Here are some more photos of Linnocent being crackie in Paris – most of these pics are from the weekend, where she partied with some A-listers and Terry Richardson. Considering there aren’t any photos of her today, I wonder if she hasn’t already moved on to a new city. Page Six has an interesting little story about Linnocent partying on Saturday night – apparently, “someone” sent Lohan 40 magnums of Dom Pérignon. She probably got through that in about an hour, right?

Lindsay Lohan insists she’s still on the wagon, but somebody sent 40 magnums of Dom Pérignon to her table at the Mister H at L’Arc Paris club. Lohan, in Paris for fashion week, joined the party put on in partnership with Morgans Hotels’ Mister H and L’Arc on Saturday night. While others were sending bubbly to her table in four batches of 10 magnums each, she didn’t appear to touch a drop. Also there: Clive Owen, Mary-Kate Olsen, Ciara and Vivienne Westwood.

[From Page Six]

CLIVE OWEN?!? Linnocent was at the same party as Clive Owen? Bitch. As for “she didn’t appear to touch a drop”… bullsh-t.

By the way, do you remember how Linnocent was asked to write an essay about Marilyn Monroe for a new coffee table book called Marilyn: Intimate Exposures? A while back, we had some excerpts of the essay, and now we have the whole cracked-out thing. It’s pretty rough, and it’s not really about Marilyn at all. It’s just about Linnocent and how she’s just like Marilyn.

I was twelve and watching the film “Niagara” over and over again when I was shooting The Parent Trap. I didn’t refer to it as film noir then. I just thought it was dark and full of emotion. Marilyn was the beautiful bad girl in that tight, rose-colored dress. The character she played was strong and taking control, which I unconsciously knew at that young age was a necessary quality for a woman. I had seen what my mother, whom I love, had gone through with my father. She, I and my brother Michael, my sister Aliana, and my youngest brother Dakota were in a constant state of uncertainty. I would have to put myself between him and my siblings.

I can understand the photographer Bernard of Hollywood’s statement, “it took a superhuman effort to be Marilyn.” I identify. Without any real family to come home to and no education, Marilyn managed to have her dream. The dream of a little girl looking out of an orphanage window at the RKO sign, and promising herself, “There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest.”

People in their mind have created who I am and act as if there is no real person inside of me. Just like Marilyn, who created the blond sex goddess on camera…. Marilyn never wanted to be a celebrity. Neither do I. I started working in commercials, when I was three. I always wanted to be in great films. I had always thought that movie stars were in films that would last forever in your mind. But now the films don’t. I don’t want to be remembered as someone who just wanted to be photographed, who goes out at night, and gets in trouble.

Look, I never had a normal high school life. I was home schooled for two years, never had a high school prom or went to college. I was just sort of acting out that period of time I never had, and I made some bad choices. So all the tabloids, just like Marilyn, keep harping on my mistakes. Heath Ledger once said to me, “It’s build you up to knock you down and that’s all it is. And you just have to see if you can stand through it.”

Marilyn said she had no foundation. But she said she was really working on it. I’ve been trying to do the same thing. But sometimes a relationship doesn’t work out like you’d hoped. The tabloids don’t give you a chance. They don’t want to know who you are inside. If everything’s OK with you, who wants to hear about it? I believe in myself and I’m a good actress.

It took time for Marilyn to be taken seriously as an actress. She risked everything and broke her contract with FOX Studios, demanded more money, approval of directors, better scripts, more respect, and formed Marilyn Monroe Productions. That was really empowering for a woman in the ‘50s. Marilyn was not a victim. She took control. And we remember her, 50 years later, for her “great films.”

[Lohan’s ‘Intimate Exposures’ essay via Perez Hilton]

“Move that corpse, I’m Lindsay Lohan!” That’s what it is. What many of you have said – and I couldn’t agree more – is that the family Lohan (specifically Dina and Lindsay) simply have NO SHAME. They don’t realize or acknowledge when they’re acting inappropriately. How could they feel shame when obviously NOTHING is ever their fault? This essay is obviously not Linnocent’s fault either. Someone obviously forced Linnocent to come in and take a dump on Marilyn Monroe’s corpse (not to mention Heath Ledger’s).

