The Notorious B.E.T.T.I.E. P.A.G.E.
The Notorious Bettie Page is opening this weekend. I’m so excited. I’ve been waiting for this film for years. I first heard about it in a late 1990’s Interview magazine feature on Guinevere Turner who wrote the script and was (I believe) originally going to play Bettie Page. For many years the picture of Turner dressed as Page that accompanied the article was a part of the huge collage that covered the ceiling of my old room in New York. A collage since dismantled by my mother who feared that my fondness for pin-up girls and half naked starlets might make a visiting electrician (happily married with a young child) think I wasn’t second wife material.
But back to The Notorious Bettie Page. It’s directed by Mary Harron who made one of my all time favorite films I Shot Andy Warhol (also the screen version of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which I have yet to see). There’s an interesting moment in I Shot Andy Warhol where Lili Taylor is talking on the telephone to this guy and he asks “What do you look like.” “A butch dyke,” she says. Lately I’ve found myself thinking of that line nearly every time I pass a mirror.
But back to The Notorious Bettie Page. It’s directed by Mary Harron who made one of my all time favorite films I Shot Andy Warhol (also the screen version of Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which I have yet to see). There’s an interesting moment in I Shot Andy Warhol where Lili Taylor is talking on the telephone to this guy and he asks “What do you look like.” “A butch dyke,” she says. Lately I’ve found myself thinking of that line nearly every time I pass a mirror.