Chelsea and Abel Ferrara on the Rocks

We heard Abel Ferrara before we saw him. As the credits for his new documentary, Chelsea on the Rocks, ran after its premiere screening at the Jane Hotel, he bursted in with a "And that's Gregory Corso," citing the poetry that was playing over the scroll. "Anybody got a poem in them?"

"This doesn't look like a question and answer group," Ferrara noted in his mook-y New Yawker drawl (think Joe Pesci circa Goodfellas as a Tom Waitsian cool cat). "These people are looking at me like they expect me to start singing." For this project, the inimitable director took on his first documentary, collecting recellections from a variety of artists and interesting people—Ethan Hawke, Lola Schnabel, Gaby Hoffman, the delightful Miloš Forman, plus much more—who have lived in and experienced the Chelsea Hotel in its artistic heyday. I've seen documentaries of this type before, lamenting a lost New York. A lot of time these sort of documentaries don't make you care about the place. Ferrara makes you care about the place. It's messy and effective, and through his many jocular interviews with the people who inhabit the place, Ferrara paints a picture of its vital spirit and why iit was a refuge for broke artists.  (He also recreates the legends of some of the Chelsea's most famous inhabitants, Sid and Nancy and Janis Joplin, and that's where the film gets silly, and features Paper Magazine-level boldfaced downtown names who were at the screening.)

He also gets a lot of face time with former hotel manager Stanley Bard, a man who was integral in setting up the Chelsea's bohemian atmosphere. When director Forman, in the midst of reminiscing, recalls a time where he couldn't pay the rent, Bard chimes in with the reason he was allowed to stay, a guiding principle of "good people you can trust." He clearly wasn't guided by the money, and was invested in making the place a haven for beautiful losers, an artists' salon. And it's absollutely tragic that era of the Chelsea has likely passed.

During his post-screening monologue, a hilarious, elliptical riff, Ferrara did reveal some insights into his mission. Bard couldn't make the screening since he was "playing tennis down in Palm Springs, Boca Raton." And the director still seemed geniunely freaked about the hotel: "We stayed there while we shot the place. If you want to see a haunted house that place is it. I'm not one to believe in it, but if you're there, you believe in it."
 

Chelsea on the Rocks opens at the Chelsea Clearview Cinemas on Friday, September 25, with a national rollout to come.