Video clip NSFW
Steven Soderbergh has made a documentary on Spalding Gray, the writer/performance artist who took his own life. His surviving wife Kathie Russo is one of the producers on the film. She did a small but interesting piece about Grey on This American Life a while back that I found incredibly moving. Karina Longworth calls Everything is Going Fine a must-see doc at SXSW.
Fine is compiled entirely of footage of Gray–interviews, home movies, footage of his one-man shows, including Jonathan Demme’s filmed version of Swimming to Cambodia (above)–telling his own life story. Soderbergh made his own film of one of Gray’s monologues, Gray’s Anatomy, in 1996 but had fallen out of contact with the artist by the time he killed himself in 2004; Soderbergh has called this film, carved out over three years from Gray’s complete archive, his “act of contrition.” It’s spooky, but celebratory, and an essential document of Gray’s work, life and the inextricable link between the two.