Gossip Central

Remembering Photographer Elsa Dorfman

A longtime collaborator with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and other literary figures, photographer Elsa Dorfman was a true American original. A portrait artist often associated with her main instrument, the large format 20" x 24" inch Polaroid camera, Dorfman, an influence to poets, and, from all reports, a great friend, died this week at 83.

In 2017, I met her when her pal Errol Morris made a film about her, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, his most intimate documentary. Usually working with out-sized personalities, McNamara to Rumsfeld, the murderous gasman of Zyklon B, to name a few, documentarian Errol Morris has the further distinction with his 1985 The Thin Blue Line, of having changed the course of one man’s destiny with his investigative work, unearthing evidence that showed he was innocent of murder.

Elsa Dorfman, a neighborhood friend seems a smaller portrait indeed, but the filmmaker caught up with this mild-mannered photographer just as the Gentle Giant movers were removing some large-scale Polaroids for storage, so his picture of her surprises as it covers the technical aspect of Polaroid photography, and perhaps, the end of an era. This conversation from that time, as the film was about to open after a distinguished festival run including the New York Film Festival, reveals something of Dorfman’s charm. Errol and Elsa complete one another’s sentences.

John Waters Cajoles Graduates at SVA Commencement: Become Covid-19 Commandoes!

Superstars Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey may be grabbing headlines offering online encouragement to college graduates this season, but John Waters did the job this week, dispensing discordant wisdom to designers and other artists graduating from The School of Visual Arts. The ceremony, usually held at Radio City Music Hall, featured far flung speakers, Waters himself at a podium with curtain backdrop from his home in Baltimore, setting of his most famous satiric films including his underground homage to filth, Pink Flamingos, and his breakout commercial hit, Hairspray. A dapper dresser in brocade jackets, Waters wore a traditional gown, cap, and latex gloves, all in black, his signature pencil thin ‘stache under an artsy mask. Pulling it off, he consoled the graduates who’d been robbed of a “normal” graduation: “If you do die tomorrow, at least you’ll have a college degree.”

Kristin Scott Thomas in Military Wives: A Virtual Premiere

Virtual premieres are new to me, and definitely to Kristin Scott Thomas who attended for her latest film Military Wives this week. After explaining that the film opened in the UK for five minutes before being shut down in the pandemic, the director of this feel good movie, Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), introduced his stars, Sharon Horgan and Kristin Scott Thomas, while Thomas groused about the bleating of sheep being shorn. Isn’t that the way with Zoom? You may overhear the chit chat as you wait to be admitted. One advantage of a virtual premiere, she said getting into the novelty, “You can wear your own dress.”

In Military Wives, a movie about a women’s chorus of military wives based on a true story, she plays Kate, a mother who has lost her teenage son in war. A control freak, and Kristin Scott Thomas is a master of contained rage, (her next role as Mrs. Danvers in Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of Rebecca should confirm), her bossy character commands the women’s group to sing. And sing they do, getting as far as London’s Royal Albert Hall. Sharon Horgan plays Lisa, another commanding leader of this group, orchestrating the music and writing lyrics. As she describes this character, her reaction to her husband going off to Afghanistan is red wine. Who can’t relate to that? “This is the right film for isolation and anxiety. You will reach for tissues and laugh out loud.”

Guild Hall Hosts A Revived Reading of Tennessee Williams

The works of Tennessee Williams are a goldmine for veteran actors, and Guild Hall has a rich history of producing his plays. At one such event, here’s how it went for a reporter and Eli Wallach. How old am I? asked Eli Wallach playfully. The occasion was a staged reading of works by Tennessee Williams in 2011, his words from memoirs, letters, and scenes from his work, most memorably The Glass Menagerie, in honor of the playwright’s centennial year. 91, averred a reporter. With a smile, his finger gestured up. Meeting the challenge, the reporter counted to 95. His face glowed. That’s it. That great evening at Guild Hall, directed by Harris Yulin who also performed, featured Mercedes Ruehl as Amanda Winfield, and on May 16, just nine years and, in the time of COVID-19, a world later, that evening will be revived at a staged reading of “Portrait of Tennessee: The Words of Tennessee Williams,” this time on Zoom.

Remembering Jerry Stiller

Of course, everyone remembers Jerry Stiller as George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld. Festivus? Remember the holiday of Festivus famously celebrated by George’s dad? Way before that he was the Stiller of Stiller & Meara, one of the greatest comedy teams ever, with his wife Ann Meara. And, as if I were paying a shiva call to his son Ben Stiller and family from my sequestered perch, I will recount a tale or two from this beloved curmudgeon comedian who died yesterday at age 92.

