Reflections on ... La Dolce Vita (1960)

/ The glorious Anita Ekberg (1931 - 2015) as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita (1960) /

From the Facebook events page for the Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies film club on 28 August 2016 at Fontaine's:

Attention, jaded Continental sophisticates! Embrace the spirit of Eurotrash hedonism (and pretend we’re still in the EU) when Lobotomy Room presents a FREE special decadent Bank Holiday Sunday [28 August] screening of Federico Fellini’s carnival-esque and hallucinatory epic masterpiece La Dolce Vita (1960)! You know that iconic image of voluptuous Swedish sex bomb Anita Ekberg frolicking in Rome’s Trevi Fountain? That’s from La Dolce Vita – one of the most stylish movies ever made! It captures the acme of Italian glamour: the cars, the clothes, the nightlife (no one films debauched nightclub, party and orgy scenes like Fellini in his 1960s pomp) and most of all – the sunglasses! While you watch the film, take the edge off your hangover with negronis or glasses of Prosecco! Needless to say it’s illegal to smoke in the Bamboo Lounge, but feel free to keep your shades on!

Because of the film’s running time (three hours!), the film starts earlier than usual at 6 pm. Arrive circa 5:30 to order your drinks and grab the best seats downstairs in the Bamboo Lounge. (I’ll be down there playing music and screening vintage “nudie cutie” blue movies before the main feature). The film is FREE and seating is limited. If you’re feeling proactive, contact Fontaine’s to reserve a seat in advance: email ruby@fontaines.bar or call 07718 000546.

/ The love-hungry, pleasure-chasing international sin set is coming – to Lobotomy Room’s FREE screening of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita THIS Sunday! In the basement Bamboo Lounge of Fontaine’s! It promises to be an orgiastic Bacchanal! See the film condemned by the Catholic Church as blasphemous and banned in Spain until 1975! (By the way: in 2016 Photobucket.com keeps deleting this photo saying it violates their standards! La Dolce Vita is still freaking out the squares all these decades later!) /

This represented the first time Lobotomy Room ever presented a serious art film with subtitles! In fact, I warned the attendees: "Do you realise you’ve signed-up for a three-hour black-and-white foreign-language film with subtitles? The doors are now locked – you aren’t going anywhere!" When I first proposed La Dolce Vita to Ruby (Fontaine’s glamorous boss lady), she expressed doubts whether anyone would actually want to sit through it. In fact we pulled-in a more than decent house and everyone sat rapt and intoxicated by Fellini’s vision. His filmmaking is so fluid, swirling and seductive, the three hours flew by.

As usual, before the film I stood up and blurted-out a garbled, half-assed introduction. (My public speaking style can definitely best be described as “blurted”). I definitely mentioned that in the spirit of La Dolce Vita, I had a thunderous hangover that Sunday. Anyway, here is a summary of the points and fun facts I spewed (obviously I've expanded considerably here):

/ See the world's most handsome man (Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita) suffer a profound existential crisis! /

Federico Fellini (1920 – 1993) had already made a few great films by this point (I particularly love 1957’s Nights of Cabiria), but the international success of La Dolce Vita really catapulted him to worldwide fame.

The film was sizzling and scandalous for its time. Perhaps inevitably the Catholic Church hated La Dolce Vita, considering it blasphemous (it was banned in Franco's Spain until 1975!). The film lets Fellini have his cake and eat it too: it’s a critique or exposé of the moral bankruptcy and hollowness of “the sweet life” (fame, wealth, celebrity and hedonism) – but we still get to enjoy watching the lengthy lurid scenes of orgies, nightlife and the beautiful people cavorting at length. (Dolce Vita is an “art film” but that’s the template for pretty much all “cautionary” sexploitation films since too!).

La Dolce Vita takes a state-of-the nation overview of Rome’s post-war upheaval. The themes of alienation and the collapse of conventional morality are personified by the existential angst of its anti-hero Marcello (played by Marcello Mastroianni), torn between art (writing the Great Novel; the world of poetry, philosophy and spirituality espoused by his intellectual friends) and commerce (his job as a sensational tabloid journalist writing about the superficial realms of cafe society and show business).

To contrast against the tawdry Roman nightlife centred around Via Veneto, mid-way through the film we see Marcello and his fiancée Emma attend his friend Steiner’s intellectual high-toned salon full of poets, artists and the literary set (complete with a sari-clad Asian woman seated on the floor strumming the guitar and singing folk songs and guests reciting poetry aloud).  No doubt I’m missing the point entirely, but the final climactic orgiastic party (where the divorcee does a striptease writhing on the floor) looks far more fun! (Bear in mind this film was made in 1959, so these are orgy scenes where everyone remains fully clothed! See also: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert).

/ One of my favourite party scenes in La Dolce Vita, set in the crumbling ruins of a castle (the gorgeous blonde in the centre of the dissolute aristocrats is Nico!) /

An interesting side note is the presence of clearly-identified gay and cross-dressing characters in several of these nightclub and party scenes.  Fascinating as it is to see frank and overt LGBT representation in a film made in 1959, what’s problematic today is that Fellini seemingly employs them to depict how low Marcello has sunk! (If you’re at a party surrounded by pretty chorus boys frolicking in drag, you’ve basically reached Dante's inner circle of hell).

Seen today, La Dolce Vita is incredibly prescient in its anticipation of the relentless celebrity and gossip culture we are now saturated in and - for better or for worse - take for granted as a constant backdrop to our daily lives.  (This is, famously, the film where the expression “paparazzi” for celebrity photographers came from: Marcello’s sidekick and photographer friend is called Paparazzo).

The film also works as a time capsule of the late fifties period when international film productions started flooding Rome's Cinecittà Studios (leading to it being nicknamed "Hollywood on the Tiber").  A lot of terrible gladiator, sword-and-sandal and Biblical epics were made at Cinecittà during these years, but so too were parts of the mega-budget 1962 Liz Taylor version of Cleopatra. Weirdly, almost all of La Dolce Vita itself was shot within the confines of Cinecittà as opposed to “on location.” (For example, Fellini painstakingly recreated Via Veneto  in the studio). Sadly, the particular studio of Cinecittà  where most of La Dolce Vita was made was destroyed in a fire in 2012

La Dolce Vita is loosely structured around Marcello’s fleeting encounters with a series of beautiful women. The most fondly-remembered and iconic of these is probably the truly statuesque Anita Ekberg as visiting Hollywood starlet Sylvia, in town to make a film at Cinecittà. (I love it when - during Sylvia’s sensational publicity stunt arrival at the airport - one of the reporters turns to Marcello and admiringly declares her a “magnificent chunk of woman!”). Ekberg is probably essentially playing a cartoonish version of herself, but it’s nice to think Sylvia’s characterisation (especially the campy, cooing little girl delivery) is a bit influenced by Jayne Mansfield.  Like Sylvia and her insecure boozy actor husband (played by Lex Barker), certainly sex kitten-gone-berserk Mansfield and her muscle-bound former Mr Universe husband Mickey Hargitay spent a lot of time stirring up trouble and making terrible movies in Rome in the early sixties. One bit does feel like an explicit tribute to Mansfield: the party scene where Frankie (one of the visiting Hollywood actors working in Rome) hoists Ekberg over his head and twirls her around  – that was one of Mansfield and Hargitay’s favourite attention-seeking party tricks.

/ Mickey and Jayne in action /

(By the way: the famous Trevi fountain scene was shot in the middle of winter.  Mastroianni wore a wet-suit under his clothes and slugged vodka to keep warm. Fellini recalled that Ekberg didn’t complain about the cold at all).

/ Who’s that girl? The mystery blonde with Marcello Mastroianni is – Nico! Yes, that Nico – long before the eternally enigmatic singer was discovered by Andy Warhol and joined the Velvet Underground as husky-voiced chanteuse, German fashion model Nico memorably appeared in La Dolce Vita as one of the series of beautiful women Marcello encounters on his nocturnal jaunts through Roman nightlife. And the role was a real stretch for her – she’s playing a fashion model called Nico!/

/ Fellini and Nico during the filming of La Dolce Vita /

Still in her early twenties, Nico was then what we now would call an in-demand, international “supermodel." I’m probably not very objective (the gloomy German diva is my all-time favourite singer), but I think her performance in La Dolce Vita is adorable, natural and – perhaps surprisingly considering Nico’s later icily-serious, gravely-composed, heroin-ravaged tortured artist image – very funny.  If you’ve read Richard Witt’s 1993 biography Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon or seen the 1996 documentary Nico: Icon, you’ll know La Dolce Vita really captures what Nico was like at that period in her life: still un-corrupted, insouciant and childlike, jet-setting around the world on modelling assignments. 

