Spalding Gray
Also Known As: Spalding Grey
Biography: Spalding Gray (June 5, 1941 – January 11, 2004) was an American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and performance artist. He is best known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for his film adaptations of these works, beginning in 1987. He wrote and starred in several, working with different directors. Theater critics John Willis and Ben Hodges called Gray's monologues "trenchant, personal narratives delivered on sparse, unadorned sets with a dry, WASP, quiet mania." Gray achieved renown for his monologue Swimming to Cambodia, which he adapted as a 1987 film in which he starred; it was directed by Jonathan Demme. Other of his monologues that he adapted for film were Monster in a Box (1991), directed by Nick Broomfield, and Gray's Anatomy (1996), directed by Steven Soderbergh. Gray died by suicide at the age of 62 after jumping into New York Harbor on January 11, 2004. He had been struggling with depression and severe injuries following a car accident. Soderbergh made a documentary film about Gray's life, And Everything Is Going Fine (2010). An unfinished monologue and a selection from his journals were published in 2005 and 2011, respectively. Description above from the Wikipedia article Spalding Gray, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Birthday: June 05, 1941
Deathday: January 11, 2004
Adult: No
Gender: Male
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Known For:
The Killing Fields
Overview: New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg is on assignment covering the Cambodian Civil War, with the help of local interpreter Dith Pran and American photojournalist Al Rockoff. When the U.S. Army pulls out amid escalating violence, Schanberg makes exit arrangements for Pran and his family. Pran, however, tells Schanberg he intends to stay in Cambodia to help cover the unfolding story — a decision he may regret as the Khmer Rouge rebels move in.
Genres: Drama History War
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1984-11-23
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Almost You
Overview: Alex and Erica Boyer are a young couple in crisis. Alex, despite his loving wife, beautiful home and high-paying job, feels trapped. When Erica has an accident that leaves her temporarily confined to a wheelchair and requiring the services of a private nurse, the beautiful Lisa enters the Boyers' lives. A complicated situation develops as Alex sees Lisa as the cure for his own problems as well as his wife's.
Genres: Comedy Romance Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-03-29
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Beyond Rangoon
Overview: Dr. Laura Bowman is a young widow who's unwittingly drawn into political turmoil while vacationing in Burma in the late 1980s. Bowman initially left San Francisco with her sister in an attempt to escape painful memories of her husband and son's violent deaths. But her fight to escape to Thailand could prove just as harrowing.
Genres: Drama Thriller
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1995-08-25
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Diabolique
Overview: The wife and mistress of a cruel school master collaborate in a carefully planned and executed scheme to murder him. The plan goes well until the body, which has been strategically dumped, disappears. The psychological strain starts to weigh on the two women when a retired police investigator begins looking into the man's disappearance on a whim.
Genres: Mystery Thriller Horror
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1996-03-22
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Kate & Leopold
Overview: When her scientist ex-boyfriend discovers a portal to travel through time -- and brings back a 19th-century nobleman named Leopold to prove it -- a skeptical Kate reluctantly takes responsibility for showing Leopold the 21st century. The more time Kate spends with Leopold, the harder she falls for him. But if he doesn't return to his own time, his absence will forever alter history.
Genres: Romance Comedy Fantasy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2001-12-25
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True Stories
Overview: A small but growing Texas town, filled with strange and musical characters, celebrates its sesquicentennial and converge on a local parade and talent show.
Genres: Comedy Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1986-10-10
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Gray's Anatomy
Overview: The film documents, in an often dramatic and humorous fashion, Gray's investigations into alternative medicine for an eye condition (Macular pucker) he had developed.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1996-09-11
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King of the Hill
Overview: Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.
Genres: Drama History
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-08-20
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Glory Daze
Overview: Jack, a soon-to-be graduate, finds he's having a difficult time letting go of the college life -- and decides maybe he doesn't have to. Also questioning whether there's life after college are Jack's roommates: Rob, who fears domestication; comic-strip artist Mickey, who's shy around girls; intellectual party animal Slosh; and perpetual student Dennis.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1995-10-01
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Monster in a Box
Overview: Monologuist Spalding Gray talks about the great difficulties he experienced while attempting to write his first novel, a nearly 2,000-page autobiographical tome concerning the death of his mother. Among his many asides, Gray discusses his problems in dealing with the Hollywood film industry, recounts the trips he took around the world in order to avoid dealing with his writer's block and describes his ambivalence about acting as stage manager for a Broadway production of "Our Town."
