Gossip Central

Hollywood Film Mavens Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and Doug Liman Praise Gaucho Gaucho: Reinventing Documentary

Documentary filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck had a shoutout of praise for their 2022 film, THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS --from Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks. These veteran filmmakers, the FORREST GUMP team, are not the only fans. For their latest doc, GAUCHO GAUCHO, about Argentinian cowboys, making the rounds of film festivals to great acclaim, director/ producer Doug Liman, another fan known for popular films such as EDGE OF TOMORROW, starring Tom Cruise, hosted a private screening of excerpts in his downtown Manhattan apartment, followed by a Q&A with Michael Dweck. On the face of it, the filmmakers could not be more different. The evening became a master class in film art.

Shot in black & white, GAUCHO GAUCHO, takes place in a hilly landscape, featuring a community close to nature, far from our tech world. In one clip, a still mound moves. A horse rises from rest, a man on top of it—all in one long take. The filmmakers knew this “horse whisperer” often slept on his animal, and simply filmed it—like a Warholian meditation. The Hollywood filmmakers appreciate how challenging such a one-shot scene can be. No tricks, cut-aways, or B-roll--just the camera recording what takes place, taking its time. The audience at Liman’s comprised of documentary filmmakers all know that even non-fiction filmmaking relies on crafting. Without the customary “script,” Kershaw and Dweck get as close to the real moment as one can get with thrilling results.

Prior to their recent screening at DOCNYC, I had a chance to speak to them on Zoom. Onto the next project, they were filming in Burgundy, in France’s wine country, yet another off the grid community—their specialty. While the doc team were honored to be lauded by Zemeckis and Hanks, and to meet Liman and be friends, as they said, they work on a smaller canvas. “We have the luxury of time to create the film we want to make,” said Dweck.

Tammy Faye: Finding Religion on Broadway

Before becoming the pioneering televangelist power couple, Jim Bakker and his enterprising wife Tammy Faye Bakker sold God using puppets out of the back seat of a car, creating an industry and an empire. Religion, as we know, is big business. Limning their rise—and fall-- in fame and fortune, the new Elton John musical, Tammy Faye, puts them onstage at the newly refurbished Palace Theater, set against a wall of television monitors. The usual ministry of heavy-weights—Billy Graham (Mark Evans), Jimmy Swaggart (Ian Lassiter), Pat Robertson (Andy Taylor), Jerry Falwell (Michael Cerveris)-- pop up like the stars on Hollywood Squares. The story doesn’t get more American than this.

Except this is Broadway, and it’s Tammy Faye whose arc we follow. Before feminism was a thing, she master-minded much of the God-selling program. A wronged woman once Jim strayed with Jessica Hahn (Alana Pollard), Tammy Faye went off her own rails, spending excessively, downing drugs in her own tearfully sad journey--all to great spectacle; she’s accompanied by Elton John’s tunes—“He’s Inside Me,” “Look How Far We’ve Fallen,” “If You Came to See Me Cry,” “See You in Heaven”--with Jake Shears’ lyrics, book by James Graham, under Rupert Goold’s direction.

Opening night had Extravaganza written all over in sequins and glitz, from Jake Shears’ multicolored track suit to Elton John’s pearls. A Tammy Faye look-alike played the red carpet, batting winged eyelashes. We met Tammy Faye’s son, Jay Bakker, and his BFF Jeanette at the Tavern on the Green afterparty. No, he doesn’t see his dad, who seems to be in hiding. The great Christian Borle is in his glory portraying a hammy Jim Bakker. Jay Bakker was thrilled to hear Katie Brayben portraying his mom, and meet Michael Stipe who told Jay that when he started out recording in a studio, he was on the same microphone as Tammy Faye, a big moment for the REM singer/ lyricist. Meantime, young Jay said he was listening to “Losing My Religion.”

Remembering Paul Morrissey

From the edgy look of his movies—FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, to name a few--you would never think of Paul Morrissey as deeply religious. With his friend and partner Andy Warhol, a fellow Catholic, he made art, collaborating on many cinema-verite films and other ventures including the purchase of cliff-high acreage in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic.

