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From Mary Harron (I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, AMERICAN PSYCHO) comes THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE, a provocative exploration of sexuality, religion and pop culture as she takes us into the 1950s and the fascinating world of famous pin-up girl, Bettie Page. In an incandescent performance, Gretchen Mol stars as Bettie Page, who grew up in a conservative religious family in Tennessee and became a photo model sensation in 1950s New York. Bettie’s legendary fetish poses made her the target of a Senate investigation into pornography, and transformed her into an erotic icon who continues to enthrall fans to this day.
As it depicts Bettie’s often accidental journey to celebrity, THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE captures a vanished but not entirely unfamiliar America, where sex is a secret obsession that can incite furor at the highest levels of government. In a stylistic tour-de-force, Harron recreates the look and feel of the films of Bettie’s 1950s heyday, variously evoking the era’s gritty black & white noirs, lush Technicolor melodramas, even its Super 8 home movies. We step into the past to follow the life and career of Bettie Page, a quiet, good-natured Southern beauty who found her calling in front of the camera and radiated vitality and joy in every pose, every costume, every milieu. Though her fetish tableaux may now look more quaint than shocking, Bettie Page remains a wonder to behold.
It is 1955, and Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn), the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency has opened hearings to investigate the impact of pornographic material on the nation’s youth. Police officers have raided New York City’s shady Times Square bookstores, where shelves are lined with men’s magazines like Escapade and Wink, and specialty photos and booklets like “Bettie Page in Bondage” are kept behind the counter for customers with specific requests. A Catholic priest testifies before Senate committee that such materials are a greater menace to America than Communism.
In the hallway outside the hearing room, a lovely raven-haired woman (Gretchen Mol) quietly waits to be called before the committee. She wears a demure suit and proper white gloves; in a warm Southern accent, she gracefully deflects the subtle overtures of an intrigued young police officer, politely assuring him that she will be fine on her own.
She is the model from “Bettie Page in Bondage.” And while her image in lace-up leather boots tells one story, the latest snapshot of Bettie and her sister Goldie, taken after church in Nashville, tells another. And both are stories of Bettie Page.
She grows up during the Depression in a poor family in Nashville. As a young girl, Bettie goes to church every Sunday with her mother and siblings. While Bettie soaks up the warming words of the preacher (John Cullum), a young admirer tries to get her attention. Bettie doesn’t mind, but her conservative mother (Ann Dowd) keeps a tight rein on all her pretty daughters. As a teenager, Bettie is a bright and dedicated student, a member of the school debating team with her eyes on a college future.
But Bettie’s life has its troubles and setbacks. Her dreams of university don’t materialize, and her youthful marriage to a handsome local boy, Billy Neal (Norman Reedus) quickly goes sour. An innocent conversation on a Nashville street ends in ugliness and terror. Yet Bettie doesn’t dwell on her misfortunes, however dark they may be; she picks herself up and moves on - often literally. And so in 1949, she boards a bus that will take her to New York City and a fresh start. It is against the sophisticated, bustling background of 1950s Manhattan that Bettie Page will rise to fame and, eventually, notoriety. A walk on the beach in Coney Island brings an encounter with Jerry Tibbs (Kevin Carroll), a police officer and part-time photographer. When Bettie good-naturedly agrees to pose for Jerry Tibbs, right there on the sand, she inadvertently launches a career. She learns how to highlight her figure for photographs, and at Jerry’s suggestion, re-styles her hair so curving bangs camouflage her high, broad forehead and so creating the famous Bettie Page hairstyle.
Soon Bettie is introduced to the world of camera clubs, becoming a favorite of the shutterbugs who take sexy photographs of women for men’s magazines and private collectors. Whether wearing a bikini or saucily revealing lingerie, Bettie is completely at ease in front of the camera, cheerfully moving her body this way and that, her expression ever-changing but always welcoming. As her image becomes a common sight at newsstands, Bettie simultaneously pursues an acting career. Enrolling at a Greenwich Village acting studio, Betty reads Stanislavski and diligently applies herself to her exercises. She is something of an anomaly among her fellow students, who don’t quite know what to make of the religious young woman from Nashville.
