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On April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York's intellectual elite packed the city's Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer fresh from the controversy over his essay The Prisoner of S*x and the backlash it received from leaders of the women's movement tangle with a panel of four prominent female thinkers and activists Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling. Part intellectual death match, part three-ring circus, the proceedings were captured with crackling, fly-on-the-wall immediacy by the documentary great D. A. Pennebaker and a small crew, with Chris Hegedus later condensing the three-and-a-half-hour affair into this briskly entertaining snapshot of a singular cultural moment. Heady, heated, and hilarious, Town Bloody Hall is a dazzling display of feminist firepower courtesy of some of the most influential figures of the era, with Mailer plainly relishing his role as the pugnacious rabble-rouser and literary lion at the center of it all.
