Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal founded the Tribeca Festival in 2002 to bring life back to downtown New York after 9/11. Nineteen years later, as the city struggles to rediscover normalcy following the pandemic shutdown, the festival has a similarly revitalizing feeling. The festival is not only the first major North American film festival held in person since COVID-19, but the first major cultural milestone to lure New Yorkers out of their homes. The streets and subways of Manhattan might still seem a bit barren—but the outdoor Tribeca screenings (the ones this writer has seen at least) have been well-attended.
“It reminds me of the feeling right after September 11th,” said Julian Schnabel, the painter, filmmaker, and native New Yorker. “Robert and Jane helped people reinhabit restaurants and other downtown businesses that had suffered from what happened. In the process of doing that, I think people felt like they were doing something useful and helping to regenerate the neighborhood and realizing how life could keep going. That positive energy has kind of been synonymous with what the Tribeca Film Festival is.”
“People help by doing what they know how to do. I’m a painter so I make paintings,” said Schnabel, who partnered with the festival and Chanel this year to launch an art project in which artists created original sketches to beautify streetscapes and vacated storefronts across lower Manhattan.
Schnabel was speaking to Vanity Fair in anticipation of Thursday’s anniversary screening of Basquiat, the 1996 biopic about the doomed 80s prodigy, that was presented in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The remaster of the film—which stars Jeffrey Wright, Benicio Del Toro, Gary Oldman, David Bowie, and Claire Forlani—is in black and white, an idea inspired by a technical malfunction in the Hamptons.
“For the 20th anniversary of Basquiat, they screened it in Montauk, on the side of a building in a kind of makeshift celebration,” explained Schnabel .“It was a bunch of friends sitting on sofas and the guy working the projector didn’t know how to get the color correct. I’m watching the movie and it came out in black and white. At first, I thought, [annoyed] ‘Oh my god.’ Then I was watching it and I thought, ‘Wow.’”
The black-and-white film is juxtaposed in the credits, Schnabel said, with a sequence in which Jean-Michel paints in color. “I’m curious to see it with an audience,” Schabel said, grateful that seeing a film with an audience is a possibility again these days. “After this pandemic where people had to stay isolated, the idea that they can finally come together is powerful.”
— An Oral History of A Different World, as Told by the Cast and Crew
— Home Truths: How HGTV, Magnolia, and Netflix Are Building a Massive Space
— Cruella de Vil Is Wicked—But Tallulah Bankhead Was Even Wilder
— Why Mare of Easttown Always Had to End That Way
— Cover Story: Issa Rae Says Goodbye to Insecure
— Kathryn Hahn All Along
— Why Kim’s Convenience Matters
— Court Dismisses Anti-Trans Assault Lawsuit Against Rosario Dawson
— From the Archive: When Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez Made Perfect Sense
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of Awards Insider.