Lifestyle
World famous artists designed this carnival in 1987. Nearly 40 years later, it's back
An aerial view of Luna Luna in Moorweide park in Hamburg, Germany in 1987.
Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC
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Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC
If you visited Hamburg, Germany in the summer of 1987, you might have been one of the lucky 250,000 people to attend Luna Luna. It was a carnival designed by some of the most famous artists of the 20th century.
Visitors got to ride a small Ferris wheel adorned with drawings by Jean-Michel Basquiat. They could waltz inside a cylindrical pavilion created by David Hockney. They could wind through Roy Lichtenstein’s pop art glass labyrinth, with music by Philip Glass; Fairgoers could also walk inside a mirrored geodesic dome decorated by surrealist Salvador Dalí, and they could ride a carousel painted with bright graffiti figures spray painted by Keith Haring.
Now, thanks to the rapper Drake, his studios and some investment partners, Luna Luna has been revived in Los Angeles.
Who thought this would work?
“I thought the idea sounded great because it is, in a way, something that has been a fantasy of mine since the first time I went to Disneyland or went to amusement parks in America when I was a kid,” the late Keith Haring said in 1987 in a documentary about the park.
Luna Luna was the brainchild of Austrian multimedia artist André Heller — an avant-garde poet, singer and impresario. He was known in Europe for his hot air balloon sculptures, acrobatic circuses and firework spectacles that could be seen over the Berlin Wall.
“Creating an amusement park out of art was an early desire,” Heller says in the documentary. “And we had to find the right artists in the right combination.”
Kenny Scharf works on his painted swing ride for the original Luna Luna.
Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC
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Kenny Scharf works on his painted swing ride for the original Luna Luna.
Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC
Heller managed to convince 33 of the world’s top contemporary artists to be a part of Luna Luna. Among them, American Kenny Scharf.
“He came just out of the blue and like, it sounded very far-fetched, but I’m like OK, great. And I loved doing it,” recalls Scharf. “I really believed it was going to be this giant thing that was going to send me to the moon — you know, the art world moon.”
Scharf remembers spending three weeks in a cold warehouse in Vienna customizing sculptures and a giant swing ride with his cartoon figures.
“Of course, I was into it,” he says. “It fit perfectly with my philosophy for art then and now, which is art is not only for a wall with a frame in a gallery, a museum or above a couch; Art can be everywhere and should be. And art can be something that you experience and that you actually sit on and you swing around and it’s fun.”
Visitors ride on Kenny Scharf’s painted swing ride in 1987.
Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC
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Sabina Sarnitz/Luna Luna, LLC
German artist Monika GilSing remembers designing flags for Luna Luna. “It was like a small miracle that an art world was created that people had never seen before, and it was very exciting to see art in this context,” she says through an interpreter. “On the other hand, art critics — it seemed like they still needed some time to recognize what was going on, because it was such a new way of presenting art.”
Monika GilSing works on Wind Images for Luna Luna in 1987.
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Sa/Luna Luna, LLC
The park closes
Luna Luna closed down after just three months, dashing Heller’s grand plans to tour the park around the world. “It was an absolute masterpiece,” he recalls in the documentary. “I had it in my hands, and I let it slip away.”
Details of exactly what happened are as muddy as the fairgrounds had been that rainy German summer.
Michael Goldberg, a creative director in New York, says some fundraising deals fell through, and then Heller went back and forth with an American foundation that wanted to bring Luna Luna to San Diego.
“The foundation basically tried to back out of the deal and it ended up going through litigation in three different courts,” he says.
In the end, everything that was in Luna Luna — dismantled rides, artwork and merch — was packed into 44 shipping containers. They languished on a desert ranch in Texas for decades.
For nearly 40 years, the Luna Luna attractions were packed away in shipping containers.
Mandalit del Barco/NPR
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Mandalit del Barco/NPR
Then, in 2020, Goldberg says he learned about the carnival and asked for Heller’s blessing to launch Luna Luna 2.0.
With Dream Crew, the entertainment company run by megastar Drake and Live Nation as investors he spent $100 million to acquire the shipping containers sight unseen. Goldberg says it was a big risk.
“I was concerned, did I lead somebody into a deal and they were gonna buy a bunch of dust?” he says.
Goldberg remembers shaking nervously when they opened the first container, packed to the brim with posters and T-shirts from 1987.
“Some sort of critters or rodents had gotten in there and basically ripped the product to shreds,” he recalls. “And then other pieces of the apparel are in perfect condition.”
He says they were relieved opening the rest of the containers. “One of the first pieces that came out was one of the figures from the Keith Haring carousel. The work looked like it was painted yesterday.”
Keith Haring’s carousel at Luna Luna in Los Angeles.
Jeff McLane/Luna Luna, LLC
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Jeff McLane/Luna Luna, LLC
With no instruction manuals, the team spent two years meticulously putting the attractions back together.
The park is reborn
Nearly 40 years after its premiere, Luna Luna has been recreated inside a warehouse in the Boyle Heights neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ferris wheel at Luna Luna in Los Angeles.
Sinna Nasseri/Luna Luna, LLC
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Sinna Nasseri/Luna Luna, LLC
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ferris wheel at Luna Luna in Los Angeles.
Sinna Nasseri/Luna Luna, LLC
Some of the original performances play on videos at the new exhibition, including an absurd “fart concert” that has visitors dumbfounded. Real-life stilt walkers and puppeteers from the Bob Baker Marionette Theater roam around the reconstructed, indoor park grounds.
Visitors are not allowed to touch the rides, but just like in 1987, visitors can still take their (unofficial) vows at the wedding chapel Andre Heller created for Luna Luna.
“This was André Heller’s idea that you could get married to whomever or whatever you wanted,” says curatorial director Lumi Tan. “In 1987, [that] was very radical, in a time when gay marriage wasn’t legal.”
She says today, like then, gay couples can get pretend-married (and pretend divorced) at Luna Luna. So can large groups of friends. “People were marrying family members and pets and inanimate objects,” says Tan. “A photographer married his camera, for example.”
Kenny Scharf says Luna Luna was ahead of its time, and when it folded in 1987, André Heller was completely crushed. So was he.
“It wasn’t like I forgot about it,” Scharf says. “I never forgot about it, in fact, I never stopped talking about it.”
Kenny Scharf’s painted swings at Luna Luna in Los Angeles.
Joshua White/Luna Luna, LLC
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Joshua White/Luna Luna, LLC
Scharf, who lives in Los Angeles, says he hopes one day visitors will be able to fly around on his swing ride again. And from Hamburg where she still lives, GilSing, says she would love to see her flags flapping in the wind outside again.
The new owners do have plans to take Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy on the road, so you never know. The park’s run in Los Angeles will close on May 12.
Demond Wilson (right) in a still from a 1974 episode of Sanford and Son. The actor played Lamont Sanford, the disgruntled offspring of Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanders (left), in the hit 1970s NBC sitcom.
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NBC Television/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
Demond Wilson, the actor best known for playing Lamont Sanford, the son in the popular 1970s NBC primetime comedy series Sanford and Son, has died.
The actor died from complications related to cancer Friday at his home in the Palm Springs area of Southern California. He was 79. Wilson’s publicist, Mark Goldman, confirmed the death in an email to NPR.
“I had the privilege of working with Demond for 15 years, and his loss is profoundly felt,” said Goldman. “He was an unbelievable man, and his impact will never be forgotten.”
Wilson was in his 20s when he landed the role of Lamont Sanford, the put-upon offspring of the cantankerous Fred Sanford, played by Redd Foxx. The dad got all the best lines, but junior held his own in their frequent disputes. Wilson reminisced about his time on the series in his 2009 memoir Second Banana: The Bitter Sweet Memoirs of the Sanford and Son Years.
Producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin based Sanford and Son on the well-known 1960s-early 70s British TV comedy series about a blue collar father-son relationship, Steptoe and Son. Sanford and Son was groundbreaking in offering a glimpse into Black family life rarely seen on network television at the time. “The character between the son and the father was very interesting to me and to Norman in the sense that, despite the fact that they lived together and complained and so forth, they couldn’t live without each other,” said Yorkin in a 2008 interview with NPR.
Wilson went on to star as a struggling gambler in the sitcom Baby…I’m Back! in the late 1970s, and as the more laid-back of the divorcees in The New Odd Couple, a TV show based on Neil Simon’s hit play The Odd Couple. His film credits include Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), The Organization (1971), Full Moon High (1981) and Hammerlock (2000).
Wilson was born in Valdosta, Ga., in 1946 to a working class Catholic family and grew up in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood. He studied dance as a child and performed on Broadway. He went on to serve in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. Upon his return, he appeared in various shows on- and off-Broadway, and eventually moved to Los Angeles. In 1971, Lear cast him in an episode of the popular sitcom All in the Family. The following year, Sanford and Sons set him on a path to stardom.
Wilson carried a strong Christian faith since childhood. After suffering a life-threatening rupture to his appendix at age 12, he sought to find a way to devote his life to God. In the 1980s, he was ordained as a Pentecostal minister, and went on to lead parallel careers in acting and preaching. His 1998 book, The New Age Millennium: An Expose of Symbols, Slogans and Hidden Agenda, is a critique from a Christian perspective of the New Age movement and Freemasonry, among other quasi-spiritual approaches.
Melania Trump.
Muse Films/Amazon MGM Studios
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Muse Films/Amazon MGM Studios
If you’ve seen the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 — prominently featuring shots of stiletto heels walking down corridors — you’ve got the general drift of what director Brett Ratner is up to in Melania. Melania is a high heels-forward documentary.
It covers the 20 days prior to her husband’s second inauguration, when much planning is required of a First Lady: Ball and banquet invitations, place-settings for a candle-lit dinner in Washington D.C.’s National Building Museum. Her staff previews for her the golden egg that will be that meal’s first course, and wonders whether the rectangular tablecloths should have broad gold stripes, and the round ones narrow stripes, or vice versa. So many decisions, and she’s on top of all of them.
The once-and-future President makes an occasional appearance, including in what appears to be a staged flashback to an election-night phone call. At another point, she drops by with her camera crew as he’s rehearsing his inaugural speech, and she suggests that he identify himself as a peacemaker “and a unifier.“ He incorporates it on the big day — in the film to a big burst of applause, which inspires a quick nod to his wife in gratitude. That’s not quite how it played out in real life; the applause and the nod are editing tricks. But never mind, the film Melania is her story, and — as not just its leading lady, but also an executive producer — she’s entitled to tell it any way she wants, peppered with needle drops from her favorite songs, including Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”
It’s a story that’s not without hiccups — the blouse collar that’s loose in the back, and not high enough; Former President Carter’s inconvenient death just before the inauguration, with his funeral falling on the first anniversary of her mother’s death. The First Lady talks in scripted voiceover through this section about missing her mom, and in decidedly unspontaneous voiceovers elsewhere about the Capitol building’s history, and her respect for the military, and at one point about the “elegance and sophistication of our donors,” as the camera drifts past Jeff Bezos, whose company Amazon did indeed donate $1 million for the inaugural.
It also paid $40 million to buy this film. That price makes Melania arguably the most expensive infomercial in history. It also makes it inconceivable that the film will return a profit — it’s only expected to take in a paltry $5 million dollars worldwide this weekend. That’s prompted speculation in Hollywood circles about what else Amazon thinks it bought when it purchased the film.
But that will be fodder someday for a far better documentary than the curated, airbrushed, glamorously dressed portrait that is Melania.
Editor’s note: Amazon is among NPR’s recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some NPR content.
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