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Flash, Food & Lodging

By Nicole LaPorte — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:28:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy The Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows—The First 100 Years by Robert S. Anderson, official historian for the Beverly Hills Hotel. Publication date May 2012.

Piers Morgan dreamed up the perfect gift for his son’s 13th birthday: Father and son would go for a ride in a new Lamborghini Murciélago. But where to score a $300,000 sports car on the spur of the moment? Morgan didn’t call his agent or his personal assistant. Instead he speed-dialed a group of more influential Hollywood players: the staff at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the grand, estate-like fortress on Wilshire Boulevard where the television personality happened to be staying—not visiting, mind you, but residing—at the time. “I gave them eight hours’ notice,” Morgan recalls. “They located the only available one in California and had it waiting outside, bang on time. My son said it was the best day of his life.”

An impromptu spin in a luxury vehicle is but one of the many perks afforded certain members of L.A. society: those who call five-star hotels home. From Greta Garbo

to Lindsay Lohan, high-end accommodations have provided plush hideaways for the gilded class. For some, a hotel is a convenient place to crash while making a movie, as it was for Robert Pattinson, who moved into the Euro-chic Palihouse while shooting parts of the last Twilight installment. For others, like Cheryl Cole, it’s a creative space—last year the British pop sensation and almost-X Factor judge was but one of countless musicians who have holed up at the Sunset Marquis to record an album in the hotel’s basement studio.

Living in a hotel for several months or years might sound extravagant, but for the rich and famous it’s often more appealing (and practical) than buying, say, a multimillion-dollar Holmby Hills manse or a midcentury lair in the Hollywood Hills. Why juggle a mortgage and manage a 12-person staff when you can have 3 a.m. room service and Swiss chocolates on your pillow? Not to mention a built-in community in a city where social connection can be elusive.

To global hotelier André Balazs, hotel stays offer something even more profound. “When someone transfers their life into a hotel, the hotel isn’t a substitute for a family but a surrogate family,” says Balazs, whose Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard figured prominently in Sofia Coppola’s film Somewhere, in which a father and daughter bond not just with each other but with the hotel.

If what Balazs says is true, that guests develop a relationship with these landmarks, then the Chateau Marmont is a seductive enabler. Over the years the neo-Gothic hotel has attracted (and perhaps inspired) decadence and scandal: John Belushi famously overdosed in Bungalow No. 3, while Jim Morrison once tumbled off the roof. More recently Lohan, using the alias “Lily Flowers,” stormed the Chateau’s halls, barking demands at the front desk at all hours. The staff always accommodated her, just as they do any long-term resident—even one patron who requested that the hotel procure special grains for a pet kangaroo. (“Of course!” Balazs says. “What else are you gonna do?”)

The Beverly Hills Hotel extends a similar largesse to its guests: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had a bottle of vodka delivered to their bungalow daily at breakfast and lunch. These days its priciest bungalow rents for $17,300 a night and is equipped with a walk-in closet bigger than most people’s bedrooms, a private plunge pool, an executive study, five limestone fireplaces (indoor and outdoor), and a kitchen with a blinding array of stainless steel appliances—presumably for decoration.

The Sunset Marquis, a few blocks east, is where musicians such as Bono and Morrissey flock, flipping the bird at any sense of decorum. Then there’s the Sunset Tower Hotel, which contains so much star power that one feels inadequate walking its halls. Last year Jennifer Aniston moved in while she house hunted, continuing a tradition set by Whoopi Goldberg back when it was the St. James Club. Nearby is the ultraposh Hotel Bel-Air, where Michael Jackson once encamped for months, keeping a life-size, cardboard cut-out of Marilyn Monroe stationed outside his suite.

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The tradition of hotel dwelling in L.A. may seem rarefied and out of touch, but the practice was key in the evolution of the city as an entertainment mecca. In the early 20th century, when the movie industry was just starting to unspool, stars from New York and Chicago arrived to find a “city” that was mostly bean fields and orange groves. Hotels were built to provide a civilized spot for a creative class accustomed to comfort. The Beverly Hills Hotel was one such place. Built in 1912, it existed two years before the City of Beverly Hills was established. According to historian Marc Wanamaker, the hotel “served almost like a city hall, community center, theater, and restaurant. Everyone went there—it was the place to be seen. Will Rogers loved it. He built a home and polo field across the street, and after polo he’d walk across Crescent and have drinks. When he died, they remodeled the old kids’ dining room into a lounge and called it the Polo Lounge in his honor.”

Families, meanwhile, fancied the hotel’s bungalows because, says Wanamaker, “they didn’t want to stay in a formal hotel and bother other guests.” Movie stars, too, appreciated being tucked away, not just at the Beverly Hills Hotel but at the old Ambassador Hotel, where John Barrymore and Jean Harlow each lived for a time.

Hotels were, and still are, a refuge for artists seeking privacy and tolerance for their eccentricities. When the Chateau went up in 1929, it was perched atop a desolate section of Sunset Boulevard known as “No Man’s Land.” Five years later, director Billy Wilder would exploit its geographical seclusion to write scripts undisturbed. Montgomery Clift checked into the Hollywood Roosevelt when he was filming From Here to Eternity and amused (or perhaps annoyed) other guests by marching up and down the hall rehearsing lines and playing the trumpet. Greta Garbo settled into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she had a huge custom-made bed installed. Howard Hughes held onto a number of that hotel’s bungalows, even when he wasn’t in town. Paranoid that people would discover which of the bungalows he was staying in, Hughes would order roast beef sandwiches to be delivered in the middle of the night and placed beside a tree located between the structures. He also used the men’s room in the hotel lobby as his office. Top that, Lohan.

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Los Angeles may have changed—the studio system has withered, the orange groves have been replaced by a matrix of freeways—but the sense that there are still places that can make the city feel a little less impersonal is what keeps actor Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire, Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol) a permanent hotel resident. “I’m a family member there. I’m a part of the staff!” he says of the Beverly Wilshire, where he has lived in “the Pretty Woman suite” for more than three years. (During that time, the staff has surprised him with an enormous Teuscher chocolate sculpture in honor of Slumdog’s Oscar win and regularly feeds him authentic chicken curry dishes reminiscent of his “real” home in India.) “From the time I entered, they were all my friends,” Kapoor says of the staff. “I keep on hugging them, they keep on hugging me.”

The hotel-as-family illusion (these are paid employees, after all) does reveal a darker reality: It’s lonely at the top. One famous actress chose hotel life because she was “scared of being alone,” according to someone close to her. “Living in a hotel meant there were always people around. And not just people—either famous people or people who would take care of her and get her whatever she wanted. It was like a big, expensive security blanket.”

In some cases hotels operate like safe houses. When Sunset Marquis habitués Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton broke up, Thornton stayed behind to lick his wounds. In recent months beleaguered former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has sought refuge at the Montage, where he’s reportedly paid $30,000 a month for his suite.

Piers Morgan is happily married, but judging by his Twitter feed, staff changes at the Beverly Wilshire upset him almost as much as an actual family feud. Specifically, when general manager Radha Arora left for another job, Morgan tweeted, “Nooo! RT @BeverlyWilshire Very bittersweet, our wonderful GM & Regional VP Radha Arora appointed Pres and CEO of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts.”

“I watched him transform the hotel into the best in the world while I was there,” Morgan says. “Everyone loved him. He’d fix it for me to watch cricket on my TV when nobody else could get it; he’d throw extravagant dinner parties on my terrace for all my friends—spectacular affairs, with amazing food, wine, brandies, and cigars. They’d always end with Radha and I having a Monte Cristo No. 2 and talking nonsense.”

After hanging his hat there for more than two years, Morgan recently moved out of the hotel, but he clearly misses his old digs. He’s not alone: Warren Beatty spent a decade in that suite in the ’70s. Morgan recalls that when he last ran into Beatty at a dinner, the actor announced to the crowd, “Piers sleeps in my old bed!” Waking up in the same hotel bed as Warren Beatty? It doesn’t get more Hollywood than that.

Status, Updated

By Nicole LaPorte — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 01:18:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy Soho House

Float up the elevator to the Waldo Fernandez-designed 14th-floor penthouse that is Soho House West Hollywood, and this is what you might see: Up in the Air director-cowriter Jason Reitman enjoying a burger at the bar for lunch; Contagion director Steven Soderbergh sitting in the lounge, tapping away at his laptop, his ears encased by humongous, sound-erasing headphones, paying no mind to the producer taking a meeting a few feet away; the Entourage cast—as though cameras were rolling—ordering a round of drinks and hunkering down to a game of Scrabble.

Here’s what you won’t see: velvet-roped VIP sections, corner tables reserved exclusively for Actress X, squadrons of handlers protectively escorting their clients. In a town where status is often measured by overt markers, part of the appeal of this restaurant-bar-lounge appears to be its egalitarianism. Once they become members, at least, the chosen mingle democratically under one gilded roof.

Faster than you can say “Bridesmaids 2!,” this Sunset Boulevard aerie has become the entertainment industry’s most exclusive sanctum—a members-only social club so desirable that the wait list to get in has more than 2,000 names on it. Although the club attracts high-profile types from all slices of L.A. high society (art, fashion, philanthropy), Hollywood has been particularly smitten. As George Heller, a manager-producer at Apostle Management, puts it, “Soho House is the new courtside Lakers tickets. It’s where you go to entertain clients and see and be seen.”

Unlike Lakers tickets, Soho House’s $1,800 annual membership fee is a bargain for a crowd accustomed to dropping that much for a business dinner. What that gets you is merely the right to enter one of the more spectacular spaces in L.A., offering a bar area with a breathtaking view, a rooftop restaurant lined with olive trees planted in the floor, and a screening room as plush as any studio head’s. With its wide marble staircase, maze of darkly lit hallways, and kitschy photo booth, the venue falls somewhere between an old-world gentlemen’s club and the Parker hotel in Palm Springs.

To gain access to this urban paradise, applicants strategize like chess grand masters in their attempts to impress the club’s Star Chamber-like membership committee. “I’m going to push my political relationships,” confides a talent agent, sensitive to the club’s well-publicized desire to limit the number of “suits.” As for those unlucky souls not invited in, they face sotto voce scorn from their peers.

“She’s been on the wait list for nine months,” hissed a manager recently after he spotted a young woman—a development executive by the look of her dressy-but-not-too ensemble—entering a sushi restaurant. (The manager, meanwhile, admitted that his own fear of being rejected had kept him from applying in the first place.)

That Soho House still elicits this kind of interest more than a year after it opened its doors in Los Angeles is testament to how well the British establishment—the first club opened in London 16 years ago—has adapted to this city. L.A., after all, is famous for hot spots that are typically hot for only one season before they’re replaced by the next thing. But the club’s brass was savvy in the way it approached the Los Angeles project, the second of three clubs to launch on American shores—in 2003, Soho House New York opened in the trendy Meatpacking District; in 2010, a Miami outpost debuted.

The perception is—and rightly so—that the L.A. club is much harder to get into than the others. Soho House New York went through a phase during which membership became lax and the club’s vibe shifted to, as one member sniffs, “bridge and tunnel.” Over the past year and a half there has been an effort to get back on track, and Manhattan memberships have not been renewed. The club’s image was also tarnished by the murder of swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay in one of the club’s hotel suites last year.

