That time filmmakers scanned every inch of Kevin Bacon’s penis

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The film Hollow Man is perhaps best remembered for being a horror film in which Kevin Bacon plays a dickhead who turns invisible. An effect achieved by a laborious process which involved scanning every inch of the actor’s body including his big honking Bacon dong. 

As an aside it’s probably worth noting before we continue that the visual effects of Hollow Man, in particular the effects used to turn Bacon into a screaming skeleton man, were widely praised by critics and even earned the team behind them an Oscar nomination. Something that may have a lot to do with the fact that when filming began while the people in charge of the effects knew that what director Paul Verhoeven had in mind was theoretically possible to achieve with CGI, they had no idea how to actually accomplish anything in the script.

For example, Verhoeven insisted upon having Kevin Bacon physically present on set for every scene he was in, you know despite the fact that he was fucking invisible for like 90% of them. Kevin Bacon himself was reportedly kind of annoyed about this because he assumed that a movie in which he never appears on camera would be a pretty easy gig.

To work around this every single shot of the movie was filmed multiple times with there always being a “clean” master shot that mimicked the exact camera movements of the shots featuring actors. These shots had to be so precise that most every shot in the movie was filmed using a camera robot, the movements of which could be programmed down the millimetre.

The level of precision required for this meant that no shots could be altered without costing production tens of thousands of dollars. The trade off for this limitation being that the “clean” footage could be used to edit Kevin Bacon out of any scene he appeared in, provided he wore something the visual effects team could easily key out.

In addition to wearing the shadow costume shown above, Bacon, depending on the background, also had to wear a very similar green getup and another that was blue. With each being both incredibly uncomfortable (each costume required him to wear coloured contact lenses and dentures) and unflattering. The latter being a thing that was exacerbated by the fact Bacon had to assert dominance on the crew by T-Posing as he was scanned into a computer.

Now you may notice from that picture that Bacon is wearing underwear and in the final film, invisible Bacon’s dong was clearly visible in dozens of shots.

So what’s going on here? Well according to Verhoeven that is Kevin Bacon’s actual penis because the visual effects team scanned everything. With the director noting that they went as far to measure the thickness of Bacon’s fingernails to ensure that the digital, CGI monster man he turned into was as accurate and true to life as possible. Meaning they presumably also measured Bacon’s penis with the same level of accuracy and attention to detail in mind, which is, well, amazing, since we know men care about their penis a lot.

Now while you’d think Bacon would be embarrassed by his wang being so, well, out there, with their being rumours that he subtly requested they make his dick bigger for some shots, Bacon doesn’t really give a shit. In fact, the actor thinks it’s fucking hilarious that people paid actual money to see his wiener flopping around in infrared and has actively campaigned for more studios to put more big ol’ dongs into their movies. Arguing that it’s important for gender equality for men to be able to, we shit you not, free the Bacon.