The girlfriend brought over a DVD last night, and the DVD did something I had never seen a DVD do before. It listed the one-hour documentary 'The True Story of Marion Davies' as the main feature on the disc, and it listed the two-hour feature film Quality Street, in which Davies starred, as a bonus extra. I don't think I have ever seen this before, where a DVD makes the feature-length film an extra while making the straight-to-video documentary the main item. But I guess it makes sense; nobody these days remembers the titles of any of Davies' films, but they DO remember Davies herself, even if only in a gossipy sort of way (i.e. as the mistress of William Randolph Hearst who inspired one of the characters in Citizen Kane, and perhaps, nowadays, as the real-life person that Kirsten Dunst played in The Cat's Meow). And as if to prove the point, the girlfriend and I watched the hour-long documentary but didn't bother to watch the film, the clips of which didn't seem all that enticing.
Are there any other discs like this, which treat the extra as a feature and the feature as an extra? And does anyone else here know anything about Davies or have any thoughts on her work? She is credited in the documentary with inventing the 'screwball heroine' in the late 1920s, and she certainly seems to have been quite talented; quite a few of her films also feature her as a character who has to disguise herself as someone else, and in at least two cases she goes around disguised as a man, whatever that might mean (even though Davies is SUCH a cutie that we in the audience simply don't buy her as a man for a second).