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DREAMING

by
in Filmmaking
on Jan 8, 2007


I don’t post a lot of rumors on this blog, but this one is cool. Ain’t It Cool News linked to Film Ick which linked to this article in New Zealand’s Stuff, in which Kirsten Dunst discusses an upcoming film role:

Her only project on the horizon is with visionary French director Michel Gondry, whom she worked with on Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. “[It’s] about somebody who everybody knows, but I can’t say who it is,” Dunst teases, before admitting her character is a “well-known singer”, giving credence to reports that she is to play a very abstract take on Deborah Harry of the band Blondie.

No idea if this is true or not, but, if so, I hope Gondry includes Harry’s story of almost being abducted by Ted Bundy. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page linked here for the link.)

This is from the Urban Legends reference page, linked above, and is quoted from a 1989 newspaper article:

The way Deborah Harry recounts the story is absolutely frightening. The rock singer, best known for her work in the post-disco, New-wave band Blondie, was just trying to hail a cab. It nearly ended in disaster.

“I was trying to get a cab on the lower east side of the Village in New York, and it was kind of late,” Harry said. “This was back in the early ’70s. I wasn’t even in a band then . . . I was trying to get across town to an after-hours club . . .

“A little white car pulls up, and the guy offers me a ride. So I just continued to try to flag a cab down. But he was very persistent, and he asked where I was going. It was only a couple of blocks away, and he said, ‘Well I’ll give you a ride.’

“I got in the car, and it was summertime and the windows were all rolled up except about an inch and a half at the top. So I was sitting there and he wasn’t really talking to me. Automatically, I sort of reached to roll down the window and I realized there was no door handle, no window crank, no nothing. The inside of the car was totally stripped out.

” . . . I got very nervous. I reached my arm out through the little crack and stretched down and opened the car from the outside. As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast, and I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street.”

The driver, Harry concluded more than 15 years later, was serial killer Ted Bundy, who was executed last January in Florida’s electric chair.

“It was right after his execution that I read about him,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about that incident in years. The whole description of how he operated and what he looked like and the kind of car he drove and the time frame he was doing that in that area of the country fit exactly. I said, ‘My God, it was him.'”

Urban Legends goes on to say that Harry’s story must be false:

At no time in his life did Ted Bundy show up in New York City. The closest he ever got to NYC was a trip he made to visit relatives in Philadelphia and to look up his birth record in Vermont in early 1969, five years before he began kidnapping and killing young women.

In fact, the site quotes Bundy biographer Ann Rule on what is actually a small phenomenon:

A dozen or more young women have called me since 1980, absolutely convinced that they had escaped from Ted Bundy. In San Francisco. In Georgia. In Idaho. In Aspen. In Ann Arbor. In Utah . . . He could not have been everywhere, but, for these women, there are terrified memories of a handsome man in a tan Volkswagen — a man who gave them a ride, and who wanted more. They are sure that it was Ted who reached for them, and declare that they never hitchhiked again. For other women, there is a man with a brilliant smile who came to their door, ingratiating, and then angry when they would not let him in. “It was him. I’ve seen his picture, and I recognized him.”

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