{"id":111854,"date":"2017-06-16T13:59:04","date_gmt":"2017-06-16T17:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111854"},"modified":"2017-06-16T15:42:55","modified_gmt":"2017-06-16T19:42:55","slug":"summers-and-swimmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/16\/summers-and-swimmers\/","title":{"rendered":"Summers and Swimmers"},"content":{"rendered":"

With\u00a0a new retrospective, the screenwriter Eleanor Perry gets belated\u00a0recognition.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from The Swimmer<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The 1972 Cannes Film Festival was marked by protests against Italy\u2019s reigning auteur, Federico Fellini, who had green-lit an ill-advised poster for his movie Roma<\/em>. Depicting a nude, three-breasted \u201cshe-wolf\u201d perched suggestively on all fours, the advertisement drew opprobrium from the venerable American screenwriter Eleanor Perry and five others, who, according to the Chicago Tribune<\/a><\/em>, \u201cstirred up a hornet\u2019s nest when they set up ladders in front of the Carlton Hotel before the [Roma<\/em>] showing \u2026 and tried to deface [the] sign.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protestors waved signs that read WOMEN ARE PEOPLE\u2014NOT DIRTY JOKES<\/small>; soon they ascended a tall aluminum ladder \u201cand threw four cans of red paint on the Fellini poster,\u201d the Tribune <\/em>reported. The cops started \u201cshaking the ladder and trying to knock them to the ground while Mrs. Perry screamed mechant<\/em> (a French word meaning wicked and evil) and ripped epaulets from their uniforms.\u201d Asked later about the demonstrations, which had sent three people to jail, Perry told the paper: \u201cI adore Fellini, he\u2019s one of my idols, but this ugly distortion of the female anatomy is a humiliating offense to women everywhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hollywood bigwigs took notice of Eleanor\u2019s willingness to confront misogyny, and soon they attempted to use it to their advantage. In 1975, at the behest of Columbia Pictures, Perry hosted a private screening of The Stepford Wives<\/em>\u2014about men who kill their wives and replace them with humanoid robots\u2014<\/em>ahead of its release. \u201cFinally, a movie that is not about two guys and their adventures,\u201d Perry deadpanned before the film started. But some moviegoers believed she was sincere, apparently; in a New York Times<\/em> article<\/a>, Judy Klemesrud skewered the film, noting that Perry\u2019s screening had prompted walkouts from the likes of Betty Friedan, who called it a \u201crip-off of the women\u2019s movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it was over, Perry asked the crowd: \u201cMen made this film, right?\u201d It was obvious to her, especially given the dialogue about bra burning: \u201cWell, it\u2019s just something no woman would have put in as a line,\u201d she said. And Perry would know: the many screenplays she\u2019d written had a knowing edge to them, brimming with complex, headstrong women who fended for themselves in moments of duress, often while fending off men. One of her most memorable characters, Tina Balser (played by Carrie Snodgress in the 1970 adaptation of Sue Kaufman\u2019s Diary of a Mad Housewife<\/em>) ripped the man she\u2019d been having an affair with, George Prager (Frank Langella), for being just as cold and sex-obsessed as her abusive husband was. \u201cYou don\u2019t need a woman,\u201d Tina spits at George, seconds before she splits. \u201cYou need a sex machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Since her death in 1981, Perry\u2019s rebukes of the Hollywood status quo have sustained her reputation in certain circles\u2014but her artistic contributions to film are too often footnotes, especially compared to those of her former husband, Frank Perry, who directed eight of her screenplays, including The Swimmer<\/em>, Last Summer<\/em>, and David and Lisa<\/em>. (The two divorced in 1971, after Diary of a Mad Housewife.<\/em>) Sure, Frank\u2019s skill is undeniable\u2014it takes a director of considerable talent to coax the notoriously prickly Burt Lancaster into running around practically naked for the duration of The Swimmer<\/em>\u2014but Frank wouldn\u2019t have made pictures at all without Eleanor, whom he married in 1958.<\/p>\n

Before her film career took off, Eleanor had earned a master\u2019s degree in psychiatric social work; she\u2019d published suspense novels. The experience gave her a keen instinct for building tension. In the early sixties, her daughter gave her Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin\u2019s novel Lisa and\u00a0David<\/em>. Eleanor decided to adapt it into a screenplay, putting Frank in the director\u2019s chair. As Frank\u2019s Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/em> obit notes, the pair financed the film with a staggering $200,000 in independent funding after both major and minor distributors passed on the film. They shot David and Lisa<\/em> in a few weeks, with enough money leftover to pop a bottle or two. The 1962 film\u2014which oozes with angst, unrequited desire, and venom\u2014garnered Frank a nomination for Best Director from the Academy, and Eleanor a nomination for Adapted Screenplay.<\/p>\n

