Complete cover art for HBO's Grey Gardens DVD now available

The DVD for HBO's Grey Gardens comes out next Tuesday...

Grey Gardens
HBO Films DVD

...and now the cover art is available! Look closely at the back cover to see the DVD extras. An audio commentary with director Michael Sucsy and producers Lucy Barzun Donnelly and Rachel Horovitz is included, as well as a Grey Gardens: Then and Now feature.

Thanks to Dfernando for sending this in!

Jessica Lange, photographer, Oscan winning actress, and potential Emmy nominee

I do hope she gets nominated, and I hope Drew does as well!

From Daily Beast, by Amanda Fortini, on July 9, 2009

Jessica Lange's Spine of Steel

Jessica Lange will likely earn an Emmy nod next week for Grey Gardens, and is now an acclaimed photographer. Amanda Fortini talks to the actress about aging, love, and her most iconic roles.

Only a handful of living American actresses belong in the pantheon of true talents: Meryl Streep definitely; Joanne Woodward, Sissy Spacek and Sally Field, formerly; Jodie Foster, perhaps. And then there is Jessica Lange. In the course of her thirty-three-year career, Lange has received six Oscar nominations and two statues (Best Supporting for Tootsie in 1983, Best Actresses for Blue Sky in 1995), earning her not only a place on the film world’s Mount Olympus, but arguably some astral plane of her own. Though she is a star in the Old Hollywood sense—the name Jessica Lange, whether or not you have watched her films, is familiar, even iconic—she is still known primarily for her gifts as an actress. Famous as she is, she does not suffer from the syndrome of so many celebrities today: Jessica Lange the person with a personal life never eclipses Jessica Lange the actor in a role.

On a recent bright, warm afternoon in Beverly Hills, Lange sat for a cup of tea in the garden of the Four Seasons Hotel. She had come to discuss her role as Edith Bouvier Beale (aka "Big Edie") in the HBO film Grey Gardens, for which she is expected to receive an Emmy nomination next week, as well as an upcoming exhibition of her photographic work. ( "Jessica Lange: 50 Photographs" opens on July 11 at the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica; it will hang through September.) "Oh, real tea!" she exclaims, as the waitress delivers a pot of loose-leaf English Breakfast, complete with tea-ritual accessories. Despite her dignified, almost regal good looks—Lange is statuesque, with alpine-high cheekbones—there is something girlish about the 60 year-old actress. Her eyes smile with a sense of curiosity and mischief. Yet she also has the serene, centered air of someone who has lived her life on her own terms.

"I just came here for the day, literally," Lange, says, in that distinct voice, rich and caramel-smooth but with a faint lilt of the Upper Midwest. Unlike almost any actor with a full-fledged film career, Lange has never called Los Angeles home. Instead, she and her longtime partner, playwright and actor Sam Shepard, lived for nine years in Stillwater, Minnesota, a town not far from where Lange was born and raised, and then, for another nine years, on a farm in Virginia. "I left New York when my children were little, just to, you know, raise them in a different environment," she says. "Then I figured I’d done enough of…" she trails off, as she tends to when the conversation turns personal. She and Shepard now live in Manhattan’s West Village, but they keep "a cabin" in Northern Minnesota.

As Lange talks, it becomes evident that, like most charismatic people, she is a tangle of interesting contradictions: sexy yet self-contained, straight-shooting but also skittish. Jack Nicholson, her co-star on The Postman Always Rings Twice, famously called her "a delicate fawn crossed with a Buick." (He may also have been referring a certain emotional heft—in her case, a fragile concreteness—that frequently characterizes those from the middle of the country. "Good solid upbringing, isn’t it? she asks, upon learning of my Iowa roots. And then: "I think it gets you through some tough spots.")

When I ask about the secret to her enduring relationship with Shepard—the pair, who met in 1982 on the set of Frances, have never married but have been together for more than 25 years—she coils up ever so slightly. "I don’t know," she says, growing quiet and charmingly flustered, "You’ve got to have some deep connection… it’s a lot of history and knowing somebody really well, and… It’s being interested in somebody after 25 years; they still fascinate you." (The couple has two children together, a boy and a girl, ages 21 and 22; Lange also has a 27 year-old daughter with Mikhail Barishnikov.)

