Gossip Central

Blythe Danner in My Brilliant Divorce at Guild Hall

The actress Blythe Danner can do anything, and in the one-woman play, My Brilliant Divorce by Geraldine Aron, she does: pirouetting, leaping, laughing, singing, sashaying across a bare stage fitted with one large stuffed chair in which she is engulfed like Eloise. Accompanied only by a stuffed dog in a wheeling cart, she recounts the tale of marital loss in a staged reading directed by the playwright and Jim Lawson. This being a comedy, she finds love. The evening of husbands and wives was sponsored by Dina Merrill and Ted Hartley who cheered Danner on along with Bob Balaban and Lynn Grossman, Danner’s children Jake Paltrow with Taryn Simon, and daughter Gwyneth with husband Chris Martin of Coldplay. This was one of Guild Hall’s stellar summer evenings.

The week prior, the shy Barbara Kruger greeted guests at her one-woman show (till October 11) featuring her trademark slogan photographs and collages. One of her satiric one-liners taking over an entire gallery ceiling reads: everyone laughs at a rich man’s jokes. This humor is particularly relevant in the Hamptons. Still, its irony could not have been more acute as partiers gathered at Julie Taubman’s beachfront estate for Guild Hall’s annual summer gala sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels. Models strolled about wearing gowns and dime-sized gems, while Kruger, humbly attired --looking like, um, a working artist-- avoided photographers. The bejeweled women clustered aroundAlec Baldwin who seemed worried that he wasn’t wearing a tie.

The infinitely affable 30 Rock actor/comedian could not be more appealing or available. Attending every event, he is a significant Hamptons presence. At the annual Authors Night at the East Hampton Library, crowds flocked for autographs of his memoir, A Promise to Ourselves, on divorce, alienation, and the joys of parenting, now out in paperback. Other popular authors at the fundraiser that raised $200,000 for the library included Dani Shapiro, Candace Bushnell, Bonnie Jacobson, and Robert Caro.

A board member of the Hamptons International Film Festival, Baldwin has served as M.C. and interviewer on a series of documentaries hosted by the festival at Guild Hall including The Art of the Steal, about the fate of the Barnes Collection, and The Most Dangerous Man in America, about the Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg. Preceding a final screening at Guild Hall on September 4 of Last Play at Shea with Billy Joel attending for a Q&A, Montblanc and the Wall Street Journal hosted a breakfast at the Maidstone Hotel last Saturday. In conversation with the HIFF’s Karen Arakian and the Journal’s Christopher Farley, Baldwin extolled the virtues of documentaries, citing the excitement of seeing The Cove and Food, Inc. among last year’s most popular movies. And in truth, the HIFF has since its inception in 1993, championed the art of non-fiction films. I for one am looking forward to October.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

A Mother's Love: The Tillman Story

Josh Brolin introduced a special screening of The Tillman Story at MoMA last week. The documentary's “voice,” the Oscar-winning actor explained that he took on this project as narrator after seeing a bit of footage: “I wanted the Tillman family to adopt me,” he said clearly moved by their dedication to their famous son's legacy.

By the time director Amir Bar-Lev and producer John Battsek were chosen to make this film among many filmmakers who approached the family, everyone knew the story of Pat Tillman, the charismatic football star with superhero good looks who put aside a multi-million dollar contract in 2002 to enlist in the U. S. army to fight the war against the terrorists who attacked our country. Killed in his second tour of duty, in Afghanistan in 2004, Tillman became a poster boy for a Hollywood scenario of heroism, of death by Taliban ambush; he also became our military's worst nightmare as his family, led by his remarkable mother, continued to press for further details, demanding the truth about Tillman's death.

The film is a riveting quest for this truth, and it is also heartbreaking, in that whatever emotions we harbor about this war, the injustice done to this family speaks in larger ways to the culture of cover-ups that passes for patriotism in post-9/11 America. 

At center is Mary Tillman, like any grieving mom, but who, in memory of her son, won't let the matter go; in 2008 she published, Boots on the Ground by Dusk: Searching for Answers in the Death of Pat Tillman. The film crew began with perhaps the most damning scene: At a Congressional hearing, top military officials are seen to be dumb and dumber around this family's aching questions about what the military knew, when they found out, who sanctioned the cover-up, leading finally to Rumsfeld, and probably beyond. At the end of this scene, these men glad hand one another in the highest court as accountability slides off them. The betrayal is devastating.

