Some Came Running

Novak/Hitchcock/Truffaut/Quine

Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, Richard Quine, 1957

In the still-vital book Hitchcock/Truffaut, made up mostly (and in the first edition, pretty much entirely) of interviews between the former critic and filmmaker François Truffaut and the director Alfred Hitchcock conducted in the summer of 1962—over fifty years ago, now—the older director discusses his 1957  1958 film Vertigo mostly in terms of disappointment. While the filmmaker who at the time was known as the "Master of Suspense" seems pleased with the daring of the movie's scenario—"To put it plainly, the man wants to go to bed with a woman who's dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia"—and is understandably proud of the way he pulled off an ostensibly impossible track-out/forward zoom shot—"it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars"—for most of his exchange with Truffaut he plays the skeptic while the younger filmmaker tries to reassure him of the movie's strength. It's hard to remember, reading this book now, just how much its very existence was an argument for what few in the mainstream of movie culture at the time believed, e.g., that Hitchcock was a great artist. While the through-line of the perception of the  greatness of Citizen Kane has been a largely consistent one, the world in which Truffaut interviewed Hitchcock is one that's a rather long way from a world in which Vertigo is proclaimed the greatest film of all time, or any such thing. 

Hitchcock had originally planned to put Vera Miles in the lead role of Vertigo, and the details of their relationship and falling out are, as they've been revealed over the years, pretty unpleasant, and don't reflect well on Hitchcock. Hitchcock's account to Truffaut is both plain and enigmatic: "[S]he became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that I lost interest; I couldn't get the rhythm going with her again." 

Truffaut moves on: "I take it, from some of your interviews, that you weren't too happy with Kim Novak, but I thought she was perfect for the picture. There was a passive, animal quality about her that was exactly right for the part."

As it happens, one is now able to hear the actual tapes of the Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews through the agency of various archives, online and off. I have not audited the discussion of Vertigo, but I can't help imagining Hitchcock emitting a long exhalation, if not an outright sigh, before saying: "Miss Novak arrived on the set with all sorts of preconceived notions that I couldn't possibly go along with. You know, I don't like to argue with a performer on the set; there's no reason to bring the electricians in on our troubles. I went to Kim Novak's dressing room and told her about the dressed and hairdos that I had been planning for several months. I also explained that the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on the screen, once the picture is completed."

Truffaut counters with a "there, there" variant: "It seems to me these unpleasant formalities make you unfair in assessing the whole picture. I can assure you that those who admire Vertigo like Kim Novak in it. Very few American actresses are quite as carnal on the screen. When you see Judy walking on the street, the tawny hair and make-up convey an animal-like sensuality. That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere." 

While his erotic predilictions, both those that were obvious fifty years ago and have since been gone into in further detail, do not suggest that Hitchcock  was much of what we call "a breast man," he does perk up here, and responds, "That's right, she doesn't wear a brassiere. As a matter of fact, she's particularly proud of that."

Animal-like sensuality? Hell, for the whole exchange Hitchcock and Truffaut do sound as if they're discussing some exotic zoo exhibit. And Truffaut's demural concerning "unpleasant formalities?" It's called directing, guys. While his routing condemnation on account of that "cattle" quip is indeed unfair, it's kind of undeniable that Hitchcock didn't have much patience with fussy performers. Not just the females—Paul Newman drove him up the wall. And when he wanted to play Pygmalion, watch out. It's also revealing to see the ostensibly more "progressive" Truffaut so naturally sliding into the alienated patriarchal mode of perception. In the event you were ever wondering why The Feminine Mystique needed to be written, it's all here in a nutshell. (It came out in 1963.) And yet, who would argue, if we look at the work by itself, that both Hitchcock and Truffaut were among the greatest directors of women, and among the most consistent providers of substantial roles for women. (Even at their most ornamental, Hitchcock women are never cardboard cutouts.)

Do directors talk about actresses as if they're objects because they (the directors) are men, or because they are directors, people whose job is, in a sense, to make subjects out of objects? In a 1960 interview with the journalist Archer Winsten, the director Richard Quine, talking about his latest film, Strangers When We Meet, said of Novak, the female lead in that film, "She's tremendously sensitive." He was quick to add a caveat: "If she doesn't know what she's doing, she draws a blank. Like in Pal Joey, she's innocuous." "Innocuous" is maybe the worst word you can apply to a performer. Perhaps Quine had a special investment in trying to sound professional, objective, in charge; he and Novak were romantically involved at the time of Strangers' making.

My friend Farran Smith Nehme recently posted, on her blog, a short essay about the largely lacking-in-compassion, and, to my mind and hardly incidentally, anti-feminist reaction to Novak's appearance at last Sunday's Oscar ceremony, and in that piece she examines the boorish, opportunistic treatment of Novak by Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn. If Novak had anything like a knight in shining armor at the studio, it was Quine, a one-time comic actor who had a number of B-pictures to his name as a director when Cohn assigned him to handle Novak's first starring vehicle, 1954's Pushover. If one of Pushover's most special features is just how prominent Novak's bralessness registers in a film girdled by the Production Code (honestly, not since Sign of the Cross has their been a more jarringly out-of-its-time reveal), Quine's overall treatment of Novak signals an appreciation of the depths that  lurk beneath the breathtakingly alabaster surface. And in fact that is the theme of his next two films with Novak. In Bell, Book and Candle, Novak plays a character who can be rendered impotent by revealing her vulnerability. In Strangers When We Meet she plays a woman whose gorgeous looks back her into a neighborhood-sexpot corner that her gentle true nature inhibits her from clawing her way out of; all of her subsequent actions in the movie are determined by her impossible position. Of his four films with Novak, it's the final one, 1962's The Notorious Landlady, made after their romantic involvement ended, that iterates this dilemma as farce (Novak's character is suspected of a murder that of course she did not commit). 

This, I think, adds up to a cinematic paradox that is both glorious and tragic. That Harry Cohn's best/worst efforts notwithstanding, Kim Novak became a great screen actress, and that at her greatest, the subject of her work was the difficulty of being "Kim Novak." See also Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, the most frenetic and confused and strangely exhilarating of meta-movie farces, and Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Clare, the most vicious of meta-movie expressions of self-loathing.

The last of Louise

That's Louise Brooks up there, flanked by John Wayne and Ray "Crash" Corrigan, with goofball Max Terhune in front of her, in a publicity still for Overland Stage Raiders, her last film, made in 1938. What a way to go. Overland Stage Raiders was an entry in the "Three Mesquiteers" short features made by the not-quite-Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures (you want to see REAL Poverty Row Westerns, go PRC) between 1936 and 1943. You think today's movie franchises overdo it, chew on this: there were fifty-one of them. The Mesquiteers were a trio of amiable cowboys whose adventures were kind of unstuck in time (in 1938's The Night Riders the boys appeal to President Garfield to help them out in a land-grabbing case, and he is assassinated before he can set things straight; by 1942's The Phantom Plainsmen they're fighting Nazis). The pictures were one of the many places where Duke Wayne found a cinematic home whilst kicking around Hollywood between 1931's The Big Trail and 1939's Stagecoach. 

Overland Stage Raiders is one of the more close-to-contemporary Mesquiteers tales, in which the boys discover that the mining business they have some kind of interest in (the fellas are really quite the entrepreneurs, with specialties in pretty much every kind of business venture that turns up in a Western) can somehow be improved via airplane travel, and determine to go into business with a young pilot, Ned Hoyt (Anthony Marsh) has a purty sister that Mesquiteer Stony Brooke is kinda sweet on. Yes, Beth Hoyt is none other than Brooks, her iconic pageboy hairdo replaced by a less-severe tonsorial non-style, long, loose and straight with ladylike pin-curls. The dresses she wears are kind of plain too. 

It's important to remember that the aforementioned iconic pageboy is only iconic today. Brooks' work with G.W. Pabst was/is sensational, but it didn't make her a star the way Dietrich's work with Sternberg on The Blue Angel did. This was the fault of the times, and, as Brooks recalls in her own indespensible book Lulu In Hollywood, her own fault as well. "[It] was during the making of Diary of a Lost Girl—on the last day of shooting, to be exact—that Pabst moved into my future. We were sitting gloomily at a table in the garden of a little café, watching the workmen while they dug the grave for a burial scene, when he decide to let me have it. Several weeks before, in Paris, he had met some friends of mine—rich Americans with whom I spent every hour away from work. And he was angry: first, because he thought they prevented me from staying in Germany, learning the language, and becoming a serious actress, as he wanted; and second, because he looked upon them as spoiled children who would amuse themselves with me for a time and then discard me like an old tow. 'Your life is exactly like Lulu's,' he said, 'and you will end the same way.' [...] At the time, knowing so little of what he meant by 'Lulu,' I just sat sullenly glaring at him, trying not to listen. Fifteen years later, in Hollywood, with all his predictions closing in on me, I heard his words again—hissing back to me. And, listening this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas."

