On Monday, October 26th, at 6pm in the Rosenthal Lecture Room at the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach’s offices, the ultimate, true, decaying “in need of preservation” haunted house documentary Grey Gardens (1975) will be shown just in time for Halloween.
The event is for CURRENT 2015-2016 MEMBERS ONLY. Only reserved seating is available. Those who wish to attend must be a member of the Preservation Foundation and should call 561.832.0731, ext. 111 to reserve a seat. Email responses are NOT accepted.
PLEASE NOTE, ONCE THE FILM BEGINS (6 pm) THERE IS NO ADMITTANCE.
Grey Gardens is a 1975 American documentary film by Albert and David Maysles. The film depicts the everyday lives of two reclusive upper class women, a mother and daughter both named Edith Beale, who lived at Grey Gardens, a derelict mansion at 3 West End Road in the wealthy Georgica Pond neighborhood of East Hampton, New York. Known as Big and Little Edie Beale—high-society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O.—they thrive 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.
In 2010 the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In a 2014 Sight and Sound poll, film critics voted Grey Gardens the joint ninth best documentary film of all time.
Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, known as "Big Edie", and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale, known as "Little Edie", were the aunt and the first cousin, respectively, of former US First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two women lived together at the Grey Gardens estate for decades with limited funds in increasing squalor and isolation.
The house was designed in 1897 by Joseph Greenleaf Thorpe and purchased in 1923 by "Big Edie" and her husband Phelan Beale. After Phelan left his wife, "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" lived there for more than 50 years. The house was called Grey Gardens because of the color of the dunes, the cement garden walls, and the sea mist.
Throughout the fall of 1971 and into 1972, their living conditions—their house was infested by fleas, inhabited by numerous cats and raccoons, deprived of running water, and filled with garbage and decay—were exposed as the result of an article in the National Enquirer and a cover story in New York Magazine after a series of inspections (which the Beales called "raids") by the Suffolk County Health Department. With the Beale women facing eviction and the razing of their house, in the summer of 1972 Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill provided the necessary funds to stabilize and repair the dilapidated house so that it would meet village codes.
Albert and David Maysles became interested in their story and received permission to film a documentary about the women, which was released in 1975 to wide critical acclaim. Their direct cinema technique left the women to tell their own stories.
The film will be followed by a showing of the short film comedy Documentary Now! – Sandy Passage (2015) which is a satirical ode to Grey Gardens.
The Foundation’s President Alexander C. Ives will present a short introduction, linking the film with the causes and work of the Preservation Foundation.
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