/ See Anouk Aimee as the most elegant wealthy nymphomaniac in film history! /

/ The fabulous Anouk Aimee in La Dolce Vita /

The most complex and inscrutable of Marcello’s women is Anouk Aimee as the bored, haughty heiress Maddalena. I’ve already written at length about Modigliani-faced French actress Anouk Aimee’s performance as Maddalena, but seeing La Dolce Vita again I was struck by two things:  1) her voice is dubbed throughout by an Italian actress (having another actor dub someone’s voice was routine in Italian cinema at the time but feels weird today. Aimee’s own distinctive whisper-soft voice is notably different), for most of her screen-time she keeps black sunglasses clamped-on and I suspect the bouffant hairstyle she sports is a wig. So Anouk Aimee is essentially in disguise! But Maddalena’s alluring sense of remote, Garbo-like inscrutability and melancholy is entirely Aimee’s own.  2) Aimee is so thin in La Dolce Vita, she’s almost wraith-like (her waist is worthy of comparison to Vampira’s). Also: virtually all of La Dolce Vita’s main players are dead now.  Aimee is still alive (she’s a very stylish 84-year old).  So is Yvonne Furneaux (now 88), the French actress who plays Marcello’s neurotic and suicidal fiancée Emma.  Furneaux appeared in some pretty distinguished European art films in addition to La Dolce Vita, like the early Antonioni film Le Amiche (1955) and as Catherine Deneuve’s sister in Repulsion (1965). Furneaux really excelled at playing mentally unstable women! 

If you’ve never watched La Dolce Vita before, anticipate being taken aback by just how troubling the film is. (Afterwards I spoke to one of the attendees who’d never seen the film before. She was surprised by how dark La Dolce Vita was: she was expecting something sweeter and more Audrey Hepburn-esque. ) The film is fondly-remembered as a sentimental classic of mid-century European cinema, but Fellini’s vision is deeply un-consoling, unexpectedly incorporating suicide and infanticide.  (Even religion is depicted as just another cynical form of show business. No wonder the Catholic Church hated it!). La Dolce Vita begins as Marcello’s existential crisis and concludes with his permanent journey into darkness. Bravely, Fellini makes Marcello become progressively more unsympathetic and misogynistic as the film proceeds. (Women get casually slapped around and roughed-up a lot in La Dolce Vita). An enduring masterpiece of style and substance, La Dolce Vita deserves its status as one of the most chic films ever made (the nightclub scenes! The cha cha music!), but it’s the uncompromisingly bleak ending that lingers in your memory.

/ I love this candid shot. Lunch break on the set of La Dolce Vita! The people assembled here are like European art cinema royalty of the fifties and sixties: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini (the controversial queer filmmaker and poet collaborated on La Dolce Vita’s script). Note that they are being serenaded by an accordion player while they dine – the sweet life indeed! /

Reflections on ... The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961)

“Tennessee Williams wanted the lead in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone to go to Katherine Hepburn, after seeing her performance as the scheming mother in Suddenly Last Summer. But Hepburn, who resented the way her advancing years had been treated in that film, had no intention of inviting comparison between herself and the lonely middle-aged actress who buys the attentions of a male hustler. Although the public was intrigued by rumors of an off-screen liaison between the film’s subsequent stars, Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty, Spring was a disappointment at the box office. It seems that audiences were uncomfortable with the film’s depressing theme, and with the painful similarities between the lives of Vivien Leigh and the mentally unstable Mrs Stone.”

