Lynda Carter ~ Colleen Camp Picture Debate

[Mad_Hatter]

Interesting story on this photo of Lynda. I have the whole photo somewhere in my files, that goes to the waist. ANYWAY, according to a little known Playboy article (with Burt Reynolds on the cover pulling the tail on a Playboy Bunny) on the movie "Apocalypse Now", Lynda Carter was originally signed to play the main Playboy Playmate whose centerfold is hanging up. Playboy shot her as a centerfold, and this is from that shot! But then Lynda got offered the role of "Wonder Woman", so she bowed out, and Colleen Camp took her place. Both are posed the same, with a denim jacket over their shoulders face tilted to the left, eyes to the camera.

I have both photos somewhere in my backup disks, but here I have included a (very cropped) version of Colleen's Centerfold that appeared in the movie.

[Mad_Hatter]

Ah, here's the Centerfold photo of Collen Camp. You can see how she's wearing the same denim jacket over her shoulders as Lynda did.

[Mad_Hatter]

And here's the Centerfold shot of Lynda in her entirety! I KNEW I had it somewhere! So you see, Lynda was posed topless in jeans with a denim jacket, left the production, and Colleen Camp took her place, and the centerfold was re-shot!

[gregj1967]

I hate to burst your bubble CTRFLD_Admirer, but this "Lynda Carter nude" is a well-known fake that has been around for years and has been debunked by several sources including The Fake Detective...



Check out TFD's website and see for yourself. It's Case #200 on this page...

http://www.fake-detective.com/book-2/casefl-2.html


As far as the Pl@boy article goes (10/79; pages 114-121, 195): the only mention of "Linda Carter" is in a quote from Colleen Camp when she says:

"Pl@boy did a centerfold shot with her, the whole bit. But seven months later a typhoon had destroyed all the sets and Linda couldn't continue because of Wonder Woman, I guess, and I was in the film after all."

First off, this info is coming from Colleen not from Pl@boy, Francis Coppola, or Lynda Carter so it's really just heresay information and doesn't provide a clear explanation of what really happened with that situation. That Colleen says they "did a centerfold shot, the whole bit" with Lynda doesn't necessarily mean it was a nude centerfold; it may have been an almost-nude "cover-up the tits 'n' bush" centerfold shot like the kind that were still being done at the time the movie was taking place (not when it was shot).

Second, if they had in fact done "the whole [centerfold shot] bit" with Lynda those pix would have come out Loooooooong ago. Pl@boy rarely, if ever, does a photo-shoot without retaining the publishing rights in full. They had no qualms about publishing the Suzanne Somers nude pix after she became famous on Three's Company, and everyone knows about the Vanessa Williams thing with Pen#h*use. Stills of Lynda nude from Bobbie Jo And The Outlaw have circulated for years in print and online and It doesn't take a lot of industry knowledge to figure out that if there were any posed nude photos of Lynda (regardless of how much skin is actually shown), they would have seen the light of day many moons ago. There's just too much money to be had to keep something like that locked up for 30 years.

Third, from what I've read, Bobbie Jo... was kind of a one-off for Lynda as far as nudity goes. Lots of actresses were doing nudity in the 1970s, a decade in which nudity and sexuality were being released from the bondage of 1950s prudism and moral stigma. In other words, a lot of people--people that wouldn't necessarily do it commonly, or even again at all--were taking their clothes off at nudist colonies, nude beaches, in their backyards, in the movies, in magazines, etc. It was liberating, or at least considered liberating at the time, especially for women. But I've read numerous interviews with Lynda where she says that if she had to do it all over again she wouldn't have done the nudes scenes in BJ&TO, and the impression I've always gotten from her is that nude modeling was not something she wanted to do, even back in the 1970s. Lynda was a top-shelf beauty pageanter and didn't really need the exposure of nude modeling to help her career I think.

Articles like this often gloss over the details of such situations anyway; it may have been that Lynda actually turned down the role because of the nudity, or that any such photos were destroyed or never printed because of the casting change. But changes like this usually aren't as simple as these types of promotional articles make them sound. Lynda probably bowed out when Wonder Woman came along, which was in 1976, not long after production began on Apocalypse Now but at least a year or more before the Bunny show scene was shot. Shooting on Apocalypse Now was delayed for long periods of time and any actress offered the starring role in her own TV series would easily take that over a relatively small part in a troubled feature film production. It may have been that Pl@boy had planned to do a shoot with Lynda for the movie but never had the chance because she began Wonder Woman before they could do it. Colleen Camp might have just gotten here facts mixed up a bit.

