HS:
To change the subject, what are your thoughts on Barbara Kopple’s documentary The Hamptons?
CB:
I agreed to do the film because my thought was, ‘Wow, here’s an opportunity to get the STAR Foundation on ABC primetime TV. But I was extremely disappointed. The reviewer in the Wall Street Journal said that I was shown simply grinning, like I show up every now and then at an anti-nuclear event just grinning.
"Barbara Kopple’s crew asked us if we’d be involved, and we said only if you will follow us as we put together an event for the STAR Foundation and highlight the cause––but that wasn’t exactly the case."
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Let me put it this way. Two summers ago, Barbara Kopple’s production crew came out to talk to us about this film she was going to do the following summer, and wanted us to be involved in it. And so they filmed Peter and me talking about why we love the Hamptons, and why we’re fighting so hard to save the Hamptons. Then the following summer when they’d gotten permission to do the film, they asked us if we’d be involved, and we said only if you will follow us as we put together an event for the STAR Foundation and highlight the cause—but that wasn’t exactly the case. And I have seen Harlan County, USA and know that Barbara Kopple has a real artist’s heart and a fighting-for-the-underdog approach.
HS:
Sounds like what you expected should have been an entirely different documentary.
CB:
[From the documentary] you’d think that the nightlife here was some seedy nightclub in New York. I’ve never been to a nightclub out here, I’d never think of going to a nightclub out here, and almost everyone I know is the same way. I thought Kopple might have shown one Saturday night—here’s this group trying to find a cure for cancer, here’s a group trying to raise money for AIDS, here’s a group trying to raise money for a school for children with special needs. I thought we’d see all the philanthropic endeavors that are taking place out here.
HS:
So what would be your take on the Hamptons after seeing the documentary if you’d never been here before?
CB:
Well, I’d never think of it as a place I’d want to go to. It looked like it was just a superficial, empty place, but it’s not. I hated the way Jeff Salaway’s death was exploited. It just ripped my heart out for his family. I just started sobbing in the theatre, and I just thought ‘this is so sad.’ As if you could just firm it all up with a few scenes in a documentary that never came close to capturing the way this community felt about his death. I hated that line [stated about the funeral] that Steven Gaines said: “Everybody’s wondering what to wear.” I thought it was a smack in the face to Jeff because nobody was thinking about what to wear, everybody was thinking “what a loss.” I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way and he probably felt disappointed by being captured saying that.
I don’t know if anybody was still watching at the end, but when the credits rolled she had a little scene with my daughter Alexa playing the piano, and I thought that was very beautifully done because that song she composed was just a perfect selection following September 11.
