Hulu Adds The Maysles’ Grey Gardens & The Beales Of Grey Gardens To Their Criterion Collection Channel

Apparently, if there is one thing that Hulu likes more than putting Criterion releases on their online streaming outlet, it’s taking the best documentaries from the collection in particular.

Just a week or so after the release of the Les Blank directed Fitzcarraldo documentary, Burden Of Dreams, onto their website, they have picked up not one, but two stunning films, in the form of both Grey Gardens and The Beales Of Grey Gardens.

Both films look at the lives of aunt and cousin to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, ‘Big’ Edie and ‘Little’ Edie Beale. The pair of films are also helmed by the fantastic duo of Albert and David Maysles, and also gives a deep look into the world that was Grey Gardens. ‘Big’ and ‘Little’ Edie had a relationship that could be at some points loving, and at others completely full of anger, all while living in a horribly decrepit mansion located in East Hampton.

The Beales Of Grey Gardens is the follow up to Grey Gardens, which itself recently received an award winning, and truly fantastic, live action neo-adaptation, and while it’s not quite as ambitious as a film like Burden Of Dreams, as pieces of documentary filmmaking, you would be hard pressed to find a pair of better films. Beales plays as a fantastic companion piece to what many see as a focal point in the history of documentary filmmaking.

And you really can’t argue with that free price point. Do not pass this one up.

Source: Hulu

Grey Gardens

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale’”high-society dropouts, mother and daughter, reclusive cousins of Jackie O.’”thriving together amid the decay and disorder of their ramshackle East Hampton mansion. An impossibly intimate portrait and an eerie echo of the Kennedy Camelot, Albert and David Maysles’s 1976 Grey Gardens quickly became a cult classic and established Little Edie as a fashion icon and philosopher queen.

Disc Features

New digital transfer
Audio commentary by filmmakers Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer, and Susan Froemke
Excerpts from a recorded interview with Little Edie Beale by Kathryn G. Graham for Interview magazine (1976)
Video interviews with fashion designers Todd Oldham and John Bartlett on the influence of Grey Gardens
Behind-the-scenes photographs
Trailers
Filmographies
English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired

Grey Gardens

The Beales Of Grey Gardens

The 1976 cinema vérité classic Grey Gardens, which captured in remarkable close-up the lives of the eccentric East Hampton recluses Big and Little Edie Beale, has spawned everything from a midnight-movie cult following to a Broadway musical, to an upcoming Hollywood adaptation. The filmmakers then went back to their vaults of footage to create part two, The Beales of Grey Gardens, a tribute both to these indomitable women and to the original landmark documentary’s legions of fans, who have made them American counterculture icons.

Disc Features