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1992-05-15
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The Pickle
Overview: Harry Stone always dreamed of making "The Great American Movie." Instead he made The Pickle - a teenage sci-fi flick about a flying cucumber. Harry just wanted to get out of debt; now everyone he's ever known, loved and neglected is standing in line for tickets.
Genres: Comedy Drama Romance Thriller
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-04-30
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Swimming to Cambodia
Overview: Spalding Gray sits behind a desk throughout the entire film and recounts his exploits and chance encounters while playing a minor role in the film 'The Killing Fields'. At the same time, he gives a background to the events occurring in Cambodia at the time the film was set.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1987-03-13
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The Farmer's Daughters
Overview: After the farmer's daughters attack the farm hand Fred, three escaped convicts arrive and have their way with members of the family. Fred surprises the convicts, only to replace them in the family's victimization.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1976-06-11
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Straight Talk
Overview: Honest and straightforward small-town Shirlee Kenyon chucks her boyfriend and heads for Chicago. Accidentally having to host a radio problem phone-in show, it is clear she is a natural and is hired on the spot. But the station insists she call herself Doctor, and as her popularity grows a local reporter starts digging for the truth. Problem is, the more he is around her the more he fancies her.
Genres: Comedy Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1992-04-03
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Beaches
Overview: A privileged rich debutante and a cynical struggling entertainer share a turbulent, but strong childhood friendship over the years.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1988-12-21
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Confessions of a Sociopath
Overview: Confessions of a Sociopath is an autobiographical film on digital video and Super 8 film, conceived as a real-life version of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. In this film, Joe Gibbons plays a fictionalized version of himself as he discovers a roomful of Super 8 footage from his own life, detailing events he can no longer recall. This footage shows his earlier film experiments, his descent into destructive behavior, and his “bottoming out” on drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, the films are replaced by random photos, police records, and psychiatric hospital records.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2002-01-01
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And Everything Is Going Fine
Overview: From the first time he performed Swimming to Cambodia - the one-man account of his experience of making the 1984 film The Killing Fields - Spalding Gray made the art of the monologue his own. Drawing unstintingly on the most intimate aspects of his own life, his shows were vibrant, hilarious and moving. His death came tragically early, in 2004; this compilation of interview and performance footage nails his idiosyncratic and irreplaceable brilliance.
Genres: Documentary Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2010-06-04
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Clara's Heart
Overview: David is a teenager whose parents are in a deteriorating marriage after their infant daughter dies. Clara is a chambermaid at a Jamaican resort who's hired to be a housekeeper. She and David develop a close bond, opening his eyes and heart to new experiences, and eventually leading to a disturbing secret in Clara's past.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1988-10-07
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The Image
Overview: When career-focused journalist's investigation indirectly causes a suicide, he questions his own methods and life in general.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1990-01-27
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Variety
Overview: A repressed young woman becomes obsessed with pornography and the mysterious rich patrons of the Times Square porn theater where she works selling tickets.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-02-27
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Yesterday's Tomorrows
Overview: Showtime's "In the 20th Century" is a millennium-related series of feature-length documentaries in which famous directors take on major subjects of their choosing. In the third of the six films, "Yesterday's Tomorrows," filmmaker Barry Levinson delves into what we, as Americans, thought the future would be as we traveled through the 20th century. Houses and cars of the future, the promise of technology, and the other hopes and dreams of the early part of the century gave way to the fears and anxieties brought about by the atomic age and the Hollywood disaster films that followed. Soon we wondered if we could control technology, or if it would control us. This film is by turns light-hearted and thoughtful, and rare historical and archival film, produced by government and industry, alternates with on-screen interviews with people as diverse as consumer advocate Ralph Nader, cartoonist Matt Groening, futurist Alvin Toffler, comedienne Phyllis Diller, and actor Martin Mull.
