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THE SEX FILES: Bettie Page Reveals All

We all know we have some amazingly creative folks living right here in the 5 boroughs (or is that creatively amazing folks) and I happened on one, Academy award nominee filmmaker Mark Mori. Mr. Mori’s most recent project fits in well with what we are about here at The Sex Files and seeing as he is a New Yorker, I felt this was the perfect piece for us.

Mr. Mori’s Bettie Page Reveals All is a documentary about arguably one of history’s most widely emulated sex symbols…narrated by the lady herself!  Notorious as much for her early fetish photos as for her silence about her modeling for some 35 years, Ms. Page became friends with Mark Mori sitting at the many lunches he took her to-where the lady was never recognized-as Mr. M. was treated to her “spin her amazing tales” which he later recorded (in much quieter places of course) to amass a recorded six hours of interviews.

Tell me how you met Bettie Page?

It was really a right place/right time kind of a thing. I was in L.A. when my entertainment attorney, who happens to also be Ms. Page’s attorney’s entertainment attorney, showed me  the Bettie Page book (Bettie Page, Life of a Pin-Up Legend). I had never heard of her, really didn’t know anything about her, but I thought this could be a movie.

It’s well know that Bettie was quite quiet about her past, almost reclusive in a way, right?

Yes, she was not looking for friends; she didn’t want to be identified by the public. Only a handful of people even had her phone number.

But you and her evidently hit it off.

She and I went to lunch, it really didn’t take that long, a couple meetings. Being an Academy award nominated documentary filmmaker (for his 1991 film Building Bombs an investigative piece about the Savannah River Site, a South Carolina nuclear facility) she trusted me I think to tell the story right.

Unlike the Hollywood bio pic The Notorious Bettie Page?

Although I have great respect for the director of that movie (Mary Harron) I feel they missed a good deal of the essence of Bettie Page. It also had a fair amount of inaccuracies in it. As I understand, it started out as a documentary.

For you, the heart of your movie was getting Bettie to narrate, correct?

Well, Bettie really did want to remain anonymous, which was fine with me. I couldn’t talk her into appearing on camera but I did get her to do the audio narrations and we get a much more intimate result. She has a great personality. She is a good story teller, entertaining with a whole bunch of funny behind-the-scenes-stories.

There’s no denying the impact Bettie and her image have had on us, but in your research you uncovered a dizzying array of stuff, right?

I found more than 70 songs written about Ms. Page and archived some 60,000 images.

So what’s the next step in post production?

We’re close to finished. Then the next step will be to get the film out to the various festivals. Ultimately I want a distributor that really understands the film. Following festivals we’ll open in theaters.

Bettie Page died in 2008 at the age of 85. Check out all the details about Mark’s upcoming movie here: www.BettiePageRevealsAll.com

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