TV Party tonight: this week's Cut & Wrapped featuring Basquait on film and The Moon alone
Blondiefest: TV PARTY
The ICA’s Blondiefest kicks off with a rare screening of excerpts from the freewheeling, hugely influential New York cable show TV Party. The hour-long, unscripted episodes ran from 1978-82 out of a tiny studio on 23rd St, hosted by Blondie’s Chris Stein and Glenn O’Brien, featuring the likes of Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Klaus Nomi and Jean-Michel Basquiat. “We thrived on disaster,” said O’Brien, “I guess it was punk TV. We were anti-technique, anti-format, anti-establishment, and anti-anti-establishment.” Tony Fletcher, author of All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York 1927-77 introduces the screening.
Event of the week: Moon
Bowie’s son Duncan Jones created his own space oddity with 2009’s Moon, using space as a Petri dish for a classic character study. Sam Rockwell stars as a lonely astronaut with Kevin Spacey as his mutinous computer. “When I was growing up I had a lot of angst and didn’t know what my place in the world was, and I think a lot of that stuff comes through,” Jones told Dazed. “It’s about discovering what’s good about yourself and having a little bit of faith.” The poetic sci-fi is screening at the Rooftop Film Club in Shoreditch on Monday 8 July.
Documentary of the week: Drop City
A Colorado hippie commune of multi-coloured domes founded in 1965 by an art collective inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Joan Grossman’s documentary charts the rise and fall of a utopian dream that imploded under the inevitable weight of drugs, ego and media attention. The story is told through archive footage, photos and interviews with Drop City’s former residents, and screens as part of the Barbican’s Architecture on Film series, with a short documentary on future visions, Towards Tomorrow,recently unearthed from the BBC’s vaults.
Premiere of the week: Lovelace
The East End Film Festival closes with the UK premiere of Lovelace, tracing the notorious career of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace from Florida girl-next-door to X-rated star and the publication of her memoir Ordeal, revealing her abusive marriage to Svengali-like manager Chuck Traynor. Directors Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman grapple with Lovelace's slippery tale by telling the story twice, once through rose-tinted glasses and a second time with the star strapped to a polygraph.