The Connection

The negative reviews inspired the Voice's Jonas Mekas to pen an apoplectic "Open Letter to the New York Daily Movie Critics," published in the Oct. 11, 1962, paper. "You have completely misled the American audiences with your bloody columns," he wrote. "You are deaf, blind and dumb."

A month later, the highest court in the state reversed the Regents' decision, but the delay, and the damage done by reviews, ensured dismal returns. According to Milestone, The Connection still has not recouped its $167,000 budget.

PHOTO © 2012 MILESTONE FILM AND VIDEO

Freddie Redd, left, Jackie McLean and Carl Lee in The Connection

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New Beverly Cinema

7165 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Melrose/ Beverly/ Fairfax

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More About

• Shirley Clarke
• Jim Dunn
• Jack Gelber
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Theater

During this time, Clarke co-founded the self-described "self-help organization" Filmmakers Co-op with Mekas. Clarke was the only woman to sign the Co-op's September 1962 "Statement for a New American Cinema," which planted a flag for film as a personal creative expression, for the "ethical and esthetic" necessity of low budgets, and railed against the tyranny of the established systems of financing, distribution, exhibition, censorship and what they called the "Product Film."

Clarke went on to win the documentary feature Oscar for Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel With the World in 1963, but she would remain a conflicted outsider to the industry, even after moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. "People ask me why I haven't made Hollywood films," Clarke said during a seminar at the American Film Institute in 1975. "I reply: 'If I were a man, I might have tried to be Orson Welles. But as a woman and an artist, it's impossible. ... They don't take us seriously."

She also might not have taken herself seriously enough. "I never felt that I was interesting," Clarke said at the seminar. "So I used the 'junkie' or the 'black man' to express my feelings of alienation. Only now I can admit it. The women's movement made me realize how brainwashed I had been; that because I was a 'female' filmmaker, my work was worthless, significant only to myself.

"But that has changed, and a female is the protagonist in my next film — a combination of Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers, which can be made for under $400,000," she said.

That incredible-sounding hybrid unfortunately didn't come to pass. Between 1975 and her death in 1997, Clarke experimented with video, but she directed only one other film feature, the Ornette Coleman documentary Ornette: Made in America — which, also restored by Lipman, is the next target of Project Shirley.

THE CONNECTION | Directed by Shirley Clarke | Written by Jack Gelber | Milestone Films | New Beverly Cinema