Another film on the must see list. This is about the destruction of the artists colony who lived in ateliers above Carnegie Hall. Almost all the spaces are offices now. None of the atmosphere was retained or is able to be returned to its former glory. The list of those artists who lived and studied there includes Brando, Monroe, Caruso, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Lee Strasberg, Bill Cunningham, Isadora Duncan, Agnes De Mille, Bob Fosse, Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, John Turturro and Joanne Woodward. Every space was completely different to accommodate light for the painters and sound proofing for the musicians. It was a vertical village that should have lived forever.
Editta Sherman, the duchess photographer and stylist who was the last to hold out, well into her nineties.
Perhaps the most haunting images are those of a fabulous pipe organ belonging to a late music teacher, smashed and crammed into a dumpster. And a tiny, aged homeless woman, Star, who regularly sneaked in to use a landing for her barre work, terrified she will be discovered and turfed out. An angel dancing teacher, soon herself to be displaced, gives the 80 year old a scholarship so that she can attend classes. We see her dance like a freed bird, alive to her soul with the joy of movement. She strikes attitudes of beatific bliss in her pursuit of perfection. When they closed the studio she disappeared, only to die alone in a womens shelter.
Another sad story is that of Jeanne Beauvais, French-born soprano and voice teacher (she played Mme Dubonnet in THE BOY FRIEND both on and off-Broadway) who lived above Carnegie Hall for almost seven decades and was instrumental in the fight to retain the apartments as an artist colony. Her joyous Bastille Day parties for the tenants were renowned. Beavais succumbed to cancer during the making of the film and did not live to see her friends evicted. A storage space containing all the historic costumes from her illustrious career was turned into a men's toilet.
The voice of a poet who had lived there for years is heard throughout warning of the coming deluge. He says that evil is real and it is unstoppable and growing globally. Evil is alive and well in the board members of Carnegie who did everything to illegally destroy the artists community set up by the original benefactor, Andrew Carnegie, and the City of New York who did nothing to stop it. You sit there cursing them all to hell.
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