INTERVIEW: Seeing life through the lens of Bill Cunningham
Photo: The Times of Bill Cunningham, directed by Mark Bozek, looks at the professional life of the famed New York Times photographer, pictured here in Paris in 1971. Photo courtesy of Harold Chapman / Provided by Greenwich Entertainment with permission.
Bill Cunningham documented fashion and style on the streets of New York City for many decades. His photography graced the pages of The New York Times, and his presence, always unassuming, placed him at the nexus of culture and society. He documented trends before they became trends, and he kept his millions of images tucked away and stored in an unparalleled archive.
Personally Cunningham led a private life. He lived in a small apartment attached to Carnegie Hall in Midtown Manhattan, and he didn’t like to be the subject of stories himself. That’s why the new documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, by director Mark Bozek, is such a revelation.
The film, which recently opened in New York City, offers a rare glimpse behind the curtain and into the professional obsessions of this famed documenter of all things fashion. Bozek’s access to the photographer’s archive and insights is profound and fascinating — and ultimately the project came about because of a fluke in the 1990s.
“I knew who he was because I had worked in the clothing business,” Bozek said in a recent phone interview. “So like everybody in fashion, I knew who he was. You would invite him to your show, and he’d come to your show. And then you’d look in the Times every Sunday and see if your pictures were in there.”
Bozek’s career eventually brought him to Fox television, where he worked for Barry Diller. At the network, he collaborated on a segment called Fox Style News, which featured stories about art, fashion, media and photography. It was here that Bozek considered a story about Cunningham and his influence on the fashion industry.
“I wanted to do a story about Bill,” the filmmaker said. “He refused, firmly refused like three times after me asking him, so finally I said, well, I’m going to do it anyway. So for a year, when I was working on other stories, my crew would see him on the street. I’d say, oh, there’s Bill. Let’s shoot some b-roll, so I got enough b-roll. And after like a year, I had enough of it, and then I interviewed Bill Blass and James Galanos and Liz Smith. And I ran the piece in December of ’93 on Fox television, and it did well. And I was happy I did it.”
With the project finished, Bozek moved on with his professional life. He eventually left Fox and started working with Diller at QVC. While at this new network, Bozek received a call out of the blue — from, of all people, Cunningham himself.
“I get a call from Bill asking me and saying, ‘Young fella, I hate to bother you, and I didn’t see your show. I don’t have a TV. I never watch the damn thing, but I have to get this award. … And I don’t want it, but the Times really wants me to accept it for photography. Would you mind coming over for 10 minutes to do a 1-minute video,’ to play when he accepted the award,” Bozek remembers about the phone call. “I jumped at the chance. I went to his tiny, little studio where he lived in Carnegie Hall, and it was too dark and kind of dank. And so we went to his best friend … a couple doors down, and the 10 minutes turned into like four hours. And he just talked and talked and talked, and I was just thinking I was going to be kicked out in 10 minutes.”
Bozek said he thinks Cunningham was open to the conversation because the filmmaker was not a fashion expert or a journalist. He was simply an interested person who was going to make a simple video for the photographer. This apparently made Cunningham comfortable and open.
This new documentary, which features the footage from that four-hour session, came about after Bozek started thinking of Cunningham again after the photographer died in 2016.
“I had worked in the TV shopping world for a long time,” the director said. “I left that world, and about a month after leaving it came back to Long Island where I live, and on the day he died, which is June 26 of 2016, I heard about it like everybody hears about things these days — on social media. I sort of sat down and was kind of sad, like everyone who knew him or certain people who knew him even more, millions around the world, particularly in the fashion world, who worshipped him. So I said, you know what, I’ve got to find those tapes that I did, that interview. … So I went in my basement, literally with my kid, and we rummaged through the junk that everybody has in their basement. I found the tapes.”
Bozek brought the tapes upstairs and viewed them. He also watched Bill Cunningham New York, another relatively recent documentary about the photographer. He changed his tapes over to a digital file, and he started to edit the four hours of footage during his spare time.
“I knew that I had enough there that wasn’t a redux of the previous film, and so I played the rough cut of the film for a bunch of his close friends,” Bozek said. “And they were incredibly excited, happy, weeping at the end of this raw footage that I had and have to this day. This encouraged me to make the movie, and so I started cutting it on my laptop, without an editor, just making it up as I went on my own. And I finished the film.”
The problem was this feature-length documentary didn’t have any of Cunningham’s iconic photography. It was simply a taped interview, so Bozek needed access to the large archive the photographer left behind.
“I hadn’t been able to get access to his archive,” he said. “Finally I did through his niece, Trish Simonson, who is an incredible woman who lives up in Boston. I showed her the film, and she loved it and gave me access to his archives. So here I had this narrative for a year and a half to two years of working on this film, of talking about Diana Vreeland, the Gay Pride Parade, photographing every parade and never publishing a picture, and Versailles in 1973 and all these stories. I was like a kid in a candy store. Here I am in the archive of 3 million unbelievable images, documents, letters. He saved everything, the classiest hoarder on the planet.”
During the time he was scanning through the archive, Bozek told himself to try and sample as many chapters in Cunningham’s life as possible. He was ravenous for this photographic history, which ultimately helped his final product, The Times of Bill Cunningham.
“Of the 3 million, I scanned 25,000 images in my dining room,” Bozek said, “and I ended up choosing over 500 of them very, very carefully to use in the film.”
Now the photographer and his archive have been joined together — by a filmmaker who answered a simple and unexpected call in the 1990s.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Times of Bill Cunningham, directed by Mark Bozek, is currently running at New York City’s Angelika Film Center. Click here for more information.
