You may remember Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty in Walter Salles’ On the Road. The Minnesota-born actor played the character inspired by the famed fast talking fast driving, Neal Cassady, son of a Denver wino in the movie based on Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel. During his time in New York doing publicity for Salles’ 2012 film, Hedlund said a dealer was trying to sell him Cassady’s bathroom door. Such is the beat industry! Didn’t Johnny Depp buy Kerouac’s raincoat? There’s the literature, and then there are the artifacts: which is more important, and to whom?
recent posts
- Marisa Tomei and Matthew Broderick at Guild Hall: The Plight of an Upper West Side Arts Space Gives A-List Actors The Big Chill
- Raul Esparza and Lily Rabe in The Winter’s Tale: Wet in Central Park
- Authors Night in East Hampton: If it’s Not One Thing It’s Your Mother
- Documentaries: Jocelyn Wildenstein The Lion Queen/ Tovah: How Jewish is It?
- Hamptons Journal: John Waters at Guild Hall: “Gay is not Enough” / “Cagney” at Bay Street/ “Signs” at the Bridgehampton Museum Tractor Barn
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That Side Show will close its run at the St. James Theater on Broadway is sad news. After an ebullient first preview in late October, the revival had a meet & greet at Sardi’s. Many of the show’s producers had not yet met the musical’s stars, Erin Davie and Emily Padgett as the Hilton sisters, conjoined twins, whose pioneering showbiz story is retold, Matthew Hydzik and Ryan Silverman as the men/promoters in their lives, and David St. Louis as their loving caretaker. They also had not yet met director Bill Condon, who took a controversial piece about unusual acts (eh, freaks) in the age of burlesque and vaudeville, revised it from Bill Russell’s original book, amplifying the twins’ backstory, and made it soar. Henry Krieger’s music, especially “I Will Never Leave You” was always great. Rising to its Dreamgirls moment, this show was making the producers very happy. -
Remember in Pretty Woman when Richard Gere asks Julia Roberts what happens after the prince rescues Cinderella? Not missing a beat, she says, she rescues him right back. In Top Five, Rosario Dawson’s Chelsea Brown tells Chris Rock’s Andre Allen, Cinderella does what every woman who knows what she wants does: she leaves something behind. It’s all in the shoe. Keep your eye on the gold pump. -
Bewildered by many choices made in the new Mark Wahlberg film, The Gambler, a remake based on his quasi-autobiographical script with a nod to Dostoyevsky’s short story, James Toback was not quiet about his dismay that the new filmmakers, director Rupert Wyatt and screenwriter William Monahan, did not make a sequel to his movie, rather than try to redo the 1974 film starring James Caan. It would have been so easy, he said holding court at a banquette at Colicchio & Sons in the meatpacking. The filmmakers seem to know a lot about addiction, but not very much about gambling. -
Missing from Monday’s lunch at The Leopard, Meryl Streep, wicked as an ugly witch in Rob Marshall’s movie adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, was on a train returning to the city from the Kennedy Center Honors. No matter. James Corden, who plays The Baker in the film’s intertwining fairy tales, spontaneously fielded questions in her behalf, reminding everyone of her witch preparation as Margaret Thatcher. This was a golden moment, proof in fact, that the British actor will be perfect as Late Late Show host on CBS, filling Craig Ferguson’s shoes when he retires. “They’ve made a big mistake,” Corden quipped, nailing British self-deprecation. “They’ve been trying for years to keep people like me off television.” -
Back in the day, Susan Sontag was the big anxiety of influence. Public intellectual, essayist, activist, provocateur, critic, and novelist, she was the giant thinker to topple for any woman. Few could claim her intellectual maternity. “I feel sorry for you,” said one male professor to the women in his class, as if we were competing with her. One of a kind, she was revered; even the most arrogant of men took notice of a woman who occupied so vital a cultural role, one to which men aspired. How odd it feels to write these words in a time when women can achieve anything, and yet I cannot think of anyone of either gender whose commitment to philosophy and politics could match hers. Now HBO will air a documentary about Susan Sontag directed by Nancy Kates, illuminating a moment in American letters when the quality of one’s mind was prized, admired and awarded. -
Okay. It was my fault. I was late for last night’s evening performance. Heavy rain. Snarled traffic on 8th Avenue. By 6 minutes for the 8 o’clock curtain. And was herded into the Golden Theater’s foyer to wait 45 minutes till the first intermission for Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance. Twenty-five others waited too, with headsets, watching the play on an overhead monitor. Security gave us a pat down, searched our belongings. “Draconian,” exclaimed one woman at the theater’s latecomer policy, before she stormed off into the storm. “I’m outta here,” announced another prior to leaving too. The glass doors began to steam from the heat. The man next to me had rivulets running down his face. As to that monitor, you could not tell Glenn Close from Lindsay Duncan. It was a very expensive ticket.