March 15, 2008 at Judith Crist’s “Survivor’s Party.” I am the guest of Sylvia Miles, and Jerry Stiller installs himself between us on Judith’s couch. Jerry Stiller tells the story about his Versace suit—he had had some sort of attack and went to the hospital—came out feeling incredible, thrilled with life. He goes by Versace where he had purchased a suit for $900 just a year before, and the salesman remembers him. He tries on this suit for $1200, a gorgeous blue silk with subtle dots woven in. Jerry says, but I bought one last year for only $900. Can’t you do something about this? Come on man, says the salesman. Don’t do this, but Jerry persists. Who can you call? Well Gianni is dead and Donatella is in Milan. Call her in Milan, and he gets the suit for $900.

Chiara Mastroianni in On a Magical Night/ Rendez-vous with French Cinema

As of the beginning of March, Film at Lincoln Center was abuzz with plans for the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, with On a Magical Night to screen, and filmmaker Christophe Honore, and his star Chiara Mastroianni to attend. The festival kaboshed, like much of everything, the film is now available: strandreleasing.com. The director and star, distanced in Paris apartments with their respective cats, talked about their film on Zoom.

The French do have a way of making infidelity, especially a beautiful, feisty older woman with younger men, seem a rite of passage. Mastroainni plays Maria, married to Richard (Benjamin Biolay) who catches on by reading her student’s sexually charged texts on her phone. She leaves for a hotel across the street and the apparition of Richard’s younger self (Vincent Lacoste) comes calling. That’s the movie’s set up, and even when it is charming and funny, disloyalty carries its own weight.

Remembering Michael McClure

A West Coast beat, Michael McClure was less of a presence in New York than the seminal figures: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, but he was no less of a master poet, combining his love of nature with traditional forms such as villanelles, sonnets and sestinas. One of the last beat poets, Michael McClure (87) died this week.

Back in 1956, at the pivotal Six Gallery reading, where Ginsberg read Howl for an audience for the first time, and a shy Kerouac passed around a jug of red wine, as legend has it, McClure performed his 1954 poem, “For the Death of a Hundred Whales,” breaking down its ballad meter to A-B-C-B rhymes, to form a “cubist poem,” as he explained in his “The Beat Journey: An Interview.” He combined a love of theater, poetry, and art with his ecological concerns, and, among his credits, performed with Ray Manzarek of The Doors.

Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine): What is “Essential?”

The writer/ editor Gordon Lish used to say, riffing off a groaner of a joke, “Everyone has to be somewhere.” For characters in isolation in a new play inspired by the moment, Felt Sad, Posted a Frog (and other streams of global quarantine), the location is all over the place. That, of course, is the point. We are all there, be it Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Bucharest or Berlin. An interweaving of streams by six playwrights—Iva Brdar, Jorgelina Cerritos, Rebekka Kricheldorf, Santiago Loza, Saviana Stanescu, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon—this work glimpses others in their sequestered locales, their loneliness, creativity, frustration, fear presented up close the way we are experiencing others these days—only, this is a work of theater, and like it or not, we’re in it.

Julia Garner in The Assistant: He’s Not That Into You

Remember when the big news was the rampant sexual predation in our culture? Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, men who preyed on women seem like proverbial spuds compared to the current threat on all our systems. The movie The Assistant, about Jane, an aspiring film producer in her entry level job at a movie studio goes through her routine, making coffee, copies, reservations, and observes some unsavory activity between a new hire and the much older unnamed, unseen boss. When she attempts to report her employer’s impropriety, the film takes on a timely edge, and made many who saw it at early screenings think of Harvey Weinstein in the Miramax years and beyond, just as the movie mogul was then the big news of the day, convicted after 87 women accused him of sexual misdeeds. Now, The Assistant is available on DVD, AppleTV, and Amazon Prime Video, and, while it has lost that hot topic punch as far as #MeToo, it gains in being emblematic of a bygone world in severe disrepair. If we ever go back to the office, it’s got to be better than this.

A Star-Studded Tribute for Stephen Sondheim at 90: He’s “Still Here”

To fete beloved Stephen Sondheim at 90 in song for two and a half hours, an A-list of Broadway stars zoomed in. Sure, you don’t get the wow production, the pageantry, the costumes and sets of a live musical, but what you do get is that up close emotion that the internet allows, as if you were seated a foot away from say Meryl Streep’s face as she carouses with Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald for a drunken rendition of “Ladies Who Lunch.” This is what the split screen was meant to do, just as Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt’s duet from Into the Woods and Annaleigh Ashford and Jake Gyllenhaal from Sunday in the Park with George keeps them in the same frame, even as they, and we are, well, apart and elsewhere.