Maybe I just misheard it... One day in late November 1997, I was watching TV. There was a commercial on for the new James Bond movie, and even though the announcer said "Tomorrow Never Dies," I heard something else, and immediately had an idea planted firmly in the back of my head.

A few days later I went to the movies with my friend Pat Quinn, who attended college across town from me. In the lobby of the theater, there was a wall-mounted unit full of postcards for various movies - among them Blues Brothers 2000 and Tomorrow Never Dies. When I went home that afternoon, I scanned the postcard on one of my housemates' scanner, then brought the picture into Photoshop on my computer. First I cleaned up some dust and crud that had scanned with it, then fixed the colors and such so it looked right. When I went searching for useable pictures of Tom Arnold on the web, I discovered something...

Tom Arnold had no fan sites.

I couldn't find a picture of him anywhere. I needed a head-on photo of him that I could place replace Pierce Brosnan's with, but the only one I could find was a small (about 200 x 200) JPEG from an ABC page about The Tom Show. I brought it into Photoshop, and sized it to fit over Mr. Bond. It looked like shit. The combination of JPEG compression and the fact that I'd blown it up to about 6 times its original size made it look worse than a TV picture through a magnifying glass. I went back online to look for a better picture, and eventually I found one site, by a lady in Kentucy, who had a black and white 3/4 shot of Tom. It was huge, and had a great deal of detail in it, so I downloaded it.

There was a problem though - as I said, I needed a color head-on shot, and this was a black and white 3/4 shot. I began to reconstruct Tom's face out of pieces of the 3/4 shot. I started a new layer over the heavily blown-up color pic, and set the layer for 'luminosity.' This left the color information from the small picture intact, but let what I was laying over it affect the brightness/darkness of those colors, allowing me to construct a detail layer for Tom that I was surprised to discover looked really good. After that, I had to re-light his face to match that of the poster. I don't even feel like getting into how long that took. Then I masked off just Tom's head and shoulders from the original photo and pasted it over Pierce Brosnan's.

Problem is, there were things obscuring Pierce Brosnan's face - important design elements like the title of the movie, the big 007 logo, and the lines surrounding it. I would have to reconstruct those. The lines and 007 were done with the line tool and the paint bucket, and took quite a while. Then I had to isolate the letters from "Tomorrow Never Dies," and construct the words "Tom Arnold" out of pieces of them (I had almost the same typeface, but not exact enough that it would be seamless, so it was cut-and-paste fever for the next hour).

Finally I was done and really happy with it, but a half hour later when I opened the picture to show to my housemate Heath, I noticed that Pierce Brosnan's hand (holding the gun) was too dark - it didn't match Tom Arnold's complexion. I went back in, brightened and re-colored it to match Tom's flesh tone, and I was done.