Bring two artists together, both sculptural and structural in their approaches, and unleash them on an unusual and open space, giving them few limitations except that their materials must be locally sourced and no more than $40 in cost. It’s an interesting recipe and one that could have resulted in bedlam or, worse, boredom.

    Fortunately, the Silas Marder Gallery and the artists Ben Butler and Michael Rosch delivered neither. The installation, titled “Architecture of a Bomb,” has filled the loft space in the gallery with plenty to keep the eye occupied and the mind engaged, and practically everything in the installation was taken from the Marders Garden Center property.

    Mr. Butler, who teaches in Tennessee but spends his down- time in Quogue, works in poplar, cedar, and other woods. With these, he often makes structural forms and objects that have been likened to Tinker Toys in their purer iterations, but which can look more organic and flowing in others. He appears to enjoy playing with the properties of wood, respecting its hardness, but looking beyond it for a softer, and sometimes frailer, construction.

    It is he who offers a way into the installation, using pieces of pallets and posts as a kind of corral to lead the viewer into the room and giving it a Western feeling, one evocative of the outdoors and open spaces that beckon just outside in the garden center surrounding the unusually sited gallery.

    Mr. Rosch’s approach to metal is even more fluid, as if he is attempting to draw squiggles with it or replicate a vine. His artistic scavenging predates requirements of the installation. As an instructor at the former Southampton College, he was showing works with automobile springs or shovel handles. Like the slate that he suspended on top of the springs a decade ago, here, he chooses to mount an old weathered wooden chair, its ordered form contrasting well with the randomness of its curvaceous coil.

    Additional order is imposed by the marble slabs he hauled up the stairs of the loft, which form a kind of second floor or pedestal for his springy mash-up. A square of sod placed within the laid-out tilework adds another note of organic contrast, offering a vague hint of regeneration, even while the grass has died. Near the edge of one wall he brings the slab away from its support so that it creates a tension within the piece. A large rock tucked near the corner offers balance. On the opposite corner, he has constructed a room of sorts with casually framed walls covered with a white material that results in a kind of shoji screened-in rock garden with an old dead tree adding a dash of rich rust to the otherwise grayish monotone. Certain squares of material have been cut out to reveal a few tantalizing glimpses of the interior. A low and narrow makeshift doorway confounds all but the smallest and slightest of entrants.

    The main event of the space, however, occupies the center space, with its accretion of hard, random, but affecting matter reaching up to the sky, contained only by the ceiling, and entwining itself around the gallery’s industrial light fixtures. Foam strips and plastic drainage tubing never looked so visceral, so much like entrails even with the absence of blood or other coloring. Beneath, there are open-grid trellis walls, rolled chicken wire, arching rebar, and rusty steel ribbons and other forms of fencing. A few old round red signs painted with the words “art gallery” self-consciously add to the rubble.

    The title of the installation arose from a coincidence: It was completed on Aug. 6, the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in World War II. The artists used the $40 they were each given to purchase a small model airplane that hangs toward the rear of the loft, not far from the heaving, allusive waste pile they have constructed.

    Mr. Marder said it was his intention to bring the two artists together — Mr. Rosch, who is more free-moving and improvisational, and Mr. Butler, who has a more formulaic approach — to see how they might collude and collide. The result, he said, was a visual conversation that took place over the course of the week they worked on the installation.

    The gallery and its audience have found so much in the work over repeated viewings that Mr. Marder will keep it up through December during the next show in the gallery downstairs.

    Spoiler alert: At the end of this picaresque romp, “Lucky Bruce,” the author, playwright, and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman (author of “Stern” and “The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life” and screenwriter of “Splash”) admits: “And always — no matter how weak the knees and frail the bank account — there has been the pleasure at Customs of filling in the blank for Occupation with the single word that has always felt treasured and benighted: writer.”

“Lucky Bruce”

Bruce Jay Friedman

Biblioasis, $26.95

    So here’s where the adventure begins. Mr. Friedman studied journalism at the University of Missouri, which he says consisted of “memorizing the names of turn-of-the-century farming weeklies.” He maintains that his only literary effort by the end of college was a freshman essay on Hemingway and the Lost Generation. Mr. Freidman joined the Air Force during the Korean War and soon found himself on the staff of Air Training magazine, edited by a lanky, Southern, bookish pilot who was a New Yorker devotee. One day Mr. Friedman decided to try his hand at a short story. He mailed it in to the venerable magazine. It was plucked out of the slush pile and an editor wrote him an encouraging letter. Mr. Friedman wrote a second short story. Soon after, he received a letter: “All of us here are delighted with your story. . . .” The New Yorker published it. Talk about lucky. And hard-working.

