The entertaining PBS portrait of composer Marvin Hamlisch, aptly titled, “What He Did For Love,” provides the music, his method for creating it, and the man. Fortunately for producer Dori Berinstein, and for us, Hamlisch was often photographed and the footage of him performing, accepting awards, Pulitzer, Oscars, Emmys, Tonys, so much a part of our recent cultural history, makes our loss all the more poignant: he died a little more than a year ago at age 68, clearly with much more music to give.
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
-
The French provincial brocade couches in Carmine and Dolly’s Camden, New Jersey house in “American Hustle” tell you what you need to know about the characters’ domestic life. But the “American Hustle” soundtrack goes far to define the movie’s con artists’ ethos; for example you hear The Jefferson Airplane’s classic “White Rabbit,” but it’s not The Airplane. So what is it? Another put on? A leitmotif for a fake sheikh from the Emirates? Susan Jacobs, the “American Hustle"'s music supervisor, filled me in about the creation of “White Rabbit” –turns out, in Arabic, and other music backstories. -
Invisibility is perhaps desirable if you are going to be the mistress of one of the most popular writers of all time. The story of Charles Dickens’ mistress, a young actress, Nelly Ternan 27 years his junior is compelling material, Ralph Fiennes’ second feature as director. Known for performances in The English Patient, Quiz Show, Schindler’s List among many other star turns including Lord Voltemort in the Harry Potter films, Ralph Fiennes was celebrated at this year’s New York Film Festival. As director and star of The Invisible Woman adapted from Claire Tomalin’s historic novel, he plays Charles Dickens as a boyish man in love with his mistress (Felicity Jones). Rather than being a woman scorned, the revelation is that Nelly survived potential scandal intact. Even Dickens’ wife and mother of his 10 children played with remarkable compassion by Joanna Scanlan seemed to be okay with the arrangement. -
Not all soldiers are heroes, but in Lone Survivor, director Peter Berg’s film based on the book by Marcus Luttrell, heroism is in full display. The movie’s three acts are well defined: first, the rigorous training of a team of Navy Seals, then a covert mission of four men on a mountain to take out a key target known as Operation Red Wings, and third, an Afghan village in the aftermath of this operation. When asked whether or not this was a movie for or against war, Mark Wahlberg who portrays Luttrell and is also a producer, said, “Neither. This film is pro soldier.” -
Leonardo DiCaprio made a cameo at The Four Seasons on Wednesday at the luncheon celebrating his new movie, Wolf of Wall Street. Brief public appearances are par for the course for this star; we forgave him cutting out before the short ribs. He was en route with director Martin Scorsese to the White House to show this edgy crime, sex and drugs romp to the first couple. Something tells me that they are cool enough to love this hilarious comedy, but may have to keep their exuberance under wraps. Leo stars as Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street stockbroker whose addictions to money, power, sex, drugs, and excess may resonate in a bad way with those still bitter over the pass the financial wheeler-dealers got over their Main Street victims. -
Christmas came early this year. First there was the gift of the documentary “20 Feet from Stardom,” now shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. Then, there were the celebrations: the most recent on Thursday night at the Edison Hotel’s Rum House featuring cast members, Judith Hill and Lisa Fischer, accompanied by pianist Robbie Kondor for Christmas carols. Director Morgan Neville introduced the evening, saying that he never expected the film to have this kind of success: if you haven’t seen it, the documentary tells the story of backup singers with testimonies of Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Sting, Springsteen all singing the praises of the less famous women with the musical chops that make the front men sound so good. In the documentary, Neville unearths a story about race, gender, the consequences of Michael Jackson’s death, making this film resonate in ways larger than the great music performed. -
Never one to miss a quip, Harvey Weinstein introduced the movie August: Osage County at its Zeigfeld premiere, noting Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts were singled out for Golden Globe acting nominations: “We like to promote new talent.” In truth, the Weston family depicted in this tragicomedy is an ensemble, reflected in a SAG nomination. This ensemble is tightly knit, troubled in the way American families can grate and love. Both matriarch Violet (Streep) and daughter Barbara (Roberts) are called monsters, and frankly in terms of the dysfunction, that’s putting it mildly. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tracy Letts, the film distills scathing dialogue, and blocks scenes so that the claustrophobic effect of the big house translates to the wide flat plains as well. The Ziegfeld’s expansive screen is ideal for viewing this American tableau. -
After a screening of his American Hustle, at a party at the Monkey Bar sponsored by OPI, director David O. Russell held court. Having paved the road toward Best Actor/ Actress awards for many cast in his movies over the years, actors must be dying to work with him although he made it clear that the American Hustle dream ensemble, a mix of Silver Linings Playbook and Fighter vets is now something of a repertory. This morning, not surprising: Amy Adams, Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper were all nominated for Golden Globes. -
Lee Daniels, always a provocateur, addressed the huge crowd at Cipriani Wall Street at this week’s Gotham Awards with a confession: he hates white people. No one gasped. It was not clear whether this proclamation was part of his complaint that no one in the cavernous space was listening to his introduction of honoree Forest Whitaker. Was he merely trying to grab the attention? All night long at this, the annual awards given to “independent” –i.e. non-Hollywood fare, speakers seemed daunted by the noise in the room throwing off the rhythms of, for example, the evening’s host, comedian Nick Kroll, who was decidedly unfunny. Still, Whitaker managed to present a gentle, Zen-like oration. And Steve Buscemi speaking of James Gandolfini delivered a moving tribute to the Tony Soprano actor who died so suddenly this past summer. “What a loss,” he noted of this most beloved actor whose family was present for the tribute. -
After a best actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, there’s no stopping Bruce Dern. As Woody in Alexander Payne’s masterpiece “Nebraska,” featured in Toronto, New York, and the Hamptons Film Festivals, he’s a doddering but endearing old fool who takes seriously one of those announcements that he’s a sweepstakes winner, and convinces his son to drive him from Billings to Omaha to pick up his millions. With old school modesty, Dern says that the obstacle to making this film which took a long time—he received the script 10 years ago this week—was not about casting him, a quasi-bankable character actor in the lead role, but that it’s shot in black and white. At lunch at Il Gattopardo this week, he applauded Paramount for letting Payne make his film the way he wanted to make it. And now, there’s no question that Dern will join a line-up that includes Robert Redford for “All is Lost,” contenders for the Best Actor Oscar. -
Casey Affleck has a youthful intensity: he’s too vulnerable to go to the deadly places he explores as a fighter to prove himself in the testosterone fueled “Out of the Furnace,” in theaters this week. The opening scenes are so brutal, with a screw loose Woody Harrelson going ballistic on his date at the drive in, you know that by the time the two meet, nothing good will come of it. After four tours in Iraq, Affleck’s sweet-faced Rodney Baze has so few options in the Pennsylvania town where he lives with a dying father, and with his brother, the incomparable Christian Bale as Russell Baze.I spent a good part of the movie with my hands over my eyes, ruing my presence at a movie that displays boys behaving so badly. That said, in the end, the story resonated at a different level, as a parable about returning war heroes and the bleak opportunities they have connecting with home, family and a meaningful job. Featuring excellent, tough but sensitive, performances by Affleck and Bale, Willem Dafoe, Forest Whitaker, and Sam Shepard against an authentic, gritty, industrial steel mill backdrop, in the end, the themes of revenge and love overshadow the violence.
-
Onstage backstage, at the Pearl Theater’s production of “And Away We Go,” six actors celebrate theater history. Set in the detritus of years of costumes, props, deflated dolls, and chandeliers, this new play by the venerable Terrence McNally sits on the most cluttered set north of 14th Street. (Small Engine Repair’s garage at the Lucille Lortel gets the prize south.) The lived-in look works well to convey an atmosphere of well-worn theatrical mayhem. The Greek plays such as Aeschylus’s “Oresteia,” an actor’s dream to perform Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” Chekhov’s “Seagull,” Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” all evoked, all supply a turn of phrase, a dramatic diva in this Dionysian and clever pastiche, under Jack Cummings III able direction, featuring the Pearl regulars Carol Schultz, Sean McNall, Rachel Botchan, and Dominic Cuskern, and a pair of newcomers, Donna Lynne Champlin and Micah Stock. -
Ethan Hawke is a manly Macbeth in a leather skirt. The men in “the Scottish play” look good in skirts, even John Glover’s “weird sister,” with pendulous breasts. At this stylish “Macbeth” directed by Jack O’Brien, you pause wondering: Alexander McQueen? Gaultier? Marc Jacobs? Catherine Zuber’s costumes, like the regal sets by Scott Pask, lighting by Japhy Weideman’s, the dark, elegant look of this production throughout including the tinged with blood roses (as if competing with the color tones of “Twilight”) signal the other worldly and worldly at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. Hecate is a Goth goddess. When Lady Macbeth (Ann-Marie Duff) asks to be unsexed, any gloss will say, for Elizabethans that means to be released from the cares of women. And indeed, childless, murderous and ambitious, she is in every way manly in that sense except for her pale bony back in strapless. (You could see her as Marin Ireland’s Marie Antoinette counterpart; in a recent downtown production, that doomed queen wore red.) Here, in black, this fated queen’s as stylish as this production is sleek, and the effect is thrilling, if not exactly like the more classical approaches to this most often produced of the bard’s work. -
