Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Albert and David Maysles’s film Grey Gardens Watching the 1975 documentary film Grey Gardens is like slowing down to watch an accident in the next lane over. You know you shouldn’t, but you simply can’t help yourself. And if you’re really a rubbernecker like me (and apparently like tens of thousands of other Americans), you line up to watch the 2009 HBO Jessica Lange/Drew Barrymore biopic, which provides the backstory to the original film. Clearly, the 1975 documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles were on to something. What is it about Big Edie and Little Edie, the mother-daughter duo who languished in squalor as their formerly grand Hamptons estate, Grey Gardens, fell into disrepair? Why do we want to watch mentally ill, codependent hoarders living out the exact opposite of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? The Kardashians, they’re not. The Maysles brothers’ idea for a documentary was spurred initially by their interest in the Bouvier family and then by national reports of