Thursday, March 02, 2006

the notorious bettie page

Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho, has completed a new film on kinky sex kitten and symbol of iconoclastic female power Bettie Page.

As famous for her hairstyle -- long and black with short, curved bangs -- as for her nude photos, jungle shots and high-heels-and- black-stockings fetish pictures, Page (played by Gretchen Mol) was revived as an icon of 1990s sex-positive feminism after two books of her photos were published in 1996. That's about the same time that it seemed independent film, and particularly women in independent film (among them Harron, co-writer Guinevere Turner and producer Christine Vachon), were poised on the vanguard of a new era in American movies.