Hasta La Ideas

Our countdown to the Friday opening of the fiftieth anniversary Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition at New York’s Solomon G. Guggenheim Museum rolls on! Today we present a real treat for fans of the original cape crusader: video of Wright’s June 1956 appearance on the long-running CBS game show What’s My Line? His line? “World Famous ARCHITECT.”

Is Wright familiar with the show’s scoring system, asks host John Charles Daly after Wright, toting his trusty cane, “signs in” on a blackboard topped with an ad for sponsor Helene Curtis? “Somewhat,” says Wright, a smirk playing perpetually on his lips. “I’ve watched one of the shows, with interest.” Adding to the fun is that the all-star panel (peopled by the likes of Arlene Francis and Peter Lawford) is blindfolded, lest they recognize Wright. Suboptimal acoustics—rather than the 89-year-old Wright’s fading hearing—are blamed when Daly has to repeat the panelists’ questions. “It goes out and comes right back,” observes Wright of the bouncing sound in the high-ceilinged studio. “Never mind. We’ll overcome it,” he reassures Daly, eliciting a big laugh from the audience. It’s almost as entertaining as when panelist Dorothy Kilgallen, her eyes covered by what appears to be a sleep mask rimmed in pearls, asks Wright, “Does your voice play any part in the work you do?” Click “continued…” to view the full video.

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Earlier this week, we talked about a piece by the street artist Banksy getting painted over accidentally by a graffiti clean-up crew. We were fortunate enough to hear from the owner of the wall Banksy had marked up, Julian Chatt, in the comments section of that post saying the reports of the incident weren’t anywhere near the truth, that “the image is probably NOT by Banksy and I have never claimed it was” and was upset more that the city council’s clean-up squad had just wandered onto his private property and painted over it without his permission and despite his many requests that they just leave it alone. Really very interesting, all of it, and we believed that it would probably be the Banksy (or not-Banksy) story of the week. But then we ran across the upcoming web-only film/documentary, Banksy’s Coming to Dinner, which looks downright crazy. The elevator pitch is that actress Joan Collins gets a request by the reclusive, mysterious artist to have her throw a dinner party for him so that he can finally reveal his true identity. Only catch is the thing was all a big hoax, completely unknown to Collins and the other guests until the Daily Mail uncovered the truth. Here’s the trailer:

This will either be an absolute disaster of a film or the best thing you’ve ever seen — and nothing in between. We can’t wait to see it.

This is great. If you were fortunate enough to have caught HBO‘s dramatized version of Grey Gardens recently (and you should have because it was one of the best films we’ve seen in a long, long time), you were likely as bowled over as we were by the production design work. As luck would have it, we ran across this great interview with Kalina Ivanov, the set designer, who took the two Edies’ estate across a slew of decades and various states of disrepair, all while maintaining remarkable accuracy to what you see in the original documentary. Ivanov talks about the difficulty in accurately recreating the house, as well as where she found the furniture, the various fabrics they used, etc. A must read for anyone who saw the film, we promise. Here’s a bit about the purchasing:

Most of the furniture was antique; all the paintings were from the period or earlier. We did buy some Chinese pieces of furniture and aged them to look older. We used different vendors from Toronto (the film was shot here) and Montreal. For the wallpaper, we used sources like Second Hand Rosein New York. We also made some of the furniture the beds in the yellow room are so well known from the documentary, they had to be re-created.

Now that Project Runway has finally broken free from its legal battles and the Bravo network intends to battle against it with the Isaac Mizrahi-helmed The Fashion Show, the Washington Post‘s Lisa de Moraes took an interesting look at what Bravo is going to launch in addition to help combat “the void left by Runway.” The short of it is that there’s lots that are sorta-kinda-design-focused shows, but the majority of them seem potentially painful, including the “we’re willing to give it one shot before we force it to walk the plank” Sarah Jessica Parker-produced American Artist, which pits contemporary artists against one another like every other reality show. You might remember that we talked about it early last year and unfortunately we still don’t quite understand a world where that would be enjoyable to watch, let alone exist in, but like we said, we’re willing to give it a shot. With the others in the line-up? Maybe not so much. Remember when Bravo used to the be the artsy network?

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Dare we give you another video still so early in the morning? We know you’ve come to read, but hey, let’s throw caution to the wind and go for it. Here’s a PBS interview with director Gary Hustwit at the recent SXSW premiere of his new film, Objectified (which you might recall us talking about here). But enough writing and reading. On to the moving pictures:

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