After the screening, hosted by The Weinstein Company, A&E Indie Films, and Michael's the audience including Brolin and the filmmakers, Army Ranger Specialist Russell Baer, Jane Fonda, Kerry Washington, Dan Abrams, documentarians Ellen Kuras, Robert Richter, and many others filed out to Michael's for cocktails, the question on everyone's lips: What really happened? The simple answer is, a bunch of our guys who were amped up to engage in a conflict, just kept shooting at Tillman's position. This wasting of life is called by the ironic term “friendly fire,” or the more Biblical, familial “fratricide.” Either way, the shooter is known, but has not been held accountable.

In other words, the question remains unanswered, in the official sense, of course.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Soul Man Sam Moore Rocks the Creeks

A benefit at the Creeks Saturday night raised a reported, whopping $800,000 for Harlem's Apollo Theater Foundation. Hosted by Ron Perelman at his East Hampton estate, the elegant event was also a great night for music: the all-star concert in Perelman's “barn” featured Sam Moore with Jon Bon Jovi, John Legend, Mary J. Blige, and The Roots, with special guests Paul Shaffer and Chuck Jackson. 

Kissing Sam Moore's hand in a moment of adoration and noting the Soul Man's status as a true legend, Jon Bon Jovi reminded the happy crowd, Sam's the only one in the room to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The intimate setting was perfect for the duets the New Jersey native sang with Sam: “Soul Man” and “Lookin' for Love.” JBJ announced he first met his wife at a Sam & Dave concert thirty years ago-and they are still together. Sam Moore paid tribute to his recently deceased pal Billy Preston who penned “You Are So Beautiful.” Sam's rendition is so moving, a glorious fixture on his tours. A surprising piano solo by John Legend, performing “Let it Be,” I'm told for the first time ever, gave me chills. Mary J. Blige had the house up and rocking to “No More Drama.”

Everyone, including Chuck Jackson, and with Ron Perelman on drums, finished up with a rousing “Soul Man,” everyone that is except Mary J. Blige, but the crowd-Penny Marshall, Lorraine Bracco, Richard Gere, Christie Brinkley, Russell Simmons, Kyle MacLachlan, and jazzman Randy Brecker-who will perform in Montauk on Gosman's Dock this Sunday--didn't seem to mind.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

David Mamet's Romance at Bay Street: A Review

You know you are in David Mamet's world when the expletives fly rapid fire, one distasteful zinger after another, breaking every taboo. You laugh, and hearing the rhythms, you call it poetry. The title Romance may suggest a candlelit evening, but here that candle may be a stick of dynamite up our cultural ass. Four tight scenes performed in an hour and a half, Romance features a fine ensemble: Richard Kind, Darrell Hammond, Chris Bauer, Matt McGrath, Reg Rogers, Joey Slotnick and Joe Pallister, expertly directed by Lisa Peterson. Like the language, time zings by.

Mamet's writing has never been this funny, or have I missed something in recent productions? Race seems more an acted out essay on that subject, Oleanna too, on the subject of sexual harassment to the point of who is manipulating whom. Romance adds slapstick and shtick to a courtroom farce. Somewhere in the neighborhood, there is a peace conference, a protest, a parade. Under consideration: how to achieve peace in the Middle East, was Abraham Lincoln a Jew (yes, just look at the photographs), was Shakespeare a Jew (inconclusive), was he a homosexual, and, what do homosexuals actually DO anyway. Then, for wardrobe: one man lounges in a leopard thong, another rips off his clothes in court revealing socks held up with garters, and boxer shorts to the loud gasps of the audience. 

Richard Kind plays the Judge who cannot remember whether or not he's taken his medication, sneezing, confessing to some impropriety with his daughter, oy vey! Most recently seen in episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm and in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, as well as Bay Street's production of Charles Busch's The Lady in Question, Kind has a featured role in the upcoming HBO series, Luck. He is a treasure, funny just standing still.

Murphy Davis, Bay Street artistic director with Sybil Christopher, said they read the play some years ago and wanted to stage it, but perhaps they were thinking, this is genteel Sag Harbor. Then, with the success of Dinner, a British transplant by Moira Buffini last summer that starred Mercedes Ruehl serving primordial soup, a dish to die for, they realized they could now do Romance. As it is, Davis said, a woman walked out in the midst of one preview noisily announcing she'd had enough. 

