Gossip Central

Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait Premieres at Tribeca

Don’t you want to paint a giant picture now? Laurie Anderson asked the audience at a post Tribeca Film Festival screening Q&A following the premiere of the documentary, Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait about the artist well known for his work on outsized canvases and plate paintings. An art star for decades, Schnabel is also well known for his films, especially Basquiat, Before Night Falls, Berlin, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Each one is about the creative process, illuminating fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cuban poet Reinaldo Areinas, rocker and close friend Lou Reed, and writer/editor Jean-Dominique Bauby. Despite the subtitle, A Private Portrait, director Pappi Corsicato never gets beneath the artist’s skin, but in showing his work and the man working, the film shows the breadth of a big career in progress.

A Doll’s House, Part 2: Nora’s Return to Broadway

Lucas Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen’s classic of world literature, A Doll’s House, titled A Doll’s House, Part 2, suggests that every work in the canon should have a follow-up. Unless they die at the end, like Anna Karenina, it would be great to catch up, after all the sturm und drang. At the Golden Theater, we have that opportunity with Nora Helmer, the husband she left, Torvald, her faithful femme d’affaires, Anne Marie, and one of the three children she left behind, Emmy. Fifteen years have passed, and Nora (Laurie Metcalf, outstanding) returns to the house. Delivering a diatribe against marriage to Anne Marie (the incomparable Jayne Houdyshell), she needs to ensure that she is indeed divorced, and is dismayed to find her daughter, Emmy (an excellent Condola Rashad), while a new and updated version of her self, is engaged to, what else, a banker just like her dad. Torvald (Chris Cooper, a man any sane woman would be loath to leave) arrives home unexpectedly, and my how he has evolved since the day Nora left!

Bobbi Jene Gets Naked at the Tribeca Film Festival

It feels perfectly natural to see Bobbi Jene Smith perform naked, grinding on a sandbag in front of an audience in the documentary Bobbi Jene, directed by Elvira Lind, now screening at Tribeca. That’s because there’s nothing risqué about Bobbi Jene’s dance exploration of female sexuality. Naked, in the film is fresh, honest, unselfconscious, and raw, and we can extend that definition to her aesthetic, neither full of artifice nor commercially motivated. We meet her as she explains to Ohad Naharin, director of the prestigious Batsheva Dance Company based in Tel Aviv, why after ten years of success, she is leaving the company. Bobbi Jene was filmed dancing in Mr. Gaga, Tomer Heymann’s documentary about Batsheva, but now in Bobbi Jene, this dancer and choreographer is star of a portrait on her own.

On a recent afternoon, I had a chance to speak to Bobbi Jene and film editor Adam Nielsen at the Smyth. I caught up with filmmaker Elvira Lind on the phone. Nine days past her due date for the baby she was having with actor Oscar Isaac, she decided wisely not to venture out. Oscar, for his part, left his own premiere of The Promise, a powerful love story set in the historic moment of the Armenian genocide, at Shun Lee a few days earlier, to be by her side. Several days later, as Bobbi Jene premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, everyone was still waiting.

Cynthia Nixon and Laura Linney in The Little Foxes: Southern Women

In Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, the lives of Southern women don’t look too shabby, but they most certainly have their limits. Regina Giddens (Cynthia Nixon in a recent matinee) and her sister-in-law Birdie Hubbard (Laura Linney—the stars alternate) define the parameters in the superb MTC production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, the first being all grins and fangs, the latter, tipsy and gently nuts. Neither one is quite who she seems, however. I am still not over the effect of Laura Linney’s dimpled smile as she instructs Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Francesca Carpanini) in the family’s history, cautioning her to stay clear of her own son Leo (Michael Benz). Cynthia Nixon broadcasts bad faith with the smallest twitch of her mouth, her eyes fixed on a far horizon.

Variety Power of Women Luncheon Honors Jessica Chastain, Chelsea Clinton, Gayle King, Blake Lively, Audra McDonald, Shari Redstone, and Tina Knowles Lawson

By the time Variety’s Power of Women M. C. Vanessa Bayer hit the podium, joking about eh, what a great year for women this has been, I had been treated to one Bellini and a hand massage by Jose in a pop up spa for SheaMoisture in a corner of the spacious Cipriani 42 Street. Feeling no pain, I found out SheaMoisture, a premiere sponsor of this yearly luncheon presented by Lifetime, not only smoothed out every gnarl on my hands, this is a company that sends 10% of its profits to African women.

