hoping he would say something like, ‘We’re not buying that kind of stuff right now’. Then I could have deleted the file and lived happily ever after, without any lingering guilt. But how could I turn down one hundred and fifty thousand dollars?
Within twenty-four hours, I had a slew of new offers from my contacts. There was a black market bidding war going on. The price rose to a quarter million, and that price would only go up once I proved that I wasn’t bluffing.
That price went up that next afternoon. I was working on another film in one of the smaller colouring suites when Alex came in and said, “You should come see this. That chick from that romance movie is on TV.” My heart started pounding. I was worried that someone beat me to the big reveal and the quarter million dollar payout.
But her secret was still safe. Vanessa had just been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. Her star rating on IMDb had shot up from fifteen to three. My heart was pounding viciously. I’d never been in a position like this before, about to make enough money to live for years. I was already daydreaming about what I could do with the cash: buy a vacation house, put it in savings so I would never have to worry about retirement in my life, buy a yacht, take five years off to travel the world… The possibilities were endless. And all I had to do was out a young transgender woman and ruin her career.
CHAPTER IV
I was sleeping when my doorbell rang. I was slow to wake up. My doorbell almost never rang. I lived in a gated community and they didn’t let solicitors or even Girl Guides in to go door-to-door. The only people who were allowed in were people who lived in the neighbourhood, or people who were on a very elite approved list.
The doorbell rang again, so I dragged myself out of bed. I threw a housecoat over my naked body and shuffled down to the front door. I looked through the peephole and was surprised to see the editor of Star Magazine—one of the magazines I often sold to. I swung the door open and rushed him inside. I couldn’t let anyone see him there. I couldn’t let anyone see the editor of a major gossip magazine at the door of a colourist’s house—then it would be obvious where all of the town’s leaks were coming from.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“You didn’t answer my e-mail,” he said.
“What e-mail?”
“The one I sent this morning.”
“What time is it?” I rubbed the sleep out from my eyes.
He showed me his watch. It was only 6:45 AM. “What the hell, man? What’s the big deal? What’s this all about?”
“Everyone’s gossiping about your gossip. We’re all trying to figure out who this star is. You’ve got a good track record for telling the truth. And if you say this girl is on IMDb’s top fifteen, then that only leaves five girls—and none of them look like dudes to me. Show me this proof of yours and I’ll make you a good offer—better than you’ll get from the other guys. I promise.”
“Can’t we do this later?” I asked.
“Every paparazzi is out stalking the five girls in IMDb�
�s top fifteen, trying to get upskirt shots. One of Ben’s guys even snagged Lady Gaga’s coffee cup while she was at a café last night. He’s getting it DNA tested, to see if there’s male DNA on the rim of the cup. The news is going to break any day now, if it’s true, and you’re going to lose your big opportunity. So what’s it going to be? Are you going to show me what you’ve got?”
“It’s too soon,” I said. “If this gets out now, everyone will know that the leak came from me. The drive has only been in the hands of maybe five guys.”
“A quarter million, if it’s true. We’ll pay in cash. I’ve got the money back at the office now. Just show me the stuff.”
My gut churned. “I was already offered a quarter mil. You’ll have to do better than that if I’m going to risk my whole career.”
“Three hundred—all in cash, all today. We’ll lie and say that our source was someone on set.”
“You know no one will believe that. Her agent is going to go straight to where the hard drive is now—at my office.”
I watched as the short, chubby editor’s eyes glimmered, as if he was suddenly thinking about breaking into my office to steal the hard drive.
“Don’t get any funny ideas. It took me days to find this scoop,” I lied. “If I find out that drive is missing, I’m selling what I have to Ben tonight.”
“Don’t make me beg,” he said to me, clasping his hands tightly together. “Three-fifty. That’s as high as I can go. Besides, what are you even going to do with that much money? Tell everyone that another rich uncle bit the dust? No one’s going to buy that.”
I opened my mouth to reply but words were slow to come out. “H—How do you know about that?” I asked.
“It’s my job to know about stuff like that. We have investigators all over town, twenty-four-seven—all ex-cops. I’ve got them on this case too. Your face is white. Don’t worry, man, I’m not going to throw you under the bus. You’ve been good to me and you’ll always be good to me, even if you don’t sell me this scoop. Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not trying to blackmail you. I just want you to know—the scoop is going to get out with or without you getting paid.”
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