Hats Off to Hollywood with Lions Love (…and Lies)

Hats Off to Hollywood with Lions Love (…and Lies)

Special guest: Introduction by director Penelope Spheeris

Hats Off to Hollywood
Penelope Spheeris’s thesis project for UCLA’s film school picks up with luminescent transgender personality Jennifer Michaels, the captivating subject of Spheeris’s nuanced docu-portrait, I Don’t Know (1970), for a loosely scripted hang within Los Angeles’s queer underground.

Lions Love (…and Lies)
For her first feature in the United States, Varda’s ode to the age of Aquarius coaxes her characters through the disorienting final years of the peace and love movement. Stealing Warhol superstar Viva away from the East Coast, Varda resettles her in a lavish Hollywood Hills rental with two hippie Adonises for a languid ménage à trois under the Southern California sun. The arrival of avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke playing a mélange of Varda and herself threatens to disrupt the trio’s aimless existence.

Hats Off to Hollywood
DIRECTED BY: Penelope Spheeris. WITH: Jennifer Michaels, Dana Reuben. 1972. 22 min. USA. Color. English. 16mm. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

Lions Love (…and Lies)
DIRECTED BY: Agnès Varda. WRITTEN BY: Agnès Varda. WITH: Viva, James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Shirley Clarke. 1969. 115 min. USA. English. DCP. Lions Love (. . . and Lies) was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and The Film Foundation.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.

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