Fran and Spalding

Lost interviews with two of America’s sharpest wits.

The recent success of Martin Scorsese’s new Netflix documentary series about Fran Lebowitz, Pretend It’s a City, put me in mind of another project from twenty years ago that featured Fran, the late Spalding Gray, and dozens of others. As it is now out of print, I thought it was worth revisiting, given the renewed interest in the intrepid Ms. L., and the poignancy of what Spalding had to say in light of his tragic end five years later.

These are interviews that have barely been seen by the general public, and never in their entirety, until now.

The film is a feature documentary called Yesterday’s Tomorrows (1999), directed by Barry Levinson and produced by Richard Berge. It was part of an initiative by Sandra Itkoff and Showtime/Disney, which commissioned a group of famous narrative filmmakers to make a series of documentaries collected under the title The 20th Century: A Moving History, to commemorate the upcoming turn of the Millennium. Each director was given an identical budget and free rein to tackle the topic of his or her choice. Levinson’s documentary is about how people in the past imagined the future, loosely based on the book of the same name by Stanford professor Joseph Corn, who appears in the film. (The other topics included comedy, marriage, sex, drugs, and the American Dream.)