Los Angeles, though, is particularly susceptible to Soho House’s charms. By touting its outsider status as a posh British institution, the club is, as one publicist puts it, “playing into the city’s cultural inferiority complex, in the same way BAFTA [the British Academy of Film and Television Arts] does.” At the same time it has mastered the age-old Hollywood game of kissing the appropriate rings and quietly courting the town’s high and mighty. The result is an irresistible hybrid of inaccessible exoticism and insiderdom few can resist.

“It’s ‘members only.’ That works better in Los Angeles than anywhere,” says producer Lynda Obst (Hot in Cleveland, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days), who joined the New York club when she was filming in the area and then became a member of the L.A. branch. “It’s like that joke: Anything that someone else can’t get into, everyone wants to be a member of.”

Obst, who is based at Sony Pictures, points out another lure of the L.A. club. “One of the brilliant things they did, which they didn’t even know they were doing, is find the invisible center of the town,” she says, referring to Soho House’s location in the towering 9200 office building on Sunset Boulevard, just west of Doheny, that straddles the leafy green residential streets of Beverly Hills and the funky commercial blocks of the Strip. “It’s right between the East- and Westsides, literally halfway between my house and my studio.”

The space also serves as a kind of cultural clubhouse. There are lectures (Carl Bernstein and will.i.am on democracy), movie screenings hosted by icons (Robert Evans presented Chinatown; Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate), and even pasta-making classes. Another key feature: It’s camera free. Because entry to the building is through a garage, paparazzi are kept at bay, meaning that stars can make discreet entrances and exits. Once inside, cameras are forbidden there, too, and it’s an unspoken rule that everyone plays it chill, no matter who walks in the door.

“It’s one of the few places in L.A. where they don’t pitch me movies when I’m there,” says indie mogul Harvey Weinstein. That sense of privacy prevails even when he’s hosting someone with a famous face. “If I have a lunch with Jim Carrey or Leo or Quentin, who I take there a lot, it’s not somewhere where I feel ‘OK, this is going to be a tough situation.’ It’s very low-key, dark, easy to deal with. I don’t mean to be snobbish, but when you’re talking about making a movie for a lot of money, it’s nice to have a quiet business lunch.”

No wonder the Weinstein Company hosts its annual Oscar party at Soho House, which may be the only time nobody minds the stars’ getting noticed. Weinstein recalls how at the Inglourious Basterds fete last year, the fire marshal showed up and threatened to shut down the overcrowded party until Cameron Diaz walked in and charmed him.

****

Soho House founder Nick Jones acknowledges that a lot of time and energy—years’ worth of reconnaissance, essentially—went into putting all these details into place, but he notes there was no guarantee any of it would work, L.A. being the unique animal that it is. For one thing, there was the idiosyncratic nature of the city’s social matrix, which he likens to a “mining town in the U.K.”—that is, a town dominated by a single industry.

Second, there was the fact that Los Angeles’s members-only scene has faded considerably. The handful of ultra-exclusive country clubs are no longer the networking hubs they were back when Dean Martin, Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis were teeing off at the Riviera. (“I went to Hillcrest for the first time last week,” says one studio executive and Soho House member, referring to the Hillcrest Country Club on Pico Boulevard. “It’s like the most geriatric, nonhip place.”) As for social clubs such as the Factory, a Rat Pack favorite, and the Daisy, a ’70s-era dance club, they have been replaced by a succession of Industry-anointed spots anyone could visit: Spago, Mortons, and most recently, Tower Bar.

“There was a lot of nervousness on our part because we know and respect what goes on in L.A., but we didn’t understand L.A. well enough five years ago,” Jones said one afternoon as he sat in the club’s sun-dappled lounge sipping a sparkling water with lime. Half a dozen screenwriters were at work on their laptops in the glass-paneled room while behind them the city stretched out in all its hazy, horizonless glory.

Dressed in designer jeans and a loose-fitting white linen shirt, his dirty-blond hair brushed haphazardly across his tanned forehead, Jones embodied the club’s stylishly relaxed atmosphere. (“Creative” is the club’s unofficial motto and the word most used to describe its ideal member. A few years ago Soho House New York put up a sign, since removed, showing a diagonal red line superimposed on the image of a suit.)

Before settling on a location, Jones began the process of getting to know Los Angeles by throwing a series of annual pop-up Oscar parties in rented homes in the Hollywood Hills. The effect was that the right people became aware of, and impressed by, the club without having to be overtly solicited; at movie studios they call this tactic guerrilla marketing. Jones, who lives in London, bought a house here and arranged tête-à-têtes with the town’s movers and shakers at Cecconi’s (another Soho House Group property), where he asked for their advice and ideas. Yet another page was taken from the Hollywood rule book: Make it about them.

Right away there were signs this was not London or New York. “We learned a lot in doing the guest list for the Oscar parties,” said Tim Geary, the club’s membership czar, who was seated across from Jones and was also dressed in jeans, which he had paired with a sharp button-down shirt. Lesson One was how Hollywood machers “react to rejection,” he said. “You get the call from the second assistant and then the first assistant and then the person himself.”

“If that was done in a nice way, then you knew you had a fantastic rapport with this powerful person,” continued Geary. “But some people, who are considered very important in this town, didn’t approach it that way, and you could immediately tell that they weren’t the kind of person who would become integrated into a club like this naturally.” In other words: Application denied.

Withholding membership in an elite club because of an applicant’s behavior? Hollywood, known for its screamers with a sense of entitlement, wasn’t accustomed to that. But Jones and Geary stuck to their core belief that money and titles aren’t enough to justify inclusion—a blasphemous notion in a town defined by IMDb credits and Forbes rankings. But it was also genius. Of course, people only wanted to join more.

“There’s an awful lot of ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ ” Geary said. “People are confounded as to why they haven’t been chosen as members. Just two days ago someone offered me $15,000: ‘I’ll give you $15,000 on top of the membership fee—you can charge me whatever you like, if you let me in.’ There are people who say they will give huge amounts to charity, which maybe we should accept. But that goes against who we are.”

****

For a time last year Paul Haggis, the writer-director who won two Oscars for Crash, the 2004 ensemble piece about L.A.’s socioeconomic dynamics, made Soho House his home away from home. Like most scribes, Haggis finds that writing in his pj’s at home makes him stir crazy, whereas being in a public place, he says, “allows me to fool myself into thinking I’m a part of life. I can hear the buzz around me. That helps.”

In Rome Haggis likes to write in bars, where no one has any problem with him tying up a seat for hours on end. But here, he says, that is harder to pull off. Hence he was drawn to Soho House, where he developed a routine of “going there almost every day. I’d go at about ten in the morning, have breakfast. It was always very quiet. Then I’d stay and have lunch and sometimes an early dinner and leave around six or seven.”

The only drawback, according to Haggis, is that too many writers have a similar plan. “I just find them all annoying,” he says, half joking. “They’re taking up the spaces I want to be in. I think they have to limit the number of writers. I told them to start kicking them out, starting with me.”

That’s not about to happen, says Jones. Moreover, for all the tales of billionaires and heads of management companies and other noteworthy personalities being denied access, he and the club are not about simply keeping out the riffraff. (The rumor that Arnold Schwarzenegger was not admitted is false, Jones says.)

Jones characterizes Soho House’s ideal member as a struggling screenwriter who must save his pennies to pay his annual dues. “We don’t mind that person sitting in a corner with a glass of tap water all afternoon or all day,” he says, adding, “Exclusivity is not what we ever intended because we’re very inclusive—I suppose in a very exclusive way.”

Parents, Trapped

By Miriam Datskovsky — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 23:07:00 GMT

Most actresses would kill to be on a top-rated sitcom. Not Ella and Jaden Hiller, the three-year-old identical twins who until recently played the part of Lily on ABC’s Modern Family. So agitated and unhappy did the Hiller girls become when a camera was aimed in their direction that they were replaced in September by four-year-old Aubrey Anderson-Emmons.

What a difference a year makes, as Eric Stonestreet, who stars as the young gay father Cameron Tucker on the show, tweeted the other day about Anderson-Emmons: “She’s 9mo older than ‘old Lily’ and happy 2 b there. We love the Hiller twins, but they were NOT happy 2 b on set.”

This is hardly an isolated example. Show runners often blame the lack of baby-related story lines on how difficult it is to shoot with infants and toddlers, whose working hours are limited and whose moods can be fickle. Cougar Town creator Bill Lawrence, while speaking on a panel recently, addressed why he didn’t include more infant-focused plot points with a question of his own: Are children under five fun to be around? “Get five really bright lights and take the shades off them, and point them at [a] baby, and then try to make them say or do what you want.” He added, “And then ask me again why the baby isn’t in the show more often.”

Typically in Hollywood, babies are considered a pain. Which is why the cast and crew of NBC’s new comedy Up All Night are doubly brave. Not only are they making a TV show about how having a baby changes your life (which necessitates working with infant twins), but the principals—Will Arnett, Christina Applegate, and Maya Rudolph, not to mention the series creator, Emily Spivey—have small children at home, as do several of the writers. “We’re all living it, going from being career people and partying all the time to having kids. It’s fresh material,” says Spivey, 40. A former Saturday Night Live writer, she admits drawing much of the inspiration for the show from her and her editor husband’s own struggle as older working parents. Real life, she adds, “is the gift that keeps on giving.” Except, that is, when it leaves you completely and utterly exhausted, which is what Up All Night is about.

“It’s a darker story,” adds Applegate, 39, who gave birth to her daughter, Sadie, nine months ago. Applegate plays Reagan, a talk-show producer and new mom. Reagan and her stay-at-home husband, Chris (played by Arnett), are “at the pinnacle of their lives, about to turn 40, when everything changes,” Applegate says. “You can be madly in love with your child and still have moments where you go, ‘Ugh!’ We’re saying things people are afraid to say.”

What type of things? Things like this: When you work and have a family, and you care about your family, your work inevitably suffers. Or this: Working and parenting, when taken together, leave little time for (or interest in) sex. Which is a corollary to this: A new parent will more likely use the energy they once might have summoned for sex to instead have an argument with their partner about which one of them got less sleep. This scene was brought to life in the first episode. Arnett and Applegate are shown bleary eyed in bed at dawn, bickering. “You were asleep when I got up at one ’cause I saw you, ’cause I was awake!” Reagan alleges, to which Chris replies, “No, I’m sure you were groggy from being in such a deep sleep that you did not see that my eyes were wide open.” The scene ends with Chris suggesting some hanky-panky and Reagan rolling her eyes in disgust.

Arnett, 41, says the weirdest thing about the scene struck him afterward, when he found himself arguing with his real-life wife, Parks and Recreation’s Amy Poehler. For the record, the couple has two kids under the age of four, so they are constantly sleep deprived. “It was kind of trippy,” Arnett recalls of the real-life spat, “because I’d shot a scene having this discussion, and now I’m actually having this discussion.”

*****

Since Lucille Ball got pregnant and introduced the world to Little Ricky on I Love Lucy in 1953, it’s been the rare TV show that honestly confronted early parenting. The late ’80s series Full House centered on a young widower who enlists the help of his best friend and brother-in-law in raising his three daughters (the youngest played by the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who were less than two when the series debuted). But over the years, most programs that have depicted parenting—from The Cosby Show to The Brady Bunch, from Married…with Children to Who’s the Boss?—portrayed kids for whom diapers were a distant memory.

Up All Night is trying to do something different: chronicle the joys and terrors that accompany the moment when one’s life is forever altered by the arrival of offspring—especially for older parents. The fact that so many on the show are older parents makes that task a bit easier. As Applegate says of her character, “Reagan’s going through the same thing I’m going through.”

