CERTAIN MOVIES desperately need to be seen first and talked about afterwards. I was blown away when a colleague with especially high cinematic standards showed me Martha Coolidge’s debut feature Not a Pretty Picture; I was also vaguely ashamed to participate in a film culture that had kept the movie relatively unknown in the almost 50 years since it premiered. Coolidge made the film in order to come to terms with her own date rape as a sixteen-year-old, in 1962, at the hands of an older boy whose name in the movie is “Curly” (played by Jim Carrington). The filmmaker is played by actress Michele Manenti who, an early title card establishes, is herself a rape victim as well. As one might expect, the reenactment is beyond harrowing, but Coolidge manages to offset the dramatized scenes with documentary footage, turning the camera on herself as she workshops the material with her young actors.
Not a Pretty Picture is hard to watch, but every frame is worth, and will seize, your attention. It addresses unthinkable subject matter with stomach-pitted courage; it will not leave you feeling good, but it is not an abject exercise in making the audience suffer. In its quest to understand, Coolidge’s experiment reveals its own inherent humanism. The film is among the most confrontational debut features ever made by an American director, one of the greatest films of the 1970s, and for me, upon that viewing, it was instantaneously one of the greatest films ever made.
I’m not usually this hyperbolic, nor do I find myself reaching for the old critical saw of a movie being “just as relevant today as when it was released.” But in this case it’s simply the plain truth. Film culture is for the better now that Not a Pretty Picture has been restored, and is being distributed by Janus Films; accordingly, I was excited at the chance to speak with Coolidge over the phone a few days before the film began a week run at Anthology Film Archives.
The first time I saw this movie it was years ago, a standard-definition copy, sitting there somewhat anonymously on your official Vimeo page…
Oh, God… (laughs)
Since then the Film Foundation and the Academy Film Archive have restored Not a Pretty Picture from the original 16mm elements; it played at the Academy Museum in December of 2022, at MoMA in June 2023, and now it’s at Anthology Film Archives… And it looks great. But even if it didn’t, I would feel the same need to tell you: everyone I know who encounters this movie is just blown away. It grabs the viewer by the lapels and does not let go.
I'm really thrilled that you're saying that to me. I know it was pretty avant-garde at the time; I got the idea when I was at the Flaherty Seminar1. I just knew I had to do it and I already knew how to do it, somehow, how to improvise with my actors. If I could find actors who were willing to share their findings, not just with me but also with the audience, that’s where things start to get really interesting. But it’s also easier for the audience that way, because they could still really feel and see how a rape like this hits a person.
In casting Martha (or “Martha”), why was it important for you to work with a girl who had herself suffered a date rape?
It was important for me that, number one, I not be the only person on the cast or crew who had been raped. Secondly, I wanted someone who could speak from their experience. I knew there was going to be an age gap, that the actress would be younger than me, obviously. But I wanted someone who would be fighting some of the same devils and memories that I was, who would be at a point where they were ready to share their experience with an audience.
In the non-reenactment parts, actor Jim Carrington talks about rape—guys who don’t realize it’s rape when they’re doing it, or this kind of primal drive that, according to him, leads men to rape. He sounds off the cuff, but it’s clear you took the time to sit together and discuss these things: not just the material but also how it feels, what it means. For the documentary passages, did you ever ask the people onscreen to do a second or third “take”?
Maybe if somebody got something wrong, like a name, but I never asked them to repeat what they had said. What I did find was, the more we talked about things, the more they’d go into it. Which is why it was important to me to work with people willing to look at themselves in that way, to examine their own feelings.
Curly is such a brazenly cruel and manipulative character, but Michele’s Martha states it very honestly: “Something about Curly intrigues me!” When it sounds like Jim is kind of defending the character’s logic, or rather his lack of logic, his caveman brain… How do I put this? He would be canceled for talking like that in 2024. Or he’d be accused of hanging out with rapists? Rape apologism?
Well, he’s a guy. (laughs) Jim had some issues facing the rape himself, the fact that some guys do this. He was trying very hard to put himself in their position, but the thing is, he wasn’t a rapist! So I was happy with the way this turned out: you see Jim fighting with himself, hitting the wall, et cetera. And prior to the film, he and Michele had been in some acting classes together, so I was grateful for that.
Right, there’s an acknowledgement that Jim and Michele had, by the time you were shooting Not a Pretty Picture, known each other for four years. I’m assuming Michele was cast first; did she recommend Jim?
I knew them totally separately. They lived very different lives: she was very involved in dance, in artistic movements that way, and because she had been raped, she was not just going out with anybody. Jim was more into hanging out with his friends, doing stuff like that. They were not on the same course, socially speaking.
