I’m sure we’ve all had experience with baby pictures. I get them occasionally, and my reaction is almost always the same: “Cute baby.” Once in a huge while, I’ll have a Kramer moment — “She looks like Lyndon Johnson” — but most of the time babies are babies, little bundles of joy wrapped in blankets, with confused looks on their faces and maybe some dribble on their chins.
Then, unless the baby in question is a blood relative, I wait a respectful few days and then flip it into the trash. (The picture, not the baby.) What am I going to do with baby pictures?
But if I happen to get one sent to me from Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, I think I’ll save it. Maybe I can trade it for a yacht, or sell it and take one of those space flights that only a Google executive can afford. I could even donate the proceeds to a charity and cure a disease.
Right now, Angelina and Brad are reportedly in the south of France, where the rules against paparazzi intrusion are much more stringent. If they were ensconced in Beverly Hills, Calif., they’d have photographers scaling their walls in much the same way that the guys in “The Dirty Dozen” invaded a German stronghold.
The price tag on their baby photos is so preposterously large that retired paparazzi are probably coming out of retirement to make one last killing, like Clint Eastwood did in “Unforgiven.”
No one really knows how much photos of Angelina’s twins will go for. The couple sold baby photos of Shiloh, now 2, the youngest of the couple’s four kids, for a reported $4.1 million to People.
So you have to figure, “Twins? Must be at least twice that.” Some have speculated a bidding war would bring it to somewhere around $10 million. Others have suggested even more — $15 million, even $20 million.
Suffice it to say that it’s in the comfortable seven figures and probably into eight figures — even if both babies look like Lyndon Johnson.
Let’s just say $15 million. That’s a nice, conservative number for an outrageous purchase. You go by the $4.1 million People shelled out for Shiloh, double it for twins, and then factor in another $7 million as the cost of celebrity-baby photo inflation.
Fifteen million dollars. For baby pictures! Do you know what that could buy?
It should be noted that Angelina and Brad reportedly donated the $4.1 million from Shiloh’s pictures to charity. And they have shown a social conscience many times in the past, so it’s likely they’ll donate the proceeds from the twins’ photos to a good cause, also.
But $15 million for baby photos? Fifteen million could buy:
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