What are the lies Bettie referred to about The Notorious Bettie Page? It seemed like a love-letter to her for the most part.
"The only reason I'm paranoid is because everyone's against me." - Frank Burns of M*A*S*H*
My educated guess is that Bettie really hated being referred to as "Notorious" in the film's main title, since she must have associated that word to criminals which she didn't considered herself to be. Of course the word, notorious does really mean that it is a person known widely and usually unfavorably therefore that could possible refer to Bettie's then mid 1950's career and status as a famous nude pin-up model and bondage queen. But I guess that it must be that scene in the film in which she is doing a screen test in Hollywood supposedly in the mid 1950's in the midst of her pin-up career, when the film director turns her down by giving the remark, "It's great meeting the Notorious Bettie Page" In reality Bettie had her screen test thru 20th Century Fox in 1944 before she became a pin up model and when she was married to her first husband who was in the Army in WWII. Bettie herself remarks that her screen test with actor John Russell(TV's LAWMAN) was awful and that she also turned down the lecherous advances of a casting couch producer at Fox that cost her also the audition.
shareI thought Mary Harron handled the aspects you mentioned fairly well. I wonder if Bettie was referring to the filthy song Little John was singing during one of the ball-gag shoots. Harron wrights Bettie objecting to the language John uses, just before she declares, "I believe in Jesus." Maybe this exchange never actually took place, or at least not in that way. Even as pure exposition it may have hit the subjects a bit too hard on the nose. I can't imagine Bettie being that much of a prude, or expressing her love for Jesus by using such an indelicate declaration.
"The only reason I'm paranoid is because everyone's against me." - Frank Burns of M*A*S*H*
According to Hugh Hefner, Publisher and founder of Playboy, he had a screening of THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE in 2005 where the real Bettie Page was present at the screening as a guest and the only things she objected to the film was the film's main title because she didn't consider herself "Notorious", as well as the Little John scene because that character by itself wasn't not there at the bondage shootings at Klaw studios(he just published in his bondage magazione those bondage photos of Bettie) and also the movie audition scene in which the film director auditioning Bettie called her "the Notorious Bettie Page" because in reality that didn't happen during Bettie's pinup years in NY but ten years before in 1944 while Bettie was married to her soldier first husband. But according to Hefner, Bettie enjoyed most of the film and especially liked Gretchen Mol's performance as Bettie with Bettie even saying that she found Gretchen Mol more beautiful than she was back in mid 1950's.
Cool. I always thought the Notorious part of the title was meant to be sardonic anyway.
"The only reason I'm paranoid is because everyone's against me." - Frank Burns of M*A*S*H*