Vanity Fair articles from March 2005

Vanity Fair archives from March 2005

For Your Consideration ...(Editorial)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Graydon Carter Washington in the age of George W. Bush has entered, as Mark Danner pointed out in The New York Times, its post-factual period. As one White House official told a reporter at the end of the presidential campaign,...

The Fantastics.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Lindsay Bucha, Fred Turner, Carolyn Bielfeldt, Meg Nolan, Abby Field, Emily Poenisch, Emily Creed, Jacqueline Neiss, Jonathan Kelly, Jessica Flint It's hard to believe it's been a decade since a 25-year-old Uma Thurman, fresh from...

The Spitzer Effect.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... How rare and wonderful it was to read a story on the making of a man of honor in our age. In the portrayal of the life of a family imbued with the ethics and values of achievement, Holly Brubach ["Spitzer's Justice," January] distinguished...

Hot Type.(books on sex, porn in Hollywood)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Elissa Schappell Red, white, or blue, America has a love-hate relationship with pornography. We can glamorize, moralize, romanticize, or demonize it, but, bottom line, we are obsessed. Legs McNeil's uncensored oral history of The...

Hot Tracks.(movie sound tracks)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Lisa Robinson Not even the best magician in the world can produce a rabbit out of a hat if there is not already a rabbit in the hat. -Impresario Boris Lermontov in The Red Shoes. When it comes to movie music,...

Industry Insider; When IMDB.(Web sites)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Punch Hutton Sure, it's who you know in the movie business, but it's also what you know. Our picks for the best entertainment Web sites: studiosystem.com Arguably the industry's most comprehensive film-and-TV database. Its...

Broadway-Bound.(movies made in to plays)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Carolyn Bielfeldt Art has returned to what it knows best, imitating itself. Hollywood and Broadway have been feeding off each other for material to produce a new crop of theatrical productions certain to leave audiences asking one...

Life of Crime.(Layer Cake)(Movie Review)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Eve Epstein In the movies, the world is full of smart, smug, basically good-hearted criminals looking for retirement after completing one last bang-up job. But the plight of the nameless protagonist in Layer Cake, the directorial...

Haute Hotelier.(Jeff Klein)(Interview)
March 1, 2005... New York native Jeff Klein, 34, a self-described "hotel geek," opened the elegant Midtown Manhattan boutique hotel the City Club three years ago. His latest project, the renovation and redesign of L.A.'s landmark Argyle Hotel building, due to...

Casting Couture.(Doris Raymond owner of The Way We Wore, cloth store)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Deda Coben Don't you just love it when someone's dark addictions somehow benefit you? "If you look up 'obsessive-compulsive disorder' in the dictionary, you'll find my name," confesses Doris Raymond, a declared shopaholic and...

New York Story.(Metropolis)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Elissa Schappell "I have always been obsessed with New York," admits novelist Elizabeth Gaffney, and it shows. The lifelong Brooklynite's debut novel, Metropolis, a meticulously researched portrait of New York in the Gilded...

Expose Yourself.(Proscenium Club, club of art patrons)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Sally Horchow "If you build it, they will come" may be true in the movies, but in Hollywood, building it is just the beginning-you've got to throw a good party, too. So, when the buzz around the crown jewel of Los Angeles's Music...

Heart of Glass.(The Glass Menagerie, play)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Aaron Gell Back in 1964, Jessica Lange made her well-received theatrical debut playing faded southern belle turned meddling mom Amanda Wingfield in a dramatic reading of The Glass Menagerie. If you missed it (the performance was...

Kids in America.(Larry Clark's photographs exhibition)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: A. M. Homes Peter Pan from the dark side, filmmaker-photographer Larry Clark has spent a lifetime immersed in the pimply hormonal hell of adolescence. From his groundbreaking 1971 book, Tulsa, documenting his own sex and drug...

Miuccia's Message.(Miuccia Prada, short movie for Prada perfume)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Leslie Bennetts When Miuccia Prada met with director Ridley Scott and his daughter Jordan about making a short film for Prada perfume, 27-year-old Jordan-a music-video and commercial director-knew just what she wanted to do. For...

Pearls of Wisdom.(Put on Your Pearls, Girls!)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Edward Helmore Already strained to the point of collapse, smart coffee tables will doubtless accommodate Put on Your Pearls, Girls! (Rizzoli), an illustrated book of witty aphorisms and easy wisdom that go some way toward...

