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SPEAKER_08: My mom, a huge Jane Austen fan, took a page from her favorite author and set her first romance during the Regency period in England. So around 1812. The plot involves two people who start out as friends, Cass and Adam, and get engaged because Adam needs a reason not to marry someone that his family wants him to marry. Cass and Adam aren't in love and they don't necessarily plan on actually getting married. But then... They start to fall for each other. And of course there are many, many obstacles in their path which they have to overcome.
SPEAKER_05: That is, of course, my mom. I'm Pam Mingle. I am the writer of six published books, four of which are romances.
SPEAKER_08: In 2015, a small publisher called Entangled bought my mom's first romance manuscript. They decided on the title A False Proposal. And eventually they also came up with a cover design for the book, which they showed my mom.
SPEAKER_05: I believe they sent me, yes, they sent me an email that had the cover attached and said, isn't this a beautiful cover? And we love it. And we hope that you will.
SPEAKER_08: Well, what did you think when you saw it?
SPEAKER_05: I thought it was lushly romantic, I guess is what you could say. I think I was a little startled by the, you know, the bending backwards and the very sort of dramatic pose. I didn't necessarily expect that, but I thought it was beautiful and I love the colors.
SPEAKER_07: The cover of the book is a deep purpley blue background, and it probably features an image of a man and a woman dressed in ballroom clothing. The man is clutching the woman's thigh, kind of pulling her leg up toward his hip and leaning her backwards, almost like he's laying her onto a bed. Their eyes are closed and their mouths are almost touching.
SPEAKER_08: The first time I saw this cover, I guess I was a little embarrassed. Like I knew my mom had written a romance. I'd even read the manuscript, but I didn't realize it was going to have a cover like this. And what do you remember my reaction being? Well, I was, we were in the car somewhere. Your dad was driving and I was relating a story of a friend of mine who had just said to me,
SPEAKER_05: wow, that book looks like a real bodice ripper. And generally romance writers don't like to have their books called bodice rippers. It just has all these connotations that romance writers don't like, one of which is sort of rape, you know. And I was relating this conversation to you and your dad. And then you said, I don't remember exactly what you said, but it was something like, well, why do you have covers like that if you don't want people to think that? Oof. Okay. I don't remember saying that exact thing. But here's what I was thinking about the cover.
SPEAKER_08: I thought it was corny and it didn't do justice to the strong writing and complicated characters inside the book. And also, yeah, I thought the dynamic, the dominant man, the submissive woman was old fashioned and kind of heteronormative. I don't recall exactly what I said that day in the car, but I do remember registering that I'd hurt my mom's feelings. I remember just going completely quiet and not even responding to what you said because it really upset me.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I'm sorry. I forgave you long ago for that.
SPEAKER_08: My mom may have forgiven me, but I still hadn't sorted it out. Like, was her cover and others like it sending out signals that I just didn't like or speaking a language I didn't speak? It all made me want to understand these covers better, where they came from and why my reaction to them was so negative. I think a good place to start with all of this might be what even is romance?
SPEAKER_10: Hi, my name is Sarah MacLean and I'm a romance novelist. Someone told me I should talk to Sarah MacLean about romance covers and the history of the genre more generally.
SPEAKER_08: That's why I reached out to her. And I swear I only learned after the fact that she had written a romance novel based on a 99% invisible episode. I've been listening to 99% invisible forever, like forever. It was the perfect security episode.
SPEAKER_10: Episode 160. It's about lockpicking and designing an unpickable lock. When Sarah heard it, she had an idea for the heroine of her next novel.
SPEAKER_10: I was like, oh my God, she's going to be a lockpick. I sort of put together this whole plan of like how this lady lockpick would pick an unpickable lock because of you. Anyway, Sarah says that the genre people call romance, the one my mom was writing in, it's always had a basic pact with the reader.
SPEAKER_08: I'm going to take you on this wild ride and there will be massive highs and massive lows, but at the end, they live happily ever after.
