Sydney Pollack on Frank Gehry: "Sketches" Barely Scratches

In August of 2005, Sydney Pollack told Cindy Adams he was working on a movie about Frank Gehry. "The truth is, I don't know anything about architecture," he said. "I know nothing about designing. Gehry is a friend of mine. He suggested the idea, so I did it."

Pollack just finished that documentary. And, unfortunately, it's as shortsighted and biased as that early intel suggested it would be.

Sketches of Frank Gehry, which premiered on May 3 at the Regal Battery Park Theater during the Tribeca Film Festival, is another notch on the headboard of the Frank Gehry lovers, another point for the grandfatherly schlub schtick, and--sadly--a big lost opportunity to finally explain the mysteries of architecture.

The opening scene shows Frank and his longtime collaborator Craig Webb in what seems to be the process of designing a building. They're sitting at a table with a model on it, in Gehry's LA office. "I don't like this guy there," Frank says, almost petulantly, folding pieces of metallic paper and cramming them into the spaces between massing blocks. "Let's move this guy here." He decides he doesn't like a straight wall, asks Craig to put some corrugation into the metal they're folding. Craig obliges, but Frank decides there's too many folds. "Maybe just two," he says. Craig obliges again, they hold it up against the block. Much better.

And that, according to Gehry's venerable myth and Pollack's new film, is how buildings are designed and architecture is made. A few folds here, the creation of a shape there. Scan it into the computer, send the drawings to the contractors. They'll put all Frank's "guys" together and it'll be a building. And sometimes, yes, it will be brilliant. It's hard to dispute the genius behind Bilbao, and very few critics have. But it isn't hard to argue that it was created with a few more, well, boring parts.

"Sketches" barely scratches the surface of Gehry's self-imposed myth, barely even tries to get behind the humble genius façade that he has spent his career building. Born in Canada, raised in California, Gehry is the Jewish kid from Toronto who got an F on his first try at a perspective class and an A on his second. The one who was told (he thought because his name was Goldberg) to drop out of architecture school in his second year, but who persevered (while changing his name to Gehry to avoid any further anti-Semitically induced criticism), who started just "making buildings" and "doing stuff" and "kinda liking it," and who then, twenty years later, exploded the architecture world with his undulating titanium museum in a little Spanish town that still pats itself on the back for having discovered him. That's the Gehry he wants us to see, and that's the Gehry Pollack finds.

At first, it's unclear whether or not Pollack is buying the myth and drinking the Kool-Aid so many non-architects have greedily slurped. You hope he's in on the joke, that he'll be one of the few to break the veneer. You hope there might be a couple shots of Gehry thinking about a budget, or playing with circulation, or discussing the program, or even--heaven forbid--talking to a client. Instead, there are only slyly self-aware nods to the consistent difficulty of the profession, small critical moments where it seems almost plausible that Pollack might rip open the slickly schlumpfy image Gehry so comfortably projects. But he doesn't. Because as much as the camera loves the buildings (and boy do Gehry's structures ever love it back), that's how much Pollack clearly loves the myth.

Gehry recommended a couple friends and critics to be interviewed. The architect and historian Charles Jencks, placed on one side of a table in an airy room (you discover later that the empty space is for his wife, who died, commemorated in a Gehry-designed cancer center in Ireland). Philip Johnson, in his New Canaan Glass House talks to Pollack about the quality of light, about how Frank just gets it. Ed Ruscha waxes lyrical, as does client Dennis Hopper. In a brilliant narrative move, Pollack includes Gehry's therapist, who's treated him for thirty years and sees his buildings and his life as so closely connected as to be almost interchangeable (no surprises there). There are two skeptics: Hal Foster, an art critic who isn't buying the Gehry branding and who, in contrast to the others who were filmed in light-filled rooms and open spaces, speaks out of what looks like a very uncomfortable chair in what looks like a very uncomfortable dungeon; and Julian Schnabel, who (in a brilliantly critical farce that Pollack seems to have missed) shows up in a terrycloth robe with a brandy snifter in one hand and a cigarette in the other, dropping loaded one-liners like "It makes me want to put my stuff in there." They get it: Frank's just fucking with us.

Caught after the Tribeca premiere, Pollack didn't agree. "Frank doesn't pretend to be an artist!" he said, after I asked him about the fact that his movie was, clearly, promoting one side of the critical Gehry divide. "He's a great artist and an architect, but I don't think of him as a sculptor." Pollack might have done well to remember the creative meat of the movie: shots of Gehry moving shapes around. Asked why he didn't show the real substance of architecture, the tedious discussions about program, scale, clients and budgets--the pesky reality that even genius architects like Frank have to deal with--he answered that it was, obviously, "because people would fall asleep." In his eyes, the struggle of merely making a shape good--which is, really, the only struggle Pollack shows us--is exactly the struggle of any practicing architect. Any one of them, including his friend Gehry, would say
otherwise.

Pollack spends eighty-three minutes trying to explain Frank Gehry and architecture. They both remain just as mysterious as before.