In the film’s cruelest line, Big Edie cackles: “The only vermin was you, Edie!”Įdith Bouvier Beale in That Summer. Big Edie shrugs: “Well, you had to find out about men sometime,” and the conversation charges on, cross-talk, arguments and interruptions in dissonant harmony. In a startling aside, the two chat about Little Edie committing “incest” with her Uncle Jack. Big Edie nags her to wear makeup, stop crossing her arms and change her costumes every two hours so she can look pretty for the construction workers tramping through the house – potential husbands we know she’ll reject. Cut into four raw reels, this early footage of the then 55-year-old stings. “I know that I romanticize it, and that it was not true because of the drugs and the economic problems, but still to me it’s the greatest place in terms of tolerance, where people could blend, meet other class, and gender, and ethnic backgrounds.”įreedom eludes Little Edie, who spends That Summer and Grey Gardens yowling her desperation to escape to New York. Finally, his childhood fixation paid off. When Peter Beard invited him to see his old Hamptons tapes and photographs, which open That Summer and sets up the spotlight everyone in the film is, or will be, under, Olsson was delighted that he recognized everyone in the background. “Everything about the art scene and music scene in Manhattan in the 70s, Bianca, Halston, the Factory, Max’s Kansas City, it was an obsession of mine, and I was totally alone in that interest,” says Olsson. As a boy growing up in Lund, he’d bicycle from his anti-apartheid club meetings to the public library to flip through Interview magazine. Yet to Olsson, both films are about freedom – and they’ve always been intertwined. In those same years, the Beales were, well, at home fighting over lipstick and who needs to feed the cats. True, but this deeper excavation of Grey Gardens still seems like a surprising fit for the Swedish-born filmmaker of the Sundance award-winning documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, which charted the rise of black nationalism as an army fighting three wars: Vietnam, poverty and heroin addiction. “Documentary has always been way ahead of the mainstream media or social phenomena.” “The Beales really paved the way for YouTubers – I certainly know that they paved the way for the Kardashians,” says Olsson. And later: “I think any of us would be happy to have raccoons who look upon us as friends.” “Cats don’t fit into having a house redecorated,” she hisses. And there’s Little Edie – fashion icon, delirious dancer, homebody goddess – leaning into the camera with never-before heard pronouncements, delivered in that urgent whisper that seems to bore through the lens and into your skull. We see the inspectors barge in brandishing court papers as Radziwill frets over what to save. Big Edie is more physically and mentally intact her home is more trashed with cat urine and rot. That Summer, Olsson’s new film, represents that lost footage. They went to Europe and Africa, they did exhibitions, they didn’t know exactly what to do about it, and they had other things on their mind.” As for the Maysles brothers, they’d return to Grey Gardens for the 1975 documentary (called Grey Gardens) that would make them, and the Beales became legends in a film so groundbreaking it announces its own existence in a newspaper clipping in the opening credits. “No, not at all,” deflects Olsson, on the phone from Switzerland. Rumor was she was embarrassed by the evidence of the Bouvier clan’s disintegration. Ultimately Radziwill saved the house and scrapped the movie. Over a couple weekends, they shot an hour of Big Edie and Little Edie squabbling with each other and the health officials threatening eviction. To help, Radziwill hired Albert and David Maysles, two brothers she knew from the Rolling Stones scene who’d just shot the concert film Gimme Shelter. (Andy Warhol, too, in one of his rare jaunts out of the city, seen nervously peering at the sun from underneath a wide-brimmed hat.) Radziwill and Beard visited Grey Gardens with the vague idea of making a documentary about the history of the Hamptons, perhaps narrated by, as Radziwill puts it, “my extremely eccentric aunt”. Big Edie’s niece Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister) and her photographer boyfriend Peter Beard vacationed at the beach with their famous friends such as Truman Capote and Bianca Jagger. Until June 1972 – the That Summer of Göran Olsson’s new documentary – when the Studio 54 era came to them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |