Hollywood's The Erotic Museum may now be gone, but through Archive.org, it lives on!
Part of The Erotic Museum's permanent collection was a grainy clip from a black-and-white film that supposedly showed Marilyn Monroe engaged in intimate relations (ahem!). The clip from the film, which was said to have been made in the late 1940s, was on a continuous loop within the Marilyn Monroe exhibit and was just a slowed-down close-up of the woman's face (and just her face). The close-up was directly compared to Marilyn's brief appearance in the Marx Brothers film, "Love Happy," which was made around the same time.
Basically, the exhibit asked you to believe that the women in the two photos below are the same person:
I could never see it. And still don't.
Read the Marilyn Monroe Collection page from this 2005 Archive.org version of the former The Erotic Museum web site.
See what you think.
Remember, the other film that was supposed to be her, The Apple, Knockers, and the Coke Bottle, was quickly debunked, found to be lookalike model Arline Hunter...
I wrote a letter to Time magazine in response to their article on ABC's Cashmere Mafia and NBC's Lipstick Jungle, Becoming Ms. Big, by James Poniewozik (for which there's also a Tuned In blog entry and an iTunes podcast, Women in Power, and TV) and its sidebar, Reality Check: Women, Work and Money, by Tiffany Sharples, which shows the real-life percentage of women in the professions of the characters on both shows, along with the average salary of the jobs. My question:
Why are there no African American female leads in neither Lipstick Jungle nor Cashmere Mafia? Of all of the aspects for both programs to take from originator Sex and the City, this one is most disappointing.
There are certainly real-life African American female counterparts of the various professions represented, including Mellody Hobson, the UCLA Four Sisters (Felicia D. Henderson, Gina Prince‑Bythewood, Sara Finney-Johnson and Mara Brock Akil), Pam Veasey, Susan L. Taylor, and newly elected New York Junior League president, Gena Lovett.
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The e-mail has bounced back (twice!) because the Time magazine letters@time.com inbox is full--probably full of letters about their Senator vs. Senator cover story on Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's presidential campaigns!
It can't be said that the shows neglect actresses of color--Chinese-American actress Lucy Liu stars in Cashmere Mafia, and I don't know whether the character will be portrayed this way, but the mother of actress Lindsay Price of Lipstick Jungle is Korean.
But doesn't it make the shows just all the more unrealistic that it shows a Manhattan so lacking in black women?
WGA Writers Strike.
The AMPTP's willful, decades-long myopia about the importance of
writers in Hollywood now seems rooted in a maleficent as well as
artificial view of the world, bent on blind, arrogant self-destruction.
I don't see what's so impossible about the WGA demands. It is labor and the writers should be paid accordingly; the content is being used again and again and the writers especially should be paid accordingly.
I have personally found no fewer than three web sites that have near-identical collections of NBC/Fox TV series available online, old and new. There's hulu.com, to which you need to submit your e-mail address to be a part of its private beta group--which is essentially defeated when you access Hulu on AOL, which is free to anyone. And then there's the new Comcast Fancast, also free to anyone. But you want to know what they all have in common, beyond their content (which range from "House" to "Cleopatra 2525" to "Nanny and the Professor," bless their hearts)? They all have SPONSORS, "limited commercial interruptions" from Intel or Saturn or Nissan or Toyota, etc etc etc! In other words, the studios are making money from these--every last episode of every show!
Meanwhile, I simply cannot imagine all the studio drones who must "just happen to be" strolling through the tree-sheltered pathways of UCLA and USC screenwriting programs these days. It is sick and disgusting and I hope the students aren't falling for it. I have refused to understand the lack of professional courtesy extended to writers as opposed to the directors and actors and other crew in that town. And it has always been this way! I don't know what Hollywood's problem is. It all starts with the script. Without the script, there's nothing to direct, nothing to act, nothing to light, nothing to costume--there's nothing to shoot, period. And this whole "blame the victim" mentality has always been an old, old, old anger for me. I'm not impressed, AMPTP. Work it out! I don't care if there's no Oscars--and if someone would take five seconds to remember the ever dwindling TV ratings for the annual program, they'd realize how little anyone else cares, either! Pay the writers and move on.
Although I can't help but wonder what the networks will do as the strike goes on and maybe the truly impossible will come to light--like reruns of "Monk" and "Psych" show up on the networks. Fox shows "Firefly" after "American Idol"--and in the right order this time!!! NBC starts showing episodes of "Doctor Who" in the "Heroes" time slot, starting with its 2005 premiere and calling it "that show from overseas that stars Claude"--! CW starts showing "Life on Mars" in the "Supernatural" time slot. CBS completely swallows its pride and apologizes to those who sat through the ultralame "Viva Laughlin" by showing the original "Blackpool" series and its sequel (albeit with somewhat necessary subtitles). ABC, not to be left out of the BBC feeding frenzy, picks up "Hotel Babylon"--and just for good measure, nicks "The Librarians" from Australian "ABC" TV!
Now THAT would be fun TV :)!!!
