Chazz Palminteri, Grace Hightower, Robert De Niro

by Adel Manoukian

Photos by Ryan McCune for PatrickMcMullan.com

Last week, Academy Award-winning actor Robert De Niro was honored at a benefit gala hosted by the Ghetto Film School (GHS). The annual event, held this year at The Standard Hotel, celebrated cinematic education by handing out scholarships to some of the kids involved in GHS’s not-for-profit program.

Founded in 2000, GHS is the nation’s first film high school. Located in the Bronx, their programs reach out to teens in all five boroughs, teaching the art of filmmaking to inspire future generations.

De Niro praised the school in his acceptance speech, calling it “progressive.” Joe Hall, the founder and president of the school, was also in attendance and gave a speech.

Soledad O'Brien

Fran Lebowitz

David Harbour, Julia Stile

Boyer, 52, has served as artistic director and head of programming for the Directors’ Fortnight since 2009. From 2004 to 2008, he was the head of Cannes’ Film Selection Committee. He is the artistic director of the Les Arcs European Film Festival at the Les Arcs ski resort in the Alps. Before joining the Directors’ Fortnight, he created and managed Videosphere, a renowned video store in Paris with a library of some 60,000 titles, including a wide range of arthouse films.

“The Tribeca Film Festival has always been a platform for a wide spectrum of filmmaking, and Frederic shares our passion and curiosity for film and storytelling,” said Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal. “We know he will make our festival team even stronger and enhance the Tribeca experience as we enter our second decade.”

“I could not be more honored and excited to begin this new chapter at Tribeca. This Festival has matured and developed so impressively from its origins, but there are many more frontiers to explore while keeping the core focus on discovering new voices in filmmaking,” Boyer added.

Other changes to the TFF executive structure include the promotion of Genna Terranova, former senior programmer, to director of programming.

The 11th annual TFF will be held April 18 through 29, 2012, in New York City.

Photo by Xavier Lambours. Photo courtesy of Tribeca Film Festival.

La MaMa Experimental Theater Club and its founder, the marvelous, mercurial Ellen Stewart—well, if you know them, they need no introduction. It’s like saying “Thomas Edison” and “electricity.” But if you don’t, here are the Cliff’s Notes.

Stewart was a hopeful African-American fashion design student who came from Chicago to New York City in the early ’60s to follow her dreams. Upon arrival she found she had no scholarship and found a job as a porter at Saks Fifth Avenue to make ends meet. On weekends she would go to Orchard Street and buy snippets of fabric to made incredible concoctions, which she wore under her blue smock as she wheeled carts around Saks.

One day, on her way to lunch wearing a “Miss Ellen Creation” a shopper stopped her to inquire where she had bought the dress. When told it was her own design, the shopper, incensed at Stewart’s uppity-ness, took her to management. Management saw the diamond in the rough and gave her a line of dresses called, you got it, Miss Ellen.

A joyous Stewart in the 1970s.

Stewart had friends writing plays—her stepbrother among them—and attempting to make it in the theater. To help them out, exactly 50 years ago this week, Stewart had the prescience to rent a small space on Second Avenue and begin the La MaMa Theater. Any time Stewart attended a performance, she would ring a tinkling bell and croon in a voice tinged with Creole honey, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to the playwright and all aspects of the theater.” Last year alone the space saw 60 different showings of dance, theater, music, multimedia and everything in between from Downtown and around the world.

Stewart died this January past the age of 90, and there have been many obits, tributes and dedications to her, but none were as personal, uproarious and full of wonder as last night in the theater she called the Annex, now dubbed the Ellen Stewart Theater on her beloved East Fourth Street. Mayor Michael Bloomberg even lionized Stewart and renamed the block Ellen Stewart Way, promising million of dollars to help renovate the wonderful old theater. Actors Bill Irwin, Harvey Keitel, Diane Lane and Estelle Parsons were there. Parsons said, “Where would the bright lights of the theater be without her? Performers, musicians, composers, everything—there’s no place like it on earth.”

La MaMa spawned hybrid performance before anyone had thought of it. Stewart combined poets, choreographers, writers, musicians, composers and visual artists and let them all find their way to create boundary-breaking art. Composers Philip Glass, Meredith Monk and Elizabeth Swados all got their start at La MaMa, and last night Swados premiered her new La MaMa Cantata, which will bow in its entirety Nov. 7, Stewart’s birthday.

Wallace Shawn performed an excerpt of his Hotel Play and Amiri Baraka, whose early work as Leroy Jones was seen on La MaMa’s tiny stages, read a poem. He later told me, “Ellen was a very courageous pioneer in the wilderness of crazy, white America.”

The Annex was filled with tables and revelers kept switching chairs and wandering during performance breaks to visit those Stewart would have called her babies. One long-time La MaMa baby, director Paul Zimet of the Talking Band, told me, “I am seeing people I haven’t seen in years—the creative output of all of us in this room is so extra ordinary.” As he said this, director Ping Chong stopped by, followed by Dario D’Ambrosi, who had flown in from Italy. D’ambrosi began his career with Stewart in 1979 on a chance meeting.

One of the purposes of the evening, other than honoring Stewart and raising funds, was to award the first Ellen Stewart Theater award. Honoree Sam Shepard could not be there. His agent, Judy Boles explained, “Sam had to be on a film set unexpectedly in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Sam doesn’t fly so it takes time, but he sent this video.” In the video, the perennially handsome over-60-year-old declared his affection for Stewart. “I was told there was this woman with a theater Downtown and I had a script and I took it to her. She was gorgeous and she took the script and my hand and said, ‘Baby, we are going to do your play.’ She never read it and yes, we did it and many more.”

Stewart was famous for her instincts about people and projects. The story Shepard told is no different than any of the thousands told by others or witnessed by me during my tenure as the theater’s executive director during the ’80s and ’90s. Stewart would hold court for writers or directors to come to her, when she would let her “beeps”—what she called her instincts—go off. She said, “Baby, if it beeps to me, MaMa will do it. If it doesn’t, well then, no.”

Stewart’s beeps launched the careers of Peter Brook, Andrei Serban, Robert Wilson, Paul Foster, Jean Claude Van Italie, Lanford Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy, Wilford Leach, John Kelly, Al Pacino, Bette Midler, Joe Chaikin, Harvey Fierstein, Robert De Niro. As the seasons, unfold there will be more new stars in the La MaMa firmament—just wait and watch.

Top Photo: The late Ellen Stewart, founded of LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club. Photos courtesy of LaMama Experimental Theater Club.