Lange is more at ease discussing Grey Gardens, her latest film project. Directed by Michael Sucsy, the film is a re-imagining of the popular 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, the brothers who trained their camera’s cold eye on Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, also named Edith ("little Edie"), the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy. The reclusive pair was found living together in bohemian squalor (feeding bread to raccoons and feral cats, taking meals in their beds) in their rambling old house, nicknamed "Grey Gardens," in East Hampton; a few years later, the Maysles arrived to film. Big and Little Edie (played in the remake by Drew Barrymore) surely rank as one of the most flawed mother-daughter pairs in history—they break the sound barrier of co-dependency—with Big Edie assuaging her loneliness by guilt-tripping her daughter into remaining with her at home, and Little Edie subordinating herself to her mother as a way of avoiding the harsh realities of the outside world.

The HBO film tunnels back into the past to recreate the circumstances that led to the Beales’ baroque dysfunction. "It’s a great role," says Lange, "The scope of it. The fact that I could play this woman over a forty-year time period was really exciting…to try to imagine or re-imagine her life earlier, I mean, for an actor it was just luscious, you know?"

During the forty-year period the film covers, the Edies evolve into a single maladjusted organism. Each is resentful of the other—and, crucially, angry with herself—for being unable to escape their mutual dependency. This narrative of grievance forms the backbone of both films; for Big and Little Edie, the issue, at every moment, is the entirety of their shared life. "You just can’t stand that the whole world is going to know the truth… about how you’ve held me back all these years!" Little Edie hollers at her mother. "You don’t leave—you say you will but you never do," her mother counters. As is the case with most familial relationships, the truth is too complicated to parse. Their symbiosis is both nightmare and fantasy.

Lange plays Big Edie with to-the-letter precision. Edith Beale’s voice, her loopy singing, her casual cruelty ("You can’t dance at all," she tells her daughter), her unwavering but pathological determination to remain tethered to Grey Gardens: the exactitude with which Lange portrays all this is eerie. But Lange strove for mimesis. When the voice coach hired to train her asked whether she would prefer to perform her own version of "Tea for Two," one of Big Edie’s amateur singing numbers, or to study the documentary and replicate it, Lange chose the latter. "I said, you can’t get any better than this, and there’s no reason to change a beat. So we studied every—she pauses for emphasis—single—pauses again—tiny facial expression, gesture, voice, everything." Lange, in fact, continued to watch the original documentary throughout the shoot. "It would be the first thing I’d do when I’d come to the set in the morning; everyday, I’d put it in. And I would listen to her voice, because as soon as I found her voice, I could find the character."

Still, the role presented its challenges, even for a veteran like Lange. Grey Gardens was, for instance, the first film for which Lange had to sing. "I’m thrilled I got away with it, you know?" (When Lange played Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams, she lip-synched.) The actress also felt the pressure of playing an "iconic character," for which there existed tangible, visual, historical evidence. "You had the voice, the accent, all the mannerisms, and to try to thread it all together so that it was believable… and then to sing, and to dance…" she says. She knew that if she got it wrong, the film’s many obsessed fans—they watch the documentary like others watch Star Trek or Donnie Darko—would inform her of her errors. "I hadn’t watched the documentary when it first came out. I wasn’t, you know, one of those people," she says, jokingly referring to the Grey Gardens disciples.

But for Lange, there was only one approach, the one she has chosen throughout her career: to throw herself into the part with unselfconscious abandon. "I said, ‘Ok, you can’t second-guess yourself and you cannot be cautious... I’ve done this before with other parts, and I wanted to be reckless again, as an actor, instead of cautious." It’s not hard to guess the roles to which Lange was referring. She memorably played Frances Farmer, the actresses who was unfairly committed in Frances, and Carly Marshall, the unstable housewife in Blue Sky. On stage, she inhabited Mary Tyrone, sunk deep into her morphine addiction, and Blanche DuBois, sunk just as deep into despair.

Lange has frequently portrayed women teetering on the edge, those who the world of the play calls crazy but the audience in the theater might not. Her specialty is the seemingly fragile woman with, as she calls it, "a spine of steel." Big Edie Beale was no exception. "She said, screw it, I’m going to do what I want to do." Lange particularly valued the part because meaty roles have become increasingly uncommon for actresses of a certain age. "At this age," Lange says, "for an actress… to keep working at that level and quality of work that you used to… that’s rare now."

