Gossip Central

Adrien Brody at the Oscars: Don’t Let Hate Go Unchecked

Hollywood sent a message at this year’s Oscars. Winning Best Actor for his role in THE BRUTALIST, his second for this prize, Adrien Brody hoped for a healthier, happier, more inclusive world: “Don’t let hate go unchecked.” That’s not a small ask. From his first win for THE PIANIST in 2002, the actor whose mother, the superb Village Voice photographer Sylvia Plachy emigrated from Hungary in the mid-sixties, the actor with a war-torn look has played parts hewing close to this background. He has even said he could hear his grandfather, as he created the accent for this role, reminding everyone of America’s highest ideals even as his partner, Georgina Chapman had to remind him to thank his mother.

The Palestinian/ Israeli team that made Best Documentary winner NO OTHER LAND, showed how their collaboration as filmmakers cut through the senseless political practices in a town in the West Bank, policies that brought violence and horror to communities in Israel and Gaza. The filmmakers asserted that our government’s current response is not helping to bring peace.

Zoe Saldana was the first American-born Oscar winner whose history goes back to the Dominican Republic. Honored with many awards on her way up to the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in EMILIA PEREZ, Saldana’s win could not have been easy for her co-star Karla Sofia Gascon, shunned for hate-speech, racist comments made online. For sure, that hurt the Netflix movie’s chances for Best Picture.

White Lotus in Rajasthan: Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright

The fictive White Lotus resort in Thailand, the locus of Mike White’s mega HBO series in its third season, has nothing on the Six Senses wellness retreats in India. Seeing the staff line up to greet guests arriving by boat in episode one recalled entrée into the extraordinarily fabulously fashioned Six Senses Fort Barwara in Rajasthan—modeled after Marrakech’s La Mamounia. On a recent trip, we were treated to a cascade of bright red rose petals on a recent visit, by a staff lining up for this awesome welcome.

True, the tiger safari is a great lure. Tourists often book multiple excursions in a given day a year in advance, just in case Charger, the alpha male, feels like a stroll in this nearby preserved habitat also occupied by crocodiles, monkeys, mongooses, and spotted deer, the favored delectable dinner for tigers. Snagging a last-minute reservation, we careened around road curves in our open-air jeep, assigned to the park’s Zone 4, hoping to catch a glimpse. Not only did Charger make the scene, so too did one of his lady friends and their three cubs. We had won the safari lottery.

But just in case, the consolation prize was none too shabby: hanging in a resort featuring prana yoga, sound meditation, classes in pottery and herbal cures—plus pool, sauna, steam, and massage. If this fort had been home to kings, we were next in line.

Climbing up the 720 steps to a white hilltop temple, we encountered a wedding party. Young boys asked to take selfies with us, and the women wrapped in festive red, green, blue saris pulled us into dance. Rose petals may be a metaphor for a valentine’s love, or for the kind of connection that has no price.

Grand Central Terminal: Always in Vogue

A fashion crowd crammed into the Campbell Bar at Grand Central station this week, to celebrate Consuelo Vanderbilt Costin, covergirl of Vogue Magazine. For most of us, the issue was unreadable, in Czech, but that didn’t matter. Air kissing is universal, after all. So is the greeting, “You look great.” That applied to everyone in the room but mostly to the men in brocade jackets. And to socialite Jean Shafiroff clad in a blue straight skirt suit and booties. She usually wears a wide skirt ball gown. But with impending snow, no room for flare.

The highlight of the evening was a grand tour of the inner Grand Central station. Terminal architect Mark Saulnier led the way through the catacombs past David Rockwell chairs, so often the seat of the homeless, they are now hidden away. Looking down at the main floor, people scurrying looked like ants, and we could appreciate the central information booth had a glass top. Saulnier pointed out the a secret echo chamber outside the iconic Oyster Bar, and how the marble in front of the original ticket windows sagged with use. Sometimes when it rains, pools form, he said. All detail was remarkable, even the inner staircases with wrought iron acorns. A move is underway to restore some peeling paint, the price tag astronomical, but worth it.

