By: Mimi Lipson

She excelled at rapacious clingers, albatrosses, and bad mothers.

By: Mimi Lipson

High Corman: pell-mell, hep, bizarrely hybridized.

By: Mimi Lipson

Her young voice throbbed with friction and experience.

By: Mimi Lipson

His music and his life disguised joy as menace — and vice versa.

By: Mimi Lipson

He may be the best put-on artist since Andy Kaufman.

By: Mimi Lipson

A contro­versial auteur who aimed at truck drivers and college students.

By: Mimi Lipson

The foppish poses, the aspect of wounded nobility…

By: Mimi Lipson

The documentary films of FREDERICK WISEMAN (born 1930) are usually set in institutions and have institutional titles like Hospital and High School and Welfare. His work is often called cinéma vérité, but it’s a term […]

By: Mimi Lipson

He knew his audience inside and out.

By: Mimi Lipson

“Just because you got them big udders don’t make you something special.” So says Earl Peterson (DIVINE, born Harris Glenn Milstead, 1945-88) to Dawn Davenport (Divine, again) in two of her greatest roles. And Earl […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Filmmaker PRESTON STURGES (1898-1959) made a joyful mockery of the Hays Code with his improbably wholesome card sharks, unwed mothers, imposters and flimflammers, his ballot box stuffers, shoplifters, party girls and bigamists. “I can’t keep […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, […]

By: Mimi Lipson

In 1965, SHIRLEY MULDOWNEY (born 1940) beat down the doors of the National Hot Rod Association and became the first licensed female drag racer. And despite the signature pink cars monogrammed with her nickname, “Cha-Cha” […]

By: Mimi Lipson

With his casual athleticism and big white teeth, with his good-looking features that somehow fail to coalesce into good looks, BRUCE DERN (born 1936) is the dropout personified — the kid who had every advantage […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Look at the way people describe JOEY RAMONE’s (1951-2001) voice: “bleat,” “snarl,” “hiccup.” Would they say the same about Ronnie Spector? His voice was honest, plangent… it was bliss. He left us too soon, yes, […]