Hasta La Ideas

A still from Detropia.

God save Detroit. In 1930, it was the fastest growing city in the world. Today a governor-appointed emergency manager is eyeing the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts as a way to pay off some $15 billion in debt (the prospect of selling off the DIA’s masterpieces has, of course, been met with outrage from within the community and beyond). Get a closer look at the long-stalled Motor City in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady‘s Detropia, which makes its television debut tonight on Independent Lens (click here to check your local PBS listings). No postindustrial gloomfest, the documentary follows several Detroiters–including an owner of a blues bar, an auto union rep, a group of young artists, and a gang of illegal “scrappers”–in an attempt to illuminate both a city and a country grasping for a new identity. Say Ewing and Grady, “We hope that the rest of America can see that they may have more in common with Detroit than they thought.”

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What Gatsby? From left, Kate Spade’s book clutch, a Mac decal inspired by the the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, and a t-shirt from the 1925 first edition jacket by Francis Cugat.

Baz Luhrmann‘s adaptation of The Great Gatsby arrived in theaters today, old sport, and everyone from here to Montenegro–little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!–is trying to get a piece of the action. Although we’ve yet to see Meyer Wolfshiem-style molar cufflinks hit stores or Goddard‘s The Rise of the Coloured Empires ascend the bestseller list, the merch is multiplying. Of course, there’s the movie tie-in version of the book, sporting a new cover that one bookseller characterized as “just God-awful.” Brooks Brothers is selling a Gatsby Collection, inspired by costume designer Catherine Martin‘s take on all those heartbreakingly beautiful shirts (Gatsby had his man in London send a fresh batch over each season), and Tiffany & Co. is promoting “jazz-age glamour” pieces, such as this diamond- and pearl-studded Great Gatsby Collection headpiece–yours for $200,000. Fans on a budget closer to that of Nick Carraway can opt for a selection of Gatsby t-shirts after trying their hand at The Great Gatsby video game, the brilliant, Nintendo-style creation of Charlie Hoey and Peter Malamud Smith. But as usual, everyone looks like beautiful little fools when compared to Stephen Colbert, who didn’t let his failure to read Fitzgerald‘s classic stop him from greenlighting a book club segment on it.

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• “[S]tripped of most traditional linguistic elements, the short film has to move fast, but it must strive not to confuse the viewer with too many objects or jarring cuts,” writes Stephen Apkon in The Age of Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, new this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book inspired this short film (above) by Daniel Liss.

• And speaking of short films, the Tribeca Film Festival has selected the winners in its six-second film competition. Watch all of the jury’s top picks in under a minute here.

• It’s the end of an era for Cooper Union, which will begin charging undergraduates tuition beginning next fall.

• The design community and members of the general public are protesting MoMA’s decision to raze the building that Tod Williams Billie Tsien designed for the American Folk Art Museum. The Architectural League drafted this open letter requesting MoMA to provide “a compelling justification for the cultural and environmental waste of destroying this much-admired, highly distinctive twelve-year-old building.”

• All is fair (use) in love and appropriation? Artist Richard Prince emerged largely triumphant in yesterday’s appeals court ruling on the copyright case involving his 2008 “Canal Zone” series, which used portraits from Patrick Cariou‘s Yes, Rasta book.

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Twenty years on, Andre the Giant still Has a Posse, and now the subversive sticker campaign that ignited Shepard Fairey‘s worldwide propaganda delivery system gets its cinematic due in Obey the Giant, a narrative film that makes it online debut today (watch it above). Director Julian Marshall is fresh out of the Rhode Island School of Design, Fairey’s alma mater and the setting for the 23-minute film. Based on the true story of Fairey’s first act of street art, Obey the Giant is something of a portrait of the artist as a young skate punk–challenging a big-city mayor (the oleaginous Buddy Cianci, played by Keith Jochim) and the powers that be at art school.

“We moved heaven and earth to make this film,” Marshall (pictured below) told us of the ambitious project, for which he raised $65,000 through Kickstarter last spring. “Pre-production was about six weeks. We had to build an army of people, elaborate sets, a 27,000-pound billboard, and pull together an insane amount of props from the 1990s. It was an amazing time though. My crew and I truly became a family.” The Washington, D.C. native, now based in NYC and at the helm of his own film production company, told us more about how Obey the Giant came to be and the hot-button issue he’s planning to tackle next.

How and when did you first encounter Shepard Fairey’s work?
I first encountered Shep’s work on my first skateboard back in the 90s. I had just bought a World Industries deck and the shop owner slapped an “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker on it.

What compelled you to make a film about him?
One morning, I was lying in bed, staring at the OBEY icon poster on my wall that Shep had given me when I interned for him, and I thought: Well, what better story to tell as a RISD student than a story of a RISD student? I had the connection to Shep having worked for him, so I emailed his wife, Amanda, pitched her the project, and a week later I heard back and she said, “Okay, Shepard’s really excited about the project, come out to L.A. and let’s talk about it.”

How did you decide on the format of this project, in terms of making it a narrative film rather than a documentary?
Documentaries don’t particularly interest me from a directorial standpoint. I love the intensity and edginess of the process of making motion pictures. So naturally, when I first thought of this story, I conceived of it in narrative terms.
continued…

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Do you yearn to watch a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel (once home to the likes of William Burroughs, Dennis Hopper, and Patti Smith) in the shadow of the Chelsea Hotel? Learn about the history behind design classics such as the Harley Davidson and the London Underground map? Or just watch a strung-out David Bowie (circa 1974) discuss mime, costumes, and the invention of characters such as Ziggy Stardust? Well, you’re in luck, because all of that and more is on the agenda for the SVA BBC Design Documentary Film Festival on Sunday, March 17. Now in its second year, the day-long event offers up a slate of groundbreaking BBC films that have seen scant screen time in the United States. Curated by the all-seeing Steven Heller along with D-Crit faculty member Adam Harrison Levy, the festival includes post-film chats with veteran BBC creative director Alan Yentob. The $15 run-of-the-festival tickets are going fast, so grab one here.

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