by The Killing of the Unicorn- Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980 (epub)
If the law had existed in 1979-80 when D.R. first began to reveal to me how she really felt about posing for Snider and Playboy, instead of just suggesting she quit, I could have said: sue them. When she replied at she had signed a contract, that she was trapped in it, I could have told her it didn’t matter since she had been tricked and intimidated and pressured. If she worried that it would be her word against Snider’s/Hefner’s, and all the film they extracted would be used against her, I could have encouraged her to be hopeful a court would understand that the photos and footage documented acts of sexual violation and that her word might, finally, count for something. And when she spoke to me in whispers of getting through the photo-sessions on hate, and of all the other injuries and injustices she had suffered and survived in her brief twenty years, we would both have known, as we did not then, that she was not alone. A law of this kind would have made a real difference in Dorothy’s life. Most of all, when eventually it is passed across the land, when the used and the innocent finally have a weapon with which to fight, the new civil rights law will stand for the life D.R. could have had—something better than being taken and sold, with something other to say than the script the pornographers wrote.
For herself, Dorothy had said it most simply in 1978, a few months before we met and shortly before she was made to pose naked for men:
. . . How can people be satisfied
By accepting someone
Without exploring them?
Is the connection
Only physical?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Bogdanovich is an internationally known film director, producer, and writer. Among his ten films are The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Daisy Miller, Saint Jack, and They All Laughed, which starred Dorothy Stratten in her last role. He has also published books and articles on the movies. He has just completed his eleventh film, Mask.