Royce Reed and Marilyn Hoggart were the Big and Little Edie of the Internet age. Two elegant ladies living in an inelegant world, with only each other as comfort and punching bag. Though Royce perhaps did most of the punching.
Their videos on YouTube made the eccentric duo viral sensations, but a 1999 LA Weekly cover story made them icons:
Royce Reed and Marilyn Hoggatt, you see, are emissaries from a more refined time, women who do not end their sentences with prepositions, nor with the declarative question mark that is the California style. They are ladies who appreciate the snug fit of custom-made gloves, who know the difference between a cocktail ring and a solitaire -- and wince whenever their club sandwiches arrive with crusts untrimmed.
Their anachronistic mannerisms and codes of dress are part of an unfaltering faith in style, a faith that has been rewarded with a kind of unified field theory of life. Yet even a consoling world-view cannot shield an elderly woman from the rough realities of living downtown on a fixed income. For that, Royce and Marilyn must rely on one another, and a friendship that is a constant adjustment of needs and wants that are seldom completely in sync.
Marilyn died in 2011 and Royce a year later, but filmmakers John Riddle and Bill Geerhart want to keep their spirits alive with a feature documentary and have started an Indiegogo campaign to render the ladies in the style to which they were accustomed:
We decided with Royce & Marilyn that we would film the duo for posterity. From the late 1990s until 2010, our cameras sporadically captured them in their SRO at the Hotel Stillwell in downtown Los Angeles and their later residences. In 2003 we submitted a short film about Royce & Marilyn to the Silver Lake Film Festival and it was received with great enthusiasm at the Los Feliz Theater. A dedicated following on social media has encouraged us to produce this new, full-length documentary about these doyennes of a lost era.
Check out Royce and Marilyn in their natural habitat--
--in the video below:
And click here to donate to the Indiegogo campaign.
