29 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Books, History, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
≈ Comments Off on Murder Orthodoxies: Sex, Lies and Marilyn
The tragic death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 shocked the world, and over fifty years later, the rumours are still coming. In a new book, Murder Orthodoxies: A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death, author Donald McGovern unpicks the myths and searches for the truth. You can read my review at Immortal Marilyn.
16 Thursday Aug 2018
Posted in Anniversaries, Fashion and Beauty, Film, Madonna, Music
≈ Comments Off on ‘You May Be My Lucky Star…’
Tags
Beautiful Stranger, Catholicism, Confessions on a Dancefloor, Desperately Seeking Susan, Evita, Ghosttown, Into the Groove, Jump, Like A Prayer, Live Aid, Live to Tell, Living for Love, Lucky Star, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Marvin Gaye, Material Girl, Ray of Light, Secret, Smash Hits, Wembley, Who's That Girl, William Orbit
From the age of eleven, my Saturdays would often include a trip to the record department at Boots to buy a 7-inch single. One of these was ‘Lucky Star’ by Madonna. Along with ‘Holiday’, it was one of her earliest songs played on the radio. Each weekend I stopped to gaze at her gorgeous album cover, but my savings rarely stretched to LPs. When I finally bought it, it had a different cover and my best friend (who wasn’t a fan) borrowed and never returned it. Continue reading
08 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Fashion and Beauty, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Music
≈ Comments Off on There’s No Business Like Show Business
Tags
A Man Chases a Girl (Until She Catches Him), After You Get What You Want (You Don't Want It), Brighton, Cinemascope, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Duke of York's Brighton, Ethel Merman, Heat Wave, Irving Berlin, Jacqueline Rose, Joe DiMaggio, Johnnie Ray, Lazy, Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Gaynor, Picturehouse, Susan Strasberg, The Seven Year Itch, There's No Business Like Show Business, Travilla, Twentieth Century Fox, Walter Lang, You'd Be Surprised
On June 1st – exactly ninety-two years after Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital – her 1954 movie, There’s No Business Like Show Business, was screened at the Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton, and will be shown at selected Picturehouse venues throughout June. The first musical made in CinemaScope (a pioneering widescreen technology developed by Twentieth Century Fox to combat the threat of television), it was also one of the last Technicolour musicals made under the studio system model of Hollywood’s golden age. Continue reading
01 Friday Jun 2018
Posted in Books, Film, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
≈ Comments Off on Marilyn: An Unlikely Feminist
In the wake of last fall’s revelations about sexual harassment in Hollywood, some were quick to point out that this was not a new phenomenon. Actress Joan Collins claimed that Marilyn Monroe had warned her about the ‘wolves’ who preyed on young starlets. Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd, who played dual roles in a TV movie about the legendary star, revealed that they were later blackballed for resisting unwanted advances. And a producer on the 2011 biopic, My Week With Marilyn, recalled how disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein loitered on the set while Michelle Williams filmed a nude swimming scene.
Just as Monroe’s glamorous image has come to symbolise Hollywood’s golden age, she has also been linked to its darker side in a way that risks over-simplification. For not only was she one of the first to speak out about sexual abuse, she also battled for equal rights and fair pay, which women are still fighting today in Tinseltown and beyond. Michelle Morgan, author of Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, paints a fuller picture in her new book, The Girl: Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch and the Birth of an Unlikely Feminist. Continue reading
01 Tuesday May 2018
Posted in Books, Marilyn Monroe
≈ Comments Off on Making Sense of Marilyn
My review of Dr Andrew Norman’s Making Sense of Marilyn, a concise biography and psychological portrait, is published at Immortal Marilyn.
