Buffalo Movies: Film review of “Make Me Famous” documentary screening at Hallwalls this week

(Above: ©Jonathan Postal. Painter Edward Brezinski and CLICK models for NY TALK Magazine, 1984)

By M. Faust

Talent and fame may go hand in hand, but they’re not blood relatives, a proposition borne out by the documentary Make Me Famous. The subject is Edward Brezinski, a neo expressionist painter you are unlikely ever to have heard of. He was a contemporary of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz in the East Village art scene of the early 1980s, a grungy demimonde that rivaled the
British punk scene of the late 1970s.

Born in Michigan and schooled at the San Francisco Institute of Art, Brezinski occupied a sixth-floor space in a dilapidated Third Avenue building that was little better than a squat. The anti-glamour was amplified by the men’s shelter across the street, and interviewees remember having to step around bodies to visit Brezinski’s space, which he dubbed the Magic Gallery.

More than his art, those who knew him talk about Brezinski’s all-consuming desire for fame. Occasionally evoking Andy Kaufman and Ed Wood, he was a shameless self-promoter who would openly copy tactics that had worked for others. When his death was announced in 2007, years after he relocated to Berlin, many wondered if he may have faked it in order to draw attention to his work.

Filmmakers Brian Vincent and Heather Spore have assembled such a treasure trove of images, home movie footage and interviews regarding the East Village scene that I often found myself wishing I could stop the film I order to look at them more closely. The interviewees (Peter McGough, Kenny Scharf, Richard Hambleton, Duncan Hannah, Frank Holliday, Mark Kostabi, Scott Covert, David McDermott, James Romberger, Eric Bogosian, Patti Astor, Marguerite Van Cook, and Annina Nosei) offer vivid, if occasionally contradictory and often bitchy, memories of the chaotic nature of an era now lost to a fog of gentrification and business.

Make Me Famous will be screened at Hallwalls on Wednesday Sept. 24 at 7 p.m.

Tickets can be purchased online here or at the door.