In Amanda Peet’s fine playwriting debut for Manhattan Theater Club at City Center, “The Commons of Pensacola,” Sarah Jessica Parker and Blythe Danner are daughter and mother locked in a domestic dilemma: Judith (Danner) is forced to scale down as her husband has been jailed for a Madoff-mode crime. Becca (Parker) arrives for Thanksgiving with a boyfriend much her junior. Her sister Ali (Ali Marsh) has broken off from their mother for mysterious reasons, so her daughter Lizzy (Zoe Levin) must sneak a visit to grandma now residing in a generic Florida condo. All would be cozy, complete with a fold out couch, except that the wrong couple ends up sleeping there. -
Two benefits this week featured a back stage glimpse into how theater is made: on Sunday night, Stanley Tucci, along with Anne Tatlock, was honored at the Plaza Hotel, at the New York Stage and Film Winter Gala for his contribution to theater. Fitting, the presentation included performances: Li-Manuel Miranda and Anika Noni Rose sang from Miranda’s work in progress, The Hamilton Mixtape. Peter Gallagher sang Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York.” Guests for this event which focused on the organization’s important work in developing and nurturing young theater artists included Patricia Clarkson, Steve Buscemi, Oren Moverman, Jon Tenney, and Oliver Platt who presented the award to Stanley Tucci. While the new Hunger Games: Catching Fire opened this week, with Tucci reprising his role as Caesar Flickerman, he was looking forward to directing theater as he did most recently in Lend Me A Tenor on Broadway. -
The subject of race was addressed head on at a luncheon celebrating the film “12 Years a Slave,” easily the film of the year in an awards season gathering momentum. “I’m a black man, as if you didn’t notice, and part of the global identity of slavery” said director Steve McQueen on a panel led by Amanda Foreman at the Lotos Club on Tuesday. The director was seated between two of his stars Chitwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o and in front of guests who included the luncheon’s host George C. Wolfe, Geoffrey Fletcher, Spike Lee, Thulani Davis, Walter Mosley, and many more of the city’s cultural and industry elite, but the context of McQueen’s remark was an answer to a question about his being a British citizen making art of a particularly American experience, and embarrassment. With family from the West Indies, he pointed out, we are all part of a diaspora, and that understanding makes the horrors of plantation life witnessed in his powerful movie all the more dreadful, and close to home no matter what your color or ethnicity.
-
Among the many ways the pioneering comedienne Moms Mabley was a pioneer was that she performed at the Apollo in 1939, five years after the Harlem theater opened. In her signature hats, mismatched housedresses, and gummy lips, she was a hoot, although her jokes consisted mostly in telling the truth. Her deadpan was killer. She came from North Carolina, and avowed, she had no use for older men. Often escorted about by younger men, she was happiest in the company of women. Dressed most elegantly in tails, she was a sharp contrast to her stage look. A mystery endures as to whether or not she was raped, twice. As a teen she had two children who were given up for adoption. A veteran of the “Chitlin’ Circuit” of black vaudevillians, she influenced every comic today, especially Whoopi Goldberg who produced and directed this documentary portrait, “Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ to Tell You,” to air on HBO on November 18. -
Even by Peggy Siegal’s usual high celebrity quotient, the event was a coup: Hillary Clinton’s introduction of a short documentary, White Gold, at its premiere at MoMA. Last Wednesday, she addressed a packed screening room: Candice Bergen, Christie Brinkley, Chuck Close, Albert Maysles, Barbara Kopple, Lawrence O’Donnell, David Schwimmer, and many others. The film’s subject, the dire plight of Africa’s elephant population would serve as horror enough. Images of elephants mutilated for their tusks are graphic, potent reminders that attention must be paid, not just for preservation of a magnificent species, but as a deterrent to something close to Clinton’s office: Security. As the documentary narrated by Clinton makes clear, the tusks are coveted by a growing middle class in China, eager for the trinkets carved out of the valuable ivory. But utilizing more and more sophisticated techniques for the plunder, terrorist groups benefit from the economics of this big business. As she suggested, director Arne Glimcher and others like Sigourney Weaver who starred as Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist, a 1988 feature shedding light on the poaching of Africa’s wildlife, the market for ivory should end.Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
-
Puffing vigorously on a cigarette substitute, Art Spiegelman addressed journalists at the Jewish Museum at a recent opening of an exhibition “Co-mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.” Referring to his most potent inspiration for subversive art, “Mad Magazine,” he jokes, he’s convinced, the Viet Nam War protests would not have happened had it not been for the influence of this satirical comic magazine on Spiegelman’s generation. What, me worry? Alfred E. Neuman’s laugh line teased young readers to check between the words and pictures for hidden truth. The sumptuous retrospective of Spiegelman’s career at the Jewish Museum including his work in underground Raw, to book covers as in his Paul Auster New York Trilogy art, to the highbrow and controversial The New Yorker covers, illustrates a much wider range, but he is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, based on his relationship with his father Vladek, a Holocaust survivor. Whatever else the artist has done, including an upcoming collaboration with Phillip Johnston, “Wordless!” at Brooklyn Academy of Music, his work is overwhelmed by Maus: “Holocaust trumps Art,” he laughs in mock ruefulness. -
