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“But Then My Obsession Went to Darker Things: Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward on Being Subjects in the Tribeca-Premiering Doc, How Dark My Love
How Dark My Love Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward are having a big summer. The reigning king and queen of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade also are known as two of the most original figures in a New York underground scene that flourished in the 1970s and ‘80s, and they continue to thrive as artists, performers and personalities. Coleman, a visionary painter, curated the sprawling “Carnival” group show at Deitch Projects, on view through June 28, which more than lives up to Coleman’s evocation of “a profane, holy place where the private desires, fantasies and fears of a society are given uninhibited free expression.” Weegee and Red Grooms rub shoulders with Freaks star Johnny Eck and legendary sideshow banner painter Johnny Meah in a phantasmagoria of circus Americana, at once lurid and magical.
The couple, who celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary this year, also are the subjects of a new documentary How Dark My Love, which has just premiered at the Tribeca Festival.
“We knew Joe was a fascinating subject,” says director Scott Gracheff, who was brought onto the project by producer Jim Muscarella (who finally realized his dream of making the film after bonding with Coleman and Ward backstage at a Nashville Pussy show in Brooklyn). “Well, you don’t quite know what the story is yet, right? This person’s interesting, but how can we really get in there and tell a story that’s compelling? And for us, we wanted to really kind of push the format and boundaries of what an artist biopic could be. It took a couple years for us to realize Whitney was really the key to telling the story, she’s the other protagonist. If we could frame this as a love story, that would give us the best shot of engaging audiences on an emotional and visceral level.”
The immersive process included a dozen years of shooting, or the time required for Coleman to complete maybe three of his towering acrylic on wood panel paintings, produced at an achingly slow pace with a single-hair brush, a pair of jeweler’s glasses strapped to his head. Coleman, whom Ward once described to me as “the walking ghost of Old America,” has conjured into paint a gallery of those closest to him and also the legendary figures from a shadow world of serial killers, sideshow icons, rockabilly singers, outsider artists and literary inspirations like Edgar Allan Poe – each portrait surrounded by richly detailed smaller portraits and tableaux that flesh out a life’s story.
Gracheff finds the film’s throughline as Coleman dedicates years to a portrait of Ward, his muse, a photographer and professional domme, as a companion piece to his own autobiographical portrait A Doorway to Joe. There’s no lack of wild reveals and anecdotes, joy and tragedy, and a lot of love and tenderness.
Days ahead of the film’s premiere, Filmmaker met up with Ward and Coleman to talk about the decade-plus production and their feelings about exposing their lives to the camera.
Filmmaker: It struck me that the filmmakers did such a delicate job of capturing a sense of intimacy in all its dimensions. But in order for that to happen, you guys have to be exceptionally trusting of the process. I was interested in how that evolved.
Coleman: I had experienced a documentary before called Rest in Pieces, And that experience was both good and bad. It was financed by the Austrian Film Institute, and they had this deadline imposed on the film. … To me, it kind of cheapens the whole film by trying to rush it. I told that to the [Dark] filmmakers from the beginning, to not worry about reaching a festival deadline and take your time. I also wanted to take my time with them, because I wanted to feel comfortable enough to get more intimate with them, which I didn’t really have in my previous experience. When [producer Muscarella] brought on Scott, I immediately found a real kindred spirit and [could] really relax. I’m painting, they have the camera, like almost at my brush while they’re filming, and they’re all around. You know, that kind of intimacy in the physical sense also became an intimacy in the emotional and psychological [sense]. I really felt that they were family, in the end, to the degree that I actually was the one that Scott and his-wife-to-be Brianna asked to marry them, so the trust was mutual.
Ward: It was instant love. I think you both bonded over your love …
Coleman: When I started to talk about one of my favorite character actors, even though he was a leading man, he was a very complex actor that never got its due. His name is Robert Ryan. And the minute I talked about Robert Ryan, Scott jumped in, and he proved his worth to me by his appreciation for this underrated actor.
Filmmaker: I don’t want to introduce spoilers, but the film is driven by a number of moments that reveal some intensely personal things about your lives – some of them quite startling for people who don’t already know your stories, but also revealing in many more complex ways. How did you feel about giving that kind of access?
Ward: It was obvious that they were going to jump in and document this epic painting that he was doing, which I already was really honored about, and also very overwhelmed simply from that, and then the trust developed over time. We liked them instantly, and certainly Joe has been out there for a lot longer. I’ve always been very, very private. So it did unfold over a period of years, I think with my willingness to really trust them, that they would handle these very sensitive things and things I felt just to be very, very, very personal, that I kept very close and didn’t even share with a lot of people that I knew. I think they handled it really well.
Coleman: But you had an amazing amount of trust in me painting you.
Ward: So perhaps that was the icebreaker. You asked if there were things that I didn’t want you to include, that might be really difficult, and I trust you implicitly.
Coleman: There are a lot of things that are cringe-worthy for me throughout both your stuff and my own stuff that I reveal. But to me, those are really important things. You have to hand over those really precious things to the right hand.
Ward: I also felt no one likes to be judged and potentially judged harshly for decisions that maybe are not understandable easily to a lot of people, or potentially are pretty unpleasant or whatnot. It’s not my desire to challenge people just because I made the decisions that I did. So that was kind of a delicate balance. … It’s going to be interesting to see what the response is. The biggest part is for me to try to wrap my head around how exposed we both are. Certainly he’s been out there, as I mentioned, more than me. But also, there’s a kind of subtleness and gentleness, kind of a sweetness that they were able to capture.
