Film
“Clear your schedule, silence your phone, brace a chair against the cabin door, prepare a bowl of wholesome snacks, and prepare to spend a couple of flying hours tonight with Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About.” James Wolcott, Vanity Fair*
Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About
- George Foster Peabody Award for outstanding achievement in electronic media, 2010
- Hugo Television Awards: Silver Plaque, 2010
- CINE Golden Eagle Award for excellence, 2009
- Prime-time Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Series (American Masters), 2009, with nominations for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming: Amanda Vaill, and Outstanding Voice-Over Performance: Ron Rifkin
- “Best Dance Documentary” listing by Wendy Perron in Dance Magazine, 2009
Jerome Robbins was a study in contrasts. He was the greatest ballet choreographer this country has ever produced, creating works like The Cage, Dances at a Gathering, and Afternoon of a Faun. But he was also the pre-eminent maker of Broadway musicals — like West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, and Peter Pan — and an Academy-Award-winning film director as well. He enjoyed unparalleled success as an artist, yet remained vulnerable and torn by self-doubt. He had a reputation for ruthless perfectionism, but he was also generous, self-deprecating, and funny. Certainly no creative figure of his time was both so polarizing and so protean.
To chronicle Robbins’s complex life and work, six-time Emmy-Award-winning producer/director Judy Kinberg interviewed more than fifty witnesses to his story, and she and Robbins biographer Amanda Vaill — who together had access to Robbins’s off-limits taped and written archives — have woven that testimony into a narrative enriched by Robbins’s own words, and by unique archival and performance film footage. The result is Something to Dance About: an in-depth portrait of an artist who was truly an American master.
Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About — a PBS/American Masters documentary, produced and directed by Judy Kinberg, written by Amanda Vaill, and narrated by Ron Rifkin, aired nationally February 18, 2009 with festival previews at the Paley Center for Media, New York, October 23, 2008 and Lincoln Center Film Society’s Dance On Camera Festival, January 16, 2009, as well as a special West Coast preview at the Letterman Digital Arts Center Premiere Theater, February 5, 2009. Other screenings at Dance Camera West, June 13, 2009, and Dallas Museum of Art, October 18, 2009.
Praise for Something to Dance About
“With unexpected frankness and affectionate insight, Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About … brings us tantalizingly close to one of the great creative minds and enduring psychological mysteries of 20th-century America.” Washington Post
“Producer Judy Kinberg and writer Amanda Vaill do far more than just pronounce Robbins’ genius; they explain and illustrate it, lay[ing] out a full portrait of their subject [and] letting you judge his choices for yourself. And they entertain you while they do it.” USA Today
* “Bio-docs can be a deadly, didactic genre… [but] Something to Dance About avoids this cradle-to-grave lead-foot shuffle, leaping into action with an arrowy concision worthy of its embattled subject.” James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
“Directed by Judy Kinberg and written by Amanda Vaill, author of the definitive biography of Robbins, this two-hour documentary is packed full of fascinating archival film clips, including color home movies of Fancy Free shot from the wings of the Metropolitan Opera House. For once, though, the interviews are as interesting as the clips, and you’ll come away with a crystal-clear sense of who Robbins was and why he mattered—and still does.” Wall Street Journal
Sex and Mrs. X
A Lifetime Cable feature adapted from Amanda Vaill’s 1999 Allure article of the same name, starring Linda Hamilton as Mrs. X, the spurned wife, and Jacqueline Bisset as the high-flying Parisian madam who teaches her how to get back at her ex.
Because networks used to be more prudish than fashion magazines, the movie bears about as much resemblance to its original source as a Big Mac does to tournedos Rossini — but it’s good cheesy fun nevertheless, with Bisset in top form. As one viewer remarked, “Don’t let the garter belt scare you!”