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balong

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the queen of versailles
« on: October 10, 2012, 08:23:49 PM »
The Unreal Housewife of Orlando:
The Queen of Versailles
by John Powers



“The rich are different than you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, to which Ernest Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” It’s hard not to think that they’re both right while watching The Queen of Versailles, Lauren Greenfield’s highly amusing (if occasionally slippery) new documentary that uses the rise and fall of a billionaire and his wife as a metaphor for a pre-crash America in which millions didn’t just live beyond their means but did it on a grand scale.

Nobody did it grander than David and Jackie Siegel, an exhibitionistic Orlando couple whose gaudy, gilded lives could have been scripted by some brilliantly opportunistic producer hoping for a show on Bravo. In the opening 45 minutes, we watch the Siegels (whose fortune comes from selling time-share resorts) prove that there’s absolutely no connection between wealth and taste. Seeing themselves as dreamers rather than vulgarians, they are building their fantasy home, a 90,000-square-foot mansion modeled on Versailles that, when completed, will be the largest single-family house in the United States. (To put this in perspective, that’s nearly three times the size of Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street was protesting the gap between the richest 1 percent and the rest of us.) When they’re not buying things—and for the Siegels, shopping is almost a sacrament—they’re hosting beauty pageant contestants, whom the seventysomething David ogles and flirts with, while joking with the 40-year-old Jackie about trading her in for two 20-year-olds.

Then the financial crisis hits. David develops “cash-flow problems” and the dream home becomes a $100 million folly. Suddenly the Siegels must cut back, laying off servants, losing their private jet, and betraying a sense of reality so gaga you think they have to be kidding. “How did you like your first time flying commercial?” Jackie asks one of her young sons at one point, and then heads off to Hertz where she’s startled that her rental car doesn’t come with a driver. Where David seems like a flat-out creep—he hints vaingloriously about helping George W. Bush steal Florida in the 2000 election—Jackie appears to have a warm heart beating beneath her cartoonishly enhanced chest. Indeed, this onetime beauty queen is rather likable, although her level of blind cluelessness about the world around her makes Marie Antoinette look like Hillary Clinton. Not that we feel much sympathy. After all, Jackie and her husband could be the poster couple for the underlying immorality of the mortgage crisis: The Siegels made their fortune by urging people far poorer than themselves into chasing the fantasy of living like kings; that is, they got them to sign contracts they could never afford.

Not surprisingly, the world has moved on since The Queen of Versailles first premiered (and won Greenfield a directing prize) at Sundance. The Siegels have not only complained that the film presents events out of sequence to make them look bad, but David has filed a lawsuit, claiming that the film defamed him by implying that his company, Westgate Resorts, was on the verge of bankruptcy. In fact, he says, his business is doing so well that they’re now finishing up that whopping mansion.

All of which brings us back to Fitzgerald and to the ending of The Great Gatsby, whose nouveau riche hero has been pursuing the fantasy he associates with the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. “Gatsby believed in the green light,” Fitzgerald tells us, “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.” The Siegels’ dream of transcendence may be misguided, even silly, but what makes it engrossing is that it’s so profoundly American.


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Re: the queen of versailles
« Reply #1 on: October 10, 2012, 08:24:44 PM »
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balong

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Re: the queen of versailles
« Reply #2 on: October 10, 2012, 08:25:46 PM »


david siegel and his wife jackie

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Re: the queen of versailles
« Reply #3 on: October 10, 2012, 08:26:34 PM »
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Re: the queen of versailles
« Reply #4 on: October 10, 2012, 08:29:37 PM »
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Re: the queen of versailles
« Reply #5 on: October 10, 2012, 08:32:33 PM »
The Queen of Versailles: farewell to the American dream
The recession turned The Queen of Versailles, a documentary attempting to chronicle the excesses of America’s super-rich, into something much more affecting, finds David Gritten.