Filmmaker: Again, without giving up too much, the recreated scenes of you in the cab you drove were highly entertaining.
Coleman: It felt like the old days, driving that old Checker.
Ward: I can’t wait to see it on the big screen. It’s one of those scenes that I think is going to feel really, really intense and perfectly claustrophobic.
Filmmaker: How many years did you drive the Checker?
Coleman: It was probably seven years. Things changed for me when I picked up David Owsley in my cab, who was the curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum. I had a show [at that time in the’80s] in the Lower East Side in this gallery, Chronocide. Martin Wong also showed there, and several artists that I’m still really close to, [like] Manuel DeLanda, who is more of a filmmaker and writer. But we all cultivated this gallery that was not like the mainstream of the East Village, right? Kind of an alternative in the East Village. This big biker from upstate New York opened this gallery, and he only put on shows that he really liked. We all kind of were drawn by his love of truth that we all kind of do. I still have some of his artifacts in my home. He died about 10 years ago. Recently, these people from my past have come back into my life, and it’s really nice that it brings up those memories.
Filmmaker: You picked him David Owsley as a passenger?
Coleman: Yeah … David Owsley did save my life. I picked him up in my cab randomly, and I started talking about art, and he and I got along really well. Eventually I was like, “I have this show right now. I’d love you to see my work.” It was late at night, but Bob Behrens lived in an apartment above the gallery, he rented that apart from his main home. I pulled over the cab and called him in a phone booth, and woke him up. Bob actually got up, came down it and let us in. And David Owsley was blown away. He was the first, important collector of my work. He bought two paintings from that show, Baboon Heart Baby Is Dead and Our Abortion. I saw them at his house on Park Avenue a few months later. He hung them between a Bruegel and a Reverend Blayney, an outsider artist who I love who deals a lot with the Book of Revelation. I was so honored when I saw what he did with the paintings, when he invited me to his home. But that experience in my cab was the beginning of a certain success, that led to me meeting Mickey Cartin, who was my biggest collector at that time. And Mickey handed me a bunch of cash and said, “Joe, just stop driving a cab.”
Filmmaker: The East Village of the early ‘80s was such a vital time and place, and the impact is still reverberating. Everything’s different now, of course. What did it mean to you?
Coleman: I mean, these were tenements – temporary housing. They weren’t meant to be these permanent homes where now people are spending, I don’t know how much money now, but the reason why I even moved into the Lower East Side was because the rent was inexpensive, and I also desired to live in a city that had a red light district. It was a really dirty, exciting city. That, to me, is what inspired you to go to New York.
Ward: Midnight Cowboy inspired me. Don’t let a kid in single digits watch that movie. I think it’s interesting that in the ‘80s, before we even met officially, Joe had this late-night film series with his first wife, Nancy Pivar, and he showed all kinds of extraordinary, not easily seen films. I went to see Nekromantik with some friends, so our paths kept sort of not exactly crossing.
Coleman: I would watch Dracula’s Chiller Theatre when I was 10. I got turned onto monster movies. But then my obsession went to darker things. We showed some movies that had really never been seen in the U.S. before, or even though made in the U.S. not seen so well in the U.S. Two of those were Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which got me involved in producing the poster for John McNaughton, and the other one being Nekromantik. Nekromantik was considered illegal, and confiscated. The director was considered criminal for thinking of the idea of making it.
Filmmaker: The film also documents your mutual departure from New York, to resettle upstate. What did that feel like to leave behind?
Ward: Neither one of us intended to not have any place in New York.
Coleman: I always thought to have a place in the country and places to go back and forth, but the circumstances of COVID …
Ward: We hung onto Montague Street [the site of Coleman’s Odditorium, a museum-like collection of all manner of curiosities, whether born of the sideshow or the anatomical — imagine House of Wax meets the Mutter Museum] for a solid year in the pandemic, and then it became clear that our heart was really upstate. I think for both of us dividing the energy wasn’t going to work, and you don’t realize that until you’ve committed to a turn, which we did. We kept the safety net for a while, and then when it became clear it just didn’t make any sense, we both realized that the place didn’t have the same feeling about our stuff either. It was just a place. It was a great apartment and a great location, but without the magic, because the magic was what Joe had created.
Filmmaker: Did the UPS guy ever come by and wander in?
Ward: Yeah, it was alway a little bit like the Addams Family.
Coleman: It was great.
Ward: Remember the cable guy?
Coleman: The cable guy came over when I was there. And he said, “This is McDougal’s House of Horrors.” Which is from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. If you’ve seen the movie, you realize it does look a lot like Montague Street. And so the cable guy walks in, he calms down, and he’s having a good time. And then somebody buzzes to come up. Somebody comes up, and he says, “I’ll be another one of the wax figures.” And it’s Whitney. Whitney walks in. [And Joe says] “That’s our new exhibit, “The Cable Guy.”
Ward: A lot of people at some of the local restaurants, after we became friendly with a lot of the places, they said, “Yeah, we used to get really excited and fight over who was going to get to deliver to your house.” I think we both certainly miss it there. It feels very surreal to walk around. But I still consider this to be home with a suitcase.
Coleman: I’m working on a painting now, which is about the house. You see a little bit in the documentary. I push myself so hard because every painting is the last painting.
Ward: If I’m feeling particularly impish, I’ll say, “Hey, what are you going to do next?” And that’ll really piss you off. Veins popping out! And another fun thing to is suggest something for him to paint. [Laughs]. That will pretty much guarantee that he will never do that.
