N.Y. Años 60´s. Edie Sedgwick.

Movies

The Poor Little Rich Girl in Leopard Skin Who Was Warhol's Muse By MANOHLA DARGIS Published: March 31, 2007

Museum of Modern Art Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol's 1965 film, "Outer and Inner Space." (Detail)

"Edie was a beauty, gee!" said Andy Warhol. She still is. More than three decades after her death from acute barbiturate intoxication, the former Warhol superstar and New York It Girl Edie Sedgwick seems more beautiful and more super than ever. There are several new books from various intimates and the embarrassing film "Factory Girl." She makes a starring appearance with Warhol on the cover of the latest edition of "POPism," his hilariously observed (with Pat Hackett) chronicle of the 1960s. And there she is, too, on the front and back covers of "Andy Warhol Screen Tests," the first volume of the authorized catalogue raisonné of his cinematic work. Starting today, the Museum of the Moving Image presents a weeklong series titled "The Real Edie Sedgwick" that further burnishes her legend and her importance as a muse. The major Warhol-Sedgwick collaborations are all here, including those in which she is the star attraction, like "Poor Little Rich Girl," and those in which she appears as one guest among many, like"Vinyl." Also on view are Warhol's western parody, "Horse"; a fragment from Richard Leacock's "Lulu," made for the Alban Berg opera; Andrew Meyer's "Match Girl" (narrated by Warhol); and Edie's excised footage from "The Chelsea Girls." Less happily, there is John Palmer and David Weisman's"Ciao! Manhattan," a portrait of her in terrible free fall.

Museum of Modern Art Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol's 1965 film, "Outer and Inner Space."

Ms. Sedgwick's beauty, fame, bad habits, bed partners, early death and continuing postmortem notoriety have helped turn her into the representative face of Warhol's film work, his ultimate superstar. But what often gets left out of the discussion about her proverbial 15 minutes is that she was, quite simply, a dazzling film presence. One of the pleasures of this series is that it allows you to look, really look, at the Edie that Warhol fell for, to watch that astonishingly animated face, pale as milk, flutter and fluctuate with seemingly millions of micro-movements. She is at once Jean Harlow and Jean Seberg, as beautiful and nervous as a hummingbird, and just as alive.

Multimedia Slide Show Factory on Film

Like some of the greatest movie stars, Edie wasn't much of an actress; like them, she didn't need to be. On his Web site, Ronald Tavel, who wrote a number of Warhol films, including "Kitchen" and "Vinyl," calls her "mollusk-memoried." (You can download some of his screenplays at ronald-tavel.com.) Watching "Kitchen," which finds Edie centrally positioned in a white kitchen surrounded by buzzing men, her legs stretched across the frame (the girl knew how to work it), you can scarcely believe they rehearsed for a week. At one point, someone in Warhol's camp had figured out a clever system for their mollusk-memoried superstar: if she needed to be fed a line she was to sneeze. In "Kitchen," Edie sneezes a lot.

Andy Warhol Museum Edie Sedgwick in a scene from "Poor Little Rich Girl," part of the film series "The Real Edie Sedgwick," screening at the Museum of the Moving Image March 31 through April 8, 2007.

Ms. Sedgwick met Warhol in January 1965, the same month one of her brothers died after crashing his motorcycle. She had landed in New York the summer before, arriving from Cambridge, Mass., where she had studied art, partied heavily with herds of witty young men and driven her Mercedes while tripping on acid. Once in New York, she moved in with her grandmother, gave modeling a whirl and started burning through her inheritance (80 grand in six months). She rode around in limousines and wore a leopard-skin coat. In some of the films she made with Warhol you can see the jagged scar between the dramatically dark and heavy eyebrows that slash across her face, a memento from roaring through a red light. In 1965, the year she appeared in every sound film Warhol made between late March and early September, the year they were known as Andy & Edie or Edie & Andy, when they were ubiquitous in the society pages and glossy magazine layouts, Ms. Sedgwick was the girl with the most ice cream. Well, at least the most speed. A onetime bulimic, the sliver-thin, silver-haired, around-the-town debutante probably didn't actually eat all that much ice cream, but she did consume drugs, lots and lots and lots and lots. For "Ciao! Manhattan," she recalls a period when, camped out at a hotel in the late 1960s, she was shooting speed every half-hour. The surprise isn't that she died at 28; it's that she lived as long as she did.

