10/30/2009 - Legendary hotel's wild days are over in 'Chelsea' - STLtoday.com

10/30/2009 - Legendary hotel's wild days are over in 'Chelsea' - STLtoday.com

For more than a hundred years, the Chelsea was a bohemian roach motel: Artists checked in, but they never checked out. Abel Ferrara, the bootstrap director best known for "Bad Lieutenant," recounts and re-creates the history of the hotel in his first documentary, "Chelsea on the Rocks."

Although the Chelsea has hosted luminaries such as Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Joni Mitchell and Dylan Thomas (who died there), Ferrara focuses on the semipermanent struggling artists who gave the place its peculiar charm. It's a cheap, vicarious high to hear these unidentified denizens reminisce about the orgies and overdoses that seem to have been included with the rent. Sphere: Related Content