Tag Archives: featured

Production Diary

Day 158: Pick A Date by

IMG_4080

Today, we lock picture, which means we make the final decisions about what images will be, and what images won’t be, in the film. After that, we move on to several weeks working on the sound — and working once again with the sound designer, Damian Volpe, who has been my brilliant collaborator now for 16 years — but as of some point this evening, the movie will be fully edited. I’m glad to say I feel very calm about it. There are a few last choices that Fonzie and I need to make, but after many months of listening, and taking in, and responding, to viewer’s notes and thoughts, I feel now that I know the movie very, very well. And I know how to finish it up. More…

Production Diary

Day 147: My Boyfriend Boris by

STA_3733

My boyfriend Boris loves the movie. I can sleep at night. That sounds more facetious maybe than I mean it, because I mean it. But sometimes one strong response — he’s a bad liar — is the thing you can hold on to, through the other bumps, other responses.  It also means that in the year ahead, I can keep his opinion, his pride, in my head and know that I have an audience. Someone close to me understood what I was up to, and thinks I succeeded. More…

Gay New York

Dear Biddy B by

JimBidgood

Our girl Biddy B- aka the magnificent photographer, filmmaker and wit James Bidgood – is back this week to tackle two problems, one of etiquette and the other of sexual appetites. Have a problem that needs a-solvin’? Send it in to adambaran1@gmail.com and we’ll get you an answer!

Dear Biddy,

During a recent excursion to avoid the perils of hurricane Irene, I stumbled upon an instance of disastrous host/guest etiquette. This rainsoaked affair involved a small cluster of early-20s blond girls who invited my friend and I (both gay men) to seek shelter in their “food and booze stocked” abode. We entered baring gifts, as any gracious guest would, and proceeded to construct a veritable cornucopia of food upon their table. They asked us to tape their windows for them, as their short arms prohibited them from doing, what they intoned, was a man’s job. Back in the kitchen, they stared quietly out at us, as they nibbled hungrily on the food that we had supplied. They proceeded to prepare a lavish meal and then as I watched in silent horror sat at the table before us and slowly ate without once offering us either food or beverage. After their meal had been consumed, our main host related, “I have a bottle of wine that’s been open in the fridge for a few days, now. I’m not sure if it’s any good.” I naturally passed. I am from the south, as was our blond host and I was fundamentally flummoxed by such behavior. —–(edited) —–Do I need to keep better company? Is old fashioned etiquette dead? Or does it just go home to Paris for the spring? Well, I am not.

Faithfully yours, Bradford
——-
Dear Bradford,

Well, Dahling, it would be equally cheeky of me to impugn any person or persons level of intelligence. Lord knows I myself am by no meter’s measure the brightest bulb in the chandelier and you convey the impression of being a very well educated fellow, although perhaps a mite loquacious. However, Dahling, I can not help but wonder —can you spell c.u.n.t.? More…

Gay New York

The World According to Tusk by

RNR Fag Bar Go-Go Dancers

Tuesday nights in the late ’80s meant Dean Johnson’s Rock and Roll Fag Bar at the World. Getting near the corner of Avenue C on 2nd Street back then involved passing a gauntlet of thin, aggressive guys offering heroin and it’s accoutrements: “need works?” they asked, “horse?” Or, “scag?” It wasn’t uncommon to see society’s dregs lying in doorways with a syringe dangling from their arm, blood dribbling out of the puncture. Dodge a crack head or two on the way, some beggars, a guy pissing against a tenement, and for your effort a gay paradise awaited. More…

Production Diary

Day 133: A Piece Of Meat by

keepthelightsonedit

I guess its been a long time, because I forgot the ups and downs of editing, and how vulnerable it can feel. You are on a high, riding through the cutting, the scenes falling into place, and then you are opening the door, and you let people in — damn their opinions, the movie they are making in their head, as opposed to yours — and suddenly crash, bang, boom, and you wake up feeling like its the end of the world. And then the next day, you are back at it, in the middle, everything that was set becomes un-set, all the smooth cuts that you were impressing yourself with, you break apart, and then the roughness is back. The thing becomes alive again. More…

Art & Autobiography

Untitled (The Istanbul Biennial, 2011) by

Vesna Pavlovic's "Search for Landscapes"

A mountain of 175 pounds of candies “individually wrapped in variously colored cellophane” piled up in the corner of a gallery. The candy is unguarded, so the viewer is encouraged to take some. Each and every day, the remaining candy is weighed and more is added until the pile goes back to the same 175 pounds. This is Untitled (Ross), one of the most poignant works by Felix Gonzales-Torres, the Cuban American artist who lived and worked in NYC in the ’80s and early ’90s. This beautiful installation underscores the process as an intrinsic part of the art piece, which is constantly being re-created, and never finished.

