Original subtitles

This is a story of how a single low budget movie managed to

cause a sexual revolution.

How it created a multi billion dollar franchise with more

sequels than any other movie,

and how it transformed an unknown twenty one year old

girl into a global sex icon.

Emmanuel premiered in the summer of nineteen seventy four

in Paris and was an instant success.

Although it was a simple story of a woman's discovery of her

own sexuality, it changed the sexual attitudes

of millions of people.

For others, it was pure poison.

I think Emmanuel was a bad thing for women.

It was a fantasy of dysfunctional men.

It will always be a fantasy of dysfunctional men.

For its star, it was a journey that would culminate in her downfall.

I knew that if I didn't get her back to Europe, she would die.

She would absolutely die.

An estimated three hundred million people have seen

Emmanuel around the world.

By the late nineteen seventies,

Emmanuel had become a global brand competing with Coca Cola.

Today, the brand has generated over eighty sequels and turned over

an estimated five billion dollars.

Why was the movie so successful?

The critics said it didn't even have a storyline.

One critic even compared the film to a long dreamy

advertisement for menthol vaginal deodorant.

But still people talked about the film more than about the

Vietnam War, the Cold War, Yom Kippur War,

all put together.

To understand the phenomenon,

we tried to go back in time to the original inspiration,

to what the early seventies were really about.

A lot of things came together in the seventies.

Paulie Toynbee was a figurehead for the feminist movement and

sat on the British government's censorship committee when

Emmanuelle was released.

First of all, you had a whole young generation that had got money,

money to be free to buy motorbikes,

to go to other places, to be free of their parents' houses.

And with freedom came, inevitably,

a measure of sexual liberation.

It was okay to have sex without marriage.

You had birth control. You did not have disease.

There was a very important element was that,

all of a sudden the pill appeared.

No doubt that was a huge breakthrough.

For a brief time,

it looked as if you could have pleasure without

responsibility, sex without consequences.

They felt in power. They're like men.

We want our own revolution. It's not men's revolution.

It's a women's revolution.

It's about us, ourselves, our bodies, our children, our sex lives.

Open Marriage came out by the O'Neills, a major,

major book telling everybody that they could engage in

multiple partners.

They should engage.

Mhmm.

We had swinging and wife swapping that hit.

Sex began to be sung about more explicitly, talked about, thought about.

Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex.

Sex. Sex. Sex.

Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex.

Sexualization of absolutely everything.

Sex was everywhere, but rarely on

absolutely everything.

Sex was everywhere, but rarely on the movie screen,

unless that movie happened to be x rated in the theater in a back alley.

Bernardo Bertolucci's last tango in Paris broke the rule.

There was a very strong potential in these

type of movies because we had the example with Last Tango in Paris.

We decided upfront, we can't get, Bertolucci,

so we have to have a intellectual alibi.

That's why the idea of a book The novel, Emmanuel,

was published and distributed clandestinely in France in

nineteen fifty seven.

The story is supposedly an autobiography of the author,

Emmanuelle Arson, a French woman of Thai origin.

In the book, she explores her sexuality with multiple

partners, has sex with her husband's male and female friends,

and is guided through random sexual errands by her mentor.

But despite all of this,

she stays loyal to her consenting husband.

In this way, the book establishes the prototype of the so called

liberated woman.

I read the Emmanuel. I said, my goodness. What can I do?

What what can I do with a book like that?

And he phoned me in the night.

He said, if it's impossible, I can do it.

So we decide to do something soft and beautiful with a nice

story with a very famous book.

And after that, we decide to find, the actress.

But finding the right actress turned out to be much more challenging.

For, the character Emmanuel,

you need absolutely

a beautiful woman, but she has to be also very pure.

And, these are very, very rare qualities.

So just organize,

a few castings in Roma, in Paris.

Casting process was suddenly nightmare.

We which kind of thing we won't do. Erotizis?

No way. Erotizis was something forbidden.

Impossible to find somebody.

And she has to look very distinguished because she will

be doing a lot of sexual things in a film.

The idea was to find something pure, not vulgar.

Never, never should she look like a whore because she's not a whore.

She's a liberated woman.

The filmmakers realized they were not looking for an actress.

They were looking for an actual living replica of the liberated woman.

What they didn't know was that actually finding her would

upset the balance of feminism.

