Canadian photographer loves shooting for Playboy but admits he still gets jitters in front of the models.
David Rams starts the story off with, "The thing about working for Playboy is ..."
And everything just stops.
We're sitting in a booth at a crowded '50s-themed diner in Waterdown, a few kilometres north of Hamilton. The couple across from us was noisily tucking into a plate of fries; their forks are now dangling. The guy behind Rams has his head cocked at 45 degrees, like a dog catching a scent. Nearby murmuring abruptly ends.
This sort of thing happens when Rams talks shop.
The native of Dundas, Ont., is one of an elite group of photographers listed on the masthead of Playboy magazine. For 15 years, he's criss-crossed the United States and exotic points beyond, shooting covers, centrefolds, themed spreads. Of naked women. This grabs people's attention, even in a pornified world.
"For the first few minutes, when you see them and they're like, fully nude ..." The guy opposite is now angling his body slowly toward us – ear first.
"... you're like, wow. You're a little nervous. I still get that way. But after a while, you just seem to forget about it. You'll be sitting at lunch with a model and she's topless and you're just talking about ..."
The guy behind Rams appears to be telling his lunch companion, who probably can't hear any of this, to shut the hell up.
" ... talking about nothing, movies, or whatever."
Rams looks like the central casting version of a Playboy photographer – gaunt, three-day beard, arm tats, earring, fingernails of his left-hand painted with chipped, black polish. He's 48, but appears 10 years younger.
He looks Hollywood, but the personality is all Dundas. He has a guileless, open smile. When he says anything approaching raunchy he has the endearing habit of covering his mouth with his hand and lowering his voice.
A couple of times, I have to lean in and say, "Sorry?" He repeats himself softly.
The guy behind him has his head craned backward at a painful-looking angle. Is it my imagination or is the waitress starting to hover?
His first job was criss-crossing Ontario and Eastern Canada shooting church registries, then trying to upsell the parishioners for a family shot.
Eventually, he moved to Atlanta and began the unglamorous climb up the career ladder. By the early '90s, he was working as a fashion photographer, doing high-end catalogue work.
One day, he was setting up in a rented mansion when the owner pulled him aside.
"Guess who was here last week?" the owner asked.
"Who?"
"Playboy."
They'd left behind their test shots – Polaroids of the models. Rams flipped through them and thought, "I can do better than this." On a whim, he sent off a resumé. He was shocked when he got a call back.
The interview was in a diner like this one. The woman who arrived to quiz him took out a series of glossy nudes and spread them on the table. Rams instinctively began piling the photos back up before anyone could see them.
"I'd only ever taken one or two topless shots in my life," Rams says.
The guy across from me is looking hopeful: Maybe Rams has brought them along.
Long story short, Playboy gave him the job. It was 1994. When Rams shot his first cover, his dad, Dave Sr., went down to the local Mac's Milk and bought every copy. The cashier looked puzzled. Dave Sr., a 68-year-old who owns a construction business, didn't say a word.
Rams' parents couldn't be prouder. When his work began appearing, they brought a copy of Playboy to a neighbourhood barbecue.
"We were passing the magazine around and people were flipping through it asking, `Which one did David take?'" says his mom, Pat.
(Yeah. Which one did David take. I'll have to remember that excuse.)
It's not all smooth. Dave Sr. made the mistake of signing up for Facebook.
"All of a sudden I discovered a young woman had sent me an email, thinking I was my son," he says.
What did she say?
"Well, she was ... a little bit explicit in what she was asking me."
Rams' buddies can't really get over it. He gets plenty of attention from women, too, and the sort of men who like to be around someone getting attention from women. Rams, who is divorced and has a 15-year-old son, Max, is more than a little bit over that whole scene. He moved out of downtown Atlanta and into the suburbs.
"A lot of my friends say I'm becoming a hermit."
The turn-on, he says, is the work. His favourite part of the year is the six weeks he spends on Playboy's college girls edition – the magazine's bestseller. He and his crew – producer, photo assistant and makeup artist – head out in an RV. Every week they're in a new town.
Day One – Media exposure.
"Sometimes we get the crazies, picketers. Then you get the guys showing up who like you a little too much."
Days Two and Three – Auditions.
"I tell the girls to take off whatever they're comfortable with. Nobody's going to force them to do anything. But. You know. It's Playboy."
Days Four and Five – Shoot the winners. Then pack and move on.
"Man, I miss that," Rams says. "Not the girls, but I miss my road family."
Rams offers one slightly blue story about an unexpected late-night call by a pair of aspiring models. He hems and haws around the details. His hand has taken up permanent residence at the edge of his mouth. The eavesdroppers lean in, hopeful.
"It was just, you know, stuff. Stuff happens," he says shyly.
Stuff? Playboy Mansion stuff?
"Maybe Playboy-type stuff" – a thoughtful pause – "but not at the mansion."
And that's it. You can almost hear the groans from the peanut gallery.

“The Stoning of Soraya M.,” a true story of religiously sanctioned misogyny and mob violence in an Iranian village, thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.
Not since “The Passion of the Christ” has a film depicted a public execution in such graphic detail. In the approximately 20 minutes during which the killing unfolds, the camera repeatedly returns to study the battered face and body of the title character (Mozhan Marno) as she is stoned to death. Buried up to her waist in a hole dug for the occasion, she is pelted with rocks and profanity by the male villagers, including her father, husband and two sons, until she dies.
The condemned woman is innocent of the charge of adultery brought against her by her sadistic husband, Ali (Navid Negahban), who wants to get rid of her so he can marry a 14-year-old girl. According to ancient Islamic law, a wife’s adultery is punishable by death. Ali pressures the corrupt local bigwigs to prosecute her based on the rumors he ignited and false evidence they coerce from a widower for whom she has worked as a housekeeper.
In one of the film’s sickeningly exploitative touches, Ali, wearing a triumphal grin, examines his wife’s crumpled, blood-drenched body to make sure she is dead and discovers signs of life in a rolled-up eye. The stoning is promptly resumed.
The casting of Jim Caviezel as Freidoune Sahebjam, the Paris-based Iranian journalist whose 1994 best seller. “The Stoning of Soraya M.: A True Story,” recounted the incident, lends the movie a queasy connection to “The Passion of the Christ,” in which Mr. Caviezel played Jesus.
Directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh, who wrote the screenplay with his wife, Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh, and filmed in an unidentified location to avoid possible reprisals, the movie re-enacts events that took place in Kupayeh, a small village in southwestern Iran, in August 1986. Mr. Sahebjam had surreptitiously returned to Iran from Paris to report on life under the Islamic government, then only seven years old.
Stranded in the village when his car breaks down, he is accosted by Soraya’s aunt Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo, familiar from “House of Sand and Fog”), who asks him to tape-record her account of her niece’s killing the day before. (In the book, two weeks have passed.) Ms. Aghdashloo, with her deep, husky voice, brings an anguished intensity to leaden, redundant dialogue that rings like strident editorial boilerplate. The screenplay’s oratorical tone is partly intentional, since the movie’s heavy-handed style harks back to the kind of 1950s Hollywood quasi-biblical parables starring Victor Mature and Jean Simmons that paraded themselves as sacred.
Visually as well as narratively, the movie embraces extremes. The village is arid, the countryside around it paradisically lush. In one scene birds flying out of the bushes are compared to angels as John Debney’s mystically overawed music pours on the syrup. Almost everything is either-or. Soraya is a beautiful martyred innocent and Zahra a stormy feminist prophet. With the exception of the mayor (David Diaan), who has qualms about the execution, and Mr. Caviezel’s reporter, who appears only briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, the men are fiendishly villainous.
Mr. Negahban’s Ali, who resembles a younger, bearded Philip Roth, suggests an Islamic fundamentalist equivalent of a Nazi anti-Semitic caricature. With his malevolent smirk and eyes aflame with arrogance and hatred, he is as satanic as any horror-movie apparition. The fraudulent local mullah, who collaborates in his scheme after being rejected by Soraya, might as well be carrying a pitchfork and breathing fire.
Yet it must be said that “The Stoning of Soraya M.” wields a crude power. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the movie was voted runner-up to “Slumdog Millionaire” for the audience choice award. As “The Passion of the Christ” showed, the stimulation of blood lust in the guise of moral righteousness has its appeal.“The Stoning of Soraya M.” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes profanity and extreme violence.