By the way, I’m not trying to pretend that Marilyn didn’t have a drug problem, but I just hate the way that this trained, talented and inspirational actress has become the poster girl for every cracked-out blonde dumbass in the world. Bitches, you’re not Marilyn.

Photos courtesy of WENN & Terry Richardson’s Diary.

Here’s the thing: I like Michelle Williams (not love, but like) but casting her as Marilyn Monroe is just… awful. Michelle was cast as Marilyn in My Week With Marilyn, a film based on a book from a production assistant who worked with Monroe in England, while Monroe filmed The Prince and the Showgirl with Lawrence Olivier. Monroe had just married Arthur Miller, and he traveled to England with her, and Monroe and Olivier famously hated each other. I get that the “behind the scenes” story is interesting, and I’m not generally opposed to the film being made, but would it have killed them to get someone more vivacious and sexy to play Marilyn? Instead, we have Michelle Williams, who… let’s just say it, is a girlish, affected hipster with no sex appeal.

These photos tend to prove that in spades – Michelle, still in character as Marilyn, covers the new issue of Vogue. The cover is especially terrible, and the rest of the photos – well, Michelle just looks like a cheap Monroe impersonator. I’ve seen drag queens do a better, more realistic Marilyn. This seems like the kind of stunt Linnocent would pull. Anyway, the full slideshow is here, and the full article is here. Here are some highlights:

MW’s hipster cred: She gestures with small, slim, expressive hands as the conversation ranges from her affinity for dresses from the 1930s and long-discontinued Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencils (“I love things that are old and beautiful and tell a story, even if it’s a sad one”) to the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, whose notoriously complex Ada is a favorite. “I think Nabokov once said that genius is finding the invisible link between things,” she tells me. “And that’s how I choose to see life. Everything’s connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it.”

Turning 30: “I feel like something has changed for me, but it’s a new change, so it’s going to be hard for me to describe,” she says. “Maybe it has something to do with turning 30. I don’t feel as shy or nervous or self-conscious. I have more confidence that I can handle what life brings me. I don’t feel scared to have an idea and express it.” She adds, “I feel giddy about it because it’s a complete transformation. It’s like I’ve found my voice.”

Playing Marilyn: “As soon as I finished the script, I knew that I wanted to do it, and then I spent six months trying to talk myself out of it,” she says. “But I always knew that I never really had a choice.” And, she adds, “I’ve started to believe that you get the piece of material that you were ready for.”

On Marilyn: “Everybody has their own idea of who Marilyn was and what she means to them,” Williams says. “But I think that if you go a little bit deeper, you’re going to be surprised by what you find there.”

Becoming Marilyn: Williams spent six months immersing herself in all things Monroe. She read biographies, diaries, letters, poems, and notes, pored over photographs, listened to recordings, watched movies, and tracked down obscure clips on YouTube. “I’d go to bed every night with a stack of books next to me,” she recalls. “And I’d fall asleep to movies of her. It was like when you were a kid and you’d put a book under your pillow hoping you’d get it by osmosis.” Her turn from indie waif to Hollywood sex goddess involved working with a choreographer to perfect Monroe’s walk and gaining weight to approximate her curves. “Unfortunately, it went right to my face,” she says, puffing up her cheeks to illustrate. “So at some point it became a question of, Do I want my face to look like Marilyn Monroe’s or my hips?” (She opted for the former and filled out the latter with foam padding.) In the end, she says, “it felt like being reborn. It felt like breaking my body and remaking it in her image, learning how she walked and talked and held her head. None of that existed in my physical memory, and I knew I needed as much time as possible to make it part of me.”