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The annual celebration of indie films kicking off the vibrant awards season every year gets more glamorous, honoring the outstanding and risk-taking films that are going to make it to Oscars—like Boyhood and Birdman, as well as those that are just great, likes’Laura Poitra documentary Citizenfour, Ira Sachs’ Love is Strange, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, and other exceptional films that do not fit any Hollywood formula. This week at Cipriani Wall Street, the sponsor Calvin Klein’s Euphoria embellished the stage, the fragrance’s name perhaps a metaphor for the high spirits: Bennett Miller was feted alongside Ted Sarandos and Tilda Swinton, the crowd of film insiders included Rene Russo in a French twist, and Scarlett Johansen in a short, smart do—it was decidedly downtown and chic. -
The story of a brilliant man, Alan Turing, brought to suicide after being disgraced for being gay, the movie The Imitation Game reflects the sexual politics of a bygone era. In the midcentury, homosexuality was a disease that could be cured, and surprisingly in the US Bible belt, some believe that canard today. In this riveting if conventional movie, directed by Morten Tyldum from Graham Moore’s screenplay, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing’s stunning mental power, bungling social grace, and naievete so compellingly, his demise at age 41 supplies an added irony to the history of his work in cracking the Nazi enigma code, using a machine that would be a forebear to the modern computer. But with all of his mind-bending intelligence, he lacked the resources to survive society’s ignorance. -
Last year we had Gravity, a chamber music concert compared to this year’s grand oratorio, Interstellar. As we all know, our planet is going to seed, or in this case, dust, and something must be done to save mankind, worthy or not. Epic, each in its way, Gravity’s outer space was intimate, a place for Sandra Bullock to heal with the help of George Clooney, while Interstellar’s is vast and unmanageable: Matthew McConaughey’s Coop is sent out there to fix that, to find a place for human migration. He leaves behind a family, most notably his devoted daughter Murph. Needless to say Interstellar is most successful as a movie when it is grounded in family, maybe because the acting is so good, Murph, young, older and old (Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn) and the fathers (McConaughey, and Michael Caine to Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand). Interstellar is messier in space, maybe because the science is so garbled. Regardless, this movie must be seen as an essential part of this season’s conversation about the trendy subject of our planet’s demise, as well as its layered filmmaking. -
You have to love this night for both maximum heart and entertainment: Stand Up for Heroes, Wednesday night. Sponsored by The Bob Woodruff Foundation and Caroline’s Comedy Club, and kicking off the Comedy Festival, Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Louis C. K., John Oliver, headlined, and Brian Williams introduced the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey, who channeled Frank Sinatra on a rousing “New York New York.” After Bruce Springsteen sang (“Dancin’ in the Dark,” and more), and told some groan-worthy jokes, he did his thing, auctioning off his guitar. To sweeten the pot, he threw in a spin around the block in his motorcycle sidecar, guitar lesson, a lasagna dinner at his place, and the blue shirt off his back, his contribution raising $600,000. Fashion may soon help raise money too: -
In his long dynamic career, Bob Hope’s story resonates as a cultural history of the last decade: a rags-to-riches immigrant, he was a pioneer in vaudeville, inventing stand up as we know it: he worked in movies and on television, and entertained the troops abroad. Not only was his profile, a ski slope nose, a world famous trademark, but so too were his walk and turns of phrase: “I wanna tell ya,” he would say. In a new biography, Hope, Time Magazine’s theater critic Richard Zoglin provides an engrossing read on Bob Hope’s life and times. I caught up with Richard Zoglin recently to find out why Hope mattered so much, the artist Jeff Koons would sculpt him in silver, and why Dick Cavett would walk his walk. -