At one point Jim is talking about all the aggression he’s trying to tap into, for his performance. He says to Michele, in a kind of disbelief, that he felt the frustration, he even says he wanted to hit Michele in the face. But Michele says she never doubted him at any point, she always knew he would not hurt her. For me this is one of the most striking moments in the documentary part of the film.
I was watching, other people were watching, and we would have intervened if something like that happened. But it was good that Jim said that; he was conscious of what was going on inside of him, and what it was doing to his mind. That was exactly the purpose of having them talk about it, instead of just doing the reenactment in a theatrical way.
How consciously did you want to include these moments? Not just him being challenged on his views, but also of kindness between the performers. It’s very moving when Michele and Jim hug at the end of one of the toughest takes…
I put it there on purpose. The thing about theater—about rehearsals, all this stuff—it makes you feel so close to one another. I wanted the audience to see that. For all the stuff we had talked about, all Jim’s aggression, et cetera, that he and Michele felt so close working together on this. It’s also one of the reasons I felt safe making the movie that way. For me, it was important to get that side, to see the closeness happening between the actors in real time.
You didn’t want them to go full Method, or to hate one another?
No. No. I knew they were professionals, though, and even if they did hate each other, it wouldn’t have stopped the performance. It wasn’t artifice, it was honesty; human beings can hate and love at the same time. You can be going along, having a terrible time, and then suddenly you’re laughing at a dumb joke. We’re complicated!
There are some moments of humor between you and the actors, a welcome relief, but also, kind of like you’re saying, it’s all very complex.
Well. People are funny, sometimes especially when things are tense! But it really matters who is the butt of the joke.
Most writeups of the film include the moment when you are, hand over your mouth, witnessing this minutely detailed reenactment of your own rape. Was it supposed to be a 1:1 reenactment? Or a kind of mutant reinterpretation?
I was not trying to 1:1 reenact the exact occurrence, in part because I had forgotten (or repressed!) certain details. And I knew I had. But I did want to recreate the general movement of that night: the other couple making out in the other room, those things. For me it was more about getting the feelings right, making sure it hit people the right way.
Curly was a rapist, no question about it. And he definitely raped more than one girl at my school. And there weren’t that many girls to begin with. He was less obvious about it than it appears in the film. One difference? I went further with the character of Curly’s friend West Virginia, played by John Fedinatz. I thought he was a really good character, being sort of the bottom of the the kissing order or the hitting order; of the guys, he was the one who got picked on. I liked what it did for the story, where it brought the audience’s thinking. So I added those parts.
The scene where Curly effectively throws West Virginia down onto the bed, where Martha is sitting, then leaves, Martha says, “Hi”, and they have this kind of hushed conversation… I found this moment so heartbreaking. Mostly you're like, “Oh, this guy is different from Curly.” Later in the film it's actually said (but not shown) that West Virginia may have been involved in a gang rape.
Right, but you don’t know if those things are real.
So he didn’t do it.
I don’t think so. This is important to the film: if a guy is bragging about it, it might not have been a real thing. Not that it isn’t done, because of course it’s done. But how do I know what did and didn’t happen?
I'm personally glad to hear that about West Virginia, because separate from the sadness around the rape, I felt a lot of sadness watching Curly treat him so terribly…
I felt that way too. John is a very real actor.
Even after the most uncomfortable moments of the film, there’s a longer, slower realization that’s also very sad, which is that these kinds of things get swept under the rug all the time.
You asked why I got a girl who had been through it. Well, way more people—way more people—have been through this than we might predict. I’m certain of this. And they don’t all want to talk about it. In the case of Michele, the guy who had raped her was a mayor. It was planned, premeditated. It was not identical to my experience. That difference was important too.
Talk about the decision to cast your real-life roommate Anne Mundstuk from those days. She’s playing herself, fifteen years younger, and she has an insane monologue early in the film, talking about how badly she wants to “get fucked”. I’ll admit I was kind of like, “Where is this going…?” Later in the film, once she’s out of “character”, she confesses that she had been teased by other girls who thought she was infatuated with you as a teenager. And concedes that she was. It’s like, you need to go back and rewatch everything to understand those dynamics.
And Anne had never told me that before; at that time we were just really good friends. It was great for me to hear that. The movie was revealing lots of things that had gone unmentioned at the time, things which were influencing our behavior. But it was literally me walking down the street thinking, “Who am I gonna cast as this character?” and I ran into her, asked her if she would be in the movie.
You weren’t worried about breaking the illusion, with her age difference. Or maybe that was the idea?
