Ig­or Strav­in­sky lived in the heart of Hol­ly­wood from 1939 un­til shortly be­fore his death in 1971 - longer than in any oth­er single place. He came ex­pect­ing to find luc­rat­ive work com­pos­ing for the movies. Al­though ini­tially at­trac­ted to the cul­tur­al im­prim­at­ur of Strav­in­sky’s repu­ta­tion, the Hol­ly­wood Stu­di­os soon dis­covered that what they couldn’t con­trol, they couldn’t use. And as quickly as they sucked him in, they spat him out.

STRAV­IN­SKY IN HOL­LY­WOOD ex­plores the short-lived film ca­reer of this le­gendary com­poser, it is the story of his tri­als and tribu­la­tions with the Hol­ly­wood Stu­di­os, the story of an “old school” European artist knock­ing heads with the brash New World.

Dur­ing the lat­ter part of his life, he shared the prop­erty with his close friend Robert Craft. In Marco Cap­albo’s doc­u­ment­ary, the now ninety-year-old Craft emerges as a know­ledge­able wit­ness of con­tem­por­ary events. Cap­albo also uses ori­gin­al film ma­ter­i­al and re­cre­ated se­quences to pro­duce a vivid and highly per­son­al pic­ture of Strav­in­sky’s life from the 1940s till his death in 1971.

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