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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, March 17th, 2006 - Comments Off on Bettie Page lives: My first bikini was green with a little rickrack all around it
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Bettie Page lives: My first bikini was green with a little rickrack all around it

Sometimes a writer is right there and in an LA Times profile by Louis Sahagun of elusive, reclusive pin-up Bettie Page at the age of 82, the writer captures a simple scene but also much of her allure, charm and outrageously healthy look, which of course led to the oh-so-close Picturehouse release of The Notorious Bettie Page. Whether the excuse is Mary Harron’s movie or an epic signing session by Page, there’s no need to excuse such sweet prose. 78787bettiepage.jpg “The 82-year-old Page—a taboo-breaker who helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s—is not a quitter. “I’m about ready to roll,” she said in a Southern drawl, freshening her bright red lipstick. “But I’m going to go slow. I won’t squiggle if I write slow.” … Nearly five decades after the last photos of her appeared in magazines like Chicks and Chuckles, Page is finally earning a respectable income for her work. “I’m more famous now than I was in the 1950s… Being in the nude isn’t a disgrace unless you’re being promiscuous about it… After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!” … “My land! Is that supposed to be me?” asked Page, surveying a painting of her reclining in a negligee with an ecstatic smile on her face. Putting pen to canvas and concentrating mightily, she muttered, “I was never that pretty.” The sadder details of her long life follow. “From the start, Page — whose measurements were 36-24-37 — preferred the skimpy outfits she designed and sewed at home. “I made all of my bikinis and most of my lingerie,” she said. “My favorite was my first bikini. It was green with a little rickrack all around it.” … Minnesota artist Rick Volkmar… has spent years painstakingly touching up old black-and-white Bettie Page photos, erasing rips and tears and thousands of tiny white specks with a fine brush to rebuild the mesh of her stockings, the sheen of her hair, the shadows on her face.” Volkmar exhaustively describes her features, concluding, “Her thumb and hands are muscular, almost mannish. Same with her feet. Her rear end is noticeably squarish, and there are two creases under the left buttocks and one under her right buttocks…. It all adds up to this… She looks like fun.” [Page’s official website is here.]

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon