Drunken Writers Celebrate Drunken Writer Den
Lushy journalists turned out in force for Jack Bryan's documentary on the storied, now-shuttered hole of a watering hole Siberia when the flick premiered last night at Soho House. Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers, former Page Sixer Chris Wilson, The New York Observer's George Gurley, publicist / bigtime author Sloane Crosley and a host of other party-loving media types showed up to watch themselves and their colleagues ramble nostalgically about the place that ruined so many young livers. Sadly, one member of that crowd was home with a mystery illness. "Former 'Page Six' reporter Ian Spiegelman opens the film: 'I don't even know how you could make a documentary about Siberia,' he says. 'I don't know how people have any memories of what happened there.'"
"Siberia was the kind of place you went to drink to forget. 'It's where I went to forget that earlier that day I showed up to cover a party for Freddie Prinze Jr. and Freddie Prinze Jr.'s publicist told me that he wasn't doing interviews,' offered Spiegelman.
"But some memories remain: 'One time [owner] Tracy [Westmoreland] interrupted our conversation to go throw some guy in a Dumpster and then returned to our conversation,' says former 'Page Six' scribe and current Maxim editor Chris Wilson. One of his fondest recollections of the bar is the night he did shots with CNN's Lou Dobbs.
"Another is the time when, just for fun, Westmoreland ordered his clients to hurl his entire inventory - several thousand dollars worth of alcohol - against the wall. 'I put it up in the pantheon with Max's Kansas City, CBGB, Mudd Club," said Wilson. 'I think they all occupy the same shadow of awesomeness.'
"''The first time I went down into the basement I thought, How can there not be a body down there?' said author and book publicist Sloane Crosley. 'It looked like Silence of the Lambs.'" [NYM]