Penny Stalling. Flesh and Fantasy (1978)

If The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (the 1961 film adaptation of the Tennessee Williams novel) is remembered at all today, it’s as a dusty and obscure minor footnote to the career of its leading lady Vivien Leigh (it would be her penultimate film; Leigh died of tuberculosis aged 53 in 1967). It seemingly never crops up on TV and is unavailable on DVD in the UK. As a fan of both Leigh and Williams (and intrigued by Spring’s sordid subject matter!), I had long been intrigued by this curiosity. When the British Film Institute in London held a retrospective season commemorating the 100^th anniversary of Leigh’s birth in November 2013, I finally got to see it.  

/ Make mine a Negroni: Vivien Leigh in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone /

It certainly feels like a “lost” film. The BFI always sources the best quality prints they can – and this one frequently looked pretty scratchy and moth-eaten. In 1961 the film suffered by comparison with Leigh and Williams’ earlier triumphant collaboration on A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which she won her second Academy Award, and it was neither a critical or commercial success. Seeing it in 2013 for the first time, I would argue The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone is ripe for a more generous reappraisal. Williams himself rated it highly, saying, “I think that film is a poem” in his 1972 memoirs (but then he also loved the catastrophic 1968 Liz Taylor-Richard Burton mega bomb Boom!). Call me perverse, but I find Spring infinitely more enjoyable than the more highly regarded Streetcar.

/ Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty in The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone /

The film is flawed but fascinating. It seethes with weird hybrid tensions. With its woman-of-a-certain age in peril heroine, Spring works as a lush old-fashioned conventional melodramatic “woman’s picture” awash with romantic masochism, stoical suffering and deluxe production values (the costumes, sets and Roman setting are pure eye candy). But it also plumbs the depths of some spicy lurid subject matter: self-destruction, sexual humiliation and glittering but empty hedonism in a milieu of pimps and prostitutes in Rome’s La Dolce Vita international cafe society. (Some of Spring’s nightclub and party scenes, with their grotesque celebrants, can be favorably compared to the earlier Fellini film). Intriguingly for modern audiences, the film is shot through with a definite queer sensibility (it’s surprisingly clear that those seeking firm-bodied Roman hustlers on the Spanish Steps are just as likely to be male as well as female; the role of Mrs Stone would probably make even more sense as an older gay man pining for his younger thug lover). It’s also convincingly permeated by a sense of real fatalistic despair almost from the very start (onscreen Leigh’s depression is almost tangible). And in its tense, shocking final moments, Spring packs the dread of a horror film.

/ The original theatrical trailer for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone /

/ Leigh, draped in haute couture by Balmain /

Leigh portrays the titular Mrs Karen Stone – a recently widowed and affluent middle-aged American actress adrift in Rome.  Rich, lonely and vulnerable, Stone is easy prey for heartless gigolo Paolo (Warren Beatty) and his malevolent female pimp The Contessa (Lotte Lenya). Leigh is only 47 here but it has to be said she seems dramatically older. (And in the context of the story, the age of 47 seems to represent something significantly older than it does in 2013). Draped in haute couture by Balmain (shame about the gruesomely unflattering blonde wigs), she is still waveringly beautiful but careworn, ravaged and fragile. (Late-period Leigh’s deep bass voice may come as a surprise; it was strikingly lower by the 1960s after years of poor health and heavy smoking). 

/ Ladylike and demure - but tortured /

Leigh is so perfect for the role, it's hard to believe it wasn't conceived with her in mind or that she wasn't the original choice. Her thin-skinned and delicate performance is a portrait of someone deeply wounded but striving to maintain a haughty dignity and detached froideur (she boosts her confidence and self-soothes with vice, chain-smoking and drinking Negroni cocktails).  And yet Leigh had a tough core: she was a profoundly unsentimental actress.  Whether as Scarlett O’Hara, Blanche Dubois or the complex and troubled Karen Stone, she never solicits the audience’s sympathy. Considering Spring is her second last film, Leigh ended her movie career on a high. My favorite moments of Leigh’s performance here are probably the simplest: the segments of Stone drifting aimlessly alone through Roman streets like a melancholy somnambulist, severely-etched  and alienated in her ladylike suits, white gloves and cat’s eye sunglasses, are haunting. Thank God Katherine Hepburn didn't accept the role. 

