As I mentioned before, Lynn Nottage's new play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, imagines a fictional African-American star of pre- and post-Code Hollywood, and to fill out the fiction there's a fan website ostensibly hosted by the film buff/scholar Herb Forrester (Daniel Breaker).
As Lynn promised in our interview, there's now a short documentary on the site about Vera's legacy featuring director Peter Bogdanovich, scholar Mia Mask, and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, all playing along admirably (Dryburgh, truth be told, is the one responsible for the lustrous look of the movie-within-the-play, The Belle of New Orleans). Duly noted: the repurposing of the infamous drain-the-pool story (which I had previously heard in reference to Nat King Cole), and the Russian-underwear anecdote whose provenance I can't place (but which I know I've heard before). Oh, and Bogdanovich's deadpan invocation of mythology at about the 6:30 mark.
Meta-enjoy...
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