Before she became known as one of the best comedy directors of her generation for the now classic “ Valley Girl ” and “Real Genius,” director Martha Coolidge made her feature debut with the searing drama “Not a Pretty Picture,” a one-of-a-kind documentary/narrative hybrid in which Coolidge recreated her own rape with actors and shot both the recreation and the behind the scenes circumstances of its making. Bravely personal and intensely provocative, “Not a Pretty Picture” announced Coolidge as a major new talent and earned praise from both critics and other filmmakers (including Francis Coppola , who invited Coolidge to come work with him at American Zoetrope), yet for decades it has been difficult to see, more talked and written about than screened.
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That changed in 2022 when the Academy Film Archive restored “Not a Pretty Picture” in partnership with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the George Lucas Family Foundation. Now, after a series of public screenings at festivals, museums, and repertory theaters, the film is widely available via an excellent new Criterion Blu-ray that also includes one of Coolidge’s early documentaries and a terrific conversation between Coolidge and her peer and fan Allison Anders — and the movie is set to begin streaming on the Criterion Channel next month.
Like Coolidge’s early comedies and her Academy Award-winning 1991 drama “Rambling Rose,” “Not a Pretty Picture” has stood the test of time and now seems poised to find the wide audience it always deserved. Not that Coolidge had any idea she was making a movie that would still be part of the conversation nearly 50 years after its release. “I don’t know that a person, when they’re young and doing these films, is thinking about that,” Coolidge told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “But what I did think about was recording American culture as I knew and experienced it.”
That impulse to capture the times in which she was living began with Coolidge’s early career as a documentarian. “I learned when I made documentaries that there is a great responsibility to deliver some reality, a story with truth to it,” she said. After seeing a film about rape at the Flaherty Film Seminar in the early 1970s, Coolidge felt that she had another way of looking at the subject that would be best served by merging her documentary impulses with a fictionalized narrative.
“I realized that I had a personal experience that I could speak about,” Coolidge said, “and the film I would want to make was a combination of rehearsals or scenes around the rape, but breaking into them talking to the actors so we could see what it’s like for a human being to go through that experience in their imagination in the way that actors have to experience things.” It quickly occurred to Coolidge that she could broaden her own perspective by casting a lead actress who had also been raped. “I found an actress, Michele [Manenti], and she’d been raped in high school by the mayor of her town or something. It was very different than mine, and she was willing to go through it and talk about it.”
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In casting the rapist, Coolidge was looking for someone who was able to go to the emotional depths that the character required and also willing to be honest about it on camera. “I found a male actor, Jim Carrington, who really was talented and who could also talk. Not all actors can talk, but talking was a part of this film.” Adding to the blurry line between fiction and non-fiction, Coolidge also cast her old roommate as herself after a chance reunion on the street. “I was walking down the street in New York and bumped into the real woman, who I hadn’t seen in several years. But I started talking to her and said, ‘Would you like to be in my film and play yourself?'”
At this point Coolidge’s experience directing actors all came from the theater, but she quickly learned a lot about working with actors on film and it informed her approach moving forward. “It was a very intense shoot,” she said. “There were situations in which the actors would get a block where they couldn’t do a certain thing emotionally.” The lessons Coolidge learned came in handy on her last day of shooting “Valley Girl,” when Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman were having trouble with a breakup scene. “They had just started dating. I had to separate them and work with them on how they could rediscover for themselves the emotions needed for the scene. They were each different and had a different way of achieving it.”
Though “Valley Girl” was Coolidge’s first Hollywood feature, it was only one of many films she was in talks to direct after “Not a Pretty Picture” caught the eye of Coppola and others. “That was the real surprise,” Coolidge said. “This isn’t exactly the kind of film that you would think was an open door to Hollywood. But I got to know lots of development executives, and I did have interviews for films. I was even brought in for ‘Animal House,’ which I really wanted to do. I read it and I thought it would be great, though I think they got the right person. It was a big, adventurous time because it led me places I never expected to be led to.”
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