Stuanch VII: Grey Gardens Turns the Big 4-0

Once again we bring it all back to the house that Grey Gardens built. “Staunch” is an annual tribute to the documentary film and most of all, to its many, many fans. This time around we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Grey Gardens with a year long celebration in tribute to the late, great Albert Maysles (1926-2015). June 2015-June 2016. Check back for updates.

Friday, June 12th, 7:30pm
Grey Gardens
Dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde & Muffie Meyer, 1976, 94 min.
Meet Big and Little Edie Beale—high-society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O.—thriving together amid the decay and disorder of their ramshackle East Hampton mansion. An impossibly intimate portrait and an eerie echo of the Kennedy Camelot, Albert and David Maysles’s Grey Gardens quickly became a cult classic and established Little Edie as a fashion icon and philosopher queen. The film and the Beales themselves have since inspired fashion lines, songs, a broadway musical, several off-broadway shows, and a 2009 HBO film.

Q&A with Jerry “The Marble Faun” Torre, one of the subjects of Grey Gardens.

Saturday, June 13th, 7:30pm
Grey Gardens

Sunday, June 14th, 7:30pm
The Beales of Grey Gardens
Dir. Albert Maysles & David Maysles, 2006, 91 min.
The 1976 cinema vérité classic Grey Gardens, which captured in remarkable close-up the lives of the eccentric East Hampton recluses Big and Little Edie Beale, has spawned everything from a midnight-movie cult following to a Broadway musical, to a Hollywood adaptation. The filmmakers then went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, The Beales of Grey Gardens, a tribute both to these indomitable women and to the original landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them American counterculture icons.