8 • Section E • INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS — Chanukah Edition • December 16, 2011
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Sladek’s film ‘Con Artist’ tackles fame, and more By CHRIS LEPPEK IJN Assistant Editor
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ou can’t accuse Denver-born and bred filmmaker Michael Sladek of dodging the big questions. What is fame? What is art? What is wealth? What is love? Titanic questions, to be sure, but not too daunting for Sladek, who asked them, explored them and sometimes even answered them in “Con Artist,” the bio-documentary he conceived and directed and which, after spending a well-received year on the cinema festival circuit and a brief theatrical run, was just released as a commercial DVD. Reviewed as “excellent” by the Hollywood Reporter, “prickly” by the Village Voice and “entertaining” by The New York Times, the documentary focuses on a fellow named Mark Kostabi, who was briefly but spectacularly famous in the 1980s and today, after being unofficially declared a pariah by the art community he once conquered, is desperately striving to make his way back to the top. “Con Artist” is the second featurelength film to be made by Sladek’s New York-based firm, Plug Ugly Films, which he co-founded 11 years ago. The son of longtime Denverites and Jewish community stalwarts Ossie and Selma Sladek, he became fascinated by Kostabi after meeting him a few years ago and working briefly as a cameraman on a self-produced game show that Kostabi was filming in his New York studio. Not a veteran of New York’s hyperhip, punk and hip-hop driven art scene in the 1980s, Sladek had never before heard of Kostabi, or his notorious moment of art celebrity in the midst of that scene. Kostabi became famous (appearing on “60 Minutes,” “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show”) and fabulously wealthy by playing the role of what he himself called a “con artist” – essentially, hiring artists to paint thousands of paintings, signing his own name to them and then selling them in galleries, all the while declaring that he hadn’t actually painted a single one of them. “Modern art is a con,” Kostabi was
ented and money-attracting milieu of the big Hollywood studios. The producers and directors of indie films have to work overtime just to get their movies seen, let alone reviewed. “Con Artist” has made excellent progress since the film premiered in 2009 at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival. It spent a year on the festival circuit (including an appearance at the Starz Denver Film Festival) and then opened in theaters. Along the way, the television rights were sold to Ovation, a cable network specializing in art-related films. It was recently released as a DVD for commercial and “non-theatrical” – mainly educational – consumers. “The critical reception has been fantastic. That’s what’s kept it going. The New York Times said it was great. Audiences seem to love it. “Financially, it’s harder. We’re at the point where we’re finally able to start selling something. Our DVD is out and we’ll start selling as video on demand as well.”
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Michael Sladek fond of telling his fans and critics alike, “and I am the world’s greatest con artist.” It was an anti-art artistic statement, bizarre and gonzo in its core, and New York’s art-hungry population ate it up, buying Kostabi’s quasi-pirated paintings like hot cakes. It didn’t last long, however. The high-brow arts community didn’t much like being mocked and those who were initially impressed by the novelty of Kostabi’s artistic shtick quickly grew tired of the gag. Almost as soon as his star had risen, Kostabi found himself bankrupt and ignored, the ultimate fad gone stale.
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y the time Sladek met him, the con artist was doing everything he could to regain that elusive spotlight. “The more I got to know him and his background and the bizarre cast of characters who come in and out of his place,” Sladek told the INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS this week, “I started to think there might be the possibility to make an interesting comedy about the art world and about commodity and fame addiction, all centered around this
very bizarre, fascinating and interesting character. “At the time, in the 80s, when he started doing this, it was a very ironic, sort of in-your-face critique of the art world. Now, the critique
‘He was the flavor of the month, but crashed and burned because of his own behavior — and people tired of the irony’ is a little old and it’s just an interesting relic of a specific time.” “Con Artist” ties Kostabi’s rapid rise and fall into the notoriously selfish and greedy culture of the 80s, symbolized today by the S&L and penny stock scandals and Michael Douglas’ timeless role in the movie “Wall Street.” “Kostabi was very much in the middle of that world,” Sladek says. “The Wall Street guys that were making money hand over fist in the 80s were the people who were fueling the purchase of these paintings. It was all fueled by this Gordon Gekko-style greed.” Sladek’s movie pays even more attention, however, to where Kostabi is today. “He was the flavor of the month,” Sladek says, “but then crashed and burned because of his own behavior and the fact that people got tired of the irony. Then he kind
of rebuilt his business and is still doing the same thing, but he still has this extreme craving, like so many in our society, to be famous, to be as rich as possible and to be recognized by his peers.” It fascinates Sladek how Kostabi – who started out as a very talented artist himself – eventually became consumed by wealth and fame. “Here’s this kid, essentially, who starts out with an amazing talent to paint and draw and a determination to join this amazingly productive art world out there, so he comes to New York and comes up with this kind of joke that made him rich. “In becoming rich, he no longer paints, he no longer picks up a pencil. He refers to himself, and we refer to him, as a business artist, which obviously riffs on Andy Warhol’s ideas that it’s more about the personality and the making of money than the art. That is a critique of our society overall; that it’s more about the industry than the actual center of our own personal humanity.” The story of Kostabi’s rise and fall says a great deal about our perceptions of authenticity and aesthetics, but even more, Sladek says, about fame. “Kostabi equates fame with love, very openly,” he says. “I think a lot of people in our society, especially nowadays with reality TV, truly equate this notion of being on TV with cameras around you, as being love. It’s this kind of hollow concept that our society has for some reason really embraced.” In that sense, Sladek says, “Con Artist” is very much a true-to-life “cautionary tale.”
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orn in Denver, Sladek attended Thomas Jefferson High School before his entire family packed up and moved to Newport Beach, Calif. He studied theater, specifically acting and directing, at several colleges in the Los Angeles area but preferred getting into the film industry to waiting for a diploma. In his thumbnail bio, he calls himself “a proud dropout of numerous mediocre colleges.” After a number of creatively-oriented jobs, including a stint at MTV, Sladek ended up in Brooklyn where he and a partner founded Plug Ugly Films in 2000. Plug Ugly is working to earn a reputation in the increasingly popular world of “indie,” or independent, cinema. He acknowledges that it’s a far cry from the glamour-ori-
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ladek and Plug Ugly Films, meanwhile, are planning to stay busy. By next spring, he hopes to have finished a feature-length documentary on the backstage reality and colorful history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which commissioned the made-for-television film in honor of its 150th anniversary. He has also optioned a novel, The Phantom Limbs of the Rallow Sisters, by Omaha author Timothy Schaffert. Sladek calls it “kind of an American Gothic . . . a really great character study, almost like ‘The Last Picture Show.’” Closer to home, Sladek hopes to soon start work on a project based on a historical story from Colorado’s Indian wars. It will involve collaboration with his brother, Ron Sladek, a historian and film producer living in Fort Collins, and will likely involve shooting in Colorado itself. Still another Sladek brother has found success in movies. Daniel Sladek was co-producer of the 2009 drama “Prayers For Bobby,” which premiered on the Lifetime cable channel and starred Sigourney Weaver. The film was nominated for an Emmy. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Daniel and I are in movies,” Sladek says. “I think it’s a coincidence that our other siblings aren’t making movies. “We all come from very creative backgrounds. My father is a musician, my mother is a musician, our grandparents are musicians and performers. Daniel and I grew up doing theater in Denver and California.” Sladek says he was very proud of his older brother’s accomplishment when “Prayers for Bobby” was nominated for an Emmy. “Obviously it was very close to his heart. It was a work of real faith and love.” As to his own faith, Sladek – who spent much of his youth at Temple Sinai where his father, a Holocaust survivor, served for many years as executive director – says he doesn’t usually incorporate Judaism per se into his work, but he suspects that his Jewishness does have an influence upon him. “There’s nothing in ‘Con Artist’ that is Jewish necessarily, but you’d have to say that I approach everything, since it’s my point of view and my eye, from an innate Jewish point of view.” “Con Artist” is available at Amazon.com and Netflix. Information: http://www.pluguglyfilms.com/.