Michael Moore: Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at Hamptons DocFest: Unleashed and Undeterred

Even Covid could not keep Michael Moore back. Of course, everyone at Hamptons DocFest was disappointed the irascible filmmaker could not make the scene for his Pennebaker Career Achievement Award—named for D. A. Pennebaker and presented by Chris Hegedus--, but show up he did, larger than life on Zoom. “Now everyone can see I really have hair,” he said, with a head shake. Usually tamed under a baseball cap, his ample head of hair was making a rare, tousled appearance. Hamptons DocFest would be screening his now classic ROGER & ME, his 1989 confrontational view of GM outsourcing their production from his hometown Flint, Michigan. All a young Moore wanted was to take CEO Roger Smith on a roadtrip around Flint to show him the impact of his business decision. His thwarted attempts are satiric, a sad laugh at his America—and ours-- on the decline. How timely!

The festival, well underway in Sag Harbor, had screened UNION the day before, a look at Amazon and the ongoing protests of workers, underpaid and overworked. Fulfillment indeed! Now on the Oscar docs shortlist for Best Documentary, the film makes you want to say, I thought slavery was ended in America. Think again. Think of the history of unions in America, democracy writ large. Where are you, Jeff Bezos? Attention must be paid!

Between DOCNYC and Hamptons Doc Fest with the inevitable overlap of non-fiction films, truly stellar work emerged: BLUE ROAD: The Edna O’Brien Story opened DOCNYC. Sinead O’Shea’s doc illuminates the transgressive sexual boldness of the Irish writer. Jill Campbell’s BEYOND THE GAZE: Jule Campbell’s Swimsuit Issue, an inside glimpse into the woman who made the Sports Illustrated’s most financially successful and most anticipated magazine of the year.

RaMell Ross’ The Nickel Boys: Re-Viewing Racial Injustice

Harrowing tales of black boys and men during the Jim Crow era are the meat and potatoes of Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead’s fiction. When filmmaker RaMell Ross, who made the acclaimed 2018 documentary “Hale County, This Morning, This Evening,” was given an advanced reading copy of Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, he was working on an exhibition in New Orleans on the history of the American South and its imprint on the Black soul. His installation and the novel, about two boys in a barbaric reform school serving time for arbitrary crimes—essentially because they were Black and vulnerable-- seemed to put the filmmaker on a thematic path toward his exploration of Black identity.

The result is an edgy film, arty in the best sense. Innovative, the movie takes a novelistic approach to visual storytelling. About a real-life reform school, the fictive Nickel Academy, is grim --and even grimmer for its Black population. Punishment, perhaps a turn on a torture device meted out by Spencer (Hamish Linklater) may also extend to murder and burial in an unmarked grave. Given the disquieting details, as viewer, you may find yourself looking up at a face, the sky, the branches of an orange tree, the interior of a dorm or cafeteria from an unexpected angle, and wonder, how did they get that shot?

At the premiere screening, on the New York Film Festival’s opening night, Ross spoke about not wanting to overburden the actors with concepts but to have them experience each other. He fitted the actors with camera rigs literally strapped on. In more traditional filming, you always assume the camera is there. With the rig on, actors have always to be more aware. Daveed Diggs spoke about wearing the heavy rig all day for fear of losing perspective. Fred Hechinger observed that actors and cameramen seemed to exchange roles in the filmmaking. The result is as close as I’ve ever seen to a novel-to-film adaptation that translates technique as well as story. Already nominated for top awards, RaMell Ross and “The Nickel Boys” are high on the lists predicting Best Director/ Best Film Oscar nods.

Sebastian Stan, Timothee Chalamet, Adrien Brody: Among Leading Men at the Gotham Awards 2024

Old Hollywood likes their leading men handsome and debonair—think Cary Grant, Rock Hudson—but with this year’s Gotham selection of A DIFFERENT MAN for the top prize, Best Feature, a new look grabs at your attention. You have to love an awards season that starts with a celebration of –well, difference. A hit at the New Director/ New Films series, the film stars a unique protagonist, a man not without his charms, but no traditional heart throb; with a face a Cubist portraitist would love, he becomes all the rage. The film choice is a reminder that no matter how smart, suave, and elegant this start to the awards season, the Gothams still keep a discerning eye on indies.

