I'm expecting more images soon, but, for now, enjoy this one!
From Women's Wear Daily, by Venessa Lau, on March 31, 2009
The Beale Deal
Grey Gardens-inspired fashions
Costume designer Catherine Marie Thomas discusses her work costuming Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange for HBO's "Grey Gardens".
Oh, my!
I am told that advertising for HBO's upcoming Grey Gardens are up all over the city and in Los Angeles. I've seen posters (see below), but I haven't seen billboards or bus benches. If any of you have photos of the billboards or bus benches, please send them in!
From Flickr, by litandmore, on March 31, 2009
From Flickr, by muuuusic, on March 31, 2009
From Flickr, by lifeaskew, on March 23, 2009
HBO has just updated their website for their upcoming Grey Gardens, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. The site now features a synopsis, cast and crew, photos and video, and community. Be sure to check out their community section. In addition to linking to this blog (thanks!), they have a Facebook page with lots of great content!
From HBO
In 1973, filmmakers Albert and David Maysles entered the strange world of "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale, two charming eccentrics who were relatives of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Spending six weeks with the reclusive mother and daughter who chose to live in squalor and almost total isolation in a decaying, 28-room mansion in East Hampton, the Maysles captured their day-to-day life in its raw, uncensored, captivatingly honest moments for a documentary entitled "Grey Gardens." Little did anyone know that the 100-minute documentary would catapult the two women from virtual obscurity to cult status as their legacy grew in depth and stature over the years.
Thirty-five years later, using the documentary as a framework, director-writer Michael Sucsy's original story for GREY GARDENS offers a wry, behind-the-scenes look at the Beales and their unique mother-daughter bond.
Told over the span of four decades, the film focuses on their glamorous and well-heeled lives long before the making of the documentary and on the circumstances behind their riches-to-rags story.
Drew Barrymore stars as "Little Edie" and Jessica Lange stars as "Big Edie" in GREY GARDENS. Directed by Michael Sucsy from a story by Sucsy and teleplay by Sucsy and Patricia Rozema, this HBO Films production recounts the early years of the mother-daughter duo, as well as chronicling the making of the iconic documentary by the Maysles brothers. Malcolm Gets and Daniel Baldwin co-star, with Ken Howard and Jeanne Tripplehorn. Lucy Barzun Donnelly, Rachael Horovitz and Michael Sucsy are executive producers; David Coatsworth produces.
Unfortunately, it's not "embeddable", so you have to go to Yahoo! TV to view it. Still, it's great!
This video now appears on YouTube.
From YouTube
"Inside Grey Gardens" promo trailer from HBO
A promotional trailer for HBO's upcoming Grey Gardens. It stars Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, and airs on HBO on April 18, 2009.
There's a never-before-seen and very cute photo of Drew and Jessica Lange in the April issue of Elle magazine.
Thanks to The Drewseum for sharing this!
From Elle Magazine, on April 2009
To apply, sign up using this form at Entertainment Weekly.
Thanks to Audriene for alerting us to this!
From Entertainment Weekly, via this very blog
Sign up to get passes to a free advance screening now!
Entertainment Weekly invites you and a guest to a special advance screening of Grey Gardens, a new movie from HBO.
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Chicago
- Dallas
- Los Angeles
- New York
- Philadelphia
- San Francisco
- Washington, DC
Raccoons sometimes exhibit some odd behavior—and your host is no exception. Here's a glimpse of what may have been happening in the attic of Grey Gardens.
From YouTube, by LiveBreatheMusic, on September 11, 2008
Crazy Raccoon House Party
Here are passport applications for Big Edie and her husband, Phelan Beale, from the 1920s. Thanks to Jerry for sending these in!
From ancestry.com
Connie of PrintMafia just informed me of some Grey Gardens prints available for sale on their site. Very interesting work!
An Ordered Life
The Line Between the Past and the Present
These are cute as well! The Drew Barrymore poster is a different photograph from the one we saw before, and the Jessica Lange poster is the full image of the one we saw before.