Sex appeal: “Any messages that I got as a child about what it is to have a woman’s body or to be sexual were all negative—that people wouldn’t take you seriously or that they would take advantage of you… The expectation to be beautiful always makes me feel ugly because I feel like I can’t live up to it,” she says. “But I do remember one moment of being all suited up as Marilyn and walking from my dressing room onto the soundstage practicing my wiggle. There were three or four men gathered around a truck, and I remember seeing that they were watching me come and feeling that they were watching me go—and for the very first time I glimpsed some idea of the pleasure I could take in that kind of attention; not their pleasure but my pleasure. And I thought, Oh, maybe Marilyn felt that when she walked down the beach.”

On the paparazzi, and her daughter: “That’s what seems the most rotten thing about it to me,” she says. “And I’m going to do everything in my power to make her feel safe and protected, and to extend her childhood for as long as possible.”

On Heath‘s death: “Three years ago, it felt like we didn’t have anything, and now my life—our life—has kind of repaired itself… Look, it’s not a perfectly operating system—there are holes and dips and electrical storms—but the basics are intact.” Still, she says, in a fundamental way nothing will ever be the same: “It’s changed how I see the world and how I interact on a daily basis. It’s changed the parent I am. It’s changed the friend I am. It’s changed the kind of work that I really want to do. It’s become the lens through which I see life—that it’s all impermanent.” Williams shuts her eyes, then opens them again and says, “For a really long time, I couldn’t stop touching people’s faces. I was like, ‘Look at you! You move! You’re here!’ It all just seemed so fleeting, and I wanted to hold on to it.”

Her love life: Williams speculates that she may be drawn to stories about the vicissitudes of romantic love because “relationships have always seemed very mysterious, and therefore worth exploring. I’m single, so it’s still kind of a mystery—a worthwhile mystery, one that I want to be on the scent of.” She confesses that she misses having a guy around when it’s time to haul wood at her house upstate. But, unlike Monroe, she doesn’t define herself through the men in her life: “I’m not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what’s on my bedside table rather than what’s in my bed.”

[From Vogue]

Yeah, I don’t even believe she’s single. I think she’s dating Cary Fukunaga, the director of the latest version of Jane Eyre. I just think she doesn’t want to talk about who she’s dating, which… I kind of wish she would just say, “I don’t want to talk about it” rather than lying. We’re not going to hold it against her if she’s dating, for the love of God.

Photos courtesy of Vogue.

Above is a photo of Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe. She will be playing Monroe in My Week With Marilyn, a film about a week on the London set of The Prince and the Showgirl back in the 1950s, told from the perspective of an assistant on the production. It’s apparently based on a true story, I guess. And I guess it got made because so many people still have a weird Marilyn fetish. Actually, I can kind of understand why this film is being made in general, just because it probably is the kind of juicy, interesting actory story that people love – Ken Branagh is playing Laurence Olivier, after all. What bothers me, however, is that I think Michelle will end up making a pretty crappy Marilyn. Yes, she kind of looks like her, but Marilyn could do vivacious and bubbly and bombshell, where Michelle… excels at drama. Eh. Here’s more about the film:

Julia Ormond is playing Vivien Leigh after Catherine Zeta-Jones dropped out, and Dougray Scott is playing Arthur Miller. Filming starts today in London on the feature, which is shooting for 7 weeks at Pinewood and on location in and around the city. Michelle Williams is cast as Marilyn Monroe alongside Kenneth Branagh (Laurence Oliver), Judi Dench (Dame Sybil Thorndike), Dominic Cooper, Emma Watson and Derek Jacobi with Eddie Redmayne playing Colin Clark, the young assistant on the set of the 1956 film The Prince and the Showgirl who helped the star escape her pressure-cooker Hollywood career for a brief week. Directed by Simon Curtis (BBC TV’s Cranford) and produced by David Parfitt (Shakespeare In Love), the film is based on Clark’s diaries and has been adapted for the screen by Adrian Hodges. Parfitt’s Trademark Films is the production company, while The Weinstein Company is financing and distributing. BBC Films and Lipsync Productions are co-financing the film, which was developed in association with the UK Film Council and BBC Films.