Photofest/Museum of Moving Image Ms. Sedgwick as Susan Superstar in the 1972 film "Ciao! Manhattan."

Warhol originally hoped to make a 24-hour-long day-in-the-life film about Edie titled "The Poor Little Rich Girl Saga," which would register her fabulous ordinariness. Some portions were made, including the film "Poor Little Rich Girl," which opens with out-of-focus images of the equally blurry Edie waking up, and the mesmerizing "Beauty #2," which shows she wasn't as dumb as she seemed or wanted to appear. The director and star eventually broke off, with her angrily confronting him. "Everybody in New York is laughing at me," Warhol quotes her as saying. "These movies are making a complete fool out of me! Everybody knows I just stand around in them doing nothing and you film it and what kind of talent is that?"

Photofest/Museum of the Moving Image Ms. Sedgwick in 1967.

Ms. Sedgwick's unhappiness is palpable, and it shows that she had no idea what she was part of. (She was also running out of money and now running with Bob Dylan's crowd.) Warhol yelled back at her: "But don't you understand? These movies are art!" And so they are. His exploration of time in film, the way he arranges all those lovely bodies he collects inside the frame, his attention to documentary and dramatic nuance are revelatory. "Warhol seems to have incorporated all the transitoriness of things into his very aesthetics," the filmmaker Jonas Mekas once wrote. "And that's why it seems to me that his cinema is really about the transitoriness of the medium and the transitory state of all things. About the transitoriness of all existence and all art."

Whitney Museum of American Art The film "Lupe" is presented in a double-screen format.

The artist Robert Rauschenberg once said of Ms. Sedgwick: "I was always intimidated and self-conscious when I talked to her or was in her presence because she was like art. I mean, she was an object that had been very strongly, effectively created." The ultimate self-made woman, Edie turned herself into a thing of beauty, a creature of frightening excesses, a legend, a muse. Bob Dylan is said to have written the song "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" about her.

Museum of the Moving Image "Beauty #2" shows a more playful side of Ms. Sedgwick.

In 1965, Andy Warhol turned his stone-cold gaze on this 22-year-old and fired up his camera, shooting one film after another, capturing a quicksilver beauty who glistened and gleamed and then, just like that, faded from view but not from history. "The Real Edie Sedgwick" runs through April 8 at the Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens; (718) 784-4520, movingimage.us.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

Billy, Carlos y Tyson.

Revista ACH Chicos Año 2 - Número 51 Abril 2007 Buenos Aires , Argentina Sexualidad

Billy, Carlos y Tyson, los "Barbie" gay By Peter

Billy y su némesis

Billy nació en 1992, es originario de Amsterdam, Holanda, vive en los suburbios de Nueva York, y su característica particular es que es un muñeco gay. Así como Barbie, también dispone de amigos (que se venden por separado) Carlos, con característica latinas, y el neoyorquino Tyson, de raza negra, compartiendo con Billy su naturaleza homesexual. Los tres muñecos Gay todo un éxito de ventas globalmente Sus creadores, el diseñador John McKitterick y el empresario español Juan Antonio Andrés, decidieron sacar del armario a Billy y lanzarlo por primera vez al mercado el 15 de noviembre de 1994, durante un encuentro en el SoHo londinense, organizado para reunir fondos de lucha contra el sida. Billy es sensible, inteligente y buen mozo, un muñeco con todos los atributos físicos de un hombre común y corriente, añadió, sólo que con preferencias homosexuales. El joven de plástico vestido de marinero, cowboy o policía, con una altura de 35 centímetros, tiene dos amigos: el puertorriqueño Carlos, con característica latinas, y el neoyorquino Tyson, de raza negra, también de tendencia homosexual. Actualmente, Billy es todo un icono en Europa, Estados Unidos, Sudáfrica y Japón para defender los derechos humanos de la comunidad gay y cuenta con el sitio en internet http://www.billyworld.com/menu2.swf, además del correo billeymx04@yahoo.com . Estos muñecos se venden en tiendas de ropa, cafés y bares de ambiente gay y diseñadores top del mundo de la moda como Calvin Klein, Gianni Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Moschino, Jean Paul Gaultier, Paul Smith y Christian Lacroix han creado diseños exclusivos para el muñeco.