Magic Potion.(perfume)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... This month an extraordinary unisex fragrance arrives wrapped in purple packaging. Mandragore, the new scent from Annick Goutal Parfums, captures the magical, mystical essence of the mandrake plant by using exhilarating notes such as black...

Explosive Scent.(perfume)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Emily Poenisch Idolized by the fashion savvy, Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, venerated for their dizzying ingenuity and singular conceptual style, are fast forging a formidable and ever evolving brand. Expect...

Exotic Reign.(fragrance)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Jacqueline Neiss La Prairie concocts new luxury with Silver Rain-the first fragrance to be launched globally by the renowned Swiss skin-care company. A refreshing combination of rare essential oils, Silver Rain blends exotic notes...

Ohio's Odd Numbers.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Christopher Hitchens If it were not for Kenyon College, I might have missed, or skipped, the whole controversy. The place is a visiting lecturer's dream, or the ideal of a campus-movie director in search of a setting. It is...

From Fear to Eternity; One of the most slyly radical anti-war movies ever, The Americanization of Emily is nearly impossible to find.(Movie Review)
March 1, 2005... Byline: James Wolcott As if to make amends for the cheap heroics that Hollywood war movies have flexed over the century-the beachhead assaults led by John Wayne, squinting with solemn resolve as he clutches the dog tags of a slain...

Don't Ask, Do Tell.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Dominick Dunne It's Academy Awards time in Hollywood again, and I've done my part for the proceedings by running about 45 movies, distributed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Oscar consideration, during...

Twilight of the News; Network news has lost almost two-thirds of its audience in a generation.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Michael Wolff There we were, at the annual CBS holiday press party, with jocular pigs in a blanket (that was the theme: cocktails and high-cholesterol hors d'oeuvres, recalling the 60s and, I suppose, the reign of the three...

Moore's War; After skewering a sitting president, a Detroit mogul, and a cultural icon, Michael Moore is taking on the health-care industry.(Biography)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Judy Bachrach It is not insignificant that, about a year ago, Michael Moore's campaign on behalf of his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 was dubbed "the war room"-a reference to the operation that once got Bill Clinton elected...

School for Cool; A formerly gritty alternative school founded in 1971, Crossroads has become the elite, anti-prep mecca for entertainment-industry offspring.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Frank Digiacomo You won't find it at Blockbuster, or even on the Internet Movie Database, but in 1987-five years before he appeared in his first commercial film-Jack Black starred in an interesting little movie called Too Far from...

Poker's Wild; Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio- it seems A-list Hollywood has got the poker bug, with a slew of poker-related film and TV projects in the pipeline.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Duff Mcdonald Brad Pitt doesn't split pots. That's according to Elliott Gould, who played Texas Hold 'Em night after night during the shooting of Ocean's Twelve with Pitt, Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, Don Cheadle, Casey Affleck,...

The Garden of Kabbalah; Kabbalah gets dismissed as a fad-with its chic red string bracelets, "blessed" water, and star convert Madonna-but the practice has changed some of Hollywood's biggest egos into, well, nicer people.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Evgenia Peretz Over the course of 5,000 years, wandering Jewish teachers have brought their ancient wisdom to Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, Caligula's Rome, and Ivan the Terrible's Moscow. Now they have found themselves at Kitson, a...

Midnight Revolution; The day an X-rated walk on the dark side called Midnight Cowboy won the Oscar for best picture, a new generation came to power in Hollywood.
March 1, 2005... Byline: Peter Biskind From where we stand now, 35 years after the 42nd Academy Awards, it is impossible to imagine an X-rated film winning best picture. But that is exactly what Midnight Cowboy did on a spring night in 1970, earning as...

Zoe Saldana.(movie actor)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Krista Smith AGE AND OCCUPATION: 26, actor. PROVENANCE: New York. ROLE REVERSAL: Saldana, whom you may recognize from Drumline, the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads, or Spielberg's The Terminal, stars this month in Guess...

James Lipton in the hot seat.(Interview)
March 1, 2005... Byline: George Wayne James Lipton, dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School of New School University in New York and host of Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio, likes to ask the questions. But so does our correspondent, so this time...

