Category: art

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art Rant

psychopath or artist?

Writing this film has been so cathartic.  Not least because I get to exorcise a life time of demons.  I also act out crimes of atrocious ferocity without ever once having to lift a gun or a knife.

What keeps me from murdering those who give me pains?

Well, for a start, I am not (much to your irritation) a psychopath.  A sociopath maybe…but even that is doubtful.

After all these years of not committing vicious crimes against humanity.

I’m not about to start now.

What stops me from commiting the vilest crimes?   The very worst of my vengeful nature?

Well, my dears, I am an artist.

When I made Clancy’s Kitchen (essentially a film about my wanting to kill and dismember a homophobe) when the prosthesis arrived…boxes of beautifully made hands, feet and other body parts…I thought to myself…good god…you really are one sick mother fucker.

Looking at the descriptions for both psychopath and sociopath…they are strikingly similar.  But what is more striking is that they describe perfectly…most Americans.

In particular those who work on Wall Street.

A blatant disregard for the well-being of others.  

Here are some other Wall Street traits…these could apply to most Hollywood talent managers…in fact…any American ‘agent’…talent, literary, real estate…

These sociopathic character defects are perceived as virtue and coping mechanisms on Wall Street or in Hollywood.

Here are some of my favorites:

  • Glibness and Superficial Charm
  • Manipulative and Conning
    They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.
  • Grandiose Sense of Self
    Feels entitled to certain things as “their right.”
  • Pathological Lying
    Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.
  • Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
    A deep-seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.
  • Need for Stimulation
    Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.
  • Callousness/Lack of Empathy
    Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others’ feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.
  • Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
    Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.
  • Irresponsibility/Unreliability
    Not concerned about wrecking others’ lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.
  • Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity
    Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.
  • Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle
    Tends to move around a lot or makes all-encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.
  • Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility
    Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.
With Wall Street running things here…Goldman Sachs et al…and trying to run things everywhere else…the disregard and arrogance they have for those of us who have very little may be their undoing.
The 99%ers are storming the Palace of Versailles!  As I predicted here in this blog many months ago:
Here come the poor!  Here come the disenfranchised.  Like Zombies.
Here comes the change we can believe in.
They ain’t going anywhere.  Get used to it.
The rich in Britain were very canny, they gave away a little to keep a lot.   The establishment flourishes.  The Royal Family keeps its many palaces.
As crowns fell all over Europe, the British picked up fabulous jewels at bargain prices, abandoning their cousins to the guillotine, the Bolsheviks and worst of all…Scandinavian mediocrity.
Americans are too greedy to give a little to keep a lot.  They want it all.  The winner takes it all.
Just remember this Jamie Dimon/Lloyd Blankfein/Rupert Murdoch:  The French Revolution.
The French Royal Family had become so complacent, so arrogant…so rich…when they heard that the angry/hungry people were coming armed with pitchforks…they couldn’t close the gates to the magnificent Palace…the iron gates had rusted open.
The peasants just walked in…
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art

Guvenor’s Island 2011

The last day…

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art Health

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980

I have spent the past day or so in bed.  The dog is less sick, eating again.  We have to get his drain removed.  He is wearing the Elizabethan collar but hates it.

My left leg is getting better…my right ankle isn’t.  Robby stayed over last night.  Today he watered the garden, filled the hot tub, went to the supermarket and ran around the house as I finally caught up on all the various tasks that could be accomplished from my bed.

Jen and Jason were incredibly helpful.  Anna brought supper.

Surrounded, as usual, with love.  Occasionally it is hard to recognize just how lucky I am.

Robby and I have a wonderful relationship.  We talk and play and the more I know him…the more I trust him.  In fact, I might trust him more than any person I know right now.  He has been a perfect antidote to JB. I feel hopeful again because he brings me love.

Crippled and confined to the couch he was pottering about the house making everything look good.

We were talking about how private one needs to be in life.

He is a tentative soul.

He wondered why I write every personal detail here in this blog.  Make public what most people keep private.  Something that delighted Jake until (of course) he was part of it, part of the narrative…then it wasn’t quite so alluring.

Learn this lesson:  If you don’t like your private life being scrutinised…avoid public figures…you will lose your anonymity.

The reality guy who killed himself this week?  He had no idea just how pernicious reality TV really is.

We mused about what remains private and what should be public.  I am quite clear why I write everything here.

If, like me, you have lived an audacious, notorious life then for every eager friend there is a fool desperate to pull you down.

It is best to live without secrets.  Many years ago I was taught that we are as sick as our secrets.  What does that mean?   If you are cheating on your wife you will be defined by your deception.  If you are lying to your friends you will be hindered by self-doubt.

If I have made mistakes, told a lie, cheated a friend or been generally disreputable then I write it here.  My part in what ever unfolding drama is worth noting. We tend to focus on who to blame and rarely acknowledge our responsibility.

Keeping my side of the street clean.

That is why I have struggled so badly with you-know-who.   It has been incredibly difficult to own my part.  I don’t want to admit my short comings.

I make him responsible.  I blame him.  I say:  He lied to me.  He cheated.  He duped me.  He did drugs in front of me.  All of this is true…of course, but has to be balanced with:   I am responsible.  I lied to him.  I chose somebody inappropriate.  I allowed myself to be duped.  I had no boundaries.

When I point at him three fingers point back at me.

What is the answer?

I aim to be ashamed of nothing.  This leads, inevitably, to peace of mind.

You, dear reader, know everything!  There’s nothing I’ve not written about.  You know every insane thought, every defect, every leak and misery.

You know everything…so I fear nothing.  Not one of you has anything on me.

When you live a lie you are vulnerable.  I don’t want to be vulnerable.

Back to NYC next month to see JB in court but it’s fashion week and I’ve been invited to a slew of fashion week events.  Robby will be in town so we can do some fun shit.  I love that boy.  Jenny will be there too and wants to come to court with me.  Before we vanish to The Hamptons.

There is a great deal to do these coming autumn/winter months.

LA will be hosting Pacific Standard Time the culmination of a long-term Getty Research Institute initiative that focuses on postwar art in Los Angeles.

Through archival acquisitions, oral history interviews, public programming, exhibitions, and publications, the Research Institute is responding to the need to document the historical record of this vibrant period.

Between October 2011 and February 2012, a major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum will present a survey of postwar painting and sculpture in Los Angeles.

It will be a great deal of fun.

In tandem with PST,  Art Platform—Los Angeles, the west coast cousin of The Armoury,  is collaborating with Pacific Standard Time to organize an extraordinary series of events and services to highlight this historic period and unprecedented weekend of art in Los Angeles.  Rather wonderfully I am part of their VIP Programme.

Tonight Eric is bringing supper.  The little dog will get better.  I am willing him to.  Help me think him right.

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art

Goodbye Twins

The twins moved out yesterday and I now know for certain exactly how Dan feels when I leave NYC.   I felt a mixture of sadness and relief.

I needed my home back.  I need to be on my own now.

I need not to wait up at night wondering if they were ever coming home.

They have gone to live and work with friends of mine in the valley.

The bedrooms have been returned to their neat selves.  The fridge has been emptied of Enchiladas and grated cheese, peanut butter and jelly.  The bathroom shelves: no more contact lens solution, acne medication.  The pile of sneakers by the door, all gone.

They hugged me as they left but I have no use for unsolicited affection.  I don’t want any flesh next to mine unless I pay for it.

I don’t want you to stay here.  That was a joke.  Of course you can.  Come on, come stay.  Then I will wait for you to leave.  I can’t wait.  Just don’t stay too long.  Don’t over stay your welcome.  

Less interest in hosting these days.  Especially here, here on the mountain.   Just leave me alone.  Let me wake up at dawn, in my own time.  Let me wander naked, grind coffee, watch bad morning ‘news’ without prying eyes.

I listen to BBC Radio 4 on-line.  The Archers, Front Row and Question Time.  I miss British news.

Somebody blew up Oslo.

Both Willy and The Little Dog are learning to love each other.  They play in the evenings as I settle in to watch Rachel Maddow or bad but addictive HGTV.

I am less likely to write my novel.  I want it to be finished NOW.

My head is in Paris.

My head is with Bella and Esther Freud whose father died yesterday.  I never met Lucian Freud.  I don’t know Esther very well but I spent a great deal of time with Bella and her family.

Bella once told me how she felt about her father painting her naked.  I’ll write about that one day.  Now is not the time.

Did you ever see Freud’s portrait of Andrew Parker-Bowles?

If his Leigh Bowery portraits shows compassion for a fellow human being, his portrait of Andrew Parker-Bowles is perhaps his most insolent, scathing, and melancholy study.

Sprawled in his guards uniform, Parker-Bowles – the former husband of Camilla Duchess of Cornwall – evokes, with his red striped trousers, glamorous 19th-century images of officers and imperial heroes.

Yet, he looks exhausted, saddened, wiped out.

