Marilyn Movie Maker

In 1955, Peter Mangone was a big-eared, fourteen-year-old Bronx boy with a deep love for Marilyn Monroe. Every day, he’d dress up in a suit and tie and ditch school to meet Marilyn outside the Gladstone Hotel on 52nd St where she was staying while she went through her divorce from Joe DiMaggio. One spring morning, he brought his brother’s 8mm Revers camera along.  Magically, Marilyn saw him as she was leaving and smiled, winked and beckoned for him to come along. 

Peter spent the afternoon with her strolling down 5th Avenue, filming periodically and later developed it himself and watched it at his home.  For many years, the film was thought to be lost, a casualty of growing up and out of childhood fantasies — until Peter’s brother rediscovered the film buried in a box in their childhood home.

httpv://youtu.be/R-stydeOZS8

images via here.