    Mr. Friedman offers four major backdrops in this book: the Beverly Hills Hotel’s swimming pool, the now sadly departed Elaine’s (his accountant once asked how he could possibly spend $18,000 per annum on veal piccata), the offices of a magazine group, and Water Mill here on the East End.

    Bruce Jay Friedman first began honing his skills, while also supporting his family, as an editor at that group, called Magazine Management, a company that published teaser magazines in the ’50s and ’60s. One of the magazines he worked at was called Swank. His boss’s main job seemed to be the careful airbrushing of nipple aureoles out of photographs. Ironically, it was an excellent training ground. One of Mr. Friedman’s hires was a then-unknown Mario Puzo. After “The Godfather” came out, Puzo told interviewers that he learned the craft of storytelling at Magazine Management.

    Mr. Friedman starts this book by telling the story of one of his first screenplays, “Stir Crazy,” starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. The year was 1980. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times stank. Mr. Friedman was, understandably, depressed. What he really wanted to do was “bury the body.” But something compelled him to hail a New York City cab and go to a movie theater to see the mess. Problem was that at one cinema after another the tickets were sold out. “That was odd,” he writes. “Probably a benefit of some kind.”

    The same cab driver kept driving. Same response at other theaters. When Mr. Friedman got in touch with one of his sons, the report was: “Dad . . . people who couldn’t get tickets were rioting and breaking down the police barriers.” The bomb that Mr. Friedman thought he’d written turned out to be the biggest grossing comedy that Columbia had ever released.

    Yet he’s a bit embarrassed — all right, almost apologetic — about his Hollywood successes. And so he found himself bouncing back and forth between Hollywood and Elaine’s. The movie money was seductive, but his siren was the New York literary world. Along the way he hangs out with Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel, James Salter, and Puzo, to name just a few.

    He writes of Elaine’s restaurant as the Eden for writers. (Yes, I’m mixing plenty of metaphors here.) It was the watering hole where Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Woody Allen, and other writers hung out — some famous, some not so. And then there was Elaine herself — seemingly all steely business. She didn’t suffer fools gladly. But often when people paid in cash, the bills found their way into her décolleté and when a writer needed it, she could bail him out. Mr. Friedman writes charmingly of the night when someone asked for directions to the lavatory and she said, “Take a right at Michael Caine.”

    He relates the story of Norman Mailer’s date once complaining about the lighting at Elaine’s. The proprietor “belly-bumped” the young woman out onto the sidewalk. Mailer took offense and wrote Elaine a long, angry letter. Elaine’s response? “Boring, Norman!” He came back to the fold.

    In true picaresque style, few characters are developed in this book. But that makes sense: There’s just too much ground to cover in too short a time. Mr. Friedman notes the dissolution of his first marriage in a classy way, but we’re left to puzzle over what happened. He writes about his longtime marriage to his second wife, Pat, in darling terms — she’s the love of his life, he admits — and this was the fellow who wrote “The Lonely Guy” books before he met her. But we’d love to see her center stage just a bit more. This is a guy who, while he was working on the film “The Owl and the Pussycat,” had Natalie Wood — at the height of her career and between marriages to Robert Wagner — as his secretary! (A producer arranged it. Yes, there was a little nooky involved — but not too much.)

    On the other hand he doesn’t have a mean thing to say about anyone — and it’s a relief that after such a long, fruitful career he doesn’t feel the need to do any score settling. He has a great many huge financial coups, but seemingly the money disappears — okay, that tab for Elaine’s veal over all those years was pretty hefty. (Mario Puzo once puckishly advised him not to mention that he had to sell a horse during one reversal.) Mr. Friedman’s even cheerful when he learns that all of his income is going to his ex-wife.

