Beach-Blanket Verite

By James Poniewozik Sunday, May 26, 2002
    • If you wanted to make a TV show about the Hamptons, the seaside Long Island, N.Y., enclave that hosts Manhattan's rich and sybaritic every summer, you might call Dynasty's Aaron Spelling, Sex and the City's Darren Star or whoever produces Wild On for the E! network. You probably wouldn't call Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple, known for her socially conscious films about coal miners and meat-packers, unless the show involved unionizing the caterers and polo-horse grooms.

    But when Kopple, 55, was approached to memorialize the Hamptons summer of 2001 for ABC, she was so enthusiastic that she trooped out to the shore in the dead of winter to shoot a sample reel of interviews. "I went in with no agenda," says Kopple, whose credits include films about Mike Tyson and Woody Allen. "It wouldn't make for an interesting piece."


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    Instead, The Hamptons (June 2 and 3, 9 p.m. E.T.) is a sweeping, empathetic picture of the people who crowd this getaway every summer. Yes, there's plenty of name-dropping: Alec Baldwin, Billy Joel, Kristin Davis, Christie Brinkley and rap mogul Russell Simmons. But there are also young professionals partying in 30-person share houses, immigrant waitresses and the cops, clammers and gas pumpers who live there year round.

    And they all want something. Singer Nancy Atlas hopes her first CD sells so she can quit waiting tables. Jason Binn, publisher of Hamptons magazine, strives to keep his place as social gatekeeper. Jacqueline Lipson, a matrimonial attorney, has a commando-like determination to land a husband that puts The Bachelor's contestants to shame. ("I will not be not married at 30," she says. "I have a whole life plan. And it starts with this summer.") ABC calls the show a "reality mini- series"--networkese for "If we said 'documentary,' nobody would watch"--but the low-key, cinema verite narrative may put off fans of Survivor's contrived reality. Quinn Taylor, ABC's senior vice president for movies and mini-series, says Kopple resisted suggestions that she artificially juice the action. "We would say, 'Well, so-and-so's going to be at the beach. What if so-and-so went to the beach too?'" he says. "Nope. She wouldn't direct them anywhere."

    Though no one got voted off Kopple's island, reality gave the documentary — sorry, reality mini-series!--a twist straight out of a soap opera: the night that high-powered publicist and society figure Lizzie Grubman allegedly backed her SUV into a crowd at a nightclub, reportedly after angrily calling a doorman "white trash." The case became the best automotive metaphor for class conflict on Long Island since Daisy Buchanan ran over Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby. But, surprisingly, Kopple gives it only a few minutes. "One thing shouldn't take over the whole summer," she says.

    No doubt ABC would have had an easier time selling When Grubman Attacks! But The Hamptons' antisensationalism — occasionally to the point of dullness — is also its strength. It avoids cheap shots, even at a couple who model their wedding on Sean (P. Diddy) Combs' famous "white party" by having their guests dress up like Good Humor men. It treats the swank partygoers and the workers setting up the shrimp-cocktail bar with equal sympathy. Like Gatsby, The Hamptons shows how a summer place comes to represent and be changed by the dreams and appetites of the people who love and consume it.

    That the summer was punctuated by a terrorist attack on New York City hangs mostly unspoken over The Hamptons. But there's an elegiac air amid the sun and glitz here, a reminder of the feeling, even before Sept. 11, that the turn-of-the-century easy-money culture was fading. (One subject, Josh Sagman, an oxygen-bar peddler — he literally charges people to breathe — is the embodiment of cocky boom-era entrepreneurialism.) Even in midsummer, local author Steven Gaines talks about the place in the past tense. "This was the resort that was closest to the financial center of the world," he says. "This moment in time will be looked back on as a real golden age." Gold or fool's gold, The Hamptons leaves it for you to decide.