Girls in
Johnny Firecloud (1975)

3-D Movies are mounting a comeback. Again. Be still, my bleeding eyes. Again.

At age 7, I stumbled upon the famous photograph of a movie theater audience staring up, enraptured, at Bwana Devil (1953) through paper eyeglasses with colored lenses.

Some nearby authority figure explained to me that those people were watching a 3-D movie, and those glasses enabled the images to jump right off the screen.

The immediate, flawlessly logical question I blurted out then was: “So why isn’t every movie in 3-D?” Nobody could explain it to me.

Seven was also the age when I happened up Pops McBeardo’s Playboy stashed in the bathroom hamper, so my unspoken query was: “And why isn’t Playboy in 3-D? And what about dirty movies?” The answers would come. As would I.

On March 27, 1973, Marlon Brando won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Godfather. However, Brando had grown angry over his country's poor treatment of Native Americans, particularly the negative stereotypes perpetuated by Hollywood and TV. Accordingly, Brando refused his Oscar and contacted his friends at the American Indian Movement (AIM) about sending a representative to the Academy Awards in his place to turn down the Oscar and state his reasons for refusing it. The AIM leaders picked former winner of the 1970 Miss American Vampire competition Sacheen Littlefeather to go on stage when Brando's name was called, officially refuse the award, and read a 15-page statement written by Brando about the 71-day standoff between U.S. Marshals and members of AIM that was currently ongoing in the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which was also the site of a massacre of Oglala Sioux Indians by the US military in 1890. The producers of the Academy Awards threatened to arrest her if she spoke for more than 45 seconds, so Sacheen improvised her comments onstage and read Brando's statement in its entirety to the press. Seven months later, Sacheen appeared nude in Playboy magazine. She also appeared in a number of films, including The Trial of Billy Jack (1974) and Johnny Firecloud, in which she got topless. For her stance against injustice and her bulbous chest-wigwams, Sacheen Littlefeather gets the one-handed salute from Mr. Skin.