On the very next page of my edition, the opening line of her epilogue, "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs," reads "'The trouble with us,' Grant Clarke told me in 1930, 'is that we are too degenerate for one part of Hollywood and not degenerate enough for the other.'"

Brooks made Overland Stage Raiders about six years before she packed her bags and went back to Kansas. In the movie, she looks as if she never left there. Although she looks entirely innocuous when Stony offers to carry some packages for her, Corrigan's Tucson Smith observes, "It never fails, when Stony meets a gal we meet trouble." Her now-seemingly cornfed looks and plain bearing aside, her line readings speak of elocution lessons above all. There is some not-unintriguing subtext available for her character. Brother Ned, it happens, is an ex-con; although he was cleared of trumped-up charges, he's still got a prison rap that turns out to be excellent kind-of blackmail fodder from back-East gangsters who wanna horn in on that mining bonanza. "Can't you forget the past?" Brooks' Beth asks her brother, and those familiar with the glories of Brooks' seedy, tragic, and definitively fatale Lulu in Pabst's Pandora's Box can easily imagine a past for this now-banal presence to have escaped from, if not forgotten. The feeling gets a little stronger, and a little funnier, when she looks up at Wayne and says, "Stony, there's something I've got to tell you. Something I should have told you a long time ago."

With Fritz Kortner in Pandora's Box, 1929. 

In a blog post in The New Yorker last spring, Hilton Als praises Girls' Jemima Kirke and her performance in that show thusly: "[S]he's less interested in our approval than she is in being watched." Als continues: "In this, Kirke is the descendant of Louise Brooks in almost anything." The tenability of comparing Jemima Kirke to Louise Brooks is, happily, no concern of this department. But as to the quality to which Als alludes, the interest in being watched, what fascinates about Brooks' presence in Overland Stage Raiders is the almost total absence of the desire to be even seen, let alone watched. Five years after turning down a lead role in The Public Enemy, six years before quitting Hollywood for good, she was done. 

Overland Stage Raiders, a pretty entertaining picture overall, as long as you're not too creeped out by Max Terhune's ventriloquism stuff, is available in a pretty nice-looking Blu-ray from, who else, Olive Films. 

Claudia Cardinale and Frank Zappa

Just because.

The trouble with cinephiles

Edmund Wilson once remarked, apropos his soon-to-be-sundered friendship with Vladimir Nabokov, that he felt for the great author "warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation." That phrase springs to mind sometimes when I read my pal Richard Brody. Aside from being an unfailingly kind and generous person, Richard's also a critic and cultural enthusiast of incredible vivacity and perceptiveness. But my, can he sometimes say the darnedest things. 

I am grateful, for instance, for the canny, erudite digging that led Richard to a dishy interview with Shirley MacLaine in the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and his translated quotes from that interview. But my exasperation sets in when he discusses the fact that MacLaine turned down the role of Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany's. MacLaine says she wouldn't have done as good a job as the 1961 film's actual star, Audrey Hepburn. Richard begs to differ. "I think she'd have been much better. What's utterly implausible in Hepburn's performance is the backstory; MacLaine would have been persuasive as the former Lula Mae Barnes and Doc Golightly's fugitive wife."

Well, indeed, she might have. In a different movie. And by that I don't even mean the different movie that Breakfast At Tiffany's necessarily would have been had MacLaine played Holly. No, I mean a movie rather entirely different from Paramount and adapter/director Blake Edwards' conception of it. Part of that conception being that it's a movie in which Lula Mae Barnes is never seen. I haven't read any accounts of the making of the film in which the issue is discussed, but it always seemed to me that part of the power of the revelation of Holly's past, and part of what makes Buddy Ebsen's single, lonely scene (and an exquisitely performed scene it is, of course) in the film so powerful, is how it preserves the Hepburn portrayal of Holly, a clear case of how Screen Presence=Character, while at the same time challenging the audience's perception of her. Whether or not Hepburn "is" or could have made a "plausible" Lula Mae Barnes is not the point. Edwards' genius in handling the matter is in asking the audience to make an imaginative leap: that is, to picture the poised, insouciant but also sad and, in the word of the character so delightfully incarnated by Martin Balsam, "phony" Holly as a barefoot and possibly even pregnant teen bride. The viewer may go as far as he or she wishes in this exercise; and whether you take it to an ad absurdum level or don't even bother to mentally limn the difference, nothing detracts from the believability (which is, I might add, something entirely distinct from the rather banal "plausibility"—there's a good reason Alfred Hitchcock, a director recalled with fondness by MacLaine in the interview Richard cites, had a dubious attitude to viewers who relied too much on said quality) of Hepburn's portrayal, from what is so actually and gorgeously there on the screen whenever she fills it. 

I remember once, in the midst of a multi-format spat/discussion of the Duplass brothers' use of zooms in Cyrus, Richard saying that the zoom was an "expression of the filmmaker's desire." I think sometimes we cinephiles and critics have a tendency to underestimate the extent to which filmmakers gauge, and honor, the desire of the audience. I think Blake Edwards' use of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's is an absolutely stellar and still exceptionally rewarding example of that. As for MacLaine, I love her too, but I don't blame her for not taking the Holly Golightly role, and one rationale for her refusal may be inferred by looking at her filmography in the late '50s and early '60s. So I'll end by saying that had Ginnie Moorehead dodged that bullet, ditched that mopey Dave Hirsch when he failed yet again to complete A Great American Novel, and caught a bus to New York, well, she coulda given Holly Golightly a run for her money. 

Image of the day, 5/20/12

Kim Novak, Bell, Book And Candle, Richard Quine, 1958

Image of the day, 1/31/12

Lee Marvin and Macha Méril, "Mon Petit Chou," Route 66, Sam Peckinpah, 1961

Hat tip: Tim Lucas.

Images of the day, 9/13/11

Gina Marès in Coeur fidèle, Jean Epstein, 1923.

Screen captures from the frankly amazing Eureka!/Masters of Cinema Blu-ray/DVD combination package, which is a must that I'll be writing on further some time soon.

The trouble with movie stars

I remember the thought occurring to me well into a screening of, believe it or not, Milos Forman's 2006 Goya's Ghosts. I was thinking, this is Forman's most interesting movie in quite a while, it's not working entirely, but he's making some bold choices, and it's going to get lambasted, and mainly because of Natalie Portman. It wasn't that she was bad, it was just that she was so...Natalie Portman that her character had trouble registering, and her character was the real key to the film. And I thought, I wonder how this film will play in 15 or twenty years, when Natalie Portman's Portman-ness isn't quite so nearly palpable in the zeitgeist. Will the picture be able to make itself felt more truly by then?

I recall these thoughts as internet film writers the world over go slightly batty tripping over themselves to agree with an individual who they'd characterize as either full of it or an insensitive boor 99 percent of the rest of the time. I refer, of course, to Sean Penn, who tried to express to the French publication Le Figaro his misgivings about Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life without seeming peevish or that he was speaking altogether from wounded vanity or ego (there is a slight distinction between the two). I refer you to Richard Brody's ruminations on the statement, as Richard's post is both admirably civil and sufficiently eccentric to have earned the impatient dismissal of the renowned esthete John Nolte.

Whether you sympathize with Penn or not, there is the fact that with both audiences and critics, the announcement of Sean Penn's presence in a movie brings with it an expectation that Penn will not only appear in a large portion of the film, but that he will do things in it other than sit or stand around looking deeply perturbed. That he will perform Feats of Acting that audiences and critics have come to expect from hi, whether they be chameleonic or merely steeped in emotional intensity. Penn's is the movie star iconography of the master thespian, and while Malick's film does many things, it does not honor Penn's iconography, at least not in any conventional way. 

By contrast, Mike Nichols' 1965 film adaptation of Edward Albee's sensational play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn't just that, or maybe even that, at all; it's also or primarily a film about MOVIE STARS acting in an adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Specifically, about Elizabeth Taylor throwing away everything that makes her "Elizabeth Taylor" and still being Elizabeth Taylor anyway. How aware was Mike Nichols of this? Very aware, I'd say; aware enough so that almost 40 years later his film adaptation of Patrick Mawber's sensational play Closer was a film about Julia Roberts talking really, really dirty. People who complain about Judy Garland having been too old to play Esther Blodgett in Cukor's 1954 A Star is Born are missing the point in twelve different ways, as the film is about NOTHING BUT Judy Garland playing Esther Blodgett, everyone else's impeccable contributions notwithstanding. Just as North By Northwest is Hitchcock making the ultimate Cary Grant film by Hitchcock. And so on. 

Ignore star iconography at your film's peril, as Joseph Losey learned with his almost impossibly muddled 1968 Secret Ceremony, in which he had La Liz and Mia Farrow enact proto-ur-Lynchian encounters with no regard for the extradiegetic resonances of the screen personalities, treating them as mere performers. Actually, Losey didn't learn, not right away at least, as he next made the ineffable Boom! with Liz and Dick entirely in sub-surreal earnest. 

As for Malick, in his latter-day films he doesn't so much ignore star iconography as he behaves as if it doesn't exist. And again, there is a slight distinction between the two. It's clear that he casts for presence, and it's pretty clear in Tree of Life that he wanted what Sean Penn's got. He just wants it differently. Which perhaps inevitably (or is that so?) creates a disjoint with an audience conditioned to expect, or want, a certain Penn-ness. Something not dissimilar is in effect with Malick's ostensible comeback film, 1998's The Thin Red Line, which was so star-studded, and within which certain of the stars made appearances much more fleeting than one would expect from such names within the context of a "star studded" film. Hence, the first viewing of the picture one might ostensibly spending an inordinate amount of time noting, "There's Travolta! There's Clooney!" and so on. It's only with several viewings that one can break through that. Just as it might take several viewings of Tree of Life to fully get past the circumstances of Penn's manifestation in the film. Add to this the fact that Milick arguably needs these names in order to get his films made, and that talents of Penn's caliber are falling over themselves to work with Malick, and this particular conundrum gets knottier still. 

Memories of Arnold

When Michael Solomon got the position of Editor-In-Chief of Premiere magazine in November of 2000, I was terrified. I had been working there since 1996, under Jim Meigs as head man, and while Jim and I had an often tumultuous relationship, on balance he really cut me a whole lot of slack in terms of my being an overdrinking, coming-in-to-the-office-at-11-a.m.-on-a-GOOD-DAY, quarrelsome querulous asshole. Whether my reputation had preceded me or not, I had a sense I was gonna have to straighten out a bit, or at least show a Willingness To Perform, for the new guy.

Didn't take me long to get my chance. As it happened, Michael, who despite my intimidation I took an immediate liking to when I saw that one of the first things he installed in his office was a sliver tray bearing two large tumblers and a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, had an idea that he wanted to make a BIG splash with his first issue. Investigative reporter John Connolly (with whom I had done some stuff at Premiere during the Meigs era; I won't go into it here, as I need to save SOME material for a memoir that I'll actually get frigging PAID for) had an idea: Schwarzenegger, who was a well-known woman-chasing-and-pawing dawg with—ew!— pig valves in his heart, and whose oft-speculated-upon political ambitions were showing signs of stirring again, and who Connolly had excellent materials and/or sources on. Just put me on a plane, Connolly pretty much said.Looking very serious, Solomon asked me, "Can we do this?" I practically jumped into his lap and started drooling. "Sure, I mean four weeks isn't that long if you want it for the January issue, but it shouldn't be a problem." The last big piece I had worked on with Connolly had taken eight months of reporting and vetting and long meetings with lawyers and publicists from pitch to actual publication. What can I tell you guys? I wanted to keep my job. 

