WEST SIDE STORIES (1972) ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Tristram Powell
Jonathan Miller, Patti Smith
A ground-level portrait of New York City, with your tour guides, British theater director Jonathan Miller and punk poet Patti Smith. Miller, who's 12 years older than Smith, first came to New York with "Beyond the Fringe" in 1961. He comes back when his work requires it, but he's an outsider who still finds the city intimidating. It's definitely not his home. Smith turned up a few years later, a scrawny kid from South Jersey, and unlike Miller, moved in. She looks like a thrift-store rag doll, at home on the streets and alive to the city's rough energy. So you've got these two creative artists with two sets of eyes and two distinct appraisals of a place where they've both done time. It's not clear from this whether Smith and Miller ever met. They appear in alternating segments, but never together. It'd be fun to see them talking over coffee somewhere, comparing notes. Call it an opportunity missed. Produced for the BBC.
Jonathan Miller
(1934-2019)
