Hats Off to Hollywood
Penelope Spheeris’s thesis project for UCLA’s film school picks up with luminescent transgender personality Jennifer Michaels, the captivating subject of Spheeris’s nuanced docu-portrait, I Don’t Know (1970), for a loosely scripted hang within Los Angeles’s queer underground.

Lions Love (…and Lies)
For her first feature in the United States, Varda’s ode to the age of Aquarius coaxes her characters through the disorienting final years of the peace and love movement. Stealing Warhol superstar Viva away from the East Coast, Varda resettles her in a lavish Hollywood Hills rental with two hippie Adonises for a languid ménage à trois under the Southern California sun. The arrival of avant-garde filmmaker Shirley Clarke playing a mélange of Varda and herself threatens to disrupt the trio’s aimless existence.