As to Mamet's “thing” with gender: This being an all male show, they deliberately decided to have a woman director. Davis quipped, they may move it to Off-Broadway with a new judge: Lady Gaga.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

How German It Is: A Film Unfinished

Just when you think historians have unearthed as many images as can be mined, illustrating what happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II, a new can of film emerges, and becomes a catalyst for a re-reading of a vintage Nazi film marked “Ghetto.” Containing scenes from inside the Warsaw Ghetto shot in May 1942, An Unfinished Film opens at Film Forum this week. A fascinating compilation of  “Ghetto” footage with diaries, letters and testimony of those who were there, Warsaw Ghetto survivors, this documentary does not so much shock with stock pictures of walking skeletons, piles of bones, bodies heaped in the streets and on carts, but with the lingering gaze of individuals as they are victims twice, having been rounded up for ghetto squalor, a prelude to their murder, but now forced to pose for Nazi propaganda. The Germans authorized this film back in the day, a proud testament to their design for genocide, and now they are the principle funders for this first-time release.

Here are some indelible moments: A group of naked women walk gingerly into a pool of water. Not yet emaciated, the women become useful, depicting “a ritual bath,” common in the life of observant Jews. A survivor, now in her '80's, remembers a film being made in the midst of ghetto misery, asking: “What if I see someone I know?” Outtakes of officers, and of cameramen at work, staging shots to show “the good life” enjoyed by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

As Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski pointed out at a special screening attended by Elie and Marion Wiesel, Tovah Feldshuh, Yoko Ono, Gabe Pressman, and others last Wednesday night at MoMA, this footage was used in other films, but here, seen in context, the viewer is overwhelmed by the pain, humiliation, embarrassment, and abject circumstance of these women who had been corralled off the ghetto streets and forced as “actors” in this piece of Nazi promotion. Would any agree to be photographed in this private, modest act? To see this footage in real time, is to witness the Holocaust unfiltered through dramatic re-enactments. The World War II era is known to us through skillfully shaped scripts and deft cutting techniques by talented and well meaning artists. The look of some of our most famous Holocaust films, like Steven Spielberg's mostly black & white Oscar winning Schindler's List comes from a study of this early Nazi documentation.

Despite the fact that it contains no scenes of sex or violence near the graphic display of your typical Hollywood action vehicle, the rating for A Film Unfinished is “R.” Perhaps nudity is a factor, although I would argue for the less prurient “naked” for this material. The market limiting “R” is reflective of the film's power: the truth is so much more visceral, bewildering and disturbing than any fictional account. As much about the crafting of history, A Film Unfinished is another important document in understanding that, as its title suggests, the Holocaust is a subject that remains unfinished.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Jacki Weaver: the “Ma Barker” of Animal Kingdom

What hits you immediately upon meeting Jacki Weaver, the extraordinary Sydney-based actress who plays Smurf (Janine) Cody in the movie Animal Kingdom is that she is nothing like the sociopath, the manipulative mom with darting eyes and flirtatious menace she plays in Animal Kingdom. This Australian Tarantino-like crime drama won top awards at Sundance, and opens this week. I had the opportunity to sit down with Weaver at the Regency Hotel in New York on June 22. Sizing you up with her blue saucer eyes, this blond Sally Strothers lookalike asks you a question or two, until the lines blur, and you wonder, who is interviewing who.

Why haven't we seen more of you in this country?

I don't know. I've been acting for 48 years. I've never been out of work, never done another job, I get some great roles, playing a lot of Americans. That's why I'm so interested in hearing the way you speak. I've done three Neil Simon plays. My husband and I did two American classics: Death of a Salesman and Prisoner of Second Avenue. I've been in a long running musical, They're Playing out Song, wearing a black wig, looking a lot like you. Last year I toured for seven months in Steel Magnolias. Now that you mention it, if I'd been living here, they're probably roles I never would have been given. I've been here a lot, coming every year for 20 years. I see a lot of theater: my best was 30 shows in 3 weeks. That's 7 nights and 3 matinees per week. I've been in a few tv series, a couple written especially for me, but I am mostly a theater actress. This year I'm doing 4 plays back to back. None is American. I will do Uncle Vanya with Cate Blanchette. You could say I'm married to the theater.

Is this all in Australia?

Yes. Nowadays all the young actors go straight to Hollywood and get into pilots, but this is something that my generation didn't do. Maybe it was lack of ambition or courage. We loved everything that came out of America. Big filmgoers, we're obsessed with American culture. I grew up watching Mickey Mouse Club. My son grew up watching Sesame Street. We are like sponges. We like our own culture but there's a lot about America that we understand. It's very surprising at this stage in my life to be in something that is getting such a big release in America. Now that I'm 63, it just makes me laugh. I knew that I was happy with what we'd done. And then we won at Sundance. We only went there because we were one of the 12 finalists. And then when we won, we'd all left Sundance because we never expected to win. Suddenly I'm talking to American journalists the way I talk to Australian journalists.

I understand you were one of the first actors to sign on to this film.

David Michon said he wrote it for me, flattering, but unexpected too. You would never expect this role to be offered to an actress like me. You expect someone more hard bitten. I usually get Sally Field roles. But the nature of this woman is so complex. You don't realize she is an amoral sociopath until way into the film. That was David's idea. My idea was to jump in boots and all and play her like a Disney witch. Sociopaths are very good at charming people and hiding their true colors. It's important that at the beginning we see her as a typical ordinary loving mom.

Someone who kisses her sons on the lips?

That's a little touch, a gesture that speaks volumes. That was David's idea. It didn't occur to me that she would do that. But it says so much about her power over these boys that she condones, encourages their criminal behavior. And the boys have all had different fathers. Her behavior is inappropriate, crossing a line toward incest.

Is this genre of film peculiar to Australia? I saw The Square, another dark badass movie with many of the same actors and a similar sensibility. For example, a character is offed, and you say, gee, I kind of liked him.

Yes, Joel Edgerton made The Square. He's is Hollywood at the moment. He's lovely, with quite a future. Yes, there's a similar banality of evil in these movies, an anti-glamorizing of the bad people. There's a pragmatism in the violence. I think we are mesmerized by the crime genre because most of us are law abiding. We find it riveting that there are people who go beyond the bounds. I think most of us are capable of bad things but most of us know when to draw the line.

How did you prepare for your role?

I read a lot of true crime, a lot of this movie mirrors events that took place in Melbourne in the 1980's, a feud going on between the corrupt police and a couple of criminal families. This is fiction, though, because David wanted to tell the story himself without worrying about the history: there were 2 young cops killed as a reprisal and there was a family of thugs. The mother has around 6 kids, a bad woman who ran brothels, and had people killed. Two of her sons died in jail. They committed several murders, one with a chain saw like in Fargo. She's only got one eye because another criminal shot it out. In Australia we've got much stronger libel laws than they do here. She's still around, and a bit scary. We don't talk about it even though everyone knows who this character is based on. We do have a reality show a little like The Sopranos but we use real names. It is incumbent on the actors to do a kind of impersonation. That would not have bothered me. But David did not want to make a biopic. He wanted to borrow from those events and make his own story, so we invented the character. The real life mother is furious. She was interviewed, saying: Everybody's making money off my fucking life except me.

Your acting! There's something about this character. She is sweet one minute and then you are not even aware she is changing. And then all of a sudden it's the look in her eyes.

That's what we wanted. It was a good collaboration. David had a clear idea of what he wanted but at the same time he is not a puppeteer like a lot of young directors. They will tell you exactly how they want things and you might as well be a storyboard for animation. The best acting comes from collaboration and David was ready to listen to all of us. At the same time he had a clear vision.

Did you go to acting school?

I started when I was 3. I came out of the womb pretending to be someone else. I love the work of Judi Dench. Meryl Streep. Anything by Woody Allen and Pedro Almodovar. I am fascinated by others: I always find other people far more interesting than I am.

Is that why you started our interview asking me questions?

You are like a lot of my black wig characters. I wear a lot of wigs.

Were you wearing one in the movie?

No, they hot rollered my hair beyond belief.

Did it take a lot of time in makeup and wigs?

Not as much as the tattoos on the boys.

At the end of Animal Kingdom, the grandson-played by an extraordinary newcomer, James Frecheville-- surprises you. What do you think happens to the grandson?

It shows good writing that the end is not spelled out. But my theory is, he's now top lion. It's too late for him. He's already committed a murder so he has to be involved with crime. The family will continue with the grandson running the roost. And the grandmother has to obey him for her own survival. David is already talking about a sequel, even a prequel. I said I'm in, but only if I can choose her husbands.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura

Daniel Ellsberg: “The Most Dangerous Man in America” to Visit the Hamptons

The Hamptons International Film Festival had scheduled the screening of the Oscar nominated documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, the second in its SummerDocs Series in East Hampton for Saturday August 7, well before Wikileaks made Daniel Ellsberg a hot item-again, 40 years after he leaked The Pentagon Papers. 

Now, swamped with media requests, Ellsworth will fly east from his home in Oakland, California to attend the Guild Hall screening and join actor Alec Baldwin and Carl Bernstein, the journalist with whom Bob Woodward broke Watergate, for a conversation that is sure to engage his anti-war passions, even though, as he asserted in a recent phone interview, “I am not a pacifist. Self defense is justified.” 

Q: Do you think the comparison between The Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks is apt?

The comparison is inevitable. The scale of this leak is comparable. There hasn't been any authorized disclosure on this scale. Both leaks are about similar, hopelessly stalemated wars: Vietnam and Afghanistan are analogous.

Q: Forty years ago, Henry Kissinger called you “the most dangerous man in America.” Who is playing these roles in today's Wikileaks scandal?

Bradley Manning is not yet arraigned. His motives are similar to mine: shortening a war and saving lives, same as mine 40 years ago. He said the information needed to be known, and was wrongfully withheld. He said he was willing to take personal risk, and expected to go to jail. I don't know of anyone else to express that readiness to risk. Why not take personal risk? In 1971, in the Pentagon, many people thought the war in Vietnam was wrong. I was supposed to serve 115 years in prison, until it was revealed that the same burglars arrested in Watergate had broken into my psychiatrist's office to steal information. Manning's case is different in that Manning faces charges in a military court, and he may have to go to jail or worse. Republican Congressman Mike Rogers called for execution of anyone who leaks such sensitive information. 

Q: Are you disappointed with Obama?

I didn't expect a lot and he is at the low end of my expectations. I just thought he was better than McCain. His foreign policy is actually similar to that of George W. Bush.

Obama violated or should I say reversed many of his views, but not on Afghanistan. He sent 27,000 more troops in March. In December of 2009, he said he expected to withdraw troops in 2011. I do not expect that to be his last infusion of troops; if he believes that, he was mistaken.

By the end of 2011 troops with remain. I said I did not expect him to keep to his pledge. I don't think he expects that himself. We will keep bases there for an indefinite period. If Americans turn over U.S. bases to Iraqis by 2011, I will never make foreign policy predictions again.

Q: Do you think our country has learned anything over the years from the Pentagon Papers?

Yes, the Pentagon has learned ways of prolonging a war: Curtail reporting, prevent Americans from seeing coffins, blood, injured, dead Americans or Iraqis. That's why what Wikileaks exposed was so important to keep out of sight. Americans saw more violence in the Rodney King video than in images from Iraq or Afghanistan. Writers tried to get the videos and were being refused. Who refused them? This should be investigated. We need to raise questions about the war. 

The public needs to know. $33.5 billion more has just been allocated for this war in our time of economic hardship. For what? To recruit for the Taliban. We cannot afford these crimes. After 30 years of war it is time to reevaluate our involvement with Afghanistan and if Wikileaks causes a drop in support of the war, that's all to the good.

Q: Have you seen the Afghan woman on the cover of Time Magazine who was brutally punished for attempting to flee her abusive in-laws? Is this image of a woman with her nose cut off being used to manipulate our sympathies toward our continued military presence in Afghanistan?

I haven't seen the cover yet, but if you oppose Taliban justice, you need to end the American occupation. Our presence strengthens the Afghanistani's support for the Taliban, a much more fanatic group, because the people will put up with their repressive rule in opposition to the American occupation. Had we left, they would be weaker. The fact is, the Taliban is larger today. The presence of our troops there recruits only for the Taliban. Our involvement goes back thirty years with our funding wars in Afghanistan. Do feminists imagine that the status of women has improved in thirty years? The improvement of women's lives has not been a U.S. government priority, or an effect.

Q: So, how do you feel about your visit to the Hamptons, and your conversation with Alec Baldwin and Carl Bernstein?

Oh, is Bernstein going to be there too? I knew about Baldwin. That's terrific.

As a beach lover and body surfer, I am looking forward to my first visit to the Hamptons for the screening on August 7th, and, the next day, celebrating my 40th wedding anniversary.

Regina Weinreich

Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura