Theresa Harris as "Chico" and Barbara Stanwyck as "Lily" in Baby Face.

Reading a review of a new book about German philosopher Nietzsche in the New York Times this morning, I was thrilled to see Baby Face with Barbara Stanwyck referenced. Apparently, the New York Censorship board cut a scene in which a friend hands Stanwyck’s character Lily a book by Nietzsche, urging her to “Be strong! Defiant! Use men to get the things you want!”

The New York censorship Board edited that scene (the book title and author was blurred and the dialogue changed) and cut a few other portions of this racy 1933 film only to have the uncut version discovered by an archivist in 2004.

While 1933 is considered pre-code Hollywood, the code existed, it just wasn’t widely enforced. Baby Face, some speculate was exactly the kind of material that prompted censors to become more vigilant.

She pays for her sins to a degree – life is certainly full of hardships for Lily but she’s also successful in her career, finances and love.

Mimi Chakarova, the filmmaker, refers to the women as “broken” and explains, “My objective was to reveal their faces and to strip away the shame and stigma that trafficked victims have carried for decades.” Right, because exploiting them some more in the name of journalism, distribution deals and money is the antidote for exploitation in the name of money and sex. In the trailer we see a pretty blonde woman talk crying, “I wish I’d never been born. It would be better to be dead than to live like this.” 

I’m not a fan of films made about people in rough spots by people not in the same rough spot. The filmmaker is not a former sex worker, though she poses as one in the film. She also has a distribution deal with Women Make Movies, a supposedly feminist film company that has consistently denied support to out sex worker filmmakers – they like films about sex workers apparently – just not told by sex workers.

This film purports to give the sex workers a voice but they are the subjects, not the writers, directors or editors – they have no authorship. The appeal here isn’t to our humanity, it’s to our prurient desire to press our noses to the glass of a pretty girl’s defilement. The film puts us in the room where the girl’s raped, but offers no way for us to help albeit insisting, as these pieces always do, that witnessing the crime and shaking our heads in disgust is doing something. 

The argument isn’t even correct – it’s not the Price of Sex – it’s the Price of POVERTY. Poor people, especially women and children have limited choices and very little power. Being forced or not forced into prostitution as the case may be isn’t even the worst possible fate – there’s going hungry, there’s watching your children go hungry, or being abused. 

On the first page of her website Chakarova has a flash animation next to a picture of an old man. The camera looks down on him as he squats and stares up with watery eyes. It reads:

“Can I take your picture. 

For what?

To show others how you live.

Will they come here and make it better?

I don’t know…Probably not.

Why you want to shoot an old man anyway?

Because history is written on your face.

Go ahead if it pleases you.

What pleases you?

I don’t remember.”

I wonder if she gets it? Journalists from the first world (Chakarova was born in Bulgaria but moved ot Baltimore as a teenager) are in a place of power, like her camera, above the man. The text plainly says the images won’t make it better, so there’s nothing in it for him, but he acquieces, maybe because he’s used to acquiecing to people in power. Perhaps he knows if he allows her to romanticize his suffering, she may buy him a meal or offer a few dollars. 

IFC recently released another sex worker film (making two out of their three current releases about sex workers – the other is Sleeping Beauty),by director Bertrand Bonello (Tiresia, On War, The Pornographer). Clearly a pretty film but not without issues. Critics once again are taking Bonello to task for his violent treatment of women and transgendered sex workers.

Tamara Pederson, Lisa Futrell, Andrea Altiery, Megan Emerick, and Angela Feddern.

Sue Luna, Joanne Messina, Paula Golding, Malai Larsen, and Sherry Morrow.

Just another movie about sex workers as victims and clients as deranged killers.

The Frozen Ground stars 50 Cent as a pimp, Nic Cage as a state trooper, Vanessa Hudgens as the teenage victim who gets away and helps catch the killer, and John Cusack as serial killer Robert Hansen, “Butcher Baker”, who kidnapped, raped and murdered two-dozen women in the 1970s and ’80s. Hansen’s twist, a pilot, cake decorator, and award-winning big-game hunter – he flew his victims to Alaska, tortured, then released them in a remote location to hunt and kill them.

Some stories don’t need to be retold and in fact, ought not be retold. I can’t come up with any value in recreating the torture of these women. Yes, he gets caught, yep good triumphs but only after we get 90 prurient minutes of wailing, abused, stalked young women.

It’s likely Hansen killed many more women than those he confessed to killing. He had a long track record of rape and assault but because the victims were sex workers, complaints against him were dismissed on multiple occasions.

I haven’t seen the script – so it’s remotely possible that the story doesn’t dwell in sadism but early press would indicate otherwise. I would be infinitely more interested to see a film about Cindy Paulson (played by Vanessa Hudgens), the seventeen year-old would-be victim who heroically escaped – who was she before this? Who is she now? Or maybe the focus could be on Shelia Toomey, the columnist with The Anchorage Daily News, who instigated the investigation with her columns about missing girls? I doubt we will see much of that – more likely it’s shots of pristine, shimmering hills of snow soaked in blood, beautiful young limbs frozen blue in a desolate wilderness.

In sunday’s L.A. Times, Jane said, “Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, you’re going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don’t accept people’s sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn’t have any money and I was living in my car. I was 18. I wasn’t averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?
…You’re a lot more open to experimentation as a young man. And for me, being a young artist and broke in Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge myself in that way…”

Love it. Love it. Love it. The show, not so much. Thomas Jane – crazy about him.