That said, the biggest stars were in the room, eh, the cavernous Cipriani Wall Street, mainly as presenters, a great show of support; the stars know this is the night for great food and fun. A-listers: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel Brosnahan, Aubrey Plaza, Jessica Chastain, and Oscar Isaac were among the presenters, some nominated for their performances: Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Saoirse Ronan, among them, but these did not take home the prize. Gender mixed, the Gothams gave Coleman Domingo Outstanding Lead Performance and Clarence Maclin Outstanding Supporting Performance for their respective roles in SING SING.

Highlights for me included James Mangold and Timothee Chalamet accepting the Visionary Award for A COMPLETE UNKNOWN, the new Bob Dylan movie. Chalamet does not imitate Dylan so much as make the songs his own. Elle Fanning cheered her director and co-star on. She made her Broadway debut this year in Appropriate and said she enjoyed the challenges of theater, especially working with Sarah Paulson. We first met “Timmy” at the Hamptons International Film Festival. He was in a group of “Rising Stars.” I think his star has risen.

Hollywood Film Mavens Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and Doug Liman Praise Gaucho Gaucho: Reinventing Documentary

Documentary filmmakers Gregory Kershaw and Michael Dweck had a shoutout of praise for their 2022 film, THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS --from Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks. These veteran filmmakers, the FORREST GUMP team, are not the only fans. For their latest doc, GAUCHO GAUCHO, about Argentinian cowboys, making the rounds of film festivals to great acclaim, director/ producer Doug Liman, another fan known for popular films such as EDGE OF TOMORROW, starring Tom Cruise, hosted a private screening of excerpts in his downtown Manhattan apartment, followed by a Q&A with Michael Dweck. On the face of it, the filmmakers could not be more different. The evening became a master class in film art.

Shot in black & white, GAUCHO GAUCHO, takes place in a hilly landscape, featuring a community close to nature, far from our tech world. In one clip, a still mound moves. A horse rises from rest, a man on top of it—all in one long take. The filmmakers knew this “horse whisperer” often slept on his animal, and simply filmed it—like a Warholian meditation. The Hollywood filmmakers appreciate how challenging such a one-shot scene can be. No tricks, cut-aways, or B-roll--just the camera recording what takes place, taking its time. The audience at Liman’s comprised of documentary filmmakers all know that even non-fiction filmmaking relies on crafting. Without the customary “script,” Kershaw and Dweck get as close to the real moment as one can get with thrilling results.

Prior to their recent screening at DOCNYC, I had a chance to speak to them on Zoom. Onto the next project, they were filming in Burgundy, in France’s wine country, yet another off the grid community—their specialty. While the doc team were honored to be lauded by Zemeckis and Hanks, and to meet Liman and be friends, as they said, they work on a smaller canvas. “We have the luxury of time to create the film we want to make,” said Dweck.

Remembering Paul Morrissey

From the edgy look of his movies—FLESH, TRASH, HEAT, to name a few--you would never think of Paul Morrissey as deeply religious. With his friend and partner Andy Warhol, a fellow Catholic, he made art, collaborating on many cinema-verite films and other ventures including the purchase of cliff-high acreage in Montauk overlooking the Atlantic.

The legendary Eothen had on it a number of cottages—more like rustic Catskill bungalows—where visitors could reside. Realtor Linda Stein who had brokered the deal stayed for a summer with Morrissey insisting that she shut lights when rooms were not in use. Not quite a conservationist, he was old school frugal and utilities out east are not cheap. Notables passed through: dutchesses, Kennedy’s and Radziwill’s, artists, musicians such as Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones. Curmudgeonly and loving, Paul Morrissey was the consummate host.

Friends and family celebrated him at his funeral this week hosted by his adoring nieces. Gerard Malanga, who had introduced Morrissey to Warhol in 1965, sent a poem. With speakers: the casting director Leonard Finger and music manager Danny Fields, much was made of Morrissey’s contradictions to a knowing crowd including Geraldine Smith and Susan Blond. A promoter of The Velvet Underground, Morrissey nevertheless cautioned against drug use. Compelled to sell the property long after Warhol died in 1987, he bought three units in the newly desirable trailer park nearby, just before the market surged for these waterfront residences now beached on cement foundations in rows. One for himself, the others for visiting family.

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.

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.