The 19-pound Gates book

We don't often recommend films in this space but I was lucky enough to score a ticket to last night's showing at the MFA of the new HBO documentary, "The Gates." It's a rollicking, funny, impassioned collage of the opinions of New Yorkers -- from the homeless to the ultra-rich Mayor Bloomberg -- toward Christo and Jeanne-Claude's 2005 public art installation in Central Park of 7,500 gates with saffron fabric panels.

After the showing, Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, along with filmmakers Albert Maysles and Antonio Ferrera (who spent two years editing 600 hours of footage down to 97 minutes) engaged in a spirited Q-and-A session. The film begins in 1979 when the artists first sought permission from the city of New York to produce the privately-funded installation in Central Park.

Jeanne-Claude dominated the discussion -- correcting misimpressions and elaborating on their ideas (you can see her mind at work in the section on their website called Common Errors -- but Christo got a few words in toward the end, referring folks clamoring for more details to the thorough documention of The Gates project in a 19-pound book published by Taschen. For further -- and less expensive -- reading, there is an extensive bibliography on the artists' site (below the notice that they derive no income from the sale of books, films or videos).

(The film premieres on HBO on Tuesday, Feb. 26, at 10 p.m.)