July 6

Time Magazine publishes “Some Sort of Nadir,” a review of the film Myra Breckinridge, 1970. The historic, X-rated disaster starred John Huston and Raquel Welch (above), along with Mae West, Rex Reed, Roger Herren and Farrah Fawcett. Its behind-the-scenes friction between West and Welch, disastrous box office and scathing reviews have become the stuff of legend, with the first line of Time’s review―“Myra Breckinridge is about as funny as a child molester”―oft repeated and alarmingly accurate. The review went on to call the 94-minute fiasco “an insult to intelligence, an affront to sensibility and an abomination to the eye. Based on Gore Vidal's sordid little sex-change novel, the movie took nine months and at least $5,000,000 to make and spawned more tales of cast warfare than any film since The Night of the Iguana. The result is an incoherent tale of sodomy, emasculation, autoeroticism and plain bad taste.”