Artwork by Ned Piyadarakorn

Leslie Kasperowicz has reviewed Love, Marilyn for the Immortal Marilyn website.

“Love, Marilyn is not the standard documentary.  It tells Marilyn’s story, yes, but not so much in a biographical sort of way.  It follows the general timeline of her life, including footage of Marilyn herself with her own words about those times.  But it isn’t a sensational, nitty-gritty type of look at her.

Love, Marilyn is honest about her problems, the struggles we all know she had.  It also makes it clear how hard she worked, how much she wanted to be loved and respected.  She is neither demonized nor canonized.  She is humanized.

This is the documentary that Marilyn deserves.”

 Love, Marilyn will be screened on June 9, closing night of the ATX Television Festival, in Austin, Texas, reports AV Club.

 Love, Marilyn begins a limited theatrical release in Hong Kong on May  16, reports Time Out.

Love, Marilyn will be screened on HBO in both the US and Canada on June 17 - not to be missed!

Magnum photographer Dennis Stock – who shot Marilyn at work on Bus Stop and The Misfits - is the subject of a new documentary, Beyond Iconic, directed by Hanna Sawka and screening at the Rosendale Theatre Collective in the Hudson Valley, New York State, tomorrow (April 21st) at 7.15pm.

Love, Marilyn will be screened next Saturday, April 20th, at 4:30 pm in the Cinemark Perkins Rowe in Baton Rouge, as part of the Louisiana International Film Festival.

Thanks to David Hoyd Hastie

Montage by Yvon Molostoff

Liz Garbus’s new documentary, Love, Marilyn, will have its French premiere in a TV double-bill on Canal on April 23rd, following an earlier screening of My Week With Marilyn, reports Yvon Molostoff on his excellent blog, Le MM Que J’aime.

In Bert Stern: Original Madman, Shannah Laumeister’s 2011 documentary about the photographer, Stern discusses his infamous ‘last sitting’ with Marilyn. He spoke to Time magazine recently, and you can watch a clip from the film at Nowness.

“After I set up the studio [at the Bel-Air] the front desk rang ‘Miss Monroe is here’ I decided to go down and meet her. I met her [for the first time] on the pathway to the suite. She was alone wearing a scarf and green slacks and a sweater. She had no make up on. I said ‘You’re beautiful,’ and she said, ‘What a nice thing to say.’

[In the suite] she looked at what was there and asked about makeup. I said I didn’t think we needed any makeup, but how about a little eyeliner? She picked up one of the scarves, which was chiffon, you could see through it. She looked [at it] and said, ‘Do you want to do nudes?’ So it was her idea.”

However, in his 1982 book, The Last Sitting, Stern detailed a more complex version of events:

“She lowered the scarf, looked at me and said, ‘You want to do nudes?’

She’d seen right through it.

‘Uh, well I – I guess so!’ Who, me? ‘It’d probably be a nice idea, wouldn’t it? But it wouldn’t be exactly nude. You’d have the scarf.’

‘Well, how much would you see through it?’

‘That depends on how I light it,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’ she said. And then, ‘Just a second. George?’

George Masters [hairdresser] came in. She said, ‘George, what do you think about these scarves and doing nudes?’

I held my breath.

‘Oh…what a divine idea!’ said George.

Thank God. If he had said, ‘Oh, no, how gauche,’ the whole thing would have been off in a second. Gone.

She was that vulnerable.”

As the shoot began, Marilyn made it clear exactly how much she wanted to reveal:

“Marilyn walked onto the set in her bare feet, a glass of champagne in one hand and an orange striped scarf tied around her bare bosom. She still had her green slacks on.

‘I’m not going to take off my pants,’ she declared.

‘Just roll them down, then,’ I said.”

It was not until late in the evening that Marilyn finally stripped:

“It was late, close to dawn, when I finally got all her clothes off…’You know, for this one you’ve really got to take your pants off,’ I said.

I expected her to call for George, who by now was falling asleep in the other room. But she just said, ‘Okay.’ We’d already gone so far in the pictures; what was there to be shy about? She stepped into the archway between the rooms and, holding the scarf around her like a towel, wriggled out of her slacks. And then she walked back out onto the white paper.

I started to shoot. This was the way I’d wanted her all along. Her beautiful body shone through the harlequin scarf in a tantalising, abstract hide-and-seek.

Until she dropped it. And I shot it. Just for myself.

One glimpse, one stolen frame.

We were finished.”

The same text has been used in all subsequent editions of the book. While I don’t believe that Marilyn was duped into posing naked, it was something that came about gradually (and with a lot of coaxing from Bert.)

Marilyn later vetoed many of Stern’s photos, though after she died, he published them anyway.

