MARY HARRON UNCOVERS BETTIE PAGE
Article by Scott Essman
When she undertook the story of the infamous 1950s erotic model Bettie Page, director Mary Harron – with co-writer Guinevere Turner – got more than she bargained for in telling Page’s story. “I feel that a lot of people think it’s just going to just be portrait of her, but it’s not really; it’s a portrait of the times,” said Harron.
A veteran of TV and films such as I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho, Harron, who always writes the films that she also directs, knew that she had to find the right Bettie Page as her leading actress for The Notorious Bettie Page. What she found was 33-year-old classy Gretchen Mol, who doesn’t actually resemble Page but embodied her presence amazingly well in the movie. “She captured the quality of someone from another era, even in her body language,” said Harron, “and the inner Bettie too, who had a childlike joy in posing and being seen.”
After writing the script, Harron thought about casting Mol, an older acquaintance. “I had wanted to cast her in American Psycho, but she didn’t want to do it,” Harron revealed. “In person, she looks so different, but she came in and auditioned and I was knocked out by her. Where other people were straining, it came natural to her.”
Cleverly, Harron shot the film in glorious black-and-white except for select scenes which “burst into color,” such as the scenes in Miami, which according to Harron “was a dreamlike place to [Page] – where she was happiest.
Doing a story such as Bettie Page’s came naturally to a screenwriter and filmmaker such as Harron. She moved from Canada to England where she attended Oxford and studied English literature. “I was a journalist and worked on documentaries,” she said. Soon she got a job in British TV as a researcher and got to direct documentaries though she had no formal training. “Documentaries teach you all about editing and structuring material,” she said. “It’s much more difficult to edit a doc than a film. I learned about pacing and editing and being ruthless – throwing out favorite things.”
When she transitioned to working with actors, narrative filmmaking came fluidly to Harron. “Talking to actors was very easy to me,” she recalled. “In my first casting sessions, I got a sense of how to adjust performances – being simple and making actors feel comfortable; letting them know what you want and letting them find it.”
Some years ago, the Bettie Page story was suggested to Harron by filmmaker Sam Green who directed the acclaimed documentary about 1960s radicals, Weather Underground. “The real Bettie Page [now 83-years-old] won’t go on camera, so other projects came and went,” Harron said. “I worked on it on-and-off for a number of years. A couple of years ago, we finished a last rewrite where I cut out a lot of stuff. Earlier, we had a lot more of Bettie’s early life [in drafts of the script].” Then, Harron realized that the film was not only about Page but also about American culture. “It was about sex in the 1950s,” Harron said. “That’s when HBO – who had first rejected it – decided to make it.”
Even though Harron spoke to Page’s family and business associates, she finally had to realize her personal image of Bettie Page. “In the end, you make your own version of the character on the screen,” she said. “I hope [the real Bettie] would see the film as a celebration of what life was like for her. It was a turning point in time – all of these things were submerged and suddenly came above ground. She was unwittingly a key to that. She was a groundbreaking person though she didn’t set out to be that.”
The Notorious Bettie Page will be a theatrical release by HBO Films in April in major cities.