26 Thursday Apr 2018
Posted in Film, Marilyn Monroe, Television
≈ Comments Off on Urban Myths: ‘It’s Me, Sugar’
Tags
Billy Wilder, Donald Wolfe, Gemma Arterton, It's Me Sugar, Marilyn Monroe, Sky Arts, Some Like It Hot, Urban Myths
“She was the biggest star in the world; she had a lot of attention on her, a lot of pressure… there is a scene, when she comes to the door, she says, ‘It’s me, Sugar.’ It took forty-seven shots to make this scene. The film is about that moment, the crisis she had. It’s funny because it’s stupid not to be able to say ‘It’s me, Sugar’… It’s tragic too.” Continue reading
26 Friday Jan 2018
Posted in Books, Fiction, Magazines, Marilyn Monroe, Non-Fiction
≈ Comments Off on Art Decades 13: Marilyn in Manhattan, The Punished and More
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Art Decades, Cy Forrest, Elizabeth Winder, Marilyn in Manhattan, Marilyn Monroe, Tara Hanks, The Punished
The latest edition of Art Decades quarterly is now available from Amazon stores worldwide (and for £11.14 in the UK.) At the heart of this issue is a tribute to cult cinema, with a profile of ‘sexploitation’ king Joe Sarno; an unpublished interview with Jess Franco, the Spanish filmmaker famed for his erotic horror flicks; and a roundtable discussion with the authors of a new book, It Came From the Video Aisle, including a special focus on director Charles Band, best-known for his horror comedies.
Elsewhere, there’s a short story from Les Bohem, set in the post-hippie California of the 1970s; a spotlight on Denver’s ‘totally rad’ nostalgia shop, Fifty-Two 80s; and extracts from Singin’ In French, a new anthology co-edited by Marcelline Block. For me, the highlight was ‘Suzie’s Zoo’, a very moving piece from Kelley Richey in which she explores childhood memories through film. She also contributes three photo-stories which celebrate nature, beauty and the coming of spring.
And finally from me, a review of Elizabeth Winder’s Marilyn in Manhattan, one of my favourite books of 2017; and an interview with Cy Forrest, author of The Punished, a ‘dystopian noir’ which alternates between the inhabitants of a ghost village during World War II and the corporate sexism of the 1980s.
08 Monday Jan 2018
Posted in Brighton, Fashion and Beauty, Film, Marilyn Monroe
≈ Comments Off on How to Marry a Millionaire
Tags
Betty Grable, Brighton, Cinemascope, David Wayne, Duke of York's Brighton, How to Marry a Millionaire, Jean Negulesco, Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, Nunnally Johnson, Picturehouse, Travilla
On a crisp Friday morning in the first week of January, I joined a handful of people at the Duke of York’s in Brighton – England’s oldest independent cinema – for a screening of How to Marry a Millionaire. It’s part of a regular series of classic movies aimed at an older audience, with tea and biscuits served beforehand, and a fifteen-minute interval – although I think it’s fair to say they could use some promotion. (Classic movie fans, please note: Millionaire is showing at Picturehouse cinemas across the UK throughout January, and looking further ahead, There’s No Business Like Show Business is scheduled for June.) Continue reading
23 Saturday Dec 2017
Posted in Art and Photography, Books, Fiction, Non-Fiction
≈ Comments Off on 2017: A Year In Books
Tags
A Beautiful Young Woman, Billie Holiday, Bright Air Black, Buchi Emecheta, David Vann, Elizabeth Winder, Emma Flint, Emma Reyes, Harriette Arnow, Jake Arnott, Jerry Dantzic, Joan Didion, Julian Lopez, Julie Buntin, Julie Lekstrom Himes, Karl Geary, Kathleen Collins, Little Deaths, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Marilyn in Manhattan, Marilyn Monroe, Marlena, Medea, Montpelier Parade, Patricia Bosworth, South and West, The Dollmaker, The Fatal Tree, The Girl From the Metropol Hotel, The Master and Margarita, The Men In My Life, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Set in 18th century London, The Fatal Tree is a rip-roaring saga laced with harsh truths, recreating the battle between Jack Sheppard, a young thief famed for his daring escapes, and the ruthlessly corrupt ‘Thief-taker General’, Jonathan Wild, from a very different perspective – that of Sheppard’s lover, the prostitute Edgworth Bess. Using historic slang to great effect, Jake Arnott evokes not only the criminal underworld, but also the parallel black and gay subcultures, as they collide with the double standard of high society and the literati. Continue reading
13 Monday Nov 2017
Posted in Madonna, Magazines, Marilyn Monroe, Radio, Television
≈ Comments Off on Liz Smith 1923-2017
Liz Smith, the veteran gossip columnist known as the ‘doyenne of dish’, has died aged 94. Continue reading