I thought about it a lot, I felt the point was better made by her being there and being real, whatever the age difference. The other actors had age differences as well, but they weren’t as extreme. Nobody ever told me it wrecked the movie for them. Again: it was a very complicated relationship, so I felt good she was in it. Our school was a ski school, we skied all the time, there were, I don’t know, sixty-something boys and maybe fifteen girls. It was not equal. And I had applied late in the summer. When all this started happening, I felt there was something unfair about the breakdown of boys and girls. How did the faculty feel about it? I went to talk to the headmaster, or the principal, and I realized he was one of these guys who would have said, “Well, that girl was drinking and wearing a short skirt. So of course it’s her fault.”
Just just for the clarification of the reader, you're talking about the guy who appears in the second to last the scene of the movie… For me, as the viewer, there's a moment where you think, “Oh, maybe a real conversation is about to happen here.” But it’s the opposite.
And that is exactly how it happened in my life.
Those final twenty or so minutes of the film really focus on the… I don’t want to say “consequences” of the rape, but the fallout. Her being alienated at school, made fun of by other girls… Did you receive any flack from anyone for putting a face to that? From a Third Wave or an even further left perspective? (I hope the answer is no…)
The answer is no. I mean, it was never hidden what the movie is about. I think because it’s human, because people are very real, it wasn’t such a reach for people to discover what the actors were doing. I think they’re sympathetic. I think it got complicated, a little bit, when some hardcore feminists came and this particular group didn’t want anything male, period. “Don’t touch anything male.” Well, there’s different kinds of people. If a guy gets raped, it doesn’t mean he’s gay. And a girl can be out on a date, wearing a short skirt, wanting to be sexy, wanting to have a good time… And if it gets out of hand, she can say no and mean it, and that still doesn’t mean she didn’t want to have fun in the first place. Things can get beyond you, people can get carried away, and then you’re struggling with how to stop it. Which is part of why rape and exploitation of women is very difficult for people to handle. These are the things we want to understand, but it’s very hard getting there.
While shooting this, did you need to take breaks to collect yourself? Your own response to what’s being staged is integral to the drama of the overall film, if that makes sense.
The cameraman was the one who needed breaks, because holding a 16mm camera like that, running continuously, takes a lot out of a person! He was very big to do it, but we had to be very conscious how long he could hold the camera, and we didn’t have an infinite amount of film stock. You don’t want to get into a situation where you need to repeat everything.
Here’s a wild question…
Okay. (laughs)
In the New York Times, J. Hoberman put Not a Pretty Picture in dialogue with American Graffiti. But when I first saw the film, the movie that came to mind most urgently was… Animal House. Not in terms of sensibility or quality, but the milieu is almost identical: East Coast, early Sixties, prep school, a bunch of guys (who are, as my father would say, “old enough to know better”) grabbing a bunch of beer, en route to an all-girls campus… And that film plays rape for laughs, or at least, it plays the Tom Hulse character’s temptation to rape an underage girl for laughs.
Yes, played for laughs like in so many other movies.
One thing the movies have in common is this attention towards the role of folk music in the early Sixties. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” is a major motif.
I licensed that song because I love it. But I also had to have original music written for the movie, because I couldn’t afford to buy real music from that time. I mean, it is real music in the movie, but it’s newly created music, because I couldn’t afford to license these historical doo-wop and pop songs. Chevy Chase wrote some of the music in the movie, actually; he was a friend.
Your more famous later work includes Valley Girl (1983), Real Genius (1985), The Prince & Me (2004)… I found a great interview with you from around the release of Valley Girl where you talk about how you didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a “feminist filmmaker” or, God forbid, a filmmaker who specializes in rape. You’re making the point that a movie designed for women and men was nearly as rare, and as radical, as a movie ostensibly just for women. So my question is… did Not a Pretty Picture help you find work in Hollywood? It’s not what my mind usually conjures when I think, “calling card film”….
Well, it was offbeat. But at that time, trying to get directing jobs as a woman was extremely offbeat! It was never meant to be my “calling card film”. In fact, the first movie I was called in to talk about—to read, and then to come back and present how I would make it—was Animal House.
…What?!
(Universal executive) John Daniels brought me in to talk about Animal House several times. I had my prep done, I had broken the script down, I had a whole presentation about it. I really wanted to do it! But it went to the right person. John was much more what Universal wanted for that script. But I liked the script, I knew I could bring something to it, make it more well-rounded… It’s really funny you said that.
This is insane. Lest we wander too far of topic… Give us a taste of Martha Coolidge’s Animal House? The things I mention are played for laughs, and some have aged far better than others, but Animal House doesn’t take it as far as your film. I mean, it would be impossible…
Yes, I would have had to walk that line very carefully. It’s a comedy after all. But it did say something real about men and women of that age. I was a stretch, but that was John Daniels. It was very creative of him to consider me for that script.