Being sleep- and sex-starved may be funny, but the laughs would soon wear thin without a comic foil: Ava, the ambitious but vulnerable talk-show host played by Rudolph. Ava is Reagan’s best friend and boss. And notably, while Rudolph herself has three kids (ages six, two, and three months), Ava is both childless and clueless about children. In a defining scene early in the pilot, Ava shows up unannounced at Reagan and Chris’s house with a gift basket “for” the baby—complete with venison stock, hot pepper cheese, and champagne. Seeing the new parents’ dismayed faces, Ava reacts with glee: “Are you telling me there’s nothing in there for a baby? Oh, well, I guess we’ll be left having an awesome time by ourselves!” In another scene Reagan tries to teach Ava how to appropriately cradle an infant. Not since Julia Louis-Dreyfus danced spasmodically on Seinfeld has physical awkwardness been so hilarious. Ava first sticks her hands up straight in the air, then grabs the baby by the crotch. Needless to say, wailing ensues.

Rudolph’s character is the show’s fulcrum, Arnett says—the one without whom it might devolve into goo-goo and ga-ga overload. “Not everyone’s goal is to start a family,” Arnett points out, laughing like a man who once thought he was one of those people. “Maya’s character allows us to explore that person who goes, ‘Oh, man, whatever, who cares.’ She’s essential to the audience, so we’re not just hitting them over the head with ‘You’d better like this baby—or else.’ ”

Even though she plays someone without kids, Rudolph says one of the reasons she wanted to be in Up All Night is because of the family-friendly attitude of its creators. Lorne Michaels, who is an executive producer, had kids later in life and understands what he calls “wanting to do it right and be present.” Spivey, whose own kids are cared for mostly by her husband, tries to limit the late nights and long days, and everyone’s children are always welcome on set.

“It’s comforting to hear someone say, ‘I know this time is hard for you, and I really want you here,’ ” says Rudolph, 39, who was in her third trimester when Spivey shot the pilot and returned to work six weeks after giving birth. “It’s not like the SNL days. Nobody’s looking at you, going, ‘That lady and her kids excuse again!’ when you don’t want to get drinks.” Instead she says Up All Night is populated by “old farts” who love to discuss when to introduce solid foods to a baby’s diet and how to change a diaper when Dad and the baby are both standing up.

This ease is only possible, of course, if it starts at the top. As veteran show runner Jonathan Groff explains, in the TV business it’s always best to work for someone who likes their own family. “They tend to work more efficiently and not want to waste time,” says Groff, whose credits include Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, and currently Happy Endings. “The ones with dissolving marriages and unhappy home lives like to keep people around working longer to avoid going home.”

While making a weekly show is always hectic, Spivey says, “I want to see my kids—and all the lady writers have kids—and I want to give them as much time as I can. Having kids makes you focus. We all have the same agenda, so we don’t goof off.”

*****

There is another upside of having parents play parents: They’re great with babies—in this case, the twins who portray newborn Amy. “Christina is a really good baby wrangler,” says Spivey. “She always gets them to look in the right direction.” Applegate prefers to call herself “the baby sheriff.” “The second I see the baby’s uncomfortable, we stop shooting,” she says. “Those little munchies—we’re protective of their time, emotions, germs, everything. They’re our surrogate kids.”

Michaels agrees. “When you see Will holding the baby,” he says of Arnett, “you know that on some level, his having just done it with two of them at home makes it feel authentic.”

Perhaps only real parents are comfortable admitting that as magical as it is to bring life into the world, sometimes you want to tear your hair out. “Can you balance it all? No,” says Applegate. “Reagan has that tension there, and she mostly fouls it up. You can’t do it all,” she adds, even as she admits that’s exactly what she’s trying to do.

Applegate knows that such honesty opens the show up to criticism. Already, she says, some are “saying this is a show about parents denying that they have a kid.” But while you can imagine where those people get their ammunition—the episode, for example, in which Applegate and Arnett call the cops on a rowdy neighborhood party, then go to the party so they don’t appear to be the snitches—the actress says such negative analysis is simplistic and wrong. “This is a show about adjusting,” she says, “not about denying their child love.”

Everyone on the show, meanwhile, describes experiencing a blurring between fact and fiction. That is a departure for Arnett, who’s made his name with over-the-top characters such as Gob in Fox’s dysfunctional family comedy Arrested Development and sweaty corporate schemer Devon Banks on 30 Rock. Using the spats he has with his wife to mine for humor? He still sounds almost surprised that it’s working.

The other day a few of the writers noticed Arnett’s underwear. He won’t describe it except to say, “I have this random underwear I wear to keep things sexy.” The writers immediately decided his character should use his undergarments the same way—which made Arnett reflect on his own behavior. “Once you have a kid, there’s a real question of how you keep your sexual being alive,” he says thoughtfully. Then he adds, “The writers are definitely poking fun at me.”

Photograph courtesy Trae Patton/NBC

Buzz Killer No More

By Miriam Datskovsky — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The Gossip Girl fans who gathered at the shoot in front of New York’s Plaza Hotel couldn’t have been watching more intently. When the cameras rolled, after all, a kiss bestowed on the Plaza steps would answer a question that had kept viewers of the CW’s hit teen drama up at night: Would the lovelorn Blair Waldorf reconcile with wanton soul mate Chuck Bass or settle for erstwhile boyfriend Nate Archibald?

Show runners Stephanie Savage and Joshua Safran knew they had a problem. Given the all-too-visible location and the immediacy of social networking, the moment actress Leighton Meester put one or the other of her character’s paramours in a lip lock, the whole world would know whom she’d chosen (ending the suspense a full nine weeks before the episode would air). So they decided to shoot the scene twice—once with Meester kissing Nate (Chace Crawford) and again with her embracing Chuck (Ed Westwick).

“The audience actually clapped when they realized they were being played,” recalls Safran, adding that in the age of Twitter and texting, “spoiler management” is part of his job.

Time was, spoilers—reports that give away key plot points—were seen as nothing more than a surefire way to send TV ratings plummeting. But as the Internet has created an unending news cycle and as spoiler Web sites like TVLine and E! Online have flourished, Hollywood has had to adjust. While it’s still hard to find creators of episodic television who embrace spoilers wholeheartedly, many have begun to accept how—if spoilers can’t be avoided—they can be used to gin up publicity.

“As a writer, I hate it,” says David Shore, creator of House, Fox’s long-running medical show. “I have this naive desire that people should experience the story as it unfolds, exactly as I intended.” He’s taken steps to ensure that they do, launching an internal investigation at one point to plug multiple leaks (several people were fired) that ruined two high-profile plotlines: actress Jennifer Morrison’s unexpected exit and House’s budding relationship with boss Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein).

As a producer, Shore sees things differently. “I think, ‘We’ve got this great act three twist—we should get it out there and get people to watch it.’ ” Though he’s never initiated the early release of information (“Anything I say or do is reactive,” he says), Shore understands that spoilers play a role. “You’re building a community that’s collectively watching and talking about the show, creating more pressure to watch every week, making people curious, and drawing them in,” he says. “It’s the Internet version of the watercooler.”

*****

If the watercooler was the traditional place to discuss what had happened on TV the night before, fans now gather at spoiler sites to speculate about what will happen. Spoilers generate anticipation and intrigue for existing and would-be viewers. They also keep the audience engaged at all times, even when a series is on hiatus. More and more, a show’s presence (or lack thereof) on a spoiler site is an indicator of whether it has heat.

“We take our cues from our readers,” says Michael Ausiello, founder and editor-in-chief of TVLine. “Their comments and questions provide a wealth of information about what’s popular—which shows are clicking, which plotlines are working.”

Ausiello and E! Online’s Kristin Dos Santos are the de facto leaders of the spoiler-media industry; both have been in the business since the late ’90s. (Ausiello, who launched his own site in January, is considered the architect of the spoiler culture. He started out interviewing soap opera stars, then headed to TVGuide.com. There he established his spoiler-centric column, The Ausiello Files, which he took with him when he moved to Entertainment Weekly.) A variety of niche entertainment sites, from New York magazine’s Vulture to AOL TV to Zap2it, also compete for scoops.

These sites do more than reveal secrets. They have also become tastemakers, providing a potential lifeline to critical favorites with small audiences. “If there is a show we believe in and we want to do well, it becomes a labor of love,” says Ausiello. “Even if it’s not generating blockbuster [Web site] traffic, chances are fans will catch on.” Friday Night Lights, the small-town high school football drama that premiered on NBC but was picked up by DirecTV after the network threatened to cancel it, recently wrapped for good, but Ausiello still receives e-mails from fans thanking him for turning them on to it. “That was just near and dear to my heart,” he says.

The ongoing chatter can be a boon for freshman efforts, too. “With a new show you have to wave your arms and say, ‘Look at me!’ and release balloons and confetti,” says Graham Yost, creator of Justified, FX’s modern-day western that recently finished shooting its second season. For Yost that meant giving a spoiler-heavy EW.com interview to coincide with this season’s ninth episode. Among other tidbits he disclosed that the show’s protagonist would tell his ex-wife he was in love with her.

“It was a bargaining chip. You give them a scoop so that they’ll do the story,” says Yost, who in retrospect wonders if he said too much. “The FX publicist should have been slapping me. I would’ve made a horrible, horrible spy. Give me Krispy Kremes, and I’ll divulge all the secrets.”

Yet he is quick to add that he didn’t give away any major developments or ruin any big surprises. “I don’t feel like I destroyed the experience of watching it. Fans have a rooting interest in the romance. If someone had leaked that Ross and Rachel were getting together at the end of Friends, everyone still would have watched.”

Striking that balance between revealing enough to get fans’ attention without eroding the viewing experience is something Yost continues to try to master. “It’s like a magician,” he says. “If you know the secret behind his trick, it lessens the watching.” He knows from his own obsession with Showtime’s Dexter just how damaging a spoiler can be. Halfway through the first season, which focused primarily on the unknown identity of the Ice Truck Killer, somebody offhandedly said to Yost (spoiler alert!), “Crazy that the Ice Truck Killer was Dexter’s sister’s boyfriend.” Yost’s reaction? “I never finished watching.”

*****

This spring, when an extra from Fox’s high school musical Glee tweeted about whom she thought the prom king and queen would be, cocreator Brad Falchuk went ballistic. “Who are you to spoil something talented people have spent months to create?” he posted on Twitter, inadvertently confirming the spoiler. “Hope you’re qualified to do something besides work in entertainment.”

Falchuk’s anger is a reminder that some TV series’ appeal is so tied to secrecy that for them spoilers have no upside. Reality shows especially are vulnerable, as when the Drudge Report announced in May—several hours before the finale of American Idol aired—that Scotty McCreery had beaten Lauren Alaina by almost two to one. To be sure, making a fuss about the importance of not spoiling the outcomes garners a certain amount of publicity of its own—witness what happened in the case of ABC’s Lost.

For most scripted series, though, show runners say there are ways to placate those in the spoiler-media business without giving away the farm. House’s Shore recommends postmortem interviews after episodes have aired. “It keeps the spoiler sites happy,” he says, “so hopefully they won’t piss you off in return.” Ausiello, for his part, says these interviews deliver all the advantages of spoiling without spoiling anything. “Fans engage even more,” he says. “They want to share their views, get their thoughts out there. It helps to get a producer’s perspective.”