Copyright by ACHchicos 2007

Padrinos de lujo; Mickey y Minnie.

Farándula Abrirlo en el Browser. Abril 08 de 2007 Agencia EFE - Los Ángeles Minnie y Mickey, en bodas "gay" Parejas homosexuales también podrán celebrar sus enlaces en Disneylandia. AP / El País Mickey y Minnie ahora acudirán a los matrimonios de parejas homosexuales que se realicen en Walt Disney World. Las parejas del mismo sexo pueden celebrar su boda en Disneylandia y Walt Disney World si así lo desean, y contar incluso con la presencia de Mickey y Minnie, los anfitriones de los populares parques de atracciones. Las parejas "gays" pueden participar en los mismos paquetes de bodas que los parques ofrecen a cualquier pareja que desea celebrar su amor entre estos personajes. Uno de los paquetes es 'Boda de cuento de hadas' que por US$8.000 incluye la planificación, ceremonia, comida, bebida y adornos florales. También la opción de lujo que añade la carroza de Cenicienta, pajes engalanados para la ocasión que hacen sonar sus trompetas cuando llega la pareja y la presencia de Mickey y Minnie Mouse vestidos de gala. Estos paquetes estaban a disposición del público hasta la fecha pero la empresa solicitaba una licencia válida de matrimonio de los estados de California y Florida, donde los enlaces del mismo sexo no están permitidos. Aún así, las parejas del mismo sexo podían celebrar sus nupcias en los parques pero reservando salones para convenciones y fuera de las áreas, o de los preparativos, habitualmente ofrecidos al resto de las bodas. El portavoz de los parques, Donn Walker, indicó en el mismo comunicado que la decisión actual es consistente con la política de "inclusión para crear un ambiente de respeto y bienvenida" a todos los huéspedes. COPYRIGHT © 2007 El País, Cali Colombia. Prohibida su reproducción total o parcial, así como su traducción a cualquier idioma sin autorización escrita de su titular. Reproduction in whole or in part, or translation without written permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.

A propósito del apartamento 904 del Edificio Laurita.......

It's Not You, It's Your Apartment By JOYCE WADLER Published: March 29, 2007

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Date Repellent? Bob Strauss refuses to "blandify" his apartment by getting rid of his stuffed baby seal, even though it puts some women off.

DATING is fraught with disappointments, so you can imagine how delighted a single woman might be to find someone like Albert Podell — particularly after she Googles him and learns how rich he is. Last year, Mr. Podell, a 70-year-old lawyer, gave N.Y.U. Law School $2.9 million. He goes out four nights a week, to the opera, symphony or theater. He is well read. He says he has traveled to 162 countries. Then comes that magic evening when the woman is ready to go back to his place. "It's totally unchanged, like it was when I went to law school in 1973, a time warp," Mr. Podell says of his small one-bedroom in SoHo, a description that seems plausible, given the hot pink living room with the futon seating and the fraying contact paper on the kitchen cabinets.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Albert Podell said his sheets had sabotaged at least one romance.

The place is also dimly lighted, which, once you examine the kitchen nook in daylight, is probably not such a bad thing. The cabinets hold nothing but a six-month supply of powdered milk for Mr. Podell's cereal, so that he can keep his trips to the supermarket to a minimum; the Formica countertop is peeling; the stove has been disconnected from the gas feed. (Mr. Podell, who usually eats out, sees no reason to waste fuel.) All these things have proved detriments to love, but none so effectively as his sheets. Mr. Podell likes the ones from the '60s and '70s that tell a story: sheets with intergalactic battles or pink hippopotami or the Beatles. Since these are no longer available in adult-bed sizes, Mr. Podell's sheets are now 30 to 40 years old. The fading is such that a person who saw one in a Salvation Army bin, having lost everything she owned in a fire, would remind herself that there was no reason to be desperate. The fading, however, was apparently not the reason that the sheets became a deal breaker. "I was dating this very nice woman, I thought," says Mr. Podell. "I was ready and she was ready to do the big deed. I take her to my apartment, go into the bedroom, and fling back the sheets, and she said, 'My husband had these sheets and he was a mean-hearted son of a bitch and you must be like him and I'm leaving.' "