The search for the liberated woman to star in the first ever

soft erotic movie, Emmanuel was on.

But did she even exist?

The casting was going on for a number of

months and

no Emmanuel in sight.

So one day we'll put one tape on,

the guy who was operating the machine rewind it and

at the beginning of the tape,

there was a little

skinny girl with short hair.

Jean Louis, all of a sudden, as he had written the script,

he said stop, stop.

This is Emmanuel, come back. She was beautiful.

She was sensuous at the same time as a little bit distant.

She had all the qualities that were required.

So we called Amsterdam, and

they didn't know who that girl was.

It was like a real search because

they had to find her.

She was a complete stranger, unglamorous,

a convent educated twenty one year old Dutch girl,

but she had elegance, purity, innocence.

In nineteen seventy two, she was still a secretary,

but she longed to be something more.

I met with Juste, and, I did so there was a camera.

And since she told me there was nudity involved,

I had dressed I had dressed with spaghetti tires,

or how do you call it?

And, this one movement, I think I

didn't even have to touch it.

I could do it over the shoulder. What?

The entire dress fell to the waist,

And I just went on talking,

like where I lived and the hobbies and why I could do this

film and da da da da.

And just said, I want to do some nude photography with you.

I said, that's fine. And it was it was fun.

So he could see that I would have no problems with with nudity.

I I I don't know.

I knew that was that was that was that was that was a girl.

She was the perfect woman.

She was the perfect Emmanuel,

and we knew that we were now going to be able to shoot the patron.

All of the sudden,

that was given, yeah, the green light.

I signed a contract,

and then we were off.

We Luca and I flew to Paris,

and then from Paris to

Frankfurt,

and

then,

off

to

Thailand.

She went to do it as a lark because she wanted to see

Bangkok, and she thought this would be a

good way to see it.

Nobody involved with that movie knew what they had.

It was really lightning in a bottle.

The crew were finally ready to shoot,

but shooting an erotic movie in nineteen seventies Thailand was no picnic,

especially when the director didn't even have a script.

The production, of course,

was not very easy because it's not very easy to shoot in

Thailand.

It was the first time just Joaquin was,

directing a feature length film.

I I never did a feature film.

If Rousseau never did Sylvia was his first film.

We just go there with a book, we had to write.

And normally, the script is the bible, you know,

for a director, but he's just,

no.

He he prefer to to work in a in a very, yeah,

relaxed circumstances and with ideas that that came

up, you know, on the spot.

You have a idea. Okay. Do it.

We did the decoration ourselves.

We do the light ourselves. We do everything ourselves.

Instead of hiring a typical filmmaker,

they hired Jeush Khan, who came out of this exquisite

fashion photography,

soft lenses.

He knew how to shoot her.

I liked the scenes with, with Marika Green,

and, we had a good time, off the set also.

She was a bit standoffish in the beginning,

but later there's this nice moment when they go with this horse,

in the field, and there's the scene with the little,

hat or this cap, where it is playful and tender.

Those that is, what I like best, which is also it shows,

really the purity, the innocence of the girl.

The filmmakers wanted to push the envelope of what was

allowed on screen.

Certain scenes were custom manufactured as marketing

devices to generate gossip and even shock,

such as the rape scene.

The rape scene was very easy to understand why it was if it

could because Yes.

Because I couldn't see,

why how a rape could be pleasurable.

It's terrifying. You you join from a story.

You join from a acting scene to something real in one end.

These two Thai people were not, actors.

I really had to fight for my life there. They were rough.

It seems that they enjoyed also what they were doing.

And I kept my underwear on because I knew otherwise,

things go absolutely bizarre.

And those guys tried to touch her with a catastrophe.

I think it was surely a very tough

thing to do, but she did it.

Oh, I really had no choice.

But thank God, he's a he's a director who, uses, like,

more than one camera, so you don't have to do the scene,

like, sixteen times in different positions.

I mean, I came out of that scene black and blue.

So, yeah.

The infamous lesbian love scene was also manufactured to generate gossip.

Oh, that's right.

The masturbation scene is with Christine Boisson.

When I read it in the script, I said, like, oh, god.

That's the truth.

How are you gonna film this? It was a very good idea.

He found this, this magazine with Paul Newman on the on the spread, and he,

laid it down on the knee of, Christine Boisson.

She took the lead, and then I followed,

and then we kind of dream dreamt away,

and then we got bang, the camera went to the clouds,

I think.

And, I remember,

by now they had a translator when it was necessary, you know.

And this and I asked this man,

do you have a smoke?

And he came back with something that looked like a cigarette.

I thought, well, maybe it's a hand roll or something.

And it took a couple of puffs, you know.

It's the first time that I I had joined apparently,

and I didn't know what's happened what was happening.

And I said to just, I see you double,

and I had laugh kicks, and I said, oh my God,

who gave her this shit?

And then, well, we couldn't we couldn't work for the rest of the day.

Things were not very, very easy.

And, after a while, we were

discovered as making these, this, film,

and it became even more difficult.

The crew had no license to shoot in Thailand,

something that would eventually prove to be problematic.

Everything went alright until Marika Green and I stood naked

under a waterfall.

And we shot just under a monastery.

And this was seen by some monk.

He said it was a holy waterfall.

The guy arrived, take the tail and eat and say, my, that's my land.

That's my land.

Don't forget we arrived in Thailand without any permission.

Then we got arrested, all of us in a police place.

The cameraman took out the magazine, put a new one.

He said cannot prove anything.

He had a phony script with him,

and it nothing to do with Emmanuel or We said to them

that we came here to do a a documentary of flowers.

But unfortunately,

he didn't remember the title of the the fake script.

He didn't remember anything.

So I said, like, why don't I just ask them how much they

want, how much money?

He said, if you don't shut up,

you'll be in jail for even longer.

Okay. Okay.

I start to be crazy or anything like that.

I can be in jail for a long time.

But luckily enough, the Yves Roux had was acquainted with

The cousin of the king.

And when I met him, he said,

I want to help you to be involved with your production.

I took the next flight to Bangkok to see again

the prince plan.

He said, well, no problem.

Come back with all your team and And this man had studios in

Bangkok so we could proceed with the film, in the studios.

And we send rushes to to Paris, and they never come back.

By the time the crew were shipped back to France,

the movie was far from finished.

So, of course, when, we came back, to Paris,

almost kicked out of Thailand, we were missing,

quite a few sequences.

I think that's the film really existed,

started to take shape in the cutting room.

We really put into the film all the sequences, like,

for instance, the sequence, of the little,

Thai girl who smokes with her pussy.

This controversial sequence caused conflict between the

director and the producer.

It later became the most talked about scene in the film.

It was an idea of Yves Voucheroir, by the way,

to put that in the picture.

Yves, in one hand,

want more to do a pornographic film that I did.

I was really disappointed when I I I saw

the editing, the first edit editing of the picture.

If Sylvia was involved with that scene,

if the guy or the husband,

everything was involved with that scene,

perhaps I was against, I refused to shoot it.

He shoot it himself.

So I helped just for editing, you know, I get something.

I This was something like,

the butter sequence in Last Tango in Paris.

It was a boring picture because it was a film where people came

just to see that sequence.

And once the butter sequence was over, you could hear the,

seats go pop pop pop pop.

And a lot of friends told me long years after,

I love your film. Why did you put that fucking thing?

You need to have a table conversation about a picture to

make it a huge success.

I said, I don't did, but I cannot go out of the theater.

I said, that's not me. I put that thing in the film.

That's you.

I wanted to be more ambitious.

The movie was finally patched together in the editing room,

but the filmmakers still faced a major hurdle before getting it released.

I didn't expect it to be, such a huge,

success.

Really, Hugo even said like, oh,

this film is never going to reach the theaters because it

will be banned, barred from censorship.

And, of course, in France,

they had trouble with the censorship.

There were rumors that,

the film would be, might be banned.

Pompidou was

very sick at that time.

So nobody wanted to take the responsibility.

Emmanuel,

photograph

In those days, the political situation of movies

is that you can't show anything.

And de Gaulle was the president of France.

His wife, Yvonne, was, very religious.

I send a telegram to the minister.

I say, well,

we we want to release, in June.

And, you know, everybody was

hesitating, you know,

because It was really going one step further than all the films.

Well, it was a time when there was a lot of really wild stuff going on anyway.

But on the artistic fringes,

so we used to go to lots of extraordinary things at the

Institute for Contemporary Art.

