Rare film is a glimpse at enigmatic Basquiat

Few artists’ public images have been as important to their early careers as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s. But these days, the image most people have of the 1980s New York painter comes mainly from the press and a 1996 film by Julian Schnabel. Basquiat lived too briefly to leave much more of a record than his often sensationalistic interviews and incandescent, jazz-and-graffiti-influenced paintings.

Schnabel’s “Basquiat,” which starred Jeffrey Wright, looked at the dramatic ascent and sudden, heroin-induced fall of the Brooklyn-born artist of Caribbean descent who riffed on images of the street and ghetto, despite his own middle-class upbringing.

But a little-known record of the artist has recently been unearthed: a relatively unguarded 20-minute interview cut with scenes of Basquiat painting and brief shots of New York and Los Angeles. It’s being shown as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s current “Basquiat” retrospective. The footage is especially valuable because of its rarity.

“There’s only, to my knowledge, two interviews that Jean-Michel did that were filmed,” says Fred Hoffman, a longtime L.A. art dealer and Basquiat friend who is also guest curating the show. “The other one is a complete travesty,” in which the artist “went into a defensive, retreat mode” after being frustrated with his interlocutor, and spends most of the time eating French fries.

By contrast, the film showing at MOCA, “A Conversation With Jean-Michel Basquiat,” was made by the artist’s friend Tamra Davis, a Los Angeles filmmaker. In the film, shot mostly at a Beverly Hills hotel in 1986, Basquiat is relaxed and mostly cooperative, with a gentle sense of humor and a hint of smile around his eyes. Although he dodges a few issues -- “I don’t think it’s good to be honest in interviews,” he says at one point -- it’s probably as clear and open a statement as we have of the real Basquiat.

Says Hoffman: “It gives keen insight into what motivated him as an artist and what he was like as a person.”

The painter puts down the Minimalism then dominating the New York art world -- it “alienated most people from art” -- and talks about his original interest in “attacking the gallery circuit” by making fun of the paintings inside. He mentions his interest in Mark Twain and recalls his mentor Andy Warhol, who “told lots of funny jokes.”

The artist seems bemused by his portrayal in the press, which he says dwells on his personality more than his work and cast him as a “wild monkey man.” But just when it seems that he’s defined by his naive charm, he adds: “I sort of enjoy that they think I’m a bad boy.”

Davis, 42, has a knack for being in the right place at the right time. She made videos for Sonic Youth, the Bangles and Husker Du at their respective peaks; she stood next to the guitarist for the Smiths when he broke up the band on lead singer Morrissey’s front stoop. And she met Michael Diamond -- Mike D of the Beastie Boys, her husband -- when he and the group were recording “Paul’s Boutique,” one of hip-hop’s most literate and important recordings, in Silver Lake.

Davis, who is straightforward, somewhat girlish and eminently agreeable, encountered Basquiat in the early 1980s, when he was in L.A. painting one of his shows for the Larry Gagosian Gallery. A native Westsider, she was then an undergraduate at Los Angeles City College working at a gallery on La Cienega, and the two bonded over their interests in the art world.

They met at the opening of another artist, when Basquiat drifted into the back room where Davis and a few friends were playing music on a stereo. “He had a really cool way to dance, and you totally wanted to hang out with him. He was like a rock star: You immediately noticed him.”

As the years elapsed, they stayed friends. “And it was his idea to make a film together,” and to include screenwriter Becky Johnson as interviewer, she says. “It was just she and I who showed up; it wasn’t like there was a crew or anything. You get to see what a flirt he was. When he put that sparkle in his eye, you just melt. It would have been a different interview if he’d been speaking to a guy.”

The ensuing film shows one true version of Basquiat, what Davis calls “the best version.” But even as a friend and longtime fan, she concedes that it doesn’t tell the whole story. “He could be a very hard person to hang out with. He might run over and tip over a table, or throw a brick through a window. It was fun but you never knew what was gonna happen. He lived in his own world.”

Once, while the two were strolling down a street in Los Angeles, the artist ran ahead and kicked a businessman walking along in front of them. “That guy could have turned around and killed us!” Davis says. “We had to run. That was the kind of thing Jean-Michel would think was really funny.”

Other times, he would draw or write on every available surface: walls, napkins, books, the tops of tables. Davis remembers spending a weekend with Basquiat in the summer of ‘88, trying to keep him sober, when he seemed to be falling apart. That weekend, she noticed, the notebooks he had with him remained empty.

Later that summer, about two years after Davis made the film, Basquiat died of an overdose. He was 27.

At the time of Basquiat’s death, Davis had done nothing with her film. His death discouraged her from showing it around or even editing the footage. “Especially near the end, he was so freaked out that people were ripping him off all the time,” she says, insisting that it was only partly his paranoia. “So when he died, I just put it in my drawer. I didn’t want him to think, even dead, that I was one of those people who’d taken advantage of him.”

Years later, Schnabel, a painter who moved in the same circles as Basquiat in the ‘80s, asked her for the footage as research material, and she shared it with him, despite not allowing it to be used in the movie. (Schnabel, reached by phone, recalls seeing her footage and says that of at least three short films of Basquiat he has seen, it is the one in which the artist is “the most buoyant and comfortable in his own skin.”)

Both Davis and Hoffman say they had some reservations about the Schnabel film, but praised Wright’s portrayal of the artist; the filmmaker refers to “his amazing job with the mannerisms and physicality,” and the curator says the “reserved, introspective” quality of some of Wright’s scenes resemble the person we see in Davis’ “Conversation.”

Davis went on to a career in video and feature films, including the 1992 indie “Guncrazy” and the 1995 Adam Sandler vehicle “Billy Madison.” She’s now the mother of two young children, and she recently shot a pilot for CBS.

A few weeks before the MOCA show, the phone rang. It was a MOCA official hoping to see the footage and screen it as part of the retrospective.

The film also has been accepted for the Toronto and Sundance film festivals.

Although Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn, was part of the art scene in SoHo and is associated with New York, Davis’ film captures him during one of several periods in which he lived and worked in L.A.

“I’ve always said that the L.A. years for Basquiat represented a relief, a decompression from the intensity of the New York art world,” Hoffman says. “It was probably too much for him to handle in New York. It all happened so quickly.

“It was so much easier for him to make art out here; he just didn’t have the distractions. He could work six to eight hours uninterrupted, then go out to a few clubs around town, go to sleep, and then come back and work. His life was a lot simpler.”

Still, Basquiat tended to attract legends and wild anecdotes wherever he was, Davis says.

“The thing about Jean-Michel is that he was such a star, and with any celebrity people will have stories about him. In a way, he kind of enjoyed that. I think he liked that that image intimidated people. In the ‘80s, the celebrity of the artist was really taking off, and he was really good at using that.

“But up until now, that was the only thing we had. It’s nice that there’s something else.”

*

‘Basquiat’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, 11 a.m. to midnight Saturdays,

11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays,

closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: Oct. 10

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222, www.moca.org

Also

What: “A Conversation With JeanMichel Basquiat,” the 1986 film by director Tamra Davis, runs (in a loop) in the downstairs reading room.