Innovative in its time, Cabaret, the quintessential movie musical marked its anniversary with a special screening last week at The Ziegfeld Theater where it premiered forty years ago. The stars, Liza Minelli, Joel Grey, Michael York, and Marisa Berenson joined Robert Osbourne onstage, answering some questions about the making of this landmark song and dance Fosse film, the 1973 Academy Award winner for Best Picture. Minelli and Grey earned actor Oscars as well, the film 8 in all. Liza Minelli attended the Oscar ceremony with her father Vincent Minelli, who helped her create her character’s Sally Bowles’ look, showing her pictures of Theda Barra and Louise Brooks. When she asked him what he thought, he said, “Strange and wonderful.” Funny to see her, in close up, the line crossed in heavy, eye-popping mascara and green nails. How did Bob Fosse create the 1931 Weimar Germany’s Kit Kat Club’s “divine decadence?”
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On Wednesday morning, just after the premiere of Neil Barsky’s documentary Koch, the news came on a television crawl: Ed Koch had missed the party, hospitalized. And this morning, on the film’s opening day, he has died. His tenure as New York mayor was not exactly “the best of times,” given a span of three-terms (1977-1989), they weren’t the worst either. They did rename a bridge after him. But even in the traditions of outsized mayoral personalities, his was particularly large, which makes the movie about him a blessing and now a bittersweet remembrance. -
Back in 2007 when I first took on gossipcentral.com, I wrote about “Sundance Envy,” an oft misdiagnosed disease with one symptom: celluloid deprivation in January. Dr. Freud, are you listening? It is not that I yearn for icy ski conditions. This year Sundance seemed particularly alluring to me with two beat era films, movies of Kerouac’s Big Sur and of his 1945 collaboration with William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, published in 2008, that became Kill Your Darlings. The latter boasted a big star: Daniel Radcliffe, and some indie favorites: Ben Foster and Elizabeth Olsen, two television stars Michael C. Hall and Jack Huston, and one newcomer, Dane DeHaan. Touted as a little-known scandal, for me, the story of the murder of Dave Kammerer (Hall) by Lucien Carr (DeHaan), the young would be poet he was stalking ever since they met in the boy scouts, years before, was a story I knew quite well from Jack Kerouac’s books, The Town & the City, Vanity of Duluoz, and a ton of secondary literature. -
Brrrrr! On this chilly weekend, the new FX television series The Americans premiered at the DGA Theater: a young couple played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell enter a Maryland motel room circa 1960’s. Russian spies, they are finding the U.S. summer brutal. Spying an air conditioner, they are relieved to bask in the frigid air. Talk about the Cold War! -
Even in the age of terrorism, the terror of the last century’s The Holocaust, has not lost its hold on the artistic imagination. As the victims of The Shoah are remembered at the United Nations and in synagogues worldwide, films continue to shed light on that darkest hour of the twentieth century. The Jewish Film Festival, an annual collaboration between the Film Society at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum just ended with the New York premiere of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt, the writer/philosopher/educator, an émigré who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, famously coining the phrase, “the banality of evil.” -
Who knew host Meredith Vieira could swear like a trucker, or imagine herself at 59 as a dead Pussy Galore? But as the television personality reminded a packed Cipriani’s on 42nd street for the National Board of Review’s Awards Gala on Tuesday night, paraphrasing Jessica Chastain’s “Maya” in Zero Dark Thirty: “I’m the Motherf—ker in charge.”Excuse me, but there were children in the room: Quvenzhane Wallis, from Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tom Holland from The Impossible each received Breakthrough Performance Awards. And while John Krasinski defined “freedom of expression” as “taking a chance,” speaking about the award given to Promised Land, others took the phrase more liberally.
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Having dined royally on Les Miserables, a musical that has its characters literally singing idealistic and starving to death, well-wishers came together for lunch at Michael’s on Tuessday–four tables worth in the garden room– to congratulate Tom Hooper on his stellar achievement directing this film. But, why now, the day of the National Board of Review awards where the Les Mis ensemble would be honored, and a few days before Oscar nominations would be announced? -
Around midnight on Monday night, the area around Crimson had a pulse. Four women from Amsterdam stood outside the club looking for Chris Rock. A crowd rushed screaming “Daniel” on East 21st street. Was it Craig, sneaking a Bond-worthy getaway in a black tricked out SUV? Or was it Day Lewis, who was honored as Best Actor for his portrayal of Lincoln? Earlier, Rock had presented a Best Non-Fiction Film award to Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon for Central Park Five, but not before shouting out to Steven Spielberg, awed: Lincoln, man, he freed the slaves! -
At a luncheon at “21” early last December, Jessica Chastain was relieved. Not because her new film Zero Dark Thirty was chosen as Best Film by the New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review, but because her secret could now be known. For a year after she was slated for the lead in this thriller based on the CIA’s mission to find and kill Osama bin Laden, she could tell no one about the film, as if CIA rules applied to her. While her mouth was zipped, many thought she would be playing one of the wives of a Navy SEAL. Yeah, you can be barefoot in the kitchen, she quipped about this attitude. Radiant in a light purple Elie Saab ensemble, Chastain worked the room in Ferragamo platforms, happy at last she could speak about her performance as “the girl,” as the real-life operative was known to CIA higher ups. -
Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters familiar to readers since 1957. In a further innovation, viewers will note that Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) talks to his mother (Marie Ginette-Guay) in a curious French, referencing Kerouac’s French Canadian roots. The writer, from an ethnic neighborhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke a dialect called joual.Interviewing surviving members of the beat generation in their research, the filmmakers spoke to Joyce Johnson, Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time that On the Road was published to become an overnight bestseller. The author of the memoir Minor Characters told them about her own study of Kerouac’s language. Looking for ways to give Sal speech, the filmmakers incorporated this source, reaching outside Kerouac’s text in creating French dialogue between mother and son. Recently published, Joyce Johnson’s new biography,The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, traces the development of Kerouac’s prose style, showing how his French freed him to create his famous spontaneous narrative.
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Standing high on a stepladder, Dr. Mehmet Oz addressed the crowd at Le Cirque, at cocktails for Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell and his star Robert DeNiro. The talk show host applied his professional expertise, noting the unexpected relevance of SLP to current events, the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Ct. as this audience award winning movie shines a light on mental health in America. Dr. Oz mentioned the moment when DeNiro as Pat Sr. asks his son (Bradley Cooper), recently released from a mental facility, has he taken the right dose of his meds. Pat Jr. and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), out on their first date at a diner discuss the relative ups and downs of anti-depressants. Looking around the room at film insiders, he commented on edge-fueled creativity. -
While The Hobbit, Peter Jackson’s prequel to his Tolkien inspired Lord of the Rings series, leads the box office charts, the New Zealand director was in town last week for its premiere, but that was not the only film he has opening. The next night, he introduced his film of passion, West of Memphis, the documentary he and partner Fran Walsh produced and funded themselves, a cause celebre in the United States revisiting the murder of three 8 year olds in 1993, and the three teens, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie
Misskelley, who went to jail for the crime.
Amy Berg directs the documentary feature, focusing on the case of the only WM3 on death row, Damien Echols, who with his wife Lorri Davis, also produced West of Memphis. While Damien Echols acknowledged Peter Jackson for saving his life, all agree, this film and Echols’ story would not be known if not for the decades-in-the-making trilogy, that covered the case as it was evolving, Paradise Lost, produced for HBO by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky.
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They’ve been going non-stop. With New York screenings and lavish dinners, a quick jump across the pond for the London premiere, and back for the New York party at MoMA and appearances on many talk shows, Hugh Jackman was positive we’d all be sick of him by now. From his Jean Valjean role in Les Miserables, transformed from the bitter prisoner hunted by Javert to a spiritually liberated and rich factory owner, and his generous on-the-spot performances at various celebrations including a lunch hosted by Ron Meyer, Jackman is truly a songman you want to have around.
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Fresh from Kennedy Center Honors, the actor Dustin Hoffman was promoting his new movie, Quartet, his directorial debut. At a Q&A following a screening last week, the Academy Award winning actor noted the relationship between acting and directing. When he was starting out, he wanted to direct. He had a dream: You could be the next Kazan, he was told, and he looked for projects to direct. He was supposed to direct Dead Poets Society and be in it. When he hesitated, the role went to Robin Williams. Decades later, he directs Quartet, and was named Best Breakthrough Director at the Hollywood Film Awards.Given that producers have been reluctant to allow him to direct without acting in the movie, he is vindicated, even though at 75, he would fit right in. -
Squalor, sewers, Dickensian suffering, a splendor of operatic riches! If you are director Tom Hooper, how do you follow the drama of last year’s multi-Oscar winning King’s Speech? A film of one of the most beloved Broadway musical epics, Les Miserables, set in the days of the French Revolution a la Victor Hugo might not be the obvious choice. Then again, Hooper is a filmmaker who has challenged himself with every project. The John Adams series for HBO comes to mind. So a musical? Why not. -
Midway through a luncheon celebrating Rust and Bone, news came that the French film starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts was nominated for an Independent Spirit Best International film award. Not even a glass was raised, as if awards for this edgy movie were simply a matter of course.SONY Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker said he and his partner Tom Bernard backed Rust and Bone even before they read the script, making a deal with director Jacques Audiard after A Prophet’s critical success for his next film, whatever it might be. Then they get a script: A woman loses her legs, befriends a bouncer who also fights and has a son, eh, why not, Barker laughs, throwing up his arms. Like A Prophet with its insider prison view, the film offers a glimpse into a world unto itself: Picture the saturated, happy colors of resorts in travel brochures. Now imagine the opposite, beaches in dour tones in perpetual off-season. That is the look of Rust and Bone.
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Jared Leto won the audience award at the annual IFP’s Gotham Awards at Cipriani Wall Street for his movie Artifacts; the film was mostly unknown to most at my table of industry insiders, but that sums up the theme of this, the ultimate alternative awards ceremony that even has a category, Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. That award went to An Oversimplification of her Beauty, by the way. Meantime Leto, chatting at cocktails prior to receiving the award said he had just arrived from LA and left his bag on the plane. Seat of pants, he seemed to think the award should go to Beasts of the Southern Wild, the most edgy and mythic film of the year. Not to worry. Benh Zeitlin, the creator of that film took away many of the evening’s honors, including the Best Breakthrough Director and newly minted Bingham Ray award, after the pioneering champion of independent films who died suddenly in Park City this past January. -
Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s take on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a thrilling Zero Dark Thirty, begins with torture so brutal I found it an eye averting experience. But not CIA operative Maya (the delicate, fine-boned, redhead Jessica Chastain) on assignment, recruited after high school to work on the war on terrorism. “She’s a killer,” or “The Girl,” as identified by CIA higher ups and we see her refusing to leave the room as “Amar” is water boarded, her pale eyes wide. -
On the face of it, Flight is your standard redemption story. Taking you aboard a plane falling apart in heavy winds, Flight is not what it seems. Audiences may be expecting Airplane! without the laughs, or a claustrophobic bumpy drama aboard a doomed vehicle. The film is about character, extending beyond the lead to nuanced supporting roles.The story of a flawed man enabled by the fact that he rarely loses control, Flight follows pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), seen drinking heavily before and during this disaster. Fueled by a variety of substances, he maintains his demeanor, landing the plane with less damage than you would imagine. He is a hero, but as a husband, father, lover, he’s the proverbial eh, plane wreck. That a hotel mini-bar can be scarier than a plane flailing in midair is a measure of this classic cautionary tale, one of the best pictures as award season approaches. Expect too a nod to John Gatins for his original screenplay.
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On April 19, 1989, you could not miss the headlines—and the horror of the Central Park jogger case. A white woman in a tracksuit, pummeled, raped, unconscious. Who did this? Packs of wild black boys aprowl in the park. Case closed.The Central Park Five, the final non-fiction feature in the DOC NYC Fest last week, a deft examination of the most publicized rape case in NY history, questions the handling of this case: the arrest and conviction of 5 black teens seemed to put the unsettling crime at rest. Now, so many years later, the 5 young men attempt to put their lives together after a 2002 exoneration that got little press attention. No one so much as said sorry.
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It seemed a delicious idea, seeing Edward Albee’s Tony award winning play, Talking Back at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf about George and Martha, a university couple whose marriage unravels over cocktails with a younger couple one night –with an audience of couples counselors. This riveting revival, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production at the Booth Theater for the play’s 50th anniversary, is however, so disarming that even a group of trained professionals, seemed flummoxed by the brilliant banter and blatant betrayal, caustic jabs and casual sex. Questions to the actors following Thursday night’s performance were about whether or not they take the emotion home with them. Answer: a complicated yes, as you would imagine. From the first “What a dump!” till dawn, this scathing examination of what is real, what imagined, what illusions keep us afloat, hits home. There’s not a more harrowing spectacle of marital evisceration on Broadway. -
En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing was censored. “This book about the creative process, this ode to literature, got to me. The characters became my heroes,” he said noting too his current inspirations: poets Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima and Gary Snyder. So charming that Peggy Siegal now calls him her new BFF, Salles took on the making of this film, a project that has eluded Francis Ford Coppola for decades. In 2004, after he saw Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries, Coppola asked him to consider the un-filmable beat classic. -
The winner of audience awards in Toronto, the Hamptons, and other film festivals, David O. Russell’s new movie, Silver Linings Playbook is not only a crowd pleaser, it has the gravitas to make it to the top awards. This movie is to Philadelphia, The Eagles and football what Lowell, Massachusetts and the ring was to The Fighter: all you need is (heart). -
David Geffen is so funny, sharing anecdotes featuring a Who’s Who in music and movies for the two-hour PBS documentary, Inventing David Geffen, you would never know that he actually dislikes public speaking. A self-proclaimed dummy in his Brooklyn elementary school, by 1976 he had sold several companies and had amassed a billion dollars. As he says at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame dinner upon receiving an award, “I never thought I would get one of these. I have no talent.” And yet interviews with those who have worked with this mogul in the entertainment industry—Barry Diller, Clive Davis, Ahmet Ertegun, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mike Nichols, Jann Wenner, Elton John, Lorne Michaels, among many others—attest otherwise: all seem to agree, the man has chutzpah. -
A force of nature himself, Harvey Weinstein did not let impending Hurricane Sandy deter his plan for a screening of Seal Team Six in Washington, said director John Stockwell at a post-storm screening hosted by Peggy Siegal in New York this week. “Harvey likes to stir things up,” he said. Wanting to insure that key political figures would see the dramatization of the real life hunt for Osama Bin Laden and raid that ended in his death, to air on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday night, his plan is to show the film in time for Tuesday’s election.
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