11/8/25

Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast

Directed by Bruce Weber (2018)

Followed by Q&A with photographer Bruce Weber and Carrie Mitchum, granddaughter of Robert Mitchum. Followed by book signing.

In the mid 1990s, iconic photographer Bruce Weber managed to convince Robert Mitchum, Hollywood’s original “bad boy,” to appear before his camera for a filmed portrait. Weber shot Mitchum in 35mm and 16mm black and white, hanging with friends and cronies in restaurants and hotel rooms and singing before a microphone at Capitol Records, recording standards for a projected album. When Mitchum passed away in 1997, Weber parked his beloved project, and it was some time before he went back into his footage; picked up the camera again, and completed his tribute to Mitchum, which includes interviews with family members, as well as with actors that knew him and/or love his work, such as Clint Eastwood, Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp.

Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast is a textured portrait of a man who came from — and for many, was the very embodiment of — a bygone era, speaking and enacting its prejudices, its longings, and its charms. In Bruce Weber’s words: “In making a portrait of Bob, I tried to show the man who made over 130 movies and still wanted us to believe that he just didn’t care. Bob was very well-read and wrote poetry, which comes as a surprise to most people, who can only see him as the original tough guy who made war movies, noir films and Westerns. Our film was initially inspired by a book Bob wrote with his brother John called “Them Ornery Mitchum Boys” but I realized that my film was really about an aging sex symbol, who happened to be a man – instead of the usual Marilyn Monroe story that we’re so used to reading about.”

---

Screens with:

MAKE ME RAINBOWS

Bruce Weber, 2025  |  5 mins  |  DCP 

A first look at a work-in-progress series of musical shorts. The title, “Make Me Rainbows,” comes from a recording on an all-new, soon-to-be released Chet Baker album, “Swimming by Moonlight.” Filmed in Miami this spring, the film presents a family of redheaded rascals messing about on the beach, intercut with footage from Weber’s 1988 Oscar-nominated feature, “Let’s Get Lost.”