Hot Docs Roundup: Waiting for Hockney

From the Waiting for Hockney website:

"Billy Pappas is a true American original. An art school graduate from a working class background living in rural Maryland, Billy has decided that his mission in life is to reinvent realism. He spends eight years on a single drawing of Marilyn Monroe working to show a microscopic level of detail he hopes will reveal something deeper than photography. Literally, he hopes to create a new art form. Aided, one might even say enabled, by an eccentric cast of characters including a clergyman, a professor and an architect calling himself “Dr. Lifestyle,” Billy finally completes the portrait and then begins a quest to show it to renowned contemporary artist David Hockney, the one person he thinks can validate everything for which Billy has been striving."

Director Julie Checkoway introduced her film with a caution that it isn't just about art. She's right. Discussion of art features prominently (the limitations of photography are considered, just as the limitation of film in reproducing the densely layered drawing was raised in the post-screening Q&A). But the film's also about obsession, self-belief, family and reinvention. Billy Pappas is a classic underdog who dreams of the one big break that will change his life. On that level he's easy to identify with; not so on the level of his intensely focused 8-year drawing odyssey. That's what makes the story work. It seems an unbelievable amount of time to spend on a sole pursuit and an audience wants to know why and how he did it and whether he will succeed as an artist. The film is careful to give the unveiling of Marilyn and the Hockney quest a necessary buildup. Revealing too early whether or not Pappas' portrait has a game-changing effect would defeat a large part of the film's purpose: exploring how artistic/life success is determined. Is it measured by profit, new commissions, family pride, the approval of an admired hero or a sense of personal achievement? Waiting for Hockney throws all those balls up into the air for the audience to catch or drop as they see fit.

Read an interview with Billy Pappas here.