Anne Chaisson, a longtime adviser to the Hamptons International Film Festival, will take over as its executive director, the festival has announced.

    She will replace Karen Arikian, the director for the past five years, who is leaving to pursue new opportunities, according to a press release. Ms. Arikian will continue as a United States/East Coast delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival and a U.S. consultant for European film promotion.

    Ms. Chaisson founded Dirty Rice Films in 2002 and has served in a fund-raising and development capacity for a number of entertainment nonprofits, including the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Nantucket Film Festival. She was the producer of “Roger Dodger,” which won a Best First Feature award at the Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals and other honors in 2002, and also produced the films “P.S.” and  “Diggers,” as well as the Independent Spirits Awards show in 2010 and 2011. She runs a student film workshop each summer through the film festival and Guild Hall.    

    Ms. Chaisson has already begun her new role.

    David Nugent, who had been the director of programming for the film festival, will now take the position of artistic director. He has taught classes in documentary film history and American independent film at the New School since 2004.

   The five-year old Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Festival has fully come into its own. Each year, the festival has grown in size and prestige, and its main event at Bay Street Theatre Saturday night brought some of the most respected names in documentary filmmaking to Sag Harbor.

    Jacqui  Lofaro, the founder and director of the festival and a Bridgehampton resident, said Saturday that the films that began the day before had been well received and attended, particularly films about Shelter Island and the North Fork, which brought in residents from all over the East End.

    In fact, “Shelter Island: Art and Friendship and Discovery” by Mike Canzoniero won the Festival’s First ever audience award on Sunday.

    Susan Lacy, the creator of the “American Masters” series for public television and a resident of Sag Harbor, was the evening’s honoree. The night began with a crowded cocktail reception in Bay Street’s lobby and continued with a full-house screening of “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” one of eight films Ms. Lacy directed out of the 185 or more she has produced for the series.

    Jamie Bernstein, one of Bernstein’s three children, introduced the documentary, which was first shown at the Hamptons Film Festival and aired on television in 1998, eight years after the conductor’s death. “The film keeps adding value over time,” she said.

    Ms. Bernstein also talked about Ms. Lacy’s career. They have been friends since the 1970s, she said, but it was Ms. Lacy’s approach to her subject that convinced the family she was the right person for the job. “We felt the love. We sensed that if she loved the subject, she would tell the story fair and true.” The director “steered away from the sentimental, sensational, and trite,” she added.

    The two-hour biography  follows the composer from his youth through his last concert with a thoroughness that never seems overdone. It also does not duck the more difficult aspects of Bernstein’s life, including his bisexuality, marital problems, and the challenges he faced as a composer of both popular and classical works while trying to balance his orchestral engagements both in New York and across the globe — Austria, Scotland, Japan, and elsewhere.

    His vitality and his action-figure approach to the baton, recorded in countless concerts, still look fresh even in black-and-white footage. The still photos chosen reveal the craggy contours of his face as well as his animated eyes and grin, which are on display in image after image. Bernstein does not seem to age or slow down until much later in life, but as he begins his decline, the documentary captures the dramatic difference in his body and face as he appears to fulfill his own prophecy of his demise at age 72.

    After the film, Ms. Lacy said she found seeing it again a highly emotional experience, especially sitting between Ms. Bernstein and Christopher Foss, the son of the composer and conductor Lukas Foss, one of the interviewees.

    A panel discussion followed with Ms. Lacy, Ms. Bernstein, and three of the directors who have contributed films to the “American Masters” series. Michael Epstein directed “Hitchcock,” “Selz­nick and the End of Hollywood,” “None Without Sin,” and “LENNO­NYC.” Anne Makepeace made the documentaries “I.M. Pei: Building China Modern,” “Robert Capa in Love and War,” and “Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light.” Roger Sherman made “Alexander Calder” and “Richard Rodgers: The Sweetest Sounds.” They discussed the challenges and rewards of their medium.

    Mr. Sherman observed that the Bernstein film was made in such a way that “in the first two-and-a-half minutes, the entire arc is laid out before you. [Ms. Lacy] is grabbing you by the ear and saying, ‘Stay here with me for this.’ This is not easy to do.”

    In his Calder film, he said, one of his biggest and most expensive mistakes was going through about 5,000 to 10,000 feet of film before realizing that the mobiles he was shooting were “dead” compared to earlier footage that showed the same pieces moving. The owners of the mobiles were reluctant to put the now extremely valuable pieces in motion, but Mr. Sherman realized he could not make the film without that movement and eventually convinced them.

