September 2008
Once upon a time, there was a small hotel in New York City called the Chelsea Hotel. It provided shelter, spirit and inspiration to many artists who filled its halls with music and walls with paintings. It was run by a gentle bard named ‘Stanley’, who would decide on the fate and rate of the residents. Sooner or later one had to cross the lobby and face the bard. The fairy tale ended in the summer of 2007 when the hotel’s board of directors ousted Stanley and decided to evict the tenants in favour of a more upscale crowd. Film Director Abel Ferrara (Go Go Tales, King of New York, Bad Lieutenant) ‘stayed up for days in the Chelsea Hotel’ to explore the mythology and history of the famous bohemian landmark, to encounter the ghosts of the past and to listen to the many stories and anecdotes told by long-term residents and passionate narrators such as Milos Forman, Denis Hopper or Ethan Hawke.
Abel Ferrara. — Where are you guys at?
Brian Hendricks — Hobo’s office is in Vancouver, I’m in Victoria which is on an island off Vancouver.
— Yes, I know. How’s the weather there? Does it snow a lot?
— We don’t get any snow here. We live in the part of Canada that is snow free. Anyway, thank you for taking the time to talk today. I wanted to speak a little about Chelsea on the Rocks. I really enjoyed the documentary. It seems that you would be the most appropriate person to have made it …
— Why is that?
— I associate you with being ‘the’ independent filmmaker, such a New York filmmaker even though I know that, besides the Keith Richards short that you did, it’s not common for you to do a documentary. As a spokesperson for everything that the Chelsea represents, I feel you are matched pretty well.
— Really? (chuckles)
— Is it something that you initiated or did somebody approach you to do it?
— Actually it was Jen [Gatien] who was doing the film and I was one of the interviewees being interviewed by this guy she was using, and this guy really just didn’t understand the place, y’know. So I said, “Put down the camera” because if you’re going to make a documentary about the Chelsea Hotel, you have to really do it. So I got my guys together, put together the money, and got the appropriate response to the idea of some kind of history and some kind of documentary film on the Chelsea.
— I really love your approach, the fact that it feels kind of spontaneous, there again it seems to fit the history of the hotel, sort of bohemian, free wheeling.
— You have a narrative, a written script, you sort of recreate fiction, you try to get into a situation and more or less discover a story, not that you have a story, you kind of work backwards, you’re actually writing a script and it’s a sort of sociological dig. You’ve got to get people and – well you know this because you do interviews – but how do you get people to do interviews and not just give you the form answer. You want some kind of truth.
— I’ve been to New York a few times, but I have never been to the Chelsea Hotel.
— Really, you’ve never been there!
— No, but I was hoping to get there before it’s completely unrecognizable.
— It will always be recognizable. It’s just recognizable in a different form. And the knee jerk reaction that everyone thought we should do for the movie is the idea that Corporate America is taking over. And it’s that financial, corporate, bland America that’s pushing out the bohemian side of life as a metaphor… and we never know what’s going to happen, or could happen or might happen. And it’s one of the reasons we have these images of 9/11 that I realized later on, that a bomb could hit. What happened with the financial crisis? It may as well be like 9/11, and all this corporate glass and steel lifestyle is going to overcome the bohemian lifestyle? It’s all just a sham. No one knows what’s going to happen, and as for the Chelsea, that building has a power. I don’t know if it will ever really be gone unless they tear it down. It’s like the end of Poltergeist.
