Alleged Monroe sex film up for auction

A SPANISH collector plans to auction what he claims is a newly discovered 8mm version of a film purportedly showing Marilyn Monroe having sex when she was still an underage actress known as Norma Jean Baker.

A Marilyn Monroe expert, however, says the actress in the film is someone else, considerably heavier and less feminine than the legendary film star.

“That’s not Marilyn. The chin is not the same, the lips are not the same, the teeth are not the same,” said Scott Fortner, who has a sizeable collection of Monroe memorabilia, including a belt he said proves how much more petite she was.

“Marilyn was a tiny little thing. And I know that for a fact. I own her clothing.”

Collector Mikel Barsa said he wants at least $500,000 (€348,000) for the sexually explicit 6½-minute, grainy black-and-white film, which he says was made before 1947, when Monroe was not yet 21.

He said it’s an exact copy of a 16mm film discovered more than a decade ago.

Barsa brokered a sale of that film to a European magazine in 1997, which he said in turn sold some 600,000 copies before a collector bought the original 16mm reel for $1.2 million (€800,000). Copies of that version are still circulating on the Internet.

“People with romantic notions have denied that it’s Marilyn Monroe, and have invented stories” to raise doubts about the film, Barsa said in his Buenos Aires office.

“This film shows the real Marilyn Monroe — it was only later that the studios discovered her and transformed her.”

The face of the woman in the film looks considerably different from the Monroe who emerged later as a star, but more similar to the Monroe seen in one of her first movies, 1949’s Love Happy, which shows the actress before she lost weight, added a beauty spot on her left cheek and became one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars.

Barsa says he plans to auction the film himself on August 7 at a memorabilia collectors fair that he has organised in Buenos Aires, and is hoping for publicity similar to the scandal he generated when he screened the 16mm version at a similar fair in Madrid in 1997.