Gossip Central

Heat and Dust Gets a New Life: An Interview with Director James Ivory

James Ivory, with his partner Ismail Merchant, famously made outstanding films, often based on literary works, for several decades. Charles Cohen, known for distributing fine foreign films, has restored their sumptuous Heat and Dust (1983), his third Merchant-Ivory classic, after Howard’s End (1991) and Maurice (1987) to be revived through his Cohen Film Collection. Set in India in two time frames, the 1920’s and 1980’s, featuring two women protagonists Olivia and Anne played by Greta Scaachi and Julie Christie, Heat and Dust feels contemporary in its portrayal of strong-willed women. Just before the film’s opening at the Quad Cinema this week, I spoke to James Ivory about his work with his longtime artistic collaborators, producer Ismail Merchant and writer Ruth Prawer Jahbvala. This legendary director filled me in on the change in audience reception for films set in India, and his latest project on Luca Guadagnino’s script for Call Me By Your Name, based on Andre Aciman’s novel, a selection in the upcoming New York Film Festival.

Sheila Nevins of HBO: Not Just Another Pretty Face

Anyone who has heard Sheila Nevins introduce her hand picked documentarians at an HBO preview, knows: she is much of the show. Formidable and funny, even when she intros heart-wrenching work like Cries from Syria with a plea to stop the killing of children in that country, her lively personality blazes forth. Now she’s written a book, You Don’t Look Your Age . . . and Other Fairy Tales, a memoir in short pieces of how she got to where she is, head of documentaries at HBO for decades, all while keeping it real. A tell-all, her book is not shy to un-P.C. revelations, like her views on sleeping with the boss, and plastic surgery, her dicey relation with her mom who had a rare disease, Raynaud’s phenomenon (a lack of circulation in your extremities), and balancing a demanding job with the challenges of raising a son with Tourette’s. Add to that, for a celebrity packed audio book, she just called a few of her nearest and dearest.

Cezanne et moi: Breakfast with Daniele Thompson and Guillaume Gallienne

Introducing her friend Daniele Thompson’s new film Cezanne et moi at a special screening at the Whitby Hotel last week, Diane von Furstenberg noted the painterly look, the sheer beauty of this movie. The audience of artists in all media could not have been more fitting: Marina Abramovic, Eric Fishl, Ahn Duong, Bennett Miller, Ellen Burstyn, Fran Leibowitz, Brigitte Lacombe, Art Spiegelman, among many others. Cezanne et moi, limns the intense and passionate friendship between two towering figures of world culture, painter Paul Cezanne and writer Emile Zola, imagining them as schoolmates, and rivals in art and love.

Just before the movie’s premiere, I had breakfast with Daniele Thompson, the esteemed director of Avenue Montaigne, co-writer of Cousin, Cousine, and the actor Guillaume Gallienne, who stars as Cezanne. Both Thompson and Gallienne identified with these artists’ struggles, while recognizing Cezanne as something of a mad genius. Thompson originally wanted Gallienne to play Zola. As it turned out, Guillaume Canet, the film’s Zola, and straight man in the bromance, could not make the celebration as his real-life partner Marion Cotillard was just giving birth to their child.

Discovering John Cohen--Again

At a wall-to-wall packed opening at the Grey Art Gallery, photographer/ filmmaker / musician John Cohen held court in front of a video installation of some vintage photographs he took at the heyday of artist owned galleries on 10^th Street. Talk about a fascinating pocket of art history! “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City 1952-1965” features paintings by Alex Katz, Jim Dine, Jane Wilson and other noted artists of the midcentury, Dan Flavin, George Segal, exhibited in the context of the galleries: Tanager, Hansa, Brata, Delancey Street Museum, to name a few. A John Cohen photograph graces the handsome exhibition catalogue’s cover: Red Grooms crossing Third Avenue, transporting artwork in what looks like a baby buggy to the Reuben Gallery in 1960.