[From Deadline]

You know what’s weird? When Marilyn filmed The Prince and the Showgirl, she was already married to Arthur Miller, and he came to London for the shoot as well. And yet I don’t think there will be an actor portraying Miller – strange. Oh, Dougray Scott is playing Miller. My bad… although that’s really strange casting. At least Branagh gets to achieve his lifelong dream of becoming Olivier.

Header photo courtesy of Deadline.

Jesus. Christ. Vanity Fair’s obsession with all things Kennedy and all things Marilyn Monroe has already gone way, way overboard. And now this – yet another cover devoted to their journalistic necrophilia. Another Marilyn cover! And this time it’s all about her “secret diaries”. Ooh, scandal! What other NEW information could possibly be covered that hasn’t already been discussed and rehashed and masturbated to (journalistically!)? Vanity Fair excerpts from a NEW book about Marilyn, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment. So it’s Marilyn in her own words? Of course not. There’s still quite about to say about Marilyn, so Vanity Fair couldn’t help themselves. Did you know that she was BLONDE?!?

She was always late for class, usually arriving just before they closed the doors. The teacher was strict about not entering in the middle of an exercise or, God forbid, in the middle of a scene. Slipping in without makeup, her luminous hair hidden under a scarf, she tried to make herself inconspicuous. She usually took a seat in the back of one of the dingy rooms in the Malin Studios, on 46th Street, smack in the middle of the theater district. When she raised her hand to speak, it was in a tiny wisp of a voice. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but it was hard for the other students not to know that the most famous movie star in the world was in their acting class. A few blocks away, above Loew’s State Theater, at 45th and Broadway, there was the other Marilyn—the one everyone knew—52 feet tall, in that infamous billboard advertising Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch, a hot blast from the subway grating causing her white dress to billow up around her thighs, her face an explosion of joy.

When it was her turn to do an acting exercise focusing on sense memory, Marilyn took the floor in front of a small group of students. She was asked to remember a moment in her life, to recall the clothes she was wearing, to evoke the sights and smells of that memory. She described how she had felt about being alone in a room, years before, when an unnamed man walked in. Suddenly, her acting teacher admonished her, “Don’t do that. Just tell us what you hear. Don’t tell us how you feel.” Marilyn began to cry. Another student, an actress named Kay Leyder, recalled, “As she described her clothes … what she heard … the words that were said to her … she began crying, sobbing, until at the end of it she was really devastated.” Was this the real Marilyn Monroe: an insecure, shy, 29-year-old woman?

Now an extraordinary archive of Marilyn’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries has surfaced that delves deep into her psyche and private life. These artifacts shed light on, among other things, her sometimes devastating journey through psychoanalysis; her three marriages, to merchant marine James Dougherty, Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio, and playwright Arthur Miller; and the mystery surrounding her tragic death at the age of 36.

Marilyn left the archive, along with all her personal effects, to her acting teacher Lee Strasberg, but it would take a decade for her estate to be settled. Strasberg died in February 1982, outliving his most famous student by 20 years, and in October 1999 his third wife and widow, Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, auctioned off many of Marilyn’s possessions at Christie’s, netting over $13.4 million, but the Strasbergs continue to license her image, which brings in millions more a year. The main beneficiary is the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, on 15th Street off Union Square, in New York City. It is, you might say, the house that Marilyn built.

Several years after inheriting the collection, Anna Strasberg found two boxes containing the current archive, and she arranged for the contents to be published this fall around the world—in the U.S. as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The archive is a sensational discovery for Marilyn’s biographers and for her fans, who still want to rescue her from the taint of suicide, from the accusations of tawdriness, from the layers of misconceptions and distortions written about her over the years. Now at last we have an unfiltered look inside her mind.

“Complete Subjection, Humiliation, Alonement”

Marilyn began taking private lessons with celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg in March 1955, encouraged by the acclaimed theater and movie director Elia Kazan, with whom she had had an affair. “Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew,” she wrote to her analyst Dr. Ralph Greenson in the last and perhaps the most important letter found in this archive, “and believe me he has known many. But he loved me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with his teacher, Lee Strasberg.”

