Jork Weismann: Asleep at the Chateau

The Chateau Marmont is a hotel whose name is rarely seen in print without "legendary" tacked onto it. It's a great gothic tower tucked away just above Sunset Boulevard. The seven-story Chateau (as locals call it) was designed after France's Château d'Amboise and was built in 1929 as a deluxe apartment building, but the Depression changed all that. The apartments were transformed into the hotel as we know it today, and since its inception it has been a beacon for the artistically inclined of Los Angeles. It's the hotel that Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, warned William Holden and Glenn Ford, "If you are going to get in trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont." And what trouble ensued: John Belushi died of a drug overdose there; a young Rock Hudson struck up his first love affair with the hotel manager's nephew; Led Zeppelin rode their motorcycles through the lobby; fashion photographer Helmut Newton died there after his car crashed into a wall on the driveway. It's where Elizabeth Taylor took Montgomery Clift to recuperate after his was almost killed in an auto accident--and in 2008, D.A.P. threw an outrageous BEA party in one of the suites.
The first question people always ask when you tell them you've visited the Chateau is "Who did you see?" For me, it's the go-to place to take any out-of-towner who wants to see celebrities. As you can see it's impossible to talk about the Chateau Marmont without namedropping. So what better setting for a celebrity book than this legendary hotel. Here, trendy, ultra-hip photographer Jork Weismann dreamed up the idea of photographing celebrities asleep at the hotel. After all, the ultimate purpose of any hotel-no matter how legendary or bohemian-is sleep.
The book is filled with film, music and television celebrities like Orlando Bloom, Patti Smith, Richard Lewis, Morrissey, as well as artists and writers Juergen Teller, T Magazine editor Sally Singer and Brett Easton Ellis (who writes the book's foreword). The book also pays homage to the fabled hotel by beautifully capturing its eccentric and bohemian rooms and interiors, giving you access to just about every one of those $600+ a night rooms, bungalows and cottages. Like Sam Taylor-Wood's Crying Men, this is an unusual celebrity portrait book, and like Aperture's successful Erwin Olaf monograph, it's highly stylized. There are a couple of non-fiction books on the Chateau Marmont, but this is the only available illustrated book. -- Jane Brown
Artbook | D.A.P. Staff