Jonathan Parker And Marlo McKenzie Talk CAROL DODA TOPLESS AT THE CONDOR!

Well, I met Carol when she opened a lingerie store on Union Street in San Francisco, and my office was in the building in front. She was in a little courtyard, and I kind of overlooked her store. This was in the late ‘90s, and she was a very famous San Francisco personality and character, but I didn’t know her story. And I started to research it a little bit, and I was really struck by her career being launched by a very seemingly random convergence of unrelated events. She was a go-go dancer who danced on a piano. A Republican Convention was coming to town. They wanted to get business into the club.

Simultaneously, fashion designer Rudi Gernreich releases a monokini, a topless bathing suit. I just found that so funny in a way. I met Carol and we got along and I kind of pitched her on doing a movie. It wasn’t going to be a documentary in my mind at that time. I was a budding filmmaker and she was receptive so I followed her around for several months. She had various master ceremonies gigs and public appearances, and she sang in a little jazz combo. We got pretty far into talking about this film project. Then she took a step back from it. I had written quite a lot of notes and even some script, and I just put it in a drawer. Twenty years later, Marlo and I were working together on another project and Marlo found my file in the drawer and took it from there.

Marlo McKenzie:

I came onto the project through Jonathan’s notes and it was very interesting to see the nature of the notes, and I started to research Carol. I hadn’t heard of her before and a few things just came up when you learn about her. The first is that when she worked in the Condor when she first took off her top or wore the monokini, that was a special time in history where it’s just before the sexual revolution, just before the Summer of Love, and the Civil Rights Movement, and all of this, and the Women’s Rights Movement, and all of that was about to happen historically.

So the time is fascinating, then also, it was a time when women were very restricted in what was expected of them what women could dream for themselves, and what society dreamed for them. And so for Carol to step up and say, ‘I’d like to have a career and I’d like to be the career to be dancing topless’, this was not something women did. She was the first to do it, but it was very courageous of her to live so authentically because she was someone who loved her form, but to have the courage to do it at a time when that was a no-no for women, was attractive. And so Jonathan and I talked and we decided to reopen the story and pursue it.

Glen Dower:

The amount of research that’s gone into this piece is amazing. How did you go about finding all that footage and those interviews that she carried out? And obviously, you talk to people like Judy Mamou, what a character she is too.

Jonathan Parker:

We started to reach out a little bit on social media and Marlo found a San Francisco History group, we subsequently found out that there was a book that had been written by the wife of one of the original club owners, Pete Mattioli. It was a biography of her husband, but it covered Carol, it covered the Condor. So, all of a sudden, we had access to a lot of people who were still around, friends of theirs, and we interviewed them numerous times, and we had a great research team on the finding of archival material related to it. We couldn’t find everything, but we found a lot of stuff, and it kept coming in through the process, even quite late when we were almost concluding the film, we’d get a whole batch of you know interesting stuff so it was kind of a living breathing project.

Glen Dower:

I also really want to talk about the soundtrack as well. You have fantastic archive footage, and music is rarely not playing in the background, as part of the soundtrack. I really enjoyed the music and would often focus on what was playing. There was a point while I was watching, I noted down ‘Music today is awful’. How did you decide on what tracks you would be playing?

Jonathan Parker:

I’m a musician, so to be tasked with the assignment of picking all my favorite songs from the mid-60s was kind of fun, and I did try to concentrate on San Francisco bands. Most of the groups are San Francisco-related. And, one of our interview subjects, Jerry Martini, is with Sly and the Family Stone, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And so he was there, both playing with a company in Carol before joining Sly after. So, music was weaving its way through this thing all the time. And Sly Stone wrote The Swim, which became a really important song at this moment and place. And that’s what she was, that’s the music that was playing when she came down topless for the first time. I think we wanted to make it a Musical and feature the music. I’m glad Glen that you responded to the soundtrack!

Glen Dower:

The soundtrack on its own is so good, and so much fun. Also, I’m a big history buff, and I very much enjoy coming across moments where a subjectively small detail then leads to something huge. Wow Moments. I have two big wow moments. The first one was the changing of shall we say the focus of the female anatomy. How breasts became the focus area as they were starting to be left unaffected by child raising, due to the introduction of baby formula instead of breastfeeding. The second one was how industrial silicone, as it just happened to lying around in Japan, was used to increase the breast sizes of the prostitutes to attract US soldiers. For you guys, were there any wow history moments you came across in your research?

Marlo McKenzie:

Definitely, for me, I didn’t know as well about why breasts are so fetishized now. I love how Judy Mamou says, ‘Men want boobs’, but I never really thought about it. Why is that in place? That was just very fascinating. And when you do think about it, you’re like, oh, actually ankles were sexy at some point in history. And then, okay, it moved to legs. But I think in the research process, the thing that maybe surprised me most was just the wildness of what was at that time, like Judy Mamou and her snakes and her monkey on stage and the fire act and just the spirit of just, whoa, this was a crazy time, really surprised me because it’s very different now. It’s very clamped down, I would say.

Jonathan Parker:

The nightclub acts, the variety of the nightclub acts between these clubs who are all competing against each other and one-up each other. Then coming up with some novel ideas was a fun aspect of that time. And I’m not sure that that exists anymore. And Marlo mentioned, at one time, it’s the ankles. It’s like whatever has suddenly been slightly revealed. I mean, it’s just amazing, to this day, if you watch the Oscars and the costumes and the after-party costumes, the amount of body that a woman reveals, both in their acts as performers and even just in their fashion statements, is a very interesting phenomenon and I think one that we tried to emphasize in the film.

Glen Dower:

And in your opinion, from the research and the work you put into the documentary, do you think we would have had so many cultural aspects today: including respectful nudity in film, like Poor Things, then the other end of the scale…Hooters, if we didn’t have Carol doing what she did?

Marlo McKenzie:

We talk about that, but the way fashion has changed as well. Is that all down to Carol and her pioneering spirit, if you like? Well, it could be. It’s hard to say. She was a part of it, right? She happened to be the one who was there at that point in history, but what happened was that this embracing of this culture was like, yes, we want this freedom, this feeling of freedom, which it was at that time. It was very different from what we have now. And so it was women who embraced it everywhere. It spread across the country, and so, yes, it does kind of start there.

If you go back in history, it’s like women have danced that way since probably the cavemen times. But it’s interesting to contrast Carol, though, with, you know, they did have strippers back then, obviously, they wore pasties, so they weren’t technically topless, but, you know, one of the things about Carol’s act is that she was very candid about her nudity. So she would stand on the stage, you know, nude, and she would engage the audience in conversation. And I think there’s something about how candid she was about it and how it wasn’t this mysterious, you know, scarves and veils and, you know, revealing of things. Here I am, and let’s just have a conversation. And I think that was a very appealing part of her act.

Jonathan Parker:

Yes, and I’ll just jump off to that. She added comedy. She was funny. So that comedy immediately relaxes people and just sets them at ease. And so for her to set someone at ease and say, hey, let’s just have fun, and there’s nothing to feel like ashamed about here. That was something that Carol was always admonishing me when I first started working on this film project with her directly: You better make it a comedy! She just wanted her life to be remembered that way, and not remembered for you know the more tragic and sad parts that you know are a part of a lot of lives.

Glen Dower:

That came across, she was dry, very quick, very witty. She seemed very sharp. I can say she wasn’t a bimbo at all, she was a businesswoman, responding to supply and demand. She wasn’t relying on her body. It was just a tool for her. One more question I wanted to ask. We have the section of your documentary where law enforcers are seen clamping down on various acts and various clubs. What is your view that law and legislation still have that aspect today, when they clamp down on entertainment when they should be clamping down on other areas? Why do you think that you have that imbalance, where we have laws and legislation against entertainment when we could be focusing our energy on gun crime or knife crime?