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times An Acquired Taste Albert Podell, a wealthy lawyer, has a rent-stabilized apartment filled with souvenirs from travels that has changed little since 1973. "What do I need a fancy place for?" he said. Women have complained about everything from his home's size to the "glamour photos" of ex-girlfriends.

Spring is here and the restaurants will soon be filled with anxious and hopeful couples, ordering wine, dusting off their most luminous lies, thinking they might finally have found love. Then they will see their dates' homes for the first time. And suddenly some of them will realize that they cannot be with this person a moment longer — or at the very latest, because that wine was not cheap, beyond the next morning. A few whose homes have been romantic deal breakers may, like Mr. Podell, know what went wrong and choose to ignore it, seeing their apartments as a reflection of their brave refusal to bow to conventional taste. "There have been at least 40 women who've said, why do you live here?" he says. Make that 41. Why does he live here? "Ever hear the words 'rent stabilized'?" says Mr. Podell, who's paying $702 for a one bedroom in SoHo. "What do I need a fancy place for? A lot of people want to show off their wealth. It ain't me, baby."

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Deal Breakers Bob Strauss, likes to date "challenging type people" who can handle his Sonic the Hedgehog figurines and Lego collection..

Then there is Bob Strauss, 46, who writes dating advice for match.com and has a real stuffed baby seal in his apartment. He didn't whack the seal on its silky little head, it's a family piece inherited from a rich aunt and uncle in Miami. It is displayed along with Mr. Strauss's South Park and Sonic the Hedgehog figurines and Lego collection. "It's provocative," he adds. "I like going out with tough, smart, aggressive, challenging type people. It's fine with me if they want to argue about it; I don't want to blandify my apartment to make myself generically acceptable." Most people, however, will never know how their homes sabotaged their romance. They operate under the assumption that if the garbage has been discarded and the dog hair removed, the house is romance-ready. They are unaware that such seemingly insignificant details as a Klimt poster or harsh overhead lighting are proof to some that they are not dateworthy. For these poor innocents, a guide. No Stuffed Animals, Even If You Are Dying Alison Forbes, a founder of The Art of Everyday Living consulting service in Los Angeles, is often called upon to help make homes relationship-ready. It was her sorry duty to inform us that the stuffed animal pandemic continues. She believes it may show a reluctance to grow up — or, in cases where the stuffed animals cover the bed, a reluctance to make space for another person. Jason Bunin, the 36-year-old bad-boy chef at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village, echoed her disapproval. "You see it more in younger girls, like between 21 and 25," Mr. Bunin says. "Pink, purple, teddy bears, unicorns, all over the bed. I'd just whack 'em off with my arm." Why do men dislike stuffed animals? "Too cutesy and immature." Also, Mr. Bunin says, if you were to get involved with someone like that, you'd have that garbage in your house. Mr. Bunin, by the way, is on the dating scene no more. He married Caron Newman earlier this month in an Elvis-themed wedding in Las Vegas. You can check out the video at cupidswedding.com. Mr. Bunin is the one in the black sequined tuxedo.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times Evan Lobel bought and decorated a $2.4 million loft. When his boyfriend returned from work with the Peace Corps, he found it too opulent; the couple broke up. .