She was living at the Gladstone Hotel, on 52nd Street off Park Avenue, when she began working with Strasberg and embarked upon the psychoanalysis that was de rigueur for taking classes at the Actors Studio. Founded in 1947 by Kazan and directors Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, it was the holy temple of the Method—acting exercises and scenes that focused on sense memories and “private moments” dredged from the actor’s life. Throughout the late 1940s and through much of the 1950s and 1960s, the Actors Studio was the most revered laboratory for stage actors in America. Its membership (one was not officially a “student” but a “member”) included a roster of the most compelling actors of the day: Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Rip Torn, Kim Stanley, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward—who all brought those techniques into film.

Strasberg, born in 1901 in Austria-Hungary and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a genius at analyzing an actor’s performance and a stern and often cold taskmaster. Short, bespectacled, and intense, he wasn’t, recalled Ellen Burstyn, “one for small talk.” For Marilyn, who grew up shunted from one foster family to another, not knowing who her father was, he became a beloved paternal figure, autocratic yet nurturing, and his acceptance of her as a private student bolstered her confidence and gave her the training to improve her acting, and turned her from a movie star (and punch line) into a true artist. But years later Kazan observed, “The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.”

Most important, this archive, far more deeply than the Inez Melson collection, made public in V.F. in October 2008, reveals a woman in search of herself, undergoing the harrowing experience of psychoanalysis for the first time, at the urging of Strasberg. The key players include Strasberg himself, her three psychiatrists—Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, Dr. Marianne Kris, and Dr. Ralph Greenson—and her third husband, Arthur Miller, whom she confesses to loving body and soul, but by whom she ultimately felt betrayed.

These poems, musings, dreams, and correspondence also touch on her great fear of displeasing others, her chronic lateness, and three of the biggest traumas of her shortened life: one buried in her past, and two that took place a few years after she began studying with Strasberg. But they also reveal her growth both as an artist and a woman as she manages to cope with memories and disappointments that threatened to overwhelm her.

In a five-and-a-half-page typed document, Marilyn looked back on her early marriage to James Dougherty, an intelligent, attractive man five years her senior. They married on June 19, 1942, when she was just 16, and in this document she describes her feelings of loneliness and insecurity in that hastily agreed-to union, which was less of a love match than a way to keep Marilyn—then Norma Jeane Baker—out of the orphanage when her caretakers at the time, Grace and Erwin “Doc” Goddard, moved away from California. (There has also been speculation that Grace wanted to remove Norma Jeane from her husband’s too appreciative eye.)

[From Vanity Fair]

Is any of this stuff new anymore? Not to me – but I read Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, which was one of the most interesting “biographies” of Marilyn ever written. Of course people will be interested in this because it’s “Marilyn in her own words” – but seriously, just let this poor lady rest in peace. She lived such a tragic life, and this mass fetish-ization has gotten out of control.

Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair.

Yes, this story is likely 95% bullsh-t. But it’s still 5% possible, and after all, weirder things have happened. According to British reports, Angelina Jolie may (MAY) be playing Marilyn Monroe in a new film about… Marilyn’s dog. That’s how far this Marilyn obsession/fetish has come. When Marilyn overdosed, people were sad, because she made them laugh and she was beautiful and vivacious and yet vulnerable and sad, and she actually was a gifted and underrated actress. Nearly fifty years later, and people are still obsessing about her to the point where a book is written through the perspective of her dog Maf. Yeah… this is some sick sh-t. Anyway, the author of this book The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe is claiming that Angelina will play Marilyn in the big film adaptation:

Author Andrew O’Hagan has said that his novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe will be turned into a film starring Angelina Jolie as the screen siren.

George Clooney will play Frank Sinatra, Mr O’Hagan said.

Production on the film is due to start soon, the Times reports.

Speculation over the project has been growing over the last few months. Scarlett Johansson had been linked to the Monroe role, and Mr O’Hagen had previously suggested that Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks could also play the lead role.

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe follows Monroe’s last two years through the eyes of her pet, Maf, a Maltese terrier which was a gift from Sinatra in 1960.

The novel also charts some of the defining moments of the 20th century.

According to the book’s description, Maf – short for Mafia – met several famous faces from the era, including President John F. Kennedy. The dog also accompanied Monroe to acting classes, restaurants, department stores and to Mexico for her divorce from playwright Arthur Miller.

“Marilyn was a strange and unhappy creature, but at the same time she had more natural comedy to her than anybody I would ever know,” observes Maf, who was 3 when Monroe died in 1962 at age 36.

[From The Telegraph]

I don’t buy it… yet. I don’t think Angelina – or anyone else – should be tackling Marilyn’s life and work in this way. It felt icky when Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvina did it all those years ago… and personally, I’m creeped out by all of the Marilyn-styling that goes on today, whether it be Lindsay Lohan or Scarlett Johansson or Paris Hilton or Madonna or whomever. I’d always given Angelina some credit for never participating in any of those “inspired by [fill in the blank of a dead celebrity]” photo shoots. And to even consider playing Marilyn in a film told from the perspective of a dog?!? Shut it down, Angie.

PS… Now, if someone is making a really good biopic of Ava Gardner, only then would I think, “Hey, Angelina should play a dead celebrity.” Just because. Angelina is the only one who could do it well (sucks to be Kate Beckinsale).

Vintage Marilyn and promotional images from Life or Something Like It, credit: WENN.

A 53-year old man, who is currently going by the name John Fitzgerald Kennedy, is claiming to be the love child of Marilyn Monroe and the original JFK. Kennedy, who’s real name is John Burton, has filed a lawsuit against the President’s estate for his share of the inheritance. Lawyers for the estate are calling the suit “frivolous”.

John, be it Burton or Kennedy, says the reason he decided to go public was because he was being ignored by the administrators of the estate despite his repeated claims.

Asked why he waited 45 years after the president’s assassination to come forward, Kennedy, of Queens, New York, said: “You wait for people to do the right thing, and they don’t.

“That’s how you end up in my position.” The Manhattan federal court filing insists “Plaintiff is a child of President Kennedy” and insists that he’s been shut out of his “father’s” fortune.
His suit names the current administrators of the trust that was set up for Kennedy’s family, Edwin Schlossberg and Martin Edelman.

“In [his] will, each child of President Kennedy was to receive a certain amount of money each year pursuant to the terms in said will,” the suit says, and because he’s a Kennedy child, he deserves his share.

[From Daily Mail]

Lawsuits against the Kennedy estate claiming paternity have come up before, and none have proven genuine. But this John has taken it a step further, going as far as to say that, even though he has no photographic evidence, that Jack and Marilyn were “great parents”, and that “I couldn’t ask for anything better.” He’s also asking for a the court to give him a DNA test.

Plaintiff requests this court order DNA testing so that plaintiffs[sic] may prove that [sic] bona fides of his claim,” and order “genetic (DNA) testing of environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Congressman Patrick Kennedy.”

“Upon such proof being made,” Kennedy wants a judge to recognize him as a rightful heir, the suit says.

[From Daily Mail]

John Burton/Kennedy, at 53, would have been born in 1955. Between 1954 and 1956, Monroe was in four movies, River of No Return, There’s No Business Like Show Business, The Seven Year Itch, and Bus Stop, all of which showed her looking in excellent shape and not pregnant. She was also married to Joe DiMaggio until November of 1954 and started dating her next husband, Arthur Miller, in May of 1955. Mr. Burton should have done some research and math in claiming his maternal identity.

Attorneys for the estate of JFK intend to “vigorously defend against” the lawsuit.