SPEAKER_10: The happily ever after, or HEA, if you want to sound in the know, has always been a distinguishing feature of the genre.
SPEAKER_08: And by this definition alone, you could argue that someone like Jane Austen was basically a romance novelist, and some people do. But Sarah believes the modern era of romance really started in the 1970s with a woman named Kathleen Widewis. And she described herself as a Midwestern housewife. She lived with a husband who read adventure novels, and she would read the adventure novels that came into the house with him.
SPEAKER_10: And at one point she said, well, I don't understand why none of these have a woman as the adventurer at the center of the stories.
SPEAKER_08: So Kathleen Widewis sat down and wrote one. It was called The Flame in the Flower, and it was a romantic adventure story with a female protagonist. And it had something else, something that would become another distinguishing feature of the genre.
SPEAKER_10: She has sex on page, and real sex, she has like sex and achieves orgasm on page in like long form.
SPEAKER_08: I mean, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy could never. But The Flame in the Flower was also deeply problematic.
SPEAKER_07: In The Flame in the Flower, the hero rapes the heroine four times in the first 100 pages of the book.
SPEAKER_10: And the heroine in her own POV, her own point of view, names it rape, calls him a rapist, loathes him for the act, punishes him for the act, and granted by the end, marries him and lives happily ever after with him, which is problematic in 2021. But it wasn't 2021.
SPEAKER_08: It was 1972. And whatever was happening in that book, it didn't keep people from buying it. It sold 2.3 million copies in its first few years on the market.
SPEAKER_10: Publishers were like, wait a second, women buy books? The floodgates were open and a lot of books similar to The Flame in the Flower hit the market.
SPEAKER_07: That is, historical romantic adventure stories that often included sexual violence.
SPEAKER_08: There was a lot of non-consensual ripping of bodices in those early books, hence the term bodice-ripper, which obviously the genre continues to be saddled with to this day. But Sarah says even though there was rape in these books, they can't be completely dismissed and they aren't even necessarily anti-feminist. One thing about romance that's been true from the very beginning of the genre is that the women are always the heroes of their own stories.
SPEAKER_10: The heroines take action and claim their happiness. These books were the only place where women could see themselves and see the trauma that women in the world often have to deal with on the page and then also see themselves in triumph and in hope and in happiness and love. Like these are powerful subversive ideas. Subversive ideas packaged with over-the-top sexy covers.
SPEAKER_07: As the 70s rolled into the 80s, you really see the classic romance cover come into being.
SPEAKER_08: You know the ones, like my mom's cover, but even sexier. A man and a woman, his abs glistening, her hair blowing in the wind. They're locked in a passionate embrace.
SPEAKER_10: The 80s were the heyday of the half-nude painted men, women with their bodices sort of half off and gravity-defying hair. This type of cover became so ubiquitous in the romance genre that it got a name.
SPEAKER_08: The clinch. Clinch is an interesting word.
SPEAKER_07: It can mean to secure something like they clinched the deal. But the second definition comes from boxing. You know that thing that boxers do when they hug each other? That's called clinching. It's basically to keep your opponent from hurting you. Fighters clinch and on romance covers, lovers also clinch. In the 1980s, no one was doing a more epic clinch on her covers than the author, Joanna Lindsay.
SPEAKER_08: She was the biggest name in romance during this time.
SPEAKER_10: In 1985, Joanna Lindsay published a romance called Tender is the Storm.
SPEAKER_08: And the cover is really a sight to behold. It's by an illustrator named Robert McGinnis. And it's a painted image of a man and a woman in a clinch. They're outside in some sort of desert landscape. And the man is 100 percent naked. He's fully nude and like backed into some sort of sage bush or something.
SPEAKER_08: The man's nether parts are conveniently hidden by the woman who's collapsed against his body in a full swoon. Like she's completely limp and literally appears to be unconscious.
SPEAKER_10: She's just lost to him. I mean, just ravished by him. The man on this cover looks kind of like Clark Kent with short, wavy dark hair.
SPEAKER_07: But Joanna Lindsay would soon introduce the world to a blonde model who would become forever and ever till death do them part married to the genre of romance. So Fabio was on most of Joanna Lindsay's covers during this time period.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, he was on many other covers, too, but he was the hallmark of a Joanna Lindsay cover. You know, he was a big guy and he was a very nice and gentle person.
SPEAKER_08: This is an illustrator named Max Ginsberg, who worked with Fabio a few times in his career. The way covers were made back in the 80s was that models like Fabio would pose for a photo shoot and then an illustrator like Max would render that photo into a painting, adding in new backgrounds like a beach or a meadow. But Max was there in the photo shoots, too.
SPEAKER_02: I was sitting there like the director in a movie, you know, hold the girl a little more firmly or a little more tenderly or whatever, you know, and we'd have a procedure a little bit like Norman Rockwell had where you would trace the images from the photographs. And then once you did that, then you would start to paint.
SPEAKER_08: Max says he never understood why Fabio became such a big thing. I thought that actually, I don't think he was much of an actor.
SPEAKER_02: You know, he didn't he didn't know exactly how to project themselves. He was just a big overpowering looking guy. But for some reason, he made it he made it big.
SPEAKER_07: In some ways, though, in being a rather automotive brute, Fabio was getting his role exactly right. If you read the books of the 70s and early 80s, heroes are impenetrable.
SPEAKER_10: They are blank slates of just kind of intense masculine pride and arrogance, and they lack a capacity for emotion and for feeling and they're ciphers.
SPEAKER_08: In any case, Fabio and other hyper masculine men in passionate embraces with their leading ladies were plastered all over romance covers in the 1980s. And wrapping the books in these covers, really, it did two things, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_10: One, it said, this is the book you're getting, right? You're going to get a woman who is, you know, in touch with her sexual identity and in touch with her pleasure and the center of the story. And she's going to triumph at the end and you'll be able to read this and explore safely your own fantasies. And also, the cover said, men keep out. This isn't for you, which both increased the likelihood that women would buy these books and also increased the level of disdain that society started to have for these books. Because if they're for women, then surely they can't have value.
SPEAKER_08: You can hear the contempt that the larger culture had for romance in this episode of Nightline from the 1980s. The segment is one part news about the success of the genre and one part unsolicited lecture.
SPEAKER_04: These products have about as much to do with classical literature as Big Mac's has to do with three star French cooking. But of course, not everybody likes rich, sophisticated food. So if William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway gives you heartburn, then these books could just be your meat. Here's one for Nightline in Washington.
SPEAKER_03: When we return, we'll talk live with two women who make their living off romance novels and understandably think there's more to the genre than titillating trash. And later, I'll look at some of the historic accomplishments this week aboard the space shuttle Challenger.
SPEAKER_06: Oh, yikes.
SPEAKER_08: Through the years, people like Ted Koppel and his correspondent and God, I guess maybe me have found lots of reasons to look down on romance. Romance is formulaic, predictable, badly written. The genre is very used to being judged on the whole.
SPEAKER_10: Julia Quinn, who wrote Bridgerton, one of the things that she says a lot and I think is really valuable is other genres get judged on the very best of their writing. And romance gets judged on the very worst of it. Often, you know, romance gets dinged for so many unfair things that I think are almost entirely related to patriarchy.
SPEAKER_08: Did I not respond well to romance and romance covers because of straight up sexism? I mean, that feels possible. I'm not dismissing it. But I think also maybe through most of my life growing up as a queer person, I just didn't see myself in those clinches. And I wasn't the only one who didn't. It was usually white couples on the cover. This is Nicole Perkins. She writes about pop culture, hosts a podcast called This Is Good For You, and is a longtime reader of romance, even though as a young black person in the 1980s, she also didn't see herself in the covers. And what I would do is I would stay away from blonde people.
SPEAKER_09: If there were blonde people on the cover, I did not pick those up. And so I picked up, I would pick up the covers with dark haired white people because I would pretend that they were black and just very fair skinned.
SPEAKER_08: In 1974, a writer named Ann Shockley put out a lesbian interracial romance called Loving Her. But you'd have had a hard time finding it in any mainstream bookstores. And then in 1980, a black editor at Dell named Vivian Stevens published a few black heterosexual romances. But by and large, the genre was white and straight. And the early black romances tended to be a little more chaste.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, if I recall correctly, sex seemed to be more alluded to because I remember that was also part of my frustration with the early black romances that I read. You know, I was a preteen and then an adolescent, so I wanted the good stuff. But then came the author, Beverly Jenkins.
SPEAKER_07: She was definitely a big deal.
SPEAKER_08: Beverly Jenkins is black and she writes deeply researched historical romances featuring black characters. And while her sex scenes in those early books weren't extremely explicit, they weren't completely hidden behind a closed door either. She also gave the world the first truly steamy clench cover featuring black characters. And she kept going book after book with black people in passionate embraces on the covers. To see those covers, I mean, obviously at the time, people were still kind of teasing women for reading romances and things like that.
SPEAKER_09: But it was still also a point of pride to be able to showcase a book with black people in these kind of very intimate, expressive embraces that were clearly indicating there's some physical intimacy here. And somebody is going to be, you know, kissed along their spine at some point.
SPEAKER_08: Over the next couple of decades, romance would continue to change with the times. Rape scenes disappeared almost entirely. The women in the books got more assertive and the men got in touch with their emotions. And although the industry would remain predominantly white and straight, it's not nearly as white and as straight as before, which means the clench cover has been claimed by more and more kinds of people.
SPEAKER_10: I'm thinking about Cat Sebastian's books. Cat Sebastian's romances are often about queer characters and feature those characters in very classic looking clinches on the cover.
SPEAKER_10: There's something so awesome about seeing the clench, but queer, right? Yes. This is our time for the clench to be owned by everyone, because there's no doubt that obviously the clench is exclusionary for, was exclusionary for many, many years.
SPEAKER_07: The style of the clench covers has changed, too. The images aren't rendered into paintings anymore. They're photographs, albeit photographs that have been worked over in Photoshop. Abs have never had more definition. Covers aren't all clinches anymore, either.
SPEAKER_08: There are lots of variations. Like now you might just have a single figure on the cover, like a man in a kilt with his shirt off or a woman in a dress throwing you a sultry glance over her shoulder. There are lots of kinds of covers, probably because there are so many kinds of romances. There are Scottish Highlander romances and Amish romances. There are thrillers and vampires and shapeshifters. And romance readers are plowing through these books as fast as publishers can get them on the shelves.
SPEAKER_10: Romance readers are voracious. We read, on average, 10 to 12 books a month.
SPEAKER_08: Notice the universal we in that sentence. That's because romance readers and writers really are kind of a big community that goes to conferences and meetups and has a surprising amount of kinship. And, you know, also a bit of infighting and controversy. But a kinship nonetheless with a shared language, some of which is coded in the covers themselves. If you show me or any romance reader a series of covers, they'll be able to tell you like that's a paranormal, that's a medieval, that's a regency, that's a contemporary rom-com.
SPEAKER_10: Nicole Perkins is particularly good at this game.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so when I see a bare-chested man, like maybe his face isn't even in the shot, it's just torso, I know that it's going to be a fairly steamy romance.
SPEAKER_09: And if it's like a blue background, the hero is some kind of law enforcement or a military person or, you know, something like that. And then the green background or a yellow background or like kind of a goldish, then I know there's probably going to be some sort of paranormal element to it. Like maybe he's some kind of werewolf or weretiger.
SPEAKER_08: And that's just some of the signaling for paranormal and contemporary romances. For historicals, Nicole says it can be a little trickier to figure out what you're getting.
SPEAKER_09: What I have found, and again it's not foolproof, but I have found that if there is like, if the cover is lavender or a lot of purple or some very deep blues, then there's going to be some explicit sex or, you know, something that's really kind of steamy. Well, it's funny you should say that because my mom's first romance novel actually has a purpley blue cover.
SPEAKER_08: When I think about what a book cover is supposed to do, it feels like generally the answer is like get people like me to pick it up and maybe buy it. But I had this realization talking to Nicole and Sarah. The covers aren't necessarily trying to appeal to me, Katie Mingle, an outsider to the genre. I feel like part of what you're saying is that like romance covers, they're not trying to get me to read them exactly. They're trying to get all the people who are already in this genre to sort of choose this particular one. Yes, the cover doesn't have to say like, hey, what's in here is also smart and feminist and thoughtful.
SPEAKER_10: Because romance readers already know that.
SPEAKER_10: It just has to say, you love most of the other books that have covers like this, so try this one too. But the target audience for romance covers might be changing.
SPEAKER_10: In the last decade, illustrated covers have become more prevalent.
SPEAKER_08: OK, so not to be confused with those classic covers that were paintings of real people. In an illustrated cover, the figures are much more cartoonish and abstract, like something you'd see in a graphic novel. The vibe is more cute than sexy, and they've become more and more popular. For example, a book like Beat Trade by Emily Henry. Beat Trade's cover features an illustration of a man and a woman, but they're not in a clench.
SPEAKER_07: In fact, they're just kind of sitting on different sides of the cover. In between them in big white lettering is the title of the book. It really looks like it could be any other piece of contemporary fiction.
SPEAKER_10: It sat on the New York Times list. It's a straight up romance novel, but it really lingered on those lists because the cover doesn't look like a romance novel cover at all. You know, this is a way to get romance in front of the eyes of people who might not ever walk into the romance section. Sarah says that a lot of indie booksellers don't carry romance at all.
SPEAKER_08: And in more mainstream bookstores, the romance section is usually hidden way in the back. In mine, in Brooklyn, the romance section is in the literal furthest place from the door.
SPEAKER_10: Illustrated covers are an attempt to sort of Trojan horse romance novels into the general fiction section
SPEAKER_08: and win over readers who would maybe be a little bit embarrassed to buy a book with a clench cover.
SPEAKER_10: Well, maybe people like you would be more willing to pick up a romance novel if it didn't have a clench on the cover.
SPEAKER_07: She's calling you out, Mangle.
SPEAKER_08: I feel so bad that I was one of those people. Don't worry about it. I really do. Like now I'm just like, what was wrong with me? The thing is, maybe illustrated covers can bring new people like me into the genre, but the people already there, they're not necessarily thrilled about this new direction. All of that coding that the classic romance cover does to tell romance diehards what they're getting, it's kind of lost in the illustrated covers.
SPEAKER_01: It's getting a bit difficult to figure out, is this women's fiction? Is this adult romance? Is this YA? This is the romance writer and reader Alyssa Cole.
SPEAKER_08: Alyssa has written several romances featuring Black, queer, and other marginalized characters. Beyond sending out a quick signal to readers about what's inside the book, Alyssa believes one of the romance covers' most important functions is to say, hey, you, person who has not always been depicted in romantic stories, love is for you too. So she likes the covers where you can clearly make out people's features. Sometimes in the illustrated ones, you can't. You know, a lot of these covers have illustrations with no faces.
SPEAKER_01: My main thing is I'm fine with doing an illustrated cover, but you absolutely have to be able to tell that the book is about people of color. Alyssa Cole doesn't want to lose clench covers.
SPEAKER_07: She just wants them to become even more inclusive. I love clench covers. I love covers where people look like they're in love,
SPEAKER_01: which is what romance novels are about.