Eleanor\u2019s penchant for a good caper, as well as for amplifying drama, gave her screenplays a rare power to wedge themselves into audiences\u2019 consciousnesses. Her sensibility led her to Last Summer<\/em>, Evan Hunter\u2019s novel of teen romance gone awry, which became in Perry\u2019s hands both controversial and unforgettable. \u201cMrs. Perry\u2019s screenplay, like the novel, is tough and laconic and exclusively centered on the young people, an isolation that spares us the most of the familiar, easy explanations about How They Got That Way,\u201d wrote the\u00a0New York Times<\/em> in their 1969 review<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Eleanor\u2019s characters often illuminated aspects of womanhood that were deeply familiar and yet seldom depicted onscreen. She was especially shrewd at showing the innate defensive tactics that women use to protect themselves from men\u2019s unwanted advances. Take her adaptation of The Swimmer<\/em>, John Cheever\u2019s famous 1964 story, in which Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) reckons with his delusions by electing to \u201cswim home,\u201d navigating the many swimming pools that dot his affluent Connecticut county. Along the way, he encounters his mistress, Shirley Abbott (Janice Rule), and a neighbor, Julie Hooper (Janet Landgard). He makes advances on Shirley, and when she\u2019s unable to get him out of her yard, she insists that a man\u2019s coming over. Then he puts the moves on Julie, too. She admits at first that she used to have a crush on him, but she becomes uncomfortable, understandably, with his leading questions and offers to meet her every day. So she tries to stave off his discomfiting advances by bringing up her jealous boyfriend. When he doesn\u2019t quit, she bolts.<\/p>\n

Though we only see her for part of The Swimmer<\/em>, Shirley is a particularly acerbic, unapologetic character. Instead of edging into trope territory, Shirley refuses to bend to Ned\u2019s charms, isn\u2019t afraid to bring him back down to Earth, and calls him out on how he treated her. During one tense scene by her poolside, she chastises Ned for how he broke it off with her. It also happened to be the only time he ever took her to a nice restaurant in New York. \u201cYou did the usual red-blooded married man thing,\u201d she says. \u201cYou took me out to lunch and gave me that lecture about the duties of a father and a husband.\u201d Ned claims he doesn\u2019t remember and denies intentionally trying to hurt her. \u201cDid you really think you could get rid of me in no more noise than the sound of finger bowls tinkling?\u201d she fires back.<\/p>\n

Eleanor never wrote women in film as bit parts, plot devices, or vehicles for arguments about men. Though her characterization of women onscreen was progressive, it was hardly perfect\u2014nor was it entirely inclusive. Perry lived through feminism\u2019s first wave, and her films are circumscribed to a degree: they focus almost exclusively on white, upper-middle-class people on the coasts of the U.S. While her politics concern the well-being and representation of women, she sometimes misstepped in her depiction of these characters. For instance, Mrs. Clemens (Neva Patterson), David\u2019s mother in David and Lisa<\/em>, is depicted as an overbearing part of his life, and it\u2019s implied that she is partially to blame for some of his emotional and mental issues. Eleanor\u2019s screenplays paid no particular attention to the plight that women of color, LGBTQ women, and transgender women faced in Hollywood and beyond, either.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s hard to know what work Perry might have gone on to make: her career didn\u2019t last into the seventies. After she divorced Frank, Eleanor was banished to Hollywood purgatory, more or less. As a 1979 Washington Post <\/em>profile<\/a> notes, Perry was, at that point, being \u201cpaid, but her work isn\u2019t seen, and she feels too old to devote the years necessary to direct a film herself.\u201d What\u2019s more, she had eleven unproduced screenplays burning a hole in the bottom drawer of her desk and seemed slighted by the \u201cstrain of incredulity and anger at the baffling status of women in her lifetime.\u201d (She touched on the film industry\u2019s dismissal of women of a certain age\u2014and the dissolution of her marriage\u2014in the only novel she published under her own name, 1979\u2019s Blue Pages.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, New York\u2019s Quad Cinema hosted a Frank and Eleanor Perry retrospective<\/a>: the start of what I hope will be a reappraisal of the feminist screenwriter. Revisiting films like David and Lisa<\/em>, Ladybug Ladybug<\/em>, and Diary of a Mad Housewife<\/em>\u2014all of which featured characters who pushed back against antiquated norms of what it means to be a woman in the world\u2014<\/em>offers a disturbing reminder that Eleanor\u2019s work remains on the outside of Hollywood norms, which continue to favor binary depictions of women as either madonnas or whores. Her rise to prominence also highlights how few women are in positions to call the shots\u2014the industry today is still in the condition that Perry spent her lifetime railing against. \u201cIt seems women are always getting killed or raped,\u201d she once noted of the movies. \u201cThose are men\u2019s fantasies we\u2019re seeing, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Paula Mejia writes about arts and culture for\u00a0the<\/em> New York Times,<\/em> NPR,<\/em> Rolling Stone,<\/em> Vulture, and others. Her first book, a 33 1\/3 series volume on the Jesus and Mary Chain\u2019s<\/em> Psychocandy, <\/em>was released in October 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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