LITTLE SHOPPE! LITTLE SHOPPE OF MODELS!

Turner Classic Movies has come through again with another hard-to-find 60s movie. This Thursday Dec. 18th at 11:45pm EST they are airing Model Shop (1969). In Jacques Demy’s beautifully filmed tribute to Los Angeles and its youth culture, Gary Lockwood (post-2001: A Space Odyssey) plays an alienated twenty-six year old architect waiting to be drafted and facing an overdue car payment. During the course of a twenty-four hour period, he has encounters with three women: his grasping starlet girlfriend (Glamour Girls' Alexandra Hay pictured with Lockwood) who wants to get married; a beautiful French woman (Anouk Aimée) who works as a model, posing semi-nude for amateur photographers; and a hippie chick (Drive-in Dream Girl's Hilarie Thompson) who he picks up hitchhiking.



Per my book interview with Hilarie, she remarked about Model Shop and playing hippies in general:

“All that I remember about Gary Lockwood is that he took me out on a date and tried to seduce me—unsuccessfully I might add."

"I hardly remember the picture itself but as I was playing this role I felt more like myself. I usually felt like a cartoon caricature of a hippie in most of the hippie roles that I played. It's hard to talk seriously about "hippies" these days because it is conceived as a silly, youthful fad. But I was a hippie. Having survived a harrowing, bohemian childhood, to finally be able to be the neurotic, war protesting, free loving and thinking person I was "raised" to be was quite liberating. The late 60's liberated me from that 50's and early 60's bourgeois life style of the normal and functioning which my family was not. One could be open about one's life experiences and the crazier or more horrendous your life had been or was, the more interesting you were. Show business made "hippies" and "the revolution" a caricature, but to me on a personal level it was not a silly, youthful fad but a time that changed the world as we knew it and saved my life. It opened up the world to many, many things that before that time were unmentionable. People opened up and began to talk and I think it was a great time.”