“I loved the idea that people like Antonio would hang out with visual artists, photographers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, poets and writers, which today is so different,” says Crump of his obsession with the late ‘60s-early ‘70s milieu.
Not to mention the illustrator’s early compatriots - models and muses Donna Jordan and Pat Cleveland, actress Patti D’Arbanville, makeup artist and early friend Corey Tippin, editor Buck and the artist Paul Caranicas who is Ramos’ lover and heir to the Lopez archive - all who attended the screening. “There was this really sexy vibe coming through the photographs and the images and I always felt that I was born too late,” he continues, adding that he first learned about Lopez and Ramos as a young teenager growing up in rural Indiana and reading Interview magazine, “which was kind of a portal to New York.”Īmazingly, the gang’s nearly all there, with on-screen interviews that range from wildly hilarious to tearfully moving from actress Jessica Lange, restauranteur and cultural figure Michael Chow, fashion editor Grace Coddington, former Interview editor Bob Colacello and especially the late New York Times street style chronicler Bill Cunningham, whose brotherly affection for Lopez permeates the whole film. “I just was turned on by the period, I was turned on by Antonio’s ‘gang’ and the fun they were having,” says director Crump over the phone a few days before the premiere at New York’s DOC NYC film festival.
Tropez and later Japan and as exemplified by his discovery of then-model Tina Chow, the movie fairly pulsates with rare film clips and a seemingly endless trove of photographs, all set against the defining music of the time from the likes of Donna Summer, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield and Chic. From downtown New York in the ‘ 60s when Lopez and his crowd would sit in the backroom of Max’s Kansas City opposite a table of Andy Warhol and his hangers-on to Paris in the early ‘ 70s, where they mingled with Karl Lagerfeld and danced at the fabled Club Sept, and then on to St.