In The Great Beauty, a gorgeously shot picture of contemporary Rome, albeit fictional, it is refreshing to see that this tourist mecca of monumental historic significance has a shallow center just like all the other important world cities of note. You could say this movie whose central character is a writer of one novel so many years ago who has evolved into a journalist of art, parties, and society gossip is like the visual equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with references to a glorious cultural past that now simply exists in fragments. When he is charged with being a misogynist, that character, Jeb Gambardella, corrects the accusation: No, I am a misanthropist. And while he wears this name as a badge of honor to go along with his impeccably tailored suits, fortunately the film does not agree with him. Within this engrossing spectacle, some of the most dramatic faces this side of Fellini scowl and grin. You have to love them. -
Disney scores again! First it was multi-Oscar winning Mary Poppins, now Saving Mr. Banks, a biopic of Mary Poppins writer P. L. Travers. In the person of Emma Thompson she’s stern, a bit of a frump, Britishly out of step, yet endearing as she comes around giving Walt Disney the rights to make this classic musical. Let’s face it: who can say no to Tom Hanks? Set in two time frames, the 1960’s when Disney finally got Travers to agree and the 1930’s back brush Australia where Travers nee Helen Goff grew up, a daughter of an alcoholic with lofty dreams played movingly by Colin Farrell. Featuring a stellar supporting cast of Jason Schwartzman, Paul Giamatti, Rachel Griffiths, Kathy Baker, B. J. Novak, the miracle of this movie is its tone: with sad and funny in equal measure, Saving Mr. Banks will surely top award season lists. -
Who or what could upstage these musicians: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Alicia Keys, Michael Stipe, Chris Martin, Eddie Vedder, Roger Waters, The Rolling Stones, Sir Paul McCartney? Maybe a big storm. Aerial shots of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy are intercut with concert footage in the new documentary 12-12-12. These shots of homes a pile of debris, water coursing through residential neighborhoods like a wild river, houses ablaze, and the people whose lives were upturned, speak volumes. The movie, under Amir Bar Lev’s deft direction, makes a big impression. Harvey Weinstein approached him, admiring his work on The Tillman Story, and work began roughly 10 days before the concert. “I hired a bunch of fellow filmmakers I admire here in town and we all fanned out around the Garden and collected material ad hoc,” wrote Bar Lev in a recent email. With a focus on helping, as the behind the scenes glimpse illustrates: whatever could go wrong did: including the Internet breakdown when people who wanted to pledge money couldn’t. Eric Schmidt was called in to the rescue. -
If you could mate John Waters with Charles Ludlam, the offspring might be Mink Stole and Penny Arcade, lead performers in a new production of Tennessee Williams’ “The Mutilated.” First seen in 1966 as a one-acter on Broadway, coupled with “The Gnadiges Fraulein,” the program entitled “Slapstick Tragedy,” the play has been relegated to a theatrical dust heap. Seen in its new jazzy production under the fine direction of Cosmin Chivu at the New Ohio Theater, "The Mutilated" resonates with familiar Tennessee tropes and showcases these over-the-top performers in a New Orleans demimonde, imaginatively on the same streetcar line as the Wingfields’ in Glass Menagerie. -
Bill Cosby must have been feeling frisky. Arriving at the Madison Square Garden Theater for the 7th annual “Stand Up for Heroes” benefit this week, he wrapped Cindy Adams in his homey sweater and began to roughhouse the gossip columnist. Recovering from the encounter, Adams asked, is my hair still up? It was. And Cosby in a lineup of comedians that included Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld, killed with a routine about his family growing up, the discipline meted out to the kids. “Stand Up for Heroes” has become so popular, organizers had to change venues doubling their audience. -
When Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione died on October 10, 2010, the obituaries dwelled on him as pornographer. That got the attention of filmmaker, Barry Avrich, a documentarian who specializes in the dramatic arc of moguls who peak and fall as a result of their own hubris: his Show Stopper told the story of theatrical producer Garth Drabinsky, for example of one larger than life figure. He also made Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project in 2011. Bob Guccione, relegated to the dust heap of porn magnate didn’t cut it, and Avrich set out to find out more. The result, Filthy Gorgeous, an illuminating documentary portrait, airs on EPIX this Friday. The big reveal: Bob Guccione, whose interests also went to math and science (he created Omni Magazine), wanted to be remembered as a fine arts painter. And guess what: he could paint.
gossipcentral.com 