So once again, I'm sorry to burst your bubble (and everyone else's). We all wish that photo was real, but it ain't. And beware--I've seen E-Bay dealers trying to pass it off as genuine (and autographed no less!) charging $50 or more for it online. It's just a fantasy I'm afraid. A good one, but a fantasy just the same.

[paddy1474]

The best inside review and in the business industry...!!!!!...great!!!!

[rmftsill]

Originally Posted by Mad_Hatter

And here's the Centerfold shot of Lynda in her entirety! I KNEW I had it somewhere! So you see, Lynda was posed topless in jeans with a denim jacket, left the production, and Colleen Camp took her place, and the centerfold was re-shot!

doesn't lynda carter have blue eyes?

[masque51]

These pics come from the Japanese version of "Apocalypse Now" pictorial and are much larger than what is already posted. As you can see there is a mole on the inside of her breast which hasn't shown up in any of the other pictures in this thread. If any of the possible models has a mole there, it would conclusive proof of who she is. Because of the location, it is possible that this mole would turn up in a bikini shot.

[Mad_Hatter]

I hate to burst your bubble CTRFLD_Admirer, but this "Lynda Carter nude" is a well-known fake that has been around for years and has been debunked by several sources including The Fake Detective...

I hate to burst your bubble, but the Fake Detective is wrong. BTW, that is the only site where I've seen it said to be a fake- all others refer to his site. So, if he's wrong, so would the others be. I had some emails with Mr. Fake over a decade ago, and found that his ego was such that even if proven wrong, he would never admit it. I found his arguments unconvincing. That someone would paint this pose of Lynda? Using the same clothes (note the rounded collars on both jackets) that Colleen Camp was wearing? Even the rings on the fingers? The Fake Detective said the same thing- if this was the case, how come they didn't come out earlier? Welll---

I've had a copy of this photo since 1980. There was a catalog put out by a small independent publishing company in California that published odd photos they had gotten hold of- Betsey Russell, Catherine Bach, Phoebe Cates, etc. This one was described simply as Lynda Carter- topless. So I ordered it. And it was remarkable. So, it may not have gotten wide circulation, but I've personally had a print of it for 27 years. I told old Fakeroo Detective that, but he didn't want to hear it. I offered to send him a scan of mine, which differs slightly in contrast from the above one. He refused. He said that OBVIOUSLY some artist decided to use the Colleen Camp Centerfold as a source and painted a fake. Why, I asked. Why THAT particular pose? All's he could think of was because Lynda Carter was supposed to be in Apocalpyse Now. Now you're saying that we can't go by that because it's only coming from Colleen Camp. Yet that's what the FD based his decision on in his emails to me. Can't have it both ways.

I have no problem believing Ms. Camp when she says Lynda was supposed to be in A-N. It's no more hearsay that Mr. FD saying that some artist painted it based on hearing Ms. Camp say that Lynda was the original Centerfold. Based on what? Just his conjecture.

So my findings have been that it being considered a fake is based solely on Mr. Detective saying so. I found him to be arrogant, and more than willing to stretch facts to fit theories rather than vice versa.

So, if you want to believe it's a fake, fine. But I for one feel that it's asking too much to believe that some artist decided out of the blue that using this photo of Colleen Camp would make a good basis for a fake painting (and Mr. Fake says it IS a painting) of Lynda.

And nothing changes the fact that I've had a copy of this photo for over 2 1/2 decades. Remember, it took 25 years for the photos of Sophia Loren in Era Lui, Si Si to surface! As a person who saw "Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw" in the movie theaters when it first came out and has been a Lynda Carter fan ever since, I've always been on the lookout for interesting items related to her.

I hope that I have set the record straight. For years the Fake Detective has screwed fans out of obtaining perhaps the best genuine topless photo of Lynda Carter. But, steer clear of autographed ones. THOSE are fake.

I felt the posibilities posed by CTRFLD_Admirer needed to be researched a bit, so that's what I did, and since I knew you all would want to know what I found, hence the long post.

And I wanted to post a rebuttal that addressed the case of the Fake Detective (indeed, he IS a fake), hence my long response. I should have addressed this in my original posting, too. The only source that ever said it was a fake was by the Fake Detective. All others, like greg here, assumed he knew what he was talking about. But he does not.

[gregj1967]

Well I still beg to differ with you CTRFLD_Admirer and I still say it's a fake. The pose "Lynda" is in is exactly the same as the Camp photo, but inverted. It's really no problem to make the changes that the artist made to the photo to get it to look like Lynda, and the fact that you've had the photo since 1980 doesn't mean anything; people have been creating fake & composite photos for decades, just ask the CIA. It's a very good fake, I'll grant you, but a fake nonetheless. I find it extremely hard to believe that a great nude photo of a well-known star--and a major sex-symbol at that--is still relatively obscure.

