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Dominik, Watts Hold Out for ‘Blonde’

Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) confirmed his plans to direct Naomi Watts in a long-rumoured, big-screen adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Blonde, in a recent interview with The Playlist. (It will be produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B company.)

While I’m impressed by the talent involved, I still wish Oates’ story was more faithful to historical fact. Like many fans I’ve spoken to, I’m concerned that this movie – however well-intended – may only add to the misunderstandings about Marilyn’s life.

“‘I’m going to do this movie called Blonde,’ which is about Marilyn Monroe,’ Dominik said.

As to the scope of Blonde, don’t expect a Lincoln-like sliver of the troubled star’s life. ‘It’s about her whole life,’ Dominik said, definitively. ‘It starts when she’s seven and it ends when she dies.’ Dominik acknowledged that it will be based on the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominated novel by Joyce Carol Oates, then clarified his approach to the material. ‘It’s sort of a Polanski descent-into-madness-type movie,’ Dominik explained. ‘It’s about this orphan girl who gets lost in the woods.’

Those comments echo his earlier description of the movie as an ’emotional nightmare fairy tale,’ and Dominik sounds genuinely excited about the project. ‘I love it,’ he said. ‘It’s my dream project and I’ve been working on it for years and years and years.’

When we asked Dominik if he was going to push, visually, into the realm of what-is-reality-what-is-fantasy, Dominik said yes. ‘It’s very pseudo-Freudian,’ he said. ‘The lines between fantasy and reality become very blurred in the story.’ About when the film will actually shoot, Dominik optimistically says, ‘I’d like to do it next year.’ He says he hasn’t hired a cinematographer yet, but that Naomi Watts — who was attached early on, but over the summer seemed like she might have to bow out — is still on board, although, as he said, ‘Anything can happen.’

We wondered though, if he has another project ready to go, should Blonde face another delay). Dominik says no. ‘It’s pretty much all about Marilyn at the moment,’ he said.”

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‘White Rose’ and Other Stories

Black Dahlia & White Rose, a new short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates, will be published next month. The title story imagines an encounter between Elizabeth Short – the young woman murdered in Los Angeles in 1947, and known as The Black Dahlia – and a young Marilyn. It first appeared in a 2011 e-anthology, LA Noire, and you can read the story here. (My review is here.)

Oates, author of the Marilyn-inspired novel, Blonde, spoke to the New York Times about her latest publication.

“The title story in your new collection, Black Dahlia & White Rose, was first published in conjunction with a bloody video game, L.A. Noire, which was noted for its narrative sophistication. Did you get a chance to play it?

No, but it sounds very imaginative and interesting, like you’re in a waking dream. I just don’t have the apparatus to see it. But we were all — the creators of the video game and I — inspired by the idea of Los Angeles in a certain period of time.

 

The ‘Black Dahlia’ here refers to Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress who was gruesomely murdered in Los Angeles in 1947.

Yes, and if you’re interested in hard-boiled mystery, the Black Dahlia is like the Virgin Mary.

She was mutilated, her body cut in half. In your story, you assume her voice from beyond the grave.

Well, I’m very interested in voices. I also had my novel Blonde about Norma Jeane Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, narrated by the posthumous Norma Jeane Baker.

Marilyn is also in this story; you imagine her as the Black Dahlia’s roommate. There have already been eight new books about Monroe just this year. Why do you think she endures?

After having had a high-profile but not necessarily successful career and then a disastrous ending, she became what we might call ‘iconic’, a sort of awkward word that means that people relate to the icon without any historical sense or intellectual comprehension of what it means.”

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Brad Pitt to Produce ‘Blonde’

Collider reports that Brad Pitt’s Plan B company will produce Andrew Dominik’s forthcoming film of Blonde, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates about Marilyn’s life. Filming will probably begin early next year. But it is unclear whether Naomi Watts – who is about to play Princess Diana in another movie – is still attached to the project.

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Is ‘Blonde’ Back on Track?

This Bert Stern-inspired photo of Naomi Watts, published in the latest issue of Russian Vogue, suggests that the Australian-born actress hasn’t given up on her long-held dream of playing Marilyn.

Director Andrew Dominik spoke of his hope to bring Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, Blonde, to the big screen at Cannes this week:

‘”I really want to do [‘Blonde’],” he said. “It’s not something I can talk about, ’cause we’re trying to work some stuff out, but hopefully that’s going to be the next picture.” And when we asked about possible Cormac McCarthy adaptation “Cities of the Plain,” Dominik replied that the Monroe biopic has the advantage: “I like that one, but my heart belongs to Marilyn. I’d like to start shooting it next year, that’s what I’d like to do. It’s a really sprawling, emotional nightmare fairy-tale type movie, and I really want to do it real bad… It’s a story about an abandoned orphan who gets lost in the woods.”‘ – IndieWire

 

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Reading Beyond the ‘Blonde’

When literary critics cite Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde as an example of modern bio-fiction, I often wonder how much they know about Marilyn’s life. Novelist Manuel Munoz writes about Oates’s novel for NPR:

“Blonde mimics the large scope of a biography: We get her life and death, as well as the rise and fall of her stardom, and our curiosity is sated by the language of tabloid, and the privacy of diaries. Flamboyant and energetic, the novel assembles everything from gossip to pinups to present the life of a woman who, in the end, was overshadowed by her onscreen persona.”

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‘Blonde’ in Derby

Blonde is a new musical play by Paul Hurt, based on Marilyn’s life (though I have no idea whether it relates to Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of the same name.) It will be staged as a student production at the Derby Theatre in the city’s Eagle Centre.

Blonde is described as featuring ‘cameo appearances from JFK to Arthur Miller and a host of other influential characters who tell the tragic and scandalous story of the original blonde bombshell.’

I hope I’m wrong, but ‘scandalous’ is often just a polite word for sleaze. I’d like to see Marilyn’s life portrayed in a different way than by simply focussing on the men with whom she was romantically linked.

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Defining Marilyn: Reel Vs Read

Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Julia Keller argues that a novel like Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde offers more insight into the real Marilyn than a movie like My Week With Marilyn can.

While both these examples may have their merits, neither is a wholly satisfying portrait of Marilyn. Perhaps the closest we’ll ever come to her true essence is not through outside interpretations, but the words and images she created herself.

“The fault lies not in our movie stars, but in ourselves — in, that is, the profoundly complex and endlessly shifting nature of human beings. To capture the richly dynamic essence of any individual requires the only medium that’s up to the challenge:

Novels.

Sitting in the dark at a recent showing of ‘My Week With Marilyn’, I was struck by the inadequacy of film as a way of conveying the boundless mystery of a real-life personality. A movie can do many things well: It can dish up terrific, gravity-defying action scenes. It can create worlds that never existed and make them uncannily plausible. It can act as a sort of prosthesis for the imagination, supplying spectacular colors and highfalutin visual hocus-pocus.

But what it can’t do — even when it tries its best — is get to the essence of a single human soul’s journey across time.

For that, you need a novel. You need the slow, methodical unfolding of a story. You need the gradual accretion of events — happy ones, tragic ones, mistakes and triumphs and accidents and turning points. A novel can deliver, one by one, the people who move in and out of any life. It can spurn the superficial. It doesn’t have to take anything at face value.”