Another strategy is to beat the spoiler sites at their own game. Gossip Girl’s Savage and Safran, fed up this winter with story lines leaking, started handing out scripts to the cast members that could not be copied, with all but their own lines crossed out. Within weeks news of the top-secret scripts swept the blogosphere, on news and entertainment sites. New York magazine and E! Online interviewed the casts about the script kerfuffle.

But there’s only so much one can control, especially with a program centered on a Web site that spills secrets about New York City socialites. Savage and Safran’s attempts at spoiler management are always complicated by the fact that they shoot so much on location, though sometimes that highly visible habit won’t fly. “With a new character or romance, we’ll often make a conscious decision to keep them on the stages,” says Safran. “Otherwise photos show up online months in advance.”

For example, when Blair (yes, the same character who planted one on both Nate and Chuck at the Plaza) and a third character kissed this season, filming on location wasn’t even considered. Fans continued to speculate about photos that caught the two characters simply walking around the city together, but the alleged romance was not exposed before the episode aired. The trick, Safran says, is to not let such fan-based scrutiny crimp the style of the show. “At a certain point we do decide that a kiss should happen in Central Park—we can’t just change it to protect the fans from spoilers. We have to serve the story.”

Illustration by Brett Ryder

Purpose Driven

By Margot Dougherty — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

A Better Life, which opens in theaters on June 24, follows the travails of Carlos, an undocumented Mexican gardener, and Luis, his teenage son, as they eke out an existence—and a coexistence—in a bare-bones home in East L.A. The $10 million film is that rare honest representation of the diversity and isolation of Los Angeles: The cast and crew shot in 69 locations in 38 days, from Bell to Bel-Air, Pico Rivera to Malibu. The majority of the crew was Latino, Spanish was the primary language on set, and former gang members from Father Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Industries made up part of the cast—the cameras didn’t roll until “Father G” blessed the set. The movie wouldn’t have been made if not for two first-time producers: the actress Jami Gertz, who lives in Beverly Hills with her investor husband and three teenage sons, and Stacey Lubliner, a former ICM literary agent with two young children of her own. Gertz, whose acting credits run from Square Pegs and Less than Zero to Entourage and Modern Family, took her seat behind the director every day. “I didn’t ask a lot of questions about their background, because I didn’t really care,” she says of the ex-gang members, whose ankle bracelets she sometimes mistook for props. “We were here to do a job. We ate lunch together, and it was lovely, I have to say.”

Two years ago Gertz and Lubliner formed Lime Orchard Productions to make films that, well, mattered to them. They were drawn to A Better Life because, says Gertz, “it’s a personal story about a man and his child. I have teenagers, and you go from being their hero to them being embarrassed by you. Add to that your father doesn’t speak English or comes from another country.” Movies like A Better Life—socially responsible, issue driven—rarely appeal to major studios looking for blockbusters. Not even smaller houses dedicated to advocacy material were biting when independent producer Christian McLaughlin went shopping for development money, although director Chris Weitz—whose New Moon has grossed $700 million and counting—was attached to the project. Philanthropist Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, the producer of documentaries such as Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman as well as the upcoming adaptation of The Help, passed. So did the Latino companies McLaughlin thought would be a soft touch. “They all want to make commercial Hollywood movies,” McLaughlin says. “Jami was willing to take a financial risk on an emotional reaction. The highway is littered with bodies who’ve done that.”

Dealing with Lime Orchard means dealing with its principals; the company consists only of Gertz, Lubliner, and their assistant—which means zero bureaucracy. “You have people who have their own vision, taste, and passion,” says veteran producer Paul Junger Witt (Brian’s Song, The Golden Girls, Three Kings), who commissioned the film’s initial screenplay some 20 years ago. “They’ll make films that might be overlooked by studios who in this climate are interested in tent poles and comedies.”

Small in terms of budget and story line, A Better Life stands to punch above its weight in impact, especially in Los Angeles. While Carlos, played by Mexican actor Demián Bichir (Fidel Castro in Che and Esteban, the drug-running mayor, in Weeds), tends to the sprawling estates of wealthy whites to whom he is essentially invisible, his son is becoming distant, on the verge of being sucked in by neighborhood gangs. After Carlos falls victim to a crime, he is unable to report it for fear of deportation; he and Luis take matters into their own hands. The movie, a reflection on the everyday realities and challenges faced by immigrants in L.A., reduces a hot-button political issue to human scale. Prerelease screenings have garnered high marks, including from Latino audiences. Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly pegged A Better Life as an early Oscar contender. “Jami and Stacey were our angels,” says Weitz. “They believed in me and my collaborators.”

*****

The Sunset Boulevard offices of Lime Orchard are spanking-new and decidedly feminine: white walls, white cabinets, white tufted love seats tossed with chain-stitched Jonathan Adler pillows. “We still don’t have any art up,” says Gertz. No paintings, maybe, but a significant piece hangs in the sun-filled conference room: a wood-framed poster of A Better Life.

“I was getting my hair colored,” says Gertz, settling into the conference room with Lubliner, “and I’m weeping in the chair. Kelly, who has been doing my hair for years, said, ‘What are you reading?’ I said, ‘I’m reading the most beautiful script—and I’ve read a lot of scripts in my day.’ ” The older Gertz got, the less interesting acting parts became—a common Hollywood lament. Encouraged by her husband of 22 years, Tony Ressler, cofounder of a successful private investment firm, she decided to take on producing. When she went looking for a partner (“I knew what I knew, but I knew I didn’t know a lot,” she says), she hit it off with Lubliner, whose work as an agent gave her the deal-making chops that Gertz lacked. “Aside from really liking each other, we bring complementary sets of skills to the table,” says Lubliner. “It’s not competitive or combustible, just ‘Oh great, you’re so good at that, you do it’ and then calling each other in when necessary.”

Both women credit their children for propelling their reinvention. Gertz, who is 45, was told by her boys she was “no longer welcome at the baseball games,” she says with comic melodrama. “Then it was OK if I came, but I couldn’t cheer. When did I become the loser mom who’s not allowed to cheer?” Lubliner, 34, found that the 24/7 schedule required of an agent was increasingly incompatible with that of a young mother. “The whole point of this is, we want a life,” says Gertz. “We want to be able to get our hair blown dry when we want to. If one of Stacey’s kids is sick, she can go be with them. For many years I was on set and I couldn’t. You should be able to do both.” The women’s husbands are a key part of the arrangement. Ressler and Gertz are the money behind Lime Orchard; Stacey is married to David Lubliner, an agent with William Morris Endeavor who counts Chris Weitz among his clients. Asked if they have a finite amount of cash to play with, Gertz says the topic hasn’t come up. “If it were ridiculous, Tony would be like, ‘Ah, honey? What’s going on?’ But we’re not frivolous girls, so we haven’t had to have that discussion.”

Witt developed the project that became A Better Life after hearing a story about a friend’s gardener. “It crystallized what was so different and mysterious about L.A.,” he says. “Every morning there’s this migration from the Eastside to the Westside, and we rarely put an identity behind the faces we see.” Time and again he tried to get the film made; Cheech Marin and Sony were attached at one point. Then in 2007, Witt met McLaughlin and passed along the script, as he had been doing for decades. McLaughlin saw potential and drafted Eric Eason, the young award-winning screenwriter of Manito, a festival favorite, to do a rewrite. He gave the new version, titled The Gardener, to his old friend Chris Weitz. “It was,” says Weitz, “the best script I’d read in years.”

Weitz is part Mexican—his grandmother Lupita was a Mexican actress. His wife, Mercedes, is Mexican Cuban. “It was a part of his life he hadn’t explored,” McLaughlin says. After the crazy-money success of New Moon, Summit Entertainment, the distributor of the movie, was willing to back anything Weitz chose to do, and he chose The Gardener. “We said, ‘You’re sure?’ ” recalls Summit’s president of production, Erik Feig. “ ‘When you can do absolutely any movie after the success of New Moon?’ ” Summit agreed to a budget somewhere around the $4 million mark, but the movie Weitz envisioned required more than double that. Unbeknownst to him, he had an interested partner in Lime Orchard: Lubliner had received the script through her husband early on and loved it. She passed it on to Gertz, which led to the tears in the hair colorist’s chair.

McLaughlin and Weitz met with Lime Orchard, then headquartered in Ressler’s Century City offices. There were few degrees of separation in the room—McLaughlin had met Lubliner when she was an intern and he was an exec at Paramount in New York; Weitz had worked with her aunt, Karen Rosenfelt, a producer on New Moon. The meeting went well, and Lime Orchard got on board. Although nobody wants to confirm the figures, they seem to go something like this: Summit put up $5 million, lottery-won tax credits from the State of California brought another $1.3 million, Lime Orchard anted up about $2 million, and Weitz added money of his own.

“We are not an ATM machine,” says Gertz. “When you get us, we are fully immersed in the project.” A hovering producer can be a director’s nightmare. “But in this case,” says Weitz, “it was a great experience. Jami is very emotionally committed. What you fear from producers is that you’re just part of a slate.” Gertz, no stranger to being a neophyte on a movie set, kept an eye out for José Julián, who is making his film debut as the son. “We called her Mama,” says the 17-year-old actor. “She had an iPad, and we played Scrabble. She was so supportive.”

As A Better Life makes its way to theaters, Gertz and Lubliner are developing several other projects: an adaptation of Three Little Words, a memoir about foster care and adoption, with director James Mangold and his wife, producer Cathy Konrad; an adaptation of Robert Goolrick’s psychological thriller A Reliable Wife, with Sony; and a teen comedy that Gertz describes as “Weird Science for girls,” with the Disney Channel. Although the projects cover a wide swath of subject matter, they’re all character-driven stories, the big-screen equivalent of Oprah’s Book Club choices. “The comic books, the creatures, the aliens, the world destruction,” says Gertz, “that’s not our wheelhouse. You have to think, ‘What do I want to put out there?’ ” Lubliner shares Gertz’s taste for the most part but comes at it from an agent’s point of view, looking for the marketing potential, the trailer moments. Sometimes she has to rein in her partner. “I told Stace I wanted to do a movie about a 16th-century excommunicated Jew,” says Gertz. “She was like, ‘I really don’t see the poster.’ ”

See a location map and read our Q&A with director Chris Weitz about shooting A Better Life in L.A. spots rarely-seen on film

Photograph by Ethan Pines

Lights! Camera! App!

By Zachary Pincus-Roth — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Like most camera assistants, John Reyes, who works on the MTV sitcom The Hard Times of RJ Berger, stores his equipment on a four-foot-tall aluminum cart. Among the lenses and tripods is a viewfinder (a short telescope-like device that helps directors see how a shot will look from a certain angle) and a depth-of-field calculator (a rotating instrument that calculates what portion of the shot will be in focus). Lately, however, the gizmos have started to disappear.

“Slowly each of these pieces of equipment is being replaced by apps,” says Reyes. “If you go on our set, it’s 90 percent iPhones. Pretty soon we’ll probably just use the camera on the iPhone to shoot our shows.” That last part’s a joke. Sort of.

The story of technology in Hollywood has long been one of a few early adopters fighting against the status quo. Each advance in the Industry, from talkies to Technicolor, took a while to catch on. Movies may be flashy and fancy, but movie sets are old-fashioned places, filled with apple crates (for actors who need a boost) and spotlights that have hung from the rafters since David Fincher was in diapers. But the iPhone and the iPad are propelling casts and crews into the 21st century, fundamentally altering the way people collaborate while saving time and money. Recently South Korean director Park Chan-wook went so far as to shoot an entire 30-minute short on his iPhone 4.

“Everyone’s looking to create a standard that will unite every department,” says Taz Goldstein, a director who blogs about production gadgets at Hand Held Hollywood. “That’s the holy grail.”

Here’s an example: A director can now hold up an iPhone to see how the mountains would look through his digital camera and send that image to an app to create a storyboard (the panel of sketches that form a visual outline of a movie) in about five minutes. During shooting, a director can plug notes on each take into his iPad and have them show up automatically in the editor’s Final Cut Pro software.

After the iPhone’s app store launched in July 2008, a group of gregarious Brits who operated a Burbank soundstage took a look at sunPATH, the software that helps cinematographers calculate where the sun will be in relation to a particular location at a particular time. A printout from sunPATH can tell you that at 10 a.m., for instance, the sun will rise over a building from the east at 60 degrees. On set a compass would pinpoint the direction and a clinometer would determine the correct angle. But an iPhone, they thought, could do better. “We wanted to take that functionality and put it in a device you have in your pocket all the time,” says Toby Evetts, one of the partners in the enterprise.

So they created Helios, an iPhone application that charts the sun’s movement. The group eventually formed a company called Chemical Wedding and created a line of apps: Artemis, which has replaced the director’s viewfinder, and Toland, the product of a collaboration with the American Society of Cinematographers that helps a director of photography know how a certain lens will affect what’s in focus and how much light is needed to shoot at a certain speed—questions previously answered via tables in a manual.

One Artemis user is Julian Farino, a director who counts the HBO series Entourage and the soon-to-be-released indie film The Oranges among his credits. He says that, typically, when using a director’s viewfinder, “you have to have a camera assistant run back to the lens box to change out a lens by unscrewing it and rescrewing it and bringing it back to have another look.” Artemis changes lenses with the push of a button. “I wouldn’t entirely rely on it—I think you want to look through as big a viewfinder as possible—but it’s a handy guide that’s immeasurably helpful,” says Farino.

Filmmakers quickly realized that the iPhone’s intuitiveness could help make specialized processes easier for generalists as well. Jonathan Houser, a cinematographer in Seattle, discovered that his film students were too lazy to make storyboards, so in 2009 he created Storyboard Composer, which allows anyone to photograph locations and create primitive storyboards within minutes.

*****

From the moment the iPad debuted last April, script runners—who drive around town delivering 40 packages of scripts a day—found themselves facing extinction. Even the introduction of e-mail hadn’t done away with paper script delivery. Unwieldy as they are, paper scripts can be scribbled on, and their format prevents them from being leaked to outsiders. The iPad is seductive, however, in that it doesn’t just enable you to read a script anywhere; you can interact with it, too.

In the past, UTA agent Keya Khayatian took an extra suitcase on vacation packed with a dozen scripts. These days he carries an iPad, as do almost half of UTA’s 100-plus reps. Last summer, while sitting on the beach on Georgia’s St. Simons Island reading the script for Too Big to Fail, a film about the financial crisis in production at HBO, Khayatian was overcome with enthusiasm. He downloaded the original book by Andrew Ross Sorkin, scanned a few New York Times articles about the subject online, and watched some CNBC clips of financial reporter Maria Bartiromo on YouTube. “It was such an enhanced experience,” he says. “It’s not just a reading device—that’s the lowest bar for what it can do. There are so many avenues.”

The iPad’s interactive capability helps performers as well. David H. Lawrence XVII, who played the villain Eric Doyle on NBC’s Heroes, created Rehearsal, an app that allows actors to highlight their lines in the script and then black out those lines to test their memories by dragging a finger across the page. They can also record themselves performing every role in the scene and act along with that recording. One day Clark Gregg, best known for his role as the ex-husband on CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine, showed up on the set of the soon-to be-released film Thor, thinking he was doing an action scene with no lines. “Suddenly it was this two-page dialogue scene, and I was screwed,” he recalls. He pulled out his iPad, turned on Rehearsal, and learned his lines while sitting in the makeup chair.

The iPad has proved especially well suited to an application called MovieSlate, which mimics those iconic zebra-striped clapperboards that synch film with sound. MovieSlate was originally developed for the iPhone, but then the iPad turned out to be about the size and shape of a clapperboard, making it all the more valuable. The device illustrates how apps help rein in costs. Whereas a regular slate is priced at more than $1,000, MovieSlate is $19.99. Of course, the iPad costs $499, but that amount includes, um, an iPad.

According to Justin Springer, coproducer of Tron: Legacy and producer of Disney’s upcoming Prom, everyone from the location scout to the caterer has begun to wonder, “How can I use this device, which I carry around in my bag to read and send e-mail, to better do my job?” On the Tron set, for instance, actors took advantage of iPads to look at the conceptual artwork before filming scenes in front of a blue screen to get a sense of the computer-generated environment in which their performances took place. On Prom the crew used iPads to look at photo boards, a string of photographic images that map out scenes.

“You could bounce around quickly—here are the photo boards, here’s the script for those photo boards, here’s the schedule for the day,” Springer says. “To have multiple people simultaneously scrolling through the images and looking at this plan for what we’ll be doing was a huge, huge time-saver.”

In September the Irvine-based company Teradek released a device called Cube, a box the size of a deck of cards that attaches to a camera and transmits straight to video whatever the camera sees on an iPad or iPhone. You can’t watch in real time—there’s a ten-second delay with an iPad, less with other equipment. But this process, dubbed “instant dailies,” means that the director and other crew members don’t have to stand behind the camera or sit in “video village”—the cluster of monitors and chairs where on-set honchos hang out—to review a shot. “The director can be walking around with a camera operator or walking with an actor or sitting under a tree,” says Nicol Verheem, a Teradek founder. “The producer, the art department—anyone—can look at the take right after it’s done and start rating it, adding comments to it. You can play it over and over again.”

Apps have found their way into even the most obscure corners of the Industry. Take “photo kills,” a process in which actors, per their contracts, can nix a certain percentage of the publicity photos taken during production that they deem unflattering. Previously photo kills necessitated printing out stacks of proof sheets and delivering them to cast members (or their publicists) all over town. In 2007, a service called PhotoKill Online made it possible to view the stills—sometimes as many as 50,000 per movie—on the Internet. But the actor and a computer had to be in the same room at the same time. Not anymore. In January PhotoKill released an iPad app that allows a publicist to simply walk up to an actor on the set for a quick approval.

Before this app, studio marketing people often had to chase down talent to learn their preferences, according to Chrissy Quesada, director of still photography for 20th Century Fox’s theatrical marketing department. Now, she hopes, the process will be “a bit easier. You won’t have to be tethered to the Internet.”

While integration sounds great in theory, it’s not surprising that many below-the-line folks in Hollywood fear that this new technology will erode personal control and jeopardize their jobs. Others just worry it’ll spark an outbreak of meddling. What happens when a director tells a cameraman, “Johnson, I see from your metadata that you’ve been shooting at a five to one ratio,” jokes Hand Held Hollywood’s Goldstein.

Not every product transforms easily into an app. Take Final Draft, the leading screenwriting software. The ability to edit and distribute a script on set via iPad would be a boon. Final Draft Inc. is currently researching and developing prototypes for the app, a process the company admits has proved tricky. One challenge is that the shortcuts writers use on a regular computer are awkward on a flat-screen keyboard. In addition, the company has had difficulty designing the software so that the script on the iPad and the script on the computer have the same page count, which profoundly affects a studio’s estimate of the length and cost of a film or TV episode. “That page count is the currency the entertainment industry goes by,” says Kirsten Thayer, a Final Draft product manager. “If I have a 125-page Final Draft file and it doesn’t open up in iPad as 125 pages, I have a problem.”

For his part, Reyes, the camera assistant, is more worried about another iPhone-related issue: distraction. When he’s on set he sometimes surfs the Web, texts his girlfriend, and looks for future jobs—and everyone around him is doing much the same thing. “It’s 90 percent waiting and 10 percent actual filming, so the iPhone or iPad often fills those downtimes,” he says. To prevent temptation he stashes his iPhone on that aluminum camera cart, with the lenses and tripods, where it’s likely to remain permanently.

Illustration by Augusto Costhanzo

Sweet Tweet

By Miriam Datskovsky — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

The bulletin was, for the fans at least, a bombshell. “Ellen Pompeo Says No Baby on Grey’s Anatomy This Season,” E! Online reporter Kristin Dos Santos announced on the Web site Twitter, referring to the lead actress on ABC’s hit medical drama. Within moments the scoop was making its way around the Internet—McDreamy’s squeeze would not have a bun in her oven! There was just one problem: Pompeo had been far less definitive.

Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator, wasted no time. “I think the word that Ellen used was PROBABLY,” she tweeted right back. “Which was a smart savvy thing for her to say.” Minutes later Dos Santos reversed herself: “good call. Ellen did say ‘probably’…Sorry and thx!”

Crisis averted. And in less than 140 characters to boot.

It’s hardly news that Twitter is the great equalizer for stars and their nobody fans. More than 6 million people may follow Ashton Kutcher’s @aplusk account, for example, but the actor still gets the same number of characters as the rest of us to express (or embarrass) himself. Lately in hierarchical Hollywood, the brevity and immediacy of Twitter—as well as its direct, unfiltered quality—are enabling a subtle redistribution of power.

Rhimes is one of many TV series creators, show runners, and writers who have begun tweeting as a way of taking control of their brands—from the media, certainly (“When the tabloids were reporting that Ellen Pompeo had six toes, I was like, ‘Should I tweet about that?’ Ellen and I have never laughed so hard,” Rhimes says), but also occasionally from the networks on which their shows exist. On Twitter, they find, it’s easy to inject a little oomph into a lackluster marketing campaign, building buzz for a young struggling show simply by making viewers feel like confidants.

“It’s made a difference in how fans interact with the show and feel a sense of community with it,” says Rhimes, who in addition to Grey’s created the spin-off Private Practice. While the number of people who follow @shondarhimes (56,400) pales in comparison to her overall viewers (20 million), these superfans are influential. She’s too polite to say so, but there’s no denying it: When managed correctly, that kind of visible audience fervor gives Rhimes added clout to protect her own shows and to promote the work of others.

“I have all these Grey’s Anatomy fans following me, and I can say, ‘Go watch this show, too,’ ” says Rhimes. “I like getting to do that.”

Consider what happened in October, when @shondarhimes—who on average tweets ten times a day—revealed her abiding love for a show she has nothing to do with. “Okay, peeps, it is Wednesday. WATCH COUGAR TOWN. It’s hilarious,” she tweeted about the ABC comedy that revolves around a fortysomething divorcée and her dysfunctional group of friends. When an assistant to one of Cougar Town’s creators, Bill Lawrence, alerted him to Rhimes’s endorsement, everyone in his writers’ room agreed: They needed to capitalize on it—and quickly.

Minutes later Lawrence (aka @vdoozer) took to his keyboard and tweeted a response to Rhimes: “We have stopped writing to figure out new ways to thank you for saying nice things about our show (and cause we hate working).” Rhimes replied, “Now I’m all embarrassed because you caught me stalking your awesome show.” Lawrence didn’t hesitate. “I’m needy,” he tweeted. For good measure Lawrence and show cocreator Kevin Biegel (@kbiegel) sent Rhimes a big batch of cookies. In November, when Rhimes weighed in again (“Cougar Town! Who watched it on the East Coast? Cause I am still at work and I need my fix!”), @kbiegel promptly gushed, “I love you, Shonda. I’m sending over more cookies.”

