Town & Country; August 2020
Dylan Hundley, Chris Eigeman, Isabel Gillies, Will Kempe, Bryan Leder, Taylor Nichols, Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, and Allison Rutledge-Parisi pose at Cannes in May, 1990.
Photographed by Micheline Pelletier
On its 30th anniversary, the doomed bourgeoisie, debutantes in distress and founding members of the Sally Fowler Rat Pack recall the making of the most charming cult classic of all time.
Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan started as a short conversation about how the upper middle class was “doomed.” Stillman scribbled the idea on a piece of paper in the summer of 1984. (A sample line of dialogue: “We hear a lot about the great social mobility in America… What is less discussed is how easy it is to go down.”)
Four years later, and Stillman finally got to make the film, a silver-spoon fantasy concerning Upper East Side adolescents during the Christmas debutante season, and the Upper West Sider, Tom Townsend, who infiltrates their circle. Lounging around parlors and playing games of “truth” (not dare, which was deemed déclassé) for as long as there is Cognac in one’s glass was the de facto past-time for the so-called “UHB,” or urban haute bourgeoisie who animate the plot.
Despite the almost make-believe preciousness of this cohort, in their finery, pearls and Brylcreem, and the bohemian splendor of their surroundings, the movie became an art house hit on a budget of $210,000 and “backed into”—Stillman’s words—an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The first-time director had managed to capture the charm of an overeducated and aimless youth, armed with too many cultural references but so little real-life experience that the only thing left to do is be too clever for its own good, usually while doing the cha-cha-cha.
Released 30 years ago this month, it's that innocence and whimsy that makes Metropolitan a still relevant cult classic, a witty, preppy Preston Sturges-style fantasy from a bygone era before celebrity and comic book heroes became the dominant forces in pop culture. (Its knowing, self-lacerating view of the leisure class couldn't be more au courant, by the way.)
And while it seems almost impossible that a comedy of manners like it would get green-lit today—Stillman made a pilot for Amazon in its early streaming days, but the series was not picked up—Metropolitan's influence can be heard in the verbal pyrotechnics of writer-directors like Noah Baumbach, Wes Anderson, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman-Palladino.
This is how it all began.
(Edited for Isabel content only)
A WASP's Revenge
Isabel Gillies (Cynthia McLean): I was in my freshman year at Rhode Island School of Design. There were no independent films; that wasn’t really a thing back in ‘89. Whit had a hard time casting, and he started to call the schools in New York. The director of the drama department said, “Well, there’s one girl, but she’s gone to art school.” Whit looked me up in the telephone book, called my parents, and said, “I’m a director, I’d love to get her a script.” They told him to send it to RISD. So I got the script, read it, and thought, "This sounds smart to me, is it a porno?" But I auditioned and got the part. The shooting schedule was in winter term, and I had a class that started at 9 a.m. We would go to work at 6 p.m. and shoot until 6 a.m. And then I got in a hired car and I would go to sleep in the back of it and get driven to Providence to attend school.
"Nobody’s Ever Going to Watch It”
Gillies: His writing was so good that even as this idiot 18-year-old, I thought, this has got a point of view. Instinctually, it felt elevated. I certainly knew people were debutantes. I had grown up in New York, but it was a stretch in that nobody spoke the way those kids did.
Filming began during an “arctic outbreak” at the start of 1989, one of the coldest winters in New York's history. Dopey comedies like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure dominated the box office and The Cosby Show and Roseanne duked it out on TV for the #1 spot in the ratings. Stillman, meanwhile, was getting ready to film a movie about a kind of polite society that was dying if not already extinct. He had a paltry 30 days to get the movie in the can and secured three locations for production, including the grand former townhouse of the famed lyricist Alan J. Lerner, where he could only shoot between 6 p.m and 6 a.m. Other locations, like the Plaza Hotel, they used on the sly.
Gillies: We were paid $70 a day, $50 deferred. It was not a lot of money [laughs]. It was more about the learning experience.
Gillies: I didn’t love my character Cynthia being called a “slut.” I didn’t love anybody slut-shaming or anything like that. I didn’t want to play that. So I remember talking to Chris Eigeman about that. He said, “You know, Cynthia is the only one that tells the truth.” I was like, “That’s right!” And I could get behind that. You can get mad at me, but what I’m saying is true.
[Taylor] Nichols: Being a “slut” in a Whit Stillman movie is hardly a scarlet letter. [laughs] It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with [my character]. At the beginning, I thought Charlie was a little soft. He was a bit too sincere, too earnest. I’ve come to see Charlie otherwise over the last 30 years. Now, I see him as the heart and soul of the Sally Fowler Rat Pack.
Charming After All These Decades
Metropolitan screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1990, a year after Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape became a phenomenon and pushed independent cinema to the mainstream. Bolstered by word-of-mouth and reviews from the likes of Roger Ebert, the film hit the Cannes Film Festival and opened in theaters on August 3. Eventually, it grossed close to $3 million but had the dubious distinction of scoring an Oscar nomination in the same category as Ghost, which had unexpectedly become the year's highest grossing film. Some of the actors, like Eigeman and Gillies, continue to work, appearing in shows like Gilmore Girls and Law & Order, and Nichols is a regular fixture on film, stage and the small screen, with recurring characters in acclaimed series like PEN15 and Perry Mason. Others took different paths, like Clements, who left his upstart career to become a reverend in Toronto, and Rutledge-Parisi, who now works at another Metropolitan, New York's Museum of Art. All that seemed improbable when Stillman reunited the cast at his apartment after the success at Sundance to explain to them that their lives, as well as his own, were about to radically change.
Gillies: I was in my living room, and I remember my father tossed the Arts section of the New York Times over to me, and I was on the cover of it. I was like, “What?! I don’t get it.” When you’re that age, you do one thing and you’re on to the next. So when we got nominated for an Academy Award, it was like, “What? You’re kidding me.”
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