Keystone Kommission

The theft put 337,000 Davidson County voters at risk for fraud because names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers were all on the purloined computers.

“Normally the plots of our Police Academy movies are too ridiculous to have been taken from real life, but this whole Nashville thing was a godsend for us,” says film director High Wilson.

Wilson heard of the story after national news outlets picked up the tale of the two laptops being taken from the Metro office building. The building had no alarm or surveillance system, the computers were left unsecured in an open office, and the private security guard on duty was too absorbed in ordering take-out food and listening to Christmas carols to make his rounds.

“I called [Police Academy star] Steve Guttenberg and was reading him one of the news accounts, and we were both wheezing for breath we were laughing so hard,” Wilson says. “I know it’s not funny if your identity is stolen, but the whole way it happened—we just knew we had to get this into the movie.”

Wilson says that he’s working with screenwriters to use the details of the Metro theft in the opening of the movie, in which the Guttenberg character is moonlighting as a security guard in an unnamed city.

County election official Ray Barrett says that he’s been in contact with the movie’s producers and is negotiating a fee both for use of the story and for possible filming locations. Any money would go into a special Metro fund to reimburse residents for the cost of credit monitoring.

“They said they may even want to use the real offices for the movie,” Barrett says. “I hope they do because I’m a huge Steve Guttenberg fan!”