Bettie’s modeling career eventually leads her to Movie Star News, a busy storefront run by Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer) and his half-sister Paula (Lili Taylor). The Klaws sell Hollywood head shots and movie stills; they also run their own photo business out of an office upstairs. Irving handles distribution and Paula takes photographs that are destined for private clients, men who like to look at women wearing very high-heeled boots and shoes, sometimes tied up or brandishing a whip. It’s unfamiliar territory to Bettie, but she does not judge the prominent men who need an escape from the pressures of their lives. In the homey, well-fed environment of the Klaws’ studio, the accoutrements of bondage seem more goofy than threatening; the models are simply play-acting for a secret audience. Bettie becomes part of the Klaws’ unofficial family, which includes the talented, profane British photographer and illustrator John Willie (Jared Harris) and the worldly model Maxie (Cara Seymour). Bettie keeps her work with the Klaws separate from her cheesecake modeling, which grows to include a rewarding collaboration with photographer Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) in Florida.
But Bettie’s work with the Klaws has put her on a collision course with the prevailing mores of the 1950s. The Senate hearings spell the beginning of the end of the Klaws’ photography operation. Soon, it will be time for Bettie Page to move on, relying as always on her faith.
Bettie Page modeled in New York from 1950 to 1957, but her impact far outstrips the relative brevity of her career. The late 1970s brought a resurgence of interest in Page’s career, winning her new generations of fans and making her an icon all over the world. Her distinctive look and radiant presence have combined to make her an influence not only on erotic media, but also the wider realm of pop culture, from fashion and music to movies and comic books.
Born in 1923, Bettie Page rose to fame on the strength of her photographs in such men’s magazines as Wink, Beauty Parade and Titter. Her image appeared on postcards, playing cards, and album sleeves. By 1954 she was the top pin-up model in New York. Model-turned-photographer Bunny Yeager extolled Bettie’s natural beauty in essays that accompanied their outdoor photo shoots, which included a session with two cheetahs at a wild animal park in Florida. Yeager’s holiday photo of a beaming Bettie wearing only Santa Claus cap became the January 1955 centerfold in Hugh Hefner’s year-old magazine, Playboy. Less well known at the time was Bettie’s work with Irving and Paula Klaw, who catered to private clients with photographs and short films featuring female models in S&M scenarios. That changed in 1955, when Tennessee senator and aspiring presidential candidate Estes Kefauver launched a campaign against pornography that included television coverage of his subcommittee’s hearings. Bettie began to work less, and in 1957 she left New York and modeling. No one knew what became of her. Though collectors sought out her old photos, she was largely forgotten.
In 1978 Belier Press began reprinting Page’s photos from the camera club sessions in bound volumes, introducing her to a new generation of fans. Author/artist Dave Stevens used Page as the model for his hero’s girlfriend in his comic book “The Rocketeer.” Page’s profile grew when a fan named Greg Theakston created “The Betty (sic) Pages,” publishing nine issues of his Bettie-centric magazine from 1987-1993. Books about Page began appearing in the mid-1990s, including an authorized biography “Bettie Page: Life of a Pin-up Legend” by Karen Essex and James Swanson. Today, Bettie Page websites abound, and her likeness adorns everything from drink coasters to hot rods. Contemporary burlesque artists like Dita Von Teese cite her as a major influence; and retailers offer clothes and wigs to achieve the Bettie Page look. Page is fully ensconced in the vocabulary of high fashion as well; in a February 2005 photo shoot for W Magazine, Renee Zellweger was styled after the pin-up model, with bangs and black hair. Meanwhile, Page’s once-scandalous bondage films are available on video and DVD.
Mary Harron was working on a television news magazine program when she first encountered the story of Bettie Page in 1993. “I had never heard of Bettie Page,” Harron recalls. “I started reading up on her and I was very intrigued by the story. She came from Nashville and I know Nashville pretty well. I was immediately interested in the sex and religion aspects of her story, and the fact that she’d sort of disappeared and then come back.”
Though Harron was unable to convince her television bosses to produce a segment on Bettie Page, the story stayed with her. She finally decided to tackle Page’s life in a feature film, collaborating with screenwriter/actress Guinevere Turner (GO FISH). Harron and Turner ended up honing their screenplay over many drafts and many years, working on it in between other projects. Those projects included Harron’s 1996 feature film debut I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, about Valerie Solanas who brought her radical manifestos to Andy Warhol’s Factory and then made a failed attempt on his life; and AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000), Harron’s darkly funny adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous novel.
With the screenplay for THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE, Harron and Turner sought to depict Page’s times as much as her life. To Harron, history and individual biography are intimately related – particularly when the individual is a woman born in the 20th Century. “I strongly believe that women’s lives changed so extraordinarily radically in the 20th Century that it’s very hard to separate a woman’s personal history from the time in which she lived,” says the director. “If you’re a 20th Century woman – and I’m speaking as one of them – the year in which you were born had a radical effect on how your life was going to go. A Bettie Page born ten years later or ten years earlier would have a very different life.”
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE focuses on Page’s heyday in the 1950s, a period of American history that has become synonymous with conformity and repressed desire. But it was also the era of Hollywood sex goddesses like Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield. Harron’s stepmother, who had been a starlet under contract at Fox, offered a first-hand perspective. “She said in that period if you were a pretty girl with large breasts people would just give you things – like the world was yours, for a brief period,” Harron says. “There was something about the sexy girl and what she summed up for the culture. Still, women’s roles and what they could be was very restricted. If Bettie hadn’t been a pin-up queen she would have been a typist or a secretary. Bettie accepted the values of her time in that she felt her proper destiny was to settle down with a husband and kids, but she was also a free spirit, a natural bohemian. Bettie’s photos reflect that split - she’s like Betty Crocker coming out with a tray of cookies, and yet she’s posing with a whip. She’s so wholesome and at the same time she’s very sexual.”
The film’s Bettie Page is a woman who embodies two American obsessions, sex and religion, and seems to live easily with both. Harron’s reading of Bettie’s religious nature stemmed in part from having spent time in Nashville when her father was a performer on the original “Hee Haw.” “Everything I read about Bettie, and knowing Nashville a little bit, it seemed to me that she had always been religious. That part of the South is such a religious culture. For the poor, the church is this particular thing: when you don’t have a friend, you have a friend in Jesus. It’s religion as consolation, as refuge. Bettie would have done the modeling and posing and still believed in God. It would have been second nature to her,” says Harron.
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE goes against the current grain of causality and psychological narrative. “So many biopics try to explain everything complex and mysterious about their character in terms of childhood trauma. I didn’t want to be so reductive, to reduce Bettie’s life to pop psychology. I wanted there to be some mystery and ambiguity,” says Harron. “Obviously it’s my interpretation of Bettie’s life because there’s a lot of selection involved and I’ve chosen to highlight certain events of her life over others. But I’m not trying to give a final answer about who Bettie was, because I don’t think there is one. I think the truth about Bettie lies within her contradictions.”
The screenplay drew the support of Pamela Koffler, Katie Roumel and Christine Vachon of Killer Films, which had produced Harron’s I SHOT ANDY WARHOL. “Our experience with I SHOT ANDY WARHOL was so positive that we definitely wanted to work with Mary again,” Koffler affirms. “Mary has a tremendous feel for authenticity in detail and period. She tackled the ’60s and the Warhol scene through Valerie Solanas. With this landscape of sex in the ’50s, her way in was through Bettie Page and who she was – and asking that question of who she was, as opposed to necessarily answering it.”
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE follows the chance encounters and spontaneous decisions that help shape Bettie’s career. It shows us the inadvertent making of a sex icon in circumstances that were relaxed and often downright homey. Bettie’s first job with a camera club takes her to a nice suburban house, where she poses in the living room. The photographers are forbidden from touching the models, under penalty of ejection, and they say “please” when asking the girls to turn this way and that. At the studio run by Irving and Paula Klaw, the setup is even more familial; there are jolly group dinners and the shooting of a bondage film becomes a mini country vacation.
“In this film, the making of an icon is a rather haphazard process. Bettie kind of falls into this work. She just happens to be good at it,” Harron reflects. “You see the light-hearted spirit in which these supposedly terrible, awful films were being made. To them, it was just a giggle, really. And they had fun making them. It’s wasn’t being done in seedy back rooms. And they were people that she was friends with. There were no men in the movies; it’s just girls messing around, as far as she was concerned.”
Harron scrupulously sought out hard facts when it came to illustrating the day-to-day reality of Bettie’s life and times. The filmmaker was able to interview many who knew Bettie, including the elderly Paula Klaw, who was nearing the end of her life. Paula’s son also offered valuable recollections and perspective on the Klaw studio and business operation, which was essentially a mom-and-pop affair. Harron traveled to Nashville and visited Bettie’s high school, her brother and her first husband Billy Neal. Her old friend Sam Green, who had gone on to make critically acclaimed documentaries including the 2002 Academy Award® nominee THE WEATHER UNDER¬GROUND, joined the project as a researcher. Among other things, Green unearthed transcripts from the Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography, and Harron incorporated the testimony verbatim in the film’s Senate sequences.
