(Gilmore Girls fan site)Watching the documentary Grey Gardens, you can smell the old house.
Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter Little Edie lived alone in a dilapidated 28-room mansion called Grey Gardens. With their cats and their raccoons. They were the aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy-Onassis. They were beautiful in their day, and a little crazy, old.
In 1972, the National Enquirer exposed the conditions in which they were living. The health department raided their home. It was a huge scandal. Then Jackie Onassis persuaded her husband Aristotle Onassis to renovate the place, keep it from being condemned.
It was in 1975, during this renovation, that Albert and David Maysles, Susan Froemke, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer produced Grey Gardens.
The documentary, filmed in cinema vérité, truly captures the feel of living with these women. It feels more like a visit, like a home movie, than a professionally produced documentary. Guy Kettelhack wrote on the Grey Gardens fan site, “I have now watched Grey Gardens four times. I’d seen it when it first came out in the mid-70s… The prospect of seeing the film again after nearly thirty years was not alluring… So I sighed when I shoved in the VHS GG tape to watch it again… And then proceeded to spend whatever time the thing took to play gaping at the screen, hands limp and dangling between my knees…”
I myself have seen Grey Gardens on DVD several times, having rented it from Netflix, specifically because the Gilmore girls enjoyed it so much.
In 2006, Albert Maysles included previously unreleased footage in a new DVD, The Beales of Grey Gardens.
Read more about Grey Gardens / The Beales of Grey Gardens - Criterion Collection (2-disc set) at Amazon.
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