If you’ve paid attention then you know by now that Loverboy adores Jayne Mansfield. Rival blonde bombshell to Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate dumb blonde who had a genius IQ, a muscleman hubby who built her a pink palace, mother of Detective Olivia Benson (no, not Taylor Swift’s cat but rather actress Mariska Hargitay), embraced flash and trash and wasn’t shy of nudity and sex, and died horribly in a car crash where she (wasn’t) decapitated. We’re obsessed with all things Jayne. When we heard that Ebersole Hughes – the team behind Hit So Hard, the documentary about lesbian Hole drummer Patty Schemel, Room 237, about the puzzles of Kubrick’s The Shining and Dear Mom, Love Cher about… well, you know – were making a documentary about the last year of Jayne’s life and her flirtation with Satanism, we were plotzing for days, darlings. Loverboy’s Fallon Gold caught up with the husband and husband production team while they are in the UK for screenings of Mansfield 66/67 at the Horror Channel Fright Fest. A documentary, btw, that has dance numbers with multiple Jaynes. Plotzing, we tells ya.

When did you first encounter Jayne?
P David Ebersole: I was actually introduced more deeply to her by Todd. Like anyone who grew up in Hollywood, I, of course, had seen her image. She is what I call a Hollywood Boulevard of Broken Dreams star, like others who died young and are forever emblazoned on T-shirts and memorabilia in souvenir shops. But it was through Todd telling me about this incredible story of the movie goddess and the Satanist that I fell in love.

Todd Hughes: When I was a little boy in the 70s my mother was very interested in the occult. She had a copy of The Satanic Bible and told me the story of the movie star who got naked at the Church of Satan and then was decapitated in a horrible car accident. That story always stuck with me and when I told David about it we decided to delve further.

What was the impetus behind making this documentary?
TH: Years ago, after doing a massive amount of research, we wrote a narrative feature about Jayne and Anton [LaVey] called ‘The Devil Made Her Do It’.

PDE: The screenplay is very popular but it also seems to never get made. So, when we were trying to figure out what our next doc should be, we knew this should be it because we knew the story inside and out. And what is fun about a doc versus a narrative project is that you can open it up to speak to cultural issues and hopefully deepen the content.

OMG, we so want that film to get made! So, what did you discover about her time in the UK when you came over to cover Jayne’s cabaret run of working men’s clubs?

TH: Well, we were working at Leeds Beckett University and lot of the students’ parents and grandparents had memories of Jayne’s last tour of Northern England. We were especially delighted when we discovered a picture of Jayne visiting the prison in Leeds which we could see from the studio where we shot all of our dance numbers.

PDE: Some people have called Jayne the working class Marilyn, or the blue collar Marilyn, so it only makes sense!

What was the most surprising thing you discovered about Jayne during the making of Mansfield 66/67?
TH: That she was a vocal opponent to the Vietnam war. She kind of did what Jane Fonda was doing but no one paid attention.

You got some big names for the documentary: John Waters, Mamie Van Doren, Kenneth Anger, Tippi Hedren – who was the most surprising Jayne fan you’ve encountered?
PDE: It was surprising how much of a feminist figure she has become. There is a great book called Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties by Martha Saxton that talks about her uncomfortable relationship with feminism, but today’s treatment of her as being a sex-positive trailblazer was not expected from our panel of female intellectuals.

TH: When we arrived in the UK we requested interviews with Siouxsie Sioux because of her song “Kiss Them For Me” about Jayne and Anton, but she declined saying she said all she had to say on the subject in the song. We also approached Barbara Windsor who would have been great but the timing didn’t work. But Boy George’s friend Marilyn turned out to not only be a huge fan of Jayne’s but well versed in her whole affair with Anton.

PDE: And he is whip smart so his commentary is great. You’d expect someone who has based his image on a bombshell to have some knowledge of Jayne Mansfield but he was informed!

Did you talk to Mariska for the documentary?
PDE: We did not. We found ourselves much more interested in the public memory of Jayne and of Anton than in tracking down family members who might say this is true and that isn’t. We favored legend over veracity.

