True Films 3.0 - Kevin Kelly

Sketches of Frank Gehry
A famous movie director (Sydney Pollack) documents how a famous
architect works. As Pollack struggles with his first documentary, Gehry
struggles to be amazing again as he plays with paper models. Gehry is
the renowned architect who designs the swoopy, crumpled, and absolutely
non-rectilinear buildings such as the Bilbao Guggenheim museum.
But he is almost an accidental architect, and certainly an accidental
superstar. He started out driving trucks and wanted to be a pilot. The
theme of this documentary is the fragile nature of creativity - how difficult
it is to sustain for anyone, but especially for the already successful. Gehry
is unexpectedly candid about his fear of failure and even lets his therapist
profile him. Best of all is his openness to let us watch him as he comes
up with lame ideas and stupid suggestions, on the way to finding something
that works.
By Sydney Pollack
2005, 84 min.
Available from Amazon
Rent from Netflix
A just-finished building that swoops like a fish. The original sketch
for Gehry’s Bilbao museum is superimposed over the final built
structure (right). We see Gehry in action as he twists cardboard
and paper while designing a new building (below).
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