From Sarah Carlson on the Roof, by Sarah Carlson, on March 21, 2009
Grey Gardens. The movie.
These images are terrific!
Thanks to David Crotty for sending this in!
From The Daily Beast, on March 20, 2009
The Fashion of Grey Gardens
View our gallery of sketches for the shabby-chic costumes in the upcoming HBO movie Grey Gardens starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore—plus a look at eccentric style of the real Beale women.
Costume designer Cat Thomas has been the brain behind several recent, memorable looks—Uma Thurman's neon yellow fight suit in Kill Bill, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin's folksy frocks in A Prairie Home Companion, and Katherine Heigl's endless slew of bridesmaid gowns in 27 Dresses. But the young designer recently had to take on her biggest challenge—recreating the signature style of Big and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, the mother and daughter pair (and aunt and first cousin of Jackie O.) who lived in squalor in an East Hampton, New York, house for years and became the notoriously kooky subjects of one of the 1970s most iconic documentaries, Grey Gardens. Both Little Edie and Big Edie loved clothes—Little Edie especially—but in their slightly senile states, turned fashion on its head. Little Edie wears cardigans as kerchiefs and skirts upside down, always sporting a signature brooch or pop of color. Her ideas were impeccable, even if executed peculiarly, and she started with the best garments (a relic of the Beales' happier days as Hamptons socialites and well-heeled Manhattan shoppers). Thomas faithfully recreated the look of the Beales' wardrobe for the upcoming HBO adaptation of the documentary, starring Jessica Lange as Big Edie and Drew Barrymore as Little Edie.
View our gallery of Thomas' original sketches for Lange and Barrymore, along with looks from the finished film, and the women who inspired the story.
One correction... Jessica didn't win the Oscar for Frances; she won for Tootsie!
From Dan's Papers, by Debbie Tuma, on March 7, 2008
Jessica Lange as Big Edie
First the Documentary, then the Broadway Show, Now the Movie
If you didn't know she was a two-time Oscar-winning actress, you'd assume that Jessica Lange was just another fair-haired, sweet and soft-spoken Midwestern girl. But after decades of playing strong-willed, eccentric and colorful leading women, Lange still maintains her quiet demeanor and keen sense of humor about her work and life. Walking across the stage of the New York Times Center in Manhattan on February 28 for a two-hour interview, she still looked young and sexy in her short skirt and tall black boots.
The reason for the appearance is Lange's most recent undertaking—the role of Big Edie in an upcoming HBO film named for the infamous East Hampton home, Grey Gardens. The film, directed by Long Islander Michael Sucsy and co-starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie, just wrapped, and is expected to air this fall.
Lange sat down next to Charles "Chip" McGrath, writer at large for the New York Times, flashed a big smile to the audience of several hundred, and waved to noted filmmaker Albert Maysles, who sat in the front row. Maysles and his brother David filmed and produced the original film, Grey Gardens in 1976 in East Hampton. After a successful run of many months on Broadway, this show, which starred Christine Ebersole as both Big and Little Edie Beale, the estranged cousins of Jackie Kennedy, recently closed.
Despite the fact that Lange had to spend four hours a day being made up for the part of Big Edie—fat suit, wig and transformation of her brown eyes to blue—she said it was "the most fun I've ever had working on a set."
Although she has played such amazing, award-winning roles as Frances Farmer, Blanche Dubois, Patsy Kline and Mary Tyrone, Lange said, "In Grey Gardens, this is the farthest I've ever been from myself physically, to play this fascinating old woman, and I found it so interesting, to become someone else, so completely. It was also the first time I ever wore prosthesis—I had such a good time."
Lange credited her co-star, Drew Barrymore, for being "amazing as Little Edie," and the movie's writer and director, Michael Sucsy, for his talent. "He grew up on Long Island, and has a great insight and feeling for these people who lived there," she said.
In the film Grey Gardens, which captures the bizarre lives of Big and Little Edie Beale living in a dilapidated old house in East Hampton overrun with cats, Lange also explained that she sang for the first time in her life.
