Grey Gardens - Documentary & HBO Movie

[flyme2themoon]

Drew is a beautiful actress, has she ever been awarded an Oscar?
Where can I find the original?

I don't think she has won an Oscar...

You can buy the original at Amazon and Ebay.
Netflix has it as well.

 

[hfgl]

Oh,it looks wonderful!I must get the documentary.It's fascinating.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Do people want a separate thread for the original documentary, or combined, including the HBO remake? I have never seen the original, and just downloaded it today. Can't wait to watch it!

I think its fine this way, perhaps the title could indicate its for both, the movie and docu.

Oh and gius i dont think you have to see the docu in order to appreciate the movie, in some way its even better to see it afterwards imo.But definietly watch it someday, its brilliant.

 

[gius]

thank you

wishing to come across either in my trip to the library..

 

[XavierRaphael]

I've got an amazing discovery.
I was on some website and found the original documentary.
http://www.megavideo.com/?v=L05Y90VG
You can only watch 72 minutes every 54 minutes.
Theres a time limit for using MegaVideo!
Enjoy!

 

[XavierRaphael]

Only been watching for 5 mins, but Edie is such a fascinating woman!
Just so fascinating, and Drew embodies her perfectly!

 

[MissMagAddict]

Ad from Vanity Fair May
Source | Scanned by MMA

 

[gius]

i just came across the original the other night, by accident.. on knowledge network here...

it was unfortunately a bit boring for me ..
plus there was a party at my house so it was hard to hear..

i liked the clothes.. the scenery..
and i got interested in the parts where they grew untrustworthy about the strangers coming into the house.. thinking they don't know what's been taken in or out of the house
and also that edie doesn't seem to be very happy there, hating the country
but these scenes were very short, i wanted to hear more of that..

 

[loonaka]

I think the film is interesting, but I feel like they people behind it is giving us only one side to the two characters

 

[gius]

in the newspapers they wrote it was a filthy home
no electricity, running water
but the two women looked pretty clean
and edie appeared sweeping the corridor and staircase with a broom.

i remember them eating ice-cream
and also they cooked corn on the cob in a pot of water
so i wonder how they are heating or refrigerating that...

does the word "socialite" mean that they are wealthy?
it just seems to be a word to mean famous

 

[bebe_tc]

This is very interesting I am fascinated w/ these 2 women, look at what i found

http://www.greygardenscollections.com/about.html

 

[BerlinRocks]

from artforum
http://artforum.com/film/id=22540

This Old House

04.16.09


NEW YORK IS ABOUT NOTHING if not the gamble of promise, the stakes that can put people in the jackpot or in bankruptcy. Stories unfolding here, however many their convolutions and fine points, are mainly pulled along by that idea of possibility on which the city was founded. What the characters Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, play out is the fear, constantly bracing New York, that to move away is to cut oneself off from possibility, to leave the dream stunted. But that is only partially the truth. There is a greater fear the story taps: That the dream is only a fantasy, that promise is only an intoxicant, and that one is driving inebriated to an end in which, to be perverse, shards of the dream get lodged in the head like windshield glass.
The story clearly resonates. It has, after all, been told many times and in many ways, facilitating something of an industry. Most famously the Bouvier Beales themselves told it, in 1974, for the documentary Grey Gardens by Albert and David Maysles, earning them permanent places as “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” in whichever realm spawns Halloween costumes and drag personas. It has since been told in a second film by the Maysles, in a memoir written by a Bouvier Beale acquaintance, in several picture books, in countless fashion collections, and in the requisite Broadway musical. Now there is Grey Gardens, the HBO drama. Starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. A prequel, of sorts.
This, again, is a story of withdrawal, and the new movie tracks the forty years that the original only imparts in pieces. Phelan Beale gets a Mexican divorce from Big Edie, a would-be singer, leaving her to live with her accompanist in the house in East Hampton, Grey Gardens. Her inheritance from her father dwindles (the sum had been reduced after she attended her son's wedding in opera costume) along with the affections of her accompanist, who eventually leaves too. Big Edie calls Little Edie, a would-be star of stage or screen, back from New York, where she has been living at the Barbizon, planning “to audition,” and seeing a married man who happens to be Secretary of the Interior. Here the clock stops, in 1952. The house falls past the point of quaint disrepair, into condemnation. After a public to-do, Big Edie’s niece, who happens to be Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, donates several thousand dollars to the cause of renovation.