In 1959 a young US Naval officer was a guest on the set of the Marilyn Monroe/Jack Lemmon/Tony Curtis movie Some Like It Hot after a visit from Monroe to his San Diego Naval base.  While on the set he took a short amount of 8mm film footage of the sex symbol, that also included a little bit of Curtis and director Billy Wilder.  Forty-nine years later, the lucky military man had passed away, leaving that 2.5 minutes of film, in its original Kodak box, to his daughter, now living in Australia.  She decided to sell.

The rare, 2.5-minute-long footage, which shows Monroe and co-star Tony Curtis on the set, was purchased by an anonymous Australian buyer during the Melbourne sale, auctioneer Charles Leski told Reuters.

“We’re surprised there weren’t more bidders, but we are happy that it sold,” Leski, managing director of Leski Auctions, said. “It was a stab in the dark what price the footage would go for.”

The footage was discovered in Australia last month and Leski had set a pre-sale estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 Australian dollars ($17,000-$25,500).

Reuters

The anonymous purchaser also acquires full commercial rights.  Let’s hope we don’t see this in a commercial for a soft drink or Florida travel agency.  That would certainly be giving Sugar Kane the fuzzy end of the lollipop, again.

An amateur film lasting 47-minute long, taken on the set of the Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable movie The Misfits, sold at auction for $60,000 earlier this year.  That footage was shot by a cast member with a small part in the dramatic western. 

“Considering what Misfits reached in the U.S., we are happy, as this means we got A$7,000 per minute,” Leski said.

The lot included a CD copy and DVD copy as well.

Leski had expected the footage, which unlike the film is in color, to generate a lot of interest, as “Some Like It Hot” is listed by the American Film Institute as the greatest American comedy film of all time.

Reuters

Some Like It Hot is also listed as the greatest American comedy film of all time in Ceilidh’s extensive DVD collection.  Maybe not as prestigious as the American Film Insitute, but very important in my household!

In related news, a New York City photographer, Bert Stern, is suing over a series of “unique and irreplaceable images” of Monroe  that he loaned to Eros Magazine, which is now out of business, and were never returned.

He says the photos are now held by Michael Weiss and Donald Penny.

Stern is seeking the photos, or at least $700,000 in repayment, plus $1 million in punitive damages and legal fees.

Messages left at Weiss’ photography studio and at Penny’s home were not immediately returned.

Movies.msn.com

A silent black and white tape of Marilyn Monroe engaging in oral sex with an unknown man has sold for $1.5 million to a NY businessman, according to a report in the NY Post. It’s said to be 15 minutes long and is obviously of Marilyn. She never looks at the camera but the man’s head is not visible, which may suggest that he planted the camera and she didn’t know it was there.

The movie was shot on 15mm film sometime in the 1950s and it first attracted the interest of the FBI in the mid 60s. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover spent “two weeks futilely trying to prove that Monroe’s sex partner was either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy, according to declassified agency documents and interviews.”

A NY memorabilia dealer, Keya Morgan, bought the only known copy of the film from the son of the informant who gave it to the FBI over 40 years ago. Morgan is now $1.5 million richer after selling it. Supposedly the guy who bought it doesn’t have any plans to sell or release it to the public:

The feds eventually confiscated the original footage – but not before the informant made a copy of it, which is what was just sold by his son, Morgan said.

There are heavily redacted, declassified FBI documents talking about a “French-type” film.

They state the informant “exhibited [to agents] a motion picture which depicted deceased actress Marilyn Monroe committing a perverted act upon a unknown male,” Morgan said.

The informant was with at least one mobster at the time, the documents state.

According to the documents, “Former baseball star Joseph DiMaggio in the past had offered [the informant] $25,000 for this film, it being the only one in existence, but he refused the offer.

“Source advised that [redacted name of the mole] informed them that he had obtained this film prior to the time Marilyn Monroe had achieved stardom.”

Morgan said he got the deceased informant’s name from the former FBI agent who tipped him off to the flick – and was floored after he found the mole’s son in Washington, DC, and the man retrieved a film canister from a safe-deposit box and spooled it up.

“You see instantly that it’s Marilyn Monroe – she has the famous mole,” Morgan said.