Shows with people no clothes on,

exotic poetry events all done in the nude,

lots of very sexy stuff around.

To be, in favor of freedom doesn't mean you have to approve of

everything within it.

It doesn't mean you want to censor everything you don't like.

That's what tolerance is about.

Upwards of twenty five thousand people demonstrated with songs

and prayers for love, purity, and family life.

And the crowd heard a call for the reform of censorship laws.

It was much wilder stuff than Emmanuel.

But because it was kind of mainstream, people felt it was,

breaking bound new boundaries.

Of course,

the film finally, got through censorship.

I guess he had to wait until there was a change of government.

On April second nineteen seventy four, Pompidou died,

and people lined up to pay their respects.

Three months later,

a similar queue formed in front of the triumph cinema.

I peeped my head through the,

at the corner of the Champs Elysees, and all of a sudden,

I saw there is a crowd.

It was huge

in front of the theater, but a huge one.

So I ran the lobby of the theater,

and I said to the cashier, what's going on?

And she said, oh, everything is fine. We're almost full.

So I ran back to the restaurant and I knew that we

had a success on our hands.

More than three million admission in Paris.

This is the biggest grossing for any film in any city in the world.

I was already amazed that the film came out in the theater.

So, I was like on top of a tidal wave.

I think it even beat West Side Story.

Emmanuel stirred up the movie industry big time.

It was made for a dollar seventy five,

it grossed a fortune, and it made Sylvia a star.

The second week was higher than the first week.

The third week was higher than the second week.

The fourth week was higher than the third week.

This is absolutely exceptional.

They say the biggest problem was getting the money to the

bank every day.

I guess that's a chance to be there at the right time, right place.

And, yeah.

So and the rest is history.

Sylvia was on her way to becoming one of the most famous

sex symbols of the twentieth

century.

But at what price?

After wrapping the shoot in Thailand and beating the

censorship laws to get the film released,

it was time for the cast and crew to face the biggest

challenge of all, fame.

I made, twice world tour and in every country.

The picture was successful in, Venezuela, in South of America, everywhere.

You know.

Can you believe that the film stays thirteen years in the

same movie theater?

It was unbelievable.

There was all of a sudden another miracle.

Women who were coming back because it

was school time, they had read on the beaches articles about this film.

So they said to their husbands, have you heard of this film,

Emmanuel?

The husband, of course, would say, no, no, no, no.

Because he didn't want to admit that he went already to see it

with his secretary.

The film, instead of dropping in September,

all of a sudden picked up.

We knew that we were assisting to a new phenomena.

Spain for instance, the film was forbidden and the Spanish

were crossing the border.

So Perpignon, town that has maybe seventy thousand,

people living there.

And we were grossing a hundred and forty thousand admission in

Perpignon because it was close to the Spanish border.

As Sylvia's fame was sky rocketing,

she figured she needed an agent.

Jacques Itard was a press agent for the film,

so why not her personal agent as well?

Would you like to be my agent?

She asked me.

I said, but Sylvia, I am not an agent.

I I I don't know the the the word,

the the work of an agent.

I said, why?

You are not an agent, but I am not an actress.

So we can work together.

Jacques Itard took Sylvia around the world in seven days,

starting with Japan,

where she was accompanied by actor Ian McShane.

The weird thing is I got a lot of letters from Japanese girls,

and particularly girls like sixteen, seventeen years old.

We arrived in to in Tokyo.

The crowd was unbelievable.

There was these young girls screaming their their,

heads off.

Sylvia, Sylvia, we love you. We love you.

The popularity was so immense that we needed the army for protection.

We were jet lagged, and I I don't know.

I didn't realize that that same day I had to appear

in a live show on Japanese television.

So, McShane and I, we had had a couple of Mai Tais in the bar.

We were both we we dropped in a coma or so, because,

I woke up and put on the television, who do I see?

Jacqui Ta apologizing that I was not there.

He said, I could not wake you up.

You are both naked and dead on the floor.

So I mean, he said, I got almost lynched by the Japanese.

The press in Japan painted Emmanuelle as a symbol of liberation.

There was this female journalist,

and she said when Emmanuelle goes on top of her husband,

all the girls and all the women in the in the theater stood up

and applauded and screamed because it was a start of

feminism and it was the end of,

the overpowering attitude of the men.

