Graceless Premiere for Anna Wintour Doc

It looks as though the biggest star of R.J. Cutler’s “The September Issue” didn’t get her picture taken at last night’s premiere.

The documentary about Anna Wintour and Vogue magazine produced an unlikely sympathetic figure: the much put-upon Grace Coddington, who actually runs the magazine. She’s its heart and soul as depicted in the film. Wintour is her antagonist, an obstacle Coddington must overcome. The whole thing is ever so entertaining for a very small group of people.

But photos from the Museum of Modern Art premiere last night from all the agencies do not indicate that Coddington was present.’ Neither, it seems, did the magazine’s flamboyant creative director,’Andre Leon Talley. Maybe they were told to stay out of the pictures. In every one with a celebrity, it’s Anna Wintour,’Sienna Miller (pictured here together), to whom she’s nasty in the film, as well as’Renee Zellweger (she’s in town, why not?), lots of models and a few designers (Donna Karan, Cynthia Rowley, etc.) as well as the ubiquitous’Marc Jacobs. Plus, of course:’David Bowie and Iman, P Diddy, Donald and Melania Trump.

Getty photo

Of the 119 photos put up on its website by Wire Image photo agency, 16 are of Wintour. There are even four of her daughter, listed as “actress” Bee Shaffer. But no Grace, Andre, or anyone else connected to Vogue. It’s a similar story at Getty Images.

Cutler’s made a fine film, as I reviewed from Sundance last January. Wintour comes off much like the character that parodied her in “The Devil Wears Prada” ‘ contentious, capricious, dismissive. The film will be a field day for fashionistas. I’m not sure who else will see it during its short-fated run in theaters. A&E Indie films (have no real idea what this is) is distributing it. Perhaps the doc will turn up on A&E before too long. That’s a good place for it.

The best part of the movie, by the way, comes toward the end. That’s when the raven-haired, most extraordinary Coddington ‘ frustrated by Wintour’s continual rejection of her photo essays ‘ uses Cutler’s cameraman as a model in a story.