Look at the way Freud paints diamonds and pearls.

Diamonds
Categories
art Rant

Hell is: Other People

Forgive me for rambling….

Rather lovely day yesterday.

Had lunch with Daniel Darling and his adorable girlfriend (?) in Cross Creek.

We were joined by Toby Mott and his friend Elizabeth.  Daniel went surfing and we drove to Malibou Lake where we sailed and then had a wonderful dinner at The Old Place on Mulholland.

Excellent food and service.  Charming!

A bird just hopped into the house and is now flying around.  We have just been for a five-mile walk so the dogs are strangely disinterested.

Willie is here visiting and we are all getting on like a house on fire.

I am going back to NYC next week.  I have people to see.  I think my Navy Seal may visit soon.

It has been fun having Toby visiting.  I sort of fall in love with my house all over again when he is here.  I am proud of the mountains, the house and the garden.

I see that my nemesis Amanda Eliasch and her truly talented friend Lyall Watson (whoring himself out to artifice) have written and performed in a ‘play’ called As I Like It.

Apparently it is rather ‘whiney’.  Apparently Amanda’s son Charles serves the actress who plays his mother as a weird, incestuous acolyte.  He has a huge head.  Apparently there is an opera singer with real talent who barely gets to sing.  Apparently the writer refers to ‘hairy legged lesbians’.  As we know, at her core, she is a homophobe.

Apparently this ‘play’ is crap.

It really isn’t any wonder, Amanda can scarcely string a sentence together.   It’s worth quoting the theatre programme notes:

This is a play what I wrote for my Father several years ago which he asked me to do after he had died. I turned it into a play with the help of Lyall Watson who had taught me at RADA in 1989. There are only a few plays for women and I wanted to contribute and increase the material available. It is a modern restoration comedy.

Yes.  You are going to do wonders for women with this pile of  tripe.  Wonders.

I once played Mr Puff at The Edinburgh Festival in Sheridan’s The Critic.   Have you seen that play?  A comedy of manners.  A real one.

Like Mrs Eliasch Mr Puff, the author of a terrible play, invites critics Sneer and Dangle to a dress rehearsal.

Puff explains to Sneer that he is ‘‘a Professor of the Art of Puffing’’: an author who has taught newspaper men and advertisers how to inflate their diction so they may ‘‘enlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor’’ and ‘‘crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives.’’

Break a leg Amanda.  Read the review here.

By the way.  I was a terrible actor.  Terrible.

OK.  Next!!

What’s going on?  What’s really going on in the UK?

This ousting of the Murdoch family is well over due, applauded by the regime, the chattering classes, the aristocracy.

The public are baying for blood, hollering at the beastly Murdochs, “Get back on the boat like your criminal Australian ancestors.  Good riddance to bad rubbish.  Take your newspaper with you”

Hold on.

The British relish tittle-tattle.  We love it!  We love gossip!  The steamier the better.  Surely we didn’t lose our appetite for rooting through other people’s dirty washing?

Now The New of The World has gone…and the other news media get more cautious…

What, in heaven’s name, will replace it?

Are we witnessing the changing of the guard?  Has the internet (Google, Facebook etc.) and on-line news outlets like the Huffington Post trumped traditional media?

Apparently people don’t read The Huffington Post for the news..they read it for the gossip.

Was Murdoch simply too old, too complacent, too rich to have a grasp on our changing world?

Is this coup de grace being played out in the British press a pantomime we will see in the not too distant future in the USA?

One of the most telling quotes of the entire debacle:

The BBC’s business editor Robert Peston points out, the News of The World phone hacking scandal has hurt the entire UK newspaper industry, making News International less attractive to potential buyers if, as is now being posited, the British arm of News Corp is amputated and sold.

Does real, forward thinking money sees a future for print media?

Controlling the British has always been a huge problem for any invader and Murdoch will end up like all the rest.  Chucked out on his ear.  Romans, Saxons (initially invited), Norsemen, Murdoch.

The British public don’t a give a fuck about Jude Law having his phone hacked, that was just par for the course.  He deserved it.  They only started giving a damn when they realised that the police (who they loathe) were benefiting financially.

They only started caring when ordinary people just like them were proved to be abused, their ordinary stories sold, their phone messages ransacked.

Until Milly Dowler they didn’t give a flying fuck.  Then, rather amazingly, for an usually inert general public…they did.  And when the public speaks (remember Diana’s death) the establishment listens.

Remember the Queen of England reading/performing that excruciating statement televised by the palace at the behest of Tony Blair before Diana’s funeral?

