Sharon Tate watches The Wrecking Crew

Sharon Tate’s afternoon screening of The Wrecking Crew at the Bruin Cinema makes the movie theater both a place of work and a place of judgment: she watches a performance she remembers making, then discovers what it does to an audience. The decisive moment is not simply seeing herself on screen, but hearing the matinee crowd laugh at the pratfall she had feared she might fail to land.

A detour on Westwood Boulevard

After leaving Arthur’s store with a rare first edition in her hand, Sharon walks along Westwood Boulevard toward the cinema where her movie is playing. She reaches the corner but misses the green light, waiting with her back to the theater and the book still in her hand. When the light changes, she does not cross. Instead, something draws her back into the Bruin’s courtyard, where she examines the lobby cards: one pairs Dean Martin with Elke Sommer; others show Sharon with Martin, first peering over a wall and then in her comic entrance, sprawled on a hotel-lobby floor as he bends to help her.

The cards return her to the circumstances of the performance. She remembers how nervous she was to attempt slapstick, a kind of acting none of her earlier jobs had required. Her character’s clumsy, bumbling manner was not an incidental gag but the part’s defining idea. She had accepted the role for that reason, yet the first fall still troubles her in retrospect: Martin had spent twenty years watching Jerry Lewis fall, and she worried that he would know if she got the business wrong. Director Phil Karlson and Martin had praised the pratfall, but their gentleness left room for doubt. Sharon wonders whether she is genuinely funny or merely the familiar screen image of a beautiful woman trying to be funny. Her own answer is practical: the audience will decide by laughing or not.

Choosing to see herself

The decision to enter the theater comes with a clock attached. The box-office window lists a 3:30 show, while Sharon’s thin gold watch reads 3:55. She calculates that this is approximately when she appears in the film and asks herself whether she can still watch it and get ready for Playboy After Dark that evening. The question also exposes a conflict between the spontaneous person she has just told herself she is and the person who stalls on the sidewalk, debating whether to see her own movie. She recalls that, without Roman Polanski, she would be driving to Big Sur with Cheyenne, dancing barefoot in the mud to Crosby, Stills and Nash. Now she recognizes the irony of standing still to argue herself out of an opportunity to act spontaneously.

She buys a ticket for seventy-five cents. As she enters the dark auditorium, the projector’s rotating reels and the small, regular ticks of the 35mm print passing through the film gate give her immediate pleasure. That mechanical sound connects the public screening to a longer history of watching movies. As a girl in Texas, she had gone to the theater on her father’s Army base, to the Azteca with friends, and to the Starlight Drive-In with a boy. Then movies had meant entertainment, not art. Living with Roman Polanski has changed her understanding: she now believes film can be art, and that a director can work with a force comparable to a great author. She regards Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby as a different kind of art from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, not as a lesser one.

The entrance and the audience’s verdict

Before the screening, Sharon hopes she has not missed her entrance while dealing with the box-office girl. On screen, Freya Carlson comes running into the scene carrying champagne and calling for Mr. Helm. When Martin turns, she trips over his camera case and lands flat on her backside. It is the pratfall that had seemed so exposed in memory: the first entrance of a character whose comedy depends on physical awkwardness, performed under the gaze of a star associated with slapstick.

The Bruin audience responds with a collective belly laugh. Sharon turns around in her seat to look at the smiling faces, wishing she could thank each person individually. Their laughter answers the question the lobby cards and her recollection could not settle. It does not erase the anxiety she felt while making the scene; instead, the screening gives that uncertainty a public measure. The moment she had privately replayed as a possible failure becomes, in the theater, a successful gag shared with strangers.

A changed relation to the performance

Once she has seen the response, Sharon turns back to the screen grinning. She unzips her white go-go boots, slips out of them, stretches her long legs over the back of the chair in front, and settles in to enjoy the rest of the movie. The small change in posture marks a release from the tension of waiting for the verdict: she is no longer watching only for the moment she might have got wrong, but allowing herself to watch the film.

The scene brings together several versions of Sharon’s relation to movies. She is the actress whose comic work is on display, the former casual moviegoer who learned to think of film as art, and the spectator who tests her own performance against an audience’s response. Her visit is unplanned, but its result is concrete: the laughter confirms that the awkward fall works, and she leaves the anxious question of whether she can be funny behind long enough to enjoy The Wrecking Crew.