Kind of funny that Sofia Coppola has made two movies about a teenage girl trapped in a luxurious mansion (Marie-Antoinette, Priscilla), while her teenage daughter is most famous for making a TikTok about being bored and grounded in a multimillion-dollar townhouse.
This is purely anecdotal, but is anyone else noticing a trend of baby-boomer parents who aren't taking this seriously as their kids because they think they're immortal and want to keep going out for dinner and don't think of themselves as "old"? (Hi, mom.)
Ayo Edebiri may have broken new ground in acceptance speeches by thanking her managers' and agents' assistants who answer her "crazy, crazy e-mails." WELL PLAYED.
"It was a pretty poor thing for Miss Barrymore to do." Here's a story I learned while researching "Oscar Wars" about how Drew Barrymore's great aunt, Ethel Barrymore, was pivotal in blocking a Hollywood labor action exactly 94 years ago, and the HUGE consequences it had. Ready?
NEW from me: With a SAG strike looming, some actors from "Orange Is the New Black" are speaking out about how they were never fairly compensated for a formative show of the streaming revolution.
Something poetic about the "HBO Max becomes Max!" ads before and after "Succession." Like, the "We here for you" vibes are coming from inside the house.
So Luca Guadagnino, Timothée Chalamet, and Michael Stuhlbarg all got together and made an erotic cannibalism movie after "Call Me By Your Name" and didn't put their one cannibal friend in it? Rude.
In 1980, Terrence McNally was at Stephen Sondheim's 50th birthday party, so drunk that he spilled a drink on Lauren Bacall. "Then someone I hardly knew, Angela Lansbury, waved me over to where she was sitting,” McNally recalled later. "And she said..."
..."'I just want to say, I don’t know you very well, but every time I see you, you're drunk, and it bothers me.' I was so upset. She was someone I revered, and she said this with such love and concern. I went to an A.A. meeting, and within a year, I had stopped drinking."
Anyone else noticing an ambient anxiety about reopening—not about getting sick but people having to face the next phase of their lives after a year of paralysis? I've anecdotally seen an uptick in irrational behavior and dread along with the hope and excitement.
I’m riding in with Anatomy of a Fall’s Milo Machado-Graner. He has never watched the Oscars but wants to meet Martin Scorsese. Follow my night at
@NewYorker
’s Instagram.
Live across the street from her, have given her trick-or-treat candy when she and her friend were dressed as “Gilmore girls,” have no choice but to stan.
"Somebody Somewhere" manages to be so warm, tender, and heartfelt without a single drop of sentimentality. It's all earned. You guys are watching it, right???
"I was just shocked that anyone would want to leave. I’m not leaving. In fact, I feel that I am like the designated New Yorker."
My conversation with Fran Lebowitz, the patron saint of staying at home and doing nothing.
Brian Cox: "I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare...It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job."
Why does Miranda still not have a place to live? Why does Wyatt need to be watched two years into adulthood? Why does the poet whisper everything? Why can Seema go to Greece but not Egypt? Who’s watching the cat???
#AJLT
Heads up: I have a new New Yorker profile coming out tomorrow, reported over six months and in three different countries. The subject is one of the most intense people I have ever met in my life.
Kieran Culkin: "After the first season, he said something to me like, 'I'm worried that people might think that the show is a comedy.' And I said, ‘I think the show IS a comedy.' He thought I was kidding."
In this week's New Yorker, I tell the story of six roommates in Bushwick who suddenly found themselves quarantining together.
I started following them in early April...and then watched it all unravel in epic fashion.
Wow, what if “The Holdovers” didn’t have boarding school or 1970 or New England or a son killed in Vietnam or any of the things that make it “The Holdovers”? The resemblance to a generic movie plot with a three-act structure would be uncanny.
Then he had an impulse to sit on the gravel instead, knowing that it would instantly render the first nine takes unusable, because of the change in continuity. So he sank to the ground and saw the white mineral dust on his hands and "the whole scene opened up."
(This all coincided with the birth of the Oscars and the Academy’s anti-union efforts. But I had to cut 90% of this from “Oscar Wars” so thank you DREW for giving me a reason to dig it up from my files.)
The reviews of this show have caused a stir, but here's a good reminder that without criticism what you're left with is...marketing. And, in this case, deceptive marketing. Neither of these phrases appear in the reviews as written. Scroll for context.