Which is around where the Maysles’ cameras entered, and around where the thrust of the HBO narrative ends (though scenes reenacting the documentary’s filming are intercut throughout). The two Edies, wound tight around each other, are at this point passing their days feeding their menagerie of cats and raccoons “luncheon,” bickering and listening to old recordings of Big Edie, holding up one memory against the other, trying to make an attractive picture. In a light harder than that which fades Long Island shingles gray, the two might be Blanche and Baby Jane Hudson. Having lacked the objective view for decades, they are now an assortment of idiosyncrasies, best illustrated by Little Edie’s “costumes”: towels or scarves wrapped around her head to cover her thinned hair; shorts under fishnets under skirts that can, she reveals, double as capes.
The path that Grey Gardens, in its many incarnations, has followed is that ironic tract that is our cultural digestive system, the same cycle that recently put Frank and April Wheeler up on screen as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. In this instance, two women find their spirits cracked enough that they can become not only the stars they wanted to be, at least versions of them, but also characters eagerly pursued (if we trust the interviews) by two much more popular stars. And it is unnerving the extent to which, in the HBO movie, these characters have been inhabited, particularly Big Edie by Jessica Lange. The way she carries the mannerisms through scenes that have no parallel in the original (which is where her counterpart is best, in studied mimicry) is shocking. This production is not about “interpretation” but about immaculate reflection.
It is actually quite a production, for all the prosthetics, vocal coaches (to teach that New York by way of Farmington dialect), and set dressers. There are the brass coffee tables and the floral wallpapers, the chipped dressers and the oriental rugs. The piano duets and the parties and the highballs in mason jars. The lit lamps, the set tables. All the familiar things that would give way to the animals infesting, the walls and ceilings crumbling, the sixty-year-old English ivy growing over the windows, thriving dry. This new movie insists on that dramatic trajectory, seeming meant to satisfy our need to know, as with any sad scenario, what went wrong where, and how does the story diverge from our own.
But part, a major part, of what drives the original Grey Gardens is all that is missing. What can the facts of this history tell us, anyway? What could possibly lead a mother and a daughter to retreat into a house for decades, away from everybody? What could lead a young woman to dance all day to the Virginia Institute military march? “Divorce” wouldn’t justify that. Neither would a mother’s loneliness. The flaws of the Edies that are tragic are not really literary, however much they recall, say, Miss Havisham, because the characters are elliptical to the core; they are repositories of broken images, broken memories, misidentifications. The refrain of “Tea for Two.” The soft-shoeing in the parlor. The hyperbole, and apoplexy. (“The most disgusting, atrocious thing ever to happen in America.”) When in the dramatization Little Edie returns to New York for the Grey Gardens premiere and throws her bouquet of white roses into the audience, we pass the scene off as typical Hollywood closure, which it is. But there the incident is found, in the newspaper archives. Little Edie’s cabaret act at Reno Sweeney seems the too-obvious finale to this vaudevillian performance. But that happened too. When Big Edie declines comment to a newspaper reporter, saying, “It’s all in the movie,” we can only roll our eyes. But that one, I think, was written up somewhere as well. We come away knowing that these are people born of screen, and that is where their tragedy lies.
Grey Gardens premieres on HBO Saturday, April 18th at 8 PM. For more information and other showtimes, click here.

Kyle Bentley

 

[MissMagAddict]

^That's a generous review... the two other reviews I've read so far this week have been scathing at best.

Thanks for posting Berlin

 

[Ievut]

Can you compare HBO movie to original documentary?

 

[tigerrouge]

For anyone in the UK, the Drew Barrymore movie version is on Channel 4 on Christmas Day (9pm).

 

[funkystar]

For anyone in the UK, the Drew Barrymore movie version is on Channel 4 on Christmas Day (9pm).

oooo, thanks for posting that will definitely Sky Plus it

 

[tullepen]

I saw the HBO one and Drew was fantastic.

 

[tigerrouge]

Channel 4 is showing the 1975 one right now - when I saw it on the listings credited as "Grey Gardens (2009)", I thought it was a repeat of the movie, but it's the original documentary.

 

[Northern Star]

I didn't know too much about these women, but the HBO movie was fantastic.
Jessica Lange was superb and Drew Barrymore totally captured the eccentricity and vulnerability of this clearly affected girl/woman.
Very sad but at least they lived full lives.