These days, special features and behind-the-scenes featurettes are an expected part of the movie experience. I know I'm not the only one who has held off on buying bare-bones discs, even if I loved the movie (like, oh, Kill Bill). The hows, the whys, and the real people behind the film are now a part of the experience, and maybe this is why a behind-the-scenes film of Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits is going on the auction block.

Jam! Showbiz reports that On Set with The Misfits -- two color reels of silent footage weighing in at 47 minutes -- will be auctioned off with bids starting between $10,000 and $20,000. It's being listed through Julien's Auctions, appropriately at Planet Hollywood in Vegas. It seems that Stanley Floyd Kilarr (an amateur photographer) shot the scenes during the making of Misfits -- which was the last completed film for both Monroe and Clark Gable. (Clark had his fourth heart attack soon after and died on November 16, 1960.) "The video shows the actors preparing for scenes, chatting with crew members and others on the set, and relaxing between takes."

The best thing about this is that while most of us don't have the cash handy to try and nab it for ourselves, we might still see it. The winning bidder owns the rights and can license it for public media like DVDs and documentaries.

Continuing our pre-coverage of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, above you will find the trailer for a documentary called Waiting for Hockney. I love docs about eccentric people, and this one definitely seems to be going in that direction: Basically, Waiting for Hockney follows a guy named Billy Pappas who graduates art school and decides that his mission in life is to reinvent realism. Thus, he spends the next eight years (yes, EIGHT YEARS) on a single drawing of Marilyn Monroe. It's his intentions to show a microscopic level of detail he hopes will reveal something deeper than photography. Literally, he hopes to create a new art form.

From the synopsis: "Aided, one might even say enabled, by an eccentric cast of characters including a clergyman, a professor and an architect calling himself "Dr. Lifestyle," Billy finally completes the portrait and then begins a quest to show it to renowned contemporary artist David Hockney, the one person he thinks can validate everything for which Billy has been striving." Waiting for Hockney was directed by Julie Checkoway and it will premiere later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.

Lots of pictures were taken of Marilyn Monroe -- it's one of the reasons she's still so well-known today. One of her foremost photographers was a man named Milton Greene, who took thousands of shots of Monroe, including the famous ballerina image. Now, years later, his son Josh is looking to sell his fathers images, and has run into a big, solid, Arnold Schwarzenegger wall. The Guardian reports that Greene is currently awaiting yet another ruling to see whether he'll be allowed to sell his dad's Monroe photos.

See, Arnie passed a "dead celebrities bill" recently, which "decrees that famous people, even those who died years ago, are entitled to pass on image rights to whomever they choose." Oh, so they mean a famous person can come back as a ghost and tell us who gets the rights? Sure, that makes sense. Why this hurts Greene -- Monroe handed most of her estate to her late acting coach, Lee Strasberg.

In the realms of law, this all seems sort of fishy, and it certainly throws a wrench into celeb photography. On the other hand, The Guardian does mention what sort of things the images have been sold for in the past -- when federal judges had ruled that he could -- products including sex oil and underwear. In the realms of taste, it's a bit questionable. He's not selling the image as a poster, in a book collection, or something Monroe-themed. Instead, sex oil. But this is a good lesson: watch out who takes your picture. One day, after you're dead, your grandkids might find your face on sexual paraphernalia.

This weekend marks the 45th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death. Did she really commit suicide? Was her death an accident? Could she have been murdered? These questions have been asked for decades, but now a new documentary seems to have the answer: Robert Kennedy did it. Well, maybe not, but the then U.S. Attorney General was in fact at Marilyn's house the night she died.

The doc, tentatively titled Death on Helena Dr., features an interview with an FBI agent who was also there that night, though outside in a surveillance van, and he claims to have witnessed RFK and other men enter Marilyn's home, where they all screamed and yelled in the guest cottage. Apparently she may have been murdered in the cottage and then moved to the bedroom where she was discovered. I guess we'll have to watch the film, produced by Marilyn memorabilia collector Keya Morgan, to find out more.

I've been a longtime enthusiast of conspiracy theories, but I never could get interested in the Marilyn death stuff. I guess I just didn't care enough, and I didn't believe the motivation to murder a huge movie star was there. Plus, I always figured, and still figure, that even if Bobby Kennedy was around that night, she could have just overdosed after he left. It makes more sense for her to have taken her own life after getting whatever news she received (possibly John F. Kennedy's decision to break off their affair), rather than for her to have been killed because of whatever information she knew (about any number of other conspiracy theories).

Death on Helena Dr. seems to be anchored on the FBI agent's interview, but it will also include other testimonials from former L.A. Police Chief Darryl Gates, Jack Clemmons, who was the first cop "officially" to arrive at the murder scene the morning of August 5, Abe Landau, who was Marilyn's neighbor and a Beverly Hills detective named Lynn Franklin. Morgan claims his film will also offer new information on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, too. A release date for the documentary was not given.

It's been exactly one week since the not-so-shocking death of Anna Nicole Smith, and as the perspective baby-daddies fight to lay claim on a fortune that may never materialize, various media outlets are competing to tag the final footnote on a film career that never really happened. Jim Keough is one of several movie pundits to scoff at the media's insistence on setting Smith's story against that of her stated icon, Marilyn Monroe. "The comparison is unfair to Monroe," Keough writes. "Anna Nicole Smith will be remembered for her outsized proportions, her tabloid-friendly personal life and her erratic behavior, which included dozens of slurry interviews, but unlike Marilyn, she's light years from being iconic." It would seem that the bulk of Hollywood agrees; the L.A. Times reports that Smith's final film, a schlocky-sounding sci-fi flick called Illegal Aliens, co-financed by the wannabe-actress herself and co-written by Smith's late son Daniel, has been unable to find a theatrical distributor and will go straight-to-DVD this spring.

That's a far cry from the fate of Monroe's final film. Though Marilyn was fired from George Cukor's remake of My Favorite Wife, after her death 38 minutes of footage from that aborted project were cobbled together for inclusion in countless tributes and documentaries. The clip reel itself, completely divorced from Cukor's original intentions, was eventually released on DVD as part of a Marilyn Monroe box set. Cultural critic Camille Paglia agrees that the comparison to Monroe is off the mark, but insists that Smith had what it takes to become a genuine movie star -- if only Hollywood had let her. Comparing the late Trimspa spokeswoman to Jayne Mansfield, Margaux Hemingway and Anita Ekberg, Paglia laments the loss of a studio system that would have made room for Smith's "sexual charisma and comedic charm." "The real problem was that the broad, Technicolor comedic films in which Smith might have thrived are no longer made -- except in Bollywood," Paglia writes in a long column at Salon. "Smith had genuine talent but no place to put it."

I think we can all agree that we're a little more preoccupied with celebrities than we should be. It's scary when I know way more about about people I've never met than my neighbors -- without batting an eye I could name Brad Pitt's girlfriends in chronological order, it's sick. Don't worry; I'm not about to hop on a soapbox about the evils of celebrity culture. Most "stargazing" is relatively harmless, although if you were Steven Spielberg or Jodie Foster, you probably wouldn't agree.

One of the most benign past-times of Hollywood lovers is collecting memorabilia. So while you and I might indulge in the occasional In Touch magazine or collector's edition DVD, for others collecting is a serious and expensive business. 20th Century Fox's charity auction in New York consisted of letters and contracts from some of the biggest names in Hollywood history. Included in the auction were a signed letter by Marilyn Monroe (sold for $7,000) and contracts from Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and John Steinbeck. Steinbeck's contract for handing over the rights to The Grapes of Wrath was the big-ticket item of the day, netting $24,000. Proceeds from the auction; totaling $267,280, went to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, providing financial assistance to struggling actors and directors. The charity might be a worthy cause, but I can't imagine forking over almost $25,000 for paperwork. What memorabilia, if any, would you be willing to take out a small loan for?

This isn't the most amazing news I've ever heard, but it got me thinking about auctions and Ebay and what not (plus it is a slow news day), so I thought I'd mention it. Yesterday at an auction in L.A., a hat and cane set once used by Charlie Chaplin was sold for $139,250, the new record for such a set. I'm not sure how many sets there are -- surely he went through quite a few in his many years as the Tramp -- but that is a lot of money for something that isn't a one-of-a-kind. I'm surprised that things like this can net such prices, particularly give how much the market for auctions has widened since the internet and Ebay came along. (Maybe I'm just bitter because I could sell an old comic book or a signed copy of a book for a lot more before online auctions made everything a lot less rare.) I'm also shocked that people still trust or care about authenticity when scandals like the Queen Mary Marilyn Monroe exhibit happen.

I guess I'm just not a big enough fan of anything to buy expensive props or merchandise or souvenirs or whatever. Once in awhile, I will purchase movie-related clothing, like my The Fisher King t-shirt and my Adaptation long-sleeve with script excerpt on the back, provided they are relatively cheap. But then, I'm not the geek that some people are. The only thing of this sort that I would spend a lot of money on is a painting commissioned for the original Star Wars poster, which was never used, only because it was done by my father.

What is the most you've ever spent on Ebay or at an auction for something movie-related?

 

Thousands of fans may have been fooled by a Marilyn Monroe exhibit, according to a lawsuit filed in L.A. on Friday. The showcase of items owned or used by the late movie icon is hosted by the Queen Mary, which is docked in Long Beach, and it costs each fan $22.95 to see it. It turns out you can't fool an expert, as the lawsuit was filed after Ernest Cunningham, an expert who wrote a book called The Ultimate Marilyn, attended. It also turns out the Queen Mary had gone ahead of the exhibit despite the fact that the Hollywood Museum had already cancelled the same display because it doubted the authenticity of some of the items, which are owned by a collector, Robert W. Otto, who insists they are the real deal.

Hopefully this controversy will make fans, not just those of Marilyn Monroe, think twice about their obsessive urge to see material objects owned by a movie star or other celebrity. In fact, it makes me wonder about every museum and Planet Hollywood I've ever been to. How do I really know the items in The Smithsonian are what they are supposed to be? How do I know that the paintings in the Louvre are the originals? Well, I don't. But someone does. Anyway, if any of that stuff wasn't real, would you even care? If you didn't know?

Mary Ann Lynch, who used to take photographs of Marilyn Monroe, still continues to take pictures of her old friend, but it's not as morbid as it sounds. Lynch travels all over snapping pictures of billboards, kitschy objects (which would be anything with Monroe's picture on it, I think), stills from old movies, and anything else with Marilyn's sultry visage. Her work is currently on display at the John Stevenson Gallery in Chelsea, and is titled "Forever Marilyn: The Enduring Legacy of Marilyn Monroe, 1926 - 1962." 

Marilyn Monroe's first husband, a Los Angles detective by the name of James Dougherty, has passed away at the age of 84. The couple married in 1942 when Marilyn (then Norma Jean) was sixteen, and divorced four years later. During their brief time together James worked as a merchant marine while Norma Jean began to pursue a career in Hollywood that would eventually lead her to stardom and a brand new namesake.