An Ingénue’s Intimate Snapshots of the New Hollywood
Sweet Clark got here to Hollywood on the daybreak of the seventies, a spunky twentysomething who’d fled her conservative Texas dwelling city and brought up modelling in New York. Although she was detached to performing, she nabbed an element, as a boxer’s girlfriend, within the John Huston movie “Fats Metropolis,” plus a movie-star beau—her co-star, Jeff Bridges. She settled into Bridges’s Malibu dwelling however saved a bungalow off Fountain Avenue, near auditions. She was forged in “American Graffiti,” George Lucas’s second movie, a couple of group of sixties teenagers on the eve of maturity, motoring round Modesto, California, on a late-summer night time. Clark performed Debbie Dunham, a bombshell in a platinum bouffant who hops in a Chevy with a dweeby admirer, on the lookout for journey. Her castmates included the younger Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford, and Ron Howard (billed as Ronny). With out understanding it—nobody did, actually—she’d landed sq. within the period that may turn into recognized, and far mythologized, because the New Hollywood. Wherever she went, she took her Polaroid digital camera.
Sweet Clark photographed by Ed Ruscha within the desert, circa 1976.{Photograph} by Ed Ruscha / Courtesy the artist
Ed Ruscha.{Photograph} by Sweet Clark
A lifetime later, Clark has launched “Tight Heads,” a group of her Polaroids from the seventies and early eighties. She’d dug them up in a spare bed room at her home in Los Angeles, on the behest of the author Sam Candy, who was interviewing Angelenos for his challenge All Night time Menu and who turned the e book’s editor and writer. “Hollywood is a historical past of males taking a look at ladies via cameras,” Candy writes in his introduction. “By no means had the lens been turned on them by the ingénue. Beneath Sweet’s gaze, the swashbuckling icons of Hollywood legend turn into harmless.” Clark’s closeups of acquainted faces—Steven Spielberg, Carrie Fisher, David Bowie—have the tossed-off intimacy of a extra freewheeling time, when the events (and the medication) have been plentiful, and everybody was “simply youngsters.”
Carrie Fisher.{Photograph} by Sweet Clark
Richard Dreyfuss.{Photograph} by Sweet Clark
“The floating celebration—you met everybody,” Clark stated not too long ago, after I met her for lunch at Smoke Home, a Burbank restaurant that’s been round because the forties. We sat in a red-leather banquette, and Clark pulled out an outdated Polaroid SX-70 picture album. She opened it to a shot of younger Sweet, mendacity on a ground with a backgammon board and a bottle of Kahlúa. “Jeff Bridges introduced that Kahlúa and milk into ‘The Huge Lebowski,’ when he was the Dude,” she stated. “He took loads from our life collectively.” In “Tight Heads,” every portrait is accompanied by Clark’s breezy, half-remembered impressions of her topics. Spielberg: “I had a bit crush on him however he had no curiosity. Didn’t even make it to first base.” Dreyfuss: “He had simply damaged up with a girlfriend previous to doing the film and spent quite a lot of time crying in his mattress. Not actual enjoyable.” Anjelica Huston: “A kind of people who find themselves so elegant that you simply’re all the time a bit intimidated even after they’re being pleasant.”
Anjelica Huston (with unknown companion).{Photograph} by Sweet Clark
