It’s always Howdy Doody time in music producer Hal Willner’s workspace at the Film Center building in Manhattan. Best known for producing music for Saturday Night Live, Willner shares his lair with many antique puppets, Jackie Gleason memorabilia including a Ralph Cramden bus driver’s suit, as well as DVD’s of Shoah and other Holocaust films. He jokes, “My work sounds like a Warner Brothers cartoon or the soundtrack to a movie about Dachau.”
The sight of two men in giant clown shoes and oversized pants shuffling on a commuter platform lingers in the mind. From the Signature Theater’s production of Old Hats, winner of this year’s “Outstanding Alternative Theatrical Experience” Award at last week’s Lucille Lortel Awards, the skit, featuring Bill Irwin and David Shiner evokes Chaplin’s little tramp and a history of slapstick. Unlike the Tony Awards, which are presented interspersed with acts from Broadway shows too, the Lucille Lortel Awards, a night of honors and entertainment from over 100 plays off-Broadway, takes much of its fun from the fact that the show would not be televised.
Noah Baumbach’s new film Frances Ha is cut from the same cloth as Lena Dunham’s Girls. Written with Greta Gerwig, who stars as Frances, shot in black and white, Frances Ha evokes Woody Allen’s Manhattan and Francois Truffaut’s Paris, key locations for the twenty-something Frances to live her dreams. A moveable feast of guys, apartments, and jobs, Frances Ha freshens up the old tropes: cell phones and the internet play comfortably with the actors’ slapstick physicality and sight gags, a throwback to, and nostalgia for early filmmaking. A dancer, Frances runs awkwardly on the street to find a cash machine, falling on her face. Frances Ha’s world is almost entirely populated by a humorous and poignant variation of Generation Me characters, including Frances’ best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and young men played by Adam Driver and Michael Zegen.
A lot has happened since 2008 when a Sunday night premiere screening and dinner co-hosted by Gloria Steinem honored Leymah Gbowee, a charismatic social worker turned activist who, in the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, tells her compelling story about how women banded together to protest violence in Liberia, set their hideous dictator Charles Taylor on a journey of exile, to be put on trial for war crimes, and enabled a democratically elected woman to govern their country. Self-assured and instinctively political, Gbowee came off as a modern day Lysistrata, as in the ancient Greek satirist Aristophanes’ play, a character who organized women in a sex strike to protest the Peloponnesian War. Now a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Leymah Gbowee was honored on Thursday morning at the New York Women’s Foundation breakfast, along with Tina Brown, founder of Women of the World Foundation among her many media accomplishments, and Rachel Lloyd, founder of GEMS, Girls Educational & Mentoring Services, to help victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.
A few years ago, the excesses of the new movie version of The Great Gatsby might have inspired cathartic revulsion. The scene outside Avery Fisher Hall for this week’s Gatsby premiere befit the mega wattage of the movie’s stars, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as he made his way through a screaming crowd. Carey Mulligan, resplendent in red Lanvin, her blond hair swept up, walked the red carpet. In the grand chaos of this opening of a state-of-the-art Baz Luhrmann movie—think Moulin Rouge set in 3D fairy tale America—Baz Luhrmann failed to introduce his stars, but did manage to say in his introduction, as the story takes place in New York, there was no other place for its world premiere, even though this American epic will open the Festival de Cannes next week.
The news that The Testament of Mary would close on Sunday hung in the air for Friday evening’s performance, more prominently than any of the play’s props, including a dead tree. At the prologue, the audience comes to the stage circling Mary as blessed icon, robed in blue. How she became that exalted figure is what this play’s about. To be sure, sharing the stage with a vulture may be genius, but not a good sign for a long life.
The movie, The Iceman, is all the chillier because it is based on a true story. A hit man procedural directed by Ariel Vromen, the film opens with a close up of Michael Shannon as contract killer Richard Kuklinski looking haggard and hirsute, being asked if he has any regrets. Moving back in time to the ‘70’s, we see him tender, courting his would be wife, Deborah, and then we see his short fuse, in a back alley pool hall, when he feels dissed. Given its subject matter, a contract killer responsible for offing over 100 men, The Iceman shows remarkable restraint: you see some straight ahead violence, throats are deftly slit, but even more terrifying is the sight of doomed men pleading for their lives, or packed as human ice bricks. The ensemble work is first rate, with Ray Liotta as a mob boss and John Ventimiglia as his knife-happy underling. Chris Evans as Mr. Freezy is both butcher and soft ice cream salesman, with David Schwimmer,Robert Davi and James Franco, heartless losers in smaller roles.
One of super agent Sue Mengers’ many rules for dealing with divas is never remind them of the beginning when you are walking them down the red carpet on the way to the Oscars. For example, do not say to Diana Ross, we are a far cry from when you were giving Berry Gordy blowjobs in the back seat of a limo. Taking that cue, it would be just wrong to remind the Divine Miss M of her work at the Continental Baths backed by the Harlettes before her Broadway revue, Clams on the Halfshell. Then again, she was so fabulous back in the day, and incarnating Sue Mengers, in I'll Eat You Last, a show that does not even touch her mega singing chops, she’s fabulous now.
Gloria Steinem, often considered the face of feminism, attended a film by Saudi Arabian Haifaa al Mansour. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend, Wadjda was celebrated at an afterparty at D.C. Moore Gallery in Chelsea. Amidst painted photographs by Duane Michals and paintings by Milton Avery, the filmmaker chatted with Queen Noor of Jordan and others, women decidedly international from the Middle East. Regal with her hair in a French twist, the queen wore a long skirt and jean jacket. Waiters passed hors d’oeuvres, including bite sized BLT’s, leading one to ponder, whose idea was it to serve bacon to Saudis?
Haifaa al Mansour said it was not easy for a woman to make films in her country, but this film had government support. When asked what traditions she was following, she said, “There are no traditions.”
On that cataclysmic day when Bernie Madoff was arrested, his loyal personal secretary Eleanor Squillari was convinced they had made a mistake. Life at the “lipstick building,” headquarters of the largest scale Ponzi scheme in financial history was wholesome and nurturing. They were family. But when she phoned Bernie to ask what gives, he was abrupt and perfunctory. And that’s when it hit her: this was for real.
