Gossip Central

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.

Bernadette Peters’ Joke: Posh Meets Borscht Belt as Guild Hall Returns to the Rainbow Room

Guild Hall Academy of the Arts President, the painter Eric Fischl got to hone his comedy chops at this year’s spring gala, fashioning a speech on a string of cliches—thanks to A. I. That set the night off in good spirits, against The Rainbow Room’s customary spectacular panoramic views of the city now fogged in, but as Board Chair Marty Cohen observed, “When it comes to Guild Hall, there’s no such thing as bad weather.”

Sure enough, we were expecting no shows but most showed: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sunny Hosten, Fern Mallis, April Gornik, Ross Bleckner, Rufus Wainwright, and the robust theater crowd to celebrate Daryl Roth. That included her son Jordan Roth, head of Jujamcyn, clad in an elegant ensemble accessorized with his grandmother Sylvia’s matching clutch. He opened his speech with, “My mother loves gay people.” That broke the ice, as a proud, even gleeful son spoke of Roth’s collection of 13 Tony Awards and counting.

She had just signed Julianne Margulies and Peter Gallagher to a show adapted from Delia Ephron’s Left on Tenth she’s hoping to stage in the fall, with Susan Stroman—also present-- directing. As I congratulated her, Roth pulled me aside to say, she has yet to find a theater. Ah, the perils of producing!

Her pal Bernadette Peters took the stage and before singing two numbers from Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods told a joke about a frog who, upon getting a kiss from an elder gentleman, promised to turn into a gorgeous blond who would make love to him every night for the rest of his life. The man took the frog home and went to bed, explaining that at this point in life he preferred to have a talking frog.

The jokes did not end there. Howard Marks, who with his wife Nancy were also honored, with a Special Award for Leadership and Philanthropy told one about a boy who got a part in a school play. His mother asked, what part? The Jewish husband. Her reply: Couldn’t you get a speaking role?

Amy Ryan, Liev Schreiber, Zoe Kazan in A Superb Revival of Doubt: A Parable

In the revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable at the Todd Haimes Theater, Amy Ryan as formidable, grim-faced Sister Aloysius is the kind of no-nonsense nun so fearful—under her eye, the consequences of actions good or bad are the same; you definitely don’t want to be caught. As directed by Scott Ellis, a fine tuning of Shanley’s work, she demonizes Liev Schreiber as Father Flynn, newly arrived at this Bronx parish in 1964. From the start, centerstage, delivering a sermon on “Doubt” in New York-ese, back lit by stained glass, he projects humanity, especially as his speech sets up the parable at hand: Doubt can be as binding as faith.

This is theater at its finest, a holy cathedral of words. Playing with notions of innocence and guilt, the 2004 play—a Pulitzer Prize winner--means to keep us juggling our own internal debates on the subject, the truth intensely shimmering far away, compelling, mysterious and suspenseful. A younger teacher, Zoe Kazan shines as Sister James. Meek as need be before her superiors, she also represents the future of the church. She has doubts about what happened in the rectory when a student—the school’s only black boy-- returns to class after a private meeting with Father Flynn. Reporting to Sister Aloysius, she suspects her superior’s accusations go too far, judging him a pedophile without saying the word. Can she maintain discipline as represented by Sister Alyosius, while keeping a tender, nurturing and welcoming presence for her students?

Sister Aloysius’ meeting with the boy’s mother in a deft performance by Quincey Tyler Bernstine brings its own surprises. As does Father Flynn’s confrontation with Sister Aloysius in her Bible-lined study, questioning why he is thought guilty without proof. Of course, we as observers have our own certainties, or doubts, and they keep shifting. And it’s hard not to be swayed by Father Flynn’s kindness, vulnerability—and sheer manliness.

Marion Cotillard at the Rendez-vous with French Cinema

Oscar winner Marion Cotillard in feathery white posed before photographers on opening night of this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. She’s a big star, known internationally since her debut role as Edith Piaf, but for this yearly festival, a collaboration with Unifrance, it did not take long before she melded into the crowd, another guest for cocktails. Similarly, at the French Embassy where the party turned swank, she was part of the crowd with Thomas Cailley, director of the opening night film, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, enjoying drinks, vegetarian tagine, the confluence of English and French conversation. The French are very good at keeping the celebrity buzz under control.

Winner of five Cesars in France, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, explores the imagined proposition of humans mutating into animals--literally. How does that affect identity? Family? Empathy? The star, Romain Duris, plays a family man whose wife has become a large beast—yes, literally. Neither he nor Adele Exarchopoulos, another big star who plays a minor role attended. In France as in America, having a film this lauded will improve chances of funding the next one, but Cailley said of his film in our conversation: This film is weird, and will widen the possibilities for others to make their more edgy films.

