Summers and Swimmers
With a new retrospective, the screenwriter Eleanor Perry gets belated recognition.
Still from The Swimmer.
The 1972 Cannes Film Festival was marked by protests against Italy’s reigning auteur, Federico Fellini, who had green-lit an ill-advised poster for his movie Roma. Depicting a nude, three-breasted “she-wolf” perched suggestively on all fours, the advertisement drew opprobrium from the venerable American screenwriter Eleanor Perry and five others, who, according to the Chicago Tribune, “stirred up a hornet’s nest when they set up ladders in front of the Carlton Hotel before the [Roma] showing … and tried to deface [the] sign.”
The protestors waved signs that read ; soon they ascended a tall aluminum ladder “and threw four cans of red paint on the Fellini poster,” the reported. The cops started “shaking the ladder and trying to knock them to the ground while Mrs. Perry screamed (a French word meaning wicked and evil) and ripped epaulets