Though she never says so explicitly, one wonders whether Lange’s serious pursuit of photography is an attempt to continue to make the highest quality work, albeit in a different medium. Her photographs are, in a word, impressive. Grainy black-and-white images, shot with a Leica M6 and without a flash at weird, unexpected angles, they project a discomfiting atmosphere of mystery. (You can view them here.) Looking at them, one feels simultaneously lonesome and connected. Many of her photos are intensely intimate (a couple embracing on a dance floor, a father dandling his daughter), and it’s clear the actress is as talented at slipping into a situation and snapping a candid as she is at slipping into a character.

Perhaps, too, her photographs are an attempt to take control, to be, for once, the viewer rather than the viewed. Lange says as much: "The thing of constantly being observed, which you are as an actor, as a photographer, you’ve got that instrument, that camera, between you and whatever is your subject. I love the anonymity of photography." Or, as punk poetess Patti Smith, who wrote the introduction to 50 Photographs by Jessica Lange, a compilation of her work, puts it: "As an actress, she has been captured by the same light she is drawn to."

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Texans: Want to be in Grey Gardens the Musical?

It looks as though the roles of the Edies have been cast already, but some supporting roles are available!

Be sure to book an audition appointment.

From DFW Theater

Grey Gardens—WaterTower

Auditions Begin

Sunday, July 19

Auditions End

Sunday, July 19

Equity?

Yes

Tell them you saw the notice at DFWTheater!

Audition Information

Grey Gardens
Book by Doug Wright; Music by Scott Frankel; Lyrics by Michael Korie
Directed by Terry Martin
Musical Direction by James McQuillen

Sunday, July 19 from 5 PM to 8 PM
Callbacks will be held the same evening at 8 PM

Addison Theatre Centre 15650 Addison Road 75001

Performance Dates

October 1—25 (with a possible extension through October 31)

Rehearsals Begin

September 7

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Please prepare 16 bars each of two contrasting songs.
An accompanist will be provided.
Equity and Non-Equity roles are available.
Audition appointment required.
Scripts available for perusal at WTT Box Office.

To Book an Audition Appointment

Copy and paste the following link into your web browser:
https://instant-scheduling.com/sch.php?kn=204069&typId=17154&step=2

Roles Available

• George Gould Strong—age 40—50; Dapper; plays piano extremely well
• Brooks, Sr./Brooks, Jr.—age 20—40; African-American
• Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr./Jerry—age 20—30; “a charming Greek god”
• “Jackie” Bouvier—age 12; Beautiful brunette girl.
• Lee Bouvier—age 8; Brunette. The tomboy.

All other roles have been cast.

More Information

Behind the closed doors of a dilapidated mansion, alongside fifty cats and piles of rubbish, live Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little Edie”—the eccentric relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Go inside the walls of two shockingly different worlds: the resplendent Grey Gardens of 1941 and the Grey Gardens of 1973—a crumbling shadow of its former self. Based upon the groundbreaking documentary film by David and Albert Maysles, Grey Gardens is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of two women whose combative and codependent relationship is the one pillar in a constantly eroding house.

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Grey Gardens News on Twitter!

This raccoon has just started a Twitter account, so you can keep track of updates to this blog that way. The address is http://twitter.com/GreyGardensNews

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Michael Sucsy talks Grey Gardens to Social Class magazine

This interesting interview includes two tidbits that I hadn't known to be true: Edie really did run out on her deb party (as shown in the HBO film) and she really did throw roses over the balcony of the Paris theater at the screening of Grey Gardens (also seen in the film)!

From Social Class magazine, by Devorah Rose, on June 2009

Michael Sucsy

Grey Gardens has Emmy competition

Despite the competition, I'm still hoping the pundits are correct!