    He also recalled that Ms. Lacy allowed him to expand his film on Rodgers first to 90 minutes and then to two hours, with the proviso of “no more interviews, no more talking — let the music flow.”

    According to Ms. Makepeace, Ms. Lacy allows directors to discover for themselves what the story is. “For me, I have to fall madly in love with the person who is at the center of my films.” Curtis was an easy subject to fall in love with, she said, but Capa was more challenging. “He was this hard-gambling, hard-drinking Hungarian, really just not my type.” It was only after she had seen the passion and humanity in Capa’s photography at the International Center of Photography, she said, that she realized she could make a film about him.

    Ms. Lacy said making a movie about a subject like Capa was not as easy as people might think. His life was a Hollywood movie. He was Ernest Hemingway’s friend; he was on the beach at Normandy capturing the action on D-Day, he had an affair with Ingrid Bergman during the war at the Ritz in Paris, and he covered five wars altogether until he stepped on a land mine and died. “You couldn’t invent a better story.”

    Cornell Capa, who founded I.C.P. to honor his brother, wanted the true story made first, not the Hollywood version. “I’ve never had that experience before,” Ms. Lacy said. “It still took a while to get that all figured out and get access to those images. That is the key to so much of our ability to bring artistry to this and bring our hearts and guts to it — to have the material to do that. It’s a huge element, and it doesn’t happen overnight, or not without a lot of expense.”

    Not everyone falls in love with their subjects, said Mr. Epstein. Steven Bach, a colleague who wrote a biography of Leni Riefenstahl, once told him never to choose a subject he loathed, because he would spend every waking hour with that person until the film was finished.

    Mr. Epstein agreed that access was essential but said it had to be paired with the freedom, both artistic and journalistic,  to make a film with integrity. “If you don’t have the freedom to say no to your subject, even if they are dead, you are completely screwed.”

    One of his trickier projects, he said, was working with Yoko Ono on the John Lennon piece. “Yoko didn’t say yes to me and didn’t say yes to the film. She said yes to American Masters, and even after that there was still a lot of struggle at times.” The time Lennon spent in Los Angeles after he left Ono, where he hit rock bottom with addiction, was not something she wanted explored too deeply. But Mr. Epstein argued that the audience needed to go on that journey with Lennon. 

    According to Ms. Lacy, “We explained to her that first of all, it happened. It was true, and we have to go to that bottom place so John can rise again, come home to you, have Sean, and have this life. And in the end, she loved the film and loved what Michael had done with it.”

    As a participant in her father’s documentary, Ms. Bernstein said the family realized that avoiding a topic or trying to gloss over it was only going to make it worse, and trusted that Ms. Lacy would handle the material appropriately. It was something Ms. Lacy admitted that she “sweated bullets over.”

    Although a contract always requires that subjects and their families give up editorial control to the director, and subjects are not shown the film until it is completed, Ms. Lacy said that “there is a huge trust factor that we honor, but not at the expense of telling the truth and the story.” In profiling an artist, she explained, it is essential to “connect the human being to the work in some way.”

    Once Ms. Lacy had received permission to use Robert Capa’s archive, said Ms. Makepeace, “It was on our shoulders to do it justice and give it the power it deserved.” Knowing how carefully his brother had guarded his legacy, she was nervous at the screening. After it ended, she said, Cornell Capa was silent for a bit and then said simply, “I can die now.”

   While every presentation of East End Stories on Film at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill offers compelling reasons to see it, last Thursday’s version was particularly rewarding, coming primarily from Genie Henderson and the LTV archive, which dates back to the station’s beginnings in 1984.

   Although there are many print documents and archives of the artists who worked and played here over the past century or so, the founding of LTV did as much for the artists as it did for the greater community in preserving a legacy that has only grown more vital and important with the passage of time. Members of the artistic community such as Elaine Benson, Priscilla Bowden, Howard Kanovitz, and Jeffrey Potter hosted shows where artists came on and discussed their lives and work.

   Ms. Henderson said the event was the first time the archives had been presented publicly in such a fashion. With 800 shows to choose from, it had to be done on a selective basis and primarily through excerpts.

   Connie Fox, who with her husband was one of the first of many artists who saw the value in such an enterprise, was also one of the first to take up a camera and go out and shoot video for the fledgling public access station. One of her early projects was a tour of the 1983 Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art with Elaine de Kooning. Frazer Dougherty, one of the founders of the station, operated the camera while de Kooning toured the show, “speaking totally extemporaneously about what she remembered. That’s what this video is. Just that, plain and simple.”

    De Kooning offered anecdotes about certain paintings, how long they took, who bought them, how her husband titled them, and what influenced them. Stopping at “Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louse Point,” she noted that 1963, when it was painted, “was the year that he really moved completely from New York City to East Hampton,” leading to a marked change in the work and a new appreciation for light and color. The paintings began incorporating “huge areas that just express light and much less of a stress on contours. The city paintings were much more congested, with closeness of forms and compacted areas. These paintings were unleashed. It was almost a gesture of light . . . in these sweeping strokes.”

    Included in the presentation was a trailer for the film “Castles in the Sand.” Produced by Max Scott and based on Helen Harrison’s book “Hamptons Bohemia,” it has archival footage and recent interviews with artists such as Jameson Ellis, John Alexander, Keith Sonnier, Donald Sultan, and Jane Martin in which they reflect on the meaning of the area’s historic legacy to those working in the present day.

    Ms. Harrison is the narrator of the film and introduced the trailer, which she said would be part of a much longer documentary. The clips showed artists such as Ibram Lassaw and Paul Brach speaking about the beach scene at Georgica and Peter Mattheissen recalling that it was once said, “If you dropped a bomb on a cocktail party in Sagaponack, you’d wipe out three-quarters of the American literary establishment.” Taking up the theme of drinking, Bill King said the whole South Fork artistic community, particularly the Abstract Expressionists, “floated on a sea of alcohol.”

    These clips were complemented by more footage from the LTV archives and a screening of a 1972 film by Howard Kanovitz that documents his painting of the picture “Hamptons Drive-In.” The work was recently acquired for the Parrish’s permanent collection and is on view in the new museum. The film follows a painstaking process involving photography, stencils, and airbrushes to create the illusion of what has become known as Photorealism. The old Hamptons Drive-In theater is depicted complete with an image of Joel Grey from “Cabaret” on the screen.

    The film is by turns serious and whimsical and embodies a free-spiritedness that seems to mark the best inclinations of the artists who were attracted to this area: all of them very serious people who still knew how to have fun.

    John Messinger, an East Hampton artist who teaches photography at the Ross School, is now in residence at the Watermill Center and will show his work there on Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m.

    The work will be on view in the studios and is from the series “#nofilter,” which examines the “evolving nature of photography amidst the ubiquity and proliferation of the digital image.” The show will include the artist’s large-scale, site-specific photographic tapestries that he began last year. The pieces consist of hundreds of smaller instant photographs taken using a Polaroid camera.

    Mr. Messinger is also a freelance photographer for The Wall Street Journal. He will publish a monograph with Harper’s Books next year called “The Estate of Joseph A. Porter.”

    On Sunday, Robert Wilson and Rufus Wainwright’s “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” will be screened at 4 p.m. The opera, which was directed by Mr. Wilson and composed by Mr. Wainwright, was filmed in Berlin in 2009. The opera was based on 24 of the Bard’s 154 sonnets, which were originally published in 1609. Reservations can be made through the Watermill Center’s Web site.

    On Tuesday at 6 p.m., Nova Jiang’s “Ideogenetic Machine” will demonstrate her interactive software and installation, which is designed to transform her audience into characters in unique comic books. The artist, who is in residence at the center, will also show props she made there to be used in devising a narrative for the piece. A reception and discussion with the artist will follow the demonstration. Reservations can be made at novajiangwmc. eventbrite.com.

   After eight childhood summers at her famous parents’ house in East Hampton, the Broadway lyricist Amanda Green went off to Camp Chimney Corners in Massachusetts, where she was homesick every single day.

    “I would write home and say, ‘Come get me!’ ” she said. “But after I was cast as Maria [in ‘West Side Story’], that was the last time they heard from me.”

    Odds on, no other 9-year-old ever got a break-a-leg telegram on opening night from the show’s composer, the legendary Leonard Bernstein. Actually, make that “Lenny,” which is what she called him while growing up in one of Manhattan’s grand old West Side buildings and on Georgica Road here. The daughter of one of the city’s most prominent theatrical couples, Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green, she had a relatively unscathed childhood despite the frequent comings-and-goings of Lenny, Cy (Coleman), Jule (Styne), and a supporting cast of characters whose names could be seen in lights up and down the Great White Way.

    “It certainly was a different household,” Ms. Green admitted on a recent weekend at the Springs house she shares with her husband, Jeff Kaplan, an orthopedic surgeon. “But as kids, it wasn’t that cool.” If her father had been Paul McCartney, she said with a double-wide Green grin, it might have been a different story.

    When she speaks, Ms. Green’s words tumble over each other like the high-flying high school cheerleaders in her current musical hit “Bring It On.” Arriving at Broadway’s St. James Theater in August after a 13-city tour, the show, featuring rival cheer squads — white-bread meanies and teen goddesses on one side, inner-city hip-hop crews on the other, plenty of adolescent angst in between — was welcomed by one critic as “a stage spectacle defying gravity.”

    “Thirty feet in the air they throw them,” Ms. Green marveled. “Bring It On” was originally scheduled to end its run in October, but it’s been extended through Dec. 31 to accommodate its core audience, the families, teens, and tourists who will be in town for the long holidays.

    Anyone who was in the Shubert Theater on Dec. 4, 2002, when Broadway stars turned out en masse for a memorial tribute to Adolph Green, will remember his daughter, alone onstage, singing a song of her own composition, “On Daddy’s Shoulders.” Its characteristic humor and poignancy had the packed house on its feet applauding:

    The waves crashing on the beach

    were dragons out to bite my feet

    the icy cold, the undertow

    was trying to drag me down below . . .

    I thought I’d scream, I thought I’d cry

    then big hands flew me to the sky

    and I was sittin’

    on my daddy’s shoulders . . .

    By the time her father died, Ms. Green was already writing for the musical theater, although, surprisingly, it wasn’t on her radar growing up. She would be an actress and singer like her mother, she thought, and after graduating from Brown she went through the usual Broadway-baby incarnations: “waitressing, coat-check girl, receptionist at Lincoln Center, development director at a charity.” At one point she was in charge of the cabaret room at Tavern on the Green, performing and booking other performers. “I got some acting jobs, but not many.”

    What she was becoming instead was a nightclub singer and sometime songwriter — a “chronically lovelorn” one. In the mid-’90s, enamored of Lyle Lovett and disenchanted with her nowhere jobs, she fled to Nashville to write — so she thought — country songs. The experience was a game-changer.

    “I’d have songwriting blitzes with four or five other songwriters in a week,” she said, among them a number of up-and-comers who were to be heard from big-time a few years later. Pretty soon she abandoned country music for a witty, sophisticated style and a comic voice much like her father’s.

    Ms. Green honed her songwriting talents and made still more gifted friends after being accepted for the prestigious BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, which brought her back to Manhattan. One of those rare artists who can not only put her personal stamp on other people’s songs but make audiences laugh and cry over her own, she was becoming a recognized nightclub draw.

    “More and more, I was singing my own songs,” she said, “until I was doing all my own songs. I drew from my past experiences dating itinerant poets and ne’er-do-wells. The first time I sang a song I’d written in front of an audience, it was absolutely intoxicating. I loved it. I felt powerful.”

    Her husband, she said, was “the first solid citizen” she ever dated. He was from Memphis, visiting East Hampton for the first time, when they met on Egypt Beach.

    “I thought he was handsome. Then his daughter Samantha, who was 4, ran up and said, ‘Daddy!’ and I thought, ‘Ah, yes . . . of course.’ ” Until she noticed the book lying on his towel: “Mom’s House, Dad’s House: Making Two Homes for Your Child.”

    “We were married three short — long — years later,” she said, “and I had no more bad-luck songs to write.”

    By then Ms. Green had started writing lyrics for musicals. One of the earliest, written with the composer Curtis Moore, was a farce called “For the Love of Tiffany,” in which she herself played — wait for it — a triple-amputee German housekeeper. “I was in a box. I had one leg, a stump, no arms. The leg stump had a feather duster in it, to clean with.” (Dr. Kaplan made the box.) The offbeat show had a sold-out run at the New York International Fringe Festival, and “We’re hoping, we’re hoping,” that it gets to Broadway some day.

    The 2006 “High Fidelity,” written in collaboration with a BMI classmate, Tom Kitt (a Pulitzer Prize-winner for “Next to Normal” who also worked with her on “Bring It On”), was her first show that did get there. After a month’s tryout in Boston, it arrived at the Imperial Theater, where it didn’t just bomb, it imploded, closing after 14 performances. Ben Brantley of The Times called it “a show that erases itself from your memory even as you watch it.”

    Ouch. How do you keep going after that?

“The best thing is not to read the reviews,” Ms. Green said with a rueful smile, “and I often don’t follow my own advice.” Critics may have excuses for their rants, she tells herself. “Maybe they woke up with toothaches.” Sometimes, though, bad press can be instructive. “If eight critics all say the same thing doesn’t work, then we know we need to work on it.”

(Don’t weep for “High Fidelity” — “It’s enjoying many regional productions now, and in colleges.”)

   This week Ms. Green is at work on a new song for a new show, “Hands on a Hardbody,” slated to begin previews in February before a Broadway opening at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in March. None other than Trey Anastasio, the frontman of Phish, is her collaborator; he wrote the music, she the words and, for the first time, some of the music as well. “We were introduced by a friend who thought we’d enjoy writing together,” she said. “He has two daughters also, and we’re about the same age. I could not have done ‘Hands’ without Trey.”

    The new musical, with a book by Doug Wright (who won the Pulitzer for drama in 2004 with “I Am My Own Wife”), is based on a 1997 documentary about an annual endurance contest in East Texas, in which contestants compete to see who can stand up the longest with one hand touching a brand-new pickup truck. The last one on their feet gets the hardbody. “This is a Red State musical that Blue State audiences won’t hate themselves for enjoying,” said The Los Angeles Times when it previewed there in May.

    One by one, the characters tell what the truck would mean to them — escape from a one-horse town, escape from a long-term marriage, escape to Hollywood to become a stuntman. “They all really need that truck,” Ms. Green explained. “No one is doing it for a lark.” Keith Carradine (“The Will Rogers Follies”) plays the oldest contestant. “I had a crush on him ever since I saw him in ‘Nashville,’ ” said the lyricist, “and I wrote a couple of songs with him in mind.”

    Sometimes, she said, she’ll rewrite a song “40 or 50 times, just to get what the character is thinking. Half of writing is rewriting.” Other times, though, especially with comic songs, inspiration comes in an afternoon.

    After a long day at a piano or in a writing workshop, Ms. Green can often be found belting them out onstage. She sang in Amagansett at the Talkhouse a few years ago and would “totally love Guild Hall, but they never asked me.” On Monday night, if you happen to be in the city, she’ll be performing at Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, in a show called “Amanda Green and Friends.” Reservations have been “strongly suggested” (birdlandjazz.com).

   Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island will bring its ninth annual OLA Latino Film Festival to the Parrish Art Museum on Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. and Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m.

    The festival will present films from recent Latino cinema, such as “Locas Mujeres,” a documentary by Maria Elena Wood about the inner world of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. The film, which opens the festival on Saturday at 6 p.m., won the Audience Choice Award at the Santiago International Film Festival.

    Following at 7:30 p.m. is Patricio Guzman’s documentary “Nostalgia for the Light” from Chile. The subject is the Atacama Desert, where astronomers gather to observe the stars and local people sift through the soil looking for graves of family members killed during the nation’s brutal political past. It was a selection for the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

    On Sunday at 3 p.m., “Un Jardin en el Mar,” from Mexico and the director Thomas Riedelsheimer, follows the underwater sculpture commission of Cristina Iglesias in the Sea of Cortez.

    Daniel Burman’s “Abrazo Partido/ Lost Embrace,” a 2004 film from Argentina, concludes the festival at 4:30. The subject is a young Jewish-Argentinean who reconnects with his father, who left for Israel to fight in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and never returned.

    Tickets for the films are $10, $8 for Parrish members.

Pollock Programs on LTV

    LTV’s Channel 20 will air a number of programs through December addressing Jackson Pollock, produced by Tim Sullivan and Patrice Jacobsen. Those outside the LTV viewing area may access them online at the ltveh.org video-on-demand feature. Air dates and times can be found on the Web site as well.

    “Poems for Pollock” was an event held in August on the 56th anniversary of the artist’s death in an automobile crash in Springs. The poets included were George Wallace, Grace Schulman, Rosalind Brenner, Lucas Hunt, Maxwell Corydon Wheat Jr., and Michelle Whittaker.

    In “Ossorio Responds to Pollock’s Death,” Helen A. Harrison, the Pollock-Krasner House director, discusses with Mr. Sullivan the paintings and drawings made by Alfonso Ossorio, a friend and sponsor of the artist, in response to his death.

    Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Harrison discuss Pollock’s career in “Jackson Pollock in Retrospect,” including an examination of works such as “The Flame,” circa 1937; his mural for Peggy Guggenheim, and his collage painting on glass “Number 29.”

Booth’s “Holiday Treasures”

    Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor is showing “Holiday Treasures,” through Jan. 15.

    The show features Stephen Wilkes, who merges images from different times of day to show the passage of time in “New York: Day to Night.” Ricardo B. Sanchez photographs bullfighters in Spain. Blair Seagram’s “Surf Report” deconstructs and reconstructs images of surf and surfers in panoramic views. Mr. Tabor’s “Horse Whisperings” are very large-format horse images.

    The gallery is open Friday through Monday.

Keyes Art Projects Sale

    Keyes Art Projects and Kraisky Printing will have a holiday print sale this weekend at 12 Bay Street in Sag Harbor.

    The sale will include work by East End and international artists and will take place tomorrow from 3 to 6 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Elkins Retrospective at Marcelle

    Peter Marcelle Gallery in Bridgehampton will have a retrospective show of the work of Terry Elkins beginning Saturday, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Mr. Elkins, a longtime Bridgehampton resident, has a career that dates back to the 1970s, when he did abstract works on paper. Today he has transitioned to more realistic and greatly detailed oil paintings. He has been the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards and has taught art classes for the Parrish Art Museum, and is an adjunct professor of art at the University of Laverne in California.

    The artist received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Sam Houston State University in 1975 and a master’s in painting from the University of Houston in 1978. He has lived in Bridgehampton since 1987.

    The exhibition will be on view through Dec. 10.

East End Stories on Screen

    “East End Stories on Screen,” a film series produced by the Parrish Art Museum, will return today at 6 p.m. with films presented by Genie Henderson, the archive librarian at LTV. She will bring selections from the East Hampton public access station’s more than 800 recordings of artists’ interviews, studio visits, and artist-made television shows.

    The 70-minute program includes the premiere of a 12-minute trailer for “Castles in the Sand,” a forthcoming documentary based on “Hamptons Bohemia” by Helen Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, who will introduce the film.

    The collection also includes a walkthrough with Elaine de Kooning of a 1983 Willem de Kooning retrospective, and portions of programs highlighting John Chamberlain, Chuck Close, Robert Dash, Connie Fox, April Gornik, Margaret Kerr, John Little, Philip Pavia, Elizabeth Strong Cuevas, and Hedda Stern. The program concludes with a 1972 film by the late painter and filmmaker Howard Kanovitz that documents the making of his painting “Hamptons Drive-In,” a recent addition to the Parrish’s permanent collection. Carolyn Oldenbusch, the artist’s widow, will introduce this selection.

    The series is a companion to the museum’s “East End Stories” database, which catalogs more than 600 artists who have lived and worked in the area since the 19th century.

Dan Christensen at Spanierman

    Spanierman Modern in Manhattan is showing the early spray paintings of Dan Christensen through Jan. 5.

    The paintings, made from 1967-69, reintroduced exuberant gesture into painting after Minimalism’s hard-edged conceptualism. The spray gun Mr. Christensen employed required physical stamina and a free hand. As the gallery noted in a release, the paintings combine “the fluidity of Abstract Expressionism with the reflective stance of the color-field painter,” reflecting the artist’s admiration of both Jackson Pollock and Henri Matisse.

Holiday Pottery Sales

    Phyllis Spiegel, a potter, is having a sale at her studio on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., on Springwood Way in East Hampton.

    Celadon Clay Art Gallery in Water Mill is holding a holiday pottery show and sale featuring handmade objects by potters from the region through Dec. 16.

Davis Recognized

    Paul Davis,  an artist and graphic designer who is a longtime resident of Sag Harbor, was recognized last week by the Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Okla. Mr. Davis, a graduate of the school in 1955, was inducted into its hall of fame.

    Other graduates of Will Rogers include Russell Myers, creator of the  “Broom Hilda” comic strip; Anita Bryant, Leon Russell, and S.E. Hinton.

    Mr. Davis attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan after high school. His career has included covers  and designs for New York Magazine, Time, Rolling Stone, Columbia Records, and other publications and companies.

Cather’s Life and Loves

    “Call Me William: The Lives and Loves of Willa Cather” will be presented at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m.

    Prudence Wright Holmes is both writer and performer of this one-woman play about Cather, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Her books include “My Antonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”

    Ms. Holmes was a member of the original cast of “Godspell,” which she helped create. She was on Broadway with Meryl Streep in “Happy End” and in the film “Kingpin” with Woody Harrelson. She has written several plays and was recently in the Broadway musical “The Light in the Piazza.”

Mozart at the Met

    Guild Hall will screen the Met: Live in HD’s presentation of Mozart’s “La Clemenza di Tito” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Elina Garanca will sing the role of Sesto in the drama set in ancient Rome. Giuseppe Filianoti is Tito and Barbara Frittoli is Vitellia. Harry Bicket conducts. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

Live for WPPB

    Corky Laing, the drummer from the band Mountain, will perform solo and with his band, Corky Laing and the Memory Thieves, at Guild Hall as a special guest tomorrow night at a benefit for WPPB 88.3 FM from 7 to 10 p.m. Cynthia Daniels, a local Grammy Award-winning recording engineer, will be joined by other radio and local personalities to bring her monthly live performance recording to the theater.

    Performers will also include the Kerry Kearney Band, Black and Sparrow, Miles to Dayton, the Black Petals, the K-O-S Band (Keeping Original Sound), the Ross Brazilian Jazz Band, the Jet Set Renegades, Darcey, Glenn Feit, Michael Pour, Dick Johansson, Alfredo Merat, and Adam Baranello with the A and G Dance Company.

    The concert, sponsored by Crossroads Music, where it is usually held, will be aired by Monk Music Radio at a later date. Tickets are $20, $18 for Guild Hall members, and $10 for students. They are available at Crossroads Music or online at guildhall.org.

Jazz in Montauk

    Music for Montauk will present a free jazz concert on Saturday with Freddie Bryant and the Melting Pot Jazz Sextet on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Montauk School.

    Mr. Bryant, a guitarist, will bring an assortment of musicians to play a program of United States, American, Brazilian, and Latin songs. The Melting Pot Jazz Sextet includes vocals, flute, saxophone, acoustic bass, percussion, and guitar.

    Songs will include familiar and exotic standards and holiday tunes from around the world.

    The Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church will hold the choral refrains of Christmases past with the Choral Society of the Hamptons concert “A Baroque Christmas” on Dec. 9, with performances at 3 and 5:30 p.m. A benefit brunch at Pierre’s in Bridgehampton will precede the concerts and a silent auction will follow.

    The concert will feature both a full chamber orchestra and the soloists Suzanne Schwing, Mischa Bouvier, Mary Hubbell, Emily Eagan, and J. Andy McCullough. Ms. Schwing, a mezzo soprano, and Mr. Bouvier, a bass, appeared with the society in last year’s performance of “Messiah” and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio the prior year. Ms. Hubbell and Ms. Eagan, who are sopranos, and Mr. McCullough, a tenor, are making their debuts with the society.

    Mark Mangini, the society’s music director, will conduct the program, which begins and ends with settings of the celebratory Magnificat, legendarily sung by Mary before the birth of Jesus. These settings, by the Neapolitan composer Giovanni Pergolesi and the Venetian master Antonio Vivaldi, the most-performed Baroque composer, counterpoise phrases sung by different parts of the chorus, reaching spirited — and topical — peaks when the chorus declares that the “mighty” will be “put down from their seat,” according to the society in a release.

    Between those pieces, several other works will be performed. They include another by Vivaldi, the vesper psalm “Beatus Vir”; a Christmas Cantata by Marc Antoine Charpentier, the late 17th-century music director of Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and “In Dulci Jubilo” by Dietrich Buxtehude, a noted predecessor of Bach. The orchestra will perform the Christmas Concerto by Arcangelo Corelli.

    At the 3 p.m. performance, the chorus will be joined by the East Hampton High School Vocal Camerata, directed by David Douglas, in a lyrical setting of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Both concerts will close with the society’s traditional presentation of familiar carols that the audience is asked to join in singing.

