American filmmaker: Ronald Tavel

Bangkok has a large expat population. No one can hope to know everyone living here. Sometimes people slip through the cracks that you wished you’d had sat down for a couple of hour conversation. Only you find out about them too late. A case in point is playwright and filmmaker Ronald Tavel. He died a few days ago on a flight from Berlin to Bangkok. Apparently he’d been a resident in Thailand for a dozen years.

This is from the New York Times:

“Ronald Tavel, a playwright and screenwriter who brought a bawdy sense of the outrageous to some of Andy Warhol’s early films and helped mold the Off Off Broadway avant-garde theater movement in the 1960s and ’70s, died Monday on a flight from Berlin to Bangkok. He was 72 and had lived in Bangkok for the past 12 years.”

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/theater/27tavel.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Hollywood%20screenwriter%20bangkok&st=cse

It’s a wake up call. Make that extra effort to get out and meet interesting people where you live. Because they won’t be around forever. And of course neither do you.

Here’s a list of Tavel’s films with Andy Warhol.

• Chelsea Girls - 1966

• Hedy - 1966

• Kitchen - 1965

• The Life of Juanita Castro - 1965

• Poor Little Rich Girl - 1965

• Horse - 1965

• Screen Test #1 - 1965

• Screen Test #2 - 1965

• Vinyl - 1965

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Tavel