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KIM NOVAK: HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN AGE REBEL

By Jessica MENENDEZ

ARTE FRANCE - as SALES All rights, World / DISTR Theatrical, TV / PROD / BROAD

Biography - Completed 2022

The first movie on Kim Novak, her career, and her emancipation from the Hollywood system, with the exclusive participation of the actress herself. An echo with the #MeToo movement. Discover the unforgettable heroine of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo.

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Biography, Social issues, Documentary
- Countries
- FRANCE
- Languages
- FRENCH, GERMAN, ENGLISH
- Duration
- 52 mn
- Director(s)
- Jessica MENENDEZ
- Producer(s)
- Florence SALA (ARTE FRANCE), Anne LABRO (TANGERINE PRODUCTIONS)
- Synopsis
- Kim Novak will forever be remembered for her dual role in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which she plays a woman forced to transform into someone else to fulfill a man’s obsession. The actress deeply identified with the role: “It’s exactly what Hollywood wanted to do to me: turn me into someone I was not.” Novak was a rebel inside a star system that broke women’s spirits in order to manufacture screen goddesses, a toxic system she never ceased to speak out against.
  
  At the tender age of 20, Novak, groomed to rival Marilyn Monroe by the head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, finds herself thrown into the limelight. With no acting experience, the young Marilyn Novak who dreamed of becoming a painter undergoes a disconcerting makeover which will transform her into the glamorous bombshell Kim Novak, otherwise known as the Lavender Blonde. Her anxiety on set is compounded by an intimidating studio head, demanding directors, and a misogynist press.
  
  This documentary tells the story of how this box office sensation who worked with some of the greatest directors of the era - Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock - takes on the Hollywood studio system and reclaims her life.