“On some level, I think she knew it was a weapon,” someone can been heard saying of the first time Carol Doda laid eyes on the monokini, the kind of wild and not particularly practical swimsuit that someone might invent in the swinging 1960s, in “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor.” The threat might’ve first seemed as if it was directed towards her when it was not so subtly suggested to the go-go dancer at San Francisco’s Condor nightclub that she should put on the get-up, which covered exactly half of her, to help spice up an act that already was quite outrageous when she’s descend from the ceiling on top of a piano. But Doda, who had rose from a cocktail waitress to a star attraction at the speakeasy through sheer will, saw the ridiculous outfit as a way to show what she was made of in more ways than one.
Where patrons saw skin, co-directors Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker see something deeper in their delightful documentary which sweeps up audiences now as Doda once did as a singular phenomenon, truly throwing some curves onto Broadway to make North Beach the Bay Area’s most bustling area. Although the act of dancing topless in and of itself may not have caused much of a stir in the notorious enclave for free spirits, McKenzie and Parker see Doda twisting more than her hips when she seized upon a number of cultural trends from dance crazes such as “The Swim,” helped to be popularized by local musicians Bobby Freeman and an 18-year-old named Sly Stone, to the movement towards women’s liberation where bras were seen as bondage. In defying public decency laws, Doda didn’t only make herself a star, but put power in the hands of women in a world where they were given little regard, giving way to everything from topless clam chowder restaurants and shoeshine benches, but exposing double standards in industries largely controlled by men.
On a larger level, it’s fascinating to see the impact Doda had simply from her performances, but McKenzie and Parker find an endlessly compelling story simply within the entertainer’s immediate circle, filled with celebrity admirers such as Frank Sinatra and the sons of Barry Goldwater, who were in town for the Republican National Convention of 1964, the mob-connected owners of some of the clubs on Broadway, and the dancers who could cash in on the trend such as Judy Mamou, who took things to an entirely different level when she brought a boa constrictor into the mix. Now the most fun you could have with your clothes on after stops at Telluride and Mill Valley last fall, “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor” is making its way to theaters (with some select screenings even boasting a burlesque show this opening weekend), and the filmmakers behind it spoke about how the project has evolved over nearly a decade, all the remarkable archival material they were able to lay hands on and keeping the energy high with a lively soundtrack.
From what I understand, this has been in your idea pile for some time. How did it rise to the top?
Jonathan Parker: Yeah, it sat in an idea pile for 20 years or so because I was talking about doing a film with Carol herself. I met her when she opened up her lingerie store on Union Street and I had an office in the building. I was a budding filmmaker and she was very famous at the time. But I didn’t really know her story. When I started looking into it, I just became fascinated by her career being launched by a random series of unrelated events — [she was] a go-go dancer, [then the invention of] a monokini, and a Republican convention [came to San Francisco], and the swim dance [trend]. I hung out with her for a while and followed her around various gigs she had for a few months and did a lot of work on the project. We almost came together on it, but ultimately, it didn’t happen. And I just put it in the file, and Marlo and I were later working on a different project. And she found it in my office.
Marlo McKenzie: Yeah, in terms of the idea pile, that one looked pretty sexy, so it rose to the top when I was cleaning the drawer. But when I did the research, aside from being a fun and sexy topic, it has some real meat to it. It’s set in this time where it’s just before the summer of love, before the sexual revolution and the women’s rights movement. That’s a great time to explore in a movie and in terms of women’s rights, it was a time where women didn’t have as many rights and Carol decided to do something that women just didn’t do. So to unpack that and explore that was very enticing. Jonathan and I talked about it, and we were like, “Okay, let’s go for it.”
Carol feels like a bit of an enigmatic character and you really do have so much ground to cover with how many cultural spheres she touched. Was it difficult to figure out how to structure the film?
Jonathan Parker: Yeah, it was a challenge to organize because it does touch on so many different elements, and so many of which are so contemporary still. Partly there’s an arc that was going on, not just in San Francisco on Broadway Street and those night clubs at that time, but really in a lot of American cities where there was a burst in the mid ’60s of optimism and idealism and innocence. This topless dancing was a part of that. But then things gradually started to change. The porn industry came in in the ‘70s, and the drugs got harder. The people got harder in a lot of ways, so you see this arc where it rises and then declines and that same thing happened in many ways in a lot of American cities during that same mid ’60s to mid ’80s time period, and we wanted to maintain that.
