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While his dream of directing a "Wonder Woman" movie remains just that, it looks like Nicolas Winding Refn will get to exercise his female fantasy hero kicks through another outlet, taking on an equally iconic character.

Deadline reports Gaumont and producer Martha De Laurentiis are bringing the iconic hero "Barbarella" -- who first appeared in the Jean-Claude Forest graphic novel and was memorably played by Jane Fonda in Roger Vadim's big screen adaptation -- to the small screen with Refn to direct and executive produce. And well, that's about it at the moment. But it appears this will be pitched as a new series, so we can only guess that once the pilot is out of the way, Refn's involvement will be at the producer level only. That said, his input can only help make this a cut above, and hopefully succeed where NBC's sad "Wonder Woman" miserably failed.

Back in 2009, I interviewed Nicolas Winding Refn about his movie Bronson, and in the course of our conversation he mentioned a director whose name meant very little to me:

The filmmakers I would have loved to meet are more obscure, like Andy Milligan. He’s a very obscure filmmaker who made films for Times Square in the 60s and 70s.

After our conversation, I went to seek out more information about Milligan and discovered that, little-known as he was, there was a book on him by the biographer Jimmy McDonough called The Ghastly One. (This book was, in fact, what got Winding Refn interested in Milligan in the first place.) I found that Milligan’s movies, however, were far from easy to get hold of.

That is seemingly beginning to change, though. The BFI has just recently put out Milligan’s Nightbirds through its excellent Flipside label, and to mark...

Why the notorious Drive director paid £16,000 on eBay to buy up Milligan's films and bring them back to life

When I was about 12, I tricked my mother into buying me my first book about film: Splatter Movies, by John McCarty. That's when I became aware of Andy Milligan and started looking for videos of his films – such as Gutter Trash (1969), Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1973), Guru, the Mad Monk (1970) and The Naked Witch (1967).

When I finally saw them I was taken aback – first by their crudeness, and then by how difficult it was to sit through them. But, at the same time, I realised that here was a man who made films his own way, on his own terms. He used the medium as something he could streamline his consciousness into, and I found that fascinating.

I had moved to New York, aged eight, in 1978, too late to experience anything of the real Times Square.

Andy Milligan, the Staten Island-based filmmaker best known for a string of micro-budget horror and sexploitation films made in the 1960’s and 70’s, was certainly one of the oddest characters in the New York ‘Grindhouse’ movie industry. Infamous for his sadistic nature towards his actors and the sadistic kink in his gay lifestyle, Milligan is legendary for the inept, technically primitive movies he made. Michael Weldon once wrote in his Psychotronic magazine that “If you’re an Andy Milligan fan, there’s no hope for you” and Tim Lucas wrote in Video Watchdog that “To reach an appreciation of (Milligan’s) work, it may first be necessary to develop a loathing toward traditional forms of cinema”. It’s true that Milligan’s films are unbelievably atrocious on so many levels yet they’re not without their threadbare charms and interesting scripts. Milligan was a one-man film crew who wrote, directed,...