Actually, Arne’s official name used to be Arnold, but everyone knows Hollywood is big enough for only one Arnold; Glimcher has switched to “Arne,” spelled the way it often is in Minnesota, where he was born. Besides, he says, “no one’s ever called me anything but Arne. " But how did this hugely successful dealer (Forbes estimates Pace grossed $80 million last year-and it was a bad year in the art market) get launched in Hollywood? Through his pal, mega-agent Mike Ovitz. After producing “Gorillas in the Mist” and “The Good Mother” (both 1988) Glimcher felt ready to direct. He’d optioned Hijuelos’s “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” before it came out.
“When I was a kid in Brookline (Mass.) high school, the mambo craze was sweeping the country,” explains Glimcher, 52, sitting in his gallery office, near a big Dubuffet sculpture and a 12th-century bronze Laotian rain drum. “Elvis Presley’s music never meant anything to me. Mambo was the music I loved-it spoke to me.” What also spoke to him was the fact that he and his older brother had the same big age gap as the brothers, Cesar and Nestor, in the story. And he, too, sometimes found the relationship “Suffocating.” “I adore this man,” says Glimcher, “but he still thinks he’s my father.”
He plans to continue directing but won’t quit the art business. “Film and art are close together,” he says, and ideas from the art world are stamped onto “Mambo Kings.” Take just one sequence, where rows of still shots of Cesar’s face fill the screen, like an Andy Warhol silk-screen. “I wanted a lot to happen without words in this movie,” he says. “The verbal richness of Oscar’s book had to find a visual analog.”
title: “Arne S Double Life” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-03” author: “Fern Burgess”
Actually, Arne’s official name used to be Arnold, but everyone knows Hollywood is big enough for only one Arnold; Glimcher has switched to “Arne,” spelled the way it often is in Minnesota, where he was born. Besides, he says, “no one’s ever called me anything but Arne. " But how did this hugely successful dealer (Forbes estimates Pace grossed $80 million last year-and it was a bad year in the art market) get launched in Hollywood? Through his pal, mega-agent Mike Ovitz. After producing “Gorillas in the Mist” and “The Good Mother” (both 1988) Glimcher felt ready to direct. He’d optioned Hijuelos’s “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” before it came out.
“When I was a kid in Brookline (Mass.) high school, the mambo craze was sweeping the country,” explains Glimcher, 52, sitting in his gallery office, near a big Dubuffet sculpture and a 12th-century bronze Laotian rain drum. “Elvis Presley’s music never meant anything to me. Mambo was the music I loved-it spoke to me.” What also spoke to him was the fact that he and his older brother had the same big age gap as the brothers, Cesar and Nestor, in the story. And he, too, sometimes found the relationship “Suffocating.” “I adore this man,” says Glimcher, “but he still thinks he’s my father.”
He plans to continue directing but won’t quit the art business. “Film and art are close together,” he says, and ideas from the art world are stamped onto “Mambo Kings.” Take just one sequence, where rows of still shots of Cesar’s face fill the screen, like an Andy Warhol silk-screen. “I wanted a lot to happen without words in this movie,” he says. “The verbal richness of Oscar’s book had to find a visual analog.”
