USA,
1987, 120 min
Shown in 1987
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jonathan Demme
- prod
-
R.A. Shafranky
- scr
-
Spalding Gray
- cam
-
John Bailey
- cast
-
Spalding Gray
- source
-
Cinecom Pictures
-
COMMENTS
Jonathan Demme, Spalding Gray in person.
OTHER
Spalding Gray walks on stage carrying a spiral notebook with a cartoon cover and wearing the kind of plaid cotton shirt that a nerd would button up to his Adam’s apple. He sits at a table with a pulldown map behind him, as though he’s about to give a class report. And he begins to talk, the words spilling out of him with the speed and candor of a modern day Mark Twain. But there’s nothing old-fashioned about his intricately crafted monologue, Swimming to Cambodia, for which he won an Obie, and that is the basis for the latest film directed by Jonathan Demme (Something Wild, Stop Making Sense, SFIFF World Premiere 1984). Gray (True Stories) gives a wide-eyed, moment-to-moment reportage of his 1983 journey to the East to play a role in The Killing Fields. He talks about his encounters with acrobatic Thai prostitutes, the egos of American politicos and the numbing evidence of the Cambodian genocide, to the music of Laurie Anderson—leaving us to wonder where the actor ends and Spalding Gray begins.
—From notes in Newsweek and Vogue
FACTOID #173
Though he starred in an Opening Night film (1967’s How I Won the War), lent his image and songs to 1968’s Festival entry Yellow Submarine and was scheduled to appear at the 1971 Festival with wife Yoko for an evening of their short films, John Lennon never attended the SFIFF.