The legendary Eothen had on it a number of cottages—more like rustic Catskill bungalows—where visitors could reside. Realtor Linda Stein who had brokered the deal stayed for a summer with Morrissey insisting that she shut lights when rooms were not in use. Not quite a conservationist, he was old school frugal and utilities out east are not cheap. Notables passed through: dutchesses, Kennedy’s and Radziwill’s, artists, musicians such as Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones. Curmudgeonly and loving, Paul Morrissey was the consummate host.

Friends and family celebrated him at his funeral this week hosted by his adoring nieces. Gerard Malanga, who had introduced Morrissey to Warhol in 1965, sent a poem. With speakers: the casting director Leonard Finger and music manager Danny Fields, much was made of Morrissey’s contradictions to a knowing crowd including Geraldine Smith and Susan Blond. A promoter of The Velvet Underground, Morrissey nevertheless cautioned against drug use. Compelled to sell the property long after Warhol died in 1987, he bought three units in the newly desirable trailer park nearby, just before the market surged for these waterfront residences now beached on cement foundations in rows. One for himself, the others for visiting family.

Luca Guadagnino's Queer at the New York Film Festival: Daniel Craig Looking for Love

The novels of William S. Burroughs may be difficult to adapt—just ask David Cronenberg—but in the able imagination of Luca Guadagnino, the transformation of Queer to film is a triumph. The packed audience at the recent Alice Tully Hall premiere, a high point at this year's New York Film Festival, went wild as the creative team took the stage for the post-screening Q&A. And it is not only because the movie stars Daniel Craig. Guadagnino explained how as a boy in Palermo, he picked up the Burroughs work and always wanted to make this film. While working on Challengers from screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ script, he gifted him the book one day and said “Read this tonight.”

The text of Queer, unlike say, Burroughs’ most famous Naked Lunch, has a linear thread so a narrative could be made of the love story between William Lee and a younger Eugene Allerton (a formidable Drew Starkey). Yes, there’s plenty of man-on-man sex—minus the testosterone. How else can you explain the tenderness? Prowling Mexico City looking for a connection, Lee has a tryst or two, essential to the vision of what homosexuality meant in the midcentury—achy, twitchy, awkward, and alone, Craig plays Lee’s vulnerability.

Of course, there are drugs involved. Costume designer J. W. Anderson spoke of dressing Lee in cool whites when the substance of choice was cocaine to the colors for heroin use. A funny moment comes when a doctor asks the sick Lee, are you addicted to opiates? Cut into chapters, Queer proceeds to South America as Lee looks to explore “telepathy;” Lee invites Allerton to travel with him in search of yage. The jungle scenes feature an unrecognizable Lesley Manville as shaman—the one significant woman in this movie, a transformation from the male Dr. Cotter of the book.

Another significant change: insisting that Queer did not have an ending, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes supply one, bringing closure to their plot. As Guadagnino put it, the novel opens a door and then closes it. Guadagnino proposed, “What if we went through that door?”

Julianna Margulies and Peter Gallagher in Left on Tenth: A Rom-Com on Broadway

Forget “meet-cute,” the winning rom-com trope that made writer Delia Ephron’s career. In Left on Tenth, Ephron’s play based on her memoir at the James Earl Jones Theater about finding love after her husband died, we get the more powerful “Bechert.” As Peter Gallagher, in the role of Peter explains, it is Yiddish for fated, --much more cosmic and explosive. That’s how he defines finding love with Delia, Julianna Margulies of ER fame in her Broadway debut, after decades, marriages, and emails. This is more than You’ve Got Mail. What could go wrong?

Well, as fate would have it, Delia’s watching her blood count after losing her older sister, writer, director Nora Ephron to leukemia. Following many reassuring doctor visits, Delia’s told, it’s not looking so good today. Delia in disbelief exclaims, But I’m falling in love.

Peter Gallagher, among his many theater credits including Guys and Dolls, is perfect in a lover role he nailed as Jane Fonda’s younger man in Grace & Frankie. Here, as Peter, he helps Delia through the arduous ordeal of cancer. We should all have such a handsome and handy lover helping us through hard life passages. Still, however based on true events, this is a rom-com in high Broadway form, and with Stro directing (that’s Susan Stroman to you), Left on Tenth features dancing. Margulies does a little tap, a little soft shoe, a happy dance. And some old school ballroom dips have the audience kvelling.

