The New York Times Agency May 2010

(NYT14) NEW YORK -- July 19, 2007 -- MAILER-FILMS-2 -- Norman Mailer, left, campaigns for mayor of New York in the garment district with Jimmy Breslin at right, in June 1969. Norman Kingsley is the main character in a movie called "Maidstone," and the alter ego, avatar and namesake of the film's director, Mailer, whose middle name, by the way, is Kingsley. "Maidstone," shot in the Hamptons in the summer of 1968 and released in 1971, is the third of four feature-length films Mailer directed, following "Wild 90" (1967) and "Beyond the Law" (1968). The last, an adaptation of his 1984 novel "Tough Guys Don't Dance," is the only one in which Mailer does not appear and the only one that can be said to obey the conventions of commercial narrative cinema. All four of these will be shown as part of "The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer," a fascinating and wide-ranging retrospective taking place over the next two weeks at three different Manhattan cultural institutions: the Film Society of Lincoln Center; the Paley Center for Media; and Anthology Film Archives. (Neal Boenzi/The New York Times)