Beauty Break: The Celebrity Portraits of Victor Skrebneski (1929-2020)

by Nathaniel R

One of the most celebrated fashion and celebrity photographers of the 1960s-1980s, Victor Skrebneski, has passed away at the age of 92.  Above you'll see a self portrait and next to it one of his most iconic images, Vanessa Redgrave shot in 1967.

Skrebneski's heyday was a smidgeon before our pop-cultural awareness dawned (we grew up during the heyday of celebrity photographers like Herb Ritts, David LaChapelle, and Annie Liebovitz), but we knew Skrebneski's images before we ever learned his name. He did amazing portraits of Bette Davis, Dolph Lundgren, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Kathleen Turner and more. His black and white work was often extremely sexy and there are a few NSFW images after the jump. He shot movie stars masterfully, you must agree...

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Links

The Guardian wonders if dog actors are a thing no more after Call of the Wild. This makes us sad. Though wild animals as CGI makes sense, dogs actually love training/performing/playing with humans.
/Film Bong Joon Ho has floated the idea that he'd like to make a musical. Unlike /film, we don't approve given his comments. We've been saying this since the days of the early Aughts 'filmmakers who are non-fans or embarrassed by the musical form SHOULD NOT make them.' Periodt.

after the jump more on the coronavirus and Hollywood, Lyle Waggoner RIP, and more...

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LGBTQ Highlights from Sundance

Here's Ren Jender filing her final report from Sundance 2020...

Tabitha Jackson and Kirsten JohnsonSundance didn't have a big queer film this year, as they have in many previous years (most recently in 2018, when director Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the Grand Jury Dramatic Prize) but with this year's awards came the news that a black, queer woman, Tabitha Jackson, would take over from outgoing, longtime Sundance Film Festival Director John Cooper. Jackson also made news on the first day of the festival when she married documentary director Kirsten Johnson (Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead, was a favorite among many critics and audiences at Sundance this year), and they jointly announced that Johnson would no longer be submitting her films to the festival during her spouse's tenure. 

Sam Feder's Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen premiered on Monday. The film is a documentary in the tradition of The Celluloid Closet, which included clips of queer characters in films and commentary on those characters by writers, actors and filmmakers...

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Middleburg Tickets on Sale

We told you about the main events at Middleburg last week but the full slate and list of movies is now available. But first here's a little listing that's historic (for us at least) -- The Film Experience will join Awards Daily and Awards Circuit for a special "Coffee and Contenders" event.

Should be fun.

Hope we don't get stage fright. You can check out the full listing of films for Middleburg after the jump...

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NYFF: "The Irishman"

Jason Adams  reporting on the opening night of the New York Film Festival

A camera stalks through the hallways of what we typically call an Old Folks Home. Old Folks. Ever think about that phrase? Disarming in its literal folksiness -- it's in truth a place where the day breaks are taken to pick out caskets. So the camera tracks through the Old Folks Home like so many cameras have tracked through Martin Scorsese's so many movies -- through the nightclubs in Goodfellas and the trading rooms and offices in The Wolf of Wall Street, the muddy mountain sides of Silence. We have walked with this man's camera through space and time together and now here we are, all of us Old Folks, stalking one another down antiseptic corridors on shaky wheels.

The camera comes to rest on Robert De Niro, as it must. De Niro looks old -- older than the actor looks right now in real life, and older than his character Frank Sheeran will look for the majority of The Irishman thanks to the (occasionally spotty) state of the art technology that will pinken his cheeks and taut up his neck flesh as the tale he starts to tell us winds us back, way back in time...

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