Douglas Kirkland Freeze-Frames Hollywood

In this busiest season for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--all should be relatively peaceful once the Oscars telecast has happened--it is worth pausing in the Grand Lobby Galley to check out some 125 photographs from the extraordinary body of work of photographer Douglas Kirkland. We'll get to his somewhat legendary picture of Ann Margaret that's seen here--the moment was every bit as hair-raising as it looks--in a moment. But a quick history first, from the Academy's precis:

Born in Toronto in 1934, Kirkland spent much of his early professional life working in New York before relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. At age 24 he landed a staff position at Look magazine, where he worked primarily on fashion assignments. It was on his way back from one of those assignments that he was asked to accompany a writer to interview Elizabeth Taylor, even though the actress had already refused to be photographed. Kirkland managed to convince Taylor to become his first celebrity subject, and the resulting photos gave his career a powerful new trajectory.

Through the years, Kirkland has worked on the sets of more than 100 motion pictures - from period dramas to musicals - that include such Best Picture Oscar?? winners as Out of Africa and Titanic. Kirkland also has published several books of photography, exhibited his work in galleries throughout the world, and traveled on assignment to every continent except Antarctica.

Recently honored by Art and Living Magazine with an Art To Life Award, Kirkland was feted with a party at Beverly Hills' Celebrity Vault--an expansive shop where even amidst the thousand recognizable faces surrounding you, his pictures stood out. It probably didn't hurt his career that he's tall, handsome and engaging, with an edge of challenge to him. He found the way early on to gaining trust through the kind of eye contact some photographers of divas (and diva photographers) don't always practice. His head-on portraits show an intimacy with the iconic goddesses--Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Catherine Deneuve, and even his own lovely wife Francoise--that make you say, as Rob Lowe did of Johnny Depp in a different context, "I'll take his starting five."

Though that portraiture is a great strength--his initial apprenticeship was with Irving Penn--it's his journalistic eye that makes for the most striking images, as with a paranoid-looking Francis Ford Coppola and his Zoetrope posse seen in 1970 atop a building, James Cameron shouting (presumably but not inevitably for "Action" on his Titanic set, or DeNiro, Liza Minnelli, a seamstress and Martin Scorsese on the set of New York, New York in a picture that only a thousand words and possibly a toxicology report could hope to encapsulate. All these are available in his recently published Freeze Frame, but the 1969 Ann Margaret photo was published in his earlier Light Years. I'd known him for years but first asked about it at his party:

I wanted to get her on the balcony with all of Las Vegas behind her, so I got a fisheye lens and as I was shooting, she grabbed onto the edge there, and she got this strange look on her face. She leaned back and said, "Sweden has the world's highest suicide rate. Did you know I was Swedish?" She leaned way back and said it. And then she pauses and says, "You know, I'm Swedish." I reached down and brought her back in--right after I got the picture.

It was two years afterward that the entertainer would be nominated for an Oscar for Carnal Knowledge, and the year afterward, would fall 22 feet from a Lake Tahoe stage and return to work only after a long convalescence. (She earned another nomination for Tommy in 1975.)

Speaking of Art To Life, around the corner from Kirkland's event, on a Friday night when pre-Oscar events were churning all around town, was painter-director Julian Schnabel's opening, at Gagosian Gallery, of his series Christ's Last Day. It's a group of images that he's chosen, cropped and greatly enlarged, but were basically found art, as the gallery's notes tell us:

Schnabel stumbled across the [decades old, made in a local hospital] x-rays last year in an uninhabited house in Berck-sur-Mer on the Normandy coast, where he had just finished directing his latest feature film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ...despite the grand bravado, a certain sense of vulnerability, even tenderness, pervades the heft of Schnabel's work. Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest 'paintings' ...these new pictures are pieces not simply of art but of argument, his pointed way of saying that while his life as a filmmaker may be threatening to eclipse his life as a painter, this new film--with its themes of transcendence and the relationship between art, life, and death, as well as its lush, experimental style that is so evidently informed by a highly evolved artistic sensibility--has reinforced the importance of painting in his own life.

There's something in what Schnabel adds to the notes that for me embraces not only his own sensibility but also found in what's that's so mysterious and yet palpable in Tommy Lee Jones' performance--particularly his expertly shot and written, if controversial, closing monologue, in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men:

"Art is not leisure; art is a utilitarian thing that people can use to find a way into their interior life."

(Ann Margaret, Las Vegas, 1971; photo by Douglas Kirkland)