A page from women’s history

“ALL women’s history is hidden to some degree,” says director Mary Harron, whose latest movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” tells of the famous 1950s pinup who gained notoriety when her bondage and fetish modeling for photographers Irving and Paula Klaw became the focus of Senate hearings led by Estes Kefauver, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, in 1955.

As famous for her hairstyle -- long and black with short, curved bangs -- as for her nude photos, jungle shots and high-heels-and-black-stockings fetish pictures, Page, played in the film by Gretchen Mol, was revived as an icon of 1990s sex-positive feminism after Taschen published two books of her photos in 1996. That’s around the same time, incidentally, that it seemed independent film, and particularly women in independent film (among them Harron, co-writer Guinevere Turner and producer Christine Vachon), were poised on the vanguard of a new era in American movies.

For a woman who looks and dresses like a friendly, well-heeled suburban mom, Harron is irresistibly drawn to troubled, violent characters. Her first film, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” told the story of Valerie Solanas, the unstable radical feminist and author of “The S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto,” who in 1968 put a couple of bullets in the most famous artist in America. Her second, “American Psycho,” was based on Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous novel about a slick, successful mergers-and-acquisitions expert who enjoys killing and dismembering girls in his spare time.

More accurately, though, what the 49-year-old director also is drawn to are characters with secret lives, living in secret worlds. In this light, it’s not all that surprising that her current image would appear to contradict her former life as a rock journalist during the CBGB era in New York, where she cofounded Punk magazine with writer Legs McNeil and was the first writer to interview the Sex Pistols in the United States.

“Certainly, I’ve always been attracted to that. Punk rock, when I was a part of it, was called ‘the underground.’ There was something very attractive in all the hidden places. The hidden histories,” says Harron, whose next film, “Please Kill Me,” is an adaptation of McNeil’s chronicle of that time.

“I like subjects that are enigmatic and contradictory,” says Harron. “And Bettie expressed these interesting contradictions between something we associate with shame and sexual oppression, something sinister, something hidden, powerful, decadent -- the bondage imagery -- and then her own spirit, which was wholesome and happy and joyful. And by expressing that joyfulness she made [the photos] seem fun and playful.”

A devout, studious Christian from Tennessee, who was her class salutatorian and won a $1,000 scholarship to a teachers college, Page radiated an innocence and naivete in her work that encapsulated the contradictions of the time. In middle age, she suffered a series of mental breakdowns, became violent, stood trial for attempted murder and was eventually committed to an institution for 10 years. It’s a period in her life the film doesn’t delve into, however, in part because it would have required too much explanation, but mostly because Harron wanted to focus specifically on the hysteria surrounding sex during Page’s heyday as a model.

“Although I think people want her to be, Bettie is not just a sassy feminist icon. She’s a woman of the ‘50s and sees her life as someone of the ‘50s would. She probably thought she should be married and have children. She wasn’t doing this to be a rebel; she was just improvising her life day to day.”

Harron was drawn to Page as a character but also as a way to talk about sex in the sexually repressive ‘50s. Shot mostly in black and white, the movie incorporates grainy, high-contrast archival footage from the time. The idea was to re-create the look of 1950s films while letting the story unfold from a neutral, nonjudgmental perspective.

“We have all these movies from the ‘50s, but they’re told from such a male perspective and such a ‘50s ideology. You wouldn’t see Bettie’s story from her point of view. People wouldn’t be interested in what it was really like or take her story at face value,” said Harron. “Films from that time are hilarious because of their complete condemnation of any kind of female initiative or ambition. It was such a contradictory world that even the law itself didn’t have a clear handle on it.... I really wanted to get across that moment in time of naivete, fear and panic.”

But if the movie seems to comment, however obliquely, on a new puritanism in contemporary culture, this was far from Harron’s mind when she conceived it.

“I started working on the idea in 1993. Bill Clinton had just been elected, and it didn’t feel at the time like we were going back. At the same time, there were those periodic panics over lyrics and video games, so that was there. But it wasn’t until a few years later that it really seemed like we were going back to the ‘50s.”

Harron, who was born in Toronto and educated at Oxford University, has always been aware of the way women’s stories are often told from a male perspective or passed through the filter of prevailing attitudes toward sex.

“If I was telling that story in a ‘50s style, it would have been a melodrama,” Harron says -- “a story of ‘An innocent girl falls into the seedy, sordid world of bondage and then sees the light and is born again.’ If I were telling it now in an urban, sophisticated way, you would have a story about a girl who is a free spirit, who does these lighthearted bondage photos, then she crashes and she turns to religion -- which would be the tragedy in the modern view, because it’s so polarized now that people see any religion as representing the horrible forces of puritanism. I was trying to comment on the sad confusion surrounding sex at that time, present it in a complex way, and give her religion a fair hearing too.”

As a filmmaker, Harron has battled both a professional resistance to female directors and her own internalized obstacles. After leaving journalism, she began working in television documentaries for the BBC, working in TV for a decade before making her first movie.

“There’s an institutional reluctance -- crews are mostly male -- but there’s also that [personal] reticence.... I went to a film class to talk, and it was half men and half women. But the women didn’t talk. So finally, halfway through, I said, ‘Why aren’t the women talking? Why are only the boys talking?’ ... But it’s not only hard for women. It’s also hard for anybody trying to do stories off the beaten track. I’ve made three films so far, but I made the films I wanted to make, how I wanted to make them.”

For Harron, retaining control of casting is crucial to getting a film done the way she wants it. While she was developing “American Psycho,” in which the director had decided to cast a then-little-known Christian Bale, Leonardo DiCaprio became interested in the script. Harron stood by her guns, and it nearly cost her control of the movie. It’s this, more than the types of stories she tells, that keeps her making smaller films that take longer to finance and longer to sell.

“If I did a big Hollywood movie, I wouldn’t be able to control casting. And certainly if I had been given a lot of money to do this movie, I wouldn’t have been able to cast Gretchen. They always want you to cast the big star of the moment. And a lot of the time, the most interesting person to play the part is not the big star of the moment. So I wind up doing things that are fairly low budget.”

Mol is grateful for Harron’s tenacity. “Certainly a lot of people didn’t necessarily see me that way [as Bettie], and she could have gotten the movie done more quickly and with more money if she had gone for anyone else,” says the actress. “But Mary has the courage of her convictions.... I thanked her later, and she said, ‘Well, I didn’t do it to be nice,’ which was the best thing she could have said.”

“She was very much of the period,” Harron says of Mol’s audition. “A lot of people played it too sexy, in a very modern way. And I think Gretchen had a very instinctive understanding of the sexiness of a very different time. You have to go back before Playboy, before the outright, blatant sexiness to something more hidden, teasing, more of the nice girl. Naughty but nice.”

“The Notorious Bettie Page,” to be released by Picturehouse and HBO Films in March, has scenes in which Mol poses nude for photographers. Whether they are enough to earn the film an R rating is up in the air.

“We haven’t faced that yet,” Harron says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. The scene when she takes all of her clothes off -- the movie is so much about what is the fear of sex, and Bettie’s whole career is about showing her body. [She is famous for posing] naked in the Garden of Eden, and she is famous for the bondage, the clothes, the gear. You have to have that contrast. You had to show what everyone is afraid of. That’s the heart of the movie. To lose that would be very hard.”