"I actually sang several songs in the movie, including 'We Belong Together,' and Big Edie's version of 'Tea for Two,'" she said. "Drew and I also do a soft shoe dance. I have never had so much fun."
When asked by Chip McGrath, who formerly spent 23 years at the New Yorker, what her favorite movie roles were, Lange said she most enjoyed portraying the women who were "larger than life"-big characters, from Edith Beale to Carley in Blue Sky to Frances Farmer, for which she won an Oscar. "I love the ups and downs of these characters, because there is so much you can do with them," she said. "In Blue Sky, working with director Tony Richardson was so great because he was an actor I really could trust, and there were no boundaries."
Citing her other roles as Blanche Dubois and Mary Tyrone, she added, "I like playing women who are basically holding on by a thread, and yet there is steel in them, somewhere—they are survivors. I like mad people."
McGrath laughed, telling Lange, "I think you're different, and quite centered, as a solid Minnesota girl. So I guess you must study these women."
He also noted that in addition to Grey Gardens, Lange is starring in another new film, Bonneville, which just opened in theaters on February 29. She stars as one of three leading women, along with her friends Kathy Bates and Joan Allen, who take a road trip.
"We usually see male road movies, but this is unique in that these are three mature women, and it's a portrait of their friendship," said Lange. "It's a very subtle film, with no violence, and my character is grieving for her dead husband." Lange added that since it's not a typical male-driven film, "If women want to take their husbands, tell them it's about a car—a Bonneville."
McGrath teased Lange about how she got started in the movie business. "People from Minnesota become ice fishermen, not actors. How did you get started?" he asked.
Lange explained that as an art student in college she joined some fellow photographers on a jaunt to Europe, where she studied mime and street theater in Paris. Upon her return to New York City, she took classes at the Actor's Studio, while waitressing at the famous Lion's Head Restaurant. Her first film was also a memorable one—the remake of King Kong in 1976. This led to a bit part in All That Jazz, and then to her famous, steamy role in The Postman Also Rings Twice with Jack Nicholson.
With her next Oscar-winning roles in Frances and Tootsie, which were only her third and fourth movies, Lange commented, "During the 1980s, there was a plethora of wonderful leading roles for women. All my friends and I had great opportunities back then—we were all starring in great movies during that era."
It was during the filming of Frances that she met her husband, Sam Shephard, and had three children. She also starred in the films Country, Sweet Dreams and Rob Roy, and in the stage productions of Long Days Journey into the Night and Streetcar Named Desire.
Lange said one of the hardest parts of her job is coming to the end of a role. "When you spend all the time studying and learning a character, and then you play her for 20 weeks, when you come to the final performance, you feel that you've lost someone," she said. "I go through a period of grieving—of physically missing these people. For example, I wanted to play Blanche DuBois forever—she was my kind of character."
The New York Times Center will be having additional talks with renowned actors, including Helen Mirren. For more information, visit www.timestalks.com.
A great interview with Jessica Lange on her preparations for and struggles with portraying Big Edie Beale in HBO's upcoming Grey Gardens.
From O magazine, by Suzan Colón, on April 2009
The Prime of Jessica Lange
How wonderful is this poster? I feel that it really captures the essence of each of the Edies, and the bright, vibrant colors are very reminiscent of the original documentary. Absolutely terrific, honestly!
Many thanks to HBO for sharing this with us!
From HBO
HBO Films Presents a Specialty Films and Locomotive Production. Drew Barrymore, Jessica Lange “Grey Gardens” Malcolm Gets, Daniel Baldwin with Ken Howard and Jeanne Tripplehorn
Casting by
Ellen Parks, CSA
Costume Designer
Catherine Marie Thomas
Music Supervisor
Randall Poster
Music by
Rachel Portman
Edited by
Alan Heim, A.C.E. and Lee Percy, A.C.E.
