And Speaking of Docs

Video clip NSFW

Steven Soderbergh has made a documentary on Spalding Gray, the writer/performance artist who took his own life. His surviving wife Kathie Russo is one of the producers on the film. She did a small but interesting piece about Grey on This American Life a while back that I found incredibly moving. Karina Longworth calls Everything is Going Fine a must-see doc at SXSW.

As far as Soderbergh goes, he’s an interesting filmmaker, always pushing the edges of the box Hollywood seems ready to fit him in.¬†¬† This is sometimes successful, sometimes overly indulgent, but always interesting.

To me, he’s never really topped his big first, Sex, Lies and Videotape. But Traffic is probably my favorite after that. I think he has a couple of great movies left in him. Being a Spalding Gray fan, I look forward to this doc with great anticipation. Says Longworth:

Fine is compiled entirely of footage of Gray–interviews, home movies, footage of his one-man shows, including Jonathan Demme’s filmed version of Swimming to Cambodia (above)–telling his own life story. Soderbergh made his own film of one of Gray’s monologues, Gray’s Anatomy, in 1996 but had fallen out of contact with the artist by the time he killed himself in 2004; Soderbergh has called this film, carved out over three years from Gray’s complete archive, his “act of contrition.” It’s spooky, but celebratory, and an essential document of Gray’s work, life and the inextricable link between the two.