And laughing. When Delia compliments the doctor’s shoes, she says she got them ages ago at a sale at Barney’s. The audience lets out a collective sigh. Barney’s! The name evokes unspeakable loss. Forget cancer! The memory of a beloved department store has us where it hurts, the very heart of elite New York City shopping. This play knows its people! Does this spontaneous expression of deep loss happen every night?

Hillary Clinton, Producer at the Hamptons International Film Festival: Speaking Out on Women’s Health

Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton led the list of producers of Zurawski v Texas, a documentary by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault. After screening in the five states where abortion is on the ballot, this essential documentary is now in a theater near you, following an impassioned event at the recent Hamptons International Film Festival.

“This means you, New York,” the women shouted from the stage at the East Hampton Middle School in early October, where the packed audience stood to cheer the film team: the directors, producers Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, and a brave and hardworking legal team from the Center for Reproductive Rights who work with women suing Texas over its Draconian anti-abortion laws. The film is an unflinching look at women who have had to endure barbaric cruelty when some basic medical care was all that was needed to avert trauma and in the state of Georgia, now two deaths. What the women want is a clarification of the language—when exactly, under the new Dobbs decision—is it legal for a doctor to perform procedures on women at risk? What is a “medical exception?”

As it stands, the medical community is scared. Doctors face fines and imprisonment. In one harrowing case, a woman is made to bring a pregnancy to term even knowing the baby had a zero chance to live. Calling her Halo, the parents watched her die in her four hours of life. The mother was so traumatized, she subsequently had her tubes tied.

Hamptons Journal: McArthur Binions at the Peter Marino Foundation, the LongHouse Gala, and Daniel Humm at Guild Hall

The work is detailed and geographic, tonal, you might say, like bop graffiti on brick in a Detroit abandoned building. The artist, McArthur Binions, in fact, comes from Detroit but spent a lot of time in New York meeting Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, moving on to Chicago where he now lives and works. Artist Rachid Johnson was his student, so favored that he became part of the family, taking care of the kids. At a recent "Brunch with Bob," at the Peter Marino Foundation, he told a packed crowd awed by Binions' art, Binions refused to sell his work at the time, proclaiming it would be worth a lot someday. And Johnson who knew him only in that school setting as his teacher, thought, "This guy is crazy." Yeah, as the saying goes, crazy like a fox. This was the talk's great takeaway.

In the foundation gardens for brunch, Prudence Fairweather asked McArthur Binions if he had ever met her husband, John Chamberlain. Oh yes, that was at the Fanelli Bar. He had a large vial of cocaine. I ask, did he share? "Yes he did. It was very good."

A who’s who of artists show up at the LongHouse gala every year. The evening, honoring Kenny Scharf and Tony Bechara, is always an homage to Jack Lenor Larsen, its founder, and a celebration for nature enthusiasts who love the combo of gorgeously curated outdoor art in the leafy setting: Robert Wilson, Ned Smyth, Joan Semel, mingling among many others. The much-awarded “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” costumer Donna Sakowska said she’s been living in Paris developing a ballet series called “Etoile” with the Palladinos.

Bob Balaban Directs Blythe Danner, Edie Falco, Alec Baldwin for 2024: The Pursuit of Happiness at Guild Hall

Begging the question: is it too soon to laugh about the pandemic year, 2020, a collection of short plays by masterful playwrights, did just that in a one-nighter at Guild Hall, directed by Bob Balaban. That was July 2021. Now for July 2024, as we ponder where we are in an arguably post-pandemic year, Balaban assembled a collection of short plays to consider “The Pursuit of Happiness” starring Alec Baldwin, Edie Falco, Blythe Danner, Jim Bracchitta, Steven Wallem, and Richard Kind.

Baldwin kicked off the staged reading with “Mr. Happiness” by David Mamet, a Dear Abby meets Miss Lonelyhearts, an advice guru which he performed with a stagy voice only Alec Baldwin could muster. Blythe Danner, for a Neil la Bute piece from his “10 x 10 Monologues,” about a woman of a certain age contemplating her current plan to go off for a weekend with a handsome stranger, said after in Guild Hall’s green room, that she merely read it straight, not trying to act at all. The result was so wistful and moving that even this playwright’s words which are often not respectful to women came off as a true insight into the female psyche.