With the screenplay completed, HBO Films joined forces with Killer to produce THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE. The casting process got underway, and Gretchen Mol was one of many actresses who received the script. Mol knew little about Bettie Page beyond the image of a dark-haired woman with bangs who posed in a leopard swimsuit. A few years earlier, however, she had seen part of a 1998 “E! True Hollywood Story” documentary about the pin-up girl. “I remembered that at the end she came on and she was blacked out – she didn’t want anyone to see her,” Mol reports. “I remembered she had this very deep Southern accent. It wasn’t what you would think this person would sound like after seeing all these images.”
The actress managed to get a copy of the E! documentary and read Karen Essex’s authorized biography. What she learned made her even more eager to play the part. “I felt a kinship for the character. She was one thing visually, and it was different than the person that I found watching even this hour of the E! television program. And then reading the Karen Essex book, seeing her handwriting, and hearing her voice, I just thought, ‘She’s a country girl.’ The way she kind of fell into her life, the way things sort of happened to her - I found her to be someone that I could relate to. I’m sure there are a lot of young women who feel that way. You go into one thing, and it leads you to the next. There are so many different roads you can take. And then Bettie just ended up being this icon for people.”
Harron had admired Mol’s work, but admits that the slender blonde actress had not immediately occurred to her for the part of the famously brunette Page. Then Mol came in to audition. Remembers Harron, “Gretchen just had an intuitive understanding of Bettie that was so clear from the very first audition she did. Gretchen wasn’t acting sexy; she was acting the joy in posing. I think she knew instinctively that that was what Bettie was about: Bettie’s delight in showing herself off, Bettie’s delight in posing. Bettie’s delight in her own body. Then also there was a kind of sweetness, friendliness and good nature. And innocence in the character that was very important to get across. When she actually put the wig on, I really was knocked out - she looked so like Bettie.”
Koffler praises Mol’s ability to infuse Bettie’s quiet, solitary moments with drama and meaning. “Gretchen conveys so much in scenes where she’s not necessarily chewing up the scenery; she’s just taking everything in, almost like she’s being batted through life. Gretchen is this constant presence that’s interior and quizzical and bright and beautiful,” the producer comments. “Gretchen draws you to the character, even though you don’t completely understand what’s going on all the time. It’s a great performance of consistency.”
Mol is complemented by an ensemble cast of actors who bring vivid life to Bettie’s milieu. Lili Taylor, who starred in Harron’s I SHOT ANDY WARHOL, portrays Paula Klaw, a motherly but streetwise woman who never stops being a businesswoman. As it happens, Koffler had met the real Paula Klaw several times, when the future producer was fresh out of college. Koffler had a job that often called upon her to visit Movie Star News. “I was really fascinated by the place, which seemed somehow out of time,” Koffler recalls. “The woman who ran it was a chain-smoker with a pompadour and bright red lipstick. She was kind of cranky and impatient but clearly in her element. Very memorable.” Later, of course, she realized the woman was Paula Klaw. “Lili is such a perfect person to play her. I can imagine Paula in her youth having Lili’s warmth but no-nonsense kind of toughness.”
Jared Harris, another I SHOT ANDY WARHOL veteran, plays another legend of erotic history, John Willie, the avid fetishist, illustrator and photographer. “He was a very fascinating character, John Willie,” Harron remarks. “He was a fantastic artist, and his photographs are very beautiful fetishistic pictures with a genuine erotic element. My favorite scene in the movie is when Bettie is all tied up and she and John Willie are discussing Jesus. It’s such a great contrast between his worldliness and his interest in her and her spiritual life. He’s really interested in her philosophy of life - like how is she doing what she’s doing, who is this girl?”
Harron created the role of Maxie, the British model, with her AMERICAN PSYCHO star Cara Seymour in mind. Completing the principal cast are acclaimed actors Chris Bauer (“The Wire”) as Irving Klaw; David Strathairn (GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK) as Estes Kefavuer; Sarah Paulson (DOWN WITH LOVE) as Bunny Yeager; and Jonathan Woodward (WIT) as Bettie’s actor boyfriend, Marvin.
Koffler considers Harron’s casting instincts impeccable. “Mary handpicks the actors for these parts and they’re just perfect. What she appreciates about an actor is that incredible gift that someone like Jared Harris has: he lights up his scenes and becomes this marvelous character with not a whole lot of screen time. He has short, interesting scenes, but he just becomes this presence in the film, as does Cara Seymour. There will be one-line guys who make such an impression, and help create a world.”
