Kiss the Past Goodbye

For over a year now Danny Seymour has followed me. Mostly when I am awake at night. I think about him. It hurts.
– Robert Frank

I still weep for Danny Seymour for the life he never finished, the books he never made, the family he never had. For years I used to think I had spotted him in a crowd on Broadway in lower Manhattan, walking his lanky shuffle, his black motorcycle jacket loosely hung on his tall thin frame, his curly hair, his Peter Pan smile, his hipster s salutation, Hey, man, what’s happening? But it was never Danny.
– Danny Lyon

SYNOPSIS

In 1972, the radiant, hell-bent photographer and filmmaker, Daniel Seymour, mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Cartagena, Columbia. Seymour was 27 years old and enjoying youth, a bohemian existence and recent artistic success. He had just beaten his addiction to heroin and stood to inherit as much as $30 million from his mother, Isabella Stewart Peabody Gardner, the heir and namesake of the famous Bostonian patron of the arts and a member of one of Boston’s richest families.

Traces of Danny are everywhere. There’s an unprinted picture of Danny taken by renowned photographer Annie Liebovitz on a contact sheet. There’s Danny rolling sound and shooting up with groupies in Robert Frank’s black market documentary of the 1972 Rolling Stones tour, Cocksucker Blues. Scratch the surface a little further there’s Danny in his Bowery loft with Yoko Ono and John Lennon shooting their film The Fly. There’s Danny’s name in the credits of Larry Clark’s groundbreaking monograph, Tulsa. For a number of years, all roads led to Danny; rock n’ roll, film and art all crossed at his door.

In the quest for clues to Danny’s disappearance buried within his mysterious wake; I have sought out those closest to him, filming interviews with his best friend Paco Grande and his wife at the time, actress Jessica Lange. Candidly sharing the intimate moments they had with Danny as they all traveled the world in the prime of their youth, the memories, unreleased films and photographs they have shared exclusively with this project establish Danny’s brilliant talent, and boundless free spirit.

Also already filmed is a very rare interview with Danny’s mentor, the influential filmmaker and photographer Robert Frank. When Danny disappeared, Robert lost a dear friend and artistic ally; Frank’s recent books and videos continue to include Danny s memory…. Here, for the first time, Robert speaks directly about this relationship.

In many ways, the dichotomy of Danny’s existence is encompassed in the vast gulf between the backgrounds of his parents: A widely published poet in her own right, Isabella Stewart Gardner was the family s black sheep, not only divorcing her first husband, but then remarrying far below her station. Maurice, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, came to America penniless at the turn of the century. In time, he opened a photo studio, taking professional headshots of everyone from Ray Charles to Times Square burlesque dancers. When they eventually divorced, no one quite knew what to do with Danny. After some disastrous years at boarding school, Danny grew into a young man with his father’s street smarts and his mother’s open spirit and checkbook

Acting as a one-man Endowment of the Arts to the lower Manhattan creative community, Danny fearlessly financed the birth of Larry Clark’s photography career, paying to publish Clark’s first monograph, Tulsa, a book publishers were too scared to touch. In a confessional interview I conducted with Danny Lyon, it seems Danny Seymour’s generosity knew no bounds: Seymour starred in Lyon’s first film, paid for his second, and lost a serious girlfriend to Lyon whom Lyon married and had two children!

In many ways, Danny rejected his formal education and his privileged beginnings. He was suspicious of high art of pretentious creativity that excluded a common audience. Danny’s films were eclectic, filled with energy, and often opened the door into very closed and private worlds. From Flamencologia, a legendary film about a rural gypsy community in Andalusia, to a verite portrait of John and Yoko called ONO. He even self published his own book: A Loud Song, is considered by scholars and collectors one the most personal and touching work of the 1970s and fetches nearly $1000 a copy with book dealers.

Scores of friends lived off his generosity. There seemed to be an endless supply to go around. Robert Frank wrote that Danny had “a lot of dope and a lot of despair”. Danny was in the room when Keith Richards hurled not one but two televisions off the tenth floor balcony of his room at the Holiday Inn. Danny paid for his friends to travel Europe for months, Paco and Jessica among them, witnessing the 1968 Paris student riots.

This same impulsive behavior led Danny to buy a yacht called the Imamou and sail it to the Caribbean. To help him manage the large boat Danny took on extra crew members, including two strange Frenchmen Danny met on a dock in Cartagena, Columbia (already a transportation hub for the cocaine cartels of South America). They set sail on May 19, 1973, and were never heard from again. Both the CIA and the FBI were involved in the investigation of Danny’s disappearance. Although the boat was recovered, Danny’s body was never found.

Kiss the Past Goodbye is about a brilliant life cut short; a tragic-hero story that retrospectively mines this tinder box of creativity that extinguished so quickly but not before touching the lives of other creative minds. It is a mythological story as well, on the order of Diane Arbus or Francesca Woodman. Seymour and his powerful influence are rediscovered as the film traces this fascinating story through the voices of Robert Frank, Paco Grande, Jessica Lange, Ralph Gibson, Danny Lyon, and Larry Clark, among others will be interviewed in the coming months. Shot on Super-16 film stock, the film also features many rare or never-before-seen archival clips from Seymour’s films and those by Frank, Clark and Lyon. I have been granted unlimited access to Seymour s archives of 35mm prints and negatives which also feature prominently in this sensual, intelligent and quite emotional montage.

Kiss the Past Goodbye is an evocative journey that breathes life back into a legendary character while also illuminating the incendiary times in which he lived. By exploring the period and the works created by Seymour and his milieu, a vivid dual portrait emerges of both the man and New York at this most vibrant moment.