Sarah Ruhl’s beautiful new play The Oldest Boy at Lincoln Center is informed by a quiet release into Destiny. A mother faces an unthinkable choice: a Midwesterner, she is married to a Tibetan restaurateur. Now when a lama and monk (James Saito and Jon Norman Schneider) come to her apartment to claim her son is a reincarnated beloved teacher, she is asked to give him up for the higher purpose, to be enthroned and educated at a monastery, far away from parental care. If Ruhl were working on a larger canvas, she might be making the kinds of spectacles for which Julie Taymor is best known. -
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Leo Bloom in Nightcrawler is as creepy as the movie’s title suggests. A bug-eyed loner who preys on the misfortunes of others, Bloom’s very language appropriates television-speak with information garnered on the Internet to make him reptilian. Negotiating his way through interactions, he acquires a camera and means to follow disasters, and finds a career as a videographer filming beyond the scope of decency: a man with gaping wounds after a car crash, a family shot in their mansion, their plush white carpets soaked in blood. Racing around in a beautifully shot L.A. in a red car, he doesn’t just follow crime scenes, he creates them. -
In a week when talk focused on the revamping of Renee Zellweger’s face, whether or not the Oscar winning actress went generic with plastic surgery, a voice from history affirmed choice for women of all ages and economics when it comes to feminine enhancement: “Beauty is power,” said Helena Rubinstein at a time when makeup was only associated with showgirls and prostitutes. A canny businesswoman, as a splendid new exhibition at the Jewish Museum establishes, the four foot ten inch Polish-born Rubinstein led the cosmetics field in face creams, and reinvented mascara wands; a rival to Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein surprisingly kept her Jewish name. -
If you’ve attended any of the packed previews of The Last Ship at the Neil Simon Theater, you may have noticed its originator and composer Sting lurking about. At your surprise to see him, he exclaims, “It’s my baby!” Indeed, this musical, with book by John Logan and Brian Yorkey, under Joe Mantello’s direction and with choreography by Steven Hoggett, is an absolute must-see about a young man who leaves home and family to travel the world, only to return after fifteen years to a place altered by modernity, what the British metaphysical poets called mutability. This change is most dramatically felt by a community losing its traditions of shipbuilding, and the work that sustained them literally and spiritually for generations. -
The sights and sounds of old New York are just a few of the marvels of the musical On the Town, newly revived at the Lyric Theater. If you see a subway sign marked IRT, you know you are in the right place. Three sailors on an overnight pass get to see the sights, “from Yonkers on down to the bay, in just one day.” Naturally, and so the guidebook says, the Museum of Natural History is a must, and everywhere there are girls, girls, girls in this ribald and rollicking classic with Leonard Bernstein’s music and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on the idea by Jerome Robbins. Director John Rando, with Joshua Bergasse’s choreography and James Moore’s music direction, has subtly reworked the original to great effect. -
Stephen Hawking, ALS and all, is such a “character,” he’s perfect as the charismatic center of a movie. That’s partly because of his brilliance in physics and cosmology, partly because his bold yet childlike persona, and partly because of the woman who kept his brain alive, his wife Jane. A new movie based on her account of their courtship, marriage, and ultimate friendship, The Theory of Everything, stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as this exceptional couple. Last week at lunch at the Lotos Club, in a Q&A led by the charming Stephen Daldry, the stars and screenwriter Anthony McCarten discussed their movie relationship in what many are calling performances that top the lists for this year’s acting awards; the film should be nominated for Best Picture. -
Famed and multi-awarded neurologist Dr. Allan Ropper, author of the definitive textbook on clinical neurology, with the help of Brian David Burrell, has turned his prodigious medical knowledge to us, the people, with an entertaining and eminently readable book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. Demystifying the art and practice of healing neurological disorders, he turns a keen eye on his patients, interviewing them and recounting stories straight from the hospital front. As the doctor told me in a recent interview, almost all of the many anecdotes contained in the book are taken from his owned taped interviews, and are 70% verbatim.