The British let their leaders get away with much until they take too much.  A prudent leader will know when to stop.  Murdoch, his son and cohorts became too..how shall I say this without provoking your ire…they became too American.

It is obvious that American politicians are bought and sold by The Corporation.   They live huge lives with fantastic wealth and are applauded for doing so.

What baffles me is why a regular British MP with nothing much to gain should ideologically side with those who seek to do us, their constituents, harm?

During this entire scandal as heads began to roll I wondered again and again how British politicians benefitted financially from New Corp.  Unlike the paid for politician here in the USA it is unlikely that anyone in Parliament could benefit financially from anything…ever.

There are simply too many prying eyes.  Unless I am being absurdly naive.  Am I?

Is it simply the acquisition of power that our MP’s crave?

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art Auto Biography

Billy Idol

Billy Idol and Vivien Goldman

I woke up at the Piettes.

I made Max some breakfast.   Sausage and egg.

After some confusion, half of us (we left Lily and Hannah at home) set off for the Eat Well festival in Culver City.

We ate well then headed to Toby Mott‘s Punk Art show at Honor Fraser‘s gallery.  Like the Haunch of Venison show in London, Honor organized a panel as a pre opening treat.

The punk panel included Billy Idol, Simon Reynolds (author) Vivien Goldman (NYU punk Professor), Garder Eide Einarsson (artist) and Toby Mott (old friend and curator).

The event made one feel very nostalgic.  I kept on thinking, gosh…I was there.  I was alive, going to gigs, Michael Temple dragging me up to Liverpool to Eric’s where I saw everybody perform.

Elvis Costello, The Clash, Joy Division, The Ramones, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Stranglers, Ultravox, X-Ray Spex.

Thank you Michael Temple for dragging me away from Ellesmere and my comfortable inertia.

I had a lovely time.  I like galleries.  I like Toby.  I like Honor.  I like the past.

I set up the video for them and wandered around with my phone shooting supplementary material.

Duncan and Anna

Al Pacino and Jeffrey Deitch in attendance.  Artists fawning over the latter.

“He’s the most powerful man in art.”  Toby said.  I was shocked.  Really?

Vivien Goldman and Honor Fraser
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art

Toby Mott at Honor Fraser Gallery

I am at The Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega.

My old friend Toby Mott is hanging his show Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper.

While the Sex Pistols and the Clash wreaked havoc on Britain’s pop scene, their disciples were busy with glue and scissors, channelling punk’s energy and DIY spirit into hundreds of posters, fanzines and sleeve art.

Toby’s exhibition brings back these lost classics of the revolution.

Later on in the day Punk Archivist Bryan Ray Turcotte joined Toby at the gallery.  Bryan wrote the best-selling Fucked Up and Photo Copied.

Backdrop courtesy of Bridget Riley.

Honor Fraser Gallery, 2622 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90034

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art Gay

Sol Lewitt

It is 6am. Monday morning. The day after NYC Gay Pride. I am sipping strong black coffee like a man who has a hangover and a job. I have neither.

There is a great deal to do today. Mostly unpleasant. The Transformers 3 party tonight. The twins are winging their way to New York. Robby called me late last night. I was too tired to talk. I wonder if he changed his mind?

Let’s talk about yesterday.

I can’t remember what I did before 12. It is lost.

At around one o’clock I wandered down tenth street to see the parade. I thought I might meet Tom and pals but they had other plans. I had a great day on my own and not on my own.

I made a few out reach calls.

Let’s face it…that’s what I like best. I like being on my own or with strangers who don’t know me.

I carried the little dog in my arms through the drunken crowd. I saw Dan Savage on the first float. His very own apotheosis. I watched Andew Cuomo, recently beautified by the gays for the bone that he threw down at us…like a fake holy relic. The body guards around him formed a tight cordon. It was funny that he should be so frightened. Needing that many body guards. We need him to guard us. Protect us. His appearance in the parade was unashamedly about his re-election.

Those about me thought that what he had done for them was wonderful.

“It’s a start!” They explained to me as if I were retarded. I have given up trying to explain my position. I just look at these men and smile weakly.

I remembered being in the Sydney Mardi Gras. How many years ago? 1990. I was covering it for the BBC. I made a BBC Radio 4 documentary. I was entranced. I should fetch out my old diaries. I should try and find that material. I don’t have any record of anything I made for the BBC.

