PT Entertainment
Page Six hears that a new movie will reveal an intriguing and delightful postscript to the Socialite Era.
Hulu’s new documentary “Queenmaker” says that James Kurisunkal, the 2000s teen from Illinois who became an unlikely mover-and-shaker in Manhattan by covering socialites like Tinsley Mortimer from his bedroom, is now living as Morgan Olivia Rose, a gorgeous, glamorous woman reminiscent of Ms. Mortimer herself.
Morgan anonymously launched “Park Avenue Peerage” in 2007 when Mortimer, Olivia Palermo, Lauren Santo Domingo, et al, were not only dominating the gossip columns but filling blogs like Socialite Rank.
It became a hit and caused something of a stir when the author of the insidery record of Uptown ephemera turned out to be a Midwestern high-school student.
It won him an internship at New York magazine and an interview in the New York Times, which described the site at the time as “a compendium of party pictures, society updates, and, once in a while, family histories he put together mostly by culling wedding and death announcements.”
Now the documentary, out Wednesday and based on a chapter of “Gatecrasher” the memoir of gossip grandee Ben Widdicombe, reveals the sometimes-shocking latter years of Rose, including her transition.
“Now that I’m older, I see how two different people existed,” she says in the film, “One that was James, and one that was me.” She adds that it, “Just took some time, and some pain.”
“For New Yorkers I think this frothy moment [in the mid-2000s] is related to the trauma of post 9/11, and how desperate people were to have something fun and uncomplicated in the newspaper,” Widdicombe tells Page Six, “It might seem frivolous in retrospect, but at the time it was a welcome respite from darker events.”
The film, in turn, reveals some darker truths behind the heady heights of the socialite life: and the lives of the regular folk who worshiped them.
