''Sketches of Frank Gehry'' is a 2006 American

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

directed by Sydney Pollack and produced by Ultan Guilfoyle, about the life and work of the Canadian-American

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

Frank Gehry. The film was screened out of competition at the

2006 Cannes Film Festival The 59th Cannes Film Festival was held from 17 to 28 May 2006. Twenty films from eleven countries were in competition for the Palme d'Or. The President of the Official selection Jury was Wong Kar-wai, the first Chinese director to preside over t ...

. Pollack and Gehry had been friends and mutual admirers for years. The film features footage of various Gehry-designed buildings, including Anaheim Ice (the training rink of the

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), the

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and located in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain. The museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I of Sp ...

, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was the final film to be directed by Sydney Pollack before his death in 2008. The film includes interviews with other noted figures, including: *

Charles Arnoldi Charles Arnoldi, also known as Chuck Arnoldi and as Charles Arthur Arnoldi is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born April 10, 1946, in Dayton, Ohio. While visiting a girlfriend's grandmother in New York, he took the opportun ...

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Michael Eisner Michael Dammann Eisner (born March 7, 1942) is an American businessman and former chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of The Walt Disney Company from September 1984 to September 2005. Prior to Disney, Eisner was president of rival film st ...

* Hal Foster * Bob Geldof * Dennis Hopper *

Charles Jencks Charles Alexander Jencks (21 June 1939 – 13 October 2019) was an American cultural theorist, landscape designer, architectural historian, and co-founder of the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres. He published over thirty books and became famous i ...

Philip Johnson Philip Cortelyou Johnson (July 8, 1906 – January 25, 2005) was an American architect best known for his works of modern and postmodern architecture. Among his best-known designs are his modernist Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut; the po ...

* Thomas Krens (former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) *

Herbert Muschamp Herbert Mitchell Muschamp (November 28, 1947 – October 2, 2007) was an American architecture critic. Early years Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp described his childhood home life as follows: "The living room was a secret. A forbidden zone. ...

* Michael Ovitz * Robert Rauschenberg *

Edward Ruscha Edward Joseph Ruscha IV (, ''roo-SHAY''; born December 16, 1937) is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography and film. He is also noted for creating severa ...

Esa-Pekka Salonen Esa-Pekka Salonen (; born 30 June 1958) is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and music di ...

Julian Schnabel Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been ...

* Dr Milton Wexler (Gehry's therapist) The film also discusses work on Gehry's own residence, which was one of the first works that brought him to notoriety.

References

External links

''American Masters'' (PBS documentary series), page on ''Sketches of Frank Gehry''

''New York Times'' Cast, Crew, Director and Awards page on ''Sketches of Frank Gehry''

Architecture Week 2007 RIBA Q&A session with Frank Gehry and Sydney Pollack about 'Sketches of Frank Gehry' (video)
* Documentary films about architecture 2005 films Sony Pictures Classics films Films directed by Sydney Pollack American Masters films 2000s English-language films 2000s American films {{bio-documentary-film-stub