I believe this is the first time an actor playing a sex worker has ever admitted to having once been a sex worker. I’m sure given the difficulty of establishing an acting career, there must be many more and yet they never admit it. As a sex worker, it’s been one of my greatest gripes with the entertainment industry – they’re obsessed with telling our stories and yet no directors, screenwriters or actors ever come out as former sex workers. I don’t want to take anything away from Jane – he’s very brave – but really what is the big deal? It’s a misdemeanor – it’s like admitting you smoked weed in high school or stole your mom’s car when you were fourteen. But wow – he did it. I’m going to try to watch Hung again – I really, really want to like that show now.

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Tralala.

There’s a very common whore archetype in movies – the sad sack slut. She’s looking for love in all the wrong places i.e. Tralala, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, in Last Exit to Brooklyn or Sera, played by Elizabeth Shue, in Leaving Las Vegas. She’ll get on her knees for the thinnest promise of affection. No matter that he tosses on her into the gutter when he’s done – she’ll come back for more humiliation.

Of course the character isn’t always written as a sex worker – sometimes she’s the easy girl. Like the sad sack slut, easy girls rarely win in the end or even enjoy the journey – they’re an endless loop of need and humiliation. Such is Heather in the new indie film, Terri.

The film, about a lonely teenage boy whose only friend is the school principal, is incredibly kind to its array of misfit characters, except for Heather, played by Olivia Crocicchia, a pretty blonde who’s ostracized after the class catches her engaging in foreplay with a boy during Home Ec class.

When the overweight, pajama-wearing protagonist, Terri, played by Jacob Wysocki, befriends Heather, she says “thank you” by getting him drunk and taking off her clothes. But Terri is a “nice” guy, so he declines and she leaves mortified. For the all the film’s considerable charm, this backwards assertion – that a girl’s sexuality is her greatest asset and if given (or taken), she’s worth less – ruined it for me.

Olivia Crocicchia as Heather and Jacob Wysocki as the title character in TERRI.

Channing Tatum - Not just playing a stripper - he was one!

Also in the film – Alex Pettyfer, Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Biel ( her second go around as a stripper – she played Rose Johny in Powder Blue), Matt Bomer, Demi Moore (I hope true to life she plays a misguided crusader searching for trafficked teens in the clubs), Joe Manganiello, William Levy (the hot guy in Jennifer Lopez’s video “I’m Into You”), and Riley Keough (Elvis’ granddaughter).

Soderbergh’s oeuvre defies simple summation. He’s directed 34 films – many sexual in theme or using sex as metaphor. His 2009 film Girl Friend Experience stuck so tenaciously to the truth of the escort life, I found it vaguely annoying – that banality and the prismic spinning of the narrative lost many a viewer – but certainly an earnest film, all the more so for his casting of porn star Sasha Grey in the lead.

With so many names attached – particularly the star whose life the story tells – Magic Mike promises another ambitious, uneven and exciting experiment that goes one step deeper towards complicating the connection between fame, success, perceived edginess of an actor and their willingness to play whores, dancers, and hustlers – with an actual “out” former stripper/movie star.

Someone we never mind seeing naked.

My hooker famiglia – you must, must, must watch these films. First of all, Sophia Loren drips sexy from every cell. She’s ridiculously juicy. De Sica, as a director, clearly loves his hos. These are not only hookers with hearts of gold, but smarts, morals and spirituality as well.

In Marriage Italian Style (1964), a seventeen-year-old Filumena meets Don Domenico “Dummi” in a Naples brothel. The relationship spans twenty-two-years. Dummi takes Filumena from the brothel and sets her up in an apartment, later has her work in his bakery and finally puts her in his mother’s house, where she sleeps in the maid’s room while caring for the ailing matriarch. Filumena is no doormat, rather she’s a mercenary for her cause – three children she’s given birth to secretly and who she supports with Dummi’s money. She wants Dummi to marry her, but he’s chosen to become engaged to a twenty-year-old cashier at his bakery.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963), which won a Best Foreign Language Academy Award, is a collection of three short films each starring Loren and Marcello Mastroianni – in the third film, Mara of Rome, Loren, as Mara, is an upper middleclass escort and Mastroianni is Augusto her long suffering client. This is the film in which Loren does the famous striptease for a trembling Augusto.

The greatest achievement of these films may be that De Sica manages to combine comedy with poignancy in just the right proportions. He makes a very certain point of lauding the prostitute in both films, overtly underlining her worth as a woman and her right to make a living however she chooses.

Made in 1957 during the tail end of Fellini’s neorealist period – Cabiria is a hard-knocks hooker working the less upscale neighborhoods of Rome. She finds what she thinks is love after a series of bad circumstances – including a boyfriend who attempts to drown her after making off with her purse and the 40,000 lire inside.

Cabiria’s one of those characters who spits and kicks even those who try to help her and yet her wide brown eyes betray a needy child willing to let her guard down for all the wrong people.

While the film doesn’t disrupt conventional expectations in the least, it’s a brilliant performance by Massina, who makes the interesting choice to model Cabiria, in part, on Chaplin’s “little tramp”. An enduringly watchable film and a deeply affecting heroine, because despite the stereotypical outcome, Cabiria conveys such heart and courage.

Watch the trailer