The Body; Hilary Swank, actress.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Talk about a fighter. Here you've got a boxing movie, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, with two icons, Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, playing two archetypes, the crusty old trainer with a secret broken heart (of gold) and the...

The Main Event; A Raging Bull reunion: Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff (producers), Jake La Motta, Martin Scorsese, Cathy Moriarty-Gentile, and Robert De Niro.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... In the 25 years since, we've seen wolves eviscerate caribou almost every night on the Discovery Channel. We've seen Lawrence Taylor snap Joe Theismann's tibia in two. We've seen Mike Tyson bite off part of Evander Holyfield's ear. But...

The Man; Jamie Foxx, comedian, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Only a handful of television comedians have done it, among them Goldie Hawn, Art Carney, Helen Hunt. And, oh yeah, Tom Hanks, the former star of Bosom Buddies. No one from Saturday Night Live has broken through (though Bill Murray...

The Eternal Sunshine; Shirley MacLaine, actress, singer, dancer, writer, director, producer, guru.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... "I deserve this," Shirley MacLaine said from the stage in 1983 when, after five nominations, she at last took hold of the best-actress Oscar statuette. Born on a peanut farm in Virginia, this big sister to Warren Beatty has had more...

The Family Business; Troy Garity and Jane Fonda, actors.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... It has been widely reported that Jane Fonda's role in the upcoming J.Lo comedy, Monster-in-Law (yes, Jane plays the title character), will be her first part in 15 years. Not quite true. This iconic actress, with two Oscars to her...

The Voice of Reason; Chris Rock, comedian, actor, master of ceremonies.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... So Billy Crystal's busy riffling through his back pages on Broadway, Steve Martin was a wartime ringer, and Whoopi is being forcibly restrained from getting near any P.A. system-why not bring in the best stand-up comic of his...

The Sexy Beast; Clive Owen, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... He's a character actor with an expressive face that can suggest demons lurking deep within. He's a handsome leading man who exudes understated British cool. For those who didn't catch his moody performances in the 1998 noir...

The Defiant Ones; A John Cassavetes reunion: Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands, and Peter Falk, actors.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Before his untimely death, in 1989, John Cassavetes was called many things- renegade, maverick, visionary-but history will remember him as the godfather of American independent cinema. Though they never topped the box-office ...

The Antihero; Paul Giamatti, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... A throwback to the maverick 70s, when Steven Spielberg and Sam Peckinpah constructed entire films around Richard Dreyfuss and Dustin Hoffman, Giamatti is another distemperate little guy with enormous magnetism. American Splendor,...

The English Rose; Imelda Staunton, actress.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... After seeing Imelda Staunton onstage more than a decade ago, a London Times critic wrote, "She has the audience in the palm of her hand and licking it." Now, with her mesmerizingly authentic performance as the...

The Force; Liam Neeson, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... As a teenager and young man growing up in Ireland, Liam Neeson was an amateur boxer, a forklift operator, and a trucker. All this, combined with his training as a stage actor, would seem to make him a perfect square-jawed action...

The Hot Tamale; Gael Garcia Bernal, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Gael Garcia Bernal, 26, a five-foot-six-inch bundle of intensity and muy caliente looks, has arrived as a new leading man for the global-cinema age. Having made his name as the star of Mexico's all-time box-office champ, El Crimen...

The Torchbearers; The managers of the Criterion Collection: Peter Becker, William Becker (seated), and Jonathan Turrell.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Called "film school in a box," the Criterion Collection is the runaway leader in the production of quality DVDs. The company sprang from Janus Films, which brought the works of Fellini, Truffaut, and other foreign directors to America....

The Storyteller; Marc Forster, director.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Born in Ulm, Germany, and raised in a remote Swiss village, Marc Forster grew up without TV and didn't see a movie until he was 12, when he caught a revival of Apocalypse Now. And just like that he heard his calling, as clear as an...

The Young Hyphenates; Dan Harris, Jared Hess, Richard Kelly, Ben Younger, Tod Williams, and Zach Braff, directors.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... A prequel to Reservoir Dogs? No, just six hungry young directors bucking the usual grotesque odds. Having accumulated Hollywood capital with his X2: X-Men United screenplay, Dan Harris, 25, was allowed to make the upcoming Imaginary...

