I definitely recommend the 2012 documentary, "
Love, Marilyn". The storyline write-up at imdb.com:
Of all the stars in Hollywood's history, no one had a more potent mix of glamor and tragedy than Marilyn Monroe. Through performed readings of her personal papers, this film explores the life and personal thoughts of this seminal movie star and how she achieved her dream with determination and audacity. Furthermore, through additional readings and interviews of her colleagues and acquaintances, we also follow her emotional self-destruction under the sexist pressures of Hollywood until her premature death in 1962.
This is an amazingly well put together movie. It's just under two hours long and it must have been very difficult to take all the available material, not to mention the newly discovered two boxes of Monroe's personal notes and letters, and whittle everything down into such a short piece of work. They could have easily made this a many-part series on HBO. That said, the focus of the movie leans towards Monroe's strength and intelligence, while at the same time showing her vulnerability and insecurities. It's an incredibly interesting work and Monroe is even more intriguing to me than before. Her awareness of how her popularity meant power and how her power meant she could control things that very, very few women ever got the chance to do. And how she re-wrote the rules of a woman in business/Hollywood even while people persistently insisted on her being a dumb blonde, all while she was demanding (and getting) her contracts be re-written to include things such as script approval and director approval.
I also found it very interesting that almost all the men felt quite comfortable to place blame with Monroe when things were not going how they wanted, yet apparently thought that there was nothing questionable in any way, shape or form about their own wants and actions. Laurence Oliver, Billy Wilder and John Huston come off looking like misogynistic pigs, although I admit that their words are extremely limited and they are presented within a movie which is, for the most part, a love letter to Marilyn Monroe (but not one shown through a soft lens). Only Monroe's husbands accept some blame, most notably with Joe DiMaggio who said something to Marilyn years after their divorce about how if, "I had been you...I would have divorced me, too!".
I could go on and on about this movie. But I'll stop here by saying that I recommend this movie if you have an even passing interest in Monroe...or if you have interest in the workings of (old) Hollywood...or if you want to see a great documentary about how a woman pushed her way into a male-dominated business with little examples of women doing anything similar before her and doing so, set the groundwork for so many women who were to come after her.
, so by process of "elimination" got 78..... bad!.