By the way, in the final shot that Stern mentioned, Marilyn looks distressed – as if dropping the scarf was an accident, not something designed to titillate. Judge for yourself here.

Love, Marilyn, Liz Garbus’s new documentary based on Marilyn’s personal writings, is now available as a video on demand in Canada, via Bell TV, reports MarilynGeek.

Scottish Monroe fans have a chance to see Liz Garbus’s acclaimed documentary, Love, Marilyn, today at 6.30 pm in Glasgow’s Cineworld 17, as part of the Glasgow Film Festival.

Rhode Island will be showing its love for Marilyn next month, with an old Hollywood-themed fundraising event at Christie’s Restaurant on February 9th, and two screenings of Love, Marilyn on the 14th (St Valentine’s Day) at Newport’s Jane Pickens theatre. Both screenings will be introduced by Adam Braver, author of the excellent Marilyn-inspired novel, Misfit.

Author Michelle Morgan talks about her many ongoing projects, including Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed, and the upcoming documentary, Marilyn: Birth of an Icon, over at The Damned Interviews.

“The reason I wanted to write a full-length biography was that I wanted to look at her story in a different way than had been done before: to talk with all kinds of people who met her in every aspect of her every day life. Boyfriends, fans, friends, family members, and people she passed in the street; everyone and anyone who had anything to do with Marilyn, I wanted to interview. Their memories are all in the book and they give a different perspective to the one often seen before. The result of my way of researching has had a great response from Marilyn’s fans and I’m very proud of that.

I am hugely excited about the documentary. I filmed my part last summer and I’m a consultant on the movie, which means that I will get to see it before anyone else so I’m thrilled about that. This is the first film I’ve ever been involved with – and hopefully not my last – and so it is an exciting experience not only for me as a Marilyn fan, but for my career also.”

Peter Mangone, who made headlines when he found rare footage of Marilyn in New York, filmed when he was a teenage fan, passed away on December 11, 2012.

The home movie was first shown in a 2003 BBC documentary, The People’s Hollywood.

Earlier in 2012, an exhibition and book, Marilyn Monroe: NYC, 1955, was announced. Sadly, the opening of the display – now at New York’s Danziger Gallery – was delayed after Hurricane Sandy devastated the city.

“I used to get up every day and put on a shirt and tie, because I read she was coming to New York to go to the Actor’s Studio and that she would stay at the Gladstone Hotel, so I used to get up every morning, dress up, get on the train, cut school and wait for hours. Some days I didn’t see her, some days I’d get a glimpse of her. Then I finally stood across from the hotel one day and I saw her. The next day I went in front of the hotel with a piece of paper, she signed it and she said, ‘You were here yesterday. You had a red tie on. Weren’t you cold?’ Because it was freezing. But she noticed. She really cared, you know.”

 The Australian-born costume designer, Jack Orry-Kelly, created Marilyn’s peekaboo wardrobe for her unforgettable role as Sugar Kane in Some Like it Hot. He also wrote an unpublished memoir, and is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, directed by Gillian Armstrong, reports The Age.

“”It’s the story of this boy from Kiama who always had a visual flair and interest in theatre,’ Armstrong says. ”He was very well known in the ’30s and ’40s … He was a great wit, quite outspoken. They say in America that people either loved or hated him.’

While researching the film, Armstrong and writer Katherine Thomson have discovered that Orry-Kelly wrote a memoir, wittily titled Women I’ve Undressed.

While he once wrote that the publishers loved the book, it never reached print – reputedly because of legal issues.

Just one chapter that he sent to a friend survives, featuring observations about Hollywood history.

Armstrong believes the sole copy of the full manuscript was passed down through Kelly’s family to a relative named Ephraim Manasseh, who has been impossible to track down.

”It still exists somewhere,” says Armstrong, who believes the memoir will be a treasure trove of Hollywood memories and secrets if they can find it.”

You can read more about Kelly’s work with MM in the recently-published Marilyn in Fashion.

Photo by Edgar Freire

MM superfan Edgar Freire attended a screening of Love, Marilyn at New York’s Film Forum recently, and shared his impressions with members of Immortal Marilyn:

“Went to see Love, Marilyn over the weekend in NY. It was an enthralling experience, being able to sit in the darkened cinema enjoying a loving, layered portrait of such an increasingly fascinating icon. Seeing some rare photos and private footage was a surprising bonus. Some early reviewers have commented (not positively) about the director’s decision to have contemporary actors reciting Marilyn’s words and thoughts, but I think this was a good tactic…it really brings Monroe’s story alive, and reinforces the serious actor’s struggle for reality and empathy for the human condition. Despite its heartbreaking end, this film breathes life, hope and trust at its core.”