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By Keziah Weir
“I don’t pretend to give credit to her alone for the discovery of the clitoris, but she replaced public discussion in profound ways,” Oscar-nominated producer and director Nicole Newnham said of Shere Hite, the subject of her film. new documentary. ” His appearance, dress, and behavior were as revolutionary and as vital in some tactics as the paintings he made. “
In 1976, the former Columbia graduate published The Hite Report, a qualitative survey of more than 3,000 American women with questions like, “Do you think sex is political in any way?”and “Do you ever fake orgasms?” In the New York Times, Erica Jong wrote that Hite was explaining “what sex is really like right now. “His work, which promoted more fluid conceptions of the genre, propelled Hite to the public’s attention. — Oprah, Maury Povich, the evening news — in front of prominent (and skeptical) men. A young David Hasselhoff breaks down in a stutter as Hite, all apricot curls and black lace, smokes coldly beside him. disappearance of feminist knowledge,” Phyllis Chesler, Hite’s colleague and co-founder of the National Women’s Health Network, Phyllis Chesler, says in the film. By the time of his death in 2020, Hite had largely disappeared from the American consciousness.
The Death of Shere Hite (released in select theaters Nov. 17), in which executive producer Dakota Johnson gives voice to his writings, reminds him of that. When Hite was a conflicted model, his Modigliani features bright reflections in Playboy and reference shots for the 1971 film. poster Diamonds are forever. After The Hite Report, he bought an apartment on the Upper East Side, where he hosted rallies attended by Gloria Steinem, Donna Summer, Flo Kennedy, and Gene Simmons. He liked Rachmaninoff and the Rolling Stones and published polls in ink to fit his vermilion nails.
The United States, however, was in no position to accept Hite, who eventually moved to Europe (where photographers embraced their multigender maximalism) in the wake of the backlash over the 1981 Hite Report on male sexuality, which its editor, Robert Gottlieb, called one of the saddest reads of historia. su life. The Disappearance shows a Harvard convention attendee urging Hite about old nude photographs and about Oprah, an audience of men who criticize Hite for his methods. (Afterward, she went to Oprah’s favorite thrift store for comfort. )”What scares people,” it reads. A Guardian review of her 2000 autobiography, The Hite Report on Shere Hite, “is the fact that she is a charming and intelligent woman, sexy and self-taught. “
Are we in a position now?” The ideas that were so radical and so frightened other people about Shere’s paintings were internalized through other young people, in particular,” Newnham says. Autumn fashion epitomizes the Hite range, from Miu Miu’s understated glasses to Rokh’s underwear deconstructed by trousers. Continued attacks on physical autonomy would possibly require a murky counterpoint.
In one scene in the film, Hite reclines on her pink brocade couch and kicks off her heels as Johnson’s velvety narration plays with the “instructions” Hite once wrote against fitting into “a stereotypical creation of his society. “in any of your desires. . . Rely on your own monetary resources. . . Have fun. A lot. “
By Eric Lutz
By Charlotte Klein
By Eva Batey
Here, Newnham talks about the making of his new film.
The documentary contains a wealth of Hite’s films and photographic material, not to mention his public and personal writings. How did it all play out?
I first met Shere Hite when I was 12 years old. I discovered a copy of The Hite Report on my mother’s bedside table. He had a small chest next to the bed where he kept everything he didn’t need us to see, so he periodically rummaged through it. I discovered The Hite Report there, and it’s like a portal to a world that no one tells me about.
When I read the New York Times obituary in 2020, I had this kind of out-of-body experience: “Oh, I came across a story that’s close to my listeners. For example, who was this woman who opened the portal?millions of people around the world and replaced the cultural belief of how women enjoy themselves. Then I started researching with this team of producers at NBC News Studios, most of whom were young and who had also been fascinated by this very obituary. for Shere Hite in the NBC archive database and this huge volume of curtains appeared. Like they’ve made a president or something. They were women in their thirties who had studied feminist studies and so on, and they said, “She was on TV all the time. It was part of the water we drank. How come I never heard of it?
Their files had been acquired through Radcliffe and they were very happy to hear from us, as they had paid a little money for it; they had negotiated this with Shere before his death. We have, as seen in the film, the handwritten letters that other people sent him, as well as many artifacts from Shere’s own life, as well as his early writings and reflections. an impressive amount of equipment, and they said it was barely touched.