There Is a Reason Nice Buildings Are Not Named for Norman Bates Sure, you can save money by moving into your mother's house, but as always in matters of romance, you must first ask yourself: Would James Bond do it? If you are still thinking about the answer, consider the experience of Adria Armbrister, a 30-year-old program coordinator at Columbia University's School of Public Health. Ms. Armbrister met a man online through Yahoo and after a month and a half of e-mailing they had dinner. It went well: The man, who was 29, owned a business, he did not ask Ms. Armbrister to pay for her own meal or try to borrow money. On the second date, they stopped by his house to pick up an umbrella. The house had belonged to his mother, who had died five years earlier. The plastic-covered gold sofas and the heavy gold tasseled lamps suggested to Ms. Armbrister that her date had not redecorated — never a sign of an enterprising personality. But the deal breaker came when she saw his room. "We walked up three flights of stairs to the attic," she says. "It looked like a teenager's room. The computer was up there and the twin bed, his clothes were all over the floor. I was like, uuuuuh-huuuuh. He didn't even seem sorry that he lived in a 12-year-old boy's room, this was like normal behavior. It said to me, this person is not grown up yet. It was frightening. He's lived his whole life in the attic." What did her date do for a living? "He was in the real estate business." The Word "Ex" May Be Substituted for the Word "Mother" It is also a detriment to romance when one's date shares a roof with a former spouse. "I met him at a function," says a woman who is a lawyer in Manhattan and has been divorced for several years. She would speak only on condition of anonymity. "It was like" — and here she sings — "across a crowded room. He was very upfront about his living arrangement. He said he and his wife had one of those huge Upper West Side apartments with four bedrooms. She lived in one, another couple lived in another one, whoever was in need of a home is in the third one. Every morning, they go to the kitchen and have coffee together. I couldn't picture myself in that scenario. It was like Frasier and Niles with that father and Daphne. He was very cute, but then I realized he was totally unsuccessful." Although the Stasi Were Said to Love It "I can't sit in a room with overhead lighting," says Michele Slung, a freelance book editor in Woodstock, N.Y. "It makes me feel like I'm in a police interrogation room. I believe in lamps that are casting warm glows, and anyone that doesn't understand that, I can't be in their house, men or women. It's a matter of warmth; it makes people happy." Ms. Slung insists on pink light bulbs, her preferred shade being Dawn Pink. She also uses amber lampshades. "I don't think I could ever like somebody who got their lighting wrong," she says. "What this probably means is that I'm not in the market for a guy. If I ever found a guy with a beautifully lit house I would propose — although probably his wife would have done the lighting."

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times On Second Thought: Matt Heindl was turned off by rabbits in Breck Hostetter's apartment, but eventually came around. They are now married and have a child.

