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Beautiful Darling

Free as part of Arts & Culture Week

Beautiful Darling

One of the oddest Top 20 hits of all time, Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" features a sauntering bass line and these words: "Candy came from out on the Island." Few listeners knew that Candy was a real person, a sometime laborer (like Reed) at Andy Warhol's Factory. Director James Rasin's "Beautiful Darling" fills in the story with grace and sensitivity.

Candy Darling did indeed come from out on Long Island -- Massapequa Park, to be specific. But that's when she was James Slattery, a boy who desperately wanted to be Kim Novak. As this moving and funny documentary shows, she came closer to that goal than might have been expected.

The movie is a labor of platonic love for co-producer Jeremiah Newton, Darling's '60s pal and the keeper of her artifacts. He co-edited a book of her diaries and letters, excerpts from which are read in voiceover by actress Chloe Sevigny. The story is framed by Newton's recent burial of Darling's ashes, along with his mother's, in an Upstate New York grave.

Becoming a woman wasn't Darling's only challenging ambition. She also wanted to be a movie-studio star of the sort that no longer existed by the time she arrived in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Explains Fran Lebowitz, the movie's most sardonic witness, Darling was "living in someone else's past."

Instead of Louis B. Mayer, Darling met Andy Warhol, who cast her in such movies as "Flesh'' with two other drag princesses, Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn. Darling was less brassy and more feminine than them, a slender boy who was believable as a woman. (More than one old friend remembers her "great legs.") Darling never had a sex-change operation, but she did take female hormones, which may have fed the cancer that killed her at 29.

Briefly, Darling kept company with the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Newmar and Dennis Hopper. Tennessee Williams wrote a legit play, "Small Craft Warnings," for her. Director John Waters recalls how her charm turned "Women in Revolt" -- Warhol and Paul Morrissey's women's lib farce -- into "a real feminist movie."

But it couldn't have lasted, even if Darling had lived. Warhol moved into a new phase, and there was no place in Hollywood for a transsexual actress, even one who did a great Kim Novak. To Lebowitz, all men who aspire to be women are naive. "Keep your winning hand," she cracks.

Darling's fragility was no secret, which gives even the movie's comical moments an underlying poignancy. It's the theme of "Candy Says," another Lou Reed song heard in the movie. But if Darling faded quickly, she survives in a way she'd appreciate: flickering on the screen as a symbol of lost glamour.

— Mark Jenkins, Washington Post

Beautiful Darling

Free show!

Thu September 15, 2011, 7:00 only, VAC Basement Auditorium (1B20)

USA, 95 min, 2011, 1.85:1, Color, Not Rated • official site

recommend

Tickets

10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission. $7 w/UCB student ID, $7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.

Parking

Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.

RTD Bus

Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus

International Film Series

(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.

First Person Cinema

(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.

C.U. Film Program

(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil Grillo.

Celebrating Stan

Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.

C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.

Thank you, sponsors!
Boulder International Film Festival
Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts

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