‘The Crystal Ball’ at Mount Sinai

The name of Mount Sinai Medical Center’s annual gala, “The Crystal Ball,” is surprisingly apt: For 18 years, the event has given guests a clear view of where their money will go by holding the event at the hospital, this year decked out in pink and orange, rather than a ballroom. “This is what makes it special. You can look up and see doctors in scrubs,” the chairman of the center, Peter May, said at the ball Thursday. “We care about our patients and don’t want to be too far away,” the dean of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Dennis Charney, added.

This year’s event raised $3.25 million, and was attended by more than 1,500 guests, including investor Carl Icahn, whose foundations have already funded a research institute at the center, and lawyer and philanthropist Joel Ehrenkranz.

Speaking to the crowd, Mr. May lauded the medical center’s financial turnaround, which last month led Moody’s Investors Service to upgrade the hospital’s debt rating, and outlined big plans for the future, such as two new buildings. Current patients will feel a difference, too. “All the furniture and beds are being replaced,” the president and chief executive of the center, Kenneth Davis, said.

A Marriage of Art and Marriage

Filmmaker Doug Block, who lives in Stuyvesant Town with his wife, Marjorie Silver, a law professor, and their 17-year-old daughter, Lucy, is having a New York moment.

Tomorrow, when his documentary “51 Birch Street” airs on the Cinemax cable channel at 7 p.m., its audience will exceed those of its 18 months of festival and theatrical screenings combined. It’s quite a culmination: the film, an investigation of what his parents’ marriage was really like, has appeared at more than 40 festivals and has been running in theaters for more than seven months, even turning a profit.

Momentum is strong. On Friday, at a Chelsea restaurant, Mr. Block agreed to a one-year option to turn the documentary into a fictional narrative feature.

The night before — actually, it was 1:30 a.m. Friday — he was hammering out a distribution deal on another film, “A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory,” at the Bowery Bar. Mr. Block is a producer of the film, which on Thursday evening had won the NY Loves Film Award at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Two nights before that, Mr. Block was holding court at a special screening of “51 Birch Street” sponsored by HBO, a major funder of the film.

“It was almost like my wedding,” Mr. Block said of the screening. “My wife invited a bunch of friends, lots of the people flew in. We had important people there, potential investors for new projects.”

While his major league film career moving ahead at full-speed, Mr. Block stays grounded — and earns a living — as a wedding filmmaker. On Saturday, he captured a marriage of a photo editor and a documentary editor under the cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

His choice of day job turned out to be highly fortuitous when it came to making “51 Birch Street”: Footage of weddings shot by Mr. Block appears throughout “51 Birch Street,” capturing the affection, fears, and expectations that begin a marriage. This contextual material helps universalize the story told in the film, which has moved audiences from Idaho to Ecuador, Ireland to Qatar.

The particular story is, however, a New York story: Mr. Block’s father, Mike, grew up in Brooklyn, his mother, Mina, in the Bronx. They married, had three children, and moved to the suburb of Port Washington on Long Island, where Mina felt isolated and intellectually cut off. Eventually she threw herself into psychoanalysis , and gained insights that threatened her marriage. But in the end, the marriage lasted — for 54 years.

Given this history, it’s not surprising that Mr. Block has chosen to live and love in Manhattan. “We love being in the city. This is where art is made, where all the excitement is,” Mr. Block said.

Mr. Block does not deliver the most memorable ruminations on love in his film. That is left to others, such as Mina’s brother, octogenarian songwriter Josh Vogel, who is seen on camera singing two verses of his song, “I Flunked Adultery.”

At the HBO screening last week, Mr. Block showed a music-videostyle clip of Mr. Vogel singing the complete song to great applause. It will be on the DVD, which is scheduled for release on August 14, along with new interviews with other family members seen in the film.

agordon@nysun.com