Inside Timothée Chalamet’s Surprise Marty Supreme Screening (and the Afterparty Supreme)
This past Friday morning, the New York Film Festival announced a last-second surprise screening for Monday night, which everyone online immediately and correctly guessed would be Timothée Chalamet‘s new project Marty Supreme, a nearly-three-hour epic about a ping-pong prodigy, directed by Josh Safdie and due out this Christmas from A24. The event sold out in 20 minutes. I quite shamelessly juiced every connection I have and managed to talk my way in; that miracle Monday-afternoon confirmation email hit like a few small beers.
If you want to understand “the magic of New York City” (I know, I know), the incredible access and possibility it provides at every turn, there are no better eyes to view it through than those of my friend, Bronx native and occasional GQ contributor Jayson Buford. Like me, Jay had spent the day hitting multiple inboxes attempting to get into the screening with no luck, but when I told him I was meeting another friend for a pre-game martini and a burger at P.J. Clarke’s a block or two from Alice Tully Hall, he met me there, we hung out and ate and drank and shot the shit, then on a whim he decided to walk over to the theater with me. He immediately ran into someone he knew from being constantly, terminally outside at in-crowd events like these. The person had an extra ticket, the seas parted, and Jay got in.
I include this anecdote because the entire night had this impossible studio-lot tenor. It was a Truman Show proposition, seemingly scripted and directed by a writer’s room with a surrealist sense of humor looking to mine action and entertainment from the moment we stepped foot in Alice Tully’s atrium, surely recorded at every step by hidden camera. The tiny, perfect, single-named Industry star Myha’la immediately ran up on me as Jay and I enjoyed a pre-show beer, likely assuming I was a Lincoln Center janitor, and asked where she could pick up a VIP ticket. Jay saw the actor Christopher Abbot, who he somehow knows from a media softball league, and ditched me for five minutes to “catch up.” Matthew Broderick was mingling in specs and a sweater. The hall was buzzing as we made jokes about how funny it would be if the consensus was wrong and everybody had packed the hall for an obscure documentary, perhaps the Christopher Nelius TIFF darling Whistle.
But it wasn’t. The film was in fact Marty Supreme, which in addition to Chalamet stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler, the Creator, and Odessa A’zion, all of whom made an appearance on stage, plus the Safdies’ usual deep-bench coterie of neurotic discovered-in-the-wild New York City oddballs, who did not. I’m operating under a strict embargo preventing me from saying a whole lot about the edge-of-seat bathroom-breakless three-hour joyride we experienced—but you can find many takes online that reflect the feeling in that room after the lights came up. On behalf of the audience I was a part of, I apologize in advance for all the hyperbole (Some critics are already engraving “Timothée Chalamet” on an Oscar statue, the comparisons to every Scorsese film besides Kundun are flying fast and free, and for now, until an audience larger than Alice Tully’s capacity gets to have their say, it’s the movie of the year). There is a specific intoxication that comes from being among the first people on Earth to watch an “important” film that you could feel from the moment composer (and Safdie mainstay) Daniel Lopatin’s title card elicited a resounding cheer. Moments like this generate an electrical current between viewer and screen, and I wonder how faithful any first read could be under that sort of intense lens.
From several sources that wished to be left anonymous, I got the picture that the screening had been in discussion for several months but remained up in the air until the last second—hence the ceremony and secrecy—because the movie wasn’t finished. Many of the higher-up decision makers at Lincoln Center hadn’t actually watched the film beforehand, for good reason: If Josh Safdie himself is to be believed, he didn’t finish the film until 2 AM the day before the screening.
