Dec 29, 2020 Web Exclusive By Ed McMenamin
Town Bloody Hall is fascinating, not because it was ahead of its time, really, but because it is so precisely
of its time, a snapshot of progressive women doing battle and also just simply enduring the presence of a Norman Mailer, a troll, an expert crowd-baiter, a brilliant writer and often unparalleled thinker who also harbored ugly and stubborn opinions on women and gender.
Filmed by cinema verité documentarian D.A. Pennebaker and a small crew in 1971,
Town Bloody Hall captures Mailer’s verbal brawl with four prominent women writers and activists Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston and Diana Trilling shortly after his essay, “The Prisoner of Sex,” inflamed the women’s liberation movement and made Mailer its public enemy No. 1, if he wasn’t already.