Genres: Documentary History
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1999-08-09
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Julie Johnson
Overview: A New Jersey housewife is dissatisfied with her everyday life because she is smarter than she or anyone else knows. While taking a computer class, Julie discovers her abilities and finds the courage to make dramatic life changes. This is a story of realizing one's potential and being willing to turn one's life upside down to take a chance on finding happiness. Claire, Julie's best friend, goes along with Julie's secret quest and eventually moves in with her. Both women are on a search to realize their dreams and come to terms with their love for each other.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2001-01-26
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Stars & Bars
Overview: A British art expert leaves New York to buy a long-lost Renoir from a Georgia eccentric.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1988-03-18
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Drunks
Overview: At the beginning of a nightly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Jim seems particularly troubled. His sponsor encourages him to talk that night, the first time in seven months, so he does - and leaves the meeting right after. As Jim wanders the night, searching for some solace in his old stomping grounds, bars and parks where he bought drugs, the meeting goes on, and we hear the stories of survivors and addicts - some, like Louis, who claim to have wandered in looking for choir practice, who don't call themselves alcoholic, and others, like Joseph, whose drinking almost caused the death of his child - as they talk about their lives at the meeting
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-03-14
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Spalding Gray: Terrors of Pleasure
Overview: Monologue by Spalding Gray about his misadventures in purchasing a home.
Genres: Comedy TV Movie
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1987-11-28
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Thirty Second Spots: TV Commercials for Artists (1982-83)
Overview: Inverting the form, style and time frame of commercial television advertising, Logue has produced a unique series of dynamic video portraits of avant-garde artists, writers, musicians and performers. In 30 Second Spots: New York, which Logue terms "commercials for artists," each of the succinct vignettes conveys the artistic essence of her subject with clarity, wit, and an elegant economy of means. John Cage, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Spalding Gray and Steve Reich are among the artists who are captured here with concise drama. Each subject performs in close-up before a stationary camera.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date:
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Spalding Gray's Map of L.A.
Overview: Spalding Gray comes to LA to perform a set of monologues.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1984-01-01
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Double Lunar Dogs
Overview: Based on Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “Universe,” Double Lunar Dogs presents a vision of post-apocalyptic survival aboard a “spacecraft,” travelling aimlessly through the universe, whose passengers have forgotten the purpose of their mission. As a metaphor for the nature and purpose of memory, the two main characters (portrayed by Jonas and Spalding Gray) play games with images of their past; but their efforts to restore their collective memories are futile, and they are reprimanded by the “Authority” for their attempts to recapture their past on a now-destroyed planet Earth.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1984-01-01
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Zelda
Overview: Famous 1920s modernist writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his eccentric Flapper socialite wife Zelda Sayre's relationship began quite passionately, but he slowly fell into alcoholism and she was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Genres: TV Movie
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-11-06
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Hard Choices
Overview: A teenaged boy goes for a ride with his brother and the brother's friends, who proceed to rob a store and murder the clerk. They are caught and, despite the young boy's protestations, he is convicted of murder and sent to prison. A female social worker assigned to the boy's case not only believes him, but begins to fall in love with him, and determines to either help him prove his innocence or escape.
Genres: Drama Crime
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-01-24
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To Save a Child
Overview: A doctor and his pregnant young wife move into a small New Mexico town. At first the locals are friendly and pleased to see them, but soon the wife begins to suspect that their new neighbors' motives are more than just hospitality.
Genres: Thriller Horror TV Movie
Original Language: el
Release Date: 1991-09-08
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Our Town
Overview: This classic American play, performed on an almost-bare stage, is about the mundane but rather pleasant lives of the Gibbs family, the Webb family, and their neighbors in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, early in the 20th century.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1989-04-01
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Bliss
Overview: On his wedding day, Joseph nervously admits that his wife is not quite like other women. But his beautiful bride is more than just the "impulsive, compulsive, obsessive" woman he thinks he knows. And when Joseph discovers she is hiding troubling secrets, it sends them both on a sexual odyssey that will either destroy or redeem their relationship.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-04-14
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Anybody's Woman
Overview: The goings-on around a porn theater in New York’s East Village, interspersed with actors recounting experiences with extreme sexualities and a description of a scene from the pre-code Dorothy Arzner film of the same name.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1981-01-01
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Love-In '72
Overview: A man must decide whether to flee the U.S. draft and go to Canada or stay or go fight for his country in Vietnam.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1970-03-21
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Sex and Death to the Age 14
Overview: Monologue created and performed by Spalding Gray, who takes us through his childhood recollections of growing up in a Christian Science household in Barrington, Rhode Island, in the 1950s.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1982-01-01
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A Personal History of the American Theater
Overview: An autobiographical monologue in which Spalding Gray randomly draws cards for titles of the plays in which he performed in the 1960s. He proceeds to tell stories that came out of the experiences with each play.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1982-01-01
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Rumstick Road
Overview: A video reconstruction of the 1977 Wooster Group production Rumstick Road, an experimental theater performance created by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte after the suicide of Gray's mother. Archival recordings are combined with photographs, slides, and other materials to recreate the original production.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2014-05-01
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Seven Minutes in Heaven
Overview: Natalie allows her classmate Jeff, who ran away from home after a fight with his stepfather, to stay at her place while her father is away on a business trip. Natalie soon starts dating Jeff's friend James Casey, who isn't as faithful as she thinks, while her best friend Polly falls in love with baseball player Zoo Knudsen.
