From her legendary block as a writer Fran Lebowitz (New Jersey, 70 years old) has managed to make a fruitful career and has been more than successful.
A
writer
who has not been able to write for 30 years and is famous?
It happens in New York, yes, and its popularity is such that it fills auditoriums and theaters, and has a legion of defenders and detractors.
It leaves no one indifferent.
One can find Lebowitz - no relation to the photographer - from on
Vanity Fair
magazine's list of most elegant women
even on the mural in the Waverly Inn restaurant, also in, for example, a video of an exhibition on Jane Austen at the Morgan Library or on a sidewalk in the West Village.
On the street he always wears sunglasses and quite possibly he will have a cigarette in his hand and the face of few friends.
Fran Lebowitz: "Nostalgia in culture is poisonous"
The triumph of a sloth
A decade ago, director Martin Scorsese made a documentary about Lebowitz,
Public Speaking
, inspired by an idea from Graydon Carter, another good friend of the writer.
After all, Fran has forgiven few parties, has and has had many friends such as photographer Peter Hujar or Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
Often compared to Dorothy Parker for her relentless sense of humor, keen observer, funny and scathing, Lebowitz was as hilarious and forthright in that first documentary as she usually is in explaining her life and talent for survival in New York.
Her innate facility, she confessed, to make judgments led her to think that she would have been a perfect judge, and she emphasized that one of her great
hits
was participating in the series
Law and Order,
precisely playing a judge.
A decade after that, Scorsese and Lebowitz have met again in the seven-episode series, about 30 minutes long each, which Netflix has just released.
Suppose New York is a city
has some nostalgic exercise.
But therein lies Lebowitz's caustic humor and her determination to remain oblivious to any sense of political correctness - and a lot of honor, she would add - as a survivor of a time and a city where there were robberies, shootings, and hardly any matting. yoga, nor of course a dog spa on every corner alongside organic juice bars.
The episodes of the new series bring together snippets of interviews with Alec Bladwin or Spike Lee on old TV shows along with several talk sessions between Scorsese and Lebowitz at a West Village club, and in various theaters with an audience.
There are also many images of the writer walking through Manhattan and around a giant model of the island.
Lebowitz is the quintessence of a legendary version of the city.
At this point and at the speed at which the bars and corners of that wild New York of the seventies have disappeared, the writer is almost a monument that still stands.
Curmudgeon, smoker, answering, talkative and humorous, tender and capable of glare, she embodies, like few others, a rabidly New York character, not Brooklynite.
And this difference must be understood, it matters.
When she and Scorsese decided to start with the new project they shook hands and it was clear that they would not leave Manhattan, although in the end they ended up going to Queens to shoot the aforementioned demo.
If Woody Allen has embodied for decades the most photogenic and bourgeois version of the city, Lebowitz known in New York, but not so much outside, it is a more gay, hooligan and critical version of everything.
Opinion snobbish
From his blockade and his freedom to express his opinion with force, he has made a flag and a career.
She was freshly expelled from New Jersey high school in the 1960s, worked as a taxi driver and, later, as a critic for
Andy Warhol's
Interview
magazine
.
He never liked it, he was scared by the number of people close to the artist who ended up dying.
Later, with AIDS, Lebowitz saw a good number of friends disappear and regretted that that critical mass of carefree, fun and cultured people disappeared and was gradually replaced by much more conventional and wealthy people.
One of his black beasts is former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has filled Times Square with sunbeds, he denounces acidity in the new series.
The city, he claims, is full of planters and furniture that make it look like "a grandmother's flat."
He collected his articles in two volumes that were very successful.
The
promotional
tour
made clear his talent for speaking and seducing the public.
She does not have a mobile or a computer, she does not renounce her proverbial laziness, nor to present herself as a character who could be in one of those books that editors for years asked her to write and that she, despite receiving the advance, could not tear.
Is Lebowitz a snob?
Her snobbery, she responds to Scorsese, has nothing to do with who your father is or where you studied but with whether you agree with what she thinks or not.
He doesn't quite understand that there are people who get angry when they hear it.
Fran confesses: "I have no power, but I am full of opinions."
She talks about young people who sometimes come up to her and tell her how much they would have liked to live in the city in the 70s. It never occurred to her at 20 to approach anyone and say that she would have liked to live in the 30s, but understands that they see her as an Abraham Lincoln who survived the Civil War.
Except that Fran is much more graceful and more modern.