East Hampton Library's Authors Night: Poets, Parties, Pretty in Pink

A fan of the foodie memoir, I was eager to find the book 32 Yolks at this year’s East Hampton Library's Authors Night. Needless to say, a formidable line had already formed in front of le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert, and his stack of books. Before asking for one for me, I decided to take a spin around the long tables to see authors poised to sell and sign; I browsed past presidential historian Douglas Brinkley and his book on FDR, Richard Zoglin, back with Hope in paperback, Vivian Gornick, a hero of mine at The Village Voice back in the day, past the throng around Gwyneth Paltrow, Dr. Ruth, Dick Cavett, and his lovely wife Martha Rogers seated half a tent away alphabetically.

My Fair Lady at Bay Street Theater: Eliza Finds “A Room Somewhere"

Based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 Pygmalian and Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 film, the Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady gets a smart revival under Michael Arden’s expert direction at Bay Street Theater. You know the story: a lowly flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, morphs from guttersnipe to goddess aided by the elocution lessons of one Henry Higgins and his sideman Pickering, to familiar songbook classics. But even in the best fairy tales, transformations have consequences both good and bad, as we learn from this thoroughly entertaining chestnut.

Troilus and Cressida in the Park: Manly Men Make War Not Love

Projectile blood is just one spectacle in Shakespeare’s problem play, Troilus and Cressida, as staged at Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, a fine Public Theater production directed by Daniel Sullivan. Written around the same time the bard penned his most famous tragedy Hamlet in 1602, T&C features warriors waging battle in the Trojan War, and as in Hamlet, the play asks the question, what makes a man? In Hamlet, after the hero’s death, Fortinbras, loosely translated as a French “strong in arms,” takes over. Might makes right, right? The more obscure T&C’s message is more muddled: Strong arms do not necessarily make for good men. The high body count is not worth the loss. And love, as in the kind young Troilus has for Cressida, does not elevate. In modern dress, and performed by an exceptional cast, including John Glover, Corey Stoll, John Douglas Thompson, Max Casella for his comic relief, and with a hunky Bill Heck as Hector and Andrew Burnap as his younger brother Troilus, this male ensemble shows men doing what men do.

Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon in James Schamus’ Indignation

Bespectacled and bowtied, James Schamus introduced his movie, Indignation, his directorial debut from Philip Roth’s novel, at MoMA, with the observation that a premiere at MoMA makes up for not having had a bar mitzvah. Hold that Jewish joke. In fact, the film starts with a brief image of war, and a Jewish funeral, a shiva—you can tell by the smoked fish at the buffet—for a fallen soldier. The grieving family is related to the Messners, the Newark butchers at the story’s heart, and their only son Marcus who goes off to college in Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson’s fictional domain) where he falls hopelessly in love with a blond shiksa, Olivia Hutton, from a divorced family with a penchant for oral sex and self destruction.

Alec Baldwin: “I Crave the Movie Elephant” at HIFF SummerDocs Screening

One of the many revelations in Jeff Feuerzeig’s riveting documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story, was that Laura Albert, the mastermind behind her fictive persona JT LeRoy, an author of some renown, also worked with director Gus Van Sant on his 2003 Elephant, a movie of a Columbine-like mass shooting at a school. She was commissioned to write the script, which was then discarded, the movie retaining only the image of a fat girl in the library, the shooter’s first victim. In the post-screening Q&A at Guild Hall for the Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDoc series, Alec Baldwin enthused about Elephant, a coincidence for him to realize the connection to Laura Albert.

Patti Smith and Marianne Faithfull Take in “The Beat Generation” at Centre Pompidou: Hipsters on the Continent

What is beat? From down and out through saintly beatitudes, beat is an attitude. As a literary movement, the Beat Generation is an American phenomenon, but every geographic area that experienced it, takes ownership, and the French are no different. In Paris, at Centre Pompidou’s 6^th floor neighboring a retrospective of Paul Klee, a vast exhibition devoted to the culture of The Beat Generation --with principals Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg-- provides essential visual and auditory material for an understanding of this literati’s global influence.