Production Designer
Kalina Ivanov
Director of Photography
Mike Eley
Produced by
David Coatsworth
Executive Producers
Lucy Barzun Donnelly, Rachael Horovitz, Michael Sucsy
Story by
Michael Sucsy
Teleplay by
Michael Sucsy and Patricia Rozema
Directed by
Michael Sucsy
No, it's not the Edie Beales; it's Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore! But don't they look like the originals?
From Fancast, on March 18, 2009
First Look: HBO’s Grey Gardens with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange
In case you lost track of all the promotional trailers circulating for HBO's Grey Gardens, there are 5 of them so far. I'll continue to update this post so that it consistently contains all the trailers.
Thanks to Alex for inspiring this post and keeping track of the trailers!
This first one is long and is very "the making of". Interesting! It is now the longest trailer to have hit the web.
From YouTube, by HBO, on April 1, 2009
Grey Gardens: Then and Now (HBO)
Go behind the scenes of Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. For more, log on to HBO.com
There are many clips from the current family members in this video.
From YouTube, by HBO, on April 1, 2009
Grey Gardens: High Society (HBO)
Grey Gardens premieres Saturday April 18th at 8PM. For more about Grey Gardens, log on to HBO.com
Lastly, a video about Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.
From YouTube, by HBO, on April 1, 2009
Grey Gardens: Interview with Drew Barrymore & Jessica Lange (HBO)
Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange discuss their role and experiences filming Grey Gardens. For more, log on to HBO.com
This video lasts 3:33.
From YouTube
This video lasts 2:01. It starts with the conversation in the yellow bedroom with the Maysles.
From YouTube
This promo lasts 1:38 and is the first one to have hit the web. It includes short interviews with Jessica Lange, Drew Barrymore, Michael Sucsy, and Lucy Barzun Donnelly.
From YouTube
This one lasts :44 and starts with Drew Barrymore doing Edie's famous "Best Costume" speech.
From YouTube
This final one is :32 and was originally seen at HBO's website.
From YouTube
I just got word of this... This raccoon wishes a speedy recovery to the brilliant actress!
From TMZ, on March 18, 2009
Jessica Lange Breaks Several Bones in Cabin Fall
Jessica Lange got extremely lucky yesterday after taking a fall at her Minnesota cabin.
Family sources tell TMZ the legendary actress grabbed for a railing that was not secure and fell over -- breaking her shoulder and collar bone and dislocating her arm.
She also suffered lacerations and received stitches at a local hospital. As one family member put it, "She's OK ... but very lucky."
This is the same trailer that appears on HBO's site (which we've known about for a week now), on YouTube for the first time.
From YouTube, on March 18, 2009
A promotional trailer for HBO's upcoming Grey Gardens. It stars Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange, and airs on HBO on April 18, 2009.
I feel like the headlines and the author's analysis don't quite capture the essence of what's conveyed in the quotes, but the stories told in this article are very interesting!
Thanks to all who sent this in.
From New York Post, by Robert Rorke, on March 17, 2009
'Gardens' Secrets
Drew was second choice for Little Edie
The buzz for HBO's "Grey Gardens" has reached fever pitch, with devotees of the documentary already passionately analyzing the film which will not air until next month.
A still photo of Big Edie and Little Edie (Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore) listening to President Kennedy's funeral on the radio that ran in The Post inspired one fan to attack director Michael Sucsy.
The fan told him he didn't shoot the scene in the correct bedroom—the infamous yellow bedroom where Big Edie and Little Edie slept in twin beds.
"The person didn't realize the scene was set in 1963," says Suscy. "It was before the women moved into that bedroom."
Like the cats and raccoons that overran the decrepit East Hampton mansion where the Beale women lived, the "Gardens" cult has been nibbling at Suscy's heels since the project was first announced.
Did he know he was stepping on sacred ground? "I knew it when they started lashing out," says Suscy, who also co-wrote the script.
They criticized him first for daring to make a movie inspired by the Maysles brothers' 1975 documentary. Then they criticized him—even though the film will not air until April 18—for leaving out minor characters in the Beales' eccentric orbit.
