Paula Vaccaro
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“A ‘Classic’ of a Film You Never Knew Existed”: Aaron Brookner on His NYFF-Debuting Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars
While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that’s as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner’s Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting — artistically, managerially, financially — the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, his massive, multinational, 12-hour opera for the 1984 Summer Olympics. And far fewer documentarians have a nephew like Aaron Brookner, […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 29, 2025 -
“The Nova Convention… a Free Artistic Experiment”: Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias on Nova ‘78
Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 centers around the Nova Convention, a late ’70s avant-garde extravaganza that took place at NYC’s now defunct Entermedia Theater (Second Avenue and 12th Street) in honor of William S. Burroughs’s return to the U.S. after living more than 20 years abroad. It was also a great excuse to gather a who’s who roster of counterculture icons to perform in the presence of the postmodern wordsmith who’d profoundly impacted them all. That would include Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, Laurie Anderson and Julia Heyward, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Merce […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 22, 2025 -
“He Could Almost Do It All Alone”: Producer Paula Vaccaro on Working with Emir Kusturica
I guess people expect to see a big bearded man as Emir Kusturica’s producer. Of course the question I get the most is, how did it start? I was a journalist more than 20 years ago in my hometown, Buenos Aires. In the late 1990s I moved into production: management, line producing, etc. In the early 2000s I moved to the UK and Spain and started to produce for others. My encounter with Emir’s work was thanks to Jose Ibañez, Pentagrama Films producer, who was producing Oliver Stone’s The Immortals, a series on world leaders seen from Oliver’s prism. I […]
by Paula Vaccaro on May 16, 2014
