More Perfume in the Movies: The Last Picture Show

There's a great scene early on in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) between Cybill Sheperd and Ellen Burstyn, who play mother and daughter in a small, stifled Texas town, circa 1951.

Teenage Cybill is alone in her frilly bedroom, reading a book on her bed while absently stroking her cat. Her mother, played by Burstyn, walks in, and Cybill immediately stomps to her vanity, where she faces the mirror, presenting her back in adolescent contempt to the parental intrusion.

Burstyn tells her she's foolish to spend so much time with her boyfriend, Jeff Bridges, who will never amount to much. He has no money and he'll never make much of himself, and she's too young to realize what being stuck in town the rest of her life will do to her.

Cybill says money doesn't seem to have made Burstyn very happy, and besides, when she married Cybill's daddy he had no money. Burstyn says she basically scared him into making something of himself. Cybill says Bridges can be made scared too, and Burstyn laughs, telling her daughter she isn't nearly mean enough to scare anybody, least of all a boy.

Burstyn is as well dressed and pretty as her daughter, with a harder edge, and it's obvious where Cybill's looks and her obsession with them came from. At one point, Burstyn approaches Cybill and grabs a perfume bottle off the vanity. She sprays it on her neck and Cybill says in disgust, you have your own, suggesting they share the same taste in fragrance.

Burstyn's great response: Maybe I want to smell good right now.

When her mother leaves, Cybill stomps back over to the bed and flings herself on it, after unceremoniously tossing the cat off, through with the girly stuff.

Every Nose in Paris Knows: Trouble in Paradise and Smelly Chandler

I was surprised, watching an old Ernst Lubitsch movie called Trouble in Paradise the other day, to learn that one of the lead characters, played by Kay Francis, is a sort of Estee Lauder figure, name of Colet, who runs a perfume company. I'd never heard the film mentioned before on a perfume blog - but then, fragrance doesn't play any great part in the story, even if it figures more than in most movies.

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall play master thieves who conspire to rob Francis of of her fortune. There are some good scenes involving the Colet board of directors, and early on a radio announcer delivers an on-air advertisement for the brand, singing:

Colet, Colet, Colet and Company

are makers - of the best perfumes!

If you and your

beloved can't agree - 

permit us to suggest a few.

Cleopatra was a lovely tantalizer!

But she did it with her little atomizer!

We'll make you smell like a rose.

Every nose in Paris knows

Colet and Company!

The corporation's slogan? "Remember, it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter how you look. It's how you smell!"

Miriam Hopkins doesn't get much love these days, but she's fantastic in Trouble in Paradise. And she acts like someone drunk on perfume. Kay Francis is even less well known now, but she makes an equally fantastic perfume mogul. The film was made in 1932, several decades before the release of Youth Dew, so it seems unlikely Lauder was a model for the character. Though the company is French, Francis is thoroughly American, the way Hollywood liked its Europeans. I first thought of Lauder but Lauder makes no sense. More likely the source of the Colet character was Coco Chanel, whose No.5 came out in the '20s. And Francis certainly resembles Coco, with her short hair and dark features. The film pokes fun at her lifestyle: she's first seen buying, on a whim, a jeweled bag which costs 125,000 francs. The bag is stolen - by Hopkins and Marshall, so that they can return it and steal even more.

Perfume has turned up in a lot of books lately too. I've been reading old detective novels - mostly Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler. Chandler mentions perfume all the time. In one of his lesser known novels, The Little Sister, there must be half a dozen mentions. Philip Marlowe often comments on the perfume a woman is wearing. It's often part of her spell. Every once in a while, he comments on a man's fragrance as well, but on men fragrance takes on foul associations. Women wear just enough, it seems. If you can smell a man's, he must be wearing too much.

You can watch Trouble in Paradise on youtube. Another good Hopkins/Lubitsch film, Design for Living, is also there.