"Jerry, the handyman, is a character in the musical 'Grey Gardens,' but he's not in the movie," says Suscy. "I was told Jerry had passed away. He hadn't. He resurfaced. He's driving a taxi in New York. [Now] there's a conspiracy theory that I had something against him."
Fans of the documentary will learn much more about the lives of the Beales before—as the documentary graphically shows—they started tossing empty cat-food cans into one corner of the house because they couldn't pay for garbage pickup.
Suscy uncovered a scrap of paper on which Little Edie wrote, "My angel Cap, I got the thorn but not the rose," an allusion to her affair with former Truman Secretary of the Interior Julius "Cap" Krug, played in the movie by Daniel Baldwin.
He also reveals that Drew Barrymore was not his first choice to play Little Edie. He considered Renee Zellweger for the role.
"I met with her but it wasn't a match," he says. "When I heard that Drew was interested, I said, 'She's not right.' Then I heard, 'She's flying to meet you.' She blew me away in a meeting. I didn't want her for the role but she won it fair and square. She understood the character."
Early on in the production, Suscy says it was clear that his stars were in for a difficult shoot when life imitated art a little too convincingly.
In the Kennedy funeral scene, he had originally planned to include one of the raccoons that had taken up residence in the house. He was behind the set as filming began when he heard Jessica Lange coughing. When it didn't stop, he called, "Cut."
"The raccoon let out its bowels," Suscy says. "It smelled like ammonia and burned your eyes. Jessica jumped off the bed and ran off set. Drew dry-heaved and said, 'Now I know what it was like for them to live here.' It took forty-five minutes to air the room out."
The raccoon was not asked back for a second take. "After that, we moved into closeups," Suscy says.
We've seen quite a few video remixes that use footage from Grey Gardens. Here's an original music video that uses the footage.
From YouTube, by Laura Duksta, on April 12, 2008
THEY SAY with footage from Grey Gardens
LAURA DUKSTA MEETS EDIE BEALE
*Fans* of mine thought my song "They Say" would be the perfect anthem for Ms Edie's Fashion Show so a friend put this video together! I think she was bald like me...and maybe I'm a bit crazy...I mean eccentric...like her ;-) This is my first time posting my music to the web...let me know what you think! More to come!!!!
Thank you Alfh, Jim and Kiehl!!!!!
I've just received word that Grey Gardens is now on Twitter. Sara Maysles (daughter of Al Maysles) "tweets quotes from GG from the unreleased outtakes".
Thanks to the contributors who sent this in!
For those of you without HBO who won't be able to see the movie when it premieres in April, you can now "save" the movie to your queue so that you can watch it on DVD once it's finally available.
From Netflix
Grey Gardens
Based on a true story, this made-for-TV drama stars Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy Onassis (Jeanne Tripplehorn)—both named Edie Beale—who retreat from tony Manhattan society to a mansion in East Hampton, N.Y. After years in isolation, the women are thrust into the spotlight when journalists report on a series of health inspections that find the house—and its owners—in shocking disarray.
Beautifully written!
Forty Years of Gardening
by Anna Gilman Hill
From What were the Skies Like, by Stephen Orr, on March 11, 2009
A Sea of Leaves
Grey Gardens from a gardener's perspective
"It was truly a gray garden. The soft gray of the dunes, cement walls and sea mists gave us our color scheme as well as our name... nepeta, stachys, and pinks... clipped bunches of santolina, lavender and rosemary made gray mounds here and there. Only flowers in pale colors were allowed inside the walls, yet the effect was far from insipid....I close my eyes and sense again the scent of those wild roses, the caress of the hot sun on our backs as we sauntered to and fro from our bath and lazy mornings on the beach."—Anna Gilman Hill, former owner of Grey Gardens in her book Forty Years of Gardening
The walled garden at Grey Gardens (circa late teens or early 1920s) from Forty Years of Gardening
Talk about your hardy perennials. The eccentric and sentimental media phenomenon known as Grey Gardens continues with a new HBO movie starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie Beale and Jessica Lange as her mother Edith Beale that premieres on April 18th.
