The Gent

The Gent is a mix of fact-and-fiction in which some of NYC’s most engaging personalities invent the life and times of a fictitious artist named “Cardero”- a composite of 1920s Lost Generation poet Harry Crosby and 1990s dot-com millionaire Josh Harris. The Gent melds the two stories to create a fable about a late 1990s banking heir turned artist who throws extravagant Warhol-esque parties, and is caught in a star-crossed romance in the euphoric run up to a financial crash. continue…

Cast

The Gent is both the tale of a fictional character, a New York-based eccentric and self-styled artist named “Cardero,” and an exploration of chance and synchronicity in the creation of fiction.  The movie is partially inspired by, and contains elements of, the exploits of two real people: Harry Crosby and Josh Harris.  Using their lives as a starting point, The Gent features interviews with disparate NYC luminaries, whose spontaneous responses to a series of random questions have been re-contextualized to corroborate the story.  Cardero comes to life as a complex reflection of different eras in the 20th century, the 1920s and the 1990s; of New York culture, art and nightlife; and of madness, extravagance, artistry, and a life that defies limitations and strives for transcendence and meaning.

Harry Crosby was the nephew of J. P. Morgan and heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful banking fortunes in New England in the early 20th century.  The black sheep of the family, Crosby enlisted in World War I to escape “the horrors of Boston and particularly of Boston virgins.”  After the shelling of an ambulance he was driving, which he miraculously survived without injury, he became mad with the idea of becoming a poet.  He renounced his Boston Brahmin heritage and seduced a married woman, Polly Peabody, with whom he moved to Paris in 1922.  Crosby and Polly (who changed her name to Caresse at his behest) lived the lives of sensualist, bohemian expatriates, as part of the literary and artistic scene that included Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dali.  Together they founded the Black Sun Press, initially because no one else would print Harry’s work, and went on to publish the greatest authors of the Lost Generation: James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Elliot, Ezra Pound and others.  Crosby became notorious for his lavish lifestyle and bizarre theatrics, womanizing, copious intake of absinthe, opium and hashish, surrealist bacchanals, sun worship and fervent death wish.  He became fixated on the Sun, a symbol to him of freedom, heat and dazzling destruction, and began obsessing about the glories of an early death.  In 1929, Crosby met a young woman, Josephine Rotch, whom he referred to as his “Fire Princess” — also a blue-blood, old family Bostonian — who was in Venice to buy her wedding dress; they began a torrid affair, which continued after her marriage, and took on dark overtones when they became convinced that death was the ultimate expression of their love.  In December 1929, amidst the stock market crash that signaled the end of the Roaring Twenties that Crosby exemplified, he and Josephine were found lying in bed – each with a bullet shot to the head, with Crosby holding a gun in one hand, and his Fire Princess in the other.

Generally considered either a brilliant visionary or a deluded egomaniac, Josh Harris acquired an $ 80-million fortune as the founder of market research company Jupiter Communications, and created the pioneering Internet TV site Pseudo.com.  He became well known in the 1990’s downtown NY scene with a series of increasingly extravagant parties, culminating in the infamous month-long art project/social experiment in December 1999 called “Quiet.” Viewing himself as the Andy Warhol of the computer age, Harris selected 150 volunteers to live for one month in a large Soho loft building, and commissioned artists to create various installations inside: “pods” (small sleeping compartments modeled on concentration camp bunks) equipped with personal video cameras and monitors; a subterranean machine gun shooting gallery; transparent communal showers and a fascist cult temple.  After they had submitted to a mandatory personality profile, Harris provided the orange jumpsuit-clad participants with limitless amounts of hedonistic delights: free sex, drugs, and outrageous entertainment of all kinds.  They enjoyed communal gourmet meals, engaged in wild orgies and frolicked in huge inflatable bubble rooms – with the caveat that their antics were constantly being recorded by an omnipresent surveillance system monitored by Harris, and that he would own the rights to all the footage.  The quasi-totalitarian elements present in Quiet intensified as the guests began to lose their sense of reality, many becoming emotionally unhinged in the process.  The event degenerated into chaos, and was eventually shut down by the FDNY on New Year’s Day, 2000.  Harris went on to lose his entire fortune as the dot-com bubble burst later that year.

The Gent creates a contemporary urban myth by interlacing both the real memories and improvisational fantasies of a variety of New York artists, art critics, journalists, actors, and other notables including historian Howard Zinn, artist Genesis P-Orridge, actress/performance artist Ann Magnuson, and Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA.  Given no context of the larger plot or character arc, each interviewee’s impromptu response was captured first take.  These reminiscences sometimes describe actual events; other times, they bear little relationship to reality.  But together they craft a multidimensional character who pushed the boundaries of the art world, whose obsessions veered between the realms of inspiration and delusion, accomplishment and idiocy, and who left a lasting mark on the New York art scene, as well as everyone interviewed in the film.  As each person adds their “memories” to the film, we witness a unique method of collaborative creation, with each person filling in details of Cardero’s rise and fall from their own distinct perspective, and collectively presenting the work of fiction — a portrait of an artist named “Cardero.”