Sydney Pollack and about seven of the standing-room-only crowd of onlookers Friday at the Apple Store (Photo: STV)

SoHo's Apple Store hosted twice as many geeks as usual Friday night, when both film fiends and architecture dorks showed up to catch a sneak preview of Sydney Pollack's new documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry. Despite the film's trickle of gut-busting party gags that bounded over my head ("Greek temples are anthropomorphic" evoked a healthy giggle or two), Pollack's first stab at non-narrative filmmaking turned out pretty nicely--even though he admitted wanted nothing to do with the project in the first place.

"(Frank) began to talk to me about the idea of doing something like this," Pollack told the crowd after the screening. "And as you heard me saying in the film, I kept saying, 'Frank, I don't know anything about architecture, and I really don't know anything about documentary filmmaking.' And he kept saying, 'Well, that's why you're perfect. I don't want somebody who's an expert at it.' "

Not that Pollack is a rookie or anything--the guy is an Oscar-winning director--and not that he had some proscribed budget and deadline to finish the film. He said he finally decided to work on the film after seeing his first time seeing the Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which he recalled as looking "like Don Quixote got stoned. It was the wildest demonstration of imagination I had ever seen in my life." He eventually shot interviews with Gehry over roughly two or three weekends a year for five years.

Pollack also said he was happy to learn that documentaries are created in the editing room. "I think you make (narrative) films in the editing room, too, frankly, but at least you have a little crack at a script," he said. "You don't have that here. I didn't have any idea what this documentary was going to be. I kept writing what I would call equations on a bulletin board, and I kept saying, 'I would like this documentary' over 'classical documentaries' = 'to be what Frank Gehry's architecture is to classical architecture.' I didn't know what the answer or the formula was."

Yeah, well... me neither. Maybe I copied it down wrong. But it seems like Pollack's approach stems from Gehry's own, which is essentially to illuminate a sort of epistemological motor behind the creative process. Pollack acknowledges Gehry's shyness, but neither man seems too possessive of trade secrets. And at any rate, you cannot really go wrong with a berobed Julian Schnabel philosophizing in a lounge chair.

Anyhow, if you missed the Apple Store fun, look for the doc soon on PBS. But at least invite a couple of architecture fans over to get the full-on tittering genius at work.