Ray Pride

"Sketches of Frank Gehry" by Sydney Pollack is a unique documentary, an ongoing appreciation-cum-bitch session between a pair of successful men in their seventies who must navigate the ego and caprice of other men who would give them the millions to practice their respective crafts of architecture and moviemaking.

Pollack, the director of sleek romances and superbly crafted comedies like "Three Days of the Condor" and "Tootsie," had never worked in nonfiction. Five years ago, Gehry prompted Pollack to attempt a portrait and a patron, one of a dozen credited producers, offered seed money. While combining interviews with peers and artists of other forms--Philip Johnson, Bob Geldof, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Dennis Hopper, Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp--with footage of Gehry's major projects, especially the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, Pollack also captures their own conversations about the creative urge, with revelations both dark and light.

There's a great moment where Gehry says with gusto, "That is so stupid-looking! It's great!" Pollack agrees: "I know! I love that. I love that." Did their friendship encompass knowing him to be able to make an observation like that? "No," Pollack says quickly. "My knowledge of Frank was gleaned from... We connected in a way that you sometimes do with people. You can't explain it all. We were just both bitching so much, I think, that we found common ground. I was pissed off and angry, he was pissed off and angry, and we were talking about how hard it is to work for these dopes that we all work for. Y'know, how everybody was a fool!" Pollack laughs. "The same things that everybody says where you have to consider a lot of people's judgments in what you do. So you're always mocking them and bitching about them." But the two of you are in a rarefied situation, where what does $100 million buy and what do people who are giving $100 million want? "Yeah. Exactly. And we got close on that basis. But I had no idea about his art, really. I used to go to dinner at his house with he and [his wife] and I thought the house was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. I'd get in the car and I'd drive home with my wife, and I'd say, I can't imagine living in that place. I don't know how you live there, but I begin to understand it now. It's begun to be beautiful to me. I think I hit a big turning point in his work with Bilbao, in '97, when it opened. I was there for opening day and I was just completely unprepared for how emotional I thought it was. If you had said to me you can get goose pimples and be brought to tears by a building, I would've said you're insane. But that's what happened to me. On Charlie Rose's show, they had it live when Philip Johnson walked in... and started to sob. They couldn't stop him, he couldn't stop crying. Live! He just looked up at that thing, it's unbelievable, it's moving--it's really moving."

"I spent a lot of time feeling flattered and pleased that Frank asked me," Pollack says of his shifting gears. "But petrified of doing it, because I honestly don't know anything about documentaries nor about architecture. I didn't think it was a good idea, y'know? He kept saying, `That's why you're perfect.' And I tried to analyze, what does that mean. And I thought, `Okay, what he means is, you won't make a documentary that's filled with scholarly academicians who are gonna make theoretical pronouncements about architecture. And you don't know anything about making documentaries, so maybe you'll find a form for this documentary like I try to find forms for my buildings that aren't beholden to tradition and everything that's gone before it."

In the most compelling moments of Pollack's film, Gehry admits that he was angry when he was younger, and leaving a marriage behind and changing his name were important to fashioning a new and successful identity. Pollack, a gifted screen actor, also has a new identity as interviewer, providing the rare intimacy of two peers observing each other. "Well, it's a very, very uncomfortable thing. Because you say, what kind of hubris is this to make a film about a guy, an artist, and then stick yourself in it? It happened purely by accident. It would happen because I needed cutaways. I just had my own one camera there and I needed a cutaway, so I said to my producer, go, go, get another angle for me, so I can cut out the boring stuff `cause I don't have coverage the way I do in a [fiction] film. And he starts shooting both of us. And then the editor, she was assembling stuff, kept showing me stuff with me in it! And I kept saying, dammit, get that out of there! They would take it and then she would put it back in and say, it works better this way. And then Frank kept saying, you know what's great about this? We're having a conversation. And you gotta be in this with me, you gotta be in this with me. And so finally I got talked into doing it that way. And y'know, I was scared to death that people were going to look at it and say, `Isn't that a little bit narcissistic, my boy?' Y'know? But they don't. I think they like it."

"Sketches of Frank Gehry" opens Friday at the Music Box.

(2006-06-06)

Also by Ray Pride

Patriotic Gore
Two bits of testimony to the strength of "An Inconvenient Truth": in the first week of its release, on both Fox and in the Washington Post, the name of Vice President Al Gore has been linked to Adolf Hitler; and Variety's charts for the past weekend noted that a four-screen tally of $365,787 was the highest per-screen total ever for a documentary
(2006-05-30)

Tip of the Week
Aside from one of the greatest titles of all time, Frank Borzage's eclectic comedy-romance-melodrama, set in Paris and Manhattan, "History Is Made at Night" (1937) contains some of the most jaw-droppingly agile shifts of tone in classical Hollywood screenplay construction
(2006-05-30)

Summer Guide Movies: June
"Three Times"; "Wordplay"
(2006-05-24)

Summer Guide Movies: July
"Spirit of the Beehive"; "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
(2006-05-24)

Summer Guide Movies: August
(2006-05-24)

Rush Hour 3
(2006-05-23)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-23)

Art Break
(2006-05-16)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-16)

Murder ballad
(2006-05-16)

Artists and models
(2006-05-09)

Tip of the Week
(2006-05-09)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment