Sam Bassett’s Changing of the Guard
Antakly Projects · The Essay
Changing of the Guard
The Hotel Chelsea, New York
I have started this one more times than I can count, which is usually how I know a thing matters. So let me just begin where it began.
I met Sam Bassett through a friend in the art world, and creatively we instantly clicked. The portfolio first, those incredible photographs that found the odd angle and the right light. Then the energy, which was its own kind of talent. He had been a lacrosse player in college and you could see it in the work, a physical appetite, a forward momentum, the look of someone who runs straight at the thing he wants. We shared a passion for film, and more than that, for what a great film actually is. We wanted to make great films together.
From Sam Bassett's portfolio
The premise was simple and, I thought, sound. He had the eye. I had the other half of it: production, the work of bringing people together, of recognising and weighing and honouring what each person contributes when a roomful of them is trying to build something larger than any one of them. Because that, to me, is the whole secret. I have always believed that a good director, a real one, understands that it cannot all be about him. He has to trust the parts. He has to trust people in the team and then he has to get out of their way.
For a while Sam understood this too. And then, somewhere along the line, the understanding curdled into something else. He began to call himself the captain of the ship, the one who had to steer. What he did not seem to notice was that there was no longer anyone left on board to help him bring it to shore. One by one the crew had drifted off. It had become, quietly and then completely, a one-man show. You cannot be the director, the cinematographer and the editor all at once, I used to tell him, and eventually I started saying that the films were going to end up starring him too. I was not entirely joking. There is a kind of self-regard that does not help a talent arrive at itself, that stands squarely in its way, and I watched it happen in real time to someone who had a great deal to give.
And here is the part that ruins the easy version of this story. Was Sam a gentle person, a genuinely kind one? Yes. Without question. The proof was all around him at the Chelsea Hotel, where some of the oldest and most fragile residents leaned on him, and he did not let them down. He helped the artist Bettina Grossman dig out an apartment she had buried under thirty years of her own unseen work, built shelves for it, coaxed her out of a reclusion that had very nearly become a tomb. He looked after Stormé DeLarverie, the performer and Stonewall-era figure, well into her nineties. Whatever I came to believe about him as a collaborator, the man who did those things was real, and I would not want this account to erase him.
It was around then that Sam moved into the Chelsea, into the rooftop apartment beneath the spire, the penthouse once occupied by Sarah Bernhardt. The Chelsea Hotel needs no introduction. What I will say is that the timing could not have been better, because the hotel was in the middle of its own upheaval, and that upheaval was the film. Stanley Bard, the manager who had sheltered the building's artists for half a century, had just been forced out by the shareholders, descendants of the original owners who made no secret of wanting to turn the place into a boutique hotel for tourists. Eviction papers were going out. The coral reef, as Sam liked to call that ecosystem of creative characters, was being taken apart in front of us. We did not agree on much by the end, but we agreed on this: the title. Changing of the Guard. Other people would get around to telling that story years later. We were standing in the middle of it.
The terrace was never empty. Historians, writers, the Chelsea's own neighbours, people from the art world drifting in and out at every hour of the day and night. I loved every minute of it, and I will not pretend otherwise.
We had a whole list of films we wanted to make. One was about my uncle, a misfit who had built a life out of refusing the one society offered him, a story about addiction and the cost of living against the grain. The image Sam fixed on, the one he swore was the entire movie, was my uncle out on the open road in his boxer shorts, setting off fireworks in the middle of Death Valley. He wanted to call it Colombia. That was Sam exactly: the instinct for the single indelible frame, the genius for the image, and, sometimes, the trouble of mistaking the image for the film.
The clearest verdict did not come from me. I brought in the man who bought documentary films for HBO, sat him on the terrace, and showed him a cut. His response has stayed with me almost word for word. This is modern art, he said, but it is not a story and it is not a film. It is abstract. It is psychedelic. There is potential here, real potential, but it cannot be a one-man show. From the outside, with none of my history in the room, he was saying exactly what I had been trying to say from the inside for a very long time.
That is a particular kind of heartbreak, knowing something holds so much and watching it fail to become what it could be, knowing too that nothing you say is going to move the other person an inch. It took a toll on me. I loved working beside someone that creative, and I would do parts of it again tomorrow. But there comes a point where you have to accept that you cannot argue a person into seeing the obvious, and that the kindest thing you can do, for them and for yourself, is to set it down. Once I understood that the work was not going anywhere, I turned the page, not only on the film but on New York, and went in another direction entirely.
I did not really keep in touch after that. I gather that once the films were behind him Sam gave himself over to the tape sculptures, those impermanent lines he used to run through stairwells and across the city, and that since then he has been hard to find.
So what is this a story about. The Chelsea Hotel, and the end of its long bohemian afternoon. A specific, gifted, exasperating, generous man. Or something larger, the oldest trap there is for anyone who makes things: the myth of the solitary genius, the seduction of being the only hand on the wheel, the slow confusion of vision with ego. Looking back, I don't think the real story was ever the Chelsea Hotel. I think it was about what happens when creative people stop trusting other creative people.
I think often about Bettina, buried alive beneath the brilliance she could not bring herself to share, and about Sam, captain of a ship with no crew, and about how close those two fates really are. One was the recluse who let no one in. The other could not stop being the only one in the room. I am no longer sure the distance between them is as wide as it looks.
I still think about those years. I still think about the roof of the Chelsea. I still think about the film that could have been and not because it failed. Because it taught me something. Talent is common and vision is rare.
But trust may be the rarest thing of all.
About Antakly Projects
Antakly Projects has been in conversation with artists and creatives from around the world since 2003.
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