The Brooklyn Rail

Make Me Famous (2021) pulsates with the urgent desire and passionate ambition that drives many artists to keep pushing out of the background and into the foreground of the art world. Husband-and-wife duo Brian Vincent and Heather Spore capture the gritty life of 1980s East Village neo-Expressionist artist Edward Brezinski (1954–2007) and his circle in this indie doc, still seeking the distribution it is worthy of.

The film relishes its setting as much as its protagonist, as if Brezinski himself were born of the downtown New York rubble. Post-apocalyptic shots reveal a city that composed itself through negative spaces: the derelict buildings, imploded empty lots, stripped-down apartments. New York is a dream as much to those who’ve made it here as it is to those far away: a dream of stardom and of starving artists, of upward mobility and of bohemia, of ritz and of rats. For those who lived this moment in the city’s history, this film’s nostalgia is tinted with squalor. For those who missed it, the cool of its vintage vibes will be unmatched by even the edgiest Brooklyn thrift shop. For all, the desperation is as unbearably palpable the peeling paint on the walls.

Edward Brezinski moved through a legendary scene, but he never quite became its focal point. What makes this film’s approach to a well-documented sliver of New York history is its noir-ish fascination with solving the mystery of this eccentric character who was at the heart of the art world but perhaps not in the heart of the art world. And then who disappeared.

Get ready to party crash this art scene. Watching Make Me Famous is like painting the town all the colors on the palette. The film really makes it feel like we’re mingling with the downtown crowd; solo interviews transition between each other in a way to make it feel like the artists, gallerists, and other cultural influencers are talking or arguing with each other (or talking about each other). Kenny Scharf, Richard Hambleton, and many more grace the screen. During a post-screening Q&A, Spore said she wanted to be at a dinner party with all of them, and the honesty of the interviews and the ways they’ve been edited makes it feel like we are at a dinner party with them just by watching the movie. Vincent and Spore took care in getting to know each of their interview subjects—artists, gallerists, and other influencers and culture makers—and making them comfortable enough to open up about Brezinski and their own experiences with the Village in the eighties. Their respect and determination to capture some truth of this bygone era is evident in the conversations they had with their subjects.

Vincent and Spore balance humor and hot gossip with compassion and even awe for their subjects. These artists' egos and doubt and humility come through with genuine care. What it means to be an artist (especially a successful one) and the tangle of art and fame and commodification emerge as the main concerns of Make Me Famous. Through this focused lens, we get a fresh view of familiar subjects seen at an angle that makes a bygone era real and tangible.

Through Brezinski, much of this particular moment in time and space is encapsulated—art, music, the Village, the decay, queer culture, the interconnectedness of different art forms and the hangouts, like Club 57, that brought them together. The movie embraces the romance of that mood without giving into the more saccharine elements of rosy-hued nostalgia by also frankly addressing the poverty, the Reagan era, and the devastating AIDS crisis. Part of what makes the movie so appealing is that Brezinski wanted so badly to be famous and didn’t really achieve his aim; it adds an element of relatability, motivation, hope, and sorrow to his story. We live in a time of the Great Resignation and quiet quitting, where a pop musician like Rihanna can become a billionaire, where movies are franchised like McDonald’s or remade like cookie-cutter McMansions, where a professor’s lecture on Bartleby, the Scrivener silences students as they contemplate if they’d prefer not to. While Make Me Famous is about the eighties, centering it on Edward Brezinski is more a reflection of our current questions about how we define success and art and how to live for who we are and what we believe in.

The film was intriguing from the start, but as the enigmatic circumstances of Brezinski's death in Southern France unfold with an aura of mystery and drama, the documentary genre gains an unusual bite. The filmmakers said some strange things happened during the making of this movie: “This film was full of paranormal activity.” As Brezinski, a masterpiece of character himself, becomes clear, we would expect nothing less than the mystical from him. What’s not mystical is a sobering scene comparing the value of artists’ work before and after their deaths—a believable motive for faking one’s own death.

The sleuthing filmmakers and other chums of Brezinski begin to wonder what did happen to him and what real proof they had of his untimely demise abroad. As the gang chases Brezinski to his vanishing point in Southern France, they whip up a frenzied air of mythmaking, of a fascinating character who people could actually believe pulled a Huck Finn. That's not to say Make Me Famous is in any way sensational; the film reaches a depth of heartfelt emotion as its makers and Brezinski's companions seek answers and closure.

Vincent and Spore have harnessed the DIY spirit of the East Village artists to get distribution for Make Me Famous thus far, an inspiring feat for any aspiring indie filmmaker. In 2021, I attended a panel about a book covering a similar stretch of history as Make Me Famous. Every panel inevitably gets a question about an alleged crisis. The crisis question for this particular panel was about “The Scene.” Where was the scene now? Did New York have a scene anymore? What is New York without a scene? It felt like an unspoken question haunting Make Me Famous as the documentarians pieced together the 1980s Village scene in an attempt to solve their quirky case. The same weekend as Make Me Famous, I caught The Elephant 6 Recording Co. (2022) doc at IFC, in which fifteen to twenty musicians from a small town in northern Louisiana moved to Athens, Georgia, where they made quite a scene that challenged mainstream music—though perhaps always remained on the fringes of the music world. Maybe the answer to the crisis question is: if you want a scene, make one. It might not make you famous, but it seems to guarantee a wild time.