While many will wait to see what Alan can drum up, one has the suspicion that the amount of new "there" there may be elusive at best, given the ground covered by Gold and Hughes, who's written a breezy, upbeat, but unflinchingly honest memoir that captures as much as we could want to know (without knowing too much). From the start you'll know that it's a labor of love and it's likely to remain the best portrait of Liz Scott the person that we'll ever have.
on 10/22/2022, 9:04 am
The best middle ground for those opposing views can be found in the essay about Scott by Anastasia Lin in the third NOIR CITY ANNUAL, which doesn't hesitate to point out the often overly-mannered acting style that Scott brought to a number of her performances, but champions her as a proto-feminist in seeking a form of self-determination that was disconnected from the strictures of patriarchal society.
There have been rumblings of a Scott biography in process from Alan Rode, but such a work might be moot given several other works about her that are emerging at this time. Musician Louise Gold delved into research areas that may or may not be available to Alan in her tribute to Scott that was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books a year ago (on what Gold claims was actually Scott's 100th birthday, proclaiming that she'd shaved a year off her age when she came to Hollywood).
https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/from-the-shards-to-the-stars-remembering-lizabeth-scott/
The issue of Scott's real-life sexuality continues to overshadow almost all other aspects of her life and career, but Todd Hughes, a director and documentarian whose fascination with her would blossom into an ongoing, twenty-year friendship, gives us the type of nuanced, slow revelation of the facts as he was able to discern them over time, learning the signals as they manifested from Scott's playful but determined sense of misdirection.
All of that emerges in Hughes' just-published memoir, LUNCH WITH LIZABETH, which utilizes a series of letters & notes sent by Scott to Hughes during their friendship. Most of these are relatively frivolous in content, but in the context of Hughes's tale they are valuable for showing how a woman could immerse herself in a world made possible to her by the twin fortunes of movie-star looks and financial independence.
Hughes devotes one chapter in his book to Scott's noir filmography--it is as good as an assessment as anyone's (save, perhaps, for her detractors, whose response to descriptions of Scott's acting style as "somnambulistic" is to scream "wooden"!). Hughes seems to follow the current party line that Scott's best performance is found in TOO LATE FOR TEARS, even though Scott herself did not like the film. He offers especial praise of PITFALL, however, following the assessments of Lin and Gold, and later in the book provides us with some additional details from Scott about how the film was made and why she felt it was the best film she appeared in.
What emerges from the book is Scott's complex joie de vivre, scarred only by the accusations of lesbian encounters that appeared in the pages of CONFIDENTIAL, which soured her on the movie business once and for all. Hughes, who's gay, repeats an assertion that others make regarding Scott--that her purported lesbianism was seen by many as a subversive sign of solidarity with a set of preferences that had shamed "into the closet" for far too long. Hughes sets the record straight, once and for all, in a passage toward the end of the book, from words that come straight from Liz Scott herself.
Scott's odd but compelling beauty, her low voice, and an undercurrent of willful transgression that emerged in some of her films, have kept her admirers in thrall for decades. With any luck, her performances in films such as PITFALL and Jacques Tourneur's EASY LIVING, her best work outside of film noir, will eventually assume the forefront in our memory of her work. As a person, we may eventually see her as someone always striving to escape the type of caricature that hounded her in her film career, which must have been difficult for someone who continued to find ALICE IN WONDERLAND to be a touchstone for her own protean identity in an increasingly unree(a)l world. As noir/crime stories continued to play out the string on early 60s television, Scott made a few appearances, still glamorous but somehow more mannered than ever. On the noir send-up show BURKE'S LAW, done as a favor to lead actor Gene Barry, she did her best to retool her lines, but her scenes become repetitive and progressively lose their bite. Her best moments in the show are actually her silent reaction shots as the story reaches its denouement, giving us a fleeting glimpse of an actress as opposed to an icon.
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