Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana

Birth : , Derry, New Hampshire, USA

History

Gary Indiana is an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of “depraved indifference” that characterized American life at the millennium's end. Indiana has written, directed and acted in a dozen plays, mostly during the early 1980s. Performed in small New York City venues like Mudd Club, Club 57, the Performing Garage and the backyard of Bill Rice's East 3rd Street studio. Earlier plays included Alligator Girls Go to College (1979); Curse of the Dog People (1980); A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking (1980), which was filmed by Michel Auder in 1981; The Roman Polanski Story (1981); Phantoms of Louisiana (1981) and Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1992), written with Jack Smith for performance artist Ron Vawter. The latter was filmed in 1994 by Jill Godmilow. Indiana has acted in several mostly experimental films by, among others, Michel Auder (Seduction of Patrick, 1979, which he co-wrote with the director), Scott B and Beth B (The Trap Door, 1980), Melvie Arslanian (Stiletto, 1981, where he plays a bellhop at the bellhopless Chelsea Hotel), Jackie Raynal (Hotel New York, 1984), Ulrike Ottinger (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press [de], 1984, with Veruschka as Dorian Gray and Delphine Seyrig as Doctor Mabuse), Lothar Lambert (Fräulein Berlin, 1984), Dieter Schidor (Cold in Columbia, 1985), Valie Export (The Practice of Love, 1985) and Christoph Schlingensief (Terror 2000: Intensivstation Deutschland, 1994, in which Udo Kier kills his character with a machine gun).

Profile

Gary Indiana

Movies

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Himself
In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Murder by Numbers
Self
A documentary on serial killer films.
Roy Cohn/Jack Smith
Writer
When Jill Godmilow’s documentary Roy Cohn/Jack Smith premiered at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the number of AIDS-related deaths was reaching an all-time high in the United States (over 270,000). In New York City, the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic, many artists and filmmakers were grappling with the disease. While Broadway was hosting the second part of Tony Kushner’s award-winning play Angels in America, downtown New Yorkers were fondly recalling another recent production, Ron Vawter’s one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, in which the actor, who died of AIDS in April 1994, performed two monologues, first as Cohn, the conservative lawyer, and secondly, as Smith, the flamboyant experimental filmmaker—both of whom died of AIDS-related causes in the late 1980s.
Terror 2000
Fricke
Germany, right after the re-unification. The people are out of control, blind hatred towards immigrants is common sense. In this time, a social-worker, with the mission to bring a Polish family to their destination (an immigration camp in a little provincial town called Rassau), gets kidnapped just as the family. Chief inspector Koern and his girl-friend start to investigate in this matter in Rassau, exploring a world of obsessive sex, mislead lust and an over-whelming irrational love to the German nation, infiltrating anyone's mind. Rascism doesn't start with shaved hair and boots but rather in the middle of society itself...
Cold in Colombia
Seduced by the country, in which German director Dieter Schidor saw a decadent tropical charm, he brought together a varied group of people and involved them in the production.
Hotel New York
A comedy about New York and its eccentric inhabitants. A french filmmaker comes to New york to show her film at MOMA. Fascinated by the city, she decides to stay.
Cinématon XXVIII
N°271
Reel 28 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.
A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking
Writer
Critic Gary Indiana wrote this satire and plays Dom, a rich, naive and young homosexual who moves into his sister's apartment. He immediately becomes involved with the lives of his quirky new neighbors. Rippley (Taylor Meade) is the chatty but depressed author and talk show host. Dominatrix Mavis (Cookie Mueller) drops by to visit or ask for child sitting favors when free from the demands of her kinky clients. Jackie Curtis plays Buddie, the handsome hunk who picks up Dom in a local bar, and Geoffrey Carey is the Angel of Death who carefully watches over all activity. (IMDb)
A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking
Dom
Critic Gary Indiana wrote this satire and plays Dom, a rich, naive and young homosexual who moves into his sister's apartment. He immediately becomes involved with the lives of his quirky new neighbors. Rippley (Taylor Meade) is the chatty but depressed author and talk show host. Dominatrix Mavis (Cookie Mueller) drops by to visit or ask for child sitting favors when free from the demands of her kinky clients. Jackie Curtis plays Buddie, the handsome hunk who picks up Dom in a local bar, and Geoffrey Carey is the Angel of Death who carefully watches over all activity. (IMDb)
Stiletto
A woman, Nadja, searches for her sister's murderer. This search goes through differing moments of reality, or unreality, that overlap within facets of a broken-up time sense. In this emulation of film noir, the investigative structure does not create suspense; the dialectic murderer/victim does not exist. The crime is fabricated bit by bit, like the staging of a spectacle, and it is in the traditional tools of seduction (the spiked heels) that the weapons will be hidden. Ultimately, the crime Nadja achieves makes her neither a triumphant heroine nor a victim.
Only You
In this ostensible murder mystery, the genre elements are merely a pretext for the series of haunting (if inconclusive and only mildly erotic) homo-social encounters he stages. Starting with the familiar premise of the absent woman, so popular with Downtown filmmakers, Vogl drains his storytelling of any hints of noir stylization. Instead of nighttime scenes, slick streets, and dark alleys, he shoots documentary-style on the nondescript, sunlit streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and City Island in a manner that casually references the art-film angst of Michelangelo Antonioni.
New York Story
Autobiographical film about Loulou (Jackie Raynal) who seeks a job as an editor on Broadway, shares a loft in Soho and marries an entrepreneur.
The Trap Door
Judge
A Nietzschian parable on the fate of innocence, THE TRAP DOOR follows the mishaps of Jeremy (John Ahearn) as he is fired by his boss (Jenny Holzer), gets laughed out of court by Judge Gary Indiana, loses his girlfriend to sleazy Richard Prince, is hustled by prospective employer (Bill Rice) and mauled by predatory bird-women. Finally, he seeks the help of a shrink (the legendary Jack Smith) who turns out to be the most demented of all.
The Straight Banana
Gaffer
Shot in Sausalito in 1969 and released in 1970, it is subtitled ‘The Story of Bonnie and Hyde’, and is the story of a nymphomaniac who meets an exhibitionist. It’s a creative and humorous madcap romp, and features entertaining artwork by Roger Brand. It also features a sexual encounter between the film’s star Grinda Pupic and a coke bottle.