Dark Passage: A Limited Edition Fragrance by Andy Tauer

For the next 25 days, Dark Passage, a limited edition fragrance by Andy Tauer made exclusively for the Woman's Picture series, will be available here.

Dark Passage is a film noir fragrance, and is presented as part of a new series in the Tableau de Parfum/Woman's Picture project called "Snapshots".

Packaged in 7ml enamel atomizers and available in limited edition quanities, the Tableau Snapshots are smaller in scale, providing Tauer the opportunity to experiment with new ideas. The snapshot fragrances are hand held, and seek to preserve fleeting moments in time.

Dark Passage is being presented for only the next several weeks as part of the kickstarter campaign for ONLY CHILD, a mother/daughter noir in the tradition of Mildred Pierce and Now, Voyager starring Grace Zabriskie (Big Love, Twin Peaks) as a mother searching for her vanished daughter. ONLY CHILD is the second feature film in the Woman's Picture series. We start shooting it in April.

I was always resistant to do a kickstarter fundraising campaign in the past, but this time I wanted to do one, as long as I could do one well. When I say well I mean a campaign that includes true incentives, rather than well-intentioned "thank you's" alone. When I started looking at kickstarter campaigns before building our own for ONLY CHILD, I was surprised to see that people didn't offer more for donations. After all, you're asking people for help. If you're making a film, you're creative, nine times out of ten. Why not pull together all your creative resources and come up with something that really thanks them?

Andy and I came up with a lot of incentives for your average person who can do without perfume but loves film. But we wanted to do something extra special for people like us who love fragrance. I was so happy when I first smelled Dark Passage, because in a sea of mass marketed banality I knew it would feel special, smell special, be special, and few things feel that way anymore. We would be forever grateful if you helped us out with this film. Like Woman's Picture it deals thematically with perfume. I make these films for you. I really do. If you like them I know I did good. But in addition to our gratitude and making a good film we want to offer you something else in return.

Dark Passage contains patchouli, cacao, birch tar, and iris, among other things.

Inspiration:

Noir films are typically black and white. Dark Passage isn't quite so polarized, but it contains equally bold contrasts. The wonderfully rich, refined patchouli used by Andy in the fragrance is something to behold, at once earthy and clean shaven. Birch tar and cacao move this patchouli theme in interesting directions, evoking the open road and the small town diner, steaming cups of coffee on a formika countertop, bright sun coming in parallel lines through window blinds, crisscrossing a dim room with their highly keyed stripes. DARK PASSAGE is both femme fatale and private eye, a happy union between feminine and masculine.  It speaks in Lauren Bacall's smoky baritone and regards you with Bogart's level gaze.

Andy Tauer has made the fragrance available this one time and this one time only in an effort to help raise the kickstarter goal for ONLY CHILD and help get the film made. After the campaign, Dark Passage, like a fugitive character out of noir, will never show its face again.  Please check out the kickstarter page to see what other things are available for your donation (hint: an exclusive soap built around tuberose) and comment on the page if the mood hits you. With any donation above 15 dollars you'll get an online link to Woman's Picture, our first film.

Note: surprises are coming there in the next week or two, including a sneak peak sniff opportunity or two.

What Does This Woman Wear? A Full Bottle Drawing.

A friend I film a lot with, Savannah, got a fur coat from her aunt several months ago, and seeing as how she's not really a fur person, per se, making a movie seemed about the only good use for the thing.

Generally when I make movies it's a long haul, marathon type thing.  It means months of preparation - planning, budgeting, casting, et al.  The more I do it, the more I crave making films - even just once in a while - that are more like relays, more sketches than full blown murals.

Savannah and I decided to get together the other day and do something simple and abstract.  We've both always wanted to do silent movies, so we did.  We filmed a sort of character study - a woman waiting, maybe.  It was so much fun dressing up and jumping right in that we decided to continue the story every so often, to pick up where we left off and see where this woman goes, bringing other friends and places into the mix as it strikes us.