Taking a conservative view on this movie that also features one such mutant who wants to fly, this is surely the best movie I have ever seen on the subject of father/son relationships. More conventional, director Pascal Bonitzer’s film AUCTION, about a Nazi-stolen Egon Schiele painting turning up in a workingclass home in the French countryside, would screen the next night, its North American premiere. A favorite among Rendez-vous critics, AUCTION is smart about the art market. Bonitzer based his script on interviews with key players in a known newspaper story. While Alex Lutz stars as an auctioneer, for Bonitzer, the young man who wants to give up his lucrative possession to the true Jewish heirs is a hero.

Sting—yes, that Sting-- plays himself in Michel Gondry’s THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS, perhaps the goofiest selection in the Rendezvous lineup. A young film director (Pierre Niney), wanting to complete his work after the project has been kaboshed, holes himself up in the French countryside with the stolen footage. Manic, he wants to complete his movie and even convinces Sting to perform. Nutty as the twists and turns seem, this film may illustrate the inner frustrations of many filmmakers.

Harry Smith at the Whitney Museum and in Cosmic Scholar: When Whimsy Meets Whip Smart

Back in the day, I thought Harry Smith was a deadbeat. Now, he’s a dead Beat. A filmmaker, artist, student of the occult, mysticism, cats’ cradle and paper airplane master, and famously a star of one of Andy Warhol’s interviews, Harry Smith was a cultural figure in his day, as a rich exhibition of his work, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith, at the Whitney Museum, demonstrates. Who knew?

An inhabitant of the Chelsea Hotel and the Breslin before that, he consorted with an array of artsy types, among them photographer/ filmmaker/ musician John Cohen, rocker Patti Smith, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and many others who appear in his masterpiece Mahagonny, a filmed reboot of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill opera about a city where anything goes. Imagining New York that way in 1970, Smith filmed Allen Ginsberg, Rosebud Pettet, and many other downtown types. Viewers enjoyed it seated on sofas on the Whitney’s 5^th floor.

The Whitney had a weekend of lectures, screenings, and other tributes to Harry Smith. Anne Waldman gave a reading in tribute. Raymond Foye provided a connection to painter Jordan Belson. Some of the interviews are like home movies with semi articulate musings by Smith. Rani Singh, Director of the Harry Smith Archives, spoke about how Mahagonny was made from 1970 till 1980. And like so much experimental work of the time, the percussive poetry of Brion Gysin, Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, William Burroughs’ cutups, the work is highly structured—not at all haphazard, as the art first appears.

Isaac Mizrahi’s Snazzy Reboot of Prokoviev’s Peter and the Wolf at the Guggenheim

Prokoviev’s classic Peter and the Wolf is reimagined at the Guggenheim Museum, an ingenious recreation from Isaac Mizrahi. The fashion designer cum cabaret performer has worked costuming for theater for decades, and for the Guggenheim’s program of “Works and Process” the Peter and the Wolf story is set, where else, but in the neighborhood, in Central Park.

Grandfather (Norton Owen), deaf and disoriented, speaks, through Mizrahi’a narration, with a Yiddish accent. Mizrahi-dressed, Peter (Kara Chen) wears a beanie with propeller, and Bird (Paige Barnett Kulbeth) wears gym shorts. Most brilliant of all, ill-fated Duck (Marjorie Folkman) looks like an edgy Park Avenue matron in tulle tutu and beaded cardigan, head covered in a schmatte. Cat (Zac Gonder) is suitably clad in velvety paws and pompoms, fashionably black with white and pink trims, while the gray Wolf (Daniel Pettrow) sports Ugg-like feet, with the Hunter (Derrick Arthur) an oversized boy scout. The look of this Peter and the Wolf is reason enough to attend, better still, to entertain your grandkids and their mother too. A more formidable reason is the talent of the musicians and dancers, who bring this simple story to life—with Mizrahi as host explaining how the instruments “color” these delightful characters.

Max (8) and his brother Zac (5), my companions, mesmerized by the musicians warming up, did not want the 30-minute performance to end, even after Wolf was suitably punished after eating Duck whole. This moment, offstage, could have been a deal breaker. No one wants Duck to disappear in Wolf’s belly. Spoiler alert: Duck is seen at end, knitting in orange, just like her webbed feet—disaster averted.

ORIGIN Premieres at Alice Tully Hall: A Docu-Drama of Ideas About Societal Divisions

At the swank premiere of Ava Du Vernay’s new film ORIGIN at Alice Tully Hall last week, made evident: this director is fearless. Taking Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a 2020 best-selling book by Isabel Wilkerson, DuVernay created her own genre, taking the lessons of the book, folding them into the narrative of the writer writing the book, and adding elements ripped off the headlines.