Genres: Comedy Drama Romance
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1986-05-09
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Maraschino Cherry
Overview: The madame of a high-class new York brothel teaches her younger sister all about the business.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1978-10-20
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The Paper
Overview: Henry Hackett is the workaholic editor of a New York City tabloid. He loves his job, but the long hours and low pay are leading to discontent. Also, publisher Bernie White faces financial straits, and has hatchet-man Alicia Clark—Henry's nemesis—impose unpopular cutbacks.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1994-03-18
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Twenty Bucks
Overview: A story about the life of a twenty dollar bill as it weaves in and out of the various lives of several people.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-10-21
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Revolution #9
Overview: A handsome and successful young man with a lovely fiancée, James Jackson seems to have everything going for him, but his life begins to unravel when he develops an acute sense of paranoia. At first, he notices little things at his office that he takes as signs that people are out to get him, but soon things escalate, with Jackson convinced that a perfume ad on television holds sinister messages aimed at him. Is Jackson losing his mind, or are the threats real?
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2002-11-15
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Bad Company
Overview: CIA operative Nelson Crowe is tasked with a deadly assignment: infiltrate a highly secret industrial espionage firm. Once inside, he teams with Margaret Wells, a master spy and seductive manipulator, in a plot to overthrow the organization's sinister president, which leads them into a darkly mysterious web of intrigue -- and shocking murder!
Genres: Action Crime Romance Thriller
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1995-01-20
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Heavy Petting
Overview: Celebrities and creatives -- including musician David Byrne, performance artist Spalding Gray, comedian Sandra Bernhard, radical activist Abbie Hoffman, and poet Allen Ginsberg-- recall their earliest sexual experiences.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1989-09-22
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How High
Overview: Multi-platinum rap superstars Redman and Method Man star as Jamal and Silas, two regular guys who smoke something magical, ace their college entrance exams and wind up at Harvard. Ivy League ways are strange but Silas and Jamal take it in a stride -- until their supply of supernatural smoke runs dry. That's when they have to start living by their wits and rely on their natural resources to make the grade.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2001-12-21
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What You Mean We?
Overview: WHAT YOU MEAN WE is a surreal short film by experimental artist Laurie Anderson.
Genres: Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1986-09-26
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Variety
Overview: A repressed young woman becomes obsessed with pornography and the mysterious rich patrons of the Times Square porn theater where she works selling tickets.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-02-27
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Spalding Gray: A Life in Progress
Overview: Performance clips and biographical anecdotes from the life of Spalding Gray.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-01-01
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Coming Soon
Overview: Privileged teenage friends Jenny, Nell and Stream spend their senior year on a quest to rid Stream of her virginity. However, Stream wants more than just her first sexual experience. She wants to have an orgasm -- but achieving this proves problematic, as the boys she meets are hardly sensitive enough to provide her the release she seeks. When it becomes clear that Nell and Jenny have never experienced an orgasm either, all three set out to get one.
Genres: Romance Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1999-06-08
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Prisoner's Dilemma
Overview: A two-part tape of a video performance done on January 22, 1974, at 112 Greene Street (as part of the Video Performance Exhibition), structured on a problem in game theory, a non-zero-sum game, in which both players can win or lose at the same time, one can win more than the other, and one can win at the others expense. Serra and Bell have used game theory as a way of dealing with genres of commercial TV: cops and robbers in the first part, and a quiz program in the second.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1974-12-31
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