It won an Oscar in 1987. It’s finally opening in New York.

Good morning. It is Friday. We are introduced to a film that is being shown for the first time in New York. We’ll also see why a judge refused to send a defendant in a drug case to a Brooklyn jail as the man awaits sentencing in March.

Brigitte Berman has been waiting for today for more than 30 years. It is the day when her documentary about clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw is finally shown in a New York cinema.

The film ‘Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got’ won an Academy Award in March 1987. Berman then spent more than a decade arguing in courts in the US and Canada after Shaw demanded a share of the profits. – 35 percent, Berman said, adding that at one point she offered a smaller discount. Shaw rejected that, she said, and the case was settled in 2003 without a payout. Shaw died the following year, at the age of 94.

If he were alive—and if Berman had been ordered to pay him—Shaw would probably still be waiting for a check. Berman said the film only recouped $190,000 of the $250,000 it cost to make. (Our reviewer Glenn Kenny calls the film “dazzling.” Now that it’s been digitally remastered, it will Can be seen twice on Friday in the Film Forum, on West Houston Street in Manhattan; Berman will participate in question-and-answer sessions following the screenings on Sunday and Monday.)

Berman, who lives in Toronto, decided to make a documentary about Shaw because he had intrigued her during an interview for her earlier film about Bix Biederbecke, another star of the big band era. She said Shaw came across as “a very articulate, super intelligent man with an amazing history.”

As for Shaw’s life, there was a lot for a documentary filmmaker to assess. Shaw rose to fame with hits such as ‘Begin the Beguine’. He also seemed to complain about being famous: he characterized his fans as “idiots.” And he was known for getting married and divorced. He went down the aisle eight times. His wives included actresses Lana Turner (No. 3) and Ava Gardner (No. 5).

And then, in the 1950s, Shaw stopped performing publicly, even though it meant parting with a reported $60,000 a week. “For the sake of my sanity,” he said, “I had to get out of the Artie Shaw business.” For the next thirty years, he focused on activities like dairy farming — “everything,” the writer David Gates said in 2010, “except what he seemed put on earth to do.”

Berman said she filmed two and a half days of interviews for the documentary.

“At the end he said it felt like his head had been vacuumed,” she recalls.

But she said he was happy with the movie, until he wasn’t.

He liked it when it came out, she said, and was more than happy to send eager fans her way, as if she were his PR person.

“Then he wanted a scene cut, he wanted something else cut, and he wanted my story cut,” she said. Berman had narrated the script she wrote to tie the parts of the film together. “He wanted someone to do it. My voice was too erratic,” Berman recalled. “That’s what he said.”

The mood became even more testy after “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” won the Oscars. (It was one of two winners in the feature documentary category that year; the other was “Down and Out in America,” directed by Lee Grant.)

“Shortly afterwards I get the call from Artie: ‘Now that this movie has become a commodity, I want my profits,'” she recalled hearing him say. Berman had worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during the making of the film. “All the money I didn’t need for my living went straight to the movies. Instead of buying a house, I made the film.”

Shaw sued in Canada, where Berman won at trial in the Ontario Court of Justice and again when Shaw appealed, and later in federal court in Los Angeles. The lawsuits were so painful that Berman could not see her own film for years.

Weather

Expect a sunny day with temperatures reaching around 30 degrees. The evening should be partly cloudy, with temperatures dropping into the low 30s.

ALTERNATE PARKING

Effective today. Suspended on Saturday (Three Kings Day).

This is how you know that the holidays are really over

Today is the first day that Christmas trees and wreaths will be collected in the Bronx and Manhattan and on Staten Island. “Your tree may not be picked up immediately,” the Sanitation Department advised on its website, “but will be picked up eventually.” This means that the trees are collected separately from regular waste and recycling in these three districts.

For Brooklyn and Queens residents, the Sanitation Department says they should put out clean trees and wreaths on curbside composting day.

The tree shots depend on the weather. “If there is little snow, the tree service will continue,” a ministry spokesperson said on Thursday. But if heavy snow falls, tree collections will be ‘paused’.

Regardless of the municipality, the department says you should remove the lights, decorations and tinsel from your tree. You will also need to remove the metal stand from your tree, as well as the metal frame or wiring that held the branches of your wreath together. Don’t put them in plastic bags either.

There is another option. Because this is the ‘chip weekend’ for the annual meeting of the Park Department Mulching partyyou can take your tree to selected parks to be ground into mulch.

Gustavo Chavez will not spend the next few months in a place where R. Kelly, the musician convicted of sex trafficking, and Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted of conspiracy in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, are being held.

Chavez pleaded guilty in November in a drug case. This week, the judge presiding over the trial declined to send him to a troubled Brooklyn jail pending his sentencing in March.

Normally, Chavez would have faced mandatory detention in such a case, Judge Jesse Furman of the Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote in a ruling. But Judge Furman invoked a provision that gave him the power to cite “exceptional reasons” for Chavez to remain free until sentencing. He said that “the conditions in the MDC qualify as ‘exceptional reasons,’” ​​using the initials for the prison, the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Judge Furman said a shortage of correctional officers had left the prison with only about 55 percent of its full staff and created a 10-to-1 ratio of inmates to officers, which he called unsustainable.

Chavez’s attorney, Andrew Dalack of the city’s Federal Defenders office, called Judge Furman’s decision thoughtful and thorough.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons had no comment on the judge’s decision. But it said it is making “every effort to ensure the physical safety of the individuals confined in our facilities through a controlled environment that is safe and humane.” The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which is prosecuting Chavez, had no comment.

Judge Furman noted that the federal government, which operates the prison, has pushed to transfer control of the troubled prison complex on Rikers Island outside the city. “It is ironic, to say the least, that even as the executive branch fails to do what is necessary to care for its own home,” the judge wrote, she “has sought the appointment of an outside trustee to ‘ to tackle unsafe issues’. “dangerous and chaotic conditions in the New York City prison system.”

METROPOLITAN diary

B. Altmans

Dear Diary:

It was the last day of the B. Altman sale in December 1989. I left my husband in charge of our three young children, left our apartment on East 67th Street and headed to 34th Street and Madison Avenue.

On one of the store’s upper floors, almost devoid of merchandise, I found a Christian Dior women’s suit against a far back wall. It was marked down six times to $35.