Date Bait

Love is a myth,” she’d say, like the opening line of a Shakespearean play. “Never fall for love.” Why was an actress of radio, stage and screen—a woman who’d been reading and performing romantic comedies for 20+ years—so pessimistic about love? The devil it seems lies in the many logical fallacies of fairytales.

She worked all her life. Talk Radio KOLA’s “Father of the Bride” ran for seven consecutive seasons, but was little more than a part time job away from the back-to-back riggers and leading roles she played at the Glendale Center Theater. During the scant 15-minute intermissions of her current performance, she’d sneak backstage to quietly rehearse the next play. Presenting the Oscar for Best Juvenile Performance, Ruth Hale, curator of the iconic Ruth and Nathan Hale Theater said, “Carol Dawn was our finest actress.” A mere 6 miles or 22-minute drive to the Entertainment Capital of the World, Carol Dawn’s commute from radio to stage and screen was cutting hairpin turns to the Land of Dreams.

She signs with Roger Corman’s new motion picture company "The Filmgroup" (today a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures) and on the occasion of her 18th birthday is emancipated from her parents who she financially supports. The Filmgroup won’t use unions, the first and only production company of its kind, pioneering a shooting technique called back-to-back film production for which Carol Dawn is well trained. For the first time in Hollywood history, “Little Shop of Horrors” with newcomer Jack Nicholson is shooting by day, whilst Carol Dawn in “Our Teenage Love” is simultaneously shooting at night. The Filmgroup is shunning Hollywood's opulent movie theaters; replacing old classics with contemporary storytelling; and churning out ultramodern double features into 4000 drive-in movie theater across America.

She approaches the corporate headquarters of the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank California. It’s a 51-acre metropolis where classics like “Mary Poppins” and the “Mickey Mouse Club” are filmed, but Disney has recently begun subletting their back-lot and sound stages to independent film makers. Directed to Stage #2 she takes her seat at the table read. It is the first time the cast is assembled, and the first time they’ll see or rehearse the entire script. Turning to the cast list, she observes that her character has the longest description, and it’s all she knows of the part she’ll soon portray on the silver screen:

Freida Porter: The Ingénue. She's Slats' girl and considered kind, compassionate, and a consummate friend. A maternal archetype, her oversized handbag contains every conceivable item from a needle and thread to countless packets of gum and a dime for an emergency phone call. Her infectious laugh and fun-loving nature conceals a deep caring for those around her.

She scribbles “Mother Complex???" in the margin for reference, and begins affixing hairpins to each page that bear her character’s name. The Filmgroup's Roger Corman takes his seat at the head of the table and reads the synopsis aloud: "Scene: Pirates; A teenage hangout in Los Angeles in 1960. A scorn lover and heroin addict confronts the heroine before she elopes to Las Vegas.”

Carol Dawn is in the opening scene, and notices that the script originally titled “Our Teenage Love” has been renamed “Date Bait.”

He's been called “The Pope of Pop Cinema” and the “Godfather of Independent Film." Roger Corman is the youngest filmmaker to have a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, British Film Institute, and Museum of Modern Art. In 2009, he received the Academy Award for his “rich engendering of films and filmmakers,” and honored for debunking classic Hollywood cinema and creating the first independent studio in Hollywood.

Five major studios controlled classic Hollywood cinema from its first film in 1910 called “In Old Hollywood.” RKO Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner and MGM were all capturing the power of live theatre on the cinematic screen. Westerns, comedy, musicals and cartoons were the order of the day, until World War II yielded romance, war movies and fairytales. However, the Big Five’s wholesome storylines and glamorous movie stars weren’t reaching the new Beat Generation, nor could they speak to or reach their emerging Counterculture Revolution.

Civil Rights, Vietnam, Gay Rights, and the Second Wave of Feminism were on topic in 1960, and the documentary film “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” examines how Roger Corman mentored iconic filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese by bringing their unique brand of storytelling to the silver screen. He even turned the All-American Boy into an iconic filmmaker when he pulled Ron Howard behind the camera in his directorial debut “Grand Theft Auto.”

He shed light on racial violence and school integration when he cast William Shatner in “The Intruder.” He explored LSD and psychedelics with Dennis Hopper in “The Trip.” He even put Peter Bogdanovich behind the camera, and Peter Fonda in front of it, to reconstruct the very phenomenon of counterculture. When a small gang of Harley Davidson motorcycles ride contrary to the California coastline, they effectively question, challenge and change the world in “The Wild Angels.”

