Film review: Make Me Famous travels back to 1980s East Village to rediscover artist Edward Brezinski
Documentary screening at VIFF Centre uncovers a driven artist, and immerses viewer in an art scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring
Edward Brezinski in Make Me Famous.
A self-portrait by Edward Brezinski, from Make Me Famous. Photo ©red splat productions
Make Me Famous screens at the VIFF Centre from August 1 to 6
FOR ALL THE BASQUIATS, Scharfs, and Harings who built fame from the squalor of New York’s East Village, there are hundreds of others lost to history.
Mysterious, reckless, and driven, painter Edward Brezinski might have been largely forgotten, beyond a few sharp-eyed collectors. It’s gratifying, then, that the documentary Make Me Famous resurrects his work with a new appreciation. Along the way, the expansive film—full of eccentric, bitchy characters, fascinating tangents, and ’80s-vintage neon intertitles and synth music—immerses the viewer in the beyond-gritty art scene of 1980s New York.
Much of Brezinski’s existence on the Lower East Side was the warehouse art-party circuit, and a wealth of video and photographs from that era capture celebs like Debbie Harry, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and, yes, Haring and Basquiat in the background of that scene.
The film begins in the early-’80s Bowery, where brooding, charismatic Brezinski inhabits a rundown studio in a building that is literally crumbling, with a homeless shelter across the street. In his rough, expressionistic style, the young, gay artist captures those down-and-out figures on canvas, while creating other haunting portraits that reveal the torment and angst of their subjects—and the times.
An impressive array of the artists who survived the era—Kenny Scharf, Marguerite Van Cook, James Romberger, Claudia Summers, and former Vancouverite and “Shadowman” creator Richard Hambleton, not to mention Brezinski’s dapper, straight-outta-the-Victorian-era ex David McDermott—dish dirt on Brezinski’s own chaotic Magic Gallery and legendary night spots like Club 57. Soon a tragic trifecta of AIDS, heroin, and mental illness takes a toll on the community—but not before it’s discovered by SoHo galleries. (In one of his most infamous acts, the frustrated Brezinski threw a glass of wine on famed gallerist and Basquiat discoverer Annina Nosei, on hand here with her side of the story; in another, he chomped on one of artist Robert Gober’s resin doughnuts—and was rushed to hospital as a result.)
The film’s title refers to the fact that, as one interviewee puts it, Brezinski had a “mania to be noticed” as an artist. But he lived in grinding poverty, often spending the only money he received from selling his works on more paints. In the long tradition of artists unappreciated in their lifetime, he went into self-imposed exile in Europe, experienced homelessness and alcoholism, and died alone, in obscurity, in 2007.
Poignantly, it’s in the posthumous final act of the film that director Brian Vincent retraces Brezinski’s rural Michigan upbringing and interviews art experts who discuss the way Brezinski exemplified the New York Expressionist movement. His cutting portrait of Nancy Reagan, her face skull-like in her signature blood-red suit, now hangs at MoMA (which finally staged a show called Club 57 in 2017, in tribute to the era). Those images and countless anecdotes help you get to know the real Brezinski—but, to the film's credit, not so much that they detract from his enduring mystique. 
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