Filmmaker Liz Goldwyn, getting into the spirit of Pretty Things (Photos: HBO)

The whole thing started innocently enough: While still a teenager attending art school in New York, Liz Goldwyn decided to write a book about burlesque fashion of the 1940s. After a year-and-a-half of videotaped interviews with some of the period's most iconic dancers, something changed.

The stories took on lives of their own.

"I realized that these women were so fascinating on camera, and that there was so much more to their lives than just the costumes," Goldwyn told The Reeler. "Having the opportunity to meet these women in person and be able to film them was great, and I thought other people would be interested in them as well. It's so rare that you're interested in the subject and you have the opportunity to find first-person interviews—people who have actually lived that and who are still around to tell you about it."

Eight years later, Goldwyn is ready to unveil her debut documentary Pretty Things. Premiering tonight at 10:30 on HBO, the film traces the careers of some of burlesque's biggest names—Zorita, Sherry Britton, Lilly St. Cyr and others—and the impact their work had on the glamour and sexuality of our time. Through a series of asides, Goldwyn also chronicles her own growth as an heir to the burlesque tradition; she takes dance lessons from Betty Rowland, studies (and models) a succession of costumes from the golden age of burlesque and works through her fears to perform her own climactic routine for her viewers.

If it all sounds a little fragmented, you are not totally wrong. Goldwyn's first-film jitters compound her apprehensions about the dancing itself, and the time she spends grappling with burlesque's emotional and physical demands results in a loose collection of legends and stories she never quite gets around to reconciling. But even if her disconnected threads' total value falls short of matching the potential sum of its parts, Goldwyn still reveals traces of rarely seen personalities and history that would have otherwise been lost forever.

Beyond interweaving archival footage and conversations with burlesque legends, Pretty Things works to nail down a certain tradition that contemporary stripping ignores. When Lois de Fee comment to Goldwyn about the tendency for dancers today to get "lewd, nude and screwed," the point is less a lament than a point of pride. From this strength—one of the few shared sensibilities among the film's independent-minded subjects—Goldwyn summons her own drive to learn their art, from the costumes to the choreography.

"I had a lot of difficulty in terms of committing to include myself in the film, which I was definitely pushed to do," she said. "And I wouldn't say by HBO, but by everybody, since the beginning of this project. So they could relate not to me personally, but to my character, I would say, as sort of a guide in getting into the lives of these women. Even men sort of felt they could relate to that. Al shot a lot of stuff of me kind of in that period, and really sort of pushed me to work it out."

Legendary documentarian Albert Maysles (L) shot Goldwyn's final dance sequence and other behind-the-scenes footage

"Al" is none other than famed documentarian Albert Maysles, Goldwyn's "principal cinematographer" whom she met through mutual friend Wes Anderson. Maysles' black-and-white camerawork provides the aesthetic balance that separates Goldwyn's protracted, grainy video quest from the refined status she achieves at the end of the film.

That the viewer is not treated to more of Goldwyn's transition is another of Pretty Things' shortcomings. As modest and awkward as her development appears in her interviews' early stages, and as resolute as she was in becoming a dancer (Goldwyn landed in physical therapy after cracking her coccyx and developing sciatica during production), the burlesque tradition that one knows was handed down somewhere along the line never really surfaces as a moment. Goldwyn acknowledges her challenge onscreen, but the viewer is left to imagine her turning point through training montages and, finally, through her final performance. She is stalled, and then she is not. What happens in between is anybody's guess, with only burlesque queen Sherry Britton's brief, poignant tutelage providing an insight.

Goldwyn responded that finding a balance between her story and those of the women whose lives she sought to document was almost as difficult as acquiescing to the dance itself. "I don't want to give more," she laughs, only half-joking. "The point is hopefully, knock on wood, I'm around. These women are not. At the end of the day, I was not trying to make a movie about myself. I mean, those revelations happen along the way. Some of them are personal, and some of them I felt worked for the story. But there is so much of these women I had to cut out to get the right time and the right pace. I had to cut out entire characters."

Still, Goldwyn is happy with the film and the legacies it upholds. Its momentum has moved her into the early stages of a screenplay about prostitution in 1897 Los Angeles, where she is based today—but do not expect another eight-year production. "I was doing research all at the same time I did Pretty Things," she said, exasperated. "I want to be in pre-production by next summer."