Any ideas who this woman is?  I'd love to know what perfume you think she'd be wearing, most of all.  But also maybe what she's doing there where she is and where she's going or where she's been.  I'll draw a name from the comments Monday after Thanksgiving.  Serious answers only, please.

The winner can choose from the following full bottles.  Random, I know, but I'm doing some late spring cleaning:

Bond No.9 Lexington Avenue (50 ml)
Caron Bellodgia (50 ml)
Guerlain Samsara EDT (30 ml)
Parfums de Nicolaï Vanille Tonka (30 ml)
Ava Luxe Queen Bess (30 ml)
Caron Third Man (100 ml)
Womanity (50 ml)
Bois 1920 Classic 1920
Chanel No. 19 EDP (50 ml)
Cartier Must Pour Homme (100 ml)
Guerlain L'Instant Pour Homme (100 ml)
Estee Lauder Beautiful EDP (100 ml)

Factice on Film: A Short Starring Voodoo, the "Perfume"

Here's another short in the Woman's Picture series, a snapshot companion piece to a longer segment which will come out next October based on the character of Ingrid, who appears in name only here but is an intensely felt presence.

At the time of the Ingrid movie's release online at Evelyn Avenue, Tableau de Parfums, perfumer Andy Tauer's ongoing collaboration with the project, will release its third fragrance, named after the character.  I haven't smelled Ingrid yet so I have nothing to tell you about it, other than to say I have smelled the first two, Miriam (release date: Oct. 2011) and Loretta (release date: March 2012) and can tell you they're wonderful.

All of the Woman's Picture material weaves perfume into its story lines in some way.  Here, Mackie, a recurring character, shops in a vintage clothing store, trying to find wardrobe for a silent film he wants to make about Ingrid, who seems to have left him for some reason.  Instead, he finds a factice, as poor a substitute for her as it is for a real perfume.

I guess I'm lucky I can't afford to collect these dummies because I don't have the space for them, but "Silent Movie" let me indulge the fantasy.  Apparently, the perfume I thought was fictitious, Voodoo (the fragrance featured in this short), actually existed.  But it's as rare a find as Mackie's factice is.  I'm told Coty made Voodoo at one time.  It wasn't very popular and was discontinued.

Mackie and his sister Meredith are a little like me and my sister and probably like a lot of siblings.  They're living in the present and the past at the same time.  Mackie wants to forget; Meredith wants to rehash and work through things somehow.  I think maybe Mackie spends more time in the past than he wants to acknowledge.  Why else would a rare factice of Voodoo be such a find?  Why else would he obsess over his ex the way he does?  The difference between Mackie and Meredith is that she wants to talk about it and he doesn't, or can't, or whatever.

My sister remembers the address of every house we ever lived in, and we moved around quite a lot as kids.  She remembers every phone number, every neighbor's name, every last little thing I did and choose to banish from my own memory.  Sometimes I can't believe the things she recalls really happened.  They seem so make believe to me, and I wonder why she can remember and I can't.  I can feel a little hunted sometimes in our conversations, because I've carefully selected what I want to bring along with me into the present, and her onslaught of biographical detail can be overwhelming and contradictory to my view of the past.

Like Mackie, I remember weird details, like the smell of a perfume someone wore.  I don't want their address, or to remember too clearly the problems or conflicts we had.  I want to remember their effect, and fragrance is like a ghost that way, carrying all that stuff in a tangle of feeling and thoughts I don't have to pick apart and break down.

Slightly Stinky Cologne: A Snapshot from Woman's Picture

Woman's Picture: Snapshot 3 - Slightly Stinky from brian pera on Vimeo.


Woman's Picture is a film series I started this year, the episodes of which for the most part focus on women characters and their relationships with each other, with men, and with perfume.  The first full length episode comes out in September, on evelynavenue.com, luckyscent.com, and a few other sites online, coinciding with the release of the first fragrance in Andy Tauer's new line of perfumes, Tableau de Parfums.  The Tableau fragrances relate to the shorts in the Woman's Picture series.

