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Cinema

The working girls

Venezia Classici
Director:
Stephanie Rothman
Production:
Dimension Pictures
Running Time:
80’
Language:
English
Country:
USA
Year:
1974
Main Cast:
Sara Kennedy, Laurie Rose, Mark Thomas, Lynne Guthrie, Cassandra Peterson, Solomon Sturges, Mary Beth Hughes
Screenplay:
Stephanie Rothman
Cinematographer:
Daniel Lacambre
Editor:
John A. O’Connor
Costume Designer:
Gwyn Ruutz-Rees
Music:
Michael Andres
Restoration:
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Laboratory:Cineric Inc., Audio Mechanics

Synopsis

Stephanie Rothman’s independent feature follows three young, single women as they make their way in the Big City here, the tie-dyed Los Angeles of the 1970s, where a spirit of personal liberation and new possibilities is in the air. Honey (Sarah Kennedy) is a farm-fresh newcomer who arrives in the city with no money and no job and finds a job as a paid companion to a lonely millionaire. Denise (Laurie Rose) is an artist who paints billboards for a living and gets involved with a street musician with a dark secret. Jill (Lynne Guthrie) is a law student who takes a job as a cocktail waitress and finds herself involved with a gangland enforcer.

Director's Statement

I packaged it as I was hired to do as a pretty, sexy, graphically strong (I hope), comic film. Today film scholars call this Second Wave Exploitation, but when I made it, it was known as a low-budget exploitation film that had to be more transgressive than major studio films to compete. Even then, to my surprise and pleasure, there were a few scholars and reviewers who saw beyond those trappings to its core message. For me it has always been a film about the quest for identity that we are all on when we are young. It is a serious film about three underemployed young women who no one takes seriously enough. By the film’s end, they have learned such life lessons as an open heart can lead to the warmth of friendship, the impermanence of love and the pain of loss; desire for the wrong man is not good for one’s ethics or ambitions; and most surprising of all, learning how to be a capitalist can lead to becoming a utopian socialist.

Production/Distribution

PRODUCTION: Dave Kehr, Sean Egan, Katie Trainor – The Museum of Modern Art, New York
11, West 53rd Street
10019 – New York, United States of America
Tel. +1 2127089612
Mob. +1 2124773488
dave_kehr@moma.org
http://www.moma.org

RESTORATION CURATED BY: Museum of Modern Art, New York

LABORATORY: Cineric, Inc and Audio Mechanics

PRESS OFFICE: Dave Kehr - Museum of Modern Art, New York
11, West 53rd Street
10019 – New York, United States of America
Tel. +1 2127089612
Mob. +1 2124773488
dave_kehr@moma.org


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Biennale Cinema
Biennale Cinema