By Stephanie Smith (aka Steph8373)

Guin Turner talks about her new movie, upcoming projects, and The L Word!

Guinevere Turner’s latest screenwriting endeavor chronicles the life of 1950’s pin-up sensation, Bettie Page.  The product of more than ten years of collaboration with director/writer Mary Harron (American Psycho), The Notorious Bettie Page takes on the apparent dichotomy between the off-camera, Christian good girl from Tennessee and photographers’ on-camera depiction of Page as a fetish-driven sex kitten.

Although it only comprised a small portion of Bettie Page’s body of work, the film focuses on her bondage and other fetish posing for Irving and Paula Klaw.  That work was the subject of a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency inquiry that might be more accurately described as a witch hunt.  Against the backdrop of the Senate investigation, Herron and Turner look back at some of the events that shaped young Bettie Page’s life, and forward to those that ultimately brought her back to her Christian roots. 

At first blush, Bettie Page appears to be a “good Christian girl” with some very naughty and contradictory hobbies; one who thrives off of posing in sexually-explicit scenes, including scenes with other women; one who rebels against the conservative values of her Tennessee upbringing.  By the end of the film, however, the filmmakers present a wealth of information that allows the audience to draw their own conclusions.  Some will continue to think of Bettie Page as motivated by sex, while others may find her to be as a fairly naive and trusting young woman who wants nothing more than to make people happy, and who doesn’t see anything wrong in displaying the body that God gave her if it brings joy to others.  The beauty of the film is that there is no right answer to the question, “Who is the notorious Bettie Page”?

Most of the story was filmed in the black and white that was characteristic of 1950’s movies.  Much like the Wizard of Oz (which makes a cameo appearance on a theater marquee in the opening scene), Herron intersperses color scenes to portray moments of joy or freedom in Bettie Page’s life.  The transition between black and white is so seamless that often times it is difficult to pinpoint the difference, even though the mood of the film “feels” noticeably lighter during the “Technicolor” moments.

Those who know about Bettie Page might complain that the unfairly focuses on her bondage material.  However, there is little question that at the time, it was the fetish genre that caused the most controversy, and which set Bettie Page apart.  All in all, The Notorious Bettie Page is a tightly-written, solidly-directed film that delivers on its promise to peel back the layers of the Pin-up Queen of the Universe.  The L Word’s Dallas Roberts also appears briefly in the film, which is now playing nationwide.

In order to learn more about this fascinating movie, I talked with co-writer and executive producer Guinivere Turner about the movie, her future projects, and of course, all things L.

(Warning: this interview does contain spoilers about the movie!)

Stephanie Smith: Did you set out for the movie to be this sad, gut-wrenching sort of story, or what was it that you were really trying to accomplish at the outset?

Guinevere Turner:  I don’t think I’d call it gut-wrenching, but very definitely sad, that scene at the end where she goes back to the church.  We wanted to show, you know, the real person behind the iconic photograph.  Our biggest mission being not to make it a moralistic tale of any kind, or you know, a cause and effect tale of any kind, as in, you do not become someone who is comfortable taking your clothes off because you were molested, or because you were raped.  You know those were all things that happened to her, but they’re not necessarily the cause.  And I think that was a big challenge in the story because you want to be true to the things that happened to her and to who she was, without trying to draw any, you know, conclusions about why people do what they do.”

SS:  So you wanted to present the facts, but not really force any conclusions on your audience, and let them work out the contradictions on their own?

GT: Yeah, it did take us, it took us about seven years to finish this script.  I mean, you know, we stopped and we did American Psycho and then came back to Bettie Page.  But, one of the things that we struggled with so much was that because there are no actual interviews with Bettie Page on camera where you can see how she acts and how she talks about what had happened to her...there’s print interviews, and there’s letters that she wrote when she was younger, and then there’s all these silent films of her.  And so we just struggled and struggled with filling in the blanks of why she did this and what did she think about what she was doing, and at the same time, the relationship to religion.  And we finally had to resign ourselves to the fact that it felt like even if you knew this woman in person, she would seem like a mystery; she would seem like a series of contradictions, and that we had to stop trying to be detectives and start just presenting what we saw, because what we saw was a portrait of a real, complicated person who made a lot of really surprising decisions for a woman in her time and place.

SS:  She really did seem to be on the progressive side of things, being willing to leave her husband and be a model, even despite her conservative values.

GT:  And also, an interesting thing that we were trying to think about was, she wasn’t dumb.  She wasn’t, you know, like ‘oh, I don’t know what anyone would want to wear these silly old shoes for.’  I think she’s figured it out to a point that it was something sexual, and she chose to just not care, to continue because she wasn’t hurting anyone.  So she would really just compartmentalize, in that sense, I think, and be like oh, you know, as she was quoted as saying, and as we have her saying in the movie, ‘what’s the harm in it?’

SS:  It seemed that she really did just want to make people happy, as long as no one was getting hurt.

GT: Yeah.  But it is sad, what happened to her.  I just found it, as I was watching it, just how she was kind of shamed by these court proceedings, and how that really just kind of made her have to re-evaluate all this stuff anyway that she wouldn’t have otherwise, and in a way that she would have been fine with it.

SS: So did she go on to another marriage after she stopped posing?

GT:  It goes like this.  She married Billy Neal, the guy you see her meeting when she’s in high school.  Then she also married the guy who she meets in Miami.  Then, when she decided she wanted to be a missionary, you can’t be a missionary if you’re divorced, so she went back to Billy Neal, and married him again.  That lasted for about two weeks because they really just had a firecracker relationship, they just didn’t get along.  And then she married one more man who she stayed with for several years.

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