At a day and time when Doris Day reigned, Roger Corman effectively ousted the old guard of classic Hollywood cinema and ushered in a period known as New Hollywood. How a rag tag group of rebels at The Filmgroup were able to sidestep the unions, challenge the studio system, and create relevant storytelling all began in 1959 with Roger Corman's “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Date Bait.” Hollywood’s transition from classic idealism to new wave realism pricked the American psyche, and provoked an appetite for more realistic stories about the true relationship between lust, passion, and love.

The Sexual Revolution of 1960 was a social movement that questioned traditional codes of conduct from every corner of society including medicine, psychology, art and science. In fact, Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1953 was being celebrated for just that: a breakthrough discovery in human sexuality.

Studying the mating rituals of gall wasps at Harvard University, Dr. Alfred Kinsey noticed the critters had a quirk. If 0 represents exclusively heterosexual behavior, and 6 exclusively homosexual behavior, the now famous Kinsey Scale observed that the vast majority of his 100,000 gall wasps appeared to be living somewhere in the rather murky margins of bisexuality.

As a zoologist at Indiana University, Kinsey turned his microscope on humans. Surveys of thousands upon thousands of men and women led to the "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" in 1948, and the "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in 1953, which combined to reveal that insects and humans shared oddly similar mating rituals.

Kinsey’s purely scientific approach inspired the Masters and Johnson research team at Washington University in St. Louis to create an actual laboratory, and to record the first data on the anatomy and physiology of human sexuality. Based on the direct observation of 382 women and 312 men—who in different combinations performed 10,000 complete cycles of sexual response—their discovery of a predictable pattern of sexuality included excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution which once again put them on the cover of Time Magazine in 1970.

Their magnum opus "Human Sexual Response" was published in 1966, and became the predominant resource for the medical community on sex. Myths surrounding promiscuity, fornication, adultery, masturbation, postpartum depression, menopause and the midlife crisis were all debunked as behavioral disorders by the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," and reintroduced as natural occurrences in the primordial life cycle.

Showtime's "Masters of Sex" chronicles how science prevailed where religion had failed—to scientifically examine the human sexual experience. Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, and proponent of the "Mother Complex," described this period as “a natural cycle whereupon a rigid culture, unable to contain the demands for individual freedom, exonerates itself from social constraint by creating a new and vibrant counterculture.” New Hollywood—with a penchant for reality, subtext and irresolution—was re-writing the greatest story on earth.

After three months of shooting, The Filmgroup sent it first full-length features into the vortex of the Counterculture Revolution. A strategic box office and awards season, “Date Bait” debunked the corollary between passion, sex, and love with a cautionary tale that brought the consequences of unchecked self-examination to the silver screen. Variety Magazine reviews the trades and writes:

"Date Bait" daringly takes on drugs, addiction and sex in Filmgroup’s new avant-garde approach to film-making. Plot and point of view are informed less by dialogue than metaphor. Enjoy the fight scene with Hollywood heartthrob Gary Clarke, but look deep into Freida’s bag for the truth and nature of love.

She gave up her career for love, is how she explained her exit from acting, for somewhere during the 118-week run of "Little Shop of Horrors" and “Date Bait,” her life began to imitate art. Like Freida, who’d eloped to Las Vegas in the movies, Carol Dawn had become a cliché. A Las Vegas romance of her own produced a son she’d raise independently and alone.

From her appeal to authority in “Father of the Bride” to the stage, where Sleeping Beauty encounters a prince and paradox, Carol Dawn wore the many colors of a woman well. "Always be the leading lady in your own life,” Audrey Hepburn once told her, elucidating upon the very line that made her famous. Correcting an unabashed misogynist in the pygmalion “My Fair Lady” she explains: “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated.”

As I approach the 30th Anniversary of my own Commitment Ceremony, I realize now that I was led here to him by her. “Find a friend,” my Mother always said, demystifying the smoke and mirrors of romance. After mistaking lust and passion for love in her youth, she trained me in a way only an actress can. “Love, dear Drew, is about point of view. It’s not just something you feel. It’s something that you do.” It was her signature line, perhaps her most memorable role, and the greatest part she ever played.