An audacious Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, who has interviewed the most powerful people on Earth, is sent to Hollywood. Here she must chase her most evasive and infamous subject yet, none other than Marilyn Monroe herself.
Oriana Fallaci was sent to Hollywood to interview Marilyn Monroe, and did not get her. The film is about everything that happened instead.
She arrives with a rumour, that Monroe is pregnant, and the conviction that anybody can be got to. What she meets is the machinery. A friend explains that Monroe answers questions by asking other people what she should say. The fixer who has the address of every star in New York does not have this one, because she moves every month. There is a press agent who will pass a message on, though a telegram has to go first. Two people in America cannot be spoken to face to face, Fallaci is told, and one of them is the President.
Everyone standing between Fallaci and the interview is a real person, and so is the man she finally sits down with. The apartment has only just begun to be decorated. He tells her he is a new man since the marriage, that they rarely go out, that his wife makes good bread and pasta, and then, once the coffee has been poured, that she is in hospital and will not be coming. His year has held a film shot in England, a trial he did not deserve and a miscarriage, and he relates all of it in the tone of a man being polite to a guest.
Her parting line to him is a proper journalist's question, and it carries whatever argument about fame the film wants to make. A person can be surrounded by so much handling and protection and so much story that the people paid to speak for her can no longer produce her.
Oriana Fallaci was an Italian journalist and author. A member of the Italian resistance movement during World War II, she had a long and successful journalistic career.
Fallaci became famous worldwide for her coverage of war and revolution, and her 'long, aggressive and revealing interviews' with many world leaders during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
Fallaci's book 'Interview with History' contains interviews with Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Willy Brandt, Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Henry Kissinger, South Vietnamese president Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, and North Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp during the Vietnam War.
Eighteen minutes. Written and directed by Alessandra Gonnella, co-written with Karla Spika, made in Italy and performed in English. Gonnella talks about making it in Yoreflix Stories, elsewhere in this catalogue.