175 pounds corresponds to the “ideal” weight that a doctor established for his patient Ross Laycock, the artist’s partner, when he was diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-80’s. Gonzales-Torres was once asked who his ideal audience was, and he answered without skipping a beat; “My audience is Ross.” Ross died in ’91. The diminishing amount of candy parallels Ross’ suffering and weight loss prior to his death, but the replenishment stipulated by the artist metaphorically grants him eternal life. More…

Production Diary

Day 126: The Best Places to Scratch Your Film by

keepthelightson-filmscratch

It feels like Christmas. After a two-week pause—somewhat unexpected, but these things happen—I’m back in the editing room this morning for the first time in weeks. What I have noticed in the meantime is how much more stressful real life is than working on a movie. I’ve missed the single-minded focus that it gives you, and also the way in which all the rest of life seems to disappear when you allow the tunnel vision, which is a movie. I begin to think that “workaholism” is not a ridiculous term, if you make the comparison to how work, like all the other “isms,” can sometimes be the best relief to the anxieties of everyday. I’ve indulged in worse vices in my life, but in this decade, this one seems to be front and center. More…

Art & Autobiography

WTC View: My Autobiography of New York After 9/11 by

Brian Sloan on WTC View set

On the night of September 10th, 2001, I placed a roommate ad on the Village Voice website for my 2BR share in the West Village. The next morning I woke up to emergency sirens and witnessed the attack on the World Trade Center from my bedroom window. After a harrowing day, I left my apartment to stay at my boyfriend’s place in Brooklyn. Then, a few days later when I called my machine (remember doing that?) to get messages, there were a number of people who had called asking about my roommate ad. Some people even called me the day after 9/11, casually asking if they could “stop by and see the place.”

This was the strange but true story that was the inspiration for my first full-length play and later feature film, WTC View. It tells the story of a man who, like myself, placed a roommate ad for his apartment on September 10th. Because of this fact, people often mistake the play for being autobiographical. This is a situation that I’m somewhat familiar with because it’s happened before with other works of fiction and films I have written. In some ways, I find this flattering because I think it means people find the story so believable and real that it must be true. However, I also find it somewhat annoying because it assumes I just write down everything that happens to me and that there is little imagination involved in my writing. Still, the burning question remains…is it true or not? Is this the story of your life? Well, here’s my attempt at an answer. More…

Art & Autobiography

Weekend Reading: Director Andrew Haigh on Writing for An Imaginary Audience by

Weekend13

By now you’ve probably heard so much about director Andrew Haigh’s wonderful new gay romantic drama Weekend that you may wonder if the film is really as good as the hype. Happily, as those of us lucky enough to see it before it was released in theaters today know, it is. Haigh is also as charming and easy to talk to as his film is to watch. After a grueling week of interviews and press, I met up with Haigh to talk about how his own sex diary inspired his new film, and his somewhat ambivalent feelings about his success on the eve of his film’s release. Note: There are a few plot points in the conversation that follows that you may not want spoiled. So see the film tonight and then come back and read the interview – yes, you guessed it – this weekend.

Adam: Chris’ character in the film is a character who is an artist and who’s making this kind of diary-like tape recordings of his experiences, cataloguing his experiences with his lovers and I’m wondering if you have any of your own sort of similar journaling thing like he does?
Andrew: I did what Russell did. I had a list that I kept password protected on my computer. I definitely used to come back straight after it happened and write a piece, like Russell does, about that person. It’s crazy when I look back at them now and read the kind of things that I said. They’re always quite sexual and I would just describe who the person was, and what happened. It was weird. It was like I would write it for someone else, even though I had no intention of ever showing that to someone. I came out quite late so it was probably a way for me just to deal with suddenly being out and sleeping with people. I suppose that list inspired elements of the film because I did look back at it before I started writing the script. Although the people on that list aren’t in the film.

Your autobiographical filmmaking -
Doesn’t go that far! More…

Avery Willard

The Sirens by

Untitled portrait by Avery Willard

In our last posting on Avery Willard, we spoke with the legendary drag performer Adrian about his friendship with Willard. This week, we turn to Amanda Hammett, one of the members of the hard-working team helping to put together In Search of Avery Willard. In the following post, Amanda gives us a little more background on Willard’s talents as a photographer and how he was seen by the photography community at the time. She also shares four astonishing shots of female impersonators from Willard’s never-before-seen collection. Here’s Amanda…

We were overwhelmed when we attempted to highlight Avery’s photographic work. The New York Public Library has ten boxes of his photos. As we started to examine the work, we noticed that Avery’s reputation as a master of the portrait was well earned – and he earned his income from it – most notably for stars on Broadway. But he didn’t stop there, moving from actors to friends, ad models to female impersonators to animals.

In one of our interviews for the documentary, photographer John Cox, who was Avery’s friend and collaborator, reflected on Avery’s work: More…