/ Like I said, the film has a genuinely queer sensibility: Warren Beatty wears very tight pants throughout and gets more than one lingering, admiring ass shot /

The film’s weakest link is callow young Warren Beatty, whose thick comedy Italian accent is frankly awful (his acting would improve considerably by Bonnie and Clyde in 1967). Why not cast an actual Italian actor as Paolo? The dark, swarthy and sensual Franco Citti had already smoldered playing sexy low-life pimps in two Pier Paolo Pasolini films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962).  Or perhaps the French art cinema heartthrob Alain Delon, who at least was Continental - and by all accounts in real life every bit as predatory and amoral as Paolo! LuchinoVisconti’s bisexual protégé would have invested the part with some of the icy sociopathic menace he brought to Plein Soleil (1960). (In fact Delon had been considered for the role – but Leigh rejected him as “too pretty.” Perhaps she didn't want to share close-ups with him. Who could blame her not wanting to be compared to young Delon?).

/ Don't Smoke in Bed: Two ultra-sultry and homoerotic portraits of very young Delon by John S Barrington, a pioneer of gay beefcake / physique photography. Delon could have played the role of Paolo in his sleep. (Apparently Delon tried to suppress these photos later on. Read the biography Physique: The Life of John S Barrington by my friend, journalist and author Rupert Smith)

It could be argued the film is well and truly stolen from both Leigh and Beatty by the frankly amazing Lotte Lenya, nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as the toxic Contessa (two years later she would play Rosa Klebb in the James Bond film From Russia with Love – her most famous movie role). The 63-year old Austrian actress and chanteuse (the definitive interpreter of her husband Kurt Weill’s songs, name-checked in the English lyrics to “Mack the Knife”) is utterly compelling: she practically purrs with smiling, serene evil. I literally gasped when she calls Stone a “chicken hawk” (a very John Waters moment. I told you this was a queer film). And don’t even get me started on how much I love The Contessa’s apartment. All the sets in Spring are amazing, but her flat – shared with a menagerie of cats - is truly brothel-like, a tart’s boudoir of crimson velvet furniture, flocked wallpaper and gilt.

/ Stirring up trouble: Lotte Lenya as the sinister Contessa. I love her blood-red and gold apartment /

As well as La Dolce Vita, for me Spring echoes Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) in its themes of sexual humiliation, cruelty and death, and Bonjour Tristesse (1958) for the joyless European jet set debauchery and luxurious settings. The story is full of Tennessee Williams’ essential recurring preoccupations:  loneliness, fear of aging, compassion for human fragility, the need to live with illusions and occupations especially the concept of the beautiful young gigolo doubling as an angel of death (See also: Boom!).

One of Spring’s other intriguing themes is American new world naivety versus European old world decadence. During a heated argument, Paolo spits at Stone, “Rome is 3000 years old. You’re what – fifty?” Later, when someone describes Stone as “a great lady”, The Contessa is contemptuous, arguing there is "no such thing as great American lady" because great ladies do not occur in country less than two hundred years old. Stone is out of her depth in Italy – against the corrupt and damaged likes of Paolo and The Contessa, she doesn't stand a chance.

No spoilers, but Spring also raises the possibility Stone has a death wish or unacknowledged suicidal impulse, subliminally motivating her. Aiming to shock and offend her, Paolo taunts she’ll be discovered dead in bed with her throat slit ear-to-ear by a gigolo three or four years from now. Stone merely laughs “a cut throat three or four years from now would be a convenience”. In a weird encounter on the street with some nosy American acquaintances Stone lies to them that she’s been diagnosed with a fatal illness so that they won’t bother her anymore. In the context of the film, this is fatalistic – she’s sealing her own fate. Even more disturbingly, throughout the film Stone is literally pursued by death – stalked by a completely silent, gauntly handsome angel of death street urchin hustler who at first might even exist only in her imagination. (He’s a very poetic Williams-ian touch: with his wraith-like cheekbones he looks like a Giacometti sculpture come to life and is arguably more attractive than Beatty).  His recurring presence foreshadows certain doom.

“A glamorous world – a strange romance!” the original theatrical trailer to The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone tantalizingly promised. The film offers a kinky glimpse of sex and dying in high society, viewed through a realm of genteel cocktail parties and gold cigarette cases.