That that I had the trouble to understand that,

but it was symbolic, for them.

It was, cute and it was welcome.

A welcome comment after the attacks I got from feminists in

in, in Holland or, France.

The press in Europe were coming down hard on Emmanuelle.

I think she had her problems in Europe,

particularly the British press.

They are extremely cruel when they sense that you're defenseless.

The journalists were aggressive.

They were saying, like, you've been doing a porno film, this and that.

The, for me, it was tough.

I saw some of the interviews. They were cruel.

She was sitting there, victimized,

and nobody was keeping the damage control

down to a minimum.

Some critics also, said like that it is the story,

it's it's all it's too thin or it's a poor excuse for what is,

pure exploitation.

Particularly,

some demeaning scenes, like, the rape scene,

and then, the scene

after the boxing match, and then a weird scene,

like this what I call the sandwich scene at the end with,

Mario.

The heat was also coming down on the director.

It was a really nightmare for me after.

You, put dirt on on movie, French movies,

and, all the Vogue, hell,

a magazine stopped to work with me like like a photographer.

Well, I I have a a big show for a mosquito at that time.

Nobody buy anymore.

For three years, it was put down because the success was

was so big and boom like that.

I I was I was a.

I had very mixed feelings about it.

On one level, delightful erotic fantasy.

Emmanuel certainly seemed glamorous in all kinds of ways.

It was a glamorous fantasy world.

It wasn't about real life in any way that anybody could see it,

and I'm sure travel and Thailand seemed extraordinarily exotic.

And I'm sure that if Emmanuel was shot in front in Paris,

a lot of people would say, it's disgusting.

Do you have some people live like that in in Paris?

I mean, I can hardly believe there's couples that say after having

watched your show, so let's now call the neighbors and do some,

you know, some experiment.

No. I don't think so.

And on the other hand,

a number of us had ambivalent feelings about Emmanuel as

being on the border of this,

of indeed opening the gateway to sexploitation on a gigantic scale.

Emmanuel has nothing to to do with, pornographic movie.

You know? Pornography is to fuck to folks.

You open door, you fuck, open the door for you fuck anybody,

very weird dog, animals, sad pornography.

When you have love somewhere, it's eroticism.

The media was blurring the line between the actress and her role.

Increasingly, Sylvia was being perceived as the iconic liberated woman.

The men thought of her as Emmanuel.

She was not.

She was not the the kind of a woman that said, boy,

did I have a great fuck last night.

Blah blah blah blah. She wasn't like that.

That is what I had to explain to to to journalists also.

It's like, John Wayne doesn't shoot

people in the weekend, in his day, in his time off.

So it is really unnecessary to to even to compare me with the parts I play.

And I made it mine as much as I could,

but it still it remains a role.

But if Sylvia Kristol wasn't the liberated woman,

then who was?

I think the image of the liberated Emmanuel is the man's

idea of what he would like a liberated woman to be,

and it's rather nice, really.

She does what she wants.

Women were endlessly available When she wants.

On men's terms With who she wants.

They look the way men wanted them to look. She chooses.

They did the things men wanted them to do She's in control.

With the fantasy that they were doing it themselves with their own free will.

Emmanuel was a fantasy of dysfunctional men.

These kind of people have not seen the picture.

So many women, have gone into the idea of being liberated and ended up being enslaved.

Because it is not a picture against women.

They're not only not married,

but they're darning the guy's socks.

They're engaging in sexual gymnastics that humiliate them.

And then As a contrary,

a picture for women.

Oh, but everybody can bullshit themselves.

You know? Tony Black can bullshit himself into a war.

I mean, anybody can persuade themselves of anything that's convenient.

And if it's commercially convenient

to think I'm making this wonderful movie to help set

women free, you can persuade yourself,

but it still beats pornography.

The liberated woman is a male concoction.

It was concocted out of the brains of men who did not love women.

Listen. That's a book wrote by women.

So this is if they don't listen Well, at the time,

I read the book of Emmanuelle Harsand, and immediately,

it came to mind that this is not a book of a woman.

It must have been written by a man.

Wait. What did she say again?

Written by a man.

Written by a man. Written by a man. Written by a man.

And it turned as it turns out, it was written by her husband.

That is public secret.

The truth about whether Emmanuelle Arson or her husband

wrote the book remains a mystery,

but did it really matter?