    Along the way he frets that he wasn’t  really being taken seriously. He’s also very funny on the subject of writerly jealousies. Once he attended a party at Norman Mailer’s house. At the time, Mr. Friedman’s play “Scuba Duba” was on Broadway, where it stayed for several years, playing to packed audiences. Mailer circled Mr. Friedman calling out: “ ‘Scuba Duba’ sucks!” Mailer’s play “The Deer Park” had just received lousy notices. Yes, punches were thrown.

    The photos in the book are charming. Bruce Jay had to fight against type: He’s a tall, handsome, strapping fellow, shy, self-deprecating in a world of egotistical self-aggrandizers. This book is a true testament to decades of hard work, of perseverance. He may have been a lonely guy for a while — he tells us a little bit about affairs he had between marriages — and there were the times when he took a woman into the Magazine Management boss’s office after hours for hanky-panky, but on the whole Mr. Friedman comes across as a wholly decent, nice fellow.

    In true Don Quixote fashion he’s fascinated by everything going on around him. Everything is an adventure. But seen through a kaleidoscopic lens. When the head of the English department at York College, where he was about to teach, took him to meet his colleagues, he announced: “Friedman here is our new irony man.” As Mr. Friedman’s agent Candida Donadio once said: “You have a crazy head.”

    Oh, and all that revelation at the beginning of this review? You knew all along that was no real spoiler alert. This review began with the end, and so now it’s going to end with the beginning of “Lucky Bruce,” which opens with the following scene:

EXT. An apartment building in the Bronx. 1947.

Two mothers meet.

MRS. GIBSON: I’m so excited. My son Richie is off to study medicine at Kentucky.

MRS. FRIEDMAN: Congratulations.

MRS. GIBSON: What about Bruce?

MRS. FRIEDMAN: He’s going to be a writer.

MRS. GIBSON: (considers, shrugs) Oh well, we can’t always get what we want.

    Mr. Friedman writes that when his mother lay dying, she puffed a Chesterfield and announced: “Don’t have any sympathy for me, darling. I’ve had my fun.”

    Not only was Mrs. Friedman’s son lucky. He got what he wanted, and this memoir makes it clear that he’s also having plenty of fun.

—

    Laura Wells is a writer and editor who lives in Sag Harbor.

    The Sixth Annual East End Black Film Festival, organized by the African-American Museum of the East End, will be presented tonight and tomorrow night at the Southampton Cultural Center and at the Parrish Art Musuem on Saturday from 12:30 to 9 p.m.

    The program begins at 7 this evening with the free screening of “Men II  Boys” with a panel discussion to follow Tomorrow night the program shifts to spoken word and jazz performances by the band Touché and Dwayne Kerr, a jazz flutist, at 7 with a $10 suggested donation.

    The films include a variety of titles for children, families, and adults in both short and full-feature formats. A day pass is $10, admission is free for Parrish members.

    “Whitewash” from 1994 will open the program, a 26-minute animated short by Michael Sporn.  “Trouble in the Water” from 2009 by Roger Lee Edwards Jr. is a 17-minute consideration of self-mockery within the African-American community.

    The 1929 film “Hallelujah” was the first sound picture with an all-black cast, and an attempt by Hollywood to portray black rural life realistically. The 100-minute film was partially financed by the director, who put his own salary into the production when the studio deemed it a risky investment.

    “DNR,” a short film released in 2010, stars the writer and director David Martyn Conley, who plays a solider returning form Iraq to find his wife having an affair. At just 10 minutes, “Hairpiece” from 1984 is an animated satire of African-American women’s self image with a focus on hair.

    Two narrative features, “Cooley High” from 1975 and “Night Catches Us” from last year, complete the event. “Cooley High” has a loose multi-character structure and is somewhat autobiographical in capturing the sights and sounds of Chicago in 1964. The heroes are two students at a vocational high school.

    “Night Catches Us” was written and directed by Tanya Hamilton and takes audiences back to Philadelphia in 1976, where a man returns to his neighborhood after a long absence. His former ties with a black power group attract suspicion among his family and former neighbors as well as people from the movement who no longer trust him. The New York Times called the film a “complex story with admirable clarity and nuance, power as well as insight.”

    On Sunday, the museum will continue its Opera and Ballet in Cinema series with Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette,” an opera in five acts, at 2 p.m. The production from the 2008 Salzburg Festival in Austria runs approximately 170 minutes with one intermission. Tickets are $17 and $14 for Parrish members.            This production stars Rolando Villazon, whom Opera News called “the most talked-about and sought-after lyric tenor in the world.” His co0star is Nino Machaidze, a young Georgian soprano whose performance Opera News also praised.    

