Adam Green Wants to Do a Papier-Mâché Remake of ‘Aladdin’ With Macaulay Culkin

AUGUST 7, 2013BY ANNA SILMAN

Adam Green in front of one of his paintings (Photo: Anna Silman)

Last night, Adam Green of the Moldy Peaches came together with other local artists and designers for the opening night of the Deep End Club, Tennessee Thomas’s new collaborative creative space and cool-kid hangout (and store!) next to a Repeat Performance.

The NYU-dorm-room-sized space was packed with local artsy types whose resumes read like a list of aspirational hipster dream jobs. New-age philosopher, psychedelic-drug aficionado and bestselling author Daniel Pinchbeck was filming for his upcoming talk show, “Mind Shift.” Meanwhile, Thomas — former drummer for The Like, Vogue “Girl About Town,” and daughter of Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas — handed out plastic cups of bubbly and oatmeal cookies.

Thomas told B+B that she envisions the Deep End Club as a sort of creative hub for her friends in the local arts scene.

“I kept walking past empty shops and kept fantasizing about doing something that featured all my friends in the local scene,” she explained. “People come to New York hoping to find this kind of stuff and we have to battle with all the high street that’s taking over the world.”

One of the local designers whose clothing was on display was Andrea Diodati, who got her start on the reality show Joe Zee’s All On the Lineand now does a diffusion line for Anthropologie. Jewelery designer Meghan Farrell (who met Thomas because they’re both part-time DJs) displayed a line of jewelry inspired by “the medical sciences mixed with love stories.”

And then of course there was Mr. Green, whose bushy beard and trucker hat reminded us of a svelte Judah Friedlander. We finally got to ask him the question we’d been mulling all week– what exactly is a cat sarcophagus?

“I was originally looking at a canopic jar – they have them in the Met – which is an Egyptian jar where they would keep the internal organs preserved. So it’s kind of like originally a giant version of a canopic jar,” he explained. And the cat component? “Well I’ve just always been really attracted to Garfield because I think he was my entry-point into a decadent lifestyle.”

We talked a little about Green’s upcoming plans, which are exactly what you might imagine from an anti-folk musician slash cat sarcophagus maker slash dabbling filmmaker (he released his debut film The Wrong Ferarri, which he shot solely on his iPhone, in 2011).

“I’m doing a movie that’s my own version of Aladdin, and I’ll be Aladdin.” Green said. “Macaulay Culkin will play a leader of a rebel group, Alia Shawkat is gonna play my sister and I think Natasha Lyonneis going to play my mom. And my hope is to get Benicio del Toro to play the genie, but I don’t know him, so, I don’t know.”

If this sounds like a psychedelic fever dream, it’s because it probably started out as one — Green got the idea for his last movie while high on ketamine. 

“I think I’ll probably film a lot of it in the East Village and make a lot of the sets myself, maybe out of papier-mâché,” he continued.

If this is to be believed, Bushwick’s Wizard of Oz is gonna have some competition for most avant-garde children’s movie revival ever.

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