Entries from Gothamist tagged with 'documentary'
May 12, 2008
Last year, after Stanley Bard was ousted by the board as manager of the Hotel Chelsea and replaced with BD Hotels -- who just got ousted themselves, filmmaker Abel Ferrara moved back in to his old digs. The NY Post reports that the move was to help in the making his documentary, Chelsea on the Rocks"I lived on the floor with the ghosts," Ferrara tells Page Six. "I didn't come in with a point to......
Continue Reading "Hotel Chelsea Visits Cannes, "on the Rocks" "May 8, 2008
Coan Nichols (aka "Buddy") and Rick Charnoski have been making movies together on 8mm film since the late 90s; their main focus being skateboarding. At some point they abandoned their New York City stomping grounds for the warmer weather of the West Coast, but the city is still the inspiration for their latest release. Deathbowl to Downtown chronicles the origin of skating in NYC and is "the first to explore skateboarding’s urban history in-depth." (View......
Continue Reading "Coan "Buddy" Nichols, Deathbowl to Downtown"May 5, 2008
Deathbowl to Downtown – The Evolution of Skateboarding in New York City will be seeping into theaters starting this summer (with a national release this fall); the film is the first to explore skateboarding’s urban history in Manhattan. Tracing "skating's epochal shift from the parks and pools of the 70's, to ramp skating in the 80's, to the street ascendancy of the 1990's as seen from a New York-centric perspective," it includes footage and interviews......
Continue Reading "NYC's Skateboarding History Gets Screentime"May 5, 2008
In 2006, Lou Reed revived his album Berlin by performing it in its entirety with a small orchestra for five sold-out shows at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The 1973 album, which riffs on themes of drugs, love and suicide, was a commercial failure when it came out; Lester Bangs described it as “the bastard progeny of a drunken flaccid tumble between Tennessee Williams and Hubert (Last Exit From Brooklyn) Selby, Jr.” But in......
Continue Reading "Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel Talk Berlin at Tribeca"April 27, 2008
Using a Leica M2 with a 90mm lens, Cuban photographer Alberto “Korda” Díaz snapped the iconic photograph of Ernesto “Che” Guevara during a mass funeral for the victims of a mysterious series of explosions in Havana harbor that killed at least 75 people 1960. The service was held the day after the tragedy, and Korda, who was Castro’s official photographer at the time, managed two photos of Guevara as he briefly stepped onstage to......
Continue Reading "Chevolution, Tribeca Film Festival"April 25, 2008
Errol Morris in a conversation with Anthony Swofford after the screening of Standard Operating Procedure at the Tribeca Film Festival. Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris was on hand last night for a Tribeca Film Festival screening of his new documentary Standard Operating Procedure, a nuanced exploration of the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those familiar with Morris’s innovative oeuvre won’t be surprised to hear that, far from a tendentious indictment of......
Continue Reading "Errol Morris Talks Standard Operating Procedure at Tribeca Film Festival"March 14, 2008
Wetlands Preserve, the beloved neo-hippy jam band club down by the Holland Tunnel, has been given a funny film tribute by Dean Budnick, senior editor of Relix magazine. His film Wetlands Preserved features ample archival footage and interviews with artist ranging from Bob Weir to Dave Matthews. The documentary was actually completed two years ago, but it took Budnick forever to find his keys and get out of the apartment. From its opening in 1989......
Continue Reading "Wetlands Preserved Gets Released Tonight (Finally)"February 26, 2008
For two weeks in the winter of 2005, Central Park was filled with 7,500 saffron-paneled gates. The project was a gift from the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who had been trying for four decades to launch the project. Their struggle - and success - comes to the the small screen with tonight's premiere of The Gates on HBO. You can remember those weeks through the second part of the documentary, with almost all New Yorkers......
Continue Reading "The Gates Return, toFebruary 10, 2008
Director of the legendary hip-hop documentary Style Wars, Tony Silver, died last weekend after battling an irreversible brain condition for several years. Shot in New York City in the early '80s and originally airing on PBS in 1983, his documentary is considered to be the first film about hip-hop culture. While the 70 minutes covers rap and breakdancing, its main focus is on graffiti, which at the time was viewed by some as a groundbreaking......
Continue Reading "Style Wars Director Dies"January 21, 2008
Shine a Light, the film documenting The Rolling Stones show at Beacon Theater in 2006, is about to hit the big screen. And the really, really big screen. The Martin Scorsese-directed rockumentary will be in both regular and IMAX theaters this April, and it won't be the first time Mick Jagger's lips have reached epic proportions; the band recorded their first IMAX concert in the early '90s. Check out the trailer for the latest one,......
Continue Reading "Video of the Day: Shine a Light"December 3, 2007
Documentary filmmaker Donny Moss has produced a movie about the carriage-horse trade in New York City called Blinders. It looks to be a revealing take on an iconic feature of the city, and includes original footage as well as documentation of well-publicized accidents and interviews with carriage owners, veterinarians, witnesses to accidents, and anti-carriage activists. Moss is engaged in the film festival application process right now, but has placed a trailer for the movie on......
Continue Reading "Video of the Day: Trailer for Blinders"