SPEAKER_08: Look, I know that I started out this journey saying clench covers were corny and old-fashioned. And to be honest, I still see some of that in those images. But I see the covers, particularly the clench covers, in a new way now too. I see them as a type of marketing, yeah, but also as almost a flag. A flag for a club in which membership has long been associated with a certain amount of shame. Shame about desire and sex, and also shame about pleasure. Because as we all well know, we are supposed to feel guilty about reading things for pleasure. Again, the one and only Pam Mingle.
SPEAKER_05: Romance was so joyful. When I began reading it, I just got this sense of joyousness that I had never experienced really in other kinds of fiction. Certainly moments of that, but not to the degree of a romance. Still, even my romance-writing mom used to feel a sense of guilt about reading romance.
SPEAKER_05: I kept telling myself, you shouldn't keep reading these books. I don't know, I don't really know why or understand why I would feel that way. I guess because maybe I was just, I went through this period of just reading a lot of them. And then I would quit for a while, and then I would go back. Every time I would go back, because I missed it, I missed feeling those great feelings that I got from reading romance.
SPEAKER_08: Now when I look at my mom's cover, that classic clinch pose, it feels different. It feels like a flag, boldly planted. Like, keep making fun of us, patriarchy. But we are out here enjoying ourselves.
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SPEAKER_03: Chances are you're listening to 99% Invisible on your phone, probably while you're on the go.
SPEAKER_07: Think of all that you do on your phone the moment you leave your front door, whether it's looking up directions, scrolling social media, or listening to your favorite podcast. It requires an amazing network. That's why you should switch to T-Mobile. T-Mobile covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else and helps keep you connected with 5G from the driveway to the highway and the miles in between. Because your phone should just work where you are, it's your lifeline to pretty much everything you didn't bring with you. So next time you head out, whether you're taking a trip or going to work or just running errands, remember, T-Mobile has got you covered. Find out more at T-Mobile dot com slash network and switch to the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone else. Coverage is not available in some areas. See 5G details at T-Mobile dot com. So I'm back with producer Katie Mingle, and there was one person that you couldn't fit into the story, but you wanted to tell us about her. Yeah, so she's actually the kind of person that just needs her own episode.
SPEAKER_08: Her name is Chris Noble, and she's an art director at a publisher called Kensington. And that means that she's basically the person who designs book covers and not just romance covers, but she's done a lot of romance covers over the years. When I came out of art school, I wanted to go into the biggest design studio and design packaging.
SPEAKER_11: But I'm like, Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola, you know? And so unlike books, every story to me is different. Every character brings something out of me that challenges me. But the art director job is also a hard one because you really have to please everyone?
SPEAKER_08: Everybody. Marketing, publicity, sales, the editors, the publishers, the therapists of the author, the dog of the author, and that one friend they have who's a graphic designer.
SPEAKER_11: And I'm sure every single one of those has their own opinion about what they want.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. And basically, like most of the time, they want something that someone else already has. They show me samples of books that are already out and they go, I like this cover. I want it to look like this.
SPEAKER_11: And I'm like, but your book is coming out two years from now. It's going to already look old. So what I do is I give them what they want. I design what I think they want. And then I go out and I do my thing. Some books I lose out on and I'm like, OK, I might be wrong and sales is right or marketing is right. And then there is some that I'm very adamant about. And I'm like, no, trust me, people are going to come to this.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And this is something we don't really talk about in the main story. And I have my own experience with this. But do authors usually get a say on what their covers look like at all?
SPEAKER_08: I think essentially that depends on how famous of an author you are. So how famous were you, Roman? I don't know. I was famous enough. I think they definitely were trying to appeal to me, but it was very clear in the contract language that it was their decision, not mine.
SPEAKER_08: Right. In the end, I think publishers generally get the final word, but they also don't want to make their authors unhappy. I mean, it is it is their book. It's their baby. We don't just snatch it out their arms and go running.
SPEAKER_11: But, yeah, appeasing authors can be a lot of work.
