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  • Billy Joel exhibit at LIMEHOF ends Oct. 26 | Long Island Business News

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    THE BLUEPRINT:

    • “: My Life” exhibit at closes Oct. 26

    • Attendance has surged since the closing announcement

    • Exhibit features 50+ years of Joel’s career and memorabilia

    • New, non- expected to debut Thanksgiving weekend

    Billy Joel fans have until Oct. 26 to see the Long Island Music and (LIMEHOF) exhibit about his life, before it is “movin’ out.”

    The “Billy Joel: My Life, A ‘s Journey” at the -based museum enjoyed a nearly two-year run, and since the announcement of its closing, has drawn a new wave of interest.

    “I can tell you that on any given day since we announced [the closing], we nearly tripled or quadrupled our attendance,” Ernie Canadeo, LIMEHOF chairman, told LIBN, without sharing specific numbers.

    It’s not only Long Islanders who are visiting the museum to learn about the Piano Man. Canadeo said visitors are visiting from New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia.

    “A lot of them have been waiting to see it and haven’t had a chance, he said. “And now that they know it’s closing, they want to see it.”

    The arts are an economic driver to the region, and contributed $330 million to the Long Island economy, supporting 4,905 jobs, according to a 2023 study by the Long Island Arts Alliance.

    Earlier, in July, when the “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” two-part documentary premiered on HBO, LIMEHOF saw an increase of about 15 percent in visitors, Canadeo said.

    Designed by , the exhibit tells the story of Joel’s life and career, featuring items spanning more than 50 years. Highlights include rare memorabilia, behind-the-scenes video footage, awards, audio and video recordings, vintage instruments and historic photographs – many of which were personally donated by Joel.

    Canadeo hopes to continue to feature several items from Joel’s archives in the future.

    A new exhibit at the museum is set to open Thanksgiving weekend, and while the details are not yet public, Canadeo said, “I’ll be announcing it certainly before the end of the month.”

    And he said, “it’s going to be big – but not music related.”

    He pointed out that museum also features “entertainment” in its moniker.

    Asked for a clue, he said, “Think television.”

     


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    Adina Genn

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  • Brandy Melville Stores Are Hell on Earth

    Brandy Melville Stores Are Hell on Earth

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    When she spots one of the painted wooden signs outside a Brandy Melville store, filmmaker Eva Orner stops in her tracks. “Since I started doing the documentary, I always sneak in and check out how many people are in there and what they’re selling,” she tells Vanity Fair. What she sees, she says, is “horrifying. I think ‘cult’ is a word that is bandied around a lot, and we were very careful when we decided to use it.”

    Orner is referring to the name of her latest documentary, Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion, which debuts on HBO on April 9. In it, the Oscar winner (Taxi to the Dark Side) unspools the dark inner workings of a fast fashion company that targets teens and has been worn by the likes of Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner. According to the doc, beneath soft baby-tees emblazoned with sayings like “Stressed, Depressed, But Well Dressed” is a shadowy operation that both preys upon and profits off female insecurity. The words “antisemitism,” “racism,” and “sexism” are tossed out within the first three minutes of the film regarding certain executives, a harbinger of dark deeds to be revealed. Brandy Melville did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    “Most companies maybe do one bad thing,” says Orner. With Brandy Melville, “something bad happens, and then something worse happens. And it just keeps going. By the end, your jaw is on the floor.”

    Orner, an Australian who drives an electric car and has adopted a vegetarian diet, was introduced to Brandy Melville by Oscar-nominated producer Jonathan Chinn (Black Sheep) and Oscar-winning producer Simon Chinn (Searching for Sugar Man). As the film shows, the store presents itself as less of a label than as a lifestyle. Brandy Melville hires beautiful girls who seem popular—typically thin, white, and under the age of 18—who are often recruited while shopping in the store, the doc claims. Candidates are asked to submit full-body photos and offer up their social media handles in the place of any skill-based qualifications, said one former employee that Orner interviewed. 