The first three episodes we filmed for Woman's Picture are playing at festivals over the next year or so as a sort of movie triptych, starting on July 11 at Outfest in Los Angeles.  You can check the Outfest.org website for showtimes.  Woman's Picture is a ten year series and will broadcast online, at festivals, and in theaters, and each episode will be released on DVD.

Ingrid, featured in this "snapshot", a shorter short from the series, loves perfume, but Mackie, her male friend, loves it even more.  He's one of the only guys in the series so far to really represent my fascination with fragrance and he embodies certain fearless, even confrontational attitudes I wish I could pull off myself.

In this short, Mackie and Ingrid have stopped at a cafe before a visit to Ingrid's mother.  Ingrid hasn't seen her mother--or been back to her home town--in ten years, so she's nervous, and wants Mackie to behave, even though she probably secretly cherishes his need to shock and agitate social conventions.  I imagine he has enough perfume on to sink a small ocean liner.  I imagine he thinks of it as a special kind of armor to keep boring people and the restrictions they might try to impose on him at bay.

It was fun playing Mackie.  It gave me a chance to be a lot more bold than I tend to be in person, in my own life.  I'm always so quiet when I shop for perfume, for instance.  I play it safe with all the sales associates.  I sometimes pretend I'm buying perfume for a girlfriend, though I'm buying it for myself nine times out of seven.  Mackie is a great alter ego to slip into on film because he just doesn't care.  Like me he might say outlandish or highly opinionated things, but he doesn't worry too much about the consequences, or what people think.  I trouble over every little thing I say, wanting ultimately to be understood and liked.  I think Mackie knows who his friends are, knows who is worth worrying about - like Ingrid, for instance.  The rest he doesn't spend too much time considering.

I always want to be Mackie when I walk into a perfume store.  Instead I end up a very pale imitation.  I try to be nice and patient and I feign ignorance so as not to make anyone feel I think I know more.  I fumble through interactions with sales associates a little bit.  I'm still scared to spray perfume on, unless it's something in the men's section.  It seems bizarre to me that at my age and after all this time loving perfume I'm still so nervous and worried out among people.  Mackie is the friend I always wanted to have - the kind of guy who would go with you and give you the balls to douse yourself in Poison, right out for the world to see.  I pretend he's with me when I hit Sephora at the mall.

Valentine to Perfume: Woman's Picture and Tableau de Parfums

Woman's Picture Trailer from brian pera on Vimeo.


Here's the trailer to a film about three women called Woman's Picture.  The film premieres in Los Angeles this July (details to follow).  The film, and the website I've created for it, Evelyn Avenue, has a lot to do with perfume.  Each of the women's stories in Woman's Picture revolves around the influence of a fragrance, in a way that gives perfume something approaching magical properties.  Ismellthereforeiam tends to cut videos in half, and can make loading the site a long term endeavor, so feel free to watch the trailer full screen through vimeo for the full effect, or watch it on Evelyn Avenue.


Woman's Picture is a tribute to the women I grew up with and the perfumes they loved.  As some of you who read the blog know, I spent a lot of time as a kid sneaking into my sister's/mother's/grandmother's perfume collections, sniffing myself into my own private fantasy world.  Woman's Picture puts some of those fantasies on film.  These three women's stories are the first in an ongoing series dedicated to cinematic first-person portraiture.  Each portrait is thirty minutes, and the gallery of portraits will broadcast on Evelyn Avenue starting in October.  Until then, you can catch the first three, in feature film form, at a film festival near you.  We'll keep you posted on dates.  I created Woman's Picture not just as a tribute to the women who've influenced me directly but as an homage to the old women's films from the 30s, 40s and 50s, many of which I love.  The biggest ambition behind the series, though, was to make movies that involve perfume directly and integrally, rather than as something that appears in the background, out of focus, on a character's dresser.