In 2007, American photographer Lauren Greenfield hit on an idea for a documentary film: one that would shine a light on the conspicuous consumption practised by the country’s most wealthy people.
Greenfield knew it would be ideal to concentrate on one super-rich family, and she got lucky: at a Beverly Hills reception thrown by Versace, she met and befriended Jackie Siegel, wife of billionaire timeshare mogul David Siegel. She photographed one of Jackie’s handbags, an absurdly expensive number (it became one of Time magazine’s photos of the year), and began following her around.
For a documentary maker, Jackie Siegel was pure gold – friendly and co-operative, gossipy and candid. And she looked exactly as you’d expect a super-rich trophy wife to look: in her forties, a former beauty queen with blonde hair, a golden tan and a formidable cleavage.
Yet what clinched the Siegels as ideal subjects for Greenfield was their extraordinary ambition. They had plans to build the largest single-family home in the United States, near Orlando, Florida – a 90,000 sq ft palace with 15 bedrooms, 30 bathrooms, 11 kitchens, six pools, a full-service health spa, indoor skating rink and a stadium tennis court seating 200 people. It would be loosely modelled on the floor plan of Versailles – though Louis XVI had overlooked the need for a sushi kitchen – and named after it.
Greenfield began shooting Jackie, David, their eight children and their grotesquely opulent lifestyle.

But then events conspired to change the Siegels’ plans and Greenfield’s film profoundly. In 2008 the global recession hit, economies collapsed and banks cut back on lending. According to the film, David Siegel had been relaxed about the amount of debt he was carrying, but now the fortunes of Westgate, his timeshare corporation, began to plummet.
Now Greenfield had an arguably even more compelling subject – a “riches to rags story”, as David Siegel called it. Thus the first section of The Queen of Versailles is a detached, mildly amused cinéma verité account of people with unimaginable wealth. But it becomes the story of a family forced to cope with an apparent catastrophic reduction in their circumstances.
Initially, the Siegels seem far from sympathetic people. Their excesses mark them as greedy, thoughtless and arrogant. David, who is 31 years older than his wife, would commission vanity portraits of them, one of which features him dressed in a king’s robe; others represent the couple as characters from Ancient Rome. At one point he alludes to his influence in getting George W Bush elected in 2000, but then clams up, saying: “It might not necessarily have been legal.”
But it’s part of Greenfield’s skill that one does come to feel for the Siegels, even if their financial problems – including their household staff being reduced from 15 to one – seem like ones most of us would be happy to handle.
The film, Greenfield says, “started out as a morality tale about the American dream and our values, and ended up being more affecting. People might not have related to David and Jackie at all if they had just stayed up there.”
Indeed. It’s sobering how rapidly the Siegels’ luxury lifestyle collapses into seeming squalor without a small army of retainers to maintain it. The eight children, unused to tidying up after themselves, soon leave the house (a mere 26,000
sq ft) looking shabby and untidy: the family’s countless pets relieve themselves on floors and carpets, and their mess stays where it is. Holed up in a relatively small room stacked with his office documents, David Siegel appears slowly to sink into depression as he tries to improve the fortunes of his business empire.
The hapless Jackie teeters around on high heels, unable to cope. She can barely cook, or take care of the children. Yet curiously, one warms to her. Greenfield certainly did: “She’s really smart, she has an engineering degree, but she realised her beauty would take her further. She has a warm heart, she has fun with her kids. But domestic skills are not her strong point.”
In the film, David Siegel insisted he would dig himself out of his economic hole if it took him his whole life, but Greenfield chose to stop shooting her film last November. This was the point that Siegel’s company sold its interest in its flagship property – an imposing tower block in Las Vegas which had remained empty. By this time Westgate had laid off thousands of employees and the Siegels had given up hope of ever moving into Versailles and put the still-unfinished house on the market.
The Queen of Versailles, which is partly financed by the BBC’s Storyville documentary strand, opened the Sundance Festival to rave reviews; Greenfield picked up a directing award. The film opened in the US last month, and is a hit on the independent art-house circuit.
But Greenfield’s dealings with the Siegels don’t end there. While Jackie has professed herself delighted with The Queen of Versailles and has accompanied the director to screenings of the film, David is deeply unhappy with it. He is suing Greenfield for defamation, claiming that Westgate remains a profitable company and that the film is “a self-serving reality TV narrative rather than a true and honest documentary”. Greenfield and her legal advisers are confident David’s claim has no merit.
Still, The Queen of Versailles does share with the best of reality TV a certain car-crash quality; you can’t turn your gaze away from the Siegels’ astonishing fall from grace.
As for Versailles, it remains unfinished and unsold. But it could be yours for $65 million.


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Re: the queen of versailles
« Reply #6 on: October 10, 2012, 08:44:23 PM »
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