“She’s smiling, she’s very charming, she’s very radiant, but she’s known for being radiant,” he said. “She moves away, and then it [the footage] stops.”

Last month, he brokered its sale, leading the informant’s son to a wealthy New York businessman who wants to keep this unseemly part of Monroe’s past buried.

“He said he’s just going to lock it up,” Morgan said.

“He said, ‘I’m not going to make a Paris Hilton out of her. I’m not going to sell it, out of respect.’ “

[From The NY Post]

This brings up all sorts of questions about who the man was in the film and who actually bought it – like whether it’s just some super rich guy who wanted it for his collection or if he has some connection to Marilyn or the man she was filmed with. Either way, we’ll probably never see it and that’s a good thing. She had enough image problems without a sex tape coming out 45 years after her death.

Marilyn is shown below with her second husband of just 10 months in 1954, Joe DiMaggio. Given the fact that DiMaggio offered so much money for the tape and that he was married to her around the time it was shot, it was possibly him in the film.

NY Magazine has released five more photos from Lindsay Lohan’s nude tribute to Marilyn Monroe’s last photo shoot, a chance to give back to her fans that Lohan considered an “honor” and her mother called “artistic.” Lohan is a Marilyn Monroe fan, owns an apartment she once lived in, and has a painting that depicts the blonde bombshell in her last moments, with a bottle of pills spilled nearby. Lohan called Marilyn’s death “tragic” in her accompanying interview. She then made a reference to Heath Ledger’s death, saying “it’s also tragic what just recently happened to someone else.” and adding that “they are both prime examples of what this industry can do to someone.” As for whether hardened addict Lohan will also meet a similar fate, she said “I sure as hell wouldn’t let it happen to me.”

Lohan has been caught driving drunk several times including a high speed car chase in which several guys claim she took them hostage while she swerved and sped, causing her passengers and the person she was chasing to fear for their lives. She may not die from a pill overdose, but the statistics are stacking up against her if she continues to drink and drive. Let’s hope Lindsay gets a driver – who takes her somewhere far away.

These photos are getting a lot of attention, and that’s sure to please Lohan despite the fact that many experts say it’s not a good career move. Many of you noted in the comments that she’s no Marilyn, and at 15 years younger than Marilyn she somehow looks less natural and young than the screen legend did just six weeks before she died.

Lohan:

Marilyn:

Pulitzer-prize winning 94 year-old photographer Eve Arnold has released a few previously unseen pictures of screen legend Marilyn Monroe. Arnold released some other exclusive as-then unseen photos of Monroe about a year and a half ago. She had a close relationship with the tragically departed star and her pictures are said to show Marilyn as a vulnerable and sympathetic subject.

The photos will be seen for just a few weeks at select galleries in the UK:

The unposed photographs capture the star in her private moments; in front of a mirror, on a plane and in bed.

Limited edition prints have been released to selected galleries across the UK of the eight pictures from the collection of world renowned photographer Eve Arnold.

Now 94 the Pulitzer Prize winner built a bond of trust with the star which shows itself in the intimate shots.

The collection is being opened today at a Marilyn-themed evening event at the Meller Gallery in Witney, Oxfordshire and will be available only until Christmas.

Only a handful of other galleries across the UK are showing the pictures as only 495 prints have been made of each one.

Ms Arnold worked with the star for over a decade and said: “She trusted me and she was a joy to photograph. She liked my pictures and was canny enough to realise that they were a fresh approach to presenting her.

“By seeing Marilyn through photographs – the only way most people ever saw her – it may be possible to get some idea of how she saw herself and perhaps to glean some insight into the phenomenon that was Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn died in 1962 at the age of 36. Her death was ruled an probable suicide with sleeping pills, although there are rumors that she was murdered in a conspiracy. She would be 80 if she were still alive today.

The images shown here were found on The Daily Mail website and are said to be the new photos. I’m not sure if all of them are new because I found other versions of the Marilyn header picture in black and white, and there are posters available of the picture of her lying in bed.

All photos copyright Eve Arnold.