By Eric Lutz
By Charlotte Klein
By Eva Batey
The film begins more or less with Hite’s student years and remains chronological, but towards the end he returns to a complicated childhood. Can you tell me how you organized the trajectory of the film?
It’s funny. Recently, in a Q&A session, a guy who came to see the movie asked me why we don’t focus more on his marriage. I said, “Hmm, I wonder if this movie was about a guy who had been a wonderful sex investigator. “What if other people wondered why we didn’t focus on his wife and how she helped him in his paintings and influenced him?
We intended to begin the film with a psychoanalysis of his formative years as an explanation of why he did this work. We thought that other people would accept their inventiveness and genius, so that they could get ahead. of society and look at it from another perspective. We look to other people to see that before we start to see the trauma of the formative years that he went through, because I think that’s how we all need to be experienced and known.
If you read The Hite Report, it’s full of other people’s fantasies and some of them are weird, but she doesn’t judge them. He just puts them in there and says, “I asked 3,000 other people, ‘What are your sexual preferences?fantasies?’ That’s what people were saying. It was in this spirit that we sought to practice it as well.
Our editor, Eileen Meyer, has come to know and love Shere, and much of the way the film is structured simply seeks to reflect to the viewer how we all felt when we were introduced to and better perceived the story. We’re literally looking at the origin of the Christian in the movie, and we’re also looking at the origin of a TV where we were given talks, and all those things, that have evolved into other facets of our culture over time. time.
There’s a passage in the film where Hite says she’s nervous because she’ll have to fight the same battles in the future.
By Eric Lutz
By Charlotte Klein
By Eva Batey
The Dobbs resolution was made while we were filming. We were editing and interviewing feminist colleagues at Shere who had been involved in the initial war over Roe v. Wade. It was intense to talk to them about this story while this other story was being played. all around us.
When did Dakota Johnson sign up? Did you imagine reading excerpts from Hite’s writings?
As we began to see so many compelling things in the written curtains, it became apparent that we needed to charge that narrative voice. Initially, we thought it would be great to have an older woman who was about Shere’s age and had experienced all of this. We were also very excited about Dakota because she’s an amazing actress and we know that in her own life and career, she’s faced a lot of cultural backlash and other people’s blocks on sexuality. We thought you’d find that compelling.
We reached out to her, and she and her production spouse called her and she said, “I love Shere Hite. “Its functionality just. . . when Eileen and I told it, which we did, because we were so excited, the next night. We did the voice recording consultation at our hotel in New York; We were literally crying as we listened to her, because she tapped into a kind of basic emotionality that I think brings you closer to her and allows for a sense of vulnerability and humanity. but also strength and intelligence. It’s hard to get from undeniable TV appearances where other people are embarrassed and play games. It gave an incredible amount of validity and humanity to Shere’s own words.
By Eric Lutz
By Charlotte Klein
By Eva Batey
With so much material, were there any beloved scenes that you had to leave in the editing room?
James Hamilton, a photographer for the Village Voice, said: “Do you know where you deserve to go through?You deserve to go to where she got her clothes, the Persian store. He said, “I think it’s still there on Madison Avenue,” so I looked it up and it’s still there. The next day we were filming in his apartment on Fifth Avenue and we ran there. We went in and the guy behind the counter said, “Shere Hite, I met Shere Hite. “”His father, who was much older than him, opened the shop I think in the ’40s or ’30s and was a fashion designer. All these amazing things he did with rare silks that he brought back from Lebanon. They still have bolts on their shelf, the same bolts that Shere made his costumes with. I took all these beautiful photographs of the silk and the old photographs of the store, and they discovered the sales records that were handwritten, and she would write them down and say, “I’m in Paris, but I’m thinking about what I need. “I can’t do anything with this silk in which the story of Adam and Eve is woven, so please stay with me.
I tried to make a scene about how she sought to access a deep history and this very ancient world, a kind of handmade structure of art, aesthetics, and beauty, and how she created the symbol of herself. Its self-symbol intentionally created with so much love and action, that I think it’s a vital facet of it. Then the film got too long and we had to cut it, and I was heartbroken.
I’ve come to see her as an artist, perhaps more than anything else. That’s part of what drove us to work on the film. I think a lot of us worked harder than ever on this project, because we felt like this user had basically said, “This is the amazing life I’ve led. Here’s that amazing story. Here’s how I did it. Here’s the plan to make it happen. “
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