“Shonda is such a powerful voice among fans,” says Lawrence. “I know without a doubt her viewers tuned in to our show.”

Lawrence and Biegel, meanwhile, have used Twitter to do for others what Rhimes did for them. “Watch #Community tonight. Watch it twice,” Biegel tweeted in October about the NBC comedy that follows the goings-on at a community college. A few weeks later a fan responded, “luv cougar town & started watching commun @ ur recommend—and luv it too. Any other suggestions?”

“I’ve never met Dan Harmon once in my life,” Biegel says of Community’s creator, @danharmon. “But now we have a 140-character relationship supporting each other. You are kind of forced to cut to the quick. Twitter takes the bullshit out of Hollywood relationships.”

Even before they learned they had a fan in Rhimes, Lawrence and Biegel were playing the Twitter game, having used it to try to change Cougar Town’s image during the run-up to the second season. The dilemma: While the show was originally written about an aging single woman on the prowl for younger guys, over the course of the first season it evolved into a fortysomething Friends-meets-Scrubs-plus-wine ensemble comedy (not surprising, given that Cougar Town stars ex-Friends cast member Courteney Cox and Lawrence created Scrubs). But most TV viewers, who had already dismissed the show as crass, sexist, and unendearing, didn’t know that.

During the summer, the creators pushed ABC to change the name of Cougar Town to something more reflective of the new premise but to no avail. So when the series returned in September, they decided to alter the name on their own, sort of, by adding a parenthetical before the title of each episode. The first one read “(Still) Cougar Town.” Another one was more blunt: “(Badly Titled) Cougar Town.”

“We’re in the awkward position of getting the message out that the show is not what you think it is,” says Lawrence. “The network, for savvy financial business reasons, was not interested in changing the title. But they’re not giving us an opportunity to let viewers know what the show really is. And we need to correct it via any avenue we can.”

If Twitter is the avenue, it stands to reason that the more people involved with Cougar Town who are tweeting, the better. After all, it’s not just each tweeter’s followers who can see what they write—anyone searching for references to the show can read the tweets. So Lawrence and Biegel ordered their entire writing staff to converge on Twitter—and then ordered fans to “find and torture them.” (Writers tweet collectively at @cougartownroom.) The cast has gotten involved, too. When Cougar Town star Busy Philipps (@busyphilipps25) asked fans to tweet suggestions for parenthetical titles for upcoming episodes, Lawrence tweeted about the impact: “Busy Philipps exploded my Twitter account. Thanks for suggestions. Some of you nailed one we are using. We will pick another from fans.”

Lawrence and Biegel plan to use Twitter as a backdoor focus group for story lines as well. For example, they’re seriously pondering a romance between Philipps’s character (Laurie) and Dan Byrd’s (Travis). “They have such great chemistry,” Lawrence says, “even in scenes they’re not supposed to. In real life they’re much closer in age than in TV life, so we’ll probably go on Twitter and see what the response is as to when it’s OK to put them together. Hopefully fans will confirm our feelings.”

And if they don’t? “I can always tweet ‘you suck,’ too,” says Biegel, adding that Twitter has become something of an addiction, particularly for Lawrence. “I have to wean him off of responding to everyone. He promised some guy he’d help him with his Halloween costume. There are boundaries, man!”

*****

Not long ago Kate Walsh (whose handle is @katewalsh, with 66,938 followers) was concerned that ABC’s promotional execs were treating Private Practice, the series in which she stars, like Grey’s Anatomy’s red-haired stepchild. So she took the matter into her own hands, rallying the whole cast to Twitter.

All but two of the leads tweet daily. Walsh posts pictures of her cats, dogs, shoes; musings from the Atlanta airport; shout-outs to fans. Clearly @katewalsh does not believe there’s a price to pay for tweeting too much. As for her costars, KaDee Strickland (@kadeestrick) gives fans weekly previews (“saw epi. 406!” she’ll tease. “big issues…lots of couple conflict! happy ending?”). Taye Diggs (@thetayediggs) shares random facts about himself (“What up, y’all—stupid personal fact #3—I didn’t learn to drive a car until my thirties”). And everybody regularly tweets photos from the set.

The fans have responded—in at least one instance—in a way that has been memorialized on the show. After viewers started referring to the romance between Walsh’s character, Dr. Addison Montgomery, and Diggs’s Dr. Sam Bennett as “Addisam,” Rhimes wrote the nickname into an episode.

Walsh has also used Twitter to expand her merchandising empire. In November, when she launched her perfume, Boyfriend, her Twitter account was on fire (as was @boyfriend, the scent’s own handle) with video links and other promotions. Boyfriend sold out on the first day.

Promotion aside, Twitter can be a useful platform for personal revelations—particularly the kind that the revealer isn’t eager to elaborate on. Neil Patrick Harris (@actuallynph) deftly tweeted just twice about becoming a father. The first tweet said that he and his partner, David Burtka, were expecting twins (“We’re super excited/nervous/thrilled. Hoping the press can respect our privacy…”) and the second stated that the twins had been born (“Babies!! On 10/12, Gideon Scott and Harper Grace entered the Burtka-Harris fold. All of us are happy, healthy, tired, and a little pukey”). The tabloids, which would have been all over the story if given an opening, had nothing to report. Harris gave no interviews. The authors of every subsequent article were forced to cite his tweets.

But if the promise of such control is Twitter’s upside, its ever-present vulnerability is the downside. What makes Twitter appealing—suggested intimacy—has also made many a tweeter wish they’d used more restraint. Who can forget Ashton Kutcher’s infamous twitpic of wife Demi Moore bent over, wearing only white underwear? And one can easily imagine @kanyewest’s publicity team pulling out its hair as the rapper’s around-the-clock tweets prove, again and again, that there is such a thing as sharing too much.

Rich Sommer, who plays Harry Crane on Mad Men, is only the latest celebrity to fall victim to what might be called tweet-in-mouth disease. In November, as contract negotiations that would determine the show’s future continued, Sommer tweeted, “I have no idea if there will be a season 5 of MM. I am operating under the assumption that there won’t be, until I hear otherwise.” Judging from a “MAJOR CLARIFICATION” he later posted on his blog, Sommer got a lot of flak from his colleagues. “I did not intend to start the s**t storm I’ve clearly started, and I did not intend to ruin anyone’s day, fans and coworkers alike,” Sommer flailed. “That is all. Retreating to my hole now.”

Rhimes offers some Twitter etiquette that works whether you’re famous or not. For starters, “Don’t tweet while drunk. Twitter can backfire,” she says. “There’s a danger when you’re speaking directly to the fans and they’re talking back to you. If you’re not self-loathing like me, you can begin to think you’re way more important than you are.”

“Say what you plan to tweet out loud beforehand,” advises Lawrence. “Twitter can’t understand your tone.” To wit, after Rhimes gave Cougar Town its first mention, Jamie Rorison, a 22-year-old aspiring filmmaker in England who goes by the handle
@bonus_mosher, sent this tweet addressed to Rhimes (but viewable by all): “surprised u and @vdoozer are friends given the frequent lashings of Grey’s in scrubs but hey, I love both!”

Lawrence immediately defended his honor: “Bonus trying to stir up trouble? Not true, by the by. Two mentions of Grey’s in nine years.” Plus, @vdoozer noted in another tweet, those two mentions only poked fun at both shows’ “unavoidably similar hospital stories.”

Rorison demurred—he’d been misunderstood. “I love scrubs,” he tweeted, attaching a link to a photo of a signed Scrubs script that he said he’d “paid a lot for.” Lawrence reassured him in just 95 characters: “No problem, my friend. Thnks for watching. Shonda has been so nice to us that I got protective.”

Illustration by Tim Bower

When to Quit

By Zachary Pincus-Roth — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Steve Gabriel works as the script coordinator on $#*! My Dad Says, the new CBS sitcom starring William Shatner. The show is based on the Twitter feed of a guy who is 29. Gabriel is in his forties—he’d prefer not to reveal his exact age.

Gabriel wants to be a TV staff writer—and at times, he’s been one. Soon after graduating from college, he got a job as a writers’ assistant on Carol Burnett’s 1990 variety show, Carol & Company. He worked with the writers of the Home Improvement pilot and went on to write a script for the series that was produced during its second season. The Home Improvement creators promoted him to staff writer on their next show, Thunder Alley, starring Ed Asner and Haley Joel Osment. His next job was another promotion: story editor on the Dave Chappelle sitcom, Buddies. But the show was canceled in 1996 during its first season.

“That’s kind of when the rails came off the tracks,” says Gabriel, whose graying, close-cropped hair makes him look more like a colonel in the Air Force than a proofreader of other people’s jokes. “I didn’t get a job after that and had to start over.”

This is the reason that Gabriel, at forty-something, is an assistant to writers instead of a writer himself. To pay the bills he became a script coordinator, first for the short-lived 1998 Fox sitcom Costello, then the following year for ABC’s Norm MacDonald vehicle, Norm, and later for Will & Grace. Toward the end of that hit’s eight-season run, he was promoted to staff writer. But then it, too, was off the air, and he went back to script coordinating on the 2008 NBC comedy Kath & Kim (canceled) and this year’s 100 Questions (canceled).

“I always feel, ‘I know more than that person.’ ‘I’m better than them.’ ‘I’m a better writer than that person,’ ” says Gabriel, explaining why he hasn’t given up. “I’ve been told my scripts came in better than a co-EP’s”—co-executive producer, high on the writer totem pole. “Stuff like that.”

When asked whether he’s ever considered switching careers, Gabriel demurs. “I know people who don’t do it anymore, and they don’t seem to be any happier,” he says, before describing various projects he is developing—a TV pilot and a comic strip called Hope & Death—that could help him break through once again. “I know people who’ve had kids and had to drop out to support them. I feel bad for them that they’re not able to pursue their dreams.”

*****

For every aspiring writer whose Twitter feed becomes a sitcom, there are thousands of others toiling away at the assistant level, striving to one day be promoted to a full-fledged staff writer. Ideally that job is like a golden chairlift that carries them up the writer hierarchy, through mysterious titles like “coproducer” and “executive story editor,” before all of a sudden they’re running a show, creating other shows, and flipping through the Tesla catalog.

That’s the fantasy. Here’s the reality: Shows get canceled. The people in charge don’t always promote from within. Or a fledgling writer’s spec scripts—intended as writing samples, not for production—just aren’t good enough. So why keep the faith? The cyclical nature of television means that there’s always next season. Which is why some assistants remain assistants for years or even decades, always praying they’ll move up the ladder.

“The siren song of being a writer on a show is very strong,” says Andrew Meyers, 40, who’s been a writers’ assistant and script coordinator since landing his first television job in 2000 on the Showtime series Rude Awakening (it was canceled a year later). He compares the allure to “no-calorie cake. It’s cold fusion. It’s free energy. It’s very tempting, but as any researcher will tell you, you can spend a lot of time trying to develop cold fusion—you can spend a lot of money that goes nowhere.”

A quick primer on the television writing support staff: The writers’ assistant sits in the writers’ room, where staff writers gather to talk through a script, and jots down every murder confession and fart joke. The script coordinator proofreads and formats each script. (On sitcoms those two jobs typically overlap.) Meanwhile the show runner (the head writer, who is the de facto CEO of the show) and the executive producers have personal assistants to answer their phones, manage their schedules, and—according to one woman in this job who wished to remain anonymous—purchase $450 snakeskin clutch purses for their waitress girlfriends. Some shows hire researchers. The writers’ production assistant, or PA, picks up lunch. Everyone plays the tricky game of doing their assigned job while trying to pitch ideas in order to get a better one. (Full disclosure: I’ve been in their shoes.)

