S.H. Cinema Screens Indie Classic ‘Metropolitan’ w/ Writer-Director Whit Stillman, 1.2.25

SAG HARBOR CINEMA SCREENS

INDIE CLASSIC METROPOLITAN

WITH WRITER-DIRECTOR WHIT STILLMAN

AND EDITOR CHRISTOPHER TELLEFSEN IN PERSON

Thursday, January 2, 2025 at 6pm

The writer-director of the “Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love.” trilogy Whit Stillman will join the Cinema for a screening and Q&A of his 1990 debut feature (and cult classic) Metropolitan alongside editor Christopher Tellefsen

Sag Harbor Cinema will host writer-director Whit Stillman for a screening of his debut feature Metropolitan (1990) followed by an in-person Q&A on Thursday, January 2nd at 6pm. The filmmaker will be joined by Metropolitan editor and Sag Harbor resident Christopher Tellefsen (Moneyball, A Quiet Place, The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Menu).

Stillman, known for his “Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love.” trilogy (Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, Barcelona), remains one of the quintessential 90s independent filmmakers. Most recently, the filmmaker wrote and directed Damsels in Distress (2011, starring a young Greta Gerwig) and Love & Friendship (2016, starring Kate Beckinsale and Chloë Sevigny, adapted from Jane Austen’s Lady Susan) as well as the TV series The Cosmopolitans (2014) for Amazon Studios.

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“It is a tribute to Whit Stillman’s observant eye, his flawless directing style and the humanity he finds in his characters that all his films seem to carry within a very special evergreen quality. Metropolitan is as fresh and surprising as it was thirty plus years ago. And a perfect film for the holidays,” says Sag Harbor Cinema’s Artistic Director Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan.

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Metropolitan chronicles a young man’s adventures with affluent Park Avenue teenagers over one Christmas vacation. Stillman’s witty, semi-autobiographical screenplay received an Academy Award nomination and an Independent Spirit Award win for its highly observant–and exceedingly hilarious–commentary on Manhattan debutante society (in Metropolitan, “The Sally Fowler Rat Pack”).

Stillman’s Metropolitan characters–a collection of melancholic bourgeois teenagers who are highly-privileged, acutely anxious, and overly-educated (which makes for rich dialogue full of literary references and incredibly clever prattling)–inspired decades of irreverent stories about the East Coast Elite.

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”I had a group that was friendly and funny, charming and silly, and likable, too, so I based the film a bit on this group,” Stillman told BOMB Magazine in 2015. “The characteristics they had in 1969 they still have when I meet them today. Judgmental Jane is still judgmental—and not talking to me.”

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Tickets are available at the box office or sagharborcinema.org

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METROPOLITAN

Directed by Whit Stillman

USA, 1990; 98 mins, in English

Rated PG-13

One of the great American independent films of the 1990s, the surprise hit Metropolitan, by writer-director Whit Stillman, is a sparkling comedic chronicle of a young man’s romantic misadventures while trying to fit into New York City’s debutante society. Stillman’s deft, literate dialogue and hilariously highbrow observations earned this first film an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. Beneath the wit and sophistication, though, lies a tender tale of adolescent anxiety.

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THE GUESTS

Whit Stillman has directed five films, Metropolitan, Barcelona, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and Love & Friendship. Stillman has also written two novels, The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterwards and Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon Is Entirely Vindicated. He has written for the Village Voice, Harper’s, The Guardian, El Pais, Vogue, and other publications.

Stillman was born in Washington, D.C., where his father was administrative aide to Democratic Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and grew up in the town of Cornwall, New York, where his father was a lawyer and Democratic County Chairman. After graduating from Harvard he entered the publishing training program at Doubleday, working there from 1974 to 1978.

During the first half of Disco’s last days he worked as the managing editor of ACCESS, a nightly news summary, putting it to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. every night, occasionally meeting friends to go on to clubs.

“One Harvard friend, then an executive at a tugboat company and now a Kansas City novelist, was in the retinue of Prince Egon von Furstenberg and helped me get in,” Stillman said. “I remember thinking, ‘this is fantastic, I’ve got to come here every night,’ but I didn’t.”

After ACCESS folded, Stillman became an unemployed job-seeker, continuing to write short fiction and beginning to get involved in the Spanish film industry, first as a foreign sales agent, then in production and as an actor (for the “ridiculous American” parts). While writing Metropolitan he also ran a cartoonist agency representing such artists as J.J. Sempe, Pierre Le-Tan and William Bramhall.

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CHRISTOPHER TELLEFSEN

Academy Award®-nominated editor Christopher Tellefsen, A.C.E., has a diverse body of work that includes hits like “A Quiet Place”, “Moneyball”, “Assassin’s Creed”, “Capote”, “M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village”, “Analyze This”, “Man on the Moon”, and “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” He has also edited legendary independent films like “Kids”, “Gummo”, and “Metropolitan.” Tellefsen has worked with directors David O. Russell, Bennett Miller, M. Night Shyamalan, Casey Affleck, John Krasinski, Whit Stillman, Harmony Korine, Miloš Forman, Larry Clark, Wayne Wang, Andrea Berloff, Doug Liman, Bart Freundlich, Robert Benton, Harold Ramis, and many others.

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As a not-for-profit 501(c)3, community-based organization, Sag Harbor Cinema is dedicated to presenting the past, present and future of the Movies and to preserving and educating about films, filmmaking, and the film-going experience in its three state-of-the-art theaters. The Cinema engages its audiences and the community year-round through dialogue, discovery, and appreciation of the moving image – from blockbusters to student shorts and everything in between. Revitalized and reimagined through unprecedented community efforts to rebuild the iconic Main Street structure after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2016, SHC continues a long historic tradition of entertainment in the heart of Sag Harbor Village.

90 Main Street, PO Box 152
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
631 725 0010
info@sagharborcinema.org

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