DVD review: ‘Public Speaking’

For a writer with the self-described affliction of “writer’s blockade,” the acerbic and opinionated Fran Lebowitz still has much to say. But whether she’s occasionally scribbling her thoughts in classic humorous essays collected in two still-vital volumes – 1978’s “Metropolitan Life” and 1981’s “Social Studies” – or just frankly speaking her mind, Lebowitz is a classic New York writer of the old school.

Her prickly personal story, her revered place on Manhattan’s literary landscape (she was a pillar of Andy Warhol’s literati scene in the 1970s and ’80s) and a whole slew of her pithy observations on the general decline of arts and culture are on grand display in “Public Speaking,” director Martin Scorsese’s cozy, barstool documentary on Lebowitz and her bookish world.

A veteran of the days when writing really mattered and barroom conversation was a contact sport, Lebowitz grudgingly bears up to constant comparisons with such boulevard wits as Oscar Wilde, Oscar Levant and, of course, Dorothy Parker.
Although her decades-long inability to commit words to paper (except for a pair of children’s books in the ’90s and a rare occasional essay) is legend among New York writers, the 60-year-old Lebowitz is nonetheless a literary lioness whose roar is still heeded by the city’s intellectual elite.