Mardi Gras. Being in the parade. From the street looking up at the millions of faces staring down at us from every window on Oxford Street. I remember taking ecstasy and wandering into the rancid, hot bathroom and watching men fuck each other. I stayed in Sullivans on Oxford Street just like I always do when I return to Sydney. Where I will be this winter.

The parade and the party afterwards. I accepted the decadence. It was as if in that sinking ship…we had no option.

I did not question our behaviour then because it was my behaviour.

If young documentarian Duncan chanced upon yesterdays parade. Given that ship is no longer sinking? What would he learn about being gay in 2011?

Well, if I was as fucked up as I was then I might have come to the same conclusions. I was just chasing a drink, a line and some tail. Loving the attention that a young gay man gets.

The attention has waned.

I thought about Paul Keeting the Prime Minister of Australia being so publicly inclusive. Letting us know that his government included/represented us too. It was the first time in my life I had ever heard a world leader positively acknowledge my existence.

Keeting reminded fellow Australians that the LGBT community paid taxes, were less likely to cause trouble or end up in prison…he then signed an anti vilification bill into law which really felt like it was real. It was. It made people think about what they said to us and how they treated us.

Yesterday, every elected politician in the state made an appearance in the parade. The police were cheered heartily as they are every year in every GLBT parade and I wondered why? Even as I was wondering why I felt the same wave of emotion that everyone else seems to feel.

I bumped into Jeremiah Newton.

He took me briefly to a tranny party in an apartment overlooking the parade. I thought of Diane Arbus.  The apartment was very dark and decorated crudely with red plastic. The ceilings covered in rainbow flags made of cheap gauze. It was too depressing. There was some sort of tranny chaser sitting on his own in the kitchen under the flourescent light. He directed me to the chicken pasties. I ate some jelly beans.

I left.

I bumped into a beautiful couple I had met on-line in Los Angeles. We ate a very late lunch at Westville (not east) and fed the Little Dog a huge chicken breast. The food seemed better (cleaner and fresher) at their West Village location.

We separated at around seven. I will see them again.

That night I thought I might watch the fireworks or go to a club. If I had been drinking or taking drugs I might have. But not drinking and not taking drugs somehow lessens the experience of being gay.

Of course I thought about Jake in that melee. What a perfect gay man he most probably is now. Drugging, drinking, fucking. Selfish, self obsessed. And I wondered if I was jealous that he could do those things and I could not. I wondered if I was missing out on being gay? I wondered if I could still be dignified and take a drink.

I thought about taking a drink a great deal at Gay Pride 2011.

Dan came home and we rearranged art on the freshly painted walls. He showed me a picture he had hidden in his office that he thought might be Sol Lewitt. He doubted it. I knew the moment I saw it that it was real but we shucked the frame and there was the neat signature.

Consequently it is off to be reframed in something more befitting.

That’s how important art work gets lost. People forgetting, not knowing. Not believing.

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20110627-053020.jpg

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art

None of My Business

It’s none of my business what you think about me. Remember that. Duncan Roy…asshole.

Busy past few days. Mostly interested by the end of my novel. Eluded me until last night. Then, just as we are serving dinner (Michael B), it hit me like a rock in the head. The dignified end that had been requested of me.

I have had to really listen these past few days. Listen to somebody I have never met yet whose opinions I trust. Somebody who although several thousand miles away, is as engaged as I am with my book. It is all at once disconcerting and exhilarating.

He asked if I was wedded to the idea that this be a ‘gay’ novel. Don’t! That’s what I thought. Please don’t do this to me. Then, without a moments thought I said that I wasn’t wedded to the idea but didn’t know if I could write it any other way. He suggested that I re read a certain novel with similar themes. That I might be inspired. Well, I did and I was. He was right.

As a result of his suggestion..everything has to be re-jigged but it is smoother, less…his words…’self conscious’. That seems to be what he levels at me most often…that my writing is ‘self conscious’. Then I think to myself, you are out there helping me write a better novel. Do you want to write? No, he says. That’s not my job. I don’t have those aspirations. Like a therapist he is loathed to talk about anything else other than my work and me. He is a closed book.

He helped me with the POV (Point of View) which I had thought about a million times when making a film but never when writing prose.

So, there’s a beginning, middle and an end. That’s that.

What else? Well, I have been in the garden for hours. It looks amazing. I am either at my desk editing or I am in the garden planting and pruning. My nails are constantly black with mud. There is a trail of dirt through the house where I can’t be bothered to take off my shoes but get very grumpy if anyone else forgets to.

I went to a dinner with Tom and wished he didn’t want to sleep with 19 year old boys but wanted to sleep with me. I had sex with the deaf boy whose deafness kinda turns me on. We fucked. I wish I knew him better.

The Dane arrives this evening and we set off on our adventure. What is it with me and adventures?

Have been to therapy every day. I feel great. I feel complete. I know, God damn it, that this will pass but being active in the body and the mind seems to placate my yearning heart. However, I am acutely aware that when I feel good like this I start hankering for more. Where’s mine?

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art

Howard Kastel

http://youtu.be/53lmJi9GWdQ

One of my favorite directors Leonard Kastle, originally an opera composer who unexpectedly found a niche in film history as the writer and director of the low-budget 1969 crime-thriller film “The Honeymoon Killers,” died on Wednesday.  He was 82.

When I made my worst ever film, The Method with Elizabeth Hurley I stole, almost shot by shot, one of Kastel’s brilliant murder scenes.  See attached video.

Sadly, not even appropriating Kastel’s genius would save that terrible film.

One of the most shocking lines from any film ever written?  When angry with her jewish boss Martha Beck says, “I’m not so sure Hitler wasn’t right about you people.”

In the 1950s and ’60s Mr. Kastle enjoyed a modest reputation as a composer of melodic, romantic operas and as a musical director of works for the stage.

Fame arrived by an unexpected route. Warren Steibel, the producer of “Firing Line” with William F. Buckley Jr. and of Mr. Kastle’s television operas, was given $150,000 by a rich friend to make a film. He hit on the idea of making a grim, documentary-style work based on the story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, who were known as the Lonely Hearts Killers.

Fernandez was a balding lothario, Beck his obese lover. Together they sought out victims by reading newspaper personal ads, and when Fernandez had won the trust of those they contacted, they robbed them. The couple murdered two of their victims and the 2-year-old daughter of one as well. Fernandez and Beck were electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1951.

At the request of Mr. Steibel, who died in 2002, Mr. Kastle sifted through the trial records at the Bronx County Courthouse. Then, after studying scripts by Fellini, Pasolini and Truffaut, he wrote a screenplay.

Both men envisioned the film as a cinematic rebuttal to “Bonnie and Clyde.” “I was revolted by that movie,” Mr. Kastle said in an interview for the 2003 Criterion Collection reissue of his film on DVD. “I didn’t want to show beautiful shots of beautiful people.”

For his director, Mr. Steibel hired Martin Scorsese, whose first film, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?,” he had seen recently. But as filming began near the summer home that Mr. Steibel and Mr. Kastle shared in New Lebanon, N.Y., trouble loomed.

It quickly became apparent that Mr. Scorsese’s deliberate, painstaking approach would break the budget and play havoc with the shooting. Mr. Kastle said that after Mr. Scorsese and Oliver Wood, the cinematographer, spent an entire afternoon filming a beer can in a bush, it was clear they would need another director.

When Mr. Scorsese’s replacement, an industrial filmmaker named Donald Volkman, also proved unsatisfactory, Mr. Kastle stepped into the breach. Against the odds, he turned out a quirky masterpiece.

“The Honeymoon Killers,” with Tony Lo Bianco and Shirley Stoler in the lead roles, stunned moviegoers and critics. Brutal, unblinking and ruthlessly honest, with a powerful undercurrent of black comedy, it quickly earned an exalted place in American cinema.

Variety, in an early review, hailed the film as “well-scripted, harrowing, brilliantly acted” and “deserving of a class build-up.” Roger Greenspun, in The New York Times, called Mr. Kastle “the real star of the movie” and placed him “among the important deliberate artists of his medium.” François Truffaut, on more than one occasion, included it among his favorite contemporary American films.

The film performed tepidly at the box office in the United States, despite strong reviews, but found a receptive audience in Europe. It reaped a new harvest of acclaim as it made the festival and art-house circuits when it was re-released in 1992.

“Even 20-plus years after its original release, this picture’s implacability and refusal to compromise are as startlingly pure as ever,” Kenneth Turan wrote in The Los Angeles Times.

In 2006 Jared Leto and Salma Hayek starred in a remake of the film, “Lonely Hearts,” with John Travolta as the detective who pursues the murderers.

It was Mr. Kastle’s first and last movie.

Mr. Kastle was often asked why he never made another film. It was not for lack of trying, he said.

“I have six or seven screenplays, and maybe something will happen,” he told the interviewer for the Criterion DVD. “But one thing I can always say — and not every director can say this — I never made a bad film after ‘Honeymoon Killers.’ ”

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