American Beauty Limited

[DetroitPlanner]

Okay whats the deal here? I am watching the world series and researching locally made movies and came across this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162852/

[Gannon]

Okay whats the deal here? I am watching the world series and researching locally made movies and came across this:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162852/

Yeah Lowell, 'fess up. You never told us you were a STAR.


Cheers!

[Zacha341]

That's right! Confess! ------

Yeah Lowell, 'fess up. You never told us you were a STAR.

Cheers!

[Lowell]

American Beauty Ltd. was a German art circle film set in Detroit around the theme of immigration to the US and an interpersonal relationship spread across the decades. It was shot in 1988 and incorporated a lot of documentary footage. There were many Detroit scenes from the Packard plant to an art opening at the George Nnambdi Gallery, then in the Whitney.

It was produced, written and directed by Dieter Marcello, a colorful Green Party activist who had trained as an actor in his youth and who I met while he was in Detroit in the 1980's as graduate studies student at Wayne State in labor relations.

He became completely enraptured by Detroit, its art scene, its crises, its ruins and history. He was responsible for opening my eyes to the significance, even reverence, with which outsiders and Germans in particular held for Detroit and the work of Albert Kahn.

The name of the film was derived from the ironically-named and abandoned American Beauty iron factory on Woodward. The main set was an artist loft set on Piquette that overlooked the factory with its American Beauty sign atop and the then neon General Motors building sign beyond.

I was hardly a 'star'. I cameo-ed in a few scenes as a Detroit artist including one where I did a painting splashdown. I only spoke a couple of lines. The actual stars were Walter Sachers and Liora Hilb.

In 1990 the film was nominated for the Deutsche Film Preis [the German Academy Award] for best picture and best cinematography. It would win the latter. So I got a trip to Germany to traveled around for premiers of the film where I also did a couple of splashdowns and attended the awards ceremony in Berlin.

The best cinematography award carried a sizable cash award. Marcello used that to return to Detroit in 1991 to make an outstanding documentary about the German-born Albert Kahn called "Albert Kahn, Architect of Modern Times".

It spanned his story from the small town where he was born to youthful travels in Italy where he was so influenced by Palladio to Detroit to Magnitogorsk in the Soviet Union, the steel town he largely built. [Kahn built 400 plants in the Soviet Union including the famous Stalingrad tractor plant where the turning point of WWII arguably occurred.]

During the making of the documentary, we traded houses and cars. My wife, son and I spent a lovely September at a country house in the vineyards of Alsace in France and at his apartment in Stuttgart while he got my big Highland Park house for him and his crew. Win-Win.

[Mikeg]

From the Google translation of a 1990 review of the film, American Beauty, Ltd.:

An elegiac swan song to the American dream.... When the film ends in the art world - Lowell Boileau used for his paintings of techniques that he learned as a worker at Chrysler - he is now himself become exhibit, museum, educational and art-piece..... Marcello's film is thus the antihesis of ROGER AND ME.....

[Lowell]

Eratum above^ I worked at Ford Dearborn Engine not Chrysler.

[Honky Tonk]

Your art work looks great, Lowell.