I love that.

TH: We were executive producers of a movie called Room 237, about people obsessed with the movie The Shining, where we actively avoided talking to anyone from the world of Kubrick because the space the director Rodney Ascher was interested in exploring was the mind of the audience that is affected by a movie, not whether or not the filmmaker intended to suggest any given idea. So, we adopted a similar approach with this movie too. The only people in the movie that we interviewed that knew either of them were Kenneth Anger and Mamie Van Doren.

What do you think of Loni Anderson in the biopic?
TH: It was camp crap. It really whitewashed Jayne’s story and omitted a lot of the more interesting truths about her. It was Arnold’s [Schwarzenegger] first acting job and he always gets a laugh when people see the clip of him as Mickey Hargitay in MANSFIELD 6/67.

PDE: Oh, I don’t know! I love her interpretation of Jayne. Loni Anderson is flirty and fun and smart.  It’s campy without knowing it’s campy so it’s supremely watchable. Let’s just call it the Showgirls of Jayne Mansfield bio-pics.

Without giving much away… In your opinions was Jayne’s flirtation with Satanism genuine interest or publicity stunt?
TH: I think it was a publicity stunt that quickly turned into genuine interest when she realized Anton was actually not preaching the devil but rather some useful common sense to the spiritually seeking sixties.

PDE: The more we learned about Anton, the more we wanted to believe. If being a Satanist means getting naked and doing all of the seven sins, I could see Jayne asking, ‘Where do I sign up?’ I like Peaches Christ’s comment in the movie: ‘It’s spooky and I love spooky things!’

If she had lived and was around now what do you think she’d have been doing the last few decades?
PDE: Jayne would have reinvented herself. She died at 34, and that was fifty years ago, so she would have only been 84 today. She was a business woman. Maybe she would have started a company and carved out a career as a producer.

TH: I would hope she would have been in a John Waters film and have her own reality show.

Hearteyes! Your production company is behind some very diverse and incredibly fabulous documentaries: Hit So Hard, Room 237, Dear Mom, Love Cher and now Mansfield 66/67. What attracts you to a project?
TH: They are all about things we love. The only one of those that was a job for hire was Cher and that was a dream come true.

PDE: Our agent called and said, ‘This might be the gayest thing I will ever say to you but apparently Cher wants to talk to you about doing a movie about her mother.’ We go with the flow. We like to say the projects find us.

You’re a husband/husband production team. What came first – love or work? And what’s it like working so intensely with a partner on these projects?

TH: Love came first. We didn’t start working together until 4 or 5 years into our relationship.

PDE: I had a screenplay-for-hire job where the deadlines were impossible. It was an adaptation of a book and I was so far behind, I started throwing highlighted parts of the book at Todd and telling him to write me up a scene. We quickly learned we were a good match creatively. His work has always been about comedy and I have always been about tragedy. So, together we’re commercial!

What’s next for Ebersole Hughes?
PDE: We have several new documentary ideas we are researching.

TH: Read: we’re tired and enjoying getting this one out into the world for the moment and really should get onto something new soon.

We love that Butchie has her own IMDB entry. What’s coming up for Butchie?
TH: Our beloved mascot Butchie passed away last year, during post production on the movie, which is why she got an In Memoriam dedication at the end of MANSFIELD 66/67.

Oh god, I’m so sorry to hear that!

Her successor, Fido, is planning her screen debut but is very picky.

The big question: chihuahuas or poodles? What dog do you most associate with Jayne?

TH: Chihuahuas! Though Jayne had several over the years, we aren’t sure if it was Momsicle and Popsicle but we choose to think they were the ones that died in the crash that night and will also remain forever immortal.

PDE: Of course, we will always associate Shamroy the rainbow poodle with Rita Marlowe (Jayne’s character in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter).

Mansfield 66/67 is playing as part of The Horror Channel Fright Fest Saturday 26^th and Monday 28^th August, Cineworld Cinema, London UK. Buy tickets here.

Check out the Ebersole Hughes website for more of their projects and photos of these gorgeous men.