Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes (2024)
Director: Sam Shahid Run Time: 96 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2024
Starring: Don Bachardy, James Crump, Jarrett Earnest, Vince Aletti, Vincent Cianni
Country: United States
Language: English
About the film:
Winner of Best Breakthrough Documentary at San Diego International Film Fest.
“A loving, elegant profile of a remarkable, nearly forgotten artist.”
George Platt Lynes began his career photographing celebrities, and it’s those portraits, along with his extravagant fashion work, that he’s best remembered for today. However, George’s heart, his passion, and his greatest talent lay elsewhere, in his work with the male nude. This work, sensuous and radically explicit for its time, has only recently begun being fully discovered and appreciated for the revolution that it represents — a man capturing his fantasies as a gift, a window to a future his camera saw coming before anyone else.
From visionary art director Sam Shahid, this documentary portrait features a stunning collection of photography from the 1930s-50s, uncovering the life of Lynes less known: his gifted eye for the male form, his longterm friendships with Gertrude Stein and Alfred Kinsey, and his lasting influence as one of the first openly gay American artists.
About the filmmaker:
Sam Shahid has been leaving his mark on the world of fashion and advertising for four decades and counting. When he became the creative director for the in-house advertising agency for Calvin Klein in the early 1980s, he helped to turn the brand into the internationally recognized name it remains today with a trademark visual style. In the early 1990s he did the same for Banana Republic, before opening up his own creative design firm and advertising agency—Shahid & Company—in 1993. In the following years, he used this platform to create original and striking campaigns for brands such as Versace, Gucci, and Valentino. Throughout the 2000s he was also the Creative Director of Interview Magazine, and he’s also designed a library’s worth of fine art books for artists and photographers such as Bruce Weber, Kelly Klein, Herb Ritts, and Ellen Von Un Werth.
Shahid worked as the art director on a handful of films directed by Bruce Webber, including the short Backyard Movie (1991), documentary feature Broken Noses (1987), and the Oscar nominated documentary Lets Get Lost (1988). Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes (2024) is Shahid’s directorial debut.
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