Do you ever wish you had made it? Did Not a Pretty Picture ever feel like a liability?
No. Once I got the idea, I understood how important it was, to look at that aspect of this occurrence. I think it was good because it did really show so many things that women complain about when they see any kind of rape or abusive scene in a movie; hopefully, the movie made them feel like someone was thinking about them, and how they feel. It’s just a thing that happens in almost every girl’s life, that’s just the way it is. Girls ask themselves, why are all the guys so bad? And they’re not all bad, of course, but the truth is there can be something very powerful something very attractive, in that badness. Especially if you’re young and naïve.
I also need to know if this inside/out, documentary/fiction hybrid approach was chosen to make the movie easier on the viewer. You don’t shy from including your crew (which is mostly made of women) in the margins of the frame, even when you’re in the foreground.
That was part of it, yes, to make the audience feel more at home.
There was never going to be a version of this where the real Martha Coolidge did not appear onscreen.
Never. It was always going to involve me going through this experience I had had.
So, tell me about the film’s life once it was completed? In other interviews you’ve mentioned there were a restrictive number of prints in circulation, and that impacted the movie’s release…
It had to do with just how much (or rather, how little) money the distributor and I were willing to put into having more prints around. We had enough that it was screened all over America, various places and festivals all over the world—in a way, movies had longer lives then. It played festivals for a few years after the initial premiere at American Film institute. It was screened at the first iteration of Sundance which was, at that time, the “Utah/US Film Festival”. And yes, it was a little bit of a problem if, suddenly, if the film became very busy and somebody wanted a copy I didn't necessarily have.
The vintage poster has all these pullquotes from different newspapers all over the country, so to me that suggests there was a pretty comprehensive rollout for this movie…
It was a very long, very slow road. I did get those quotes very early—in other words, I knew it had been screened, it often screened for the press prior to its release. And this is a job, you know, not just making the film but then you have to really go muckraking about it. To make the picture I had gotten a nice grant from the American Film Institute, and the AFI screened it at the Kennedy Center, in D.C. That was the premiere. Then came Boston, the Academy, New York. I don’t remember what New York theater it was, though, I’d have to look it up. I know it played at libraries, women’s groups organized screenings on college campuses… In those days it was sort of a mishmash. Independent films like this didn’t get a straight theatrical release. So Not a Pretty Picture played wherever someone wanted to book it. I remember learning it was held over at a theater in Amsterdam for years, if you can believe that.
But my biggest surprise, traveling and speaking with the movie, was that it introduced me to a whole other category of people who had been raped, and that was men. Who felt even more constricted talking about it than some of the women at that time, if you can imagine… They told me how they couldn’t talk to anybody about it. And like a lot of women who get raped, they blamed themselves for it after the fact. It was really interesting.
Did you have “feedback screenings”? The movie has such a unique shape, it’s far ahead of its time, it’s also deeply personal, closely held trauma…
I got feedback that affected the film but I wasn’t testing it over and over and over again to see the audience’s reactions. But someone who hadn’t seen it before, of course I asked what they made of it. That was part of my conception.
I have to assume women would come up to you after screenings to share their own experiences.
Definitely. If it wasn’t them it was a story about their sister, their friend, their brother…
And what about people in your life who didn’t know this had happened to you until they saw the film?
There definitely were some. But I was in therapy at the time, I had people I could talk to; I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing a wrong step. I was very positive about doing it when I did it.
Telling your own story, what would a wrong step have been?
Well, I was painting a picture of myself. I didn’t want to say, “I’m a victim. I’m a victim.” This is just one step that could have been wrong, making myself and the character both look like complete victims. Which is certainly a reaction a woman can have to an unfortunate, traumatic event. But I knew I wasn’t doing it for that. I knew so many people have had experiences like this. All kinds of people were going to see the movie.
Another friend who saw it this weekend said that yes, it‘s a great film, but he worried it may have been traumatic for you or for your actors to go back to that memory. I can’t claim to know, of course, but I think the idea was to confront the memory, or to de-traumatize…
Looking at your emotions, your reactions, how something felt to you—I knew those key issues affected me very strongly. Trauma comes from people not understanding what happened to them, or how it happened. I felt it was important to show those things, that it would ultimately make people feel better.
Current Mood: Somber 😔
Current Music: Franco Mannino - Adagio per Pianoforte (from L’innocente)
Special thanks to Martha Coolidge, Vadim Rizov, Chris Boeckmann, Ellie B and Isaac Davidson.