Pretty Baby

Production

Pretty Baby, although based in the red-light district of New Orleans, was filmed at the Columns Hotel located in the uptown area of the city at 3811 St. Charles Avenue. The hotel “had been converted into a baroque Hollywood version of a Storyville bordello” during the filming. Studio designer Trevor William’s decor, indigenous pieces such as beds with mosquito nets, and Victorian furniture filled the hotel for what screen director Polly Platt described as “splendor without comfort.” Local rumors of “Babylon coming to New Orleans” prompted production company Paramount and director Louis Malle to develop a low key publicity strategy for the film in an attempt to avoid receiving an “X” rating. The film was eventually rated “R”(Flake 1978).

Cast and Crew

Louis Malle

French director Louis Malle has a passion for directing films that “surround our greatest taboos” said film critic Carol Flake (Flake 1978). Before directing Pretty Baby, his first American film, Malle worked on films such as Black Moon and The Lovers, which generated much interest and lead to both French and American film offers (Arnold 1978; Flake 1978). Malle claims that over the years his directing style has evolved from a “young and innocent and pretending to be tough”€ to a style that is “actually tough” (Duplantier, Stephen. “A Modern Bellocq Meets €’Pretty Baby'”.€ Figaro, April 12, 1978, pg. 25).

Although the release of Pretty Baby lead to many negative associations with his name, Malle’s film also received much positive feedback; film critic Jack Kroll called it “a civilized intelligent work by one of the world’s most intelligent and civilized filmmakers.” In an interview with Gary Arnold, Malle stated, “I feel that it is my function to disturb, in fact to transmit my own disturbances which is immense. I want to force people to look inside themselves even if they hate me for doing that” (Kroll 1978, 106).

Brooke Shields

Brooke Shields, who was twelve years old during the filming of Pretty Baby, was introduced on the big screen when the film released in 1978. Before Pretty Baby, Shields appeared in advertisements for companies such as Ivory Soap, Colgate, and American Home Magazines, making her “a veteran icon of the all-American girl”(Flake 1978). However, her role in Pretty Baby as a child prostitute caused an uproar among many child’s rights activists and film critics, accusing Louis Malle of “exploitation of child prostitution” (Kroll 1978, 106). Although her role involved what was deemed unsuitable activity for a young girl, Susan Sarandon said of Shields that “people don’t realize she is more mature than her age. She knew what the role involved, and she is a professional”(Flake 1978).

Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon appears in Pretty Baby as Violet’s mother, Hattie, a prostitute working in a New Orleans brothel in which she births and raises a daughter (Scott 1978). During the filming of Pretty Baby, Sarandon was intimately involved with the director, Louis Malle. In response to harsh criticism of the film and of Malle’s treatment of Brooke Shields, Sarandon wrote a letter of protest to New York stating that much of the criticism was “a distortion of the whole situation”€ and that “Louis was always considerate of Brooke’s feelings” (Flake 1978).

Aside from Pretty Baby, Sarandon has appeared in a multitude of films and received many awards including an Academy Award for her role in Dead Man Walking and five nominations for her roles in Atlantic City, Thelma and Louis, Lorenzo’s Oil, and The Client. Although critic Jay Scott describes her career as “one most actresses would warm Naugahyde casting couches-and slit throats-to attain,” Sarandon claims that she never planned on a career as a film star (Scott 1978).

Keith Carradine

Keith Carradine appears in Pretty Baby as Earnest Bellocq, the man who in reality photographed Storyville prostitutes, and in the film photographs Hattie (Sarandon) and becomes romantically involved with child prostitute Violet (Shields). Director Louis Malle chose Carradine for the film because of a certain “strangeness to his face: He really has the most bizarre looking of the whole Carradine family, if you observe his face closely.” Screen director Polly Platt said of him, “he’s come a long way from playing the all American sex hero to an asexual eccentric.”

In the film Bellocq’s character, although in his late twenties, is actually the more innocent and naïve in comparison to his young lover. Carradine said of the relationship that “Bellocq is a 27 year old virgin when he meets Violet, and the movie is about his underdevelopment as much as her precocity. He can relate to her because he, himself, is a child, and she can respond to him in a safe way” (Flake 1978).

Influences

Al Rose

Historian Al Rose’s book Storyville, New Orleans, is one of the main inspirations for the film Pretty Baby. However, Rose claims that the film is inaccurate and although he had been paid for the rights to the book, he was “ignored.” One discrepancy in the film, Rose claims, is “the presence of both black and white prostitutes in the same bordello.” Also, Rose stated that Louis Malle “sensationalized”€ the story of child prostitute Violet, which was so brief a segment in his book. The book contains a short interview with the real Violet in which she states, “I know it’d be good if I could say how awful it was and like crime don’t pay-but to me it seems just like anything else-like a kid whose father owns a grocery store. He helps him in the store. Well, my mother didn’t sell groceries”(Flake 1978). 

Earnest Bellocq

There is little known information on the life of photographer Earnest Bellocq. He lived in New Orleans, photographing the prostitutes of Storyville, and created a collection of photographs that were discovered after Bellocq’s death in 1949 by local collector Larry Borenstein and then sold to photographer Lee Friedlander (Flake 1978). Friedlander created prints of Bellocq’s work, which appeared in 1978 in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit “Storyville Portraits.”

New Orleans local artist Mary Daspit remembers Bellocq “not as the misshapen hydrocephalic dwarf he has been called” but as “a slightly obese character with a floor-length great coat full of pockets” and that “he spoke with a more Teutonic accent than a French one” (Duplantier 1978). Some who claim to have known him saw he was Swiss, as well as German, while others say French. Local historians have come to the consensus that he was “a grotesque Toulouse-Lautrec sort” (Flake 1978).