'Guest of Cindy Sherman' filmmakers
By Robert Levin
Special to amNewYork
Paul H-O (short for Hasegawa-Overacker), was the host of “Gallery Beat,” a public access show in the 1990s that brought an everyman’s perspective to the often close-knit, incestuous New York art world. He never attracted many viewers, but the art community genuinely appreciated the show.
“That’s the thing that made me the happiest. Artists liked my show and that’s the only thing that really mattered,” he says.
One of those artists was Cindy Sherman, press shy portrait artist who caused a sensation in the 1980s with her seminal “Untitled Film Stills.”
In the early ’90s, Sherman surprised everyone by consenting to a series of interviews with Paul.
These eventually blossomed into romance, the complicated path of which is charted in “Guest of Cindy Sherman,” a documentary by Paul and Tom Donahue that opened at the Cinema Village Friday.
The film impressively tackles a host of complex subjects in its 88 minutes. It tells the stories of “Gallery Beat” and Cindy’s career, and chronicles an art community fundamentally changed by the intrusion of big business and commoditization.
But the core of “Cindy Sherman,” however, is the story of an improbable couple brought together, besieged with insurmountable challenges and ultimately driven apart.
“It’s about men and women,” Donahue says. “It’s about a male and a female who meet cute, and then they fall in love, and then there’s conflict. That’s the big story.”
