Metrograph

Metrograph will be joined by Reverse Shot co-founder and editor, author of the essential movie memoir Films of Endearment, newly minted Senior Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image and all-round pillar of New York cinephile culture Michael Koresky on the occasion of the publication of his new book Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, signing copies of his latest after presenting the 1954 Judy Garland-James Mason A Star is Born, directed by the unofficial King of Queer Hollywood, George Cukor.

Neither the first nor the last but by many estimations the finest of the show business tale of two fortunes passing one another, one rising, one declining, with Judy Garland as aspiring singer “Vicki Lester,” née Esther Blodgett, and James Mason as the hard-drinking matinee idol “Norman Maine,” né Ernest Gubbins, who takes Esther/Vicki under his wing before proving to need a little protection from himself. Cukor’s first feature in color and his first in CinemaScope, both used with dash and brio.

"Garland's performance is so potent that it practically removes the invisible scrim between audience and performer and between the performer and her character, so that A Star Is Born seems to collapse all reasonable boundaries of melodrama. If it sounds as if I'm engaging in the kind of irrational idolatry that befits a Garland fanatic, then so be it." —Michael Koresky

Pre-screening conversation with writer Michael Koresky on Sunday, June 15th