/ Ominous: Karen Stone, stalked by death /

Further reading:

This great blog has some beautiful screen shots of The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone's lavish sets and costumes

My reflections on another Tennessee Williams adaptation, the notorious Boom! (1968)

The screenplay for The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone was adapted by Gavin Lambert (1924-2005).  During the making of the film, Vivien Leigh was freshly divorced from Laurence Olivier and struggling with mental illness - and yet was consistently elegant and professional throughout. Read his sympathetic and insightful account of working Leigh here. 

/ "Oh show me the me way to the next pretty boy ...": The incomparable Lotte Lenya (in 1962) singing us out with Kurt Weill's "Alabama Song"

 

When John Waters Met Nico

It turns out that cult filmmaker extraordinaire John Waters and I have something in common: we both revere the late, great German chanteuse Nico. I bought his riotous 1981 book Shock Value: A Tasteful Book about Bad Taste in the late 1980s when I was still a university student and it had a profound impact on me. In it he briefly and tantalisingly recalls meeting...

“... Nico, my favourite singer, who was so out of it when I met her that she asked, “Have I ever been here before?” (I had to tell her I really had no idea).”

I wanted to know more about this historic meeting between cinemas’s Sleaze King and the heroin-ravaged Marlene Dietrich of punk. I interviewed Waters (a life-long hero of mine) for Nude magazine in December 2010 when he was in London promoting his excellent new book Role Models, so I was finally able to get him to elaborate on his encounter with Nico. It was the end of the interview and this was only for my own personal interest and never intended for the final article (which you can read here).

So here it is: when John Waters Met Nico...

Graham Russell: Before you go, tell me about the time you met Nico.

John Waters: Nico ... I met her when she played in Baltimore. Well, (before that) I saw her play with The Velvet Underground at The Dom on St Marks Place (in New York) with The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I have the poster still. But I met her much later when she had her solo career, which I loved. She was a total heroin addict. Did you ever read that book The End? (The 1992 book is a jaundiced and not exactly objective account by her former keyboardist James Young). It’s so hilarious. It was that – although it wasn’t that, that was later when she was touring England. She played at this disco, and I went. And people went, but not a lot, it wasn’t full. And she was heavy and dressed all in black with reddish dark hair, and she did her (makes guttural moaning noise). Afterwards I said, “It’s nice to meet you, I wish you’d play at my funeral”, and she said (mimics doom-laden Germanic voice), “When are you going to die?” I told her, “You should have played at The Peoples Temple; you would’ve been great when everyone was killing themselves!” Then she said, “Where can I get some heroin?” I said, “I don’t know.” I don’t take heroin, so I don’t know. But even if I did, I wasn’t copping for Nico!

“But that was basically it. But I’ll always remember her, and I love Nico. I remember when she died, when she fell off the bicycle (in 1988). Every summer my friend Dennis and I, we play Nico music on the day she died (18 July). I saw that documentary Nico-Icon (Susanne Ofteringer, 1995), which was great. It’s a shame: she was mad about being pretty! She was sick of being pretty, being a model. And I remember her when she was in La Dolce Vita (1960), even before. Nico ... great singer; and even the Velvet Underground hated having her. And her music can really get on your nerves. You have to be in the mood. Sometimes it gets on my nerves. You have to be in the mood to listen to it. To put on a whole day of Nico can be ... my favourite song of Nico ever, and I only have it on a tape that someone made, it’s a bootleg. Did you ever hear her sing “New York, New York”? It’s great! I wish she’d done a whole album of show tunes! Like “Hello Dolly” or “The Sound of Music”! (Mimics Nico singing “Hello Dolly”).



/ Nico in the 1980s at New York's Chelsea Hotel singing a punk-y and dramatic version of her classic song "Chelsea Girls" /



/ Nico with Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) /

/ Rare shot of Nico and Fellini during the filming of La Dolce Vita /

/ John Waters: The Maestro /

/ Hog Princess: The Filthiest Woman in the World -- Divine. RIP /

 / John Waters and I at his book launch party in London in December 2010 /

The Nude website is now defunct, sadly, but you can still read my full interview with John Waters here