Make Me Famous
Indie doc comes to Indy and is well worth a look.
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I didn’t know much about the 1980s New York City art scene prior to watching writer/editor/producer/director Brian Vincent’s documentary “Make Me Famous,” which will be showing at Indianapolis’ Kan-Kan Cinema (1258 Windsor St.) on Friday, May 17 at 7 p.m. with a post-screening Q&A featuring Vincent and his co-writer/co-producer/wife Heather Spore afterwards.
Sure, I’d seen and enjoyed noted New York artist Julian Schnabel’s docudrama “Basquiat” about Jean-Michel Basquiat as a teenager and kept up with Schnabel’s work over the following years (his “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” is an all-time favorite of mine). I also distinctly remember Keith Haring’s AIDS activism artwork that was so prevalent in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I wasn’t familiar with “Make Me Famous” subject Edward Brezinski prior to seeing the film and he never gained the fame of Schnabel, Basquiat or Haring, but I very much enjoyed learning about him and the scene in which he worked and acted out against.
Brezinski hailed from Detroit and was the only child of two aged parents. As a teenager he learned about and glommed onto German Expressionism at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Brezinski moved to NYC in the late ‘70s and was a fixture of the art scene (for good and for ill) through the ‘80s and ‘90s.
He’d hold art openings at his Lower East Side apartment (directly across the street from a men’s shelter) and was as well known for his misbehavior (throwing a glass of wine in the face of Italian gallery owner Annina Nosei, eating a poisoned donut from artist Robert Gober’s installation) as he was for his well-regarded paintings.
Brezinski, like his father before him, was an alcoholic and the disease often dotted his work. He eventually became a squatter in Berlin in the early 2000s. Vincent and Spore alongside Brezinski’s artist friends Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger travel to France in order to investigate whether Brezinski actually died in 2007.
“Make Me Famous” often oscillates between silly and serious. It’s fun to see stills and archival footage of the likes of Andy Warhol, Deborah Harry and Madonna and Vincent scored a cool and informative interview with actor and playwright Eric Bogosian. The documentary also highlights Brezinski’s homosexuality, his relationship with fellow painter David McDermott and the AIDS crisis of the ‘80s that so radically affected the NYC art scene and the LES. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to hear Van Cook recall losing AIDS-positive friends to increasingly radical forms of suicide, i.e. committing seppuku and leaping out of a window onto a spiked fence below.
Vincent seems like an interesting figure (the Julliard grad co-starred in the Patrick Swayze vehicle “Black Dog” and co-wrote with co-star Randy Travis the tune “My Greatest Fear” for the movie’s soundtrack) and he’s made an interesting movie. If you’re in Indy and have an interest in the NYC art scene of the ‘80s or want to learn more about it a trip to Kan-Kan may very well be in order.