Anthology Film Archives regretfully announces that it will not be able to open the new feature CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS for its premiere engagement, which had been scheduled to screen daily from March 20 to 26. Anthology has been informed that the distributor with whom it booked the film, Empire Film Group / Hannover House, has decided not to, or is unable to, follow through on its plans to represent the film. The producers have thus canceled the engagement despite the prior commitment for the NY Theatrical Premiere which was announced by Anthology. Citing contractual reasons, the producers have declined to honor this commitment.
An (all-too-rare) Reeler post informs us that Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea Hotel documentary Chelsea on the Rocks, which we covered at Cannes, has been pulled from its planned one week run at Anthology Film Archives later this month.
What could they mean by “contractual obligations”? A “misplaced” (or more likely, never obtained) release? Complaints from the people behind the hotel itself, which was in the middle of a management change while Ferrara was filming in 2007? Considering Chelsea’s relative lack of freshness, we’ll assume it’s not the same kind of contractual obligation that AFI Dallas’ John Wildman blogged about today, the kind that causes a film to drop out of one festival so it an play another … although it is interesting that the Ferrara news comes within 24 hours of Wildman going public about a film dropping out of his festival so it can play Tribeca. In any case, we’ll keep our ears open…
“Freud’s ultimate impulse, the reason why he did all his creative work, was to get laid –– which is ultimately a highly creative act.”
That’s a quote from Nick Nolte, pulled from Nick Nolte: No Exit, Tom Thurman’s experimental, quasi-existential documentary on the actor, his inner life, and his somewhat incredible journey from one dubious achievement to another: first PEOPLE Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, then, just ten years later, star of the most mockable celebrity mug shot in recent history. (It’s the latter achievement that seems to give Nolte greater pleasure––the mug shot is prominently displayed in a laugh-out-loud bizarre flash intro on his official website.)
The nature of the quote––its balance between absurdity and plausibility, its revision of history through the lens of impulse––makes it seem like it just as well could have been housed by Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, the other film I saw on my last day of screenings in Cannes. In addition to sharing an interest in the relationship between excess and art, both films offer us stories presented through the eyes of older men of some notoriety, offering dispatches from a space on the dividing line between mainstream celebrity culture and a tangetial space––dirtier, less stable, less a sub-culture than an afterworld.
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“Did everybody see the film?” Abel Ferrara cried at the jump of the Cannes press conference for Chelsea on the Rocks, compulsively putting on and pulling off a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, sipping on a can of Budweiser. Several journalists coughed in response. Said Ferrara: “What is this, avian flu? Everybody cough, yeah. We got a Howard Hughes complex as it is.”
The press conference as a whole was a woozy, half-sickly, half-populated affair…maybe typical of anything involving Ferrara meeting journalists, but definitely emblematic of the Festival itself at this point. But! But! Ferrara twice talked about Werner Herzog’s alleged Nicolas Cage-starring remake of his Bad Lieutenant––once in response to a question from a reporter, and once just because he apparently felt like he needed to vent.
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