The Captivator; Leonardo DiCaprio, actor, producer.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Some people may not want to believe it, but it's true: Leonardo DiCaprio is all grown up. It's time to retire the Titanic jokes, and long past time to stop insisting that What's Eating Gilbert Grape is his best movie. The dude is...

The Strong, Silent Type; Javier Bardem, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... As a quadriplegic in The Sea Inside, Javier Bardem, 35, turned in an amazing performance, one that won him the European Film Award for best actor. Bardem, a former Rugby player and a big star in his native Spain ever since he...

The Everywoman; Joan Allen, actress.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... At 48, Joan Allen is the exception to the Hollywood rule that actresses have an impossible time finding great parts once they hit 40. In last year's $276-million-grossing blockbuster, The Bourne Supremacy, she lent her usual crispness...

The Ace; Laura Linney, actress.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... God, she's gorgeous, and her smile is as infectious as any this side of Julia Roberts's. But Laura Linney isn't typically thought of as one of your sexier movie stars. (Maybe it's that wee bit of East Coast starch in her DNA, that...

The Real Deal; Don Cheadle, actor.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Thank goodness The Golden Palace wasn't a hit. If that long-forgotten sitcom, a 1992 spin-off of The Golden Girls, had prospered, then Don Cheadle, 40, might be making a very nice living today by playing a persnickety manager of a...

The Return Engagement; Ellen Barkin, actress.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... You can take the girl out of the Bronx, but you can't take the Bronx out of Ellen Barkin. In more than 25 years of dealing with Hollywood, this heartthrob with a crooked grin has always been tough enough to go her own way. She...

The Bright Young Things; Eva Green, Rachel McAdams, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Naomie Harris, Rose Byrne, and Bryce Dallas Howard, actresses.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... These six beauties from around the world have all displayed good taste in choosing their first major roles. Eva Green, of France, so stunning in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, will play a beautiful princess in Ridley Scott's...

The Rainmaker; Matt Damon, actor, screenwriter.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Since making his breakthrough in the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting, Harvard dropout Matt Damon, 34, has managed to hang on to the affection of moviegoers by keeping his head down, staying out of the tabloids, and, mainly,...

The Thoroughbred; Annette Bening, actress.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... For the last dozen or so years, since she fell for Warren Beatty on the set of Bugsy, she's seemingly been following her husband's pickier approach to career, even taking a three-year hiatus after her Oscar-nominated performance...

Eyes Wide Open; Few know how the teenage Stanley Kubrick took his first steps toward becoming one of the 20th century's greatest filmmakers: as a $50-a-week photojournalist for Look.(Biography)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Mary Panzer Everybody who makes it big has some sweet stroke of luck early on. That's what the movies say, anyway. And for Stanley Kubrick that charmed moment came at age 16. As a skinny misfit growing up in the Bronx, Kubrick...

The King Who Would Be Man; Deeply seductive, exquisitely sensitive, and gloriously talented, Marlon Brando had everything but a belief in his work.(Biography)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Budd Schulberg No other actor has ever rocketed to overnight stardom on the Broadway stage as Marlon Brando did in 1947, in Tennessee Williams's steamy play A Streetcar Named Desire. There have been some memorable debuts in the...

And the Oscar Doesn't Go To...(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Not one of these 21 revered actors, directors, screenwriters, and songwriters ever received an Oscar in a major competitive category. But they were happy just to be nominated, weren't they? Back row (with number of nominations in parentheses):...

Dangerous Talents; When James Dean's Porsche Spyder crashed 50 years ago, killing the actor just before the premiere of Rebel Without a Cause, his legend was sealed.(Biography)
March 1, 2005... Byline: Sam Kashner James Dean was only 24 years old when he crashed his Porsche Spyder and died on a lonely stretch of highway outside Bakersfield, California. The tragedy occurred on September 30, 1955, scarcely a week before the opening...

Olivia de Havilland; With dozens of beloved performances and two Academy Awards for best actress to her name, the incomparable Olivia de Havilland has left a professional mark on Hollywood that cannot be surpassed.(Interview)
March 1, 2005... What is your greatest fear? The loss of physical, financial, and psychological independence. Which living person do you most admire? Nelson Mandela. What is your greatest extravagance? Champagne. What or who is the...