Tune in Tonight: Death of a Centerfold
The tragedy of Dorothy Stratten gets a condensed & misleading made for TV treatment.
80s made for TV movies about true stories had a few strikes against them from the beginning. Often, due to time constraints, real life events were condensed into 90 minute highlight reels, diminishing any dramatic impact. The limited production values also made them look cheap and campy, which was fine if you were telling, say, The Jayne Mansfield Story, but no so great if you were dramatizing a horrific murder-suicide, as in 1981’s Death of a Centerfold, a movie that tried hard to be high drama, but ended up looking like a reenactment on America’s Most Wanted.
Based on the death of Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten, a true story far too gruesome to be watered down and made appropriate for network television1 (if you’re feeling in too good of a mood, read the Pulitzer Prize winning Village Voice article about it), it stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy, and Hill Street Blues‘ Bruce Weitz as Paul Snider, her husband and eventual killer. Both are woefully miscast: Curtis looks nothing like Dorothy, and, though she makes a yeoman’s effort, she just isn’t convincing as a wide-eyed naif whose blind trust in men ultimately seals her doom. While Weitz is absolutely convincing as a murderous scumbag, and wears a series of impressive gold medallions, at nearly 40 he’s simply too old to play the mid-20s Snider. The tragedy of Snider is that he was naive in his own way, believing he had the juice to make it in Hollywood as Dorothy’s “manager,” while Weitz comes off as a slick con man who just spent ten years in jail immediately before the movie begins.
After a cheesecake photo session over the opening credits, we very briefly get to know Dorothy before the fame and the downfall. A sweet, shy teenager, she’s stunningly beautiful, but of course completely unaware of it. Sauntering into her life is Paul, a satin cowboy shirt-wearing lowlife who dazzles Dorothy by trying to pay for a .55 cent ice cream cone with a hundred dollar bill. Because there was limited time to give the characters any dimension, Paul is such a broad parody of a smooth-talking predator that it ultimately ends up making Dorothy appear less naive and more like she was dropped on her head as an infant.
Though malevolence all but seeps like pizza grease from Paul’s pores, even when he’s trying to be loving and tender, Dorothy adores him. She’s disappointed when absolutely no one else in her life feels the same way, particularly not her aunt (Bibi Besch), who tells her “He’s after something, and I’m not just talking about you know what!” That something that isn’t just you-know-what is making Dorothy into a star, which Paul does by demanding that she go braless in a plunging neckline dress and lie about her age so that a photographer buddy will agree to do a racy shoot of her. After the weakest of protests, Dorothy is won over by Paul’s promises of Hollywood fame and fortune, and they submit her photos to a Playboy talent search.
Dorothy’s photos make the cut, and she’s invited to stay at the Playboy Mansion. A smalltown hayseed from a city which is basically the Canadian equivalent of Los Angeles, Dorothy goggles at such mysterious objects as “limousines” and “swimming pools.” She meets Hugh Hefner (Mitchell Ryan), who takes an immediate shine to her. All things considered, of the three men who figure prominently in Dorothy’s life, Hef comes off the best here, kind and paternal, and not wanting to push such an innocent, sweet girl into anything she doesn’t want to do. It’s a puzzling choice to portray Hefner, who famously referred to Quaaludes as “thigh openers,” in such a way, except perhaps that folks behind the scenes at NBC wanted to ensure that they’d still be invited to the Mansion after this aired.
In that previously mentioned condensed storytelling unique to made for TV movies, the time elapsed between when Paul and Dorothy first meet and when Dorothy is invited to stay at the Playboy Mansion seems to be just a month or so, when in reality it was at least a year. Paul joins Dorothy in Los Angeles, and appears to be there for one whole day before he bristles at the attention Dorothy (whom he encouraged to be a nude model, let us reiterate) receives from other men. Despite his lofty goals of stardom for Dorothy, Paul doesn’t seem to understand how show business works, in that Dorothy is expected to meet people who aren’t impressed by Paul’s exposed chest hair and Vancouver street cred (though the planet where anyone would be impressed by Paul has yet to be discovered).
Meanwhile, largely without Paul’s help, Dorothy’s star is on the rise. In addition to being chosen as Playmate of the Year, she draws the eye of writer-producer David Palmer (played by Robert Reed, and presumably based on Peter Bogdanovich), another older man who thinks he knows what’s best for her, except the difference between him and Paul is he has class and actual pull in Hollywood. Though she’s clearly attracted to David, Dorothy marries Paul. Marital bliss is short-lived, however: literally, as just two scenes later they split up, and Dorothy moves into David’s mansion.
Despite finding happiness and stability with David (or at least stability), Dorothy still feels a great deal of loyalty to Paul, who…well, we’re not quite sure what Paul has done for her, considering it’s her face and body that made her famous. Nevertheless, Dorothy steadfastly insists, with a doomed look in her eyes, that she owes him her entire career, and can’t just leave him to crawl back to Canada with his tail between his legs. As the film edges closer to its tragic conclusion, Dorothy begins to act as though she has foreseen her fate, and is quietly giving into it, making emotional phone calls to her family, and all but saying goodbye to her friends. It’s another puzzling choice considering that, by all accounts, in real life Dorothy was optimistic that she and Paul could separate amicably, and didn’t behave as though she didn’t expect to move on with her life.
The final confrontation between Dorothy and Paul plays out like some weird, awful stage play, where they take turns crying and screaming at each other, and then Dorothy politely sits there and waits for Paul to take a shotgun from his closet and murder her. I will spare you the details of the real life event (and indeed it’s not entirely known what sort of horrors occurred in the hours leading up to the real Dorothy’s death), but it’s highly unlikely that she simply accepted a shotgun blast to the face as the inevitable outcome of her relationship with Paul.
While capably made, what is essentially a Cliffs Notes version of the life and death of Dorothy Stratten lacks the emotional punch such a story should have. Though Paul Snider, of course, deserves no sympathy, the film lacks nuance, or any explanation as to why Dorothy, naive but not an idiot, would still feel some sense of responsibility (and even love) for him, despite his awful behavior. He’s a dirtbag when he comes into the movie, and he’s a dirtbag when he goes out, and there’s simply no way anyone would buy what he’s selling. For all that we’re shown, it seems as though the only thing Paul does for Dorothy is take her out to dinner a couple times and then introduce her to a photographer, which makes her stubborn loyalty to him all the more baffling. No one would let the Paul of the movie help them change a tire, let alone allow him to talk them into posing nude.
The movie does ever so briefly explore the notion that Dorothy seems to be chafing against her relationship with David, who also wants to “take care” of her (which is, of course, a polite way of saying he wants to control her). One can assume that the real Dorothy, pulled on all sides by the responsibilities of being a rising young star, and more importantly, by the men in her life (which included the “paternal” Hugh Hefner) wanted to try living life for herself for a little while, and that would have made a far more interesting story, as would Hefner and Peter Bogdanovich spending the next few years after Dorothy’s death publicly debating over which one of them was more devastated by it (Bogdanovich ultimately ended the debate by marrying Dorothy’s younger sister, because why wouldn’t you). A beautiful young woman treated in death as she was in life, as an object to be fought over and claimed by men, makes for a far more compelling plot than this prime time soap opera.
A more realistic version would come a year later in Bob Fosse’s Star 80, a movie in which former pretty boy Eric Roberts was so terrifyingly effective that he would spend the rest of his very busy career playing heavies, scumbags, and guys who just shouldn’t be trusted.