From Dailybeast.com:
Jean-Michel Basquiat was young when he reached the apex of his fame and then overdosed on heroin in his downtown New York City studio. But it’s easy to forget just how young: he was an international sensation by the age of 23; by 25 he was a millionaire; by 26 he had a nasty heroin habit and was making what critics were calling “late work,” even then; by 27 he was dead.
Art historians, patrons, and survivors of that 1980s downtown scene have attributed the artist’s rise and cataclysmic fall to a wide variety of factors—from a botched relationship with his father to the fact that Basquiat, despite all his fame, struggled to find lasting acceptance in the high art world (something that has, of course, changed significantly since his death in 1988). Basquiat’s story was told to some extent in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 dramatization, Basquiat, but a new documentary by Tamra Davis (director of such films as Half Baked, Billy Madison, and Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads, and wife of Beastie Boys’ Mike D.) seeks to fill in some of the holes.
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