It looks like it might hold some promise. Let's hope that it adequately captures the wistful beauty of the relationship of these two reclusive women who spent decades on the verge of poverty in a crumbling beachside mansion in East Hampton, singing, dancing, and reciting poetry—"Bed in Summer" by Robert Louis Stevenson being my favorite number of Big Edie's.
Not much has been said of the garden of Grey Gardens though. In the more recent Maysles Brothers' film, The Beales of Grey Gardens, Little Edie merely remarks:
"That's why Mrs. Hill sold it....She was one of the world's greatest feminine horticulturalists. She was a landscape gardener and a very famous horticulturalist...Mrs. Robert C. Hill. And she said to mother, 'I can't grow my delphiniums on account of the northeast wind. And the hurricanes...storms have ruined my garden every year, you know, in the fall.' And that's why they named this Grey Gardens....Eventually everything will grow back."
Be sure to check out the original post for more information and photos!
One element of HBO's upcoming Grey Gardens that I've been interested in seeing more of is Jeanne Tripplehorn's role as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She appears briefly in a couple of the trailers, but that's been it.
Tripplehorn is interviewed in the March issue of More magazine. Grey Gardens is only briefly mentioned, but it includes a photo of Tripplehorn in her role!
From More magazine, by Margy Rochlin, on March, 2009
Jeanne Tripplehorn
Jeanne Tripplehorn says she's got the best job in town: Learning all about sharing on HBO's hit series Big Love. Next up? Playing Jackie O. in HBO's Grey Gardens.
One thing about the passing years that has surprised her is the quality of the roles that have come her way. "I'm in a really great place," says Tripplehorn, who plays Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the HBO movie Grey Gardens, airing in April, as well as a mother tending to her traumatized daughter (Dakota Fanning) in the upcoming indie film Winged Creatures. Then, of course, there is "the best job in town," Big Love. "I'm in my 40s and I'm being written for," Tripplehorn says. "It's the greatest role I've ever played—beyond three-dimensional. If more gifts like these are coming my way, then I'm looking forward to getting older."
And, although the cover isn't specifically Grey Gardens-related, I loved this photo of Jeanne so much that I had to include it:
 |  |
Grey Gardens
HBO Films DVD
(Digital version from Amazon.com here.)
(Digital version from iTunes here.)
Grey Gardens
Soundtrack by Rachel Portman
(Digital version here.)
Grey Gardens &
The Beales of Grey Gardens
Criterion Collection DVD Set
Grey Gardens
Criterion Collection DVD
(Digital version here.)
The Beales of Grey Gardens
Criterion Collection DVD
Grey Gardens
Masters of Cinema DVD
Grey Gardens 11" x 17" Reproduction Poster
(Framed version here)
BFI Film Classics: Grey Gardens
by Matthew Tinkcom
Grey Gardens
by Sara & Rebekah Maysles
Soundtrack to Grey Gardens MP3s
My Life at Grey Gardens
by Lois Wright
Forty Years of Gardening
by Anna Gilman Hill
Edith Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens
by Eva Beale, et al.
MemoraBEALEia
by Walter Newkirk
Little Edie Live! A Visit to Grey Gardens audio CD
Talk to Her: Interviews
by Kristine McKenna
Contemporary Film Directors:
Albert Maysles
by Joe McElhaney
Grey Gardens the Musical
original Broadway cast recording CD
(Digital version here.)
Grey Gardens
by Doug Wright, Scott Frankel, and Michael Korie
Grey Gardens: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical
by Doug Wright
Grey Gardens Songbook
by Scott Frankel & Michael Korie
The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost's Poems
by Robert Frost
The Marble Faun
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
by Omar Khayyam
translated by Edward Fitzgerald
Andromeda and Other Poems (includes Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorree)
by Charles Kingsley
Wild Blue Yonder DVD
A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents
Ghosts of Grey Gardens DVD
Gigi
Wings
Nashville
It's All in the Stars
Art by Pacifico Palumbo