Yes, there were big names featured at this luncheon from Blake Lively to Tina Knowles Lawson, that’s Beyonce’s mom, who was awarded the Commerce Impact Award by SheaMoisture. With its high octane focus on promoting good health, the safety, nourishment, and education of children, women’s right to physical autonomy, this was no ordinary event. Speakers from Cory Booker, who flew in from California just to introduce Gayle King, and then flew back again just after, to Lena Dunham introducing Jessica Chastain, to 16-year-old Hayley Thomas presenting Chelsea Clinton, each one was an inspiration for empowering others.

Aretha Franklin at the Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night: Celebrating Clive Davis

Music mogul Clive Davis is so beloved, one of his premiere stars Aretha Franklin, complaining of upper respiratory problems, came out in full vocal force to celebrate him at Radio City Music Hall for the opening of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. What a night! First the screening of the documentary, Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of our Lives, a glorious film directed by Chris Perkel tracing Clive’s genius career, first seeing Janis Joplin at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and signing her up at CBS, which prior to that auspicious recognition of rock and roll as art, was dominated by the sing along sound of Mitch Miller.

Through success and scandal, Brooklyn-born Clive Davis comes off as modest, even humble, his passion for music an unpredictable gift. After he was unfairly ousted from CBS, and disbarred, in the midst of a new business rise, he studied for the bar exam, and passed. It was that important to him to bring the karma around. The death of Whitney Houston was as devastating for him as his loss of parents when he was in college, he said, but he soldiered on, as she would have wanted, with his legendary pre-Grammy party.

Paula Vogel’s Indecent on Broadway: Is It Good For the Jews

Indecent dramatizes the epic journey of the Jews in Europe and America in the early part of the 20^th century. Staged with utter brilliance through the story of the staging of a single play, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, here is an event at the Cort Theater that brings that controversial 1907 work back to Broadway.

Opening with the actors, suitcases in hand on a bare black space, this 100 minute fast-paced tour from Berlin to Constantinople, to New York and back to Lodz and the great beyond, had the star-packed opening night audience –including Joel Grey, Molly Ringwald, Julie Taymor, Tovah Feldshuh, Arianna Huffington,
Mercedes Ruehl, and many more—revealing where their ancestors were from, how they came to America, where they were during the McCarthy period. No small task, however small the venue, Indecent was a breathtaking sweep for the audience, the cast and crew, and the creators, Paula Vogel and director Rebecca Taichman. More than one said, “This is for my grandmother.”

Richard Gere in Norman: It’s all about the accessories

Upon meeting Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi at the premiere of Norman, Joseph Cedar’s smart new movie starring Richard Gere in the title role, I first looked at his feet. His shoes, elegant leather lace ups, looked remarkably like the ones he, as Micha Eshel, accepts from Norman, before he becomes Prime Minister of Israel in the film, when he is a low level government official and Norman, a self-styled entrepreneur and businessman, is courting him in a Lanvin boutique. The shoes are a benign if expensive gift, a way for Norman to get his foot in, so to speak, believing that the connection to Eshel will pay off. An important person must wear important shoes.

Dynamic Screenwriter Initiative at the Sarasota Film Festival

On the Sarasota Opera House stage last week, where Sarasota Film Festival President Mark Famiglio’s annual swank dinner was well under way, John Henry Summerour entertained a diverse group of writers and actors with a hilarious performance, his lanky limbs moving in every direction at once. Who knew he had this in him? That afternoon I had the opportunity to meet this award winning filmmaker and Saschka Unseld, a pioneer in virtual reality filmmaking, alumni of the prestigious Nantucket Screenwriters Colony, to talk about their residency at the Hermitage Artists Retreat in Manasota Key, Florida, in a newly formed partnership with the Sarasota Screenwriting Colony for developing film projects and virtual reality storytelling.

Frida Kahlo in Andrea Dantas’ One-Woman Show at BAM

Perhaps Frida Kahlo, a singular artist, could only be portrayed in a one-woman show. Voices of her parents, Diego Rivera, Nelson Rockefeller, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others supply the illusion of an outside world. Playing with her dolls and stuffed monkey, or her paints, Brazilian actress and Flamenco dancer Andrea Dantas, who also wrote Fragmented Frida, inhabits this legendary figure at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Fisher Hall under the fine direction of Christine Renee Miller; the outside world, outside the clay house in Coyoacan, Mexico with its vivid red bougainvillea comes alive through the chatter of fascinating art world and political characters, Kia Rogers’ superb lighting, Justin West’s projections of New York City, and evocative Mexican music: “Llorona” fills the room.