    Two South Fork architectural firms walked away with distinction at the 47th annual American Institute of Architects-Long Island Chapter Archi Awards ceremony on Oct. 19 in Huntington.

Bates Masi Architects, based in Sag Harbor, won in the single and multi-family residential category for Genius Loci, a house in Montauk. The firm also achieved a commendation for Robins Way, a house in Amagansett, which also won a residential lighting award sponsored by Enterprise Lighting Sales.

Stelle Architects, a firm from Bridgehampton, won a commendation in recognition of outstanding achievement in sustainable design for the Green Woods House in Amagansett. The firm also won a Sustainable Design Award for a residential project, sponsored by Green Logic.

The firms’ designs were chosen from some 65 submissions from all over Long Island. According to the chapter, each entry is judged on the success of the design solution presented and not in competition with the other entries.

    “The first time I saw the movie, it had a profound effect on me,” said Murphy Davis, the artistic director of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Mr. Davis is directing a stage version of Harper Lee’s classic drama “To Kill a Mockingbird” as part of the theater’s Literature Live series.

    The objective: to take the curriculums of East End schools to the stage.

    The play opens next Thursday with a school performance, and then will be presented to the public for the next three weekends, starting on Friday, Nov. 11, and Nov. 12.

    Published in 1960 in the midst of a burgeoning civil rights movement, the novel was loosely based on an actual event that occurred near the author’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala., in 1936.

    The story revolves around Scout, a tomboy, and her little brother, Jem, who are children when the book begins but gradually lose their innocence as they become aware of the racism and hate that predominate in their town, culminating with a black man put on trial for raping a white woman, a case their father, Atticus Finch, litigates.

    “To Kill a Mockingbird” went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the young Ms. Lee, who never published another novel, but who also was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, the highest civilian award, for her contribution to literature.

    Two years after it was published, the book was adapted into a film, which won Academy Awards for the screenwriter, Horton Foote, and for Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch, who has also been named “the greatest movie hero of the 20th century” by the American Film Institute. The movie also featured Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, in his screen debut.

    The challenge, Mr. Davis said, is working with something so iconic. “I’ve discussed it with the cast,” he said. “How do you make it immediate and in the moment when most of the audience know the story and know how it ends?”

    In spite of the familiarity of the piece, Mr. Davis said,  “it is universal and timeless. It deals with an unsettling view for the capacity to hate in our culture, but when I saw it as a kid, I was also changed by it.”

    “It was the first time I felt what it was to be a part of humanity, with its challenges and pitfalls and the triumphs that are possible,” said Mr. Davis.

    Literature Live at Bay Street is a program geared toward presenting books onstage that are currently being read by a majority of middle and high school students. “We offer three to five choices and we poll the schools to see what they’re interested in,” Mr. Davis said. “We want to keep this curriculum-based.” The program debuted two years ago with “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and last year Bay Street offered up a production of “The Miracle Worker,” based on the early life of Helen Keller.

    This production features some familiar East End faces, along with a few newcomers and some out-of-towners. The cast list includes Shonnese C.L. Coleman from New York City (Calpurnia), Lily Spellman from Hampton Bays (Scout), Susan Galardi from Sag Harbor (Miss Maudie), Keith Francis of Patchogue (Judge Taylor, Mr. Cunningham, Boo Radley), Seth Hendricks of Southampton (Heck Tate), Joanna Howard of Westhampton (Mayella Ewell), Joe Pallister of Sag Harbor (Bob Ewell), Myles Stokowsky of Sag Harbor (Jem), Hudson Galardi-Troy of Sag Harbor (Dill), Ken Foreman of New York City (Atticus Finch), McKinley Belcher III of New York City (Tom Robinson), and Scott Thomas Hinson of Southampton (Mr. Gilmer).

    “It’s been a treat working with talented local actors,” Mr. Davis said.

    Tickets for “To Kill a Mockingbird” cost $10 for students, $20 for adults, and are on sale at the Bay Street box office or online at baystreet.org. Performances will continue on Nov. 18, 25, and 26.

Hudson in New York

    The work of Judith Hudson, a part-time Amagansett resident, is now on view at Salomon Contemporary in West Chelsea. The show is called “Judith Hudson: Playboy Advisor” and includes works on paper from “Sex Advice Drawings.” This is a series that takes sex column dialogue and motifs and parodies them for maximum visual effect.

    French maids, cheerleaders, Kama Sutra positions, and nurse imagery are all adopted as images to explore sex and frame moralistic melodramas. According to the gallery “she turns tables, delights in discomfort, and ultimately sees comedy as empathy.”

    The show is up through Dec. 10.

Eleven to Show at Ashawagh

    Karyn Mannix is at it again, this time bringing 11 artists together in a show at Ashawagh Hall this weekend. In what she is calling “Eleven: A Pop Up,” she is including Zoe Breen, Maeve D’Arcy, Kristin Gale, Steve Haweeli, Setha Low, Dalton Portella, Jennifer Rich, Athos Zacharias, Steven Zaluski, Evan Zatti, and Zig.

    The artists will present work ranging from paintings and sculpture to photography and digital paintings. The show will open on Saturday afternoon at 1. There will be a 5 p.m. performance of “Master Vibration” by Kate Mueth and the Neo-Political Cowgirls. The program will consist of sketch dances based on ’80s rock videos with a $5 suggested donation at the door. A reception that evening from 6 to 8 will feature music by Mr. Portella.

Multimedia at Crazy Monkey

    Beginning today, the Crazy Monkey Gallery will present a new exhibit featuring Eileen Hickey-Hulme, Joanna Paitchell-Lee, Barbara  Bilotta, and Dianne Marxe, all of whom project a strong artistic vision as well as different approaches to artmaking.

    Ms. Hickey-Hulme takes feminist and surreal themes and infuses them with a touch of fabulousness, using lipstick, nail polish, and glitter to express herself in hot colors. Recurring subjects are nudes, roses, rugs, and ceramics.

    Ms. Paitchell-Lee works in oil, gouache, charcoal, and clay. When painting, she likes large and colorful images, whether it’s a portrait, still life, or allegory.

    Ms. Bilotta considers herself an abstract impressionist, attempting to use color theory to inspire her imagination.

    Ms. Marxe is a sculptor who works in wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, often depicting animals in her pieces, one of which was accepted for an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

    There will be an opening reception  on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m, and the show will be on view through Nov. 27.

Perle Fine’s Color Field

    Spanierman Modern is opening a show of Perle Fine’s work, focusing on Color Field paintings. “The Cool Series (1961-1963)” will examine how art changed in the 1960s, evolving from the Abstract Expressionist movement into something less angst-filled and more tranquil.

    Fine, who had a key role in the earlier movement, found herself wanting her paintings to express more and used form and color to do so. This is the first time this series has been seen publicly since the paintings were first presented in 1963 and 1964. The show was organized by Christine Berry with a catalog by Lisa N. Peters. The show is on view through Dec. 10.

The Pollock Family

    Jason McCoy Gallery has collaborated with the Charles Pollock Archives in Paris to present “American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock and Family,” an exhibit composed of painting, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and letters on view through Dec. 16.

    The exhibit marks the publication of the book by the same title, which collects the correspondence among the five Pollock brothers: Charles, Marvin Jay, Frank, Sanford, and Jackson and their parents and wives during a time of both economic privations and the upheaval of war. It also captures a time rarely examined in Pollock’s career before his early successes in New York.

    Artworks by Jackson and Charles Pollock dominate the exhibit, which also includes examples by mentors and influences such as Thomas Hart Benton, his wife Rita Benton, and Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

    How they do go on, the guides, the advisers, the gurus, those beguiling blossoms on TV screens, those eruptions in print in newspapers, shining from the pages of glossies, becoming distinguished, often quoted, held in highest reverence, reputed to have the power to turn whole lives around, stamp out ignorance, ministerially lead the uninformed into the New Zion of knowledge, turn amateurs into professionals the way water was once turned into gold. We live in an era of foolproof gardening and, if your plot looks shabby or undernourished, you simply have not followed sweet reason or listened to the advice that swirls around you like a warm and aromatic embrace.

