BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!
02 march 2011
A Revealing Pin-Up's Story (Bettie Page)
Source: online.wsj.com - The Wall Street Journal - USA
USA- NEW YORK- Mark Mori's home studio on West 66th Street lately has been a beehive. Every day for the past 18 months, a pair of staffers spend hours at laptops, digitally enhancing images, chasing clearances, posting annotated video clips to YouTube and Facebook, and links on Twitter. Meanwhile Mr. Mori, 61 years old, an Academy Award-nominated documentarian and producer, is busy fine-tuning a rough cut of his latest film, under the playful, poster-size gaze of its bikini-clad subject: Bettie Page.
It's an unexpected subject for Mr. Mori. The filmmaker earned his first Oscar nomination for "Building Bombs," an investigative 1991 film about the Savannah River Site, a South Carolina nuclear facility. Now he's exploring the secret life of a different kind of bombshell.
"My entertainment attorney was [Ms. Page's] attorney's entertainment attorney," said Mr. Mori, flashing back to 1996 when a lunch meeting with his attorney prompted the director to ask about pitching Ms. Page on a documentary. "I was in the right place at the right time."
The 1950s pin-up idol and fetish model had vanished by the end of the decade, maintaining a Garbo-like silence for 35 years. Then a new surge of pop-culture popularity brought her tentatively out of hiding in late-'90s. That's when Mr. Mori became an occasional lunch date. He would meet Ms. Page at the group home where the still-vivacious 73-year-old resided, following an eight-year stay in a state psychiatric hospital. The pair often drove to a diner near Mr. Mori's Los Angeles office. Ms. Page, who died in 2008 at 85, was one of history's most widely emulated sex symbols. Yet she sat in the restaurant unrecognized as he recorded about six hours of audio interviews, part of which serve as the film's narration.
Age and obscurity, he discovered, hadn't diminished her. She was the same Bettie. "How about your grandmother regaling you with tales of fetish and bondage?" Mr. Mori asked, laughing. "But only in appearance. She had that raspy voice and Southern drawl. She was funny."
That's the same voice audiences hear in "Bettie Page Reveals All." It takes a salty, canny account of everything: her father's alleged molestation of her and her sisters; the lovemaking skills of various ex-husbands; facing down the prudes, whether it was Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver and the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, where she refused to testify about bondage photos she famously appeared in, or the vice cops who arrested her and some photographers (including the celebrated Weegee) during an outdoor nude session. "If she wasn't a character, a personality, someone who could talk in an interesting way about her life," Mr. Mori said, "the movie wouldn't work with her narrating."
The tapes sat untouched until 2007, when Mr. Mori began the project in earnest. The interviews had been intended as only research. "I was going to talk her into going on camera," he said.
But the iconic Bettie, with her jet-black hair cut in those trademark bangs, would keep her mystique. After watching "The Kid Stays in the Picture," a 2002 documentary about the Hollywood producer Robert Evans that features only his recorded voice, Mr. Mori was convinced he could make the Page tapes work in a similar fashion.
Meanwhile, Bettie Mania had reached new heights. Mr. Mori found more than 70 songs written about Ms. Page, and archived some 60,000 images. Networking through social media, the filmmaker tapped deeply into a global community of fans, many of them women. "It's so cool that it's her real story because so many people have told it for her," said Bettina May, a New York burlesque performer who volunteered to assist with the film after contacting Mr. Mori through its website. "Her story is so much like my life, I'm happy to be a part of it."
Though the film is loaded with tell-all zingers, the biggest surprise for Mr. Mori was how Ms. Page's fan base shifted over 50 years. "I went into the Apple store, and I'm talking to the girl behind the counter and she's got the bangs and the tattoos and she says, 'Oh my God! Bettie Page, she's my hero!'"
Mr. Mori explained Ms. Page's enduring popularity as a post-feminist role model. "It has to do with not fitting into the dominant culture idea of what's good or sexy," he says. By identifying with her, women are saying, "I'm not a supermodel. I'm not Barbie.
Whatever ideal it is that they are supposed to fit into. Whatever it is about Bettie, Bettie is the one they latch onto that allows them to feel comfortable in their own sexuality."
That factor becomes a huge selling point for the film, which Mr. Mori is shopping to distributors, while developing various transmedia spin-offs. He never has trouble finding Bettie Page look-alikes to appear at promotional events. But as Dita Von Teese, perhaps the best-known of the Bettie-influenced burlesque models, told him, the other part of Ms. Page's appeal is what she didn't expose. "She said, 'Now you know everything about a celebrity, but Bettie, you know nothing about,' " Mr. Mori said. "All people had to go on was the photographs."
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The Wall Street Journal.