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How cool is Buster Poindexter? The alter ego of David Johansen of New York Dolls fame, Poindexter is VERY cool. A seasoned lounge singer, he sports a pompadour, a wavecrest that may stand erect using a formula once shared by Bello the Clown: a mix of Rogaine and Viagra. A pencil thin mustache grazes his upper lip a la John Waters, but he makes it his own as he shimmies, sashays, and rhumbas his way around the Carlyle stage, his pelvis moving to Presley precision. His show—only five nights– is a tongue-in-cheek medley of genres: doowop, country, rock, his wit evident throughout, opening with “Viper” (“I had a dream about a reefer five feet long”), and “Bad Boy” (“I’ve taken the trouble to turn my night into day.”). After four songs, he predicted his own review: “Did you see Poindexter the other night?” “How was it?” “Good. But he was crazy.” -
Alex Gibney’s documentary, Mr. Dynamite, limns the extraordinary rise of James Brown’s career, and more: interviews with his sidemen give a history of rhythm and blues, and race. Mick Jagger talks about coming to the Apollo to see James Brown and trying to simulate, and surpass, the legendary performer’s signature moves. Jazz musicians Fred Wesley and Christian McBride reveal the many ways that Brown’s unique talent and professional ethics transformed the music, how the theatrics of putting on a cape near the end of the act—borrowing from the world of boxing– would lead to an encore, and how subbing for Little Richard on tour, styling himself with that makeup and adapting from his sound, led to Brown’s scream. Many who appear in the film were on hand for a premiere at the Time Warner Center on Monday night, including Mr. Wesley, Mr. McBride, Martha High who tells how James Brown changed her name, and the Reverend Al Sharpton. -
Every computer-age gadget is deployed to bad effect in Jason Reitman’s satiric new movie, Men, Women, and Children, and that’s the least of the targets of his scrutiny: how about sex, ambition, and most of all, power, particularly of the parental kind. Let me say, there was not one adult I could admire in this film. In that way, the movie is a fantasy of teen disaffection in perhaps the mode of J. D. Salinger. Forget social media, which as Reitman so aptly put it in the post-screening Q&A with a panel of psychologists and experts including Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano, is mere “geography.” As in the case of all of Reitman’s movies, especially Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and Up in the Air, this movie is smart and edgy; its themes will generate much debate. -
Radiant in black taffeta on Guild Hall’s stage after the movie Still Alice screened, Julianne Moore said the way you play a woman with degenerating early Alzheimer’s is to reach for normality, for what she can remember. Even buffeted by family, a supportive Alec Baldwin, and daughters Kate Bosworth and Kristen Stewart, son Hunter Parrish, not to mention a house in the Hamptons, Dr. Alice Howland, a prominent professor of linguistics at Columbia, makes a wrenching journey toward not recognizing those closest to her. And she’s only 50. The movie struck a chord big time in the Hamptons community. -
As any Freudian will tell you, father and son relationships are mythically fraught. In Robert Downey, Jr.’s new movie, The Judge, he’s a killer New York lawyer with a small town judge father (Robert Duvall) to topple, but there’s a twist: he has to defend his father in a murder case. The courtroom tension rests in questions of justice, with a silver-maned and chilly Billy Bob Thornton as a determined prosecutor. At a luncheon at 21 last week, fathers and sons faced off in celebration of this excellent movie that also features a superb supporting cast: Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong. Not only were the stars present, but Downey’s renowned filmmaker father, Robert Downey, Sr., and Dan Abrams with his father, legendary First Amendment attorney, Floyd Abrams. -
Holding court after a sumptuous brunch honoring Hilary Swank for receiving Montblanc’s Creative Impact in Acting award and Variety’s “Class of 10 Actors to Watch” at the Maidstone in East Hampton, Swank, her dog Kai by her side, spoke about her role as Mary Bee Cuddy in The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’ movie set in “the territories.” You could say this is a dark “how the west was won” from a woman’s point of view, with strong Coen Brothers influence. Based on Glendon Swarthout’s novel, The Homesman has the mythic structure of Jones’ directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, with a star-studded supporting cast including John Lithgow, James Spader, Hailee Steinfeld, Tim Blake Nelson, and Meryl Streep, his Hope Springs co-star, the familiar faces a cushion for the movie’s somber message. Hilary Swank said she took the role of a woman tasked with bringing three women gone mad back to their Iowa families from a Nebraska frontier, an arduous journey, because it was a feminist story.
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