Gossip Central

Ric Burns on Making Oliver Sacks: His Own Life: Narrative is Therapy

Waxing euphoric, documentarian Ric Burns, exclaimed, “The story in 14,233 lines was an attempt to get to the bottom, to heal the world.” He was not speaking of Doctor Oliver Sacks and his biopic, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, of the noted neurologist and writer of Awakenings (1972) and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), the subject that brought us together on the phone this week, but of a current project on Dante, the Italian Renaissance author of The Divine Comedy: “Now in 2020,” said Burns, “Everything needs healing.”

The theme of healing unites these films for Ric, the younger brother of Ken Burns, to whom he apprenticed himself for the mini-series The Civil War and other projects, before striking out on his own. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life was featured in last year’s New York Film Festival—he says of the prestigious festival: “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” but as he’s made the rounds, including the 2019 Hamptons International Film Festival, he’s found, “People really gravitate toward Oliver Sacks.”

David Byrne’s American Utopia: Spike Lee’s Documentary Brings Us to Our Senses

Back before the pandemic made everything stop making sense, David Byrne opened his American Utopia at Broadway’s Hudson Theater, the most entertaining show in town. Everybody knew it, and tickets sold like hot cakes. Of course, so much in America had stopped making sense prior to the unanticipated lockdown; as upbeat as American Utopia was, a sly critique marked every song in this unique musical, immigration, leadership, and Black Lives Matter. Now that Spike Lee has made a film of the staged performance, with the great Ellen Kuras’ cinematography, and now that the film has opened the Toronto Film Festival last week, and will be featured in the upcoming New York Film Festival before it airs on HBO in October, a new audience can have a close up view of the most exuberant, life affirming, and topical musical, just before our elections.

John Waters on Fire: New York Film Festival Poster Boy

Speaking of bad boy artists such as himself, writer William S. Burroughs proclaimed that “You become respectable if you stick around long enough.” John Waters, the creator of the nastiest images in movie satires, would gag at the implication of respectability, and if you check out the irreverence of his poster for the 58^th NYFF, you can see his level of impropriety at work. No boundaries. Nothing sacred. Some of our finest directors—Scorsese, Almodovar, Godard, Varda, Jenkins-- trashed. How very John Waters!

And yet, the bad boy in brocade jackets is on a roll! This past May, when he received an honorary degree from The School of Visual Arts, 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.” As SVA’s President David Rhodes conferred upon him a Doctor of Fine Arts, Waters thanked everyone for their support of a lunatic: “Just call me Doctor Dirt.”