Interview: Martha Coolidge on 'Not a Pretty Picture'
The filmmaker discusses the creation, importance, and new restoration of her ahead-of-its-time 1976 feminist documentary.
Before breaking out in Hollywood and directing the ‘80s teen comedies Valley Girl and Real Genius and the Oscar-nominated drama Rambling Rose, Martha Coolidge was a documentary filmmaker in the 1970s. In a way, her transition piece was Not a Pretty Picture, a 1976 feature that combines dramatic scenes with interviews and other documentary material. Based in part on her own experience of being raped at 16, the film centers around a rehearsal of the scene reenacting that traumatic scenario.
While not the first hybrid work utilizing methods of in-person reenactment and other Brechtian docudrama techniques, Coolidge’s film still feels way ahead of its time given how commonplace this approach is becoming in nonfiction cinema today. It was also very progressive in its address of date rape. Not a Pretty Picture certainly deserves to be talked about more in documentary film history discourse and ought to be more widely seen. Fortunately, it has been digitally restored in 4K by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation for a theatrical re-release in New York City.
Ahead of its latest showing at the Anthology Film Archives (a one-week run starts February 2, 2024) via distributor Janus Films, I talked to Coolidge by phone about her little-known yet trailblazing masterpiece. Below is our conversation in full.
This is being marketed now as a feminist documentary, but IMDb classifies it as a drama and other places call it a docudrama. Did you then or do you now have a preferred way of defining it?
Oh, huh. It never struck me as a necessity, but I would say that it's a docudrama. That's a good description. It's a combination. Yeah.
I sadly wasn’t familiar with the film until recently and...
Well, that's good. I think it's very interesting for you then.
I was surprised to see how ahead of its time it was, given how many documentaries do this sort of “Brechtian” reenactment rehearsal stuff now. What inspired you to tackle the film and the subject this way?
I was at the Flaherty Film Seminar, which is a group that gets together every year. A lot of independent films were screened there because independent films at that time did not really have a place in the national way of screening in theaters — real theaters, big theaters. It was mostly relegated to the short film category. I went with Films Inc., which was the biggest of those companies that really showed things, and it was feature-length. It was a bigger bite of the apple, shall we say.
“Somehow I felt that because of my experience, I could do it better.”
It was meant to be walking a fine line between documentary and drama. It was because of seeing this other film. There was a little short film shown where a girl talks about the fact that she'd just been raped to the cameraman who is shooting her, and essentially she describes her whole experience, and it's very much like you're watching a rape. I mean, it sort of was a rape. And at the same time, it was about a rape. Yet it didn't go into all the things that this film goes into, and somehow I felt that because of my experience, I could do it better.
Because of my own rape experience but also because of my theatrical experience. I studied acting. I understood improvisation and things like that. So it was part of the concept for the film and I just got it right there. I said, oh my god, I should do it this way and show the actors getting in and out of their characters and what's difficult for them in the parts, and they could talk about their feelings.
I kept talking about it there at Flaherty and then sort of started writing it. It was complicated to put it together because I had to kind of imagine or really create what the purpose of each interview is and what kinds of things the interviewees might say before I could actually finish writing and shoot the drama portion of the film that was recreating the reality, so to speak. So, I have a lot of transcribing to do, and all of it me on this editing machine. It was a very interesting personal journey making the film.
Did you want this to be a therapeutic endeavor for you as a survivor of a rape or a meta experiment in filmmaking and acting or a treatise on the media’s depiction and exploitation of the act — or all of the above?
It was all of the above, except what it wasn't was my healing. It wasn't purely my healing because I'd been through a lot of therapy. I felt I knew too well, very well, for myself, what this experience meant to me, and that's why I wanted it so much for everybody else. It wasn't a personal therapeutic experience. It was an experience for everyone else. I made it for people. That was what it really was. That's how I did it.
That’s interesting because it's also often described as a semi-autobiographical film or autobiographical film…
Well, it is. It is that.
While the story is based on your experience, you also let Michele, the actress playing you, bring in her experience, and you also encourage improvisation. Did you originally intend to let the dramatization elements be so collaborative and potentially stray from autobiography?
Yes. It was meant to be because, frankly, think about it. I know how many people have been raped or have had similar experiences. So many. Or their relative or their brother or sister. It's really important to understand that that is a collaboration. Film is a collaborative process, and the film intends to bring up feelings and memories from those peoples' lives. It's definitely something that includes them as well. That is why this was so important and why I cared a great deal how it was done because it had to be done in a way that continued to include them.
“They understand it in their own way but not the whole way. It's very very important that people look at all of it.”
If people got involved in it and felt, oh why are you caring so much about what men feel, or why are you showing so much about this or that, the point is because that's what affects all of us. That's what affects us when you go through something like that. There are incredible surprise experiences where people just don't understand. They would never understand what you've gone through. Or they understand it in their own way but not the whole way. It's very very important that people look at all of it. There are so many people who said, well, you wore a short skirt and you were drinking, you know, you were interested in sex. Yeah. That's normal teenage stuff until you realize you're in a situation that's out of control.
That makes me think about Jim Carrington in the film. His part in the film is so important but also kind of uncomfortable. Did you find his comments disturbing during the filming or did he seem like, as he admits, an uneducated man of his time?