Andy Tauer is collaborating with this ten year project by creating a line of perfumes called Tableau de Parfums.  Visit Evelyn Avenue for more information on that, as well.  These perfumes are inspired by the characters of Woman's Picture.  The first three perfumes are "Miriam", "Ingrid", and "Loretta".  The launch date for the line is October of this year.

The film is on facebook under facebook.com/womanspicture, if you "like".

Perfume on Film: The Women

The other night, I watched The Women. Has anyone ever seen it? Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Joan Fontaine preside over the salon, the department store, the dinner club, the dressing room, the living room, the kitchen. There isn't a single man in the whole film--not in the flesh, not off screen, not even a disembodied voice on the phone, but men of course play a crucial role in the proceedings, just as the tag line promises. The Women: It's All About Men!

Norma Shearer finds out from Rosalind Russell's manicurist that her husband, Steven Haines, is seeing shopgirl Joan Crawford. First Shearer fights to win him back, then she caves. She divorces him, and he marries Joan (Crawford, not Fontaine) who cheats on him with a man she thinks is wealthy (in fact, he's kept himself). Meanwhile, busybody Russell, who from the beginning of the story has thrilled at the slightest misfortune of others, is dumped by her husband for Paulette Goddard. She finds this out in Reno, at a recuperative ranch, where all the women migrate, post divorce.

One of the best scenes of the film is set at Crawford's place of work, the perfume counter of Black's Fifth Avenue. The movie was adapted from a play by Clare Booth Luce, which openly refers to Saks. I'm guessing Saks didn't take kindly to the suggestion it employed women of questionable repute; thus, the name change. Blacks, Saks, or otherwise, the scenario says a lot about the various social intersections revolving around perfume, intersections which don't occur at the cosmetics counter, pretty exclusively the domain of women.

A man goes to the counter to buy his wife a present. Summer Rain is the latest thing. An enormous display features the decorative, umbrella-themed bottles. Every woman who passes has heard of the stuff. To have it is to be what it says it represents. To buy it and present it is to bestow luxury, glamor, sex appeal. The shopgirl sees that her male client cares enough to buy the very best, which is actually probably crap, meaning that in addition he is also very impressionable, easily led. She leads him astray. Wifey gets Summer Rain. Shopgirl hits the jackpot.

Gossip Rosalind Russell visit Blacks to investigate, hiding behind the Summer Rain display to spy on Crawford. Joan has just been on the phone with Steven Haines, playing him like a fiddle. He was calling to cancel their dinner plans (the assumption being, dinner is at her place, which was bought and paid for by him) but she can't allow his interest in her to go interrupted, so in her best little girl voice she declares it happens to be her birthday, and he changes his mind.

Crawford has no idea who Rosalind is, so Rosalind makes sure she knows. It doesn't change anything, because Crawford's "Crystal Allen" has no conscience, thinking only of herself and her feelings. Any man is fair game. Norma Shearer shouldn't have fallen asleep at the wheel. Rosalind and her friend comment on the fact that Mr. Haines must have been in the store, because Mrs. Haines owns a new bottle of Summer Rain. They would very much like to smell it, they say, so Crawford sprays some in their faces.

Perfume is secondary to the plot and ultimately has nothing really to do with anything in any specific way, no more than the fashion show which occurs smack in the middle of The Women, a sudden burst of technicolor in an otherwise black and white film. But seeing perfume at all in the story made me realize how much I'd like to see that kind of content in other movies, and how rarely I do. It also made me realize, when it comes to perfume, how many different things there are to explore thematically. Perfume weaves in and out of our lives in ways most of us don't even think about. Smells attach to memory and become an essential part of who we are. In The Women, Summer Rain defines a version of womanhood. If your husband gives it to you, you're loved. Owning it, women become charter members of a fantasy lifestyle, where maids prepare fancy meals in the kitchen, children are on their best behavior, a dress fits in such a way that the woman wearing it looks like no one else who owns it, and kisses don't feel rushed or perfunctory. In real life, perfume has been working the same way ever since.

Does anyone else know of a movie (besides Perfume) which features perfume in some way?