Screenings
Part of the series Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind: Joan Didion and Cinema
Play It As It Lays
TUE OCT 25, 7:30 PM
Copresented by the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Visit the exhibition Joan Didion: What She Means before the film. Galleries will be open until 7:30 p.m.
Joan Didion’s Hollywood novel Play It as It Lays was adapted by Frank Perry, based on a script she penned with her husband John Gregory Dunne. The film proceeds as a kind of hypnotic regression. Its scenes pulse between the memories of an actress played by Tuesday Weld—of poolside parties and clandestine abortions, of visits with her institutionalized daughter and languid hours wiled away in a furnished apartment—cohering into a distinctive and underappreciated vision of Los Angeles anomie.
(1972, dir. Frank Perry, 35mm, color, 99 min.)