In the Afterglow of Love, Nobody Ever Reaches for a Hammer Michael Longacre is a New York graphic designer. He believes that design people are aesthetically demanding, but in the case of one brief affair, the problem was a more basic sort. "This was a great looking guy, who worked on Wall Street," Mr. Longacre says. "He wore like $2,000 suits, but his great pride was really, really expensive shoes. He told me he had 50 or 60 pairs of these Italian shoes that are $750 a pair. I go to his apartment, there was no framing on the doors, there were like test colors on the walls. He'd started work on it several years earlier. I said, 'You've spent $30,000 on shoes, but you're gonna renovate your own apartment when you get around to it?' He also showed me his waterless bong. Having high-tech marijuana equipment is another deal breaker for me." We Aren't Kidding About the Klimt Adam Handler, who is 35, lives in Atlanta where he does grass-roots organizing for CARE. He is now married. But five or six years ago, when he was single and living in Washington, D.C., a nascent relationship was destroyed when a woman he'd been dating invited him back to her apartment. "On her walls she had my two most despised pieces of art," Mr. Handler says. One was "The Kiss" by Gustav Klimt. "I happen to hate Klimt, but 'The Kiss' is the most trite and overdone and what made it worse, it was in her bedroom. Then there was the Robert Doisneau photograph of this couple kissing." That black and white photo taken on a Paris street in the '50s? That's kind of romantic. "It's romantic when you're 16," Mr. Handler says. "At some point you need to outgrow it." The romance, while it did not end that evening, ended soon after. "She was attractive, she was smart, she was all the things I thought I would have liked in a woman, but I decided I didn't trust her judgment," Mr. Handler says. What was his wife's place like when they met? It was a studio in Manhattan, Mr. Handler says, with a few really nice antiques. She also had a very impressive set of Le Creuset cookware. He had just about the same amount of All-Clad. It worked. A Touch of Raffia Might Have Helped. But We Doubt It Evan Lobel knows how to put together a welcoming apartment — in addition to being the owner of Lobel Modern, a vintage furniture store in lower Manhattan, he's a designer. But even that doesn't guarantee success. "I was dating somebody very seriously," says Mr. Lobel, who is 42. "He went away for a year to work in the Peace Corps. The two of us were in love. I said, I'm gonna wait, I'm not gonna be with anyone else, and I lived up to that. When he came back, we were supposed to live together. I thought, wouldn't it be a nice surprise, after a year of living in huts, to live in a nice big, beautiful apartment." While his boyfriend was posted in Swaziland, Mr. Lobel sold his 1,200-square-foot Chelsea apartment and bought a 2,500-square-foot loft, with a fireplace and stone bathrooms. It was a frightening financial leap. While his old apartment sold for $1.5 million, the new one cost almost $2.4 million. He brought in beautiful pieces: a cabinet by the midcentury designer Tommi Parzinger; a Karl Springer chandelier with an estimated value of $25,000. Then his boyfriend returned. "He said, 'What is this? I can't live in a place like this, I was just around people who were hungry and dying,'" Mr. Lobel says. "In the end we were breaking up. For a while I regretted even buying that apartment." It's Not My Place, It's You Matt Heindl, who is 34 and does Internet marketing, remembers two terrible dating experiences. The first involved a woman who was a nail biter — he discovered this in the cold light of morning when he found bits of her nails on the bedside stand. He also has a vivid memory of the mildewed towel she offered when he took a shower. "It kind of smelled like dog," he says, with a tone of disgust. "I can smell it now." The second experience involved an artist who lived in an East Village tenement. As he entered her apartment, a free-flying parrot relieved itself on his head. Then a large rabbit darted out from somewhere and licked his feet. A baby gate separated a second rabbit from the first — there had been a nasty penis-biting episode, his date explained. Also, the kitchen wall was covered with antique egg beaters, which looked to Mr. Heindl like weird tools. Mr. Heindl and his date, Breck Hostetter, have now been married two years, and have a 9-month-old daughter, Greta. She operates Sesame Letterpress out of their home in Carroll Gardens. It is named, Ms. Hostetter says, after a parakeet who passed away at age 12. Can Mr. Heindl explain how a deal breaker turned into marriage? "I seriously thought, 'Shall I run? No, I like her, I like her, I'll check it out,' " he says. "I thought about it, I asked myself, 'Why are you doing this?' and I decided it showed she can really nurture, because one was like a really old rabbit, a geriatric rabbit. And she baked, obviously." So there it is — if your date doesn't get your rabbit or your seal or your light bulb, he or she is not the person for you. Mr. Handler, the Klimt hater, now believes he was probably looking for a reason to break up with the woman he was seeing because she wasn't right for him. Mr. Podell, of the cartoon animal sheets, proudly fills a page with the household complaints of his dates. They include the size of his apartment, the lack of a coffeepot, the nonexistent stove connection, the lack of closet space. His love life, however, is great. He has a 22-year-old Russian girlfriend, whom he met in Malta. They have taken vacations to Asia, Europe and India, with Mr. Podell footing the bill. Mr. Podell's girlfriend lives in Moscow. She has never seen his apartment.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007

DVD "Ballet Russes"

Dance & DVD Film.

The War of the Russes, Ballet's Fabled Troupe By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH Published: April 8, 2007

Geller/Goldfine Productions From the documentary "Ballet Russes": George Zoritch and Nini Theilade in "Rouge et Noir."

