Justin Wilkes and Sara Bernstein really were into the project, and what was it? Six weeks later, COVID hit and all of a sudden there were no cabaret performances in New York City for a year-and-a-half. Imagine had come on board and they were incredibly supportive. And Marty kept on saying, “We have to film it now, now, now.” We thought, “Well, he’s about to film a very long shooting schedule feature film, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’” and I thought maybe that was the urgency. We were really moved, and we thought, “Well, we have to do something with this.” And Mara and David were interested, but in the world we live in, it’s not so easy to get money for any kind of documentary. Mara invited us to see the show, and went maybe in May 2019 and it was everything you see. With Scorsese’s appreciation of Johansen dating back to when he’d play the Dolls to get actors amped up on the set of “Mean Streets,” there is a lot of love packed into every frame of “Personality Crisis,” all carefully curated by Tedeschi, credited as a co-director here after serving as the director’s longtime editor for music docs including “Rolling Stones: Shine a Light,” “Bob Dylan: No Direction Home” and “George Harrison: Living in the Material World.” After premiering last fall at the New York Film Festival, the film is premiering on Showtime where it is bound to transform every home it plays in to the Cafe Carlyle for the night nd Tedeschi spoke about capturing the concert only a few weeks before the world would change forever and how piecing together the film during the pandemic was informed by what was happening in the outside world and how it could serve as a respite from it.įrom what I understand, this came together in a bit of a whirlwind. It just so happens that filming took place on Johansen’s 70th birthday, but he appears to be throwing the party for everyone else and the occasion give way to exploring the many lives that the singer/songwriter has lived in a fragmentary style that resembles how its subject would seem to defy description of himself or his interests when he still searches for meaning. Marks Place with Abbie Hoffman and showing up at Todd Rundgren’s home in Hawaii to record an album to the “I Saw the Light” singer’s surprise. Then again, the modest yet slippery answer is indicative of an artist who might’ve been announcing who he was right from the start – or the various selves he’d inhabit – over the course of a career which has taken him from playing the grungiest of clubs on East Village to holding court at the Cafe Carlyle off of Park Avenue where in the winter of 2020, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi settle in for an evening in which Johansson did something a bit unusual – he would sing songs he had written as himself.Īllowing a far larger audience into the intimate jazz venue than would be let in to sit side by side with Debbie Harry, among others, “Personality Crisis: One Night Only” sees Johansen perform with the same verve that made the Dolls, and later acts, the Harry Smiths and Buster Poindexter so magnetic while casually throwing off tales of planting a tree in the concrete jungle of St.

“Personality Crisis,” the lead single of the New York Dolls’ debut album, was prophetic in many ways, believed to help launch the punk movement with its release in 1973, though when cornered decades later by Conan O’Brien into taking credit for this, lead singer David Johansen would joke that it had more to do with the Newcastle Brown Ale they were drinking abroad and the memorable sight of their drummer puking all over his kit that might’ve inspired the Sex Pistols and others in the UK more than the music.

Buster poindexter dolls side by side