Accurately recreating the world of the 1950s lay at the core of Harron’s vision for THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE. From the very beginning, the filmmaker saw it as a black & white film with only a few scenes in color. “Black & white gives it the look of the past, which was very important. Entering this black & white world signals you that you’re going back in time. It’s a very different world. The mores, the values, the way of thinking, the attitudes to women and sex: a lot is different. Then there are all those things, of course, that are the same,” Harron laughs. “The same issues that pop up in American culture. But it really was a very different time.”
Harron and director of photography Mott Hupfel reviewed numerous films as they set about fashioning a drama that merged factual accuracy with 1950s style. They looked at the gritty, low-budget noirs of director Sam Fuller, including PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and UNDERWORLD U.S.A. The lush, supersaturated color of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas was the primary reference for the sequences of Bettie in Florida, and religious rebirth in particular.
Their techniques also harkened back to the 1950s. Harron used black & white 35mm film rather than transfer color film to black & white; the stock for the color sequences was similar to the old-fashioned Technicolor no longer in production. For the reproductions of the Klaw bondage films, including “Sally’s Punishment,” Hupfel used an old hand-cranked 16mm camera with black & white stock that resembled the actual Super 8 footage.
Hupfel took an old-style Hollywood approach to lighting, as well. Says Harron, “We had banks of lights everywhere when we shot outside. We had huge lights up on the beach at Coney Island, huge lights on the Miami night scene at the water. People these days shoot outdoor scenes very naturalistically, and don’t use a lot of light. But we did, so it automatically looks slightly stagy and stylized, which is what we wanted. It does make it look like an old movie.”
Meticulous research was important in all aspects of the films, in all departments. Notes Harron, “From our art director doing the great graphics, to the props, to wardrobe: everybody gets very immersed in the period. I feel strongly that you have to familiarize yourself with the literature of the time, the pop culture of the time, the events of the time to try to capture how people talked and how people thought.”
Mol points out the very garb that made Bettie a figure of notoriety can now be purchased with ease in any major city. “When you walk down the street in New York, there are all these little shops, like Fantasy World, and the mannequins have these weird outfits on. And it’s just second nature to us now. But at the time, it was so underground; it was so subversive.”
THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE filmed in New York and Miami for 32 days. Over the course of the film, Mol recreates many of Bettie’s celebrated poses. We also see both the making of “Sally’s Punishment” and black & white scenes from the finished film. Mol reports that the filming of those scenes was light-hearted, as the original productions had been. “Seeing the original loops, you knew they were trying not to laugh. It felt like a slumber party. When you’re dressed up like that, too, you kind of forget it after five minutes. When you walk out in front of the crew, you feel a little exposed and then after five minutes, it’s just like you have on a costume. It was really fun.”
Source music was carefully chosen to complement Bettie’s journey and the tenor of her times. Peggy Lee’s “It’s a Good Day” offers a droll accompaniment for the filming of “Sally’s Punishment,” while Jeri Southern’s “An Occasional Man” compliments Bettie’s Miami romance with Armand. “I wanted to have some women singers, women’s voices for different times of her life,” Harron explains. “The Patsy Cline song ‘Life is like a Mountain Railroad’ was written into the script. I always thought it was very important in terms of Bettie’s spirit, both her faith and that sense of just stoically keeping on. She’s kind of a drifter. She was always moving, getting on a bus, going somewhere else when bad things happened.”
Detailed post-production work was necessary to further establish the mood of a period film. Archival footage was interwoven at particular moments, bringing back vanished road signs and empty rolling highways, not to mention the old, wantonly lit Times Square. An old-fashioned optical printer was used to create scene transitions like wipes and fades, a time and labor-intensive process that has all but vanished from contemporary filmmaking. “There’s only one person in New York who does them – but they look beautiful, I think,” says Harron. “We tested digital versus optical in those effects, and optical just looked older and more organic. We’re probably the last film to do them, which is a shame because it is a beautiful process.”
Harron’s unflagging attention to detail has led to a film of unique delights, in Koffler’s view. “One of the joys of this movie is reveling in something that feels like an old movie. It so beautifully captures the feelings of the movies of the time that Mary is depicting. That’s Mary – she has a unique ability to play with that.”
Finally, THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE is an opportunity to revel in an endlessly fascinating woman who spoke to the camera as few ever had. Nearly 55 years after she posed for Jerry Tibbs on a Coney Island beach, Bettie Page has lost none of her magnetism. “Bettie was an icon then, and she’s an icon now. In different ways, and for different reasons,” Harron reflects. “There’s something in her that strikes a nerve.”