“The truth is somewhere in the middle,” Cooper says. From the queen bee dumb blonde in Hollywood (said her All About Eve costar Celeste Holm, “I thought she was quite sweet and terribly dumb and my natural reaction was, ‘Whose girl is that?’”), she has been elevated to a silver screen saint martyred by a beastly tabloid media and the ravages of addiction. The multitude of perspectives combine to form a prismatic view of a much-analyzed personality, already subject to constant public reappraisal and re-reappraisal. “This is the last film about Marilyn Monroe exclusively populated by people who knew her, touched her life, felt her presence, really knew what it was like to be around her,” she says. Having scoured innumerable hours across hundreds of his tapes, archived at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, Cooper brings this audio to life via lip-synced reenactment, using actors in costume. In the course of researching his book back in the 80s, Summers amassed a goldmine of audio recordings with firsthand eyewitnesses in the star’s orbit. The film and its source material both eschew talking-head segments from experts or obsessives, relying on a cast of Monroe’s collaborators, confidantes, and closest loved ones. In a crowded marketplace of Monroe biography, Cooper and Summers set their work apart by branding it with a shoe-leather true-crime angle. “By the end of this process, she’d become a much more real person to me, with more modernity as a woman than I’d ever seen in her.” “To me, Marilyn had always been a bit one-dimensional,” Cooper says.
He was the one who sold Cooper on the concept, convinced that she would also come to see the person behind the legacy of victimhood. Cooper’s film joins investigative journalist Anthony Summers as he recounts the important points of his 1985 book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, its timeline and accompanying insights repackaged for a visual medium. The instinct to do away with appearances and expose the foundations undergirding an image aptly matches the intent of her latest project, which favors fact-based reportage over thrall to Monroe’s dazzle. The inked portrait isn’t a caricature of those distinguishing features instead it’s winnowed down to uncolored outlines so minimal we may as well be looking at the screen idol’s bones. You’re going to go mad for her.’ I thought, ‘Of course I won’t.’ Cut to me on Sunset Boulevard, getting this done.” While I was in town, I also met one of her biographers.
“On my first research trip in Los Angeles, I went to see her grave and visit the Academy. “I did not think I’d end up having her as part of my body, but you become obsessed with her,” she tells the Guardian.
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