Valda Z. Drabla

Brooke Dammkoehler’s meditation on the rise to stardom of a glamorous movie idol (modelled after Greta Garbo), draped in gorgeous black & white photography and a tone of delirious grandeur.

Teenagers Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb share a dangerous sexual bond and an amoral outlook on life. They spend afternoons breaking into storefronts and engaging in petty crimes, until the calculating Nathan ups the ante by kidnapping, and murdering, a young boy.

A gay poet heads west from New York City in his convertible. He picks up a muscular sailor who's bisexual; then Jackie, a waitress at a diner, joins them. Jackie is attracted to the poet who rebuffs her romantic gestures; rejection fuels her continued interest in him. The sailor and the poet are bonded by sex, but the sailor's frank advances to Jackie make him uninteresting to her. The sailor can get violent, the poet is passive, Jackie is glamorous and detached. The landscape changes, they stop in cities and in the desert. They reach a lake. Who will be left out of a final pairing?