Nelson Sullivan was a highly talented and prolific videographer, who documented New York’s art, club and youth scene of the 1980s. His filming style was fluid, raw and breathless, with jump-cuts and in-camera editing, all fabulously complimented the city’s dynamism, as it focussed on luminaries Keith Haring, Michael Alig, John Sex and RuPaul.
Just as he was about to produce his own cable TV show, Sullivan died of a heart attack in 1989. It was a sad demise to such a genuine talent
Back in December 1988, Sullivan filmed Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club.
The Flaunt It Club was another brilliant publicity stunt created by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey to promote their disco act The Fabulous Pop Tarts. It was was presented every Sunday night at LImelight NYC and gave other aspiring performers the chance to appear alongside established personalities in a talk show format broadcast, broadcast later that week on Manhattan public access television. Quentin Crisp was the celebrity guest this night, and the event was documented on video by Nelson Sullivan. Robert Coddington edited this from Nelson’s original videotape.
The brilliant Fenton Bailey once pitched a documentary on Nelson, where he described “Nelson’s epic canvas of Downtown” as an:
“...anthropological documentary that takes us beneath the fashionable surface and shows us the reality.
The reality is that Downtown is a tribe, a loose-knit collection of cultural refugees socially bonded by their rather anti-social ambition to make it. Although not an apple-pie Main Street nuclear family, it is an extended family much like a chorus line. Indeed Nelson’s work shows us, in addition to the glorious highs when the show goes on, the individual lows when its all over, the lonely moments of vulnerability. He was able to do this because most of those he filmed were his friends who trusted him, and who - given that Nelson’s camera went wherever he went and was for at least ten years as natural an extension of his body as his arms or legs - simply forgot that the camera was there.
And so the most captivating and poignant part of Nelson’s work is not the famous who have emerged from Downtown, but the people who are left behind and who strive in vain for the limelight. One of them himself, Nelson filmed the wannabees, the never-will-bees and the has-beens. While he captured the glorious orgy of self-invention of those seeking fame and fortune, he also captured the price it often exacted, the despair and self-destruction that followed repeated frustration and failure.
This is Sullivan’s film of Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, which reveals a delightfully at ease Mr. Crisp, enjoying the company of NY’s young things.
DM’s Richard Metzger writes about Nelson Sullivan here.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Inside Quentin Crisp’s Apartment
Nelson Sullivan Pioneering Chronicler of NYC Nightlife in the 1980s
Part 2 of Quentin Crisp at the Flaunt It Club, after the jump…