Adams at this point was at a crossroads in his career. It wasn't clear that making images of landscapes totally devoid of humanity or living beings other than quivering aspens was a paying proposition. Taking an incalculable chance (for one later known for his relentless not to say ruthless calculations), he signed a contract as the stills photographer for a project with Franco-German financing, a Polish director, and a then unfashionable Romanian location. The shooting script was variously known as Atak pięćdziesiąt stóp kobiety, Angriff der fünfzig Fuß Frau, attaque du 10 mètre de haut femme, based on an idea from the still all-but-unknown Franz Kafka. It was to be built around the sensual, athletic glamor of an actress who had recently been a top draw on the Mediterranean volleyball circuit. Her name may have been Marina Goliumova or Marta Giulinskaya, but the nickname on set was Mme Golem, attributable to certain appetites and of course her stature--she was well over 2 meters tall.
Adams was supposed to make a publicity shot the developers could use to raise money from their primary marks, bankers, lawyers and dentists with discretionary wealth and the usual physical impairments of age, especially those concentrated in Nice and Monaco, to maximize the appointments per diem to pitch the project. It was assumed this image would be a sidelit profile, velvet backdrop, extensive coiffure and tasteful décolletage, and the backers would receive a signed 8x10 with vague promises about a private meeting after the opening at Cannes.
However, Adams was interested in experimenting with candids and contre jour, so an hour before the scheduled shoot he positioned himself outside the curtained privy reserved for Mme G, and when she parted the curtain to exit the loo he attempted what we now call an upskirt, though no skirt was involved. For the image in question we are indebted to the set dresser who for this doomed project had specifically acquired a Leica Ia, though even more indebted to a very young Roman Polanski, there as an assistant shoeshine boy according to archival notes and who had just pinched the Leica with the same idea as Ansel, namely, exposing Mme Golem at her height of sensual candor.
You can guess the rest. The project was scuttled: there was martial clamor in the news, and the lengthening continental shadow of war; nervous financiers not interested in being known by government officials for their support of decadent, creepy-peepy Nosferatu-influenced cinema booking passage for America and the safer pleasures of the Hollywood film business; and poor Adams lost his Universal Juwel, crushed between Mme Golem's iron thighs after she knocked his nose out of joint and pissed in his Stetson. She however took care of the youngster Polanski in ways that contributed to both his peculiar cinematic vision and his attraction to under-aged partners.
Although Adams cleaned and preserved the hat as best he could, the chemicals certainly hastened his baldness, all too apparent in the 1958 documentary film on his method narrated by Beaumont Newhall. That was also the year that a low-budget version of the original idea was produced in the US, aimed apparently at the culture of drive-ins with their broods of dinosaur-finned cars oozing exhaust in the desert night. Kafka had no idea his feverish, random workbook sentence would end up in low-budget horror, extracted from all he wanted to burn by Max Brod to be repackaged as Kafka's Diaries, certainly not in a film starring Allison Hayes as a wealthy but abused heiress whose close encounter with an enormous alien being causes her to grow into a giantess who straddles an interstate flyover, clutching an Oldsmobile like King Kong with Fay Wray in the best-known poster image.
It is not known whether Adams caught the movie during a break in the more pedestrian rigors of being filmed in a ridiculously well-lit darkroom in an apron, no less, in his own best-known role as the Prophet of The Zone. Nevertheless, it is not hard to see, in his landscapes of peaks, half-domes, mountainous moonrises, and startlingly erect aspen trees, lifelong subliminal echoes of the moments he anticipated Mme Golem's emergence fom the loo, with precisely the wrong tool for the job in hand.
