Even though I spent a lot of time in 2012 stranded on the island of Manhattan, I still managed to do some continent-hopping to a bunch of my favorite foreign locales--and one city that I'd never been to before.
In January, Diane Pernet sent me to Rio again (I had to pout and beg a little bit and she finally relented because it was during my birthday) at the invitation of Monica Mendes and ABIT (Brazilian Textile & Apparel Industry Associaton). We stayed in Copacabana which is really the more authentic, egalitarian Rio experience as opposed to trendy Ipanema.
I celebrated my birthday with Rosario, Suleman and lots of complimentary champagne at the chic Fasano Hotel. (We craftily piggy-backed on a party the hotel was throwing for Mario Testino.)
And I made some new friends at the beach!
I set my camera down on the windowsill next to my bed in my room at the Windsor Atlantica so that I could jump up and capture this gorgeous sunrise on the far end of Copacabana called Leme.
Me hanging out at the treehouse restaurant Aprazivel in Santa Teresa.
In September, I took my yearly trip to the magical music-box-like city of Vienna, where I am invited to cover MQ Vienna Fashion Week.
I usually stay close to the Opera House, but this year for the first 3 nights I stayed in the rarely visited district of Margareten. After World War I, Vienna was known as "Red Vienna" because of the left-wing government that put a lot of Socialist programs in action, including municipal housing projects for the poor. There are quite a few in Margareten (and the highway that borders the district is nicknamed the "Ringstrasse of the Proletariat") and I did my own self-guided tour of the area. This one was my favorite communal housing project: the elegant Reumann-Hof, built in 1924 (above).
Lovely late-day light in Margareten.
Backstage at the Tiberius show at Vienna Fashion Week.
Designer Mariella Morgana Meyer at the "White Mask" afterparty for the Tiberius show at the fabulous Le Meridien Hotel (where I stayed for 3 nights).
One of my rockstar hosts at Vienna Fashion Week, my friend Zigi Mueller paired stars & stripes with rainboots (it always seems to downpour for one day whenever I visit Vienna).
I really enjoyed the "Reflecting Fashion" exhibit at MUMOK in Vienna's Museum Quartier. (Maria Oberfrank of MQVFW kindly supplied me with passes to all the museums.) One of the highlights was the inclusion of Elsa Schiaparelli's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the iconic lobster dress, which was very conspicuously absent from the Met Costume Institute's disastrous Prada/Schiaparelli show. Even though I am a Freudian, I was very amused by this feminist provocation (above), "Flow My Tears 1" by Mai-Thu Perret. The mirrored face is meant to reflect back all Freudian theories projected onto women, making her impervious to them.
After Vienna, I passed through Berlin for 3 days to visit my nutty "cousins" Vaginal Davis and Isabel. (Isabel has since fled the cold shoulders of the Germans and is now somewhere in sunny northern Thailand.) Isabel and I went to the Humboldt Cube museum and I took these photos from the veranda of the museum's restaurant.
Mitte is packed cheek by jowl with trendy, soulless boutiques that all seem to sell the same bougie "design" pillows and lamps for 50 euros a pop. One moment of respite was an interesting bookstore (the entrance, above) that also hosts reading.
Vaginal Davis in her studio in Schoneberg.
After Berlin, I took a 5-day holiday in Amsterdam--my first time!--and I was instanly won over by this charming little city.
House of Cheese!
Amsterdam street style
My friend Marcelo took me out to a marvelous dinner at the Silver Mirror, a restaurant that has not changed much since the early 17th century! We quaffed champagne and supped on foie gras brulee while sitting inside the fireplace. Those tiles!
View from the window of my suite at the delightfully quirky Lloyd Hotel & Cultural Embassy
My suite at the Conservatorium Luxury Spa Hotel
Happy art at the recently re-opened & re-vamped Stedelijk Museum
Me + Moet at the Amsterdam premiere of the amazing DIANA VREELAND: THE EYE HAS TO TRAVEL
Artist Scott Neary took me on a tour of "his Amsterdam."
We stopped by the Theater Tuschinski to check out the eye-popping interior.
Ilanga met me for green tea out on the terrace of the Amstel InterContinental Hotel where I stayed for one very royal night.
From pristine canal-lined streets to the gritty hutongs of dynasties past: non-stop flight from Amsterdam to Beijing!
Alice McInerney of Anywearstyle.com & I at Dada bar
Design writer Laura Houseley & Beijing Design Week Creative Director Aric Chen
Full moon over the Lama Temple
Partying with rich Communist Party brats at Baby Face
Madame Cat & Monsieur Fish at Wuhao Curated-Shop
Me & Jeffrey Ying aka Oscar Madison & Felix Unger at the Baccarat champagne toast in Sanlitun Village.
Rem Koolhaas's CCTV Tower which generates almost as much propaganda as Fox News.
Beijing's arbiter of elegance, Jeffrey Ying, gave a party for the Party on China's National Day in his glamorous penthouse.
NYC-Vienna-Berlin-Amsterdam-Beijing-NYC: This was literally a trip around the world as my return flight to NYC traveled over the Pacific. Thanks for taking this journey with me.
A look from the Jeremy Scott collection, which was inspired by '90s internet culture. Photo: Glenn Belverio
Dear slaves of New York fashion,
I'm very selective now about what I attend during New York Fashion Week (back in the day, I would go to 9 or 10 shows per day). I like the idea of the shows being staged at Lincoln Center--because it elevates fashion to be on par with opera and ballet---but it's too annoying for me to go up there and wait in long lines. Here are the links to my reports on A Shaded View on Fashion of the downtown events I covered:
Everyone who knows me knows that Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is one of my favorite obsessions and that Oscar Niemeyer is my favorite architect. So I'm very excited to hear about the Brasilia photo exhibit at 1500 Gallery which runs from September 9 through November 27, 2010.
Photo: Gervasio Batista
Photo: Nicolau Drey
Here is some info on the exhibit:
Brasilia, a group exhibition of vintage photographs celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the capital of Brazil, will be on view at 1500 Gallery September 9-November 27, 2010. Curated by Brazilian photographer Murillo Meirelles, the exhibition will include images that show Brasilia being planned,
constructed and inaugurated from 1958-1960. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, September 15 from 6-8 pm. 1500 Gallery is located at 511 W 25th St. #607, New York, NY.
A city planned and built from scratch in the very center of the country, Brasilia replaced Rio de Janeiro as the capital of Brazil in 1960. The architectural, figurative and photojournalistic images in the Brasilia exhibition highlight the idealism of Juscelino Kubitschek’s socialist government and its team of visionary urban planners, architects and landscape designers including Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx. The nine images in the exhibition include a portrait of Oscar Niemeyer, pictures of workers cutting steel and laying beams, an aerial view of the Esplanade under construction, and several images of the National Congress.
I'm off to Fashion Rio to cover the shows for A Shaded View on Fashion; looking forward to getting out of frozen New York for 8 days. If you love Rio as much as I do, then check out Mario Testino's upcoming Taschen book on Rio de Janeiro. (I think it might actually be out now...?) I haven't been to Rio since last January (my first time was September 2008)....very excited to return.
"Louis XIV had devised a most imperative Manner of viewing the gardens at Versailles. Citizen Xavier Veilhan, as a guest for the season, has created a path along which his work invites the visitor to take a different view."
Ron Galella, the godfather of American paparazzi, has a gorgeous new photography book out, Viva L'Italia!--and it's chock full of images of famous Italians and Italian-Americans alike, from Al Pacino to Gina Lollobrigida. The book is dedicated to Galella's father, Vincenzo, who lived in Muro Lucano, Italy, near a 10th-century castle which was home to both Queen Giovanna the 1st and future Pope Benedict XIII of the Orsini Family.
Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro
Anna Magnani
Frank Sinatra
Sophia Loren
I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Galella in his home back in 2002 for a feature I penned on him and his work for the Holt Renfrew magalogue.
Ron Galella
By Glenn Belverio
Perusing the oeuvre of 72-year old photographer Ron Galella, one could get the impression that his work is all about hands. And not just the outstretched, banishing palm which is the international sign for “Don’t take my picture!” but hands that tell other stories as well: Peter Falk’s heavily bandaged hand, Barbara Streisand’s jumbo diamond-ring-bearing hand, Diana Vreeland’s chicly brandished claw gleaming with scarlet talons. Upon closer inspection of the photographs it becomes evident that the hands are merely the proverbial tip of the iceberg, and that the man behind the camera rightly deserves the tag “Dean of the American Paparazzi”. “I defined what ‘paparazzi’ is," boasts Galella, not unjustly. “Off-guard. Spontaneous. Unrehearsed. The only game.” ‘Game’ is an apropos description when one examines Galella’s photos of a certain woman who often seems to be eluding pursuit; running through Central Park like a hunted gazelle or shielding her face with a bouquet of flowers or the collar of a turtleneck sweater as she ducks into her apartment building.
“Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the most desirable woman in the world wanted to be chased by me, Ron Galella, the paparazzo. I knew even then that there could be no stopping, no turning back,” Galella wrote rather hyperbolically in his obsessive 1974 book Jacqueline. Jackie was Galella’s most famous subject and he hounded her relentlessly, whether she was emerging from her Fifth Avenue apartment, strolling through the yard of her Peapack, New Jersey bungalow, or relaxing in Skorpios with Aristotle Onassis. “My interest in Jackie was a love of adventure, a love of hunting someone down and capturing the picture,” explains Galella. “She didn’t make it easy so it was a great challenge and I like that.” Despite Jackie’s resistance (she took him to court and obtained an injunction that prevented him from photographing her for four years) many people today agree that Galella’s shots of the famous First Lady are what cement her image as an eternal icon. “They say I kept her alive,” muses Galella. The most well-known photo was taken on October 3rd, 1971: ‘Windblown Jackie,’ Galella’s Mona Lisa. “It has all the characteristics of paparazzi photojournalism: spontaneity, the wind blowing in her hair, natural lighting, no makeup,” says Galella. “That’s what I look for – the real person rather than the contrived shot with lots of makeup and phony smiles.”
Galella was raised in a working class Italian-American family in the Bronx and enlisted in the Air Force at age twenty. He began his career as a photographer by shooting for the base newspaper while stationed in Orlando, Florida during the Korean War. After he was discharged, he used his GI bill to attend the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and graduated in 1958 with a degree in photojournalism. He moved back to New York and worked from his father’s house in the north Bronx. “There was a recession and I couldn’t afford my own studio in NY so I started shooting celebrities on location,” he explains. And where was the best place to shoot celebrities in their natural habitat? Hollywood, of course. Once Galella became more established in the late 60’s he began traveling back and forth between NY and California, and it was in LA that he shot some of his most engaging images. His strongest period was the 1970’s when his reality-based photography style was in perfect sync with that decade’s gritty approach to filmmaking, a time when Hollywood had largely discarded the sugar-coated schmaltz of '50s and '60s artifice.
Among the panoply of images from 1965-1989 in Greybull Press’s beautifully printed The Photographs of Ron Galella, which is out this fall in paperback, this period in Hollywood is chronicled in all its fascinating, narcissistic splendor. Here is a startled Bette Midler looking behind her shoulder at the Grammy Awards, her askew tiara making her look like a lost, overgrown trick-or-treater. Alfred Hitchcock at the premiere of his film Family Plot wearing a stony, zombie-like expression that recalls Tor Johnson’s performance in Plan 9 From Outer Space. A pre-Saturday Night Fever John Travolta already basking in fame, a crowd of fans restrained mere inches away and behaving as if Travolta’s then unadulterated charisma had driven them to fits of ecstasy. And a miniscule Herve Villechaize ducking under a velvet rope at the Golden Globe awards like a mischievous gremlin hell-bent on carrying out acts of sabotage on the glamorous proceedings. Despite Galella’s cinema verite hand, there is a persistent dream-like quality that emerges throughout the book. There are moments when the images almost threaten to tumble into a vortex where reality and fantasy merge – like the spiraling narrative of the amnesiac actress in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s savagely surreal commentary on Tinseltown. Of all the visions in Galella’s work, however, the most sobering seems to be the reminder of the ephemeral nature of fame and flesh.
To understand the genesis of the paparazzi, one must look back to a former film capital, that Hollywood-on-the-Tiber known as Rome. “While creating La Dolce Vita, Fellini assigned the name ‘Signor Paparazzo’ to a character in the film, a photographer who was always scurrying up and down Rome’s Via Veneto snapping candids of movie stars and other strolling celebrities,” Galella explains helpfully in his 1976 book Off-Guard. During those heady days in late-50s’ Rome, paparazzi such as Felice Quinto tracked glamorous quarry like Fellini actress Anita Ekberg, whose response was to turn a bow and sharp arrows at her hunters. Galella, who is credited with establishing this distinctly Italian art of photography in America, has also had more than his share of celebrity slings and arrows.
“Marlon Brando knocked five teeth out of my mouth in 1973 when I asked him to take his sunglasses off,” Galella recalls as if it were yesterday. “One of my teeth was embedded in his hand which became infected. He has scars to this day.” A subsequent photo of a football helmet-clad Galella trailing Brando is an iconic image of the photographer’s legacy. In St. Tropez, Brigitte Bardot’s beau tried to hose Galella down and ruin his camera when the photographer snuck shots of the blonde bombshell swimming. And in Mexico in 1971 on the set of Elizabeth Taylor’s flop film, Hammersmith is Out, Richard Burton ordered crew members to beat Galella up and destroy his film. To add insult to injury, Galella alleges that Burton had him banned from the Tony Awards for four consecutive years.
But these days Galella has gone from inciting celebrity ire and contempt to becoming a bit of a celebrity himself. His work is frequently displayed in galleries where stars gather to admire their own history. “One of the factors is that I shot them when they were younger and more beautiful and that’s what the last book captures,” Galella explains. “That brings back nostalgia for them.” Ironically, the American paparazzi craze that Galella inspired has become so huge that it has not only virtually excluded the man who pioneered it – he still has problems getting into events – but it has changed and cheapened the caliber of the craft’s output. “There are too many press agents and many of them don’t know what they’re doing, and all the photographers are calling out to the stars so everyone gets the same picture,” complains Galella. Another problem is the solipsistic attitude adopted by celebrities in a post-9/11 world – they fear becoming targets of terrorism and the result is truncated red carpets and excess security. “Yeah, Saddam Hussein was looking for the cast of Friends,” Galella’s wife and business manager of twenty-four years, Betty, sarcastically quipped recently. Galella and his wife share a home in New Jersey where framed photos taken by the two of them vie for attention with a large collection of rabbits: wooden, porcelain, and glass renditions – as well as a few live ones. “They don’t bark and they don’t smell,” Betty explains.
Divine & Grace Jones at Xenon, late '70s.
Their basement contains a sprawling labyrinth of filing cabinets and shelves where over one million photographs are catalogued. Theme-photo boxes marked with such titles as “Hollywood Kiss” or “Smoking” are squeezed onto shelves that groan with the weight of mammoth Jackie Kennedy and Liz Taylor collections. Even a brief dip into the archives proves to be an overwhelming venture; the vast array of stars and their milieus is mind-boggling. And it is difficult to find a bad picture. “Most paparazzi are not trained, anyone can pick up a camera and be a paparazzo,” says Galella. “I was an artist before this so I understand a bit about art, composition, color, and directional lighting.” One wonders if Jackie were alive today would she have second thoughts about Galella’s work, as her son John-John did when he asked Galella to shoot him for George magazine. Would Jackie still order her Secret Service men to smash his camera, as she did in 1969? “Okay, smash my camera. I’ll get another one,” Galella wrote in Off-Guard. “Because practicing my trade is my right, my duty and my sole ambition in life. And the more I work at this risky game, the more I am convinced it is the only game for the true photo-journalist, for the picture-reporter who is in unafraid pursuit of the truest picture.”
Two stills from the obscure Jerry Schatzberg gem Puzzle of a Downfall Child
Dear Fashion Fans:
A few days ago I checked out the "Model as Muse" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had expectations, but not too high. After all, I've been looking at and writing about model culture for over ten years. I was hoping to see something new, something startling--some new twist on what is just, let's face it, a recycled theme and a weak idea. As I walked through the exhibit I was making air check marks in front of various photos and tableaus: Iconic Penn photos, check. Dovima and the Elephants, check (would have loved some obscure images/info on Dovima; she had an interesting trajectory), a "Studio 54 room," check. Vintage Dior clothing, check. Magazines opened to '90s Calvin Klein ads, check. Scenes from Funny Face projected on a wall, check. (Great film but THE most obvious choice! Why not throw a curve ball and project scenes from Puzzle of a Downfall Child?....but more on that later).
The music played in the various "decades" rooms was predictable and uninspired: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the '90s room (most obvious choice) and "Talkin' 'bout My Generation" by The Who in the '60s room. Considering that Paco Rabanne was the featured designer in this room (complemented with clips from William Klein's film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? which satirizes Rabanne's metallic fashions in its opening sequence) I would have thought someone would have been savvy enough to dig up "The Martian Without a Master" by Pierre Boulez. This was the song played when Rabanne marched black models down his runway, a first, in the mid-'60s. But instead we got The Who? Mediocrity! Mrs. Vreeland would not be pleased.
When I contacted former Costume Institute curator Diana Vreeland via Ouija Board, she confirmed that she was not pleased with the Met's current show. Photo by Andy Warhol.
I will admit that I was pleased to see some of the metal costumes from Klein's film. There was only ONE photo in the exhibit that I had never seen before, a sublime shot of Penelope Tree. But most of the choices were predictable and unsurprising to the fashion initiated. They've been seen millions of times; reproduced in the pages of American and foreign fashion magazines year after year and featured in countless other exhibits. (Even though I've seen it many times, I will admit it's always a pleasure to see Franco Rubartelli's photo of my favorite model, Veruschka--whom I interviewed in 1999 for DUTCH magazine--in Saint Laurent safari chic.)
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Glenn, you're old and jaded! You think you've seen it all." Perhaps, and perhaps this show will be of interest to teenagers and people in their early '20s. But even I know that many young people, especially young fashion fanatics, are very aware of fashion history and do have high standards. I have young friends who can describe in detail the looks from Azzedine Alaia's first collection (who, by the way, was not featured in this exhibit despite being well-known for promoting the concept of models as muses).
Above: Azzedine Alaia with Naomi Campbell. Campbell boycotted the Met "Model as Muse" gala to protest Alaia's omission.
Finally, one last gripe (which, I admit, is also a segue): I do not recall seeing even one image by Jerry Schatzberg in this show. Am I wrong? If I'm right, this is absolutely criminal! Schatzberg not only shot brilliant fashion images in the '50s and '60s, he also directed the above-mentioned film Puzzle of a Downfall Child which features a model/muse, played by Faye Dunaway, who has a nervous breakdown. So, would you rather see that (it's never been officially released on DVD or video) or Funny Face for the trillionth time?
Back in the spring of 2000, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Schatzberg at his Central Park West apartment and penned the following feature which originally appeared in the September/October 2000 issue of DUTCH magazine.
Schatzberg vérité
by Glenn Belverio
Jerry Schatzberg is talking about the time he was blacklisted--not by Senator McCarthy, but by Faye Dunaway. "We had a fight because she arrived late on the set. She put my name on the list and I just left it there," he recalls. Schatzberg is referring to the filming of his obscure masterpiece, Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), the story of a fashion model who has a mental breakdown. The film's protagonist, Lou Andreas Sand, played by Dunaway, has compiled an ever-growing list of photographers she refuses to work with. In a life-imitates-art moment, Dunaway added Schatzberg, who was once a fashion photographer and Dunaway's lover, to Lou's list. Luckily they reconciled and were able to finish this quirky gem of a film.
Based on the real-life story of model Anne St. Marie, Puzzle documents the rise and fall of a top model whose distortion of reality shapes the film's surreal narrative. "Anne had her own sense of humor," says Schatzberg, who fell in love with her when he shot her for Vogue in the late '50s. "The stress of this business led to her breakdown." The film is a bit like a Nostradamus prophecy of the tribulations suffered by contemporary models such as Kate Moss. Eerily, Dunaway's visage seems to channel the waif supermodel in the film. But Puzzle can be any girl's story. "Anne was not unique," Schatzberg remembers. "There were models who would walk into the studio and just break down crying because some editor told them that one shoulder was higher than the other."
Schatzberg tape-recorded St. Marie during her downward spiral, which was abated by booze and pills, and later played the tapes for Carole Eastman, who wrote the screenplay for Puzzle. "Faye also listened to the tapes and got to know Anne that way," says Schatzberg. Eastman combined her own odd sense of humor with Anne's recorded persona, and Lou Andreas Sand was born. "When Carole initially listened to the tapes, she was so intrigued she left a friend with a toothache waiting in her car for three hours," recalls Schatzberg.
Above: Faye's fractured image in Puzzle
The film's title is derived from the story of a woman Schatzberg knew, who would wake up in the middle of the night, rush to the window and try to catch a "falling child." Schatzberg originally envisioned a film that was about an abortion, but as the story developed it became more about St. Marie and her downfall. Puzzle takes the viewer through Lou's fractured mind which imagines events such as an art director gunning her down while she is being photographed on a beach, and her bridal gown (which resembles a nun's habit and was inspired by the designs of Geoffrey Beene) changing from white to black as she flees the wedding altar.
Puzzle is so obscure that the only copy Schatzberg has of his own film is the one designer Anna Sui taped when it was aired at an ungodly hour on a forgotten TV channel. It's the kind of film you hear fashion film freaks talk about in the same breath as that other classic Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? directed by another photographer/director William Klein. "We knew each other in the '60s," says Schatzberg. "I shot him working backstage at the Paris collections for Esquire."
Fashion photo by Jerry Schatzberg
Schatzberg, a native of Forest Hills, Queens, NY, got his start in photography in 1954 when he assisted fashion photographer Bill Helburn. In 1956, he moved to Manhattan and started shooting his own editorial for Glamour and Vogue. In addition to his fashion work, he was also involved with the '60s rock scene in swinging London. There, photographer David Bailey introduced him to Mick Jagger before most people had heard of the Rolling Stones. "Here was this guy with a ripped sweater and dirty fingernails, and all the girls were screaming and pulling at him when we got out of my car at one of their gigs," says Schatzberg, who later photographed the Stones in drag for the cover of their single "Can't You See Your Mother Standing in the Shadows?" Later, he was a financial backer for two seminal New York clubs, Ondine and Salvation, where Jimmy Hendrix (then Jimmy James) played his first gig. Most of all, Schatzberg wanted to make films and leave fashion photography. His debut Puzzle functions as a neat exit from his former profession.
Edie Sedgwick photographed by Jerry Schatzberg
Most of Schatzberg's films have garnered more enthusiasm abroad, mainly due to his European cinema sensibility: minimalist story lines, languid pacing, painterly-like vistas. "When I go to Paris, I'm treated like Spielberg. It's so good for my ego," laughs the director who still spends most of his time in New York, where he resides on Central Park West. After Puzzle, Schatzberg immediately began working on a new project, a film that he is perhaps most famous for: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), starring Kitty Winn and Al Pacino as heroin addicts who hang out in the park at the intersection of 72nd Street and Broadway. It soon becomes clear, however, that "Needle Park" is more than a row of grimy park benches; it is the mental landscape, or existential prison, that heroin addicts inhabit. The script was written by Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who it is rumored spent just a couple of days researching the topic of junkies. However, before shooting, Schatzberg, Pacino and Winn hit the streets for six weeks to build on the script. "We hung out with junkies at Blimpie's and went to seminars for addicts at Roosevelt Hospital," says Schatzberg.
"What do you mean I can't get a prescription for heroin?" Kitty Winn in The Panic in Needle Park
The resulting film is pure cinema verite, partly because real ex-junkies were cast as denizens of Needle Park. A scene depicting the cutting and packaging of heroin by dealers is so realistic that one waits for a documentary-style voiceover to accompany the action. The authenticity is helped again by the casting, this time of actual heroin cutters. In many of Schatzberg's films, particularly Panic, Scarecrow (1973) and Honeysuckle Rose (1980), the action is so natural that one almost suspects a candid camera technique, as if the actors were unaware of being filmed. "I think in some ways it's what I did in fashion photography. When I brought people into the studio, I still wanted them to be honest and real. For the collection I shot for Vogue in 1960, I just had people walking across the set in a very natural way, with their skirts poofing up and so on."
Jerry frames a shot
Schatzberg continued to make films throughout the '70s and '80s, winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes in 1973 for Scarecrow, but was relatively quiet during the '90s. "I worked on six films where either the script didn't work out or the money didn't come through. But I'm not very prolific anyhow," he shrugs. Happily for Schatzberg fans, the director has both a new film release and a retrospective scheduled for the fall. His latest, The Day the Ponies Came Back, is about a Frenchman (Guilaume Canet of The Beach) who goes to New York to track down his father and through him, to find himself. The story is inspired by Schatzberg's ex-wife who embarked on the same quest. With Schatzberg's help, she found her father. "I think we're all looking for our fathers, even if we have a father, we're always trying to please him. We do everything we can to make him like us."
The film, shot in the Bronx, promises to have the same gritty appeal as earlier works. His next project, Boomer, will be another collaboration with Puzzle scripter, Carole Eastman, who Schatzberg hasn't worked with for twenty-five years. It's based on the memoirs of an English professor overcome with ennui. "She experiments with drugs and homosexuality because she is tired of her life," he explains. "Then she sees an ad for a railway worker position and she takes it. She still works there today."
Al Pacino in Scarecrow
Schatzberg has been credited with being one of the few directors to craft a new style of drama, an American genre that surfaced after the dust of the tumultuous '60s cleared. "The absence of schmaltz and sentimentality in many '70s dramas had a lot to do with the reality of the '60s," he says. "That decade brought us a lot, but also took away a lot." One device Schatzberg often likes to employ is the anti-climactic/non-resolution ending (a style pioneered by Michelangelo Antonioni). Lou walking away from her beach house still trying to piece together the jumbled episodes of her life in Puzzle. Helen silently following Bobby after he is released from jail in Panic. Max the drifter banging his shoe on the ticket counter at the train station after leaving his catatonic companion behind in the hospital in Scarecrow. The characters stay with you after the film is over, you worry about them as if you knew them. "You hope that maybe something nice will happen to them," says Schatzberg. "I loved Anne and I wanted her to come out of it the whole time I was photographing her during her breakdown. Those endings leave a little hope, a little optimism."
Surprise! "Puzzle of a Downfall Child" is on YouTube.
Attended the NEW YORK book soiree at the Four Seasons and the much-touted TAR magazine launch this past Wednesday night. My full report can be read here at A Shaded View on Fashion.
Later, Glenn
Adrian Cowen of Pleasure Principle at the Lindeberg residence
Sorry I've been so behind on the party blogging but I've been caught up in the election drama, freelance work, and blogging the Juicy Couture party for Diane. On October 30 I was invited to a wonderful exhibit of jazz musician photos from the '60s at the upstairs gallery at the Hermes store. My gorgeous friend Joselle Yokogawa (she took most of the photos in this post) accompanied me, dripping in furs and jewels. There's nothing more divoon than a little irresponsible ostentation during a Depression, don't you think darlings? Very the Marchesa Casati during World War I. The caviar, foie gras, champagne, and Hermes merch at the party completed this mini-theme. After the opening, we headed over to the unofficial after party at Thom to have drinks with some of my jet-set friends from Rome and Istanbul.
Andre Serrano at Hermes
Artist Melodie Provenzano adorned the walls of the gallery with her delightful illustrations. They worked quite well with the photos.
Me and Rinaldo Rocco at Thom
I adore Rinaldo. He's so smart and cute. Rinaldo is a Rome-based, Milan-born actor/writer who was my translator when I interviewed Dario Argento in Rome a few years ago.