NOW, just weeks from the start of the spring seasons of New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, is as good a time as any to consider the Americanization of classical dance. Again and again, the story has been told through George Balanchine, who came, saw and conquered. But there was ballet in the United States before Balanchine got here. And there were other forces kindling the flame far beyond New York. Their influence persists even now, as Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller show in their documentary "Ballets Russes." The film does not diminish Balanchine; he is a player here too. But it shows him in a transcontinental, even intercontinental, context, and his is not the name on the marquee. Admired at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, the film opened to raves in theaters that year and is now available on DVD from Zeitgeist Films. Young dancers who care where they come from should see it. So should balletomanes of all ages and persuasions, both for the sheer pleasure of the thing and for the historical implications. Serge Diaghilev, impresario extraordinaire, died in 1929, and the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev died with him. The film follows the vicissitudes of rival companies that sprang up to fill the void, laying claim to the Ballets Russes franchise. From Paris the chronicle spirals to London, North and South America and even Australia. Without striking explicit revisionist attitudes, the filmmakers present priceless archival material and oral histories of dancers who toured America during the war years. In so doing they quietly set the record straight. Consider the testimony of the imperious Yugoslavian beauty Mia Slavenska. When Balanchine returned to the Ballets Russes in the mid-1940s after an absence of 12 years, he sent word that he was expecting her for an early morning rehearsal. She had never heard of him. Miffed, she refused to go. "Big mistake," she admits on screen. On a happier note she takes credit for training the American Indian ballerina Maria Tallchief, who went on to fame as one of Balanchine's brightest stars (and the third of his four wives). "That's why she had that technique," Ms. Slavenska says. In the words of the dancer Frederic Franklin, "We were the covered wagons of ballet." Born in 1914 and still going strong at American Ballet Theater as Friar Laurence in "Romeo and Juliet" and the Tutor in "Swan Lake," Mr. Franklin shares vivid memories of the 1940s, when the Ballets Russes performed one-night stands throughout the United States. The members slept on the train, leaving perplexity and astonishment in their wake wherever they danced. The filmmakers illustrate with a clip from Léonide Massine's bizarre "Bacchanale," music by Wagner, décor by Salvador Dalí, in which the ballerina Nini Theilade slithered onstage through the womb of a bleeding swan. We hear too from Irina Baronova, one of the three "baby ballerinas" hand-picked by Balanchine in 1932 as stars of the new Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. (She was 12 at the time.) "We loved what we were doing," she says. Riding the rails was tiring, and she doubts that today's dancers would tolerate it. "It never occurred to us to call a union," she adds. "It was fun. Sometimes you even got paid. What more do you want?" When they reached Hollywood, they were the toast of the town. In its wanderings, the Ballets Russes company picked up new dancers. There are glimpses of the American Indian Yvonne Choteau, who left Oklahoma at 12 to study on scholarship with the School of American Ballet in New York. Two years later she won a spot in the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Her Russian counterparts had their mothers for company, but Ms. Choteau traveled alone. "To this day," she says, "I can't hear a train whistle without thinking of the years I missed mom and dad terribly. Happy as I was, and fulfilled, there is a price to pay." New York was not the only place where good instruction was to be had. The teenage Marc Platt auditioned in Seattle and promptly went to work as Marc Platoff. In "Seventh Symphony," danced to Beethoven, Massine showcased him as the Spirit of Creation. "Best part I ever had," Mr. Platt recalls. "Danced my fool head off." Vintage clips from Hollywood capture him tearing up a soundstage to music ranging from jazz to Rossini. At 89, backstage at a community theater in Marin County, Calif., he applies his makeup for a turn in "The Nutcracker." And so the legacy of the Ballets Russes keeps filtering down, much of it through immigrants. The third-generation Russian ballerina Nathalie Krassovska put down roots in Dallas and founded a school. Tatiana Riabouchinska, another baby ballerina, founded a school in Beverly Hills, Calif. "What will I do?" she says, when asked why she still teaches. "Sell books? Sell fruit? It's my life." George Zoritch, in his youth an Adonis the Ballets Russes alumnae still rhapsodize about, ended his career on the dance faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "I'm still a dreamer at 83," Mr. Zoritch says, smiling angelically, working the machines at a gym before joining Ms. Krassovska in his stocking feet for a tender moment from "Giselle," likely their last. No one can say how many new dreamers the Ballets Russes inspired in America. But they're out there, everywhere.

Buy a copy of the DVD at Amazon.com

Copyright by the New York Times 2007