Just sat next to a nighmare woman on a 5-hour flight, which began with her looking at our shared outlet, in which I was charging my phone, and pronouncing, “I expect to use that.” Downhill from there.
Elisabeth Moss is one of the most unconventional stars of her generation, and her career traces the trajectory of the last quarter century of television. But also...what's with the Scientology? My profile for The New Yorker.
Two months later, Equity was so fed up with Hollywood that it refused a petition from 46 screen actors begging it to come back. But there was talk of forming a "body of screen actors independent of Equity." It took four more years to materialize, and it was called...SAG. The end.
Union members were PISSED, especially after it was reported that she'd met with Irving Thalberg & Jack Warner in her dressing room. One actor said, "If Miss Barrymore could not say anything beneficial for us the least she could have done would have been to keep still."
In 1929, there was no SAG. Actors' Equity represented stage actors, and Ethel Barrymore had been very involved in its fight for recognition ten years earlier. With talkies ascendent, Equity president Frank Gillmore was actively trying to unionize Hollywood actors under Equity.
The result: "EQUITY BADLY WHIPPED." In August, Equity folded, after a tearful meeting that "developed into a bitter harangue of Ethel Barrymore, upon whose shoulders the entire blame for the failure of the campaign was placed by the speakers." Film actors remained un-unionized.
Ethel Barrymore, as Equity's VP and in L.A. doing a play, released a "bombshell" statement undermining Gillmore's effort and claiming there had been a settlement between Equity and the studios. Gillmore called this intrusion "regrettable."
That June, Gillmore made a shock announcement: NO Equity actors could appear in a sound picture without an all-union cast. Under sustained pushback from the studios, actors walked off sets and got jobs picking fruit. The standoff lasted 11 summer weeks. UNTIL...
In 2018, Louise Fletcher welcomed me to her home and we talked for two hours about her extraordinary, Oscar-winning performance as Nurse Ratched, for Vanity Fair. Her deconstruction of the character was riveting. I'm so sorry to hear she's gone. RIP.
Next season of “The Baby-Sitters Club” should be a “Succession”-style power struggle in which each girl tries to wrest control of their babysitting empire.
Matthew Macfadyen thanking the "human grease stain that is Tom Wambsgans" is very Tom Wambsgans, and Kieran Culkin starting his speech with a self-conscious belch is very Roman Roy, so this is kind of like an extra season of "Succession."
If you noticed the moment in tonight's episode where Kendall suddenly has a buzzcut when he arrives in Italy, here is the extremely Jeremy Strong reason.
"I sometimes lament how much more writing Sondheim could have done if he weren’t such a generous mentor to so many generations of artists, myself included." -
@Lin_Manuel
, two weeks ago
Daniel Radcliffe, who's playing a fact checker on Broadway, came to the New Yorker offices two weeks ago to embed in the fact-checking department. A very meta Talk of the Town.
The horrific "Don't Say Gay" bill reminds me of my sixth-grade Hebrew school teacher, Mr. Kessler. This was in the ancient year 1992, and my class decided, somehow, that Mr. Kessler was gay. One day, the kids erupted in the chant "MR. K! HE IS GAY! MR. K! HE IS GAY!" (cont)
Jeremy told me about that incredible scene in the parking lot, which he said had a "cathartic event" but didn't say what. Originally, Kendall was sitting on a stone pillar that Jeremy asked the production designer to make. They did nine takes and he just wasn't feeling it.
I just read a TV review on a major website that says the actions of the antagonists in a teen soap opera "raise some ethical questions" in a storyline that is deemed "problematic." Have people lost the plot on...plot?
@RottenInDenmark
These pieces are both self-negating (because the writer is by definition not being silenced) and self-fulfilling (because they then get roasted on social media). It’s like Schrodinger’s cancellation.
Glad to hear Drew has "paused" her show. Meanwhile, it's not every day I have a history thread go viral, so here's a link to my book, which has 100 years of spicy Hollywood tales.
Heads up! I've got a wild & crazy story coming out in tomorrow's New Yorker that I started work on in 2019. It involves: the 1970s San Francisco leather scene, Robert Mapplethorpe, gay liberation, sex, drugs, murder, and—naturally—the Oