Exclusive: Michael Lieberman, formerly head of publicity at Metrograph, has been hired as Director of Communications, U.S., at Mubi. He will be based at the New York offices of the global film distributor, producer and curated film streaming service.
In his new role, Lieberman will lead all communications for the U.S. including publicity for Mubi releases, working alongside Global Director of Communications Sophie Rhatigan, U.S. Director of Marketing Corey Wilson, VP Global Marketing Lilly Riber, U.S. Director of Distribution Chris Mason Wells and Global Distribution boss Jon Barrenechea.
At Metrograph, Lieberman helped oversee the launch of the Metrograph cinema in 2015, Metrograph Pictures in 2019 and Metrograph Digital last year. He also promoted programming like retrospectives of Brian De Palma, Maggie Cheung and Gena Rowlands/John Cassavetes, and theatrical releases of A Bigger Splash and Downtown 81 among others.
He previously held publicity positions at Susan Norget Film Promotion and Film Presence.
In his new role, Lieberman will lead all communications for the U.S. including publicity for Mubi releases, working alongside Global Director of Communications Sophie Rhatigan, U.S. Director of Marketing Corey Wilson, VP Global Marketing Lilly Riber, U.S. Director of Distribution Chris Mason Wells and Global Distribution boss Jon Barrenechea.
At Metrograph, Lieberman helped oversee the launch of the Metrograph cinema in 2015, Metrograph Pictures in 2019 and Metrograph Digital last year. He also promoted programming like retrospectives of Brian De Palma, Maggie Cheung and Gena Rowlands/John Cassavetes, and theatrical releases of A Bigger Splash and Downtown 81 among others.
He previously held publicity positions at Susan Norget Film Promotion and Film Presence.
- 5/24/2021
- by Patrick Hipes
- Deadline Film + TV
Dennis Hopper on Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in Malia Scharf and Max Basch’s documentary, produced with David Koh: “They brought a vitality and an energy to art that just hadn’t been there. The importance of those three artists, they just seemed to bring the eighties alive really.” Photo: Tseng Kwong Chi / Courtesy Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc.
Two of the 2020 Doc NYC highlights are on artists. The world premiere of Chris McKim’s hard-edged Wojnarowicz brings back to life the committed activist/artist/poet/performer David Wojnarowicz who died from AIDS in 1992 at age 37.
Malia Scharf on Kenny Scharf with Keith Haring: "He was and still is such an important part of Kenny and our lives."
And there is Malia Scharf and Max Basch’s intimate portrait, Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide (produced with David Koh), which features remembrances from Kenny of Keith Haring,...
Two of the 2020 Doc NYC highlights are on artists. The world premiere of Chris McKim’s hard-edged Wojnarowicz brings back to life the committed activist/artist/poet/performer David Wojnarowicz who died from AIDS in 1992 at age 37.
Malia Scharf on Kenny Scharf with Keith Haring: "He was and still is such an important part of Kenny and our lives."
And there is Malia Scharf and Max Basch’s intimate portrait, Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide (produced with David Koh), which features remembrances from Kenny of Keith Haring,...
- 11/4/2020
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
UTA has teamed with Metrograph to organize a series of drive-in movie screenings in the Hamptons starting next month. Produced by Amp Events, the Metrograph Drive-In will take over a park in Water Mill, New York and show classic films, advanced screenings of upcoming fall releases, and critically acclaimed movies from the talent agency’s clients alongside a catered picnic.
The series kicks off August 13 at Nova’s Ark, a 95-acre sculptural park and arts center. They’ll show three movies per week; slated for the first weekend are David Lynch’s 1986 Oscar-nominated mystery “Blue Velvet” and the Jean-Michel Basquiat-starring “Downtown 81.”
“Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,” which closed AFI Docs earlier this year, will also be screened the first weekend. The film explores the role music played in getting Jimmy Carter elected, and features interviews with Willie Nelson, Bono, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Buffett, Roseanne Cash, and Paul Simon, along...
The series kicks off August 13 at Nova’s Ark, a 95-acre sculptural park and arts center. They’ll show three movies per week; slated for the first weekend are David Lynch’s 1986 Oscar-nominated mystery “Blue Velvet” and the Jean-Michel Basquiat-starring “Downtown 81.”
“Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President,” which closed AFI Docs earlier this year, will also be screened the first weekend. The film explores the role music played in getting Jimmy Carter elected, and features interviews with Willie Nelson, Bono, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Buffett, Roseanne Cash, and Paul Simon, along...
- 7/28/2020
- by Chris Lindahl
- Indiewire
With drive-in theaters making a resurgence, UTA has teamed with New York City indie theater Metrograph for Metrograph Drive-In, an outdoor theater series. Events will take place at Nova’s Ark Project and Sculpture Park in Water Mill, New York and kick-off August 13.
The events will feature advance screenings of some of fall’s most anticipated releases, critically acclaimed films from UTA clients, curated culinary experiences, appearances by surprise talent, and more. The Metrograph Drive-In was organized by UTA Marketing and UTA Fine Arts in partnership with producer Amp Events.
Starting on August 13, there will be three screenings a week starting with Downtown 81, Blue Velvet and the upcoming documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President.
“The last several months have challenged us to pivot and innovate our approach towards supporting our clients,” said Alex Hooven, UTA Marketing Executive. “With the Metrograph Drive-In, we have created an experience that brings people...
The events will feature advance screenings of some of fall’s most anticipated releases, critically acclaimed films from UTA clients, curated culinary experiences, appearances by surprise talent, and more. The Metrograph Drive-In was organized by UTA Marketing and UTA Fine Arts in partnership with producer Amp Events.
Starting on August 13, there will be three screenings a week starting with Downtown 81, Blue Velvet and the upcoming documentary Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President.
“The last several months have challenged us to pivot and innovate our approach towards supporting our clients,” said Alex Hooven, UTA Marketing Executive. “With the Metrograph Drive-In, we have created an experience that brings people...
- 7/27/2020
- by Dino-Ray Ramos
- Deadline Film + TV
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
Film Forum
Two by Ozu, Tokyo Story and Tokyo Twilight, screen in restored versions.
Films by George Lucas and Joseph Losey play this weekend, as well as a print of Twelve O’Clock High.
Museum of Modern Art
MoMA has reopened, and it is–I do not say this lightly–almost too much in one weekend.
Film Forum
Two by Ozu, Tokyo Story and Tokyo Twilight, screen in restored versions.
Films by George Lucas and Joseph Losey play this weekend, as well as a print of Twelve O’Clock High.
Museum of Modern Art
MoMA has reopened, and it is–I do not say this lightly–almost too much in one weekend.
- 11/7/2019
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
It's a narrow race at the top of the box office, but based on estimates WB's Joker was able to return to the weekend #1 spot after a brief respite last weekend as Disney's Maleficent: Mistress of Evil falls to second in its sophomore frame Meanwhile it was an equally tight race for third as well as fifth with the new releases of Countdown and Black and Blue competing for that last spot in the top five.
Returning to the top of the weekend box office is WB's Joker, which dipped just -35% as it entered its fourth week in release with an estimated $18.9 million three-day. The film's domestic cume now tops $277.5 million, which is enough to make it the seventh largest R-rated release domestically of all-time. Internationally the film added another $47.8 million this weekend, pushing the film's overseas total to $571.5 million for a global tally totaling nearly $850 million.
Returning to the top of the weekend box office is WB's Joker, which dipped just -35% as it entered its fourth week in release with an estimated $18.9 million three-day. The film's domestic cume now tops $277.5 million, which is enough to make it the seventh largest R-rated release domestically of all-time. Internationally the film added another $47.8 million this weekend, pushing the film's overseas total to $571.5 million for a global tally totaling nearly $850 million.
- 10/27/2019
- by Brad Brevet <mail@boxofficemojo.com>
- Box Office Mojo
Nadav Lapid’s Synonyms found the right words this weekend to have a solid opening in two locations, bringing in an estimated $19,070. The acclaimed French-Israeli film about cultural identity played to sold-out screenings in New York, setting itself up for a nationwide expansion to Los Angeles, Toronto, Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland, with more expected in the coming weeks.
Kanye West wanted to bring his “Sunday Service” brand to the masses, and as expected, he went big to match his personality. His 35-minute documentary short Jesus Is King premiered this weekend with 372 runs in 134 markets, landing in the top 10 on Friday in limited runs. The companion piece to his Christian-themed album of the same name is said to be an immersive experience and “an expression of the gospel.” It gives people a chance to see Sunday Service and take a look at James Turrell’s art exhibit,...
Kanye West wanted to bring his “Sunday Service” brand to the masses, and as expected, he went big to match his personality. His 35-minute documentary short Jesus Is King premiered this weekend with 372 runs in 134 markets, landing in the top 10 on Friday in limited runs. The companion piece to his Christian-themed album of the same name is said to be an immersive experience and “an expression of the gospel.” It gives people a chance to see Sunday Service and take a look at James Turrell’s art exhibit,...
- 10/27/2019
- by Dino-Ray Ramos
- Deadline Film + TV
After a strong opening for Pain and Glory, Sony Pictures Classics will throw another title into the Specialty box office mix this weekend with the Ira Sachs drama Frankie starring Isabelle Huppert. The actress is certainly a draw when it comes to prestigious awards and there’s hope that her name will bring in audiences to see Frankie. The film joins the Specialty race after Parasite and Jojo Rabbit hit the ground running. Frankie looks as though it will be a good palate cleanser after two straight weekends of bold, genre-driven films.
The French-Israeli film Synonyms from Nadav Lapid will make its American debut in theaters this weekend, with its gripping tale about cultural identity. On the opposite end of Synonyms’ drama, we have the vibrant comedy Housefull 4, which is looking to make a global splash (Bollywood films usually do) while the re-release of 2000’s...
The French-Israeli film Synonyms from Nadav Lapid will make its American debut in theaters this weekend, with its gripping tale about cultural identity. On the opposite end of Synonyms’ drama, we have the vibrant comedy Housefull 4, which is looking to make a global splash (Bollywood films usually do) while the re-release of 2000’s...
- 10/25/2019
- by Dino-Ray Ramos
- Deadline Film + TV
In the three decades since he died, at 27, of a heroin overdose, Jean-Michel Basquiat has come to be thought of in timeless terms. With every passing year, his paintings only rise in acclaim, in price, in the essential perception of where he stands in the pantheon of 20th century art. But it wasn’t always that way. In his time, Basquiat was a celebrated but intensely controversial figure. There are still those who look at Basquiat’s art and don’t see the totemic poetry of it; they see words and blotches and scrawls. Yet if you’re a Basquiat believer, as I am, what’s extraordinary about his work is that it is composed of words and blotches and scrawls — but when you look at the paintings, they’re alive. They pulsate.
There are other painters whose work has this dimension (Jackson Pollock springs to mind), but in Basquiat...
There are other painters whose work has this dimension (Jackson Pollock springs to mind), but in Basquiat...
- 5/9/2018
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Totally and tragically unconventional, Peggy Guggenheim moved through the cultural upheaval of the 20th century collecting not only not only art, but artists. Her sexual life was -- and still today is -- more discussed than the art itself which she collected, not for her own consumption but for the world to enjoy.
Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and countless others. Guggenheim helped introduce the world to Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and scores of others now recognized as key masters of modernism.
In 1921 she moved to Paris and mingled with Picasso, Dali, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Leger, Kandinsky. In 1938 she opened a gallery in London and began showing Cocteau, Tanguy, Magritte, Miro, Brancusi, etc., and then back to Paris and New York after the Nazi invasion, followed by the opening of her NYC gallery Art of This Century, which became one of the premiere avant-garde spaces in the U.S. While fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo where she moved in 1947. Since 1951, her collection has become one of the world’s most visited art spaces.
Featuring: Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Vasil Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Jean Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kurt Schwitters, Gino Severini, Clyfford Still and Yves Tanguy.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Director and Producer)
Lisa Immordino Vreeland has been immersed in the world of fashion and art for the past 25 years. She started her career in fashion as the Director of Public Relations for Polo Ralph Lauren in Italy and quickly moved on to launch two fashion companies, Pratico, a sportswear line for women, and Mago, a cashmere knitwear collection of her own design. Her first book was accompanied by her directorial debut of the documentary of the same name, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012). The film about the editor of Harper's Bazaar had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, going on to win the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the fashion category for the Design of the Year awards, otherwise known as “The Oscars” of design—at the Design Museum in London.
"Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" is Lisa Immordino Vreeland's followup to her acclaimed debut, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". She is now working on her third doc on Cecil Beaton who Lisa says, "has been circling around all these stories. What's great about him is the creativity: fashion photography, war photography, "My Fair Lady" winning an Oscar."
Sydney Levine: I have read numerous accounts and interviews with you about this film and rather than repeat all that has been said, I refer my readers to Indiewire's Women and Hollywood interview at Tribeca this year, and your Indiewire interview with Aubrey Page, November 6, 2015 .
Let's try to cover new territory here.
First of all, what about you? What is your relationship to Diana Vreeland?
Liv: I am married to her grandson, Alexander Vreeland. (I'm also proud of my name Immordino) I never met Diana but hearing so many family stories about her made me start to wonder about all the talk about her. I worked in fashion and lived in New York like she did.
Sl: In one of your interviews you said that Peggy was not only ahead of her time but she helped to define it. Can you tell me how?
Liv: Peggy grew up in a very traditional family of German Bavarian Jews who had moved to New York City in the 19th century. Already at a young age Peggy felt like there were too many rules around her and she wanted to break out. That alone was something attractive to me — the notion that she knew that she didn't fit in to her family or her times. She lived on her own terms, a very modern approach to life. She decided to abandon her family in New York. Though she always stayed connected to them, she rarely visited New York. Instead she lived in a world without borders. She did not live by "the rules". She believed in creating art and created herself, living on her own terms and not on those of her family.
Sl: Is there a link between her and your previous doc on Diana Vreeland?
Liv: The link between Vreeland and Guggenheim is their mutual sense of reinvention and transformation. That made something click inside of me as I too reinvented myself when I began writing the book on Diana Vreeland .
Can you talk about the process of putting this one together and how it differed from its predecessor?
Liv: The most challenging thing about this one was the vast amount of material we had at our disposal. We had a lot of media to go through — instead of fashion spreads, which informed The Eye Has To Travel, we had art, which was fantastic. I was spoiled by the access we had to these incredible archives and footage. I'm still new to this, but it's the storytelling aspect that I loved in both projects. One thing about Peggy that Mrs. Vreeland didn't have was a very tragic personal life. There was so much that happened in Peggy's life before you even got to what she actually accomplished. And so we had to tell a very dense story about her childhood, her father dying on the Titanic, her beloved sister dying — the tragic events that fundamentally shaped her in a way. It was about making sure we had enough of the personal story to go along with her later accomplishments.
World War II alone was such a huge part of her story, opening an important art gallery in London, where she showed Kandinsky and other important artists for the first time. The amount of material to distill was a tremendous challenge and I hope we made the right choices.
Sl: How did you learn make a documentary?
Liv: I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.
Research is fundamental; finding as much as you can and never giving up. I love the research. It is my "precise time". Not just for interviews but of footage, photographs never seen before. It is a painstaking process that satisfies me. The research never ends. I was still researching while I was promoting the Diana Vreeland book. I love reading books and going to original sources.
The archives in film museums in the last ten years has changed and given museums a new role. I found unique footage at Moma with the Elizabeth Chapman Films. Chapman went to Paris in the 30s and 40s with a handheld camera and took moving pictures of Brancusi and Duchamps joking around in a studio, Gertrude Stein, Leger walking down the street. This footage is owned by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art. In fact he is taking a sabbatical this year to go through the boxes and boxes of Chapman's films. We also used " Entre'acte" by René Clair cowritten with Dadaist Francis Picabia, "Le Sang du poet" of Cocteau, Hans Richter "8x8","Gagascope" and " Dreams That Money Can Buy" produced by Peggy Guggenheim, written by Man Ray in 1947.
Sl: How long did it take to research and make the film?
Liv: It took three years for both the Vreeland and the Guggenheim documentary.
It was more difficult with the Guggenheim story because there was so much material and so much to tell of her life. And she was not so giving of her own self. Diana could inspire you about a bandaid; she was so giving. But Peggy didn't talk much about why she loved an artist or a painting. She acted more. And using historical material could become "over-teaching" though it was fascinating.
So much had to be eliminated. It was hard to eliminate the Degenerate Art Show, a subject which is newly discussed. Stephanie Barron of Lacma is an expert on Degenerate Art and was so generous.
Once we decided upon which aspects to focus on, then we could give focus to the interviews.
There were so many of her important shows we could not include. For instance there was a show on collages featuring William Baziotes , Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell which started a more modern collage trend in art. The 31 Women Art Show which we did include pushed forward another message which I think is important.
And so many different things have been written about Peggy — there were hundreds of articles written about her during her lifetime. She also kept beautiful scrapbooks of articles written about her, which are now in the archives of the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim foundation did not commission this documentary but they were very supportive and the film premiered there in New York in a wonderful celebration. They wanted to represent Peggy and her paintings properly. The paintings were secondary characters and all were carefully placed historically in a correct fashion.
Sl: You said in one interview Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement?
Liv: Yes and she did it without ego. Sharing was always her purpose in collecting art. She was not out for herself. Before Peggy, the art world was very different. And today it is part of wealth management.
Other collectors had a different way with art. Isabelle Stewart Gardner bought art for her own personal consumption. The Gardner Museum came later. Gertrude Stein was sharing the vision of her brother when she began collecting art. The Coen sisters were not sharing.
Her benevolence ranged from giving Berenice Abbott the money to buy her first camera to keeping Pollock afloat during lean times.
Djuana Barnes, who had a 'Love Love Love Hate Hate Hate' relationship with Peggy wrote Nightwood in Peggy's country house in England.
She was in Paris to the last minute. She planned how to safeguard artwork from the Nazis during World War II. She was storing gasoline so she could escape. She lived on the Ile St. Louis with her art and moved the paintings out first to a children's boarding school and then to Marseilles where it was shipped out to New York City.
Her role in art was not taken seriously because of her very public love life which was described in very derogatory terms. There was more talk about her love life than about her collection of art.
Her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1960) , was scandalous when it came out — and she didn't even use real names, she used pseudonyms for her numerous partners. Only after publication did she reveal the names of the men she slept with.
The fact that she spoke about her sexual life at all was the most outrageous aspect. She was opening herself up to ridicule, but she didn't care. Peggy was her own person and she felt good in her own skin. But it was definitely unconventional behavior. I think her sexual appetites revealed a lot about finding her own identity.
A lot of it was tied to the loss of her father, I think, in addition to her wanting to feel accepted. She was also very adventurous — look at the men she slept with. I mean, come on, they are amazing! Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and she married Max Ernst. I think it was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms.
Sl: You also give Peggy credit for changing the way art was exhibited. Can you explain that?
Liv: One of her greatest achievements was her gallery space in New York City, Art of This Century, which was unlike anything the art world has seen before or since in the way that it shattered the boundaries of the gallery space that we've come to know today — the sterile white cube. She came to be a genius at displaying her collections...
She was smart with Art of the Century because she hired Frederick Kiesler as a designer of the gallery and once again surrounded herself with the right people, including Howard Putzler, who was already involved with her at Guggenheim Jeune in London. And she was hanging out with all the exiled Surrealists who were living in New York at the time, including her future husband, Max Ernst, who was the real star of that group of artists. With the help of these people, she started showing art in a completely different way that was both informal and approachable. In conventional museums and galleries, art was untouchable on the wall and inside frames. In Peggy's gallery, art stuck out from the walls; works weren't confined to frames. Kiesler designed special chairs you could sit in and browse canvases as you would texts in a library. Nothing like this had ever existed in New York before — even today there is nothing like it.
She made the gallery into an exciting place where the whole concept of space was transformed. In Venice, the gallery space was also her home. Today, for a variety of reasons, the home aspect of the collection is less emphasized, though you still get a strong sense of Peggy's home life there. She was bringing art to the public in a bold new way, which I think is a great idea. It's art for everybody, which is very much a part of today's dialogue except that fewer people can afford the outlandish museum entry fees.
Sl: What do you think made her so prescient and attuned ?
Liv: She was smart enough to ask Marcel Duchamp to be her advisor — so she was in tune, and very well connected. She was on the cutting edge of what was going on and I think a lot of this had to do with Peggy being open to the idea of what was new and outrageous. You have to have a certain personality for this; what her childhood had dictated was totally opposite from what she became in life, and being in the right place at the right time helped her maintain a cutting edge throughout her life.
Sl: The movie is framed around a lost interview with Peggy conducted late in her life. How did you acquire these tapes?
Liv: We optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy : The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorized biography of Peggy, which was published after she died. Jackie had spent two summers interviewing Peggy but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Jackie had so much access to Peggy, which was incredible, but it was also the access that she had to other people who had known Peggy — she interviewed over 200 people for her book. Jackie was incredibly generous, letting me go through all her original research except for the lost tapes.
We'd walk into different rooms in her apartment and I'd suggestively open a closet door and ask “Where do you think those tapes might be?" Then one day I asked if she had a basement, and she did. So I went through all these boxes down there, organizing her affairs. Then bingo, the tapes showed up in this shoebox.
It was the longest interview Peggy had ever done and it became the framework for our movie. There's nothing more powerful than when you have someone's real voice telling the story, and Jackie was especially good at asking provoking questions. You can tell it was hard for Peggy to answer a lot of them, because she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion. And this comes across in the movie, in the tone of her voice.
Sl: Larry Gagosian has one of the best descriptions of Peggy in the movie — "she was her own creation." Would you agree, and if so why?
Liv: She was very much her own creation. When he said that in the interview I had a huge smile on my face. In Peggy's case it stemmed from a real need to identify and understand herself. I'm not sure she achieved it but she completely recreated herself — she knew that she did not want to be what she was brought up to be. She tried being a mother, but that was not one of her strengths, so art became that place where she could find herself, and then transform herself.
Nobody believed in the artists she cultivated and supported — they were outsiders and she was an outsider in the world she was brought up in. So it's in this way that she became her own great invention. I hope that her humor comes across in the film because she was extremely amusing — this aspect really comes across in her autobiography.
Sl: Finally, what do you think is Peggy Guggenheim's most lasting legacy, beyond her incredible art collection?
Liv: Her courage, and the way she used it to find herself. She had this ballsiness that not many people had, especially women. In her own way she was a feminist and it's good for women and young girls today to see women who stepped outside the confines of a very traditional family and made something of her life. Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up.
About the Filmmakers
Stanley Buchtal is a producer and entrepreneur. His movies credits include "Hairspray", "Spanking the Monkey", "Up at the Villa", "Lou Reed Berlin", "Love Marilyn", "LennoNYC", "Bobby Fischer Against the World", "Herb & Dorothy", "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child", "Sketches of Frank Gehry", "Black White + Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe", among numerous others.
David Koh is an independent producer, distributor, sales agent, programmer and curator. He has been involved in the distribution, sale, production, and financing of over 200 films. He is currently a partner in the boutique label Submarine Entertainment with Josh and Dan Braun and is also partners with Stanley Buchthal and his Dakota Group Ltd where he co-manages a portfolio of over 50 projects a year (75% docs and 25% fiction). Previously he was a partner and founder of Arthouse Films a boutique distribution imprint and ran Chris Blackwell's (founder of Island Records & Island Pictures) film label, Palm Pictures. He has worked as a Producer for artist Nam June Paik and worked in the curatorial departments of Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, Mfa Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum. David has recently served as a Curator for Microsoft and has curated an ongoing film series and salon with Andre Balazs Properties and serves as a Curator for the exclusive Core Club in NYC.
David recently launched with his partners Submarine Deluxe, a distribution imprint; Torpedo Pictures, a low budget high concept label; and Nfp Submarine Doks, a German distribution imprint with Nfp Films. Recently and upcoming projects include "Yayoi Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots", "Burden: a Portrait of Artist Chris Burden", "Dior and I", "20 Feet From Stardom", "Muscle Shoals", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Rats NYC", "Nas: Time Is Illmatic", "Blackfish", "Love Marilyn", "Chasing Ice", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Cutie and the Boxer"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Wolfpack, "Meru", and "Station to Station".
Dan Braun is a producer, writer, art director and musician/composer based in NYC. He is the Co-President of and Co-Founder of Submarine, a NYC film sales and production company specializing in independent feature and documentary films. Titles include "Blackfish", "Finding Vivian Maier", "Muscle Shoals", "The Case Against 8", "Keep On Keepin’ On", "Winter’s Bone", "Nas: Time is Illmatic", "Dior and I" and Oscar winning docs "Man on Wire", "Searching for Sugarman", "20 Ft From Stardom" and "Citizenfour". He was Executive Producer on documentaries "Kill Your Idols", (which won Best NY Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival 2004), "Blank City", "Sunshine Superman", the upcoming feature adaptations of "Batkid Begins" and "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" and the upcoming horror TV anthology "Creepy" to be directed by Chris Columbus.
He is a producer of the free jazz documentary "Fire Music", and the upcoming documentaries, "Burden" on artist Chris Burden and "Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots" on artist Yayoi Kusama. He is also a writer and consulting editor on Dark Horse Comic’s "Creepy" and "Eerie 9" comic book and archival series for which he won an Eisner Award for best archival comic book series in 2009.
He is a musician/composer whose compositions were featured in the films "I Melt With You" and "Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Radiant Child and is an award winning art director/creative director when he worked at Tbwa/Chiat/Day on the famous Absolut Vodka campaign.
John Northrup (Co-Producer) began his career in documentaries as a French translator for National Geographic: Explorer. He quickly moved into editing and producing, serving as the Associate Producer on "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012), and editing and co-producing "Wilson In Situ" (2014), which tells the story of theatre legend Robert Wilson and his Watermill Center. Most recently, he oversaw the post-production of Jim Chambers’ "Onward Christian Soldier", a documentary about Olympic Bomber Eric Rudolph, and is shooting on Susanne Rostock’s "Another Night in the Free World", the follow-up to her award-winning "Sing Your Song" (2011).
Submarine Entertainment (Production Company) Submarine Entertainment is a hybrid sales, production, and distribution company based in N.Y. Recent and upcoming titles include "Citizenfour", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Dog", "Visitors", "20 Feet from Stardom", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Muscle Shoals", "Blackfish", "Cutie and the Boxer", "The Summit", "The Unknown Known", "Love Marilyn", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Chasing Ice", "Downtown 81 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Wild Style 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Good Ol Freda", "Some Velvet Morning", among numerous others. Submarine principals also represent Creepy and Eerie comic book library and are developing properties across film & TV platforms.
Submarine has also recently launched a domestic distribution imprint and label called Submarine Deluxe; a genre label called Torpedo Pictures; and a German imprint and label called Nfp Submarine Doks.
Bernadine Colish has edited a number of award-winning documentaries. "Herb and Dorothy" (2008), won Audience Awards at Silverdocs, Philadelphia and Hamptons Film Festivals, and "Body of War" (2007), was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review. "A Touch of Greatness" (2004) aired on PBS Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her career began at Maysles Films, where she worked with Charlotte Zwerin on such projects as "Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser", "Toru Takemitsu: Music for the Movies" and the PBS American Masters documentary, "Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For". Additional credits include "Bringing Tibet Home", "Band of Sisters", "Rise and Dream", "The Tiger Next Door", "The Buffalo War" and "Absolute Wilson".
Jed Parker (Editor) Jed Parker began his career in feature films before moving into documentaries through his work with the award-winning American Masters series. Credits include "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart", "Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens", and most recently "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides".
Other work includes two episodes of the PBS series "Make ‘Em Laugh", hosted by Billy Crystal, as well as a documentary on Met Curator Henry Geldzahler entitled "Who Gets to Call it Art"?
Credits
Director, Writer, Producer: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Produced by Stanley Buchthal, David Koh and Dan Braun Stanley Buchthal (producer)
Maja Hoffmann (executive producer)
Josh Braun (executive producer)
Bob Benton (executive producer)
John Northrup (co-producer)
Bernadine Colish (editor)
Jed Parker (editor)
Peter Trilling (director of photography)
Bonnie Greenberg (executive music producer)
Music by J. Ralph
Original Song "Once Again" Written and Performed By J. Ralph
Interviews Featuring Artist Marina Abramović Jean Arp Dore Ashton Samuel Beckett Stephanie Barron Constantin Brâncuși Diego Cortez Alexander Calder Susan Davidson Joseph Cornell Robert De Niro Salvador Dalí Simon de Pury Willem de Kooning Jeffrey Deitch Marcel Duchamp Polly Devlin Max Ernst Larry Gagosian Alberto Giacometti Arne Glimcher Vasily Kandinsky Michael Govan Fernand Léger Nicky Haslam Joan Miró Pepe Karmel Piet Mondrian Donald Kuspit Robert Motherwell Dominique Lévy Jackson Pollock Carlo McCormick Mark Rothko Hans Ulrich Obrist Yves Tanguy Lisa Phillips Lindsay Pollock Francine Prose John Richardson Sandy Rower Mercedes Ruehl Jane Rylands Philip Rylands Calvin Tomkins Karole Vail Jacqueline Bograd Weld Edmund White
Running time: 97 minutes
U.S. distribution by Submarine Deluxe
International sales by Hanway...
Her colorful personal history included such figures as Samuel Beckett, Max Ernst, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp and countless others. Guggenheim helped introduce the world to Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko and scores of others now recognized as key masters of modernism.
In 1921 she moved to Paris and mingled with Picasso, Dali, Joyce, Pound, Stein, Leger, Kandinsky. In 1938 she opened a gallery in London and began showing Cocteau, Tanguy, Magritte, Miro, Brancusi, etc., and then back to Paris and New York after the Nazi invasion, followed by the opening of her NYC gallery Art of This Century, which became one of the premiere avant-garde spaces in the U.S. While fighting through personal tragedy, she maintained her vision to build one of the most important collections of modern art, now enshrined in her Venetian palazzo where she moved in 1947. Since 1951, her collection has become one of the world’s most visited art spaces.
Featuring: Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Vasil Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Fernand Leger, Rene Magritte, Man Ray, Jean Miro, Piet Mondrian, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Kurt Schwitters, Gino Severini, Clyfford Still and Yves Tanguy.
Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Director and Producer)
Lisa Immordino Vreeland has been immersed in the world of fashion and art for the past 25 years. She started her career in fashion as the Director of Public Relations for Polo Ralph Lauren in Italy and quickly moved on to launch two fashion companies, Pratico, a sportswear line for women, and Mago, a cashmere knitwear collection of her own design. Her first book was accompanied by her directorial debut of the documentary of the same name, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012). The film about the editor of Harper's Bazaar had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, going on to win the Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the fashion category for the Design of the Year awards, otherwise known as “The Oscars” of design—at the Design Museum in London.
"Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict" is Lisa Immordino Vreeland's followup to her acclaimed debut, "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel". She is now working on her third doc on Cecil Beaton who Lisa says, "has been circling around all these stories. What's great about him is the creativity: fashion photography, war photography, "My Fair Lady" winning an Oscar."
Sydney Levine: I have read numerous accounts and interviews with you about this film and rather than repeat all that has been said, I refer my readers to Indiewire's Women and Hollywood interview at Tribeca this year, and your Indiewire interview with Aubrey Page, November 6, 2015 .
Let's try to cover new territory here.
First of all, what about you? What is your relationship to Diana Vreeland?
Liv: I am married to her grandson, Alexander Vreeland. (I'm also proud of my name Immordino) I never met Diana but hearing so many family stories about her made me start to wonder about all the talk about her. I worked in fashion and lived in New York like she did.
Sl: In one of your interviews you said that Peggy was not only ahead of her time but she helped to define it. Can you tell me how?
Liv: Peggy grew up in a very traditional family of German Bavarian Jews who had moved to New York City in the 19th century. Already at a young age Peggy felt like there were too many rules around her and she wanted to break out. That alone was something attractive to me — the notion that she knew that she didn't fit in to her family or her times. She lived on her own terms, a very modern approach to life. She decided to abandon her family in New York. Though she always stayed connected to them, she rarely visited New York. Instead she lived in a world without borders. She did not live by "the rules". She believed in creating art and created herself, living on her own terms and not on those of her family.
Sl: Is there a link between her and your previous doc on Diana Vreeland?
Liv: The link between Vreeland and Guggenheim is their mutual sense of reinvention and transformation. That made something click inside of me as I too reinvented myself when I began writing the book on Diana Vreeland .
Can you talk about the process of putting this one together and how it differed from its predecessor?
Liv: The most challenging thing about this one was the vast amount of material we had at our disposal. We had a lot of media to go through — instead of fashion spreads, which informed The Eye Has To Travel, we had art, which was fantastic. I was spoiled by the access we had to these incredible archives and footage. I'm still new to this, but it's the storytelling aspect that I loved in both projects. One thing about Peggy that Mrs. Vreeland didn't have was a very tragic personal life. There was so much that happened in Peggy's life before you even got to what she actually accomplished. And so we had to tell a very dense story about her childhood, her father dying on the Titanic, her beloved sister dying — the tragic events that fundamentally shaped her in a way. It was about making sure we had enough of the personal story to go along with her later accomplishments.
World War II alone was such a huge part of her story, opening an important art gallery in London, where she showed Kandinsky and other important artists for the first time. The amount of material to distill was a tremendous challenge and I hope we made the right choices.
Sl: How did you learn make a documentary?
Liv: I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.
Research is fundamental; finding as much as you can and never giving up. I love the research. It is my "precise time". Not just for interviews but of footage, photographs never seen before. It is a painstaking process that satisfies me. The research never ends. I was still researching while I was promoting the Diana Vreeland book. I love reading books and going to original sources.
The archives in film museums in the last ten years has changed and given museums a new role. I found unique footage at Moma with the Elizabeth Chapman Films. Chapman went to Paris in the 30s and 40s with a handheld camera and took moving pictures of Brancusi and Duchamps joking around in a studio, Gertrude Stein, Leger walking down the street. This footage is owned by Robert Storr, Dean of Yale School of Art. In fact he is taking a sabbatical this year to go through the boxes and boxes of Chapman's films. We also used " Entre'acte" by René Clair cowritten with Dadaist Francis Picabia, "Le Sang du poet" of Cocteau, Hans Richter "8x8","Gagascope" and " Dreams That Money Can Buy" produced by Peggy Guggenheim, written by Man Ray in 1947.
Sl: How long did it take to research and make the film?
Liv: It took three years for both the Vreeland and the Guggenheim documentary.
It was more difficult with the Guggenheim story because there was so much material and so much to tell of her life. And she was not so giving of her own self. Diana could inspire you about a bandaid; she was so giving. But Peggy didn't talk much about why she loved an artist or a painting. She acted more. And using historical material could become "over-teaching" though it was fascinating.
So much had to be eliminated. It was hard to eliminate the Degenerate Art Show, a subject which is newly discussed. Stephanie Barron of Lacma is an expert on Degenerate Art and was so generous.
Once we decided upon which aspects to focus on, then we could give focus to the interviews.
There were so many of her important shows we could not include. For instance there was a show on collages featuring William Baziotes , Jackson Pollack and Robert Motherwell which started a more modern collage trend in art. The 31 Women Art Show which we did include pushed forward another message which I think is important.
And so many different things have been written about Peggy — there were hundreds of articles written about her during her lifetime. She also kept beautiful scrapbooks of articles written about her, which are now in the archives of the Guggenheim Museum.
The Guggenheim foundation did not commission this documentary but they were very supportive and the film premiered there in New York in a wonderful celebration. They wanted to represent Peggy and her paintings properly. The paintings were secondary characters and all were carefully placed historically in a correct fashion.
Sl: You said in one interview Guggenheim became a central figure in the modern art movement?
Liv: Yes and she did it without ego. Sharing was always her purpose in collecting art. She was not out for herself. Before Peggy, the art world was very different. And today it is part of wealth management.
Other collectors had a different way with art. Isabelle Stewart Gardner bought art for her own personal consumption. The Gardner Museum came later. Gertrude Stein was sharing the vision of her brother when she began collecting art. The Coen sisters were not sharing.
Her benevolence ranged from giving Berenice Abbott the money to buy her first camera to keeping Pollock afloat during lean times.
Djuana Barnes, who had a 'Love Love Love Hate Hate Hate' relationship with Peggy wrote Nightwood in Peggy's country house in England.
She was in Paris to the last minute. She planned how to safeguard artwork from the Nazis during World War II. She was storing gasoline so she could escape. She lived on the Ile St. Louis with her art and moved the paintings out first to a children's boarding school and then to Marseilles where it was shipped out to New York City.
Her role in art was not taken seriously because of her very public love life which was described in very derogatory terms. There was more talk about her love life than about her collection of art.
Her autobiography, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1960) , was scandalous when it came out — and she didn't even use real names, she used pseudonyms for her numerous partners. Only after publication did she reveal the names of the men she slept with.
The fact that she spoke about her sexual life at all was the most outrageous aspect. She was opening herself up to ridicule, but she didn't care. Peggy was her own person and she felt good in her own skin. But it was definitely unconventional behavior. I think her sexual appetites revealed a lot about finding her own identity.
A lot of it was tied to the loss of her father, I think, in addition to her wanting to feel accepted. She was also very adventurous — look at the men she slept with. I mean, come on, they are amazing! Samuel Beckett, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and she married Max Ernst. I think it was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms.
Sl: You also give Peggy credit for changing the way art was exhibited. Can you explain that?
Liv: One of her greatest achievements was her gallery space in New York City, Art of This Century, which was unlike anything the art world has seen before or since in the way that it shattered the boundaries of the gallery space that we've come to know today — the sterile white cube. She came to be a genius at displaying her collections...
She was smart with Art of the Century because she hired Frederick Kiesler as a designer of the gallery and once again surrounded herself with the right people, including Howard Putzler, who was already involved with her at Guggenheim Jeune in London. And she was hanging out with all the exiled Surrealists who were living in New York at the time, including her future husband, Max Ernst, who was the real star of that group of artists. With the help of these people, she started showing art in a completely different way that was both informal and approachable. In conventional museums and galleries, art was untouchable on the wall and inside frames. In Peggy's gallery, art stuck out from the walls; works weren't confined to frames. Kiesler designed special chairs you could sit in and browse canvases as you would texts in a library. Nothing like this had ever existed in New York before — even today there is nothing like it.
She made the gallery into an exciting place where the whole concept of space was transformed. In Venice, the gallery space was also her home. Today, for a variety of reasons, the home aspect of the collection is less emphasized, though you still get a strong sense of Peggy's home life there. She was bringing art to the public in a bold new way, which I think is a great idea. It's art for everybody, which is very much a part of today's dialogue except that fewer people can afford the outlandish museum entry fees.
Sl: What do you think made her so prescient and attuned ?
Liv: She was smart enough to ask Marcel Duchamp to be her advisor — so she was in tune, and very well connected. She was on the cutting edge of what was going on and I think a lot of this had to do with Peggy being open to the idea of what was new and outrageous. You have to have a certain personality for this; what her childhood had dictated was totally opposite from what she became in life, and being in the right place at the right time helped her maintain a cutting edge throughout her life.
Sl: The movie is framed around a lost interview with Peggy conducted late in her life. How did you acquire these tapes?
Liv: We optioned Jacqueline Bogard Weld’s book, Peggy : The Wayward Guggenheim, the only authorized biography of Peggy, which was published after she died. Jackie had spent two summers interviewing Peggy but at a certain point lost the tapes somewhere in her Park Avenue apartment. Jackie had so much access to Peggy, which was incredible, but it was also the access that she had to other people who had known Peggy — she interviewed over 200 people for her book. Jackie was incredibly generous, letting me go through all her original research except for the lost tapes.
We'd walk into different rooms in her apartment and I'd suggestively open a closet door and ask “Where do you think those tapes might be?" Then one day I asked if she had a basement, and she did. So I went through all these boxes down there, organizing her affairs. Then bingo, the tapes showed up in this shoebox.
It was the longest interview Peggy had ever done and it became the framework for our movie. There's nothing more powerful than when you have someone's real voice telling the story, and Jackie was especially good at asking provoking questions. You can tell it was hard for Peggy to answer a lot of them, because she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion. And this comes across in the movie, in the tone of her voice.
Sl: Larry Gagosian has one of the best descriptions of Peggy in the movie — "she was her own creation." Would you agree, and if so why?
Liv: She was very much her own creation. When he said that in the interview I had a huge smile on my face. In Peggy's case it stemmed from a real need to identify and understand herself. I'm not sure she achieved it but she completely recreated herself — she knew that she did not want to be what she was brought up to be. She tried being a mother, but that was not one of her strengths, so art became that place where she could find herself, and then transform herself.
Nobody believed in the artists she cultivated and supported — they were outsiders and she was an outsider in the world she was brought up in. So it's in this way that she became her own great invention. I hope that her humor comes across in the film because she was extremely amusing — this aspect really comes across in her autobiography.
Sl: Finally, what do you think is Peggy Guggenheim's most lasting legacy, beyond her incredible art collection?
Liv: Her courage, and the way she used it to find herself. She had this ballsiness that not many people had, especially women. In her own way she was a feminist and it's good for women and young girls today to see women who stepped outside the confines of a very traditional family and made something of her life. Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up.
About the Filmmakers
Stanley Buchtal is a producer and entrepreneur. His movies credits include "Hairspray", "Spanking the Monkey", "Up at the Villa", "Lou Reed Berlin", "Love Marilyn", "LennoNYC", "Bobby Fischer Against the World", "Herb & Dorothy", "Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child", "Sketches of Frank Gehry", "Black White + Gray: a Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe", among numerous others.
David Koh is an independent producer, distributor, sales agent, programmer and curator. He has been involved in the distribution, sale, production, and financing of over 200 films. He is currently a partner in the boutique label Submarine Entertainment with Josh and Dan Braun and is also partners with Stanley Buchthal and his Dakota Group Ltd where he co-manages a portfolio of over 50 projects a year (75% docs and 25% fiction). Previously he was a partner and founder of Arthouse Films a boutique distribution imprint and ran Chris Blackwell's (founder of Island Records & Island Pictures) film label, Palm Pictures. He has worked as a Producer for artist Nam June Paik and worked in the curatorial departments of Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, Mfa Boston, and the Guggenheim Museum. David has recently served as a Curator for Microsoft and has curated an ongoing film series and salon with Andre Balazs Properties and serves as a Curator for the exclusive Core Club in NYC.
David recently launched with his partners Submarine Deluxe, a distribution imprint; Torpedo Pictures, a low budget high concept label; and Nfp Submarine Doks, a German distribution imprint with Nfp Films. Recently and upcoming projects include "Yayoi Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots", "Burden: a Portrait of Artist Chris Burden", "Dior and I", "20 Feet From Stardom", "Muscle Shoals", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Rats NYC", "Nas: Time Is Illmatic", "Blackfish", "Love Marilyn", "Chasing Ice", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Cutie and the Boxer"," Jean-Michel Basquiat: the Radiant Child", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Wolfpack, "Meru", and "Station to Station".
Dan Braun is a producer, writer, art director and musician/composer based in NYC. He is the Co-President of and Co-Founder of Submarine, a NYC film sales and production company specializing in independent feature and documentary films. Titles include "Blackfish", "Finding Vivian Maier", "Muscle Shoals", "The Case Against 8", "Keep On Keepin’ On", "Winter’s Bone", "Nas: Time is Illmatic", "Dior and I" and Oscar winning docs "Man on Wire", "Searching for Sugarman", "20 Ft From Stardom" and "Citizenfour". He was Executive Producer on documentaries "Kill Your Idols", (which won Best NY Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival 2004), "Blank City", "Sunshine Superman", the upcoming feature adaptations of "Batkid Begins" and "The Battered Bastards of Baseball" and the upcoming horror TV anthology "Creepy" to be directed by Chris Columbus.
He is a producer of the free jazz documentary "Fire Music", and the upcoming documentaries, "Burden" on artist Chris Burden and "Kusama: a Life in Polka Dots" on artist Yayoi Kusama. He is also a writer and consulting editor on Dark Horse Comic’s "Creepy" and "Eerie 9" comic book and archival series for which he won an Eisner Award for best archival comic book series in 2009.
He is a musician/composer whose compositions were featured in the films "I Melt With You" and "Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Radiant Child and is an award winning art director/creative director when he worked at Tbwa/Chiat/Day on the famous Absolut Vodka campaign.
John Northrup (Co-Producer) began his career in documentaries as a French translator for National Geographic: Explorer. He quickly moved into editing and producing, serving as the Associate Producer on "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel" (2012), and editing and co-producing "Wilson In Situ" (2014), which tells the story of theatre legend Robert Wilson and his Watermill Center. Most recently, he oversaw the post-production of Jim Chambers’ "Onward Christian Soldier", a documentary about Olympic Bomber Eric Rudolph, and is shooting on Susanne Rostock’s "Another Night in the Free World", the follow-up to her award-winning "Sing Your Song" (2011).
Submarine Entertainment (Production Company) Submarine Entertainment is a hybrid sales, production, and distribution company based in N.Y. Recent and upcoming titles include "Citizenfour", "Finding Vivian Maier", "The Dog", "Visitors", "20 Feet from Stardom", "Searching for Sugar Man", "Muscle Shoals", "Blackfish", "Cutie and the Boxer", "The Summit", "The Unknown Known", "Love Marilyn", "Marina Abramovic the Artist is Present", "Chasing Ice", "Downtown 81 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Wild Style 30th Anniversary Remastered", "Good Ol Freda", "Some Velvet Morning", among numerous others. Submarine principals also represent Creepy and Eerie comic book library and are developing properties across film & TV platforms.
Submarine has also recently launched a domestic distribution imprint and label called Submarine Deluxe; a genre label called Torpedo Pictures; and a German imprint and label called Nfp Submarine Doks.
Bernadine Colish has edited a number of award-winning documentaries. "Herb and Dorothy" (2008), won Audience Awards at Silverdocs, Philadelphia and Hamptons Film Festivals, and "Body of War" (2007), was named Best Documentary by the National Board of Review. "A Touch of Greatness" (2004) aired on PBS Independent Lens and was nominated for an Emmy Award. Her career began at Maysles Films, where she worked with Charlotte Zwerin on such projects as "Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser", "Toru Takemitsu: Music for the Movies" and the PBS American Masters documentary, "Ella Fitzgerald: Something To Live For". Additional credits include "Bringing Tibet Home", "Band of Sisters", "Rise and Dream", "The Tiger Next Door", "The Buffalo War" and "Absolute Wilson".
Jed Parker (Editor) Jed Parker began his career in feature films before moving into documentaries through his work with the award-winning American Masters series. Credits include "Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart", "Annie Liebovitz: Life Through a Lens", and most recently "Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides".
Other work includes two episodes of the PBS series "Make ‘Em Laugh", hosted by Billy Crystal, as well as a documentary on Met Curator Henry Geldzahler entitled "Who Gets to Call it Art"?
Credits
Director, Writer, Producer: Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Produced by Stanley Buchthal, David Koh and Dan Braun Stanley Buchthal (producer)
Maja Hoffmann (executive producer)
Josh Braun (executive producer)
Bob Benton (executive producer)
John Northrup (co-producer)
Bernadine Colish (editor)
Jed Parker (editor)
Peter Trilling (director of photography)
Bonnie Greenberg (executive music producer)
Music by J. Ralph
Original Song "Once Again" Written and Performed By J. Ralph
Interviews Featuring Artist Marina Abramović Jean Arp Dore Ashton Samuel Beckett Stephanie Barron Constantin Brâncuși Diego Cortez Alexander Calder Susan Davidson Joseph Cornell Robert De Niro Salvador Dalí Simon de Pury Willem de Kooning Jeffrey Deitch Marcel Duchamp Polly Devlin Max Ernst Larry Gagosian Alberto Giacometti Arne Glimcher Vasily Kandinsky Michael Govan Fernand Léger Nicky Haslam Joan Miró Pepe Karmel Piet Mondrian Donald Kuspit Robert Motherwell Dominique Lévy Jackson Pollock Carlo McCormick Mark Rothko Hans Ulrich Obrist Yves Tanguy Lisa Phillips Lindsay Pollock Francine Prose John Richardson Sandy Rower Mercedes Ruehl Jane Rylands Philip Rylands Calvin Tomkins Karole Vail Jacqueline Bograd Weld Edmund White
Running time: 97 minutes
U.S. distribution by Submarine Deluxe
International sales by Hanway...
- 11/18/2015
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
In its best moments, Downtown 81 achieves a rare state of transcendence, wiping away the mists of time and making the Manhattan that existed in 1981 come alive once again. Too bad those moments are few and far between. Written by Glenn O'Brien, directed by Edo Bertoglio, and starring Jean Michel Basquiat in his only dramatic performance, Downtown 81 is structured around 24 hours in the life of an artist who gets locked out of his apartment and then spends the day rambling around the city, wondering what to do with his life. The narrative is loosely assembled, with all the dialogue apparently added and synched in post-production. To be kind, I'll note the low, low budget, and pass on to what holds the greatest...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 7/6/2015
- Screen Anarchy
On May 19, artist, fashion designer, and glorious weirdo about downtown Maripol hosted a screening of the new high-definition version of Downtown 81, the film that she made with Glenn O’Brien and Edo Bertoglio that starred Jean-Michel Basquiat as a version of himself — an artist who wanders through that then-gritty part of the city after he finds himself evicted and penniless. The party was at Happy Ending, despite the fact that Basquiat didn't come to one, but whoever is still around from that scene three decades later has reason enough to feel nostalgic. The DJs at the after-party only played songs from the year 1981 to keep the mood going.Always fascinated by this mystical land of 1981 — with its legends of cheap rent and the hoary tales of good times — we decided to do some research and ask everyone about it to see what it was really...
- 5/21/2015
- by Ann Binlot
- Vulture
Jean-Michel Basquiat is, of course, now known as one of the most important and influential artist of the late 20th century. But back when he was still a struggling artist trying to find his vision, and made a name for himself, he starred as himself, a struggling young artist, trying to find the cash to prevent his eviction, in the low budget part documentary/part experimental film "Downtown 81."Made in 1980-1981, directed by Edo Bertoglio, written and produced by Glenn O’Brien, who knew Basquiat from his appearances on O’Brien’s public access TV show "TV Party," the film presented a hard core, unblinking version of a New York City of that period, quite a different place...
- 6/10/2014
- by Sergio
- ShadowAndAct
Jay-z has a long-standing habit of name-checking the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (see: "Most Kingz," "3 Kings," "Illest Motherf--ker Alive," "Ain't I," etc.), but it's on "Magna Carta Holy Grail" that the rapper takes his obsession with the downtown New York icon to new heights.
There are many references on the album, but none are more explicit than on "Picasso Baby," when Jay-z drops the subtleties and simply raps, "It ain't hard to tell, I'm the new Jean-Michel." Jay -- who recently purchased another Basquiat painting from Swizz Beatz (see above) -- also discusses Basquiat at length in his memoir-cum-lyrics-explainer "Decoded," describing the artist as "hip-hop when hip-hop was still in its cradle." Here's more from the illuminative excerpt:
One Basquiat print I own is called Charles the First—it’s about Charlie Parker, the jazz pioneer who died young of a heroin overdose, like Basquiat. In the corner of the painting are the words,...
There are many references on the album, but none are more explicit than on "Picasso Baby," when Jay-z drops the subtleties and simply raps, "It ain't hard to tell, I'm the new Jean-Michel." Jay -- who recently purchased another Basquiat painting from Swizz Beatz (see above) -- also discusses Basquiat at length in his memoir-cum-lyrics-explainer "Decoded," describing the artist as "hip-hop when hip-hop was still in its cradle." Here's more from the illuminative excerpt:
One Basquiat print I own is called Charles the First—it’s about Charlie Parker, the jazz pioneer who died young of a heroin overdose, like Basquiat. In the corner of the painting are the words,...
- 7/12/2013
- by The Huffington Post
- Huffington Post
If you want to tell a story about American street culture and the rough and tumble young folks that live it everyday, it would seem New York City has got to be your setting. Fitting into the pantheon somewhere between Kids and Raising Victor Vargas (with a touch of Downtown 81 thrown in), Adam Leon 's SXSW Narrative Competition winning Gimme The Loot is another impressive entry in the subgenre. With the raw aesthetics of talented nonprofessional actors and a less than shoestring budget (call it shoe-less), this enjoyable film marks the emergence of a real directorial talent in Leon. Set all over the NYC, Gimme The Loot is the story of two punk kids Malcolm and Sofia, out of high school but not...
- 6/21/2012
- Screen Anarchy
This Week’s Must Look At: The artist book Don’t Kill the Weatherman by Martha Colburn has an online photograph preview and it looks stunning! I love Martha’s animation, but it always moves so quickly that it’s tough to savor the actual art. But, now I can! The above borrowed image is from frames from the film Spiders in Love: An Arachnogasmic Musical, the first Colburn film I ever saw way back in 2000. (If you go to the photo set, you can find details on how to purchase this limited edition.)Craig Baldwin has published issue #22 of Otherzine. You can read the whole thing here. But, two highlights are: An interview with Dominic Gagnon, who is seeking to save “censored” online videos; and curator Brenda Contreras reviews Sylvia Schedelbauer’s found footage film, Sounding Glass.This one’s for Canyon Cinema members only: But if you are one,...
- 3/4/2012
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
Ever since Bing Crosby starred in the 1930 film "King of Jazz," countless musicians have tried, with varying degrees of success, to parlay their musical ability into a side career in film.
The following list -- dug up in honor of this Sunday's Video Music Awards on MTV -- is proof that not all musicians are created equal when it comes to their acting abilities.
For every Mariah Carey in "Precious," you can find a Mariah Carey in "Glitter," but these 40 artists have shown that they can, at least some of the time, create memorable roles and transcend their musical careers. Sometimes, they even win Oscars.
40. Madonna
During the nascent years of MTV, no female artist had more influence visually than the Material Girl, whose mix of eye-popping fantasy and gritty urban realism videos continue to influence a generation of vocalists. Despite a Best Actress Golden Globe for 1996's "Evita," the...
The following list -- dug up in honor of this Sunday's Video Music Awards on MTV -- is proof that not all musicians are created equal when it comes to their acting abilities.
For every Mariah Carey in "Precious," you can find a Mariah Carey in "Glitter," but these 40 artists have shown that they can, at least some of the time, create memorable roles and transcend their musical careers. Sometimes, they even win Oscars.
40. Madonna
During the nascent years of MTV, no female artist had more influence visually than the Material Girl, whose mix of eye-popping fantasy and gritty urban realism videos continue to influence a generation of vocalists. Despite a Best Actress Golden Globe for 1996's "Evita," the...
- 8/24/2011
- by Jason Newman
- NextMovie
Cashiers du Cinemart, the legendary cult movie zine that puts all other movie zines to shame, has returned with a brand new print edition that is available in a variety of formats, from an old school photocopied version to a glossy high-end print-on-demand version to an electronic Kindle edition and more.
After a four-year hiatus, publisher and editor Mike White has returned to the printed page as part of a wider “Print Is Not Dead” movement. In typical fashion of it’s earlier print editions, Cashiers du Cinemart #16 is a massive 100-plus page endeavor with contributions from numerous writers, including White himself, riffing on classic cult movies, taking apart mainstream films, analyzing obscure genres, interviewing filmmakers a ton more fun stuff.
This new print zine comes hot on the heels of the hit book Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection, which gathered the best articles from the zine’s previous 15 issues,...
After a four-year hiatus, publisher and editor Mike White has returned to the printed page as part of a wider “Print Is Not Dead” movement. In typical fashion of it’s earlier print editions, Cashiers du Cinemart #16 is a massive 100-plus page endeavor with contributions from numerous writers, including White himself, riffing on classic cult movies, taking apart mainstream films, analyzing obscure genres, interviewing filmmakers a ton more fun stuff.
This new print zine comes hot on the heels of the hit book Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection, which gathered the best articles from the zine’s previous 15 issues,...
- 8/22/2011
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
Although it's an unfortunate turn of phrase given the era, the best way to describe the documentary "Blank City" is still as something of a gateway drug when it comes to the late '70s, early '80s underground film scene in New York. It's easy to tell this since it's obvious French director Celine Danhier recreates her own experience of discovering the no-budget avant garde movement known as "No Wave" cinema in her documentary, presenting one snippet of rare footage after another, teasing the audience with clips of Michael Holman's self-descriptive "Vincent Gallo as Flying Christ" and Charlie Ahearn's groundbreaking hip-hop flick "Wild Style" and having such personalities as Deborah Harry and Steve Buscemi talk about what a wild and crazy time it was.
It's the shortcoming of "Blank City" that it isn't as adventurous in mirroring the era the film documents, settling into a style where...
It's the shortcoming of "Blank City" that it isn't as adventurous in mirroring the era the film documents, settling into a style where...
- 4/8/2011
- by Stephen Saito
- ifc.com
“Downtown 81 represents Manhattan’s last stand as a beatnik haven for creatively driven impoverished artists, a moment where everyone was connected in one giant electrical circuit creating their own cultural power.”
Downtown 81, featuring a nineteen year old Jean-Michel Basquiat, captured the movers and shakers from the no wave, hip-hop, graffiti, and alternative fashion scenes, as they collided down in the depths of New York’s lower east side. Originally shot by director Edo Bertoglio in the winter of 1980-81, it remained unreleased for nearly twenty years before being re-assembled in 1999 by co-producer Maripol Fauque (a Polaroid photographer and fashion designer, behind the iconic look for Madonna on the cover of Like a Virgin). Basquiat first acquired notoriety in the early eighties New York art scene with his ‘Samo’ graffiti slogans, which caught the attention of TV Party host Glenn O’Brien. After Basquiat appeared as a guest on...
Downtown 81, featuring a nineteen year old Jean-Michel Basquiat, captured the movers and shakers from the no wave, hip-hop, graffiti, and alternative fashion scenes, as they collided down in the depths of New York’s lower east side. Originally shot by director Edo Bertoglio in the winter of 1980-81, it remained unreleased for nearly twenty years before being re-assembled in 1999 by co-producer Maripol Fauque (a Polaroid photographer and fashion designer, behind the iconic look for Madonna on the cover of Like a Virgin). Basquiat first acquired notoriety in the early eighties New York art scene with his ‘Samo’ graffiti slogans, which caught the attention of TV Party host Glenn O’Brien. After Basquiat appeared as a guest on...
- 2/23/2011
- by Tom Jarvis
- SoundOnSight
Setting Eric Lavallee's "American New Wave 25: Class of 2010" at Ioncinema alongside Filmmaker's annual roundup of "25 New Faces of Independent Film," you'll find very little overlap but plenty of multi-tasking resourcefulness. Also in the new Summer 2010 issue of Filmmaker: Brandon Harris talking with Gaspar Noé about Enter the Void, Jason Guerrasio's interview with Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story), Lance Weiler on transmedia and Anthony Kaufman: "Why Won't Kickstarter and Twitter Save Indie Film?" In its tech section, Filmmaker staff and friends recommend apps and Roberto Quezada-Dardon evaluates the latest HDSLRs.
"Tamra Davis's documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child might make you weep (it did me) and might help you better appreciate a painter whose work matters enormously in the history of late-twentieth-century art." Amy Taubin for Artforum: "It achieves these ends largely though an abundance of footage of its subject at work and with a long interview that...
"Tamra Davis's documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child might make you weep (it did me) and might help you better appreciate a painter whose work matters enormously in the history of late-twentieth-century art." Amy Taubin for Artforum: "It achieves these ends largely though an abundance of footage of its subject at work and with a long interview that...
- 7/25/2010
- MUBI
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