The film starts with the actual soundtrack of Trayvon Martin’s murder, significant because this horrible killing put the situation of innocent black men at risk on the proverbial map. But on the geographic map, DuVernay’s reach brings together key far flung places—Germany, India, the United States, to show how caste, not race, drives the methods of subjugation, dehumanization, humiliation, creating cultural divisions, separating target groups from equal status.

Lately, research into the Nazi agenda illustrates how antisemitism of the 1930’s was informed by the study of how Americans constructed slavery. Filming in Berlin, DuVerney’s fictional Isabel, in a fine performance by Aunjanue-Ellis Taylor visits the famed Jewish Museum archive. The film transitions to a story of a Nazi party member who refused to signal “heil” because he was in love with a Jewish woman. Having stripped Jews from citizenship, confiscated their property, murdered them, the concentration camp system seems a logical consequence of this ideology—if you claim supremacy--no matter how baseless, heartless, inhumane, and self-serving.

The caste system in India works on a similar level of dehumanization. Focused on the Dalits (“Untouchables”), the film shows men neck deep in sewage, made to clean without the use of tools, with their bare hands—it’s an image you cannot unsee.

The story of artist Al Bright makes for a riveting mini-movie, when as a 9-year old he was not permitted into a swimming pool with his teammates. That he was led around the pool on a rubber float, repeatedly told not to touch the water, is hilarious in its pointlessness, if it were not a sad reminder of the basic stupidity of segregation.

Barbie at the Peninsula: A Doll Rules

In the doll metaverse, Barbie is queen. A party at the posh Peninsula Hotel brought together her movie creators with members of the Academy to anoint her with awards. The movie about her has had world domination in sales. Even in Morocco, where I saw it when it was released in July along with Oppenheimer—famously creating the “Barbenheimer” unit—it was a hit, I was happy to report to Margot Robbie, who spear-headed the collaboration with Mattel and starred, and Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, scriptwriters with Gerwig directing. The phenomenon spoke of girl power, and what men have to do to measure up. So where was the movie’s primary Ken, Ryan Gosling?

Ryan Gosling made the movie a musical, his song and dance numbers major entertainment a la La La Land. Mark Ronson filled me in on creating the movie’s sound: he just followed Greta’s script. There wasn’t even supposed to be music, but fortunately she, a major music maven, and fan, was keen on creating a sound. Eschewing the pink cocktail of the evening—a prosecco with cotton candy, Ronson said he was overstuffed from Thanksgiving with family, and following a routine, waking at 7 to write. How do you follow up on Barbie? Ronson is writing a book on DJing in the ‘90’s.

“What would I do without acting!?,” exclaimed F. Murray Abraham at the party, agreeing, his White Lotus character should be continued into the next season. “Didn’t you love the writing,” he asked. “I would follow Mike White’s writing anywhere,” he said, so happy to be working. Next up: he’s the husband in the Broadway production of The Queen of Versailles, based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 excellent riches-to-rags documentary, with Kristin Chenowith as his wife.

Mourning in Lod at the Hamptons International Film Festival: When Terror Hits Home

Introducing her documentary, Mourning in Lod at HIFF, Israel-based filmmaker Hilla Medalia announced that a crew member had been murdered—one among thousands-- in the Hamas attacks from Gaza on Jews during the Shabbat/Simchat Torah holiday. Mourning in Lod plays out a story of connection and communication after terror comes to a community at peace. What might have been a silver lining moment illustrating that from acts of barbarism generosity of spirit can come, the takeaway was a microcosm of what was raging front page news: cycles of retribution demanding justice, but in the end, civilians pay for the age-old Middle East enmity.

The backstory: producer Sheila Nevins had asked Medalia to make a short film when she heard about the family of a Jewish man in Lod, stoned by Palestinians, donating his organs to a Palestinian woman in need of a kidney. Investigating the story, Medalia found out that the man had been murdered in revenge for a Palestinian man who had been randomly shot by zealous Jewish settlers, outside agitators as it were. The three families involved were intertwined, neighbors who had done business together prior to the tragic events.

East Hampton’s Patti Kenner served a pizza and salad dinner for a post-film gathering that now reflected upon news so much larger than the violent/bittersweet events at Lod—as the reality unfolded. Guests were able to find out more about this story from the filmmaker; in the end though, with news of Israel making its own movie in our minds, feelings were raw. Everyone understood: more deaths would be announced, although the actual brutality had not yet registered: Israel was at war.