MAPPLETHORPE P


VIEWED THROUGH A NEW LENS


lenty of artists have been the subjects of movies over the years. Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, Caravaggio, Diane Arbus and Jean- Michel Basquiat are but a well-known few. Several of them were LGBTQ. Now, we can add gay photographer


Robert Mapplethorpe to the list. One of the most consequential and controversial artists of the 20th century, he is being newly represented by a reworked version of the 2018 biopic, Mapplethorpe, The Director’s Cut. The film is now available for viewing via Hulu or video on demand (VOD). The new version marks the narrative feature debut of acclaimed documentarian Ondi Timoner and stars Doctor Who alum Matt Smith in the title role. Mapplethorpe, The Director’s Cut features an all-new soundtrack and offers restored scenes depicting the artist’s childhood love of photography, his embattled relationship with his father, and his lingering yet ambivalent connection to the Catholic Church in which he was raised. It also more deeply explores Mapplethorpe’s love affair with rocker Patti Smith and his subsequent, pivotal romance with powerhouse art collector Sam Wagstaff (played by current Tony Award nominee John Benjamin Hickey). We see the development of his precise, erotically-charged photographic style along with his climb toward mainstream recognition. His eventual success was only briefly halted by Mapplethorpe’s untimely death from AIDS complications in 1989. The story behind this new, revised version of Timoner’s film is almost as tumultuous as its subject’s life. Producer Jamie Wolf saw an early cut of Mapplethorpe and was especially impressed with its reverberant quality, which she felt effortlessly transcended the traditional biopic. Wolf, who is quietly known for her creative hand as a producer


(Newtown, City of Gold, The Truffle Hunters), has a particularly strong commitment to enabling a director’s vision. When she learned the original version of Mapplethorpe had been altered for its theatrical release, Wolf recalled an article by Richard Brody in The New


Yorker that chronicled Kenneth Lonergan’s long journey to restore the original cut of his 2011 film Margaret, after a version he did not endorse was first distributed. Wolf and partner Geralyn Dreyfous persuaded The Samuel


Goldwyn Company, distributor of the 2018 release, to allow them to follow the Margaret road map and create a director’s cut of Mapplethorpe. Wolf tapped Nathalie Seaver, executive vice president at Foothill Productions, to work with her on the project, which was expected to be a three-month endeavor. However, with their meticulous attention to detail — which included adding an original score by Drazen Bosnjak and a new soundtrack assembled by Michael Turner — the film’s re-working stretched to over a year. Having seen both versions, I can attest that the new Director’s Cut is a significant improvement. Smith’s performance is especially impressive. Director and co-writer Ondi Timoner has built her reputation as a documentarian, accomplishing the unusual feat of garnering two Grand Jury Prizes at the Sundance Film Festival with her film Dig! in 2004 andWe Live in Public in 2009. Timoner’s first exposure to Mapplethorpe’s work came when she was 12. “I had a calendar of Mapplethorpe’s flowers,” she said. “I absolutely loved it, but I had no idea that there was this other side to his photography.” The photographer’s famed floral portraits, especially of the white calla lily, have now rippled across generations. But many of his other images, including full-frontal male nudes, were considered so trangressive that much of his work was covered up at an early exhibition in Boston and could only be viewed by lifting up an obscuring curtain. As Timoner reveals in the film’s press notes: “My goal in making this film was to make an anthem for artists. I make films about difficult visionaries, about people who are unable to turn away from the quest, even when they come up against doubt and ridicule and struggle, as well as the penalties often involved. Robert Mappletho- rpe set out to make people bend to his vision, to embrace what they deemed obscene, and worship it as holy. That’s an incredible thing.”


APRIL 2021| @theragemonthly 21


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