So out John went. We had worked out that as speed was of the essence, we would write-as-we-go. That is, Connolly would fax me notes or just tell me shit over the phone and I would craft prose based on them; not in my customary conversational piling-up-subordinate-clauses style, but in a terse, sometimes mildly ironic, slightly moralistic tone during the setups leading to just-the-facts-ma'am passages of scandal data. John was a real pit bull in terms of pursuing individual stories, and would go after any lead, so another part of my job was narrowing his focus. There were a number of different Arnold-behaving-badly themes he wanted to pursue, and just to keep the fucking thing moving, or because I didn't much care, I would discourage this, encourage that. I remember having a devil of a time having PAL videocassettes of Arnold copping a feel off of a British morning show hostess converted to NTSC, but once that happened, well, there he was. "Playful," I think his claque referred to this sort of thing as. 

Of course Arnold's legal representatives, once word got out that Connolly was turning up at greater Los Angeles body-building hangouts got out, took umbrage, and their pushback approach was two-pronged; first, they tried to remind the Premiere editors what a Bad Person John Connolly was (there had been some stock market shenanigans in which his name had been mentioned, back in the Golden '80s), and then, rather peculiarly, coming right out and telling us just which bits of Arnold scandal they considered actionable, as in, "if you say [X], we'll sue." Almost a roadmap, one of our own lawyers noted, a bit bemusedly, as it turned out to be an incredible helpful document as we vetted the finished piece. 

I remember being at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2001, having two-to-three hour conference calls with Connolly and Hachette's legal team and Premiere's fact-checkers (and let me mention that Hachette's legal people were always incredibly helpful and encouraging to us whenever we did sensitive stories, which you wouldn't necessarily think if you know certain aspects of the history of U.S. Premiere at Hachette) and thinking, "Holy crap, we're really pulling this off." We had a GREAT headline ("Arnold The Barbarian"), Matt Mahurin did a really creepy photo-illustration, and our stuff was fucking airtight. What it all meant in the larger scheme of things was completely beyond my ken at that moment, but at least I wasn't going to get fucking fired. 

You know who did get fucking fired? Michael Solomon. Before he had even served out a year as Premiere's editor-in-chief. And believe it or not, the Arnold story represented the first couple of nails in his coffin. Yeah, we got A LOT of Hollywood blowback from Schwarzenegger's claque: irate letters from very big-name collaborators, many of them women, complaining at how disappointed they were that Premiere was trucking in such baseless garbage and what a great guy Arnold was. (And I do believe, incidentally, that the protestations of Schwarzenegger's great-guyness were entirely sincere; after all, don't we all have friends who are generous and kind to us and may be less than entirely gallant in other respects, about whom we tend to say, "Oh, that's just X?" when we hear stories of them doing things that aren't so cool?) Every day for like two weeks there were a bunch of new letters, and the names: James Cameron, Jamie Leigh Curtis, Emma Thompson (whose verbal wrist-slapping was hand-written; I remember thinking she had the most beautiful handwriting of any living person that I had ever seen) and so on. But there was no black-balling, no "We'll never work with Premiere again" grandstanding. From any of them. It was just due-diligent noise-making. Because, as much as they liked the fellow, they really did know what was up.

No, the blowback that counted actually echoed that which we got from our readers, many of whom were up in arms that we were "picking" on Arnold. It wasn't just a matter of people thinking highly of Schwarzenegger; because of his rags-to-riches story and Terminator awesomeness, people actually had quite a bit invested in the idea of thinking highly of Schwarzenegger, and they just didn't want that messed with. Quite a few of the bigwigs at Hachette, both French and American, apparently looked at "Arnold the Barbarian" and said "Why are they/is he doing this?" Hachette had acquired U.S. Premiere in order to unify it with the international editions of the book; aside from that, the company never really had much of an idea of what to do with it. THIS, however, they did NOT want to do. So the fellas upstairs all of a sudden got a little bit skeptical of the young man who had been their exciting new fair-haired boy just about ten weeks before. Michael was out in October, I think. And now when people cite the history of reputable Arnold scandal-mongering, all they talk about is the 2003 Los Angeles Times piece. Well, Premiere was there first, and we didn't get sued. Next time I see Michael Solomon, I think I'll buy him a drink.  

The swinging '60s

From top: Jacqueline Bissett; Pattie Boyd; Jane Birkin (with Ray Brooks); Charlotte Rampling (with Michael Crawford); The Knack...And How To Get It, Richard Lester, 1965.