the showgirls director offered to paint kyle maclachlan an erection "any size you vant." he checked his contract. we checked our pulse.

Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Entertainment Weekly and Wealth of Geeks

Showgirls has given the gays a great deal over the last 31 years. The pool scene, the line readings, a lifetime supply of midnight screenings. It turns out there was one more thing it nearly gave us, and Kyle MacLachlan said no.

In his new memoir, Fictional Selves, excerpted by Entertainment Weekly, MacLachlan describes the night shoot by the pool, with director Paul Verhoeven and cinematographer Jost Vacano standing in the water "in their tight European Speedos." Verhoeven, he writes, wanted him to walk out onto the patio full frontal. The memoir renders the director's accent phonetically, and it is doing a lot of work: "when you valk across the pool deck and we shoot you here and you have a giant erection and you valk into the pool."

"Hold on a second," MacLachlan says he replied. "Paul, I'm sorry, you can't shoot me from the front."

Verhoeven, undeterred, offered a technical solution. "It's not a problem if you can't get an erection; we can matte one in," MacLachlan quotes him as saying, adding that he said it with "not a trace of irony." Then the line that will outlive us all: "We can paint one any size you vant."

MacLachlan writes that he stayed "congenial, despite the insane suggestion," offered to be shot from behind instead, and when Verhoeven kept pushing, "I refer to my contract, and the issue is dropped." Wealth of Geeks, which also quotes the book, picked up the same exchange.

Verhoeven shot him from behind. "That is my backside," MacLachlan writes. "And I make sure that's all it is." His sign-off on the matter, per the excerpt, is three words long and should be taught in drama schools: "Film is forever."

So, to recap: a man was offered a made-to-order erection by his own director, in a swimming pool, at night, and he read the fine print. Agent Cooper would be proud.