Lynn Grossman’s play “The Keepsake” took on the subject of memory and its lapses during the COVID era. As performed by Richard Kthis was the longest and most direct evocation of the virus and its aftermath, still uncharted. Grossman said she wrote the play with Richard Kind in mind as perfect to perform its manic ins and outs of memory and ending with a recitation of a Shakespeare sonnet.

Remembering Audrey Flack

At the end of Audrey Flack’s new memoir, With Darkness Came Stars, published when she was 92, she takes stock of a life well lived:

I am lucky that my mind remains clear and sharp, filled with ideas for new art. The creative spirit is running strong and I continue to work.

These words, and the fact that Flack’s mother lived to 100, gave the impression that she would always be there, encouraging artists of every kind, dispensing wisdom on every subject, exuding enthusiasm in her belief that art can heal. Her recent death at age 93 from a torn aorta was a great shock.

A noted pioneering photorealist, abstract expressionist, and sculptor, she was controversial in every genre. As a photorealist, her work featured lipsticks, mirrors, beads shining bright as the chrome veneers of the men’s autos. Flack’s very subjects, Marilyn Monroe to ç1 as Cleopatra, to teary eyed macarenas, were seen as secondary to the men’s “reflections on metal surfaces.” Excluded from a show, she knew women were being written out of the history of art. Her dealer Ivan Karp told her flat out: “Paint cars and trucks and I’ll make you famous.”

Flack went her own way. Airbrush was a no-no but she experimented anyway, and favored figuration when abstract expressionism was all the rage. Against the feminist grain, her bejeweled goddess statues were deemed kitsch, totally out of phase. Flack observed the art world from the inside: And she told her stories in the memoir and through her songs written for her “History of Art” bands. She played the banjo.

Jackson Pollock was a favorite subject, but not the only one. Often drunk, the male artists come off as boorish; the women subservient, and catty, always second place. Flack opines on who’s a feminist (herself) and who is not (Elaine DeKooning and Alice Neel) and tells juicy stories describing the artists’ loft scene, galleries and gallerists, liaisons. In one, she’s instrumental in introducing Jackson Pollock to Ruth Kligman, an aspiring artist, instructing the voluptuous young woman to the far seat at the Cedar Tavern’s bar.

Alec Baldwin Returns to East Hampton for Summerdocs: Skywalkers: A Love Story

Even more than meeting any Hollywood star, Alec Baldwin loves documentarians, he said this week, after a screening of Skywalkers: A Love Story, the first film screened at the newly refurbished Guild Hall and the first of the series, Summerdocs. The elite doc series, a cornerstone of HamptonsFilm programming, founded by Artistic Director David Nugent and Chairman Emeritus Baldwin, has since its inception showcased crowd-pleasing, feature-length nonfiction films that have gone on to Oscar nominations and wins (think Navalny). With its international focus, outstanding cinematography and core romance, expect Skywalkers to be an awards contender as the season approaches.

Baldwin, despite legal battles around the accidental shooting on set making Rust, was in top form interviewing Tamir Ardon and Maria Bukhonina, the filmmakers of Skywalkers, on the frontier of a new era of cutting-edge documentaries. Two Russian rooftoppers, Vanya Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, already popular on social media, team up and fall in love. Challenged to climb the tallest construction site in the world, in Malaysia, they allow a film crew along for the trip, but, as Bukhonina pointed out, Vanya was already an expert drone photographer. They climb a 118-story building and spire, a nail-biting journey, and perform a balletic stunt atop, with Vanya holding Angela, a trained gymnast, as she “flies.” Believe him when he tells her, “I will never let you fall.”

Prior to the film coming to the Hamptons, I had the opportunity to speak to director Jeff Zimbalist and producer/ director Maria Bukhanina:

 What was the most difficult part of making your film?

Jeff Zimbalist: Our primary challenge was safety. We developed a protocol with Vanya and Angela's families to reassure them that our crew wouldn't distract them during their most daring climbs and we had an agreement with Vanya and Angela that they wouldn't do anything for our cameras that they wouldn't do otherwise. We kept reminding them, this isn't a film about the fear of falling from heights; it's about the fear of falling in love. Like the metaphor Angela uses in the film about trapeze couples, there's the flyer and the catcher, sometimes we found ourselves grounding our subjects when their heads were in the clouds and other times, they grounded us, and fortunately for a film about trespassing and death-defying stunts, that led to a process with few injuries and no arrests.