Greetings from lovely Durham, NC, where your pal the cinetrix is covering the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival for GreenCine Daily.
In the press area, the whole world drifts by if you sit sucking wi-fi long enough. Ken Burns and festival director Nancy Buirski schmoozed mere feet away en route to a work in progress screening of an episode from his latest series, The War. Burns narrowly missed multihyphenate Sydney Pollack, whose first documentary directing effort, Sketches of Frank Gehry, bowed last night as the Opening Night Film to a packed house. Pollack was fortunate in his subject—Gehry is garrulous and charming—but his Hollywood roots showed through in his choice of talking heads. Noted architecture “experts” Barry Diller, Mikes Ovitz and Eisner share the screen with architect Philip Johnson in one of his last interviews, Herbert Muschamp, and, as comic relief, an outsized Julian Schnabel, clad in a white bathrobe and opining wildly, a snifter in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
The true stars of the post-film Q&A, conducted by Alan Berliner, were Pollack's gleaming cordovan cowboy boots, drawing my eye even from the perilous heights of the second balcony. Today, he was sporting an equally buttery black pair. What will he wear tomorrow? Developing....
OK, off to learn about rich people and Iraq, in that order. More TK.