From Gold Derby, by tomoneil, on July 4, 2009

Inside track: Emmy race for best TV movie

All pundits presume "Grey Gardens" is a shoo-in to win best TV movie at the Emmys, and it probably is. It reaped rapturous acclaim from TV critics and stars a double Oscar champ (Jessica Lange), plus Drew Barrymore, in a biopic based upon real people (Jackie Kennedy's kooky relatives). Oh, yeah, it helps that it was aired by HBO, the network that's won this category 13 out of the last 15 years. Sixteen years ago, it tied itself with two victories in the one race ("Barbarians at the Gate," "Stalin")!

But watch out for another HBO film, "Into the Storm." The pay channel's previous biopic about Winston Churchill battling Nazis, "A Gathering Storm," won this Emmy battle in 2002, as did lots of other biopics about WWII figures: "Warm Springs" (2005), "Truman" (1996) and "Stalin" (1993). Another WWII drama is keenly in the running too, "Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," starring Anna Paquin as a Pole rescuing Jews during the Holocaust, but it was telecast by CBS last year, not HBO.

HBO's "Taking Chance" has a good chance of a nomination because it deals with America's current war. Kevin Bacon stars as a real-life Marine who escorts the body of a fallen comrade back to America from Iraq.

The focus of Lifetime's "Prayers for Bobby"—a gay teen shamed into suicide—has special resonance among California voters in the shadow of the state's shame over passage of Proposition 8.

Watch out for two stealth entries here: drama series competing with long-form episodes‐Fox TV's "24" (Emmy winner, best drama series 2006) and PBS' "Wallander" (BAFTA winner, best drama series, 2009).

Best TV Movie

(Front-runners)

• "Accidental Friendship"
• "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler"
• "Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story"
• "Grey Gardens"
• "Into the Storm"
• "Jesse Stone: Thin Ice"
• "My Zinc Bed"
• "Prayers for Bobby"
• "Taking Chance"
• "24 Redemption"
• "Wallander: One Step Beyond"

(Possible)

• "A Number"
• "America"
• "Coco Chanel"
• "Front of the Class"
• "The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice"
• "Living Proof"
• "Loving Leah"
• "A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa"
• "Natalee Holloway"
• "Pedro"
• "Sybil"

(Long Shots)

• "The Christmas Choir"
• "Flirting with Forty"
• "Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story"
• "Merry Christmas, Drake and Josh"
• "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year"
• "My Fake Fiance"
• "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving"
• "Safe Harbor"
• "Sex and Lies in Sin City: The Ted Binion Scandal"
• "Special Delivery"
• "The Two Mr. Kissels"
• "Will You Marry Me"

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Grey Gardens coloring books and brooch in the press

Grey Gardens is getting a lot of love lately!

By David Crotty, on July 3, 2009

The Coloring Books and the Brooch

Just wanted you to know that the coloring books are going to be in the Aug/Sept issue of BUST MAGAZINE.

I think there's going to be a story about them.

I will let you know when I get my copy in the mail to make sure it's in there.

AND the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles will be selling the brooch in their gift shop in conjunction with the EMMY'S Exhibit.

It may also be in their annual Emmy Costumes Exhibit! Keep our fingers crossed.

A romper inspired by Little Edie Beale's wardrobe

As the designer says, "Let's see Edie trump Audrey as a style icon, just once!"

From Exuve, by Olivesingley, via this very blog

Eddie Romper

This breezy and light wide leg romper incites memories of Grey Gardens glam.

Materials: Silk Cotton blend in dusty colours (also to cover buttons)

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Trailer for Cat Ladies documentary

Although not specifically Grey Gardens-related, this documentary may be of interest to Grey Gardens fans. This raccoon is certainly going to keep an eye out for it!

From YouTube, by HotDocsFest, on March 25, 2009

Hot Docs 2009 Trailers: CAT LADIES

Hello kitty! Whether they dote on one cat or hoard hundreds, women can be unjustly derided as "crazy cat ladies." With humour and compassion, this film delves into the feelings of love, loss and loneliness behind these very real attachments.

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Grey Gardens the documentary and HBO film, side by side

Very interesting! The HBO film (from the filming to the performance to the sets and costumes) almost perfectly duplicates the original documentary.

From YouTube, by FandeLuxe, on June 19, 2009

Grey Gardens vs Grey Gardens

original vs. movie

That said, what makes the HBO film so amazing are the scenes that weren't a part of the original documentary, that seem like they very well could have been a part of it!

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