There hasn’t been much news about the much-anticipated Jean-Michel Basquiat biopic Samo Lives since the film was first announced in January 2022. (Filming was supposed to have begun that fall.) But earlier this week, New York blog EV Grieve noted signs alerting neighbors that filming has begun around the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park.
Samo Lives is directed by Julius Onah, whose credits include The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) and Luce (2019), and stars Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Basquiat. No other actors have been announced yet, though based on EV Grieve’s grainy photos, someone has been cast to play Basquiat’s friend and frequent collaborator, Andy Warhol.
Basquiat’s connection to the East Village is well-established. He lived in several apartments in the neighborhood over the years, and frequently scrawled Samo© (his graffiti tag) on buildings along the Bowery. He rented an apartment and studio space from Warhol at 57 Great Jones from 1983 until his death in 1988, at age 27. That building, now rented by Angelina Jolie for her Atelier Jolie endeavor, is a 15-minute walk west from where Samo Lives is currently filming.
It will be interesting to see how Samo Lives differentiates itself from the 1996 biopic Basquiat, written and directed by artist Julian Schnabel and starring Jeffrey Wright as the groundbreaking young artist. Other Basquiat films include the infamous Downtown 81, which was shot in the early 1980s and released in 2000, and stars Basquiat himself as a young, up-and-coming downtown artist, and The Radiant Child, a 2010 documentary directed by the artist’s friend Tamra Davis.