MarilynMonroe Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Why does anyone bother saying "Rest in Peace" anymore? The jig is up! You might think you'll lay in the ground forever, but maybe a lake has to be created where the cemetery is, financial turmoil hits, or scientists want to display your aged corpse in museums. In this case, one poor deceased man is being ripped from his space above Marilyn Monroe to pay off a mortgage.

Over the summer, Reuters reported that Elsie Poncher wanted to pay off her mortgage so she could leave her home "free and clear" for her kids. So, she decided to auction off her husband Richard Poncher's final resting place above Marilyn, move him to her adjacent spot, and get cremated herself. ("In fact the person occupying the address right now is looking face down on her.") The winning bid fell through and now Reuters reports that she's trying again. Expected to sell for millions, they aren't taking chances this time around: "bidders will have to be ready to make a deposit of 1 to 5 percent of the cost of the crypt, and they will have to prove that they have sufficient funds to buy it."

Let's get back to the face-down thing. Sounds weird, right? This is because it was his wish when he bought the space from Monroe's ex, Joe DiMaggio: "Poncher had a yearning for the crypt because he wanted to have in death what he never had in life, the chance to be face down on top of Marilyn Monroe, which is how his family placed him when he died in 1986." Gotta wonder if Elsie was none too happy with her husband wanting such an afterlife.

What would you pay for the chance to remove Richard Poncher from his dreamed final resting place?

If you ever needed a poster girl for the darker side of fame, then look no further than the tortured 'sex goddess' Marilyn Monroe. In the last couple of days we have been treated to two Monroe-related pieces of gossip: the first was the mind-boggling news that Lindsay Lohan (a dedicated Monroe-phile) was looking to remake Billy Wilder's classic comedy, Some Like it Hot, and today, Scarlett Johansson has reportedly been hired to play Monroe in an adaptation of Colin Clark's memoir, My Week with Marilyn. So even though in both cases it's all probably nothing more than silly rumors, it did get me thinking about the romance that Young Hollywood seems to have with the legendary actress.

Monroe's life and death has been either a cautionary tale or a romantic tragedy as far back as I can remember, and as I watch young Hollywood fall deeper into their love affair with the actress, I have to wonder: "Just what's so great about Monroe anyway?" Blasphemy? Maybe, but but hear me out: Monroe might have been a strong comedic actress and possibly one of the most beautiful women to grace the screen, but a role model? Not on your life pal. You can't help but wonder what we all see in a woman who allegedly suffered from severe depression and substance abuse for most of her life, and thanks to Hollywood was a walking-talking blow-up doll for most of her career.

After the jump: the sad state of young Hollywood and the darker side of Monroe's legacy...

Let me make this clear: when I say that I'm compiling a list of the most contrived rom-com scenarios, I'm not saying that they're automatically the worst -- although a glance at the titles doesn't exactly stray far from that correlation. Tomorrow's The Proposal finds Sandra Bullock forcing Ryan Reynolds into marriage for the sake of holding off immigration authorities and keeping her/their jobs (I guess it's not too soon to remake Green Card and Picture Perfect after all), so we're talking about seven plot points along those lines of high-concept, close-quarters thinking, with some (dis)honorable mentions along the way...

It never ceases to amaze me what can be found on eBay:

• Since it's almost Valentine's Day, I thought I'd lead off with an engagement ring for the geek crowd. If you're about to propose to a Spider-Man fan, you might want to pick up Aunt May's engagement ring from Spider-Man 3. It's listed at $2,500, which isn't bad for something that can double as a fan prop and engagement ring.
• Just as we close on our last Watchmen-free days, a few original signed lithograph plates from the comic issues have hit eBay for a whopping ten grand. Well, ten grand if you want one, or you could get two for the discounted price of $17,500! Pricey splurges, especially for these times, but they are signed by both Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
• But just to make that deal sound a bit cheaper, what about the trophy cup used in Citizen Kane? $499,000.00 seem steep? The seller claims that this is the only on-screen object from the film held by Welles himself, so there's the tres unique factor.
• On a creepier front, and the cheapest so far on this list, you could own some of Marilyn Monroe's bleached hair -- starting bid is $995.00. The clump of hair was taken from one of her last haircuts in 1962.
• Finally, there's an original Gremlins Gizmo prop with a Buy It Now price of $750.00. You probably wouldn't want to cuddle up to this head though -- it looks much more suitable for scaring the pants off someone.

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?