    The cost for the concert is $25 in advance on the society’s Web site choralsocietyofthehamptons.org and at Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor. They will be $35 at the door. Student tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door.

    The benefit brunch will be served at 12:30 p.m. and tickets begin at $200 per person. A free reception and silent auction will follow the 5:30 performance at the Bridgehampton Community House.

    In December, the Choral Society will release its first commercially-available recording, of last year’s performance of Handel’s “Messiah” with orchestra and soloists. Copies are expected to be available in local stores that carry CDs as well as on the society’s Web site. It will also be available to download at CDBaby. com. 

   The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will return to Sag Harbor this weekend with three days of programming and a gala honoring Susan Lacy, the creator of the “American Masters” series on PBS.

   Ms. Lacy has served as executive producer for more than 185 documentaries made through this series, which has received 64 Emmy nominations and 24 wins, along with many other awards. She has also written and directed several of them. Subjects have included Johnny Carson, Placido Domingo, Buckminster Fuller, Judy Garland, Lillian Gish, Lena Horne, Joni Mitchell, Edward R. Murrow, Rod Serling, Paul Simon, and Tennessee Williams. The latest film in the series, on David Geffen, began airing on Nov. 20.

   The gala will include a screening of “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” which, according to the organizers, is Ms. Lacy’s favorite film. The film won an Emmy Award and was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary. After the screening, she and three American Masters directors will be part of a panel discussion. The directors are Michael Eptstein, Anne Makepeace, and Roger Sherman. Tickets to the gala, which will be held at Bay Street Theatre, cost $25.

    The screenings will begin tomorrow from 4:30 to 10:30 p.m. at Bay Street and cost $15 each or $100 for a festival pass to all events. The first film, Ian Cheney’s “The City Dark,” about light pollution, will be free of charge and includes footage of Montauk and a follow-up discussion with Susan Harder, a Dark Skies advocate.

    Screening tomorrow at 6:45 p.m. will be “Long May You Shine” by Mark Costello Higgins, about the Long Beach Bar Lighthouse in Greenport. At 8:15 p.m., “Shelter Island: Art + Friendship + Discovery” will be shown. The film, by Mike Canzoniero, is about an outsider artist and gas station owner on Shelter Island.

    Saturday’s films include three student shorts in the morning and “The Wind That Blows,” an hour-long film about Yankee whalers in the West Indies by Tom Weston, beginning at 10 a.m. At 12:15 p.m., a film about Long Island commercial fishermen, “The Salt of the Sea” by Tom Garber of Hampton Bays, will be shown along with “Shinnecock: Remember the Past, Hope for the Future,” a short film by a Ross School student about the tribe’s tradition of storytelling. At 2 p.m. “Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution” will be shown. The two-hour film by Lucy Winer revisits a now-abandoned site where the filmmaker was once committed. The short films “After” by Jeremy Cohan and “Irene Williams: Queen of Lincoln Road” by Eric Smith will be shown at 4:30 p.m.

    On Sunday, six films will be screened from 10 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. The day begins with “Children of Chabannes” by Lisa Gossels and Dean Wetherell, the story of 400 Jewish refugee children who were saved by a French village during World War II. “Deputized-Como Pudo Pasar?” by Sue Hagedorn and Amanda Zinoman revisits the killing of Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, by a group of Long Island teenagers. It will be shown at 1 p.m. “Harry Hellfire,” at 3:30 p.m., is the story of a great unknown rock musician who lives in a tent in Greenport. Jim Morrison is the director. “Courting Justice” by Ruth B. Cowan, to be shown at 5:30 p.m., looks at South African justices who are in charge of guarding human rights. “Right There,” a short film by Florence Buchanan and Arthur Bijur, follows.

    The closing film, at 7:30 p.m., is “Plimpton: Starring George Plimpton as Himself.” The film by Luke Poling and Tom Bean and co-edited by Casey Brooks of East Hampton looks at the life of the multitasking editor, writer, and society fixture.

    Each film has a scheduled discussion afterward led by Andrew Botsford on Friday and Sunday and Bonnie Grice on Saturday.

    Jacqui Lofaro of Bridgehampton, who is the founder and director of the festival, said in a release that the festival had grown dramatically since last year. “We’ve tripled the number of festival days and doubled the number of documentary film screenings.” The festival will also present an audience award for the first time.

    Tickets can be purchased at the door or in advance at ht2ff.com and the Bay Street box office.