    There are Emily Posts at the garden gate counseling green deportment like huggable old grandmothers exuding cordials and jams and storied gardens of immense, unstoppable bloom and charm. Through our lecture halls they go, endlessly pouring out wisdom whether it be the most auspicious moment of the tides or phases of the moon to plant seeds, or the easiest, fastest way to make the most nutritious compost soft as down and as colorful as cocoa, or find the best plant for the worst location (You Too Can Grow Orchids in Maine!), how to stamp out invasives, woo butterflies, grow the old and the rarest and the finest heirloom tomato that ever graced a salad, find Gertrude Jekyll’s original color scheme for her very first long border. . . .

    A certain aesthetician has reportedly found Monet’s secret manure formula and will impart it to you for a fee and a vow of silence. And, under the Fool Proof Gardening section of your bookstore, Amanda Allurement’s recent classic, Drop Dead Gardening, is now released on tape as well. You may recall that Amanda, in her salad days, launched the first Away series: Away With Bugs, Away With Weeds, Away With Blank Spots in the Garden, Away With Backache and Broken Nails, all of which gave birth to the Care Free series so that we were blessed with Care Free Perennials, Annuals, Bulbs, Bushes, Trees. . . . Some of the chapters read: All About Lima Beans, Up-to-Date With Vintage Flowers, Never Prune Again, Natural Remedies (Twig Slaw, Pebble Soup, Sassafras and the Common Cold, Rhododendron Honey for the Insomniac — Alexander the Great’s Secret Recipe), Ethnobotany for City Dwellers, Mulch That Barbershop!, Seasoning With Leftover Seeds (Parsley and Poppy Seed Soup), Let Your Beans Flop (Taking the Girdle Off the Garden), Corn in Your Window Box, Rutabaga: The Miracle Veggie, The Little Beet That Could, The Story of Ketchup, What to Wear When You Hoe, Holy Hollyhocks (Faith and Flowers), Money, Madness and Manure (The Dark Side of Mulch), The Cucumber That Took Cincinnati, The Search for the Peeled Potato, Will We Ever See a Square Pea? And one I might write: The Salads of Central Park.

    John Pomianowski does not pose as a painter. In talking about his work on Saturday at the Out East Gallery in Montauk, his speech was as refreshingly free of opaque jargon as his paintings are free of schooled artifice.

A visitor to the gallery attempted to lure him into a discussion of the light the East End was famous for among plein-air painters past and, presumably, present. The oils and watercolors large and small, mostly seascapes, now hanging at the gallery are full of light. The oils were done in the late 1990s.  

The light question drew a smile. Mr. Pomianowski began making Montauk his home in the late 1970s. “I came for the waves. I didn’t come here for the light, but I found it. The light is beautiful in Hawaii, too, and Indonesia has light,” he said, naming two of the many places around the world he has traveled to for waves.

For the past few years, he has traveled with a small watercolor kit. While introducing groups of watercolors done in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Montauk, Mr. Pomianowski spoke about how the spontaneity of working in the medium was not solely his own, that the atmosphere, including raindrops, contributed.

    “The brushstroke captures the air, it’s not deliberate,” he said, pointing to an Indonesian seascape, its colors obviously muted by humidity. Watercolors of Montauk beaches in fall exhibit sharper lines, brighter light. “The paper can absorb and capture the light.”

    The artist also noted how the details in his watercolors done in Sumba, Indonesia, were centered, an “unconscious nod to the spiritual feeling of the place,” he said he realized after the fact.

    Did he find his watercolor work liberating? He did, he said. The challenge was holding back. “In watercolor you can only add color, one brushstroke can be too much. I try to stay empty-headed. I try to be the filter to what I’m seeing.”

    Working in oil was the other side of freedom, he said. The oils can be re-worked for days, weeks, months, or years to evoke the memory of a given day. “Time is built into the canvas. You can see the history on the surface.”

    Both techniques work extremely well. And, speaking of light, the Out East Gallery with its windows welcoming the afternoon light that pours off Fort Pond Bay is perfectly suited to kindling Mr. Pomianowski’s colors and supporting his strong compositions. The Out East show will continue through Wednesday. 

    What’s next in oil? The artist said he was breaking with the horizontal plane of most land and seascapes in favor of studio work, still lifes, and figures. He intends to continue traveling for waves with his watercolor kit close at hand.

    Matthew Broderick and even his interviewer, Alec Baldwin, revealed much about themselves and their careers in a freewheeling discussion on Saturday at Guild Hall that included some surprises and surprisingly candid insights on hits, flops, directors, and Marlon Brando. The talk was part of the Hamptons International Film Festival Conversations series.

    Mr. Broderick, who has a house in Amagansett, has been in a vast assortment of films, including “War Games,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Glory,” “Election,” and the phenomenally successful play and movie remakes of “The Producers.”

    The discussion actually was a conversation: unwieldy, funny, and candid at times, two actors basically shooting the breeze about their craft and recounting their experiences to each other while a packed audience looked on. “This is more about me, though,” Mr. Broderick joked at one point when Mr. Baldwin once again used his own experience as an introduction to a question. Later, when Mr. Broderick directed a question back to him, Mr. Baldwin parried with “but this is about you.”

     Mr. Broderick grew up in an acting family. His father, James Broderick, who died at the age of 55, early in his son’s career, was most commonly known for his role as the father on the television series “Family.” At the time of his father’s death, Mr. Broderick had already broken through with roles in “Broadway Bound” on stage and the movie “War Games.” Still, he said, “I don’t remember that as a joyous time.” Mr. Baldwin said his father died at 55, also early in his own acting career.

    According to Mr. Broderick, it was during the filming of “Ladyhawke” in 1985 when he finally felt he had arrived. “It was my first time overseas,” filming in Cinecitta studios in Rome. “I remember seeing Michelle Pfeiffer there leaning out a window I think with a cigarette.  .  .  . She was so incredibly gorgeous in this Italian light and I thought, ‘I’ve made it.’ ”

    The two candidly discussed movies that they thought would be very good and ended up being disappointing, such as “The Road to Wellville,” directed by Alan Parker. “That was an example of the best intentions and, I don’t think I’m alone in saying this, did not work out,” Mr. Broderick said. It was a film based on a T.C. Boyle novel. “I loved the book and was thrilled to be cast. It had Alan Parker, the best design people, a wonderful cast, and the movie was just silly and not as good as the book.”

    In noting the differences between film and theater, Mr. Broderick recalled, “I was working with Donald Sutherland and he said he just does what the director wants because [film] is a director’s medium.” He added that a director can make a film much better or much worse depending on his or her approach. “It’s very mysterious when it all goes together. I find it extremely unpredictable.”

    Mr. Baldwin said that he avoided “giving in to folks that don’t have my full confidence.” Yet, “you realize you’re not the one calling the shots. . . . You don’t want them in the cutting room hating you.”

    Mr. Broderick added, “You have to give them whatever it is they want that, to some degree, you like, too.” He especially enjoyed working with the directors Herbert Ross, Alexander Payne, and John Hughes, he said.

    Hughes, who died in 2009, directed Mr. Broderick in “Ferris Bueller.” He was an example of someone who “was so tuned in to my performance. He was hilariously funny and quiet.” Although he could get mad at times, “he was the most easy person for me to work with” and receptive to ideas, too. Mr. Baldwin remembered that he was the only director he knew of who used cue cards during filming for notes.

    Another film milestone for Mr. Broderick was working with Marlon Brando in “The Freshman.” Mr. Broderick said “nobody ever really thought Brando would show up. At least I didn’t. We got to rehearsal and he wasn’t there and they said, ‘He’s on his way.’ And I said ‘Yeah, he’s on his way, whatever.’ ” Then he arrived, not that late and on his knees apologizing. Mr. Broderick was not certain of this memory, but he said he believed he was in a velour sweatsuit with sunglasses and possibly a cowboy hat.

    He said he was surprised that Brando would just sit down and read the script like the other actors. “Every now and then he was not in the best mood and you would be careful around him, but most of the time he was cheerful and an absolute thrill to act with.” He recalled that the actor said on set that he hadn’t had “an honest moment with another person in 40 years, because he felt people treated him like Marlon Brando.”

    Mr. Baldwin added his own recollection of a conversation he had with the actor at his house. “He said, ‘We’re like two dogs, you and I, sniffing each other. . . . Why don’t you just say whatever it is you want to say and I’ll say what I want.’ I think he was used to people being in awe of him and creating an artificial environment around him.”

    According to Mr. Baldwin, one of the most explosive moments he had ever witnessed in theater was the opening night of “The Producers” in Manhattan. “People almost blew the roof off the building from the applause. They laughed from beginning to end. They had the time of their lives.”

    Mr. Broderick said he really liked doing plays, something in front of an audience that goes from beginning to end, unlike films, which are rarely shot sequentially. They knew from the beginning in a test preview in Chicago that they had a hit. “We just had a little piece of an audience and they went crazy right from the beginning. . . . Even the bad jokes are hilarious, apparently.”

    At one point toward the end of the conversation, a distraught guest interrupted the questions from the audience to implore the actors to help her with various government agencies plotting against her. She was escorted out by security. Mr. Baldwin defused the situation with humor, saying that the “big burly gentleman behind you would like to get some information from you now.”

    Mr. Broderick was next asked how he met his wife and he said, “Sure, right after I’m assassinated” to much laughter. He actually met Sarah Jessica Parker through her brother, who worked with the Naked Angels theater company at the same time he did. “She would come around to rehearsal and I met her that way.” They lived together for a few years, then got married in 1997.

Focus on Materials

    The Southampton Cultural Center’s fall exhibit, which opens today, will turn a spotlight on materials in the work of several artists, whether they have created those materials or repurposed them for their art.

    “Material Matters” brings together the sculpture of artists such as James DeMartis, Don Saco, Eric Ernst, Margaret Kerr, James Gemake, and Robert Skinner. Arnold Hoffmann Jr., who is known more for his printmaking, is represented here with two balsa wood constructions he made in the 1960s.

    Carol Hunt’s weaving of wool, silk, and feathers has become a recent mode of expression for her, an alternative to her usual modes of painting and printmaking. Gabriele Raacke’s images are made by painting acrylic on glass. Alexander Russo’s early works incorporate strips of canvas, rope, and sand, whereas Roseann Schwab contributes small collages of painted, cut, and torn papers.

    A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The exhibit is on view through Nov. 20.

Death Be Not Proud

    Death and mourning in the mid to late 19th century is the subject of a new exhibit called “In Memory of . . .” at the Bridgehampton Historical Society’s Corwith House. It opens tomorrow with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Black attire is optional.

    The show examines how the death of Prince Albert in England in 1861 plunged Queen Victoria and that country into a period of mourning that lasted all of her life. The resulting cult of mourning spread to America.

    The exhibit will include materials depicting Victorian mourning customs based on rules that society felt compelled to follow. Widowed women were the focus and were expected to grieve for as long as two and a half years with clothing styles indicating their particular stage of mourning. At home, black crepe on the front door alerted passers-by that the household was in mourning. Mirrors and paintings were often covered as well.

    The exhibit will include clothes and accessories and period artifacts. It will remain open through February.

“Hunting and Fishing”

Draws to a Close

    The Southampton Historical Museum will mark the close of its “10,000 Years of Hunting and Fishing in Southampton” with a curator’s talk on Saturday at 4 p.m.

    David Bunn Martine, who organized the exhibit, will discuss Long Island’s earliest settlers and how they went about their food harvesting, later teaching the English colonists how to survive off the land. Mr. Martine is the director of the Shinnecock Indian Nation Cultural Center and Museum.

    The exhibit includes remnants such as arrowheads, more modern tools, and graphics to show how the Europeans and Native Americans worked together to meld their customs to ensure their survival and flourish in a punishing environment.

    The exhibit is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Saturday, with a reception following on Saturday with the talk and refreshments.

Ross Teachers Do

    The Ross School will present “Art + Media: A Faculty Exhibition” beginning tomorrow with a reception from 3:45 to 5 p.m. at the Ross Gallery on the Upper School campus in East Hampton. The show features works from faculty members in the Lower, Middle, and Upper Schools.

    Ned Smyth will display photo documentation of his large-scale site installations from around the country. Jennifer Cross, who is the school’s visual arts chairwoman, will show oil paintings that are meditations on loss, memory, and the passage of time. MaryJo Allegra will display two small landscapes that use vivid color. Jon Mulhern will show two energetic, painterly abstractions.

    Alexis Martino, the head of media at Ross, will show a portrait as well as a collaborative work with Kerry Sharkey-Miller, who also will have her own work on view. Paintings by Kenneth Kilfara, a figurative mixed-media work by Christopher Engel, and photographs of children at play by Michele Claeys round out the exhibit.