    Staff members of color are hired but are often relegated to working in stock rooms, ex-employees told the filmmaker. Those who work at a store’s entrance—all of whom must fit the “one size fits most” clothes the company carries—are required to take daily “store style” photos that are sent to Brandy Melville’s enigmatic founder, former workers in the doc explained. Employees could be—and reportedly were—hired and fired based on such images. “They’re like 16-year-old girls. You can find, like, 700 different reasons to fire them,” one anonymous company employee says in the doc. “Like, it’s too easy. It wasn’t even fair.” 

    All of this information was unearthed before Orner began working on her film through lawsuits brought against the company and reporting by Kate Taylor, an investigative journalist at Business Insider. (Brandy Melville denied all wrongdoing in a 2022 class-action lawsuit brought by ex-employees. The company settled for $1.5 million.) But the revelations haven’t made much of a dent in Brandy Melville’s revenue. “There has been an exposé on this company. A lot of young girls know that the company’s not great, but they still shop there,” Orner explains. “And I find that really disturbing. There comes a point in your life where you have to [decide], What kind of person do I want to be? When a brand’s been exposed as being really shit, you can get clothes elsewhere. The fact that people are so locked into this brand is really surprising.”

    Orner set out to make a film that would contextualize the company’s ethical issues within a larger environmental landscape. Her cameras traveled to the far reaches of Prato, Italy—where Brandy Melville’s clothing is produced in crowded factories—and Ghana, which has become a dumping ground for heaps of unwanted garments. In the documentary, former staff members said that higher-ups would buy the non-Brandy shirts off their backs so they could replicate and mass produce their design—a practice that has led to copyright infringement suits against the brand. (After being sued by Forever 21 in 2016, Brandy Melville’s parent company settled out of court.)

    “The level of exploitation against women is staggering,” says Orner, especially when it’s further enabled by social media platforms like Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok. “You are being exploited by companies and doing their work when you make videos promoting them and [don’t] get paid,” she explains. “There are these armies of young girls advertising for these evil companies who are just laughing all the way to the bank.” 

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    Savannah Walsh

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  • For Mr. Chow, Everything’s on the Menu

    For Mr. Chow, Everything’s on the Menu

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    For restaurateur, painter, actor, and designer Michael Chow, the world is in a state of Technicolor. Hitchcock and Lean are the masters; Ruscha, Newton, and Hockney are his friends. His precision is exacting, his jabs are hysterical, his energy is relentless, and his joy is contagious. Chow’s world is a place where “motherfucker” is a term of endearment, and Hermès suits, Charvet socks, and George Cleverley shoes are the only things in this life one absolutely must own.

    He sees life’s moments as scenes he’s prewritten in his head, his friends and loved ones serving as willing actors. Evidently, the philosophy has served him well: Chow has built a restaurant empire that merges East and West and turns his eponymous hotspots into dazzling theaters of cultural energy.

    Two weeks before the premiere of AKA Mr. Chow, the forthcoming HBO documentary from Nick Hooker, Chow invited me to lunch at his Beverly Hills restaurant. Seated in a corner booth below the portrait Warhol painted of him in 1981, Chow dishes on control, his childhood, and the restaurant’s future, offering Vanity Fair the exclusive on his planned foray into fast food. Below is our conversation, where I was lucky to get a word in edgewise—even at the very beginning.

    Michael Chow: How tall are you? This is a reverse interview.

    Vanity Fair: I’m five foot 11 and three quarters. I would like to grow one quarter inch.

    Lucky.

    You’re lucky too.

    No, I’m something else. I’m a dinosaur.

    But you have so much energy! At the young age of 84, I was impressed by all the things you seem to accomplish in a day. What does a typical day look like for you?

    First of all, I’m extremely… not a little bit lucky, but—[He looks around his restaurant.] This is impossible. This is impossible. Look, I have my little baby who is two years and three months old [a daughter, Skye, whom he welcomed with wife Vanessa Rano in 2021] and she can swim already. She’s a different kind of human. So at this very moment, anybody older than you, I’m finding a little bit difficult to talk to. I’m so quick now that at your age, your energy, right now I’m in power with you.

    Who wakes you up? Your alarm, your wife, your daughter?

    Unfortunately, all of the above. But I’m very good in the morning. I’m educated by movies so as far as waking up is concerned, immediately an image comes to me: Laurence Olivier. The latest thing I’m really into is name-dropping. Sir Laurence, Lord Laurence, late Laurence Olivier, in a very important movie for me, Richard III.

    By Allan Tenenbaum/HBO.

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    Britt Hennemuth

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  • Like It or Not, the Aaron Rodgers Era Gets the Hard Knocks Treatment

    Like It or Not, the Aaron Rodgers Era Gets the Hard Knocks Treatment

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    “People will talk to me on Tuesday nights and say, ‘That was a great show. What’s going to be on next week?’” Rodgers said. “And I say, I have no idea, it hasn’t happened yet.”

    Sabol used to say that making the show was akin to building an airplane in flight, but there is a rhythm to Hard Knocks that has made it less daunting than other docuseries of its ilk. Rodgers said each edition of the series has a “clear beginning, middle, and end” that dovetails with the NFL’s preseason schedule: Players report to camp, suit up for a few meaningless games, and wait for the final 53-man roster to be announced. Hard Knocks has also developed a routine that can, at times, veer into sameness.

    Rodgers said that he and his team “fight to make sure that familiarity doesn’t turn into staleness.” He compares Hard Knocks to Survivor, a reality-TV contemporary that premiered in 2000 and remains a fixture on CBS’s lineup. Both shows, Rodgers said, are “familiar and fresh,” combining a familiar template with new characters. (Survivor has had many seasons featuring past contestants, but the point is taken.)

    But like an actual NFL team, the success of any Hard Knocks season generally comes down to the players and coaches who are on it. The 2010 edition of the show also featured the Jets, and stands out as one of the best in the series, not least because of then head coach Rex Ryan’s indelible sound bite: “Let’s go eat a goddamn snack!” Last summer’s Hard Knocks with the Detroit Lions was mostly well-received, particularly for the appearances of its swashbuckling head coach, Dan Campbell.

    But even with colorful personalities like Ryan or Campbell involved, the show doesn’t get too spicy. Hard Knocks is a property of the NFL, after all, and the league is militant when it comes to protecting its brand. To some, that has made the show into “infomercial fluff,” as a writer for the Detroit Free-Press put it in a review of Hard Knocks last year.

    Rodgers said participating teams are able to screen each episode before it airs, but that is mostly to ensure that it includes no revealing details about play calls. “We don’t try to spin things to make people look worse, and we don’t even spin things to make people look better,” Rodgers said. “We didn’t say last year how great of a coach Dan Campbell is or how great of a leader [he is]. We just showed him for who he was and people decided, by watching him, how great he was.”

    Head coach Brian Billick of the Baltimore Ravens talks to his team during a game against the the New York Giants, December 12, 2004.Doug Pensinger/Getty Images.

    Traditional TV ratings for Hard Knocks have dropped in recent years. But Rodgers said those numbers don’t capture how much of the show’s audience has migrated to the streaming-verse. According to Rodgers, a much higher percentage of viewers watch Hard Knocks on Max than on linear HBO. “Our audience is just as strong as it was [during] the boom years,” he told me.

    Billick, for his part, said he hasn’t kept up with the series. “I think we did set the template and they seem to be just a repeat of what we did,” he said. Billick stopped coaching in the NFL following the 2007 regular season, almost six years before the league approved the Hard Knocks mandate. Back when he was leading the Ravens, Billick had a go-to response when the NFL tried to force teams to do certain things: “Well, does Bill have to do it?”

    By “Bill,” he means Bill Belichick, the immortal (and imposing) coach of the New England Patriots.

    “They can say, ‘Well, the league can mandate it,’ but until they make New England and Bill Belichick do it, then no, they’re not making anybody do it,” Billick said.

    The Patriots have been exempt from Hard Knocks thanks to the team’s consistent postseason appearances in the Belichick and Tom Brady era. But Belichick has opened his doors to a film crew before. He was mic’d up for the 2009 season, which was documented by NFL Films for the first two episodes of its long-running series, A Football Life.

    “When people say it’ll never happen, I say, well, it’s already happened,” Rodgers said of Belichick.

    We may find out sooner rather than later. If Belichick were to fall short of the playoffs for the second season in a row, the Patriots would be out of exemptions and, potentially, on the short list for the show next summer.

    Hard Knocks: New England? I’d watch.

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    Tom Kludt

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