If it is genuine, why has Pl@boy NEVER published it? In the mid-70s Lynda wasn't a big enough star to demand or even ask that Pl@boy not publish it. I seriously doubt that Pl@boy ever spends the time and money on a photoshoot without retaining all publishing rights. Asuming it is a Pl@boy photo, how did anyone get a hold of a copy of the negative to make prints from without having their asses sued off by Hefner & Co.? How come that photo is not nearly as common as the many other swimsuit and cheesecake photos of Lynda that everyone has seen a million times already? It's a nude of Lynda Carter! If it was real it would be being sold by 20 times the e-bay dealers that do sell it.

Why use the Camp photo as a basis for a Lynda carter fake? Because Camp bears a resemblence to Lynda: dark hair, similar build, and of course, large breasts which indeed look about the size of Lynda's. Look at the lighting on Lynda's face and you'll see that it's dissimilar to the lighting on the rest of the torso. The clothing and pose are not identical but are very close. This might be a composite photo that drew upon several sources as to not look like an obvious fake, with airbrushing taking care of the rest of the details.

Don't know what I'm talking about? I've seen tens of thousands of fakes of virtually every celebrity you could name and although there are some truly realistic ones out there, I can always tell a fake from a genuine photo. Don't know why or how, but I just can. I've seen this pic at just about every fake site I've been to or belonged to, assuming the site had Lynda Carter section. I've never seen it promoted as genuine anywhere (except from the aforementioned e-bay dealers). I've also seen thousands of Lynda Carter pix over the years in print and online; I've seen numerous variations and versions of the same photos in the same photoshoots from every possible source so I think I DO know what I'm talking about. Hell, I'm the ONLY PERSON to EVER post exstensive vidcaps of Bobbie Jo and The Outlaw on the internet PERIOD, so I think I also have a good "feel" for what Lynda looks like nude. Do you have a DVD copy of Bobbie Jo? I do, and I didn't buy it online because nobody sells it online. I checked. About 10 times.

And The fact that there has never been any reference to this photoshoot in any interviews I've read with Lynda or any articles I've ever read in Pl@boy, or anywhere else at all for that matter just doesn't jibe at all. If the photo was real it would have been revealed as such and plastered everywhere long ago like every other sexy photo of Lynda. And don't give me the "Pl@boy probably didn't publish it at Lynda's request" or "they didn't want to embarass Wonder Woman" or "the network asked them not to/threatened to sue/ paid them off" explanations. There's just too much money to be had by publishing a genuine Lynda Carter nude for Pl@boy not to and their army of lawyers would no doubt be able to combat any threats or lawsuits that might come thier way as a result. Also, if this was part of a "photoshoot", why have we never seen the other photos of the shoot? Wouldn't someone with the negatives of this shot also have at least a few more from the same source?

If you or anyone else can PROVE that this is a genuine photo, I will eat all the words I've typed here. Third-party confirmation from a source such as Lynda herself, Pl@boy magazine, the photographer who did the shoot would all be acceptable to me.

Anyone else that frequents this thread have any opinions on this matter? Let's hear from some other voices on this issue regardless of what "side" they are on.

[Mad_Hatter]

Actually, I'm still looking for proof that it's a fake. You know, proving a negative and all that?

Um, I've seen extensive vidcaps before of Lynda Carter's set from Bobbie Jo before yours. So you are not the only one to do so. Period.

Some "unknown arteest" used Colleen's photo because Camp bears a resemblance to Lynda? Come on. So do a lot of better known actresses, centerfolds and such. For example, why not use a photo of Cynthia Myers? So Mr. Unknown Arteest just happened to use that one Centerfold shot of Colleen? The same basic pose from Apocolypse Now? Odds are way against it. Why hasn't that artist come forward?

As far as the rest of your argument goes, it's all conjecture. You're assuming there were other photos. You're assuming that Playboy even remembers! When they did K.C. Winkler's pictorial, they didn't even mention that she tried out for their 25th Anniversary (her photo was in that issue). You're assuming that some artist decided to use Colleen's photo out of all the hundreds of possible other actresses for a fake photo.

Again, it boils down to Mr. Fake Dick saying it's phony. All the other "what-ifs" and "why nots" were conjured up to back up his theory.

Here are the facts: Colleen Camp said that Lynda was the original choice for the Centerfold. Colleen said they did the Centerfold shot, and I see no reason to doubt her. I've had this photo for 27 years. And as we can see, the outfit and such are the same.

Everything else is based on conjecture. I say it's real. Sure, let's see what others may think.