Photo by tk
Liz Goldwyn
Issue #24
The Pretty Things filmmaker trains her camera on burlesque and on herself
By Becky Vlamis
Published: June 1st, 2005 | 11:27am
"I tend to romanticize the past,” admits Liz Goldwyn, the director and co-star of Pretty Things. Indeed, Goldwyn’s rose-tinted view of the old days is what led her to embark on her project, a sprawling, eight-year-long foray into the world of burlesque entertainment boiled down to a feature-length documentary for HBO.
Pretty Things is nothing if not an historical document of sorts: examining the last generation of burlesque queens, it draws from hours of interviews with the former artists, now in their 70s and 80s.
Goldwyn’s interest in burlesque was piqued at age 18, after she happened upon two burlesque costumes in a New York City flea market. Intrigued, she wore the costumes for a series of self-portraits that incorporated traditional burlesque poses. Goldwyn found both the experience and its results to be thrillingly self-assuring and sexual.
Before long, Goldwyn began to wonder about the costumes’ original owners. Given their style and relatively pristine condition, she concluded they belonged to artists from burlesque’s Golden Age, the 1930s and late ’40s. In those days, theater audiences sat captivated as a woman artfully disrobed to music performed by a live orchestra. The pros knew how to control the often-packed house with clever routines that could include anything from reciting poetry to imitating the biblical Eve by wearing little but a live snake.
Despite such a rich history, Goldwyn says, burlesque’s heyday received scant critical attention. “It was a period that was not being taken seriously by costume historians, by the academic world. I wondered why these women were not being given their due.”
Determined to tell their story, Goldwyn tracked down a handful of striptease artists, contemporaries of Gypsy Rose Lee and Lili St. Cyr, who once headlined theater halls around the country but had since fallen into obscurity. Once she won her subjects’ trust, Goldwyn began recording interviews about their lives and careers.
The women Goldwyn showcases react very differently to the camera. Some seem grandmotherly, at ease in their raisiny skin. Others — particularly 86-year-old Sherry Britton, who wears a mask of makeup on her surgically stretched face — have not reconciled the reality of who they are today with the youthful sexuality they once possessed. All, however, willingly recount their troubled childhoods, which often involved instances of sexual abuse.
But while the women chronicle their own bittersweet — and sometimes just bitter — lives, Goldwyn clings to her own romantic notions of burlesque. This impulse is seen most explicitly in her personal quest to master the art of striptease, which she makes the driving arc of her film. In a startlingly sincere act of exhibitionism, Goldwyn laces the interviews with her own attempts to learn a burlesque routine under the tutelage of the former stars and hired dance instructors.
As a result, the film’s ultimate focus is not the aging beauties but Goldwyn herself. “It was a decision I was never 100% comfortable with,” she admits. “I think I subconsciously wanted to learn how to be comfortable with my own sexuality the way they were.”
The tension between Goldwyn’s burlesque fantasy and the reality of her subjects’ grisly lives pervades the documentary, lurking barely beneath its surface. Reconciling these issues did not come easily for the filmmaker; she didn’t begin to confront her dilemma until the death of one of her interviewees, Zorita, in 2001. A tough-as-nails, foul-mouthed woman, Zorita was a role model of sorts for Goldwyn. Not coincidentally, she was also Goldwyn’s toughest critic, backhandedly encouraging Goldwyn to get in touch with her own burlesque character. In one scene, Zorita chastises Goldwyn’s Mary-Janes, which she dismissively refers to as “those clunkers.” “She saw what I was romanticizing about her life, and she really wanted me to examine that,” says Goldwyn.
In the final sequence of Pretty Things,Goldwyn attempts to bridge fantasy with reality. The scene begins with the director, decked out in an ivory suit coat and little else, prancing, Fosse-like, to her own rendition of “Big Spender.” She intersperses her performance with clips of Sherry Britton and others, undulating in their prime, as an ode to their legacies.
Ultimately, Goldwyn maintains, her ambivalence boiled down to one question: Could she fantasize about burlesque queens and simultaneously acknowledge the truth about their lives? “My personal answer was yes,” she says. “I can still fantasize. But now it’s a bit more real.”
Pretty Things airs on HBO in July.
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