"I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel"
The San Francisco Docfest will be screening Abel Ferrara's documentary chronicling the rich, weird, debauched and legendary history of New York's Hotel Chelsea at 7:15 p.m. on Friday, October 17 at Roxie Cinema (16th Street and Valencia). There's no need for me to list the numerous artists and fascinating people who have resided at the Chelsea as their names can be found in the synopsis below and here. I made a trip down to the Hotel Chelsea once, expressly for the purpose of standing in front of this artists' mecca and when I got there I thought, "It looks just like one of the "hotels" (read: flophouses) in the neighborhood I grew up in." Then I made for the Hudson River. I know, there isn't a story there. Anyway, the ownership of the hotel has since been wrenched from Stanley Bard (whose family owned the property until only a couple of years ago) and was taken over by a crazy, rich lady with a shoe fetish, the last I heard.
The New York Times ran a profile of Abel Ferrara's (Kings of New York, Bad Lieutenant, Go Go Tales) upcoming projects in its film section on Friday. It's safe to say that he does not approve of Werner Herzog's remake of Bad Lieutenant. Read the Times article here.
SF Docfest Opening Night Film
SYNOPSIS
CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS will document the personalities and artistic voices that have emerged from this legendary residence in the heart of New York.
The 12-storey, 250 room Chelsea Hotel - originally built in 1883 as Manhattan’s first cooperative apartment, and the tallest building in New York until 1902 - was converted into a hotel and residence in 1905. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has recently been claimed as a boutique hotel venture for a management company who shows blatant disregard for its formidable history.
The officially landmarked building is recognized as an American cultural icon and renowned for those who have lived and created there, including Sir Arthur Clarke, Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Miller, Joni Mitchell, Dee Dee Ramone, Larry Rivers, Dylan Thomas, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Milos Forman, Janis Joplin, Donald Sutherland, Patti Smith, Philip Taaffe, Dennis Hopper, Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick, Eugene O’Neill, Jane Fonda, Larry Rivers, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Waits, Courtney Love, Sam Shepard, Charles Bukowski, Julian Schnabel, Jasper Johns, Viva, Quentin Crisp, Jimi Hendrix and many others (some of whom will appear in this film).
Beyond the famous are the little known who have made this their refuge in New York - countless writers, painters, directors, costume and lighting designers, gallerists and curators, and those who are just always there with no visible means of support. And then there are those - most famously Sid Vicious’ girlfriend Nancy Spungen - who died there.
Each of these characters fills out a cast that makes this story come together with the best of New York architecture, history, art, comedy and tragedy, all through the eyes and passion of acclaimed auteur Abel Ferrara. Interviewing current tenants, recreating scenes of events that occurred at the Chelsea and intertwining archival footage with different formats of film and video, Ferrara will create a film that breaks through the documentary mould into something that captures the essence of the Chelsea Hotel.
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The New York Film Festival wraps up today with a screening of Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (full coverage of the festival can be found here). Aronofsky (Requiem For A Dream), whose last film, The Fountain was panned by critics as an unwieldy mammoth of a picture, has returned to the ring with a scaled-down feature about a down-in-the-dumps, aging wrestler played by one-time "Motorcycle Boy," Mickey Rourke. The film received the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival and garnered excellent reviews at the Toronto Int'l Film Festival earlier this year for Rourke's career-defining performance, Aronofsky's direction, and Robert Siegel's script. It was bought by Fox Searchlight and will be released on December 19th. Slashfilm conducted a three-part interview with the director in September. It can be found here, here, and here.
Oh, man. On a somewhat related note, here's a YouTube video of a WWF (World Wrestling Federation) wrestling match between The Undertaker and Papa Shango (two of the scariest mofo's I'd ever seen as an eight-year old kid). I'll admit, I watched wrestling religiously in between episodes of Star Search and Perfect Strangers. I remember watching this original broadcast quite clearly. Ah, the gay ol' nineties.
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