Each time Bette Davis's name comes up here or there (surprisingly often) I feel waves of guilt that I never completed that Seasons of Bette series. And here I was planning my own series, as its follow up, inspired by "A Year With Kate" in which I would do 52 episodes on someone. (FTR Anne Marie and I are both brainstorming how to follow up that amazing beast of a project).
But I couldn't let this new episode of Blank on Blank pass by without our attention. If you haven't seen the series it's a terrific time waster from PBS in which celebrity voices play on the audio and an animator interprets them for a unique short film. Bette talks about her intelligence and the gender politics of 1963 in this fun short...
I was always terribly outspoken and just always said what I thought...
I think it's too much trouble to be dishonest and keep up with yourself. The simpler road is to just say what you think. Then you haven't got to always check what you said to one person and what you said to another. I think this is EXHAUSTING actually. One can be respected with the truth in Hollywood just as much as anywhere else, you know, or else I wouldn't have had a career.
This interview was recorded at quite a hot moment in her career. After years of tinkering around with the then newish television medium and films that didn't go anywhere, she was back in the conversation in a big way for the first time in a decade. What did it was of course the comeback hit Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) which netted her one final Oscar nomination in a fascinating and inarguably marathon career as a movie star; she found work steadily as an actress -- sometimes a lot of it -- from the age of 22 through her death at 81 in 1989.
Here's that Blank on Blank episode.