The concept of the liberated woman was now a cultural imprint.

And the sequel, Emmanuel two, was about to add to the legacy.

In Emmanuel two, Sylvia Kristel took her role a step further,

much to the concern of her agent.

I went to see the rushes. I was not on the shooting.

And I went and saw the rushes.

I was shocked. The sequins were in. She's masturbating.

It was more almost pornographic for me, you know, for me. Yeah.

And we said to Silvia, please, you are not Emmanuel.

Well, I I accepted to do this.

You should have refused to do that, you know.

I said, I don't know.

I don't know. I did not realize.

The second one was banned because all of a sudden there

was a new law about pornographic films.

And, in order to create an example,

the French government,

banned that film as if it was a pornographic film.

But the

government.

I won two years after.

But in the meantime It came out in Spain, I believe,

because Franco died or and there was also a new covenant.

And the French crossed the border.

From Perpignan to go over the the frontier

and see, Emmanuel in Spain.

In some countries,

the release of Emmanuel became the testimony

of the democracy, of liberty of communication.

Eager to step up a gear,

Sylvia began receiving offers from Hollywood.

I didn't pay my taxes in France.

And after you've conquered Europe, you know,

you wanna conquer Hollywood.

Although, that is not as easy as it sounds.

She was having an affair with Ian McShane,

who was a client of ours.

And Ian was married, so all of this had to stay very

hush-hush at the time.

And he was working in Hawaii,

and Sylvia was coming over to join him.

We bonded immediately. I became immediately a Yiddishamama.

There was no question about it.

But Los Angeles wasn't as pretty as it looked.

Because Los Angeles is not a metropolis.

The days are long and boring. It's a factory town.

Because I was very lonely, in Los Angeles,

and I didn't have anything to do.

I felt absolutely useless.

You know, she was always a duck out of water.

She was not one of those hungry,

ambitious actresses that would, you know,

kill to get no.

That was not Sylvia.

Because for instance, I refuse to do auditions auditions.

I sit like that.

In Europe, I don't.

It's like putting a shy introvert

into a world where they have to be, ta da,

I'm out there.

It can be done, but at a price.

Also, these people, at the time I arrived,

were so obsessed with cocaine and freebasing.

I was caught up with that, for a while.

The cocaine was her stimulation.

I think without her,

drinking and drugging at that time,

she would never get out of bed.

When you came to negotiate something or or for some event,

first thing people will do is like make a line.

At a certain point even the doctor who is going to check me

for, insurance for the film.

And the cost of it.

Her business manager said, Sylvia,

a lot of my clients cope,

but none of them spend what you spend.

She, you know,

could hardly remember what she did the night before,

but she knew it wasn't good.

Because it was still highly socially accepted.

They spoke spoke about it like it was a recreational drug.

You would have thought that after private lessons, which was

a humongous success,

the phones would be ringing off the hooks for her.

And it's a shame that I saw it for once.

Now I got a percentage, you know.

And then the producer calls me, like,

three weeks before the film opens.

He says, do you wanna sell your points for a hundred fifty thousand dollars?

I said, yeah, sure. Yeah. And that was done.

But,

yeah.

But he was very happy.

So if he leads people around in his mansion, he says,

Sylvia Kristall made this possible.

Yeah.

Tinseltown was a letdown.

A string of unsuccessful relationships, drug addiction,

and a downward spiraling career hit Sylvia all at once.

It was a poor social life. It was the wrong social life.

It was awful.

The worst of it is that she would cope and lay in bed.

So it was a kinda yin yang thing.

There she was buzzed out of her head,

but not moving.

It did bad things with my brain, I guess.

Then my business manager said to quit or sell the house.

She was under a hundred pounds.

She looked like she had just come out of Auschwitz.

I knew that if I didn't get her back to Europe, she would die.

She would absolutely die.

It was not a long period of time, but it was enough.

I mean, if you start to have a bad reputation,

it's very difficult to,

to overcome that.

So I was glad that I could, disappear in my paintings.

That was fun. Then finally, I started to be a bit happy.

Hollywood almost managed to destroy Soviet Cristal.

But for the Emmanuel franchise,

it was the perfect platform to launch a global brand.

Hollywood had sent Sylvia Christel into a tailspin.

A string of unsuccessful relationships, drug addiction,

and her downward spiraling career hit her all at once.

Meanwhile, the legacy of Emmanuel was soaring higher than ever.

After the second sequel,

Alan Soritsky stepped in and took control.

In our lives,

there

is very few important things.

And, love and sex, which by the way is two words,

but it's the same thing,

is very, very important.

It's the reason why we are here.

If we can have the rights to a character who symbolizes

love and sex, we have to keep this character running.

After the success of the fourth film,

Savicki moved to Los Angeles and was on his way to shooting

Emmanuel straight into space.

Emmanuel became very early on a myth.

Like, Rambo became a myth, or Superman became a myth,

or James Bond became a myth.

Well, in my library, I have, thirty two Emmanuel pictures.

I continue making them because I hope that

one day I'll make a really good one.

Currently, Sierrysky is on a worldwide search for the next Emmanuel.

The character Emmanuel, in fact,

is more a spirit.

Emmanuel moves from one body to another

because every woman at a certain moment in her life has

to become Emmanuel.

She is a queen.

She's a goddess, goddess of love and sex.

The first goddess of love and sex eventually wound up back in

Amsterdam.

Not only had she lost all of her money in failed ventures,

the taxman was now

after

her.

So it's not

for the friends that I moved to to Holland,

but it's easy to live here, you know.

It is it's more comfortable for a poor person,

in the sense that,

you can you don't have to dress up in the streets.

You can just go in a tramway. You're not bothered.

This is Sylvia.

To see this is to know that exquisite body.

So you see here is where she's safe to show a

little exhibitionism

where she will draw her body, and to look

Tsiritsky still has plans for the liberated woman.

So far, we've made a number of, TV movies,

but it's such a,

fabulous character.

She has so many fans out, there in the world that,

we really would like to bring the character to,

a theatrical picture again.

I think she deserves it and I think we will make it.

The latest twenty first century Emmanuel is Natasha Vermeer,

also of Dutch origin.

Alan Siwitsky's photographer discovered her in Ibiza in a

Cave.

I know a lot of people go to Ibiza to party,

but I was actually just there, you know,

to really turn into myself and to go back to basics.

So and I was completely very zen and just like pure water

coming out of the rocks there.

I had my own vegetable garden.

And then that one morning that I came actually out of the

cave, I bumped into this, this photographer.

He said, Alan, I have a new Emmanuel for you.

Oh my God. Yes. I have to put you on film.

So we designed a collection of films that we

called Emmanuel's private collection.

And he promised me that he was gonna make it very much like

the first Emmanuel.

Also, Emmanuel, it's not so different from my own personality.

We have, like, that similar free spirit,

and we're not being put down because we are sexually liberal.

So I thought, like, you know, basically,

the only thing that I have to do is being myself.

I'm like, I think I can do that.

It's a little bit more explicit than, you know, they told me.

So I've been filmed back to back,

and usually a lot of people have to go into acting school

to get that much experience.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, Sylvia's troubles haven't ended.

Her recent boyfriend died from cancer just after she found out

she had cancer herself.

For the last year, she has been recuperating.

I mean, we were at the hospital,

Marianne picks up the phone,

and I can see the tears coming into her eyes.

I said, okay. It's Freddy. Is he dead here?

And so he was gone.

And all of a sudden, you feel like,

you you get to think of mortality.

It's when you start to realize that you're getting older when you Okay.

But I'll tell you something great about Sylvia.

The last years, she's lived with minimal money.

She lives very simply.

She certainly doesn't wear couture clothes anymore,

and she's fine.

She doesn't have any bitterness

or she doesn't go back and say, oh,

those were the glory days, and look at me now.

There's no self pity.

Looking back, I think, I was extremely lucky.

I have had great opportunities. I saw the world.

And, now,

I feel like, well, I don't really need to to go out there

and yell, look at me, love me, etcetera.

I've had all of that, you know. Now I can relax.

I'm still a bit in mourning,

so I'm not quite open for other relationships.

And also, at first, I have to recuperate, you know.

That's the main goal.

Soldier destined for Vietnam wants to be human rather than

just a killing machine.

Tigerland on Film four Weekly tomorrow at ten.

Now next here on Channel four,

youngsters explain why they are so keen to get married in Teens

That Tie the Knot.