Michael F.X. Daley, a 43-year-old script coordinator on HBO’s Big Love, has been playing this game for a long time. His master’s in screenwriting from Loyola Marymount led to entry-level assistant jobs on shows such as The X-Files, Crossing Jordan, and the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, where he penned a script that was made into an episode. On the side he wrote spec scripts for The West Wing, Ally McBeal, Six Feet Under, The Shield, and Without a Trace. He finally got a staff writer job on the CW network’s 2007 fantasy series, Reaper. The gig almost tripled his salary. But the show was canceled. His agent sent him to interview for writing jobs, but nothing panned out—which means he proofreads other writers’ scripts even as he yearns to become a staff writer himself.

“I can’t just sit home,” Daley says. “I need a paycheck. I couldn’t afford to live on unemployment. I’ve put so many eggs in this basket.”

For late-blooming TV writers, the numbers give reason for optimism. In 2007, only 6 percent of the TV writing jobs went to people 30 years old or younger, and 37 percent went to those ages 31 to 40, according to the Writers Guild of America—meaning that the majority of television writers are over 40.

Yet the clock is ticking, says Jane Espen-son, who is a writer-producer for series such as Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She also has a blog that gives advice on breaking into television writing. “I think age does still matter, unfortunately, especially in comedy,” she wrote in an e-mail. “There is certainly a perception that younger writers are going to bring in a ‘fresh’ point of view and that their writing will appeal to younger fans.”

Television writers have been at the forefront of the fight against ageism in Hollywood. In January a group of older writers settled their age discrimination lawsuit against the major networks, studios, and agencies for $70 million. The Writers Guild recently raised concerns with the Internet Movie Database about the site’s policy of listing writers’ dates of birth. The fear is that writers will be judged by their age first, their work second.

*****

Many assistants believe that when show runners hire writers, they don’t care about age; they simply want the best people for the job. But others are apprehensive that TV bigwigs might subconsciously assume that an assistant who is nearing midlife must have a past riddled with well-deserved failure. Daley says he worries that producers will wonder, “Why has it taken this guy so long?”

To guard against this preconception, Daley, for example, canceled his MySpace account and doesn’t indicate his age on his Facebook page. One late-thirties assistant who didn’t want her name used says she secretly studied Saved by the Bell and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers to understand the cultural touchstones of her younger colleagues.

Some assistants are self-critical and admit they may not be selling themselves the right way. Wendy Wilkins, who turned 41 in August, has a résumé that resembles a highbrow Netflix queue, with credits for Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and Rome. Her low points in the assistant trenches include being yelled at on the set of Malcolm in the Middle and being asked to procure a ten-inch black dildo for Mr. Show with Bob and David.

“I’m always the mom,” she says mournfully. “Like buying birthday cakes and making sure people pick up after themselves. I think that’s why people don’t take me as seriously as a writer.”

David Rodwin, 39, is more uneasy about the fact that he took an assistant job in the first place than he is about his age. “I’ve begun to think that having been a writers’ assistant at all has actually been a detriment,” he says. Rodwin allows that while the job has created some relationships, “people know you by what you’ve done previously.” He’s afraid that prospective employers will think, “Once an underling, always an underling.”

Rodwin left a career in New York heading a company that produced short films and musicals to move to L.A. and try his hand at TV writing. His first job was as a writers’ production assistant and researcher for the CBS drama Swingtown, which lasted a single season. At his age, Rodwin says, the shift in his relative status seemed surreal. “People felt a little awkward asking me to do things that a PA would normally do,” he says, though that didn’t prevent one person from telling him his coffee was undrinkable. Now his peers are starting to run shows: The electric guitarist for the solo opera Rodwin wrote and performed in 1997 became the show runner for the Jonas Brothers sitcom, Jonas L.A., and hired Rodwin as the script coordinator.

“The hardest thing is to be a bystander,” he says. “I’m the stenographer. I’m the note taker. I’m the person who makes sure all the periods and commas line up and the formatting is correct and the coffee is made. The hardest thing is keeping my mouth shut.”

More than one assistant has vented his or her frustrations by writing about the experience. Wilkins has a pilot called The Assistant, about a female lackey in Hollywood in the midst of a career crisis. Rodwin once wrote a script called The 40-Year-Old Assistant, about a guy who makes it big in finance only to fall on hard times and be forced to take an assistant job in the movie business (he later changed the setting to a vineyard after an agent was unreceptive to another show about the entertainment industry).

Rodwin promised himself that when he turns 40, if he hasn’t achieved success, he’ll turn to another line of work. But many others are staying the course.

Dustin Paddock, 38, began as a PA at Dick Clark Productions right out of college, in 1994; since 2004 he’s been the script coordinator on Fox’s medical drama House. With a writing partner and an agent, Paddock believes that his breakthrough could come at any moment. Luckily his understanding wife, a nutrition manager at a nonprofit, has a more stable job that helps support their three sons and pay the mortgage on their home in Altadena.

“I think if I had a backup plan, I probably would have used it by now,” says Paddock, who also keeps his frustrations in check by puttering on a novel called Nobody’s Nephew, which is inspired by his inability to benefit from nepotism. “There’s no age in my mind where I say, ‘This is it.’ Because there’s always a little trickle of hope.”

Illustration by Barry Blitt

Indie Minded

By Gina Piccalo — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Ethan Pines

The world’s great film festivals don’t lack for personality. Cannes does an excellent job every spring in attracting the paparazzi and the requisite beachside cleavage while also occasionally righting some of Oscar’s most egregious wrongs. Case in point: In 1976, Taxi Driver didn’t win a gold statuette (Rocky nabbed Best Picture) but claimed the Palm D’Or. Audiences at the Toronto Film Festival have proved adept at foretelling unlikely box office champs, from Michael Moore’s debut, Roger & Me, to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. In the January freeze of Park City, Utah, the Sundance Film Festival has made the American independent film worthy of Hollywood bidding wars. There are others that have distinguished themselves—from Sarasota to São Paulo, from Austin to Venice, the latter being the eldest of the bunch, giving out Mussolini Cups in its first eight years (it began in 1934) before switching to the Golden Lion.

The Los Angeles Film Festival, by contrast, hasn’t captivated the global media or even the local news. The event, which this year takes place downtown from June 17 to 27, has grown exponentially since its inception in 1995; last year more than 83,000 attended LAFF premieres, tributes, and awards ceremonies. Still, its public profile remains dreadfully low. Unlike Toronto or Sundance, where executives from Lionsgate and Fox Searchlight can be seen charging in after a screening waving wads of cash to acquire distribution rights, the Los Angeles Film Festival, says its new director, Rebecca Yeldham, is “not really a market as much as it is a think tank and a community.”

There is something refreshing about the fact that so little money changes hands at the LAFF. In a real way the program does what Sundance set out to do years ago: nurture young filmmakers rather than co-opt them, and encourage conversation more than auction off potentially hot properties. But the absence of “festival frenzy,” as the heightened competition at many fests is called, hasn’t been because LAFF organizers aren’t trying. Over the years Film Independent, which sponsors the festival, has made tricky pacts with the studios and corporate sponsors. The organization’s proximity to Hollywood has had a counterintuitive effect on its mission to introduce films with “original subject matter” and “uniqueness of vision” using “the economy of means.” To be sure, it has shepherded the careers of a few notable indie filmmakers. But in its attempt to support those artist-driven projects, Film Independent has also slipped into bed with the conglomerates that threaten to overshadow them.

Leading the organization for the past 18 years is Dawn Hudson, a chatty Arkansas native and Harvard-educated actress who came to the group to do part-time work between auditions and hadn’t the slightest idea of how to run a nonprofit. Not that her predecessors had any inkling themselves—Film Independent, which when Hudson came on board was still part of a New York-based collective called the Independent Feature Project, was all but bankrupt and hemorrhaging members when she arrived.

Hudson has created filmmaker labs and mentorship programs. She transformed the project’s annual Independent Spirit Awards from a scrappy restaurant get-together into a celebrity-studded televised event in 1995. She took over the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2000, splitting from the Independent Feature Project in 2006. Meanwhile membership has surged from 900 in 1992 to more than 4,000 today.

Last year, in perhaps her most important strategic decision, Hudson brought in Yeldham as festival director. An Aussie producer with a string of critical darlings to her credit (including The Kite Runner, Motorcycle Diaries, and last year’s award-winning documentary Anvil!), Yeldham knows how to straddle both the indie and commercial realms. Her longtime romantic partner is writer-director Curtis Hanson, and for five years she was the senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival. She and Hudson are impassioned when they discuss film and their desire to spark a serious dialogue about the art form. If they raise the festival’s profile and open up more mainstream opportunities for the winners, all the better.

The centrality of the LAFF’s home city, of course, has been an obstacle to the kind of energy you get when throngs of Industry executives decamp to some isolated snowy burg or foreign beach town. “While there’s great enthusiasm for film here, there’s sort of an oversaturation,” Yeldham says. So she envisions drawing added vitality to the festival from other L.A. creative engines not nearly as exposed. Gradually, she says, the festival will grow into more of a “cross-pollination of the arts,” a demonstration of the “outpouring of creative expressions,” with lots of street life and the voices of musicians, architects, novelists, and other artists. Film, it seems, will always be a key element of the festival, but far from its sole focus.

Sponsors as disparate as LG Electronic and ZonePerfect Nutrition Bars keep the Spirit Awards and the Film Festival afloat, while HBO, Target, and Sony Pictures have helped supplement Film Independent’s patchwork of grants that seek to educate and to launch 80 or so indie filmmakers each year. They also help pay for Film Independent’s utilitarian, high-rise headquarters on Pico Boulevard, which offers its casting rooms, editing suites, and a library equipped with a universe of filmmaking software free to its members, who pay annual dues of $95. But Film Independent can’t have it both ways. Inevitably, some of its DIY credibility has gotten muddied in the process.

“They do try to do a lot of good things,” says Dave Poland, an L.A.-based film blogger who has consulted for film festivals in Bermuda and Miami. “But the two big events that drive their machine are skewed in this weird not-quite-independent, not-quite-studio, not-quite-honest-about-the-real-purpose way.”

*****

L.A. did once have a film festival that had no such contradictions. In retrospect it seems no accident that the Los Angeles International Film Exposition, or Filmex, originated in 1971—one year into the most daring and independent-minded decade of Hollywood filmmaking we’re likely to see—and that it folded in 1985, when Back to the Future pulled in nearly $200 million. That film was box office evidence that boilerplate heroism had returned and that what writer Peter Biskind would dub the “Raging Bulls, Easy Riders” era of antiheroism, in his book of the same name, was emphatically over.

During its short but vibrant existence, Filmex not only screened The Last Picture Show and Annie Hall but lured Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel to premieres of their later films and ran 24-hour Billy Wilder marathons and 50 straight hours of musicals. Not that Filmex was all high-brow: It evinced a weakness for Barbra Streisand-related kitsch, staging world premieres of Funny Lady and the 1976 remake of A Star Is Born. But the festival gave an unparalleled sense of the best of what lay behind and hopefully ahead for Hollywood. Out of Filmex’s ashes rose the American Cinematheque, the nonprofit revival house that hosts special screenings in the Egyptian and Aero theaters.

