Beard's friend from the New England aristocracy, Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy, had an idea to make a film about two of her relatives Edith and her daughter Edie who were living in a rundown mansion in the Hamptons in a weird kind of royal hillbilly existence. Mother and daughter eccentric to the nines, surrounded by cats who appear to infected the humans into servitude, sit in rooms, reminisce, opine in Katherine Hepburn style lost accents about anything that comes up as the weeds grow over the windows.
We get four reels edited to the extent of whole sequences and sound matching as we sit through a dollied up dvd extra. That's not being mean. The project was abandoned because the footage we see is very samey, never breaking through the promise that the true life eccentrics seem to radiate. It's as though some travellers came across a field of gold nuggets, thought they were pretty and moved on.
The pair had hired two brothers to help them with the filming, Albert and David Maysles. These two had earned some serious stripes in the '60s with the likes of The Beatles First U.S. Visit, Salesman and the mighty rock/true crime/end of '60s nightmare concert film Gimme Shelter. They turned up and saw the gold on the ground, came back and made the incomparable Grey Gardens which allowed the Edies to bloom into their full identities and appear in a portrait of a ghostly remnant of the old one percent.
The only thing this brief show reel adds is that the interesting people who got there first didn't quite know that they need to store all that interesting-ness into batteries of observation. It's not a bad proof and it shows the working but it will find no credible place on the documentary shelf without its greater context. Would Criterion be interested in a special edition of Grey Gardens, perhaps? It's that or festivals until exhaustion.
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