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Downtown 81 – Last Chance!
December 6, 2019 - December 15, 2019
As part of our 40th anniversary, we have revisited several films from the our early days. Downtown 81 is a film that we would have shown if it had ever been released. In 1981, writer and Warhol confederate and Interview magazine founder Glenn O’Brien, Swiss photographer Edo Bertoglio, and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat hit the streets of lower Manhattan to make a movie about the bombed out bohemia that they knew and loved. Downtown 81 was screened at Cannes but was not released until October of this year. A self described “fairy tale,” the film follows Basquiat trying to move a painting while hustling for a place to sleep. Forty years later, it’s a window on a lost world–a celebration of life on the margins in Manhattan in all its messy, early-80s glory. Featuring John Lurie, Fab Five Freddy, and Debbie Harry, with musical performances by DNA, James White and the Blacks, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts performing in the Mudd Club and the Peppermint Lounge. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s own band, Gray, is heard on the soundtrack.
1981; 2019 / 75 min
Friday Dec 13
Synonyms – 7:00 – IU Fine Arts Theater
Downtown 81 – 7:30 – IU Global Theater
Saturday Dec 14
Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins – 5:45 – IU Global Theater
Synonyms – 7:00 – IU Fine Arts Theater
Downtown 81 – 7:30 – IU Global Theater
Sunday, Dec 15 at Bear’s Place
Raise Hell: Molly Ivins – 3pm
Downtown 81 – 5pm – Last Chance!
Synonyms – 7pm