Hudson and her team clearly hope to bring more artistic gravitas to the Los Angeles Film Festival this year, largely by staging it in downtown L.A., a cultural center for the young and creative that, Yeldham says, is “tied very much to the DNA of Film Independent.” The program is culled from more than 4,600 unsolicited entries to give viewers a populist mix of studio fare, navel-gazing indies, and cinema from around the world. The goal is to foster an urban destination event with a rhythm that appeals to cineasts, Industry types, and even occasional filmgoers. Indeed, moving the festival hub to the splashy L.A. Live complex, with its 7,000-seat Nokia Theatre, certainly brings some much-needed verve. And screening films at REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall and at the historic Orpheum and Million Dollar movie palaces on Broadway, even outdoors at the California Plaza, make hoofing around Westwood (the festival’s former home) seem flat-out dull. “What we liked about downtown was this incredibly vibrant, forward-thinking, diverse arts community,” says Yeldham. The move, she says, “represented an expanded footprint for the festival.”

Film Independent’s board and staff have talked about relinquishing the “glamour and casualness,” as Hudson once put it, of a summer festival and moving it to the fall to latch onto Oscar buzz. They’ve also considered new ways of exhibiting films—everything from expanding the Film Independent Web site to partnering with national theater chains. But like so many others in entertainment today, Film Independent hasn’t yet come up with a formula that can preserve artistic integrity and make some cash in the process. “We haven’t pinned it down,” says award-winning director and board president Bill Condon.

“There’s a recalibrating for everyone,” says Hudson as she gazes at the panoramic view of West L.A. from her office. “We want to help filmmakers reach their audience, but the model that will serve filmmakers hasn’t really shown itself. You can put your film out in a variety of ways, and it won’t matter. It won’t help the artist. It might get feature distribution deals. It might get you a slot on a long list of [video-on-demand] options, but nobody ever sees the film. And you certainly never see any money for it. What is the option that’s going to work?”

In terms of possibilities and tidy Industry synergies, Hudson need look no further than her organization’s Independent Spirit Awards, which has turned into a sort of televised rehearsal dinner for the Oscars, packed with movie stars, studio muscle, and corporate funding. Even the show’s presenters were stuck trying to distinguish the event from the Oscars, typically held the following night. “The Academy Awards honors the biggest directors and superstar actors,” Sarah Silverman told the audience in 2006, “while this show is the champion of struggling artists like Ang Lee and George Clooney.” When Ben Stiller spoke at this year’s awards, he joked that “it says volumes about the organizers of this event that even though I’ve been in over 350 big-budget studio movies during the last five years, the Spirit Awards were bold enough to say ‘You, Ben Stiller, epitomize our core values.’?”

The Independent Spirit Awards’ outsider bona fides were assured as long as John Waters was host. The writer-director with the pencil-thin mustache, who put obese men in drag, pioneered the scratch-and-sniff “Odorama,” and made unflinching cult classics like Pink Flamingos and Polyester, was the antithesis of the Billy Crystal insider glad-hander. Waters’s hosting of the show was as unexpectedly appealing as his movies. Sponsorship dollars poured in, and the dinner party on the beach became a hotter ticket than the Oscars.

Alas, Waters did his farewell telecast six years ago. Since then movie stars (Samuel L. Jackson) and comic actors (Silverman, Rainn Wilson, Eddie Izzard) have taken his place. But the acerbic filmmaker has no hard feelings. He managed to get a few reliable paydays out of the gig, and as a cash-strapped auteur, he’s only too grateful for that opportunity. “Independent filmmakers will take the money wherever they can get it,” Waters says. “Believe me. From drug dealers. From studios. From the Mafia. We’ll take it anywhere we can get it.”

Oscar Mortis

By Gina Piccalo — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph courtesy Ampas

The day before Jeff Bridges received his fifth Academy Award nomination, for his role as grizzled country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, the 60-year-old actor took a moment to ponder what he called the “mythology” of Oscar. “I don’t want to take anything away from getting the nod,” said the man most fans still associate with The Dude from the Coen brothers’ 1998 comedy, The Big Lebowski. “It’s in the mythology that we all live under as actors. It’s ingrained in there. But at the same time it’s show business.… It’s really an opportunity for all the moviemakers to herald their movies.”

He wasn’t being blasé. He didn’t sound jaded. It’s just that he’d been through this before, having been nominated for The Last Picture Show (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Starman (1984), and The Contender (2000). Here’s what those accolades taught him: They “really didn’t mean much as far as changing anything.”

How much does an Oscar matter? The question is posed every year as the “For Your Consideration” frenzy mounts. Without a doubt, getting some love from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can translate into dollars. Movies that were all but forgotten at the box office before a win can, afterward, earn back their budgets in a weekend. Salary quotes for even the highest-paid celebrities get a bump.

Then there’s the legacy factor. Give birth or get arrested, hospitalized, or sent to rehab, and the adjective before your name in every news report will most certainly be “Oscar winner.” Being honored by the Academy does leave a lasting mark. “There has to be, in every pursuit, some sort of holy grail,” says longtime Oscar campaign consultant Tony Angellotti. “This has been the designated one.” But Oscar is fickle; he can change a life and reboot a career or merely complicate and overwhelm both.

For established actors Hollywood’s most prized award isn’t so much a career catalyst as a garnish to an already-sumptuous feast of opportunity. In fact, Oscar can stall a career—at least temporarily. When Kathy Bates won in 1991 for her portrayal of a psychotic fan who kidnaps a famous novelist in Misery, no one blinked. She was an accomplished actress, with Broadway chops and a weighty résumé. The surprising thing was what happened after she was anointed Best Actress in a Leading Role: Her phone stopped ringing. For an entire year. Suddenly filmmakers seemed to think she was too famous (or too expensive) to be approached.

“The other side of all this hoopla is the reality: Well, where’s the next job coming from? And when is it coming?” Bates told this magazine in 2003, when she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in About Schmidt. “You just hope it’s coming soon. It’s tough. It’s the underside of all this emperor’s-new-clothes, walking-down-the-red-carpet kind of stuff.”

The experience can be more exhilarating for unknowns in that Oscar shines a light where none has shone before. The town swarms the latest “discovery.” Anil Kapoor, unrecognizable in the United States but a big star in India, wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of a game show host in Slumdog Millionaire. Still, after the film swept the 2009 Academy Awards, he received standing ovations just for walking into Koi restaurant in Beverly Hills. A short time later he landed a role as a diplomat on Fox’s hit drama 24.

When Julian Fellowes won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Gosford Park, Robert Altman’s 2001 period piece, the Brit had no name recognition here. Oscar’s afterglow provided him a bonanza of job opportunities. He was offered high-profile screenwriting gigs, novels, directorial debuts, musicals, even a U.K. game show. The result: He wrote the screenplay for Mira Nair’s 2004 costume drama, Vanity Fair, wrote the book for the West End musical Mary Poppins (which recently ended a run in Los Angeles), hosted the BBC game show Never Mind the Full Stops, published his clever best-selling novel Snobs, and directed his first film, Separate Lies, which earned Best Debut Director from the National Board of Review in 2005 and starred Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson. “No sad tales here,” says Fellowes, who also wrote last year’s Young Victoria, which nabbed three Oscar nominations (for makeup, costumes, and art direction).

Fellowes’s publicist and veteran Oscar campaign consultant Ronni Chasen says an Academy Award win “will open a lot of doors. You have to make sure you walk through the right ones.”

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But how to choose the right door? Mickey Rourke, whose portrayal of the title character in The Wrestler garnered a nomination for Best Actor last year, was an unusual case: He was both a movie star and an unknown. After a stunning early career (Diner, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, 9?½ Weeks, Barfly), he had self-destructed, stopped acting, and become a boxer and something of a joke. Then suddenly he was back, and the swarm was upon him.

His agent, David Unger, returned director Jon Favreau’s calls first. It was days before the Oscar nominations were announced, and everyone expected Rourke to land one. Favreau was looking to cast the lead villain in Iron Man 2, the sequel to the 2008 blockbuster. It was the ideal follow-up role for Rourke. But Unger was determined to make the Oscar buzz pay off for his client—while he also protected him.

So as Favreau and Marvel Studios executives camped out in the Four Seasons Hotel lobby, hoping the actor, who was staying there, would take the part, Unger put on the brakes. “You’re the toast of the town,” the ICM agent explains. “But you can’t make lucid decisions at that time.”Clearly there was an enormous amount of stress that accompanied Rourke’s whirlwind comeback. Unger, whose other clients include Val Kilmer, John Hurt, and James Caan, let Rourke enjoy the attention while also keeping his eye on the calendar. He had to remind himself, he says, that “this is just one moment in a career, not the totality of it.” He resisted the usual agentlike instinct—sell, sell, sell!—for fear of spooking Rourke into paralysis. “You have to almost act as if it never happened,” says Unger. “If you don’t, you’re going to be looking backwards for the rest of your career.” (Ultimately Rourke accepted the Iron Man role.)

No Oscar-aftermath analysis would be complete without an acknowledgment of the so-called Oscar Curse. Legend holds that an Academy Award exacts a cruel price, punishing winners for their good fortune by dimming their star forever. Of course, the curse is easily proved false. Consider Penélope Cruz and Marion Cotillard, whose recent wins put them on the short lists of Hollywood’s most successful directors. Then there’s Bates, who has received two nominations since her Misery win.

How cursed or blessed you feel depends on your definition of success. When Louise Fletcher won in 1976 for her performance as Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she was 41 and simply happy to get more work from the award, which helped her buy a house in France and has kept her acting into her seventies. So what if that meant appearing in Exorcist II: The Heretic? “Fame was not something that I sought or wanted particularly,” she said recently. “I think as a result of that, I have had the best of everything.”

Bridges appears to have found some footing on this shaky ground. Though he notes all the noise surrounding the Oscar race is “disconcerting,” he’s always taken refuge in the work. By the time this story comes out he may (or may not) have won his first Academy Award. Either way, he says, he will continue to live by his mother’s words: “Don’t take it too seriously. Don’t mistake what you’re going through as reality.”

Congrats (Not!)

Cuba Gooding Jr.
»Gooding spent the 1980s and ’90s on the ascent as a serious dramatic actor, known for roles in Boyz n the Hood and A Few Good Men. But after his 1997 Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor in Jerry Maguire, it appeared the sentiment “Show me the money!” had come to define him. Snow Dogs, anyone?

Adrien Brody
»Brody was poised to succeed once he grabbed the Best Actor statuette for The Pianist in 2003, getting lead roles in The Village and King Kong. Then came a string of flops. Now he’s Psycho Ed in the upcoming stoner comedy High School and may forever be best known for that kiss he planted on Halle Berry on Oscar night.

Renee Zellweger
»She had us at hello in Jerry Maguire, and Bridget Jones’s Diary and Chicago made Zellweger a star. After her Best Supporting Actress win for Cold Mountain in 2004, she kept up the pace in Cinderella Man and Miss Potter. But since Leatherheads, Appaloosa, and My One and Only, her girl-next-door appeal has faded.

F. Murray Abraham
»Abraham earned his cred playing a thug in Scarface. But after nabbing a Best Actor Oscar for Amadeus in 1985, he toiled for years in classical theater with few memorable film roles. From his magnificent turn as Antonio Salieri to roles in Last Action Hero, Muppets from Space, and Thir13en Ghosts? That’s just wrong.