Peter Bogdanovich: an apology.

I chose to write fiction instead of, say, journalism because I'm too lazy to check facts. If I seem to get something wrong in a story, then I just say "Yes, your leading character can change the color of his eyes between books. That's the way it is in my world. Twenty-three dollars, please."

But reality can still bite you in the fleshy parts. Yesterday's whimsy about Secundus's majestic video included a reference to an early gem from the oeuvre of Peter Bogdanovich (who can do no wrong, because he made What's Up, Doc?, one of my favorite movies of all time, even if it was a rip-off of Bringing Up Baby). And in doing so, I committed a grave error.

As will become apparent, I haven't actually seen Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, as I mendaciously implied, and for the shameful purposes of mere humor, I rashly and recklessly assumed that the eponymous females would be clad in fur bikinis.*

Alas, the briefest trip to the Internet Movie Data Base would have avoided my faux-fur-pas. Those prehistoric ladies (from the planet Venus incidentally, among them Mamie Van Doren) did not wear fur bikinis. They wore hip-hugging skin-tight pants and seashell bras.

Glad we cleared that one up.

*c.f. Raquel Welch in the seminal One Million Years, B.C., which includes the stunning work of special effects wizard and all-round genius of the silver screen, the great Ray Harryhausen and is probably responsible for the sticky creationist belief that cavemen and dinosaurs co-existed, although I wouldn't underestimate the impact on intelligent design of that Ringo Starr movie, either. Well, on intelligence, anyway. A pre-Cheers Shelley Long and a pre-Ringo (until she got to the movie set) Barbara Bach wore the fur bikinis in that one. So I'm told.