Yes. I mean, it was important to have. That's the point, it's boys and girls, and we don't think alike. Especially at this age. Very different. Men — and women too when they're older — they don't necessarily understand that you can be flirting and be happy about being on a date and then suddenly it goes past where it's okay, where it's not okay anymore. It's very hard for a girl to, herself, find the way between saying yes and saying no. It's a difficult route to follow.
That's why I felt he was so good. He could talk about himself. He would talk about his feelings, but they were very different than what Michele's were. Michele had her own experience and she was extremely traumatized by it, but he didn't have any of that going on in himself at all. And he never thought of himself as a rapist or anything like that. So I knew his struggle to get to the character would be a different kind of struggle than her struggle.
Did you cast Michele because of her experience or was that a coincidence?
I wanted to get somebody who'd had an experience, so I talked to everyone who came in for the part about that. She had the most interesting reaction and was the most interesting on the subject, so that's why I cast her here.
Can you talk about the casting of Anne to play herself?
I had been having a lot of trouble finding an actress who would fit that part. It was two days before I was shooting and I'm walking down the street in New York City and, my god, I practically ran into her. She was right there. She didn't live in New York. She was just visiting. And she's walking down the street, and I mean it was amazing. I hadn't seen her in a few years, so we talk and I tell her about the film and then I invite her to play herself, and that was really interesting.
She was willing to do it, and the thing is it added a whole other layer of stuff that was not talked about. Our whole relationship, we never talked about it. It hadn't been something that we explored at the time. So for her to talk about it on film was a big reveal to me of what was going on in her and shows how much is going on for everybody that's not discussed on the surface. I was very happy that I ran into her, and it was a very important inclusion in the cast making it even more of a memory of the real thing and yet a new thing. I thought it was really great to have that.
“I knew that would bring the audience in as another participant.”
How did you decide which parts would be shown as dramatization and which to do as documentary, as with the making of the apartment sequence? Was that sequence ever shot as dramatization?
You mean the rape? No, that was the whole concept of the film was how the rape was shot, that it was an improvisation. That people were talking about their feelings and that we build on. The rest of the script wasn't finished until I did that scene because I knew things would happen in that scene that I loved that weren't included in the script. I wanted to make sure that it was full and that the rest of the film dealt with what was in that scene.
So it took longer, but it was worth it. That's the whole idea of it was to do it like that because I knew improvisational rehearsals were like that, that you'd talk about your feelings and you'd talk about what you were doing and if that was right or not. I knew that would bring the audience in as another participant in what the film was showing.
I think it’s interesting how the sequence ends with the camera turning to you while we hear the act performed off-screen. Was that instructed to the cameraperson?
Well, I wanted him to do it, but he said, “I'm going to pan. When I feel it's right.” That's the thing about him. He's just an incredible documentary cameraman. His instincts on when to do things like that were perfect. So I said yes, that's what I want you to do, and it was his own journey because I'm not thinking about the fact that I'm performing on camera. I'm thinking about the scene and what is going on, what I'm going to say next, and where I'm going to take it. He built that sequence by panning over and showing me, and it was amazing to see me watching that scene. My hand is over my mouth. That was a big revelation to me about myself, and that was great.
Can we talk about why and how the film is being restored now and finally really getting its due?
I don't know. What happens with films, even scripts once they are written, once you've made a film, it has its own life. It's going out there, and people are seeing it, and they're not going through you. So you don't know exactly how it's going.
Why at this moment they decided to, I don't know, but I was going to go to the AFI and ask them if they were interested in my footage and interested in my films. So it was a very mutual feeling about doing it, and then when they said, “We're going to redo it,” I was so thrilled because when you do a film in 16mm it's a journey, and it's a fight. We had to keep messing with the chemical baths, and we pushed the film so that we were shooting at such a higher, much more sensitive on color, and the imprint in the dark — I could basically shoot it in the dark.
We took a lot of preparation and tests before we went into shooting it, and I knew that I was dealing with a lot of people that I had to make sure were all kind of set up for how this film was going to be put together. It was a very big journey in that sense, and it was a family. Some of the crew even slept in my house, which I had sort of control over at that point and sort of emptied out. It was such a great experience.
As I said, I didn't do it to be therapeutic for me, but it really did bring me back in with the whole filmmaking groups and organizations, and it did bring me in touch with my feelings and the public's feelings. It was a film that accomplished a great deal of what I wanted to accomplish and other things. I was very happy with it.
It's still an important film because...
Because it's not fixed. It's not stopped. It's still going on.
“It was clearly a better time for more people to see the film than it was before.”
Is there something that you hope today’s audience will get from it, either similarly or differently than they did when it was made?
Yeah, well, the thing that is most interesting is I went in for the screening at MoMA and met with the audience, and it was really different. I hadn't been at a public screening presentation like that in a long time. I couldn't believe what it was like. It was much deeper questions, more questions about the real things that happened and how this occurs and men and women and all of this. It was just a very different, revealing kind of experience, and it was clearly a better time for more people to see the film than it was before.
It was raw. It was not what people expected in a film. That was kind of the surprise of it, but it was something that people were more ready for now, and I felt very welcomed and very warmly about the whole audience, and that was great. That helped me feel that this was a very lucky thing that happened, and I was very happy about it.