Make Me Famous

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Back in the ‘80s I owned an apartment in New York’s East Village. On one side was St. Mark’s Place with its goth culture, avant-garde bookstores, off-brand boutiques, and punky music venues. On the other side was McSorley’s Old Ale House (established 1854), with its two-for-one beers, a place where Abraham Lincoln, Harry Houdini, and Dustin Hoffman drank.

In the neighborhood, I’d bump into Yoko Ono, Jonathan Demme, Cindy Lauper, Keith Haring, Holly Woodlawn, Jim Jarmusch, James Romberger, Richard Kern, Peggy Cypher, John Holmstrom, Joey Ramone, Jean-Michel Basquiat, et al.

I never knowingly met Edward Brezinski, an almost-forgotten painter who was part of the East Village art scene.

However, I feel like I know Brezinski, having watched the new documentary – “Make Me Famous.” You can catch it at the Tropic Cinema.

Directed and edited by Brian Vincent in his feature directorial debut, the doc tells about the rise and fall of the East Village art scene in the 1980s “through the unlikely lens of little known neo-expressionist painter, Edward Brezinski.”

As The Brooklyn Rail describes it: “Post-apocalyptic shots reveal a city that composed itself through negative spaces: the derelict buildings, imploded empty lots, stripped-down apartments. New York is a dream as much to those who’ve made it here as it is to those far away: a dream of stardom and of starving artists, of upward mobility and of bohemia, of ritz and of rats. For those who lived this moment in the city’s history, this film’s nostalgia is tinted with squalor. For those who missed it, the cool of its vintage vibes will be unmatched by even the edgiest Brooklyn thrift shop. For all, the desperation is as unbearably palpable the peeling paint on the walls.”

Along with archive footage of Brezinski and his circle, “Make Me Famous” presents an array of compelling participants in “this last flowering of bohemia in the grubby, pungent glamour of New York’s dirt-cheap Lower East Side.”

Brezinski moved through this legendary landscape, but he never quite made it as an artist.

Director Brian Vincent and his wife producer Heather Spore declare: “Edward Brezinski really is the archetype of what it means to be a struggling artist.”

Drowning his disappointments with booze, Brezinski would cause a terrible scene at a gallery and realizing that he would never be shown there, came to his own solution. He opened a gallery in his apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up across from a men’s shelter. And then he filmed it.

While “Make Me Famous” centers on Edward Brezinski and his failed ambitions, the film introduces a milieu of East Village artists, “some achieving stellar heights of success in a rapidly and irrevocably commercialized art world. Brezinski, by turns charismatic and self-sabotaging, was decidedly not one of these.”

“Make Me Famous” tackles with “noir-ish fascination” trying to solve the mystery of “this eccentric character who was at the heart of the art world but perhaps not in the heart of the art world … and then who disappeared.”

The enigmatic circumstances of Brezinski’s death in Southern France unfolds with an aura of mystery and drama. Or did he fake his own death?

Brezinski wanted so badly to be famous and didn’t really achieve his goal. Did he kill himself … or simply go away?

The tangle of art and fame is the main theme of “Make Me Famous.”

“I wanted the film and editing to represent Brezinski’s frenetic career, which mirrored the kinetic energy of the Lower East Side,” says Brian Vincent. “I wanted to let the photographs, videos, and artwork of the artists who knew Brezinski best, tell his story. I wanted to combine the brilliant archival footage we found with candid interviews. We spent a lot of time getting to know the artists of the 1980s scene who were still in NYC showing in galleries. Artists such as Marguerite Van Cook, James Romberger, Richard Hambleton, Duncan Hannah, Frank Holliday, Robert Hawkins, David McDermott, Peter McGough, Scott Covert, and Annina Nosei, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first gallerist.”

As one interviewee said, “Who cares about his painting. The mystery of Edward Brezinski is the story.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com