In 1982, Los Angeles District Attorney John Van de Kamp reopened the case of Marilyn Monroe’s death
reaffirming the coroner’s original 1962 assessment after the actress’s body was found in her Brentwood home
As the case was being reopened,a British newspaper suggested that Irish-born journalist Anthony Summers might want to launch his own investigation,
which resulted in 650 tape-recorded interviews and eventually led to a 1985 book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,
Those taped interviews, never available to the public, have been dramatized and shaped into the documentary The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes, directed by Emma Cooper and featuring Summers as a guide.
The results are often a little more prurient than they need to be, and the film’s revelations aren’t so much world-rocking as very, very sad. There are no definitively solved mysteries here.
Most of these interviewed people are now gone, of course, so the documentary uses actors to mime the words we hear on the tapes; these performers are seen in low-lit rooms, sometimes only half-glimpsed, wearing ‘80s-appropriate clothing.
the idea of the casting couch should shock no one. And no one who loves Marilyn Monroe, or even just the image of Marilyn that we know, is likely to pass judgment on her for anything she did on her way to becoming a star.
What’s more, hearing this now 40-year-old testimony from a relic of old Hollywood serves as a reminder of how the business used to work—and in that context, that it took until 2017 for Harvey Weinstein to fall seems all the more remarkable.