SPEAKER_08: There was a woman, an author who I worked on her book cover and everybody loved it, including her.
SPEAKER_11: But she took it to her psychic. And the psychic said that this wasn't right for her because this color wasn't. I mean, and to the point that the psychic was like sending me messages and the author would not budge because her psychic said no matter what sales, marketing, publicity, the editor, the publisher said she was adamant that she did not want that cover. And I changed the cover and the book became very successful. So I always worry about whether or not it was me or the psychic that actually designed the book right and made it work.
SPEAKER_07: It was her. It was probably her. I'll call that ball for her.
SPEAKER_08: So over the years, Chris Noble has been in a lot of photo shoots for for clinch covers, and she's full of interesting info, as you can imagine. Like like this.
SPEAKER_11: The male models tend not to be as tall as the female models. So we have to like put this dude who's supposed to be like this big, punky cowboy on a box. Why is that?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I mean, of course, I asked that also. And basically it's because the men tend to do like sports catalogs, whereas the women tend to be kind of regular, like fashion. Runway models. They're selected for being tall and can wear clothes like on runway and the men just have to be built.
SPEAKER_11: They're short and stocky and muscular, you know, so we want the big muscle chest because, you know, that's what the ladies are looking for. I got it.
SPEAKER_08: So my favorite anecdote of Chris's was about this one particular shoot that she did for a clinch cover. One specific time, like, you know, we got these male and female models and they were very timid with each other.
SPEAKER_11: You know, they didn't want to touch. And this was a contemporary, very hot. This was during the time of Fifty Shades of Grey. So the content was very hot and sexy. And they were acting like they were giving the church hug, you know, like this. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to have to really go in.
SPEAKER_07: Wow. I never really thought about it, but the models are most likely strangers when they come in.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah, they are. And I think sometimes they know like what kind of shoot they're going to do. And sometimes they don't even know that. Oh, my God.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah. And that was the situation with this couple that Chris just mentioned. They didn't feel comfortable with each other at all. The photographer I tend to work with, he was really good at setting the mood.
SPEAKER_11: So his seat, he would turn down the lights, we would get a lot of people off the set, put on the right kind of music. We got some R&B, you know, we got some old Motown, you know. And so about an hour in, they started to really started to relax. So we set up, you know, a bedroom scene. And so there's a bed and they're laying on the bed and we're shooting above. So we're looking down on them and they're like laying on the bed and we're getting that shot where their bodies are entangled, her hair is like, you know, all over the place. By the end of the shoot, I could not stop them. Like it had gotten that high. This is between you and I and the other people who are listening. I had to, the photographer and I were going, OK, that's it. It's a wrap. It's a wrap. And they were like, I mean, going in.
SPEAKER_07: Between you and I and the rest of the people who are listening. Yeah, you're right. She really kind of needed her own episode. Truly like someone give her a podcast.
SPEAKER_07: Well, thank you, Katie. That was so interesting. The whole episode, I just absolutely loved it. I love that it comes from you and your mom, too. That's the greatest part of it all.
SPEAKER_08: Thanks, Roman.
SPEAKER_07: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mingle, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Amita Ganatra, music by our director of sound, Sean Rial. Our senior producer is Delaney Hall. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivien Leigh, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Lasha Madone, Chris Berube, Sofia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Elizabeth Semelhack, Vita Engstrand and Vivien Stevens. If you'd like to know more about Katie's mom's books or read Sarah MacLean's romance about lock picking inspired by an episode of this very show, or listen to the incredibly charming podcasts that Nicole Perkins has hosted or or browse through prints of Max Ginsburg's classic vintage clench cover paintings. Well, we'll tell you how to do all of that at 99pi.org. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit, too. You can find 444 old but still amazingly relevant episodes of this show and other shows I love from Stitcher on our website. It's 99pi.org. I think Stitcher knows they bought us like it was in the New York Times and everything. Here we go.
SPEAKER_06: Stitcher. Sirius XM.
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