Marlo McKenzie: There’s this quote that I love that Alfred Hitchcock said, that people make fiction or narrative projects, but God or the universe makes documentaries, so there’s always that element of, “Whoa, what do we have here?”
Was there anything that took this in a direction you really didn’t expect?
Marlo McKenzie: The part of it where Jimmy the Beard was crushed by the piano [that Carol was known to dance on], I was quite surprised that it was actually probably connected to the mafia, according to the people that we talked to. That definitely took that into a direction that surprised me.
Jonathan Parker: I was continually surprised. The interview [Carol] does with the priest, which we use a lot of in the film was something that came to us fairly late in the process. That was just such an incredible discovery for so many reasons.
Was there much available where she could recount her own experiences?
Marlo McKenzie: I would say we really used almost everything that we had of her voice and that was important to have her speaking for herself as much as we could. If we had more, we would have loved to put more of her in there. But we searched everywhere.
Jonathan Parker: She did a few talk shows that had the tapes, but nobody [at the TV stations] kept that stuff. They just destroyed that stuff after it was broadcast. There’s probably three or four or five elements of her speaking on camera in the film, but it was a challenge.
Still, it was staggering the amount of archival material generally you were able to get your hands on. Did you have an idea before going too deep into it how much was out there?
Marlo McKenzie: We had a team of researchers. We had about four people and then Jonathan, myself, and our editor Jennifer were finding material in various archives in the Bay Area, mostly. But also we had people contacting us who found things [everywhere, like] an estate sale. So it was a years-long process of a lot of people working on it. We were delighted that we found as much as we did.
Jonathan Parker: And really great interview material kept coming in late in the process when we almost felt like we were finishing the film, but wanted to incorporate it, so it was very much a living process.
You have a lot of great interviews, including with Judy Mamou, a fellow dancer of Carol’s and a wonderful counterpoint. What was it like getting her involved?
Marlo McKenzie: It was amazing. Judy Mamou is just exactly how you see on camera. She just whips out these one-liners, these zingers and she’s so amazing and brilliant. I really admire her and to hear about her nightclub act was like, “Wow, what a cool thing. Who wouldn’t want to go see that show?”
Jonathan Parker: And we didn’t include everything about her act, including the three guys having to try to pry open the jaws of a snake that had bit her in the back and latched onto her. But [she’s] another courageous nightclub performer.
Jonathan, you actually were the music supervisor on this as well and the music not only places it in the era, but really sets the energetic tempo. What was that like to work on?
Jonathan Parker: We talked about it having the character of a musical the whole time we were making it, so to be able to go through and pick all my favorite mid-’60s songs, particularly centering on San Francisco-based groups, was really fun. We couldn’t get the rights to everything, but we did have Jack Douglas, a very well-known guy in the music producing world and he composed and recorded about seven songs also for us to take the place of the big songs that we couldn’t get the rights to. He did such a wonderful job.
It’s as much a film about San Francisco as it is about Carol, and it was nice to see everyone who gathered for the Mill Valley Film Fest screening. Did a sense of community grow out of the film?
Jonathan Parker: Yeah, very much. Carol, obviously, is a lot more famous in San Francisco than she is elsewhere and even in San Francisco, you have to be of a certain age to have remembered her. But she had tremendous amount of goodwill in San Francisco and people really thought very well of Carol, so I think there’s a lot of people in the community in the Bay Area where to have this film about her career is a really welcome addition to the culture.
Marlo McKenzie: Yeah, and I’ve had so many women come up to me after the screenings, [especially] from that time period and they had this sense of their contribution to the women of today. That sense of their sisterhood was definitely a feeling in the air because of this movie, and that was really delightful to see.
“Carol Doda: Topless at the Condor” opens on March 22nd in New York at the Angelika Film Center, Los Angeles at the NuArt and San Francisco at the Roxie before expanding on March 29th. A full list of theaters and dates are here.
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