Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir & Don’t Touch the White Woman
I suspect that the easiest money I’ve ever made in my
entire life as a writer was the year I mainly supported
myself, 1974-75, during my fifth and final year of living
in Paris, by writing capsule film reviews for a monthly
magazine in English called Oui — a joint publishing
effort of Hugh Hefner in Chicago and Daniel Fillipachi
(the publisher of Lui and, for a long stretch in the 1960s,
Cahiers du Cinéma) in Paris. At a time when I was struggling
to make ends meet -– my inheritance money having run
out, and my other freelance jobs being few and far
between -– my life was virtually saved by Terry Curtis Fox,
a Chicago-based associate editor of Oui, who engaged
me to write reviews for the magazine on a regular basis.
If memory serves, this paid $50 a review (a fortune
at the time), and I could pretty much select which films
I wrote about as long as the two-page section of the magazine
called “Prevue” could meet its monthly “tits and ass”
quotient with its illustrations, which the magazine gathered
on its own. So I wound up writing about the latest films of
Jacques Rivette, Robert Bresson, Carmelo Bene, Maurice
Pialat, Alain Resnais, and everything else I could find that
interested me, usually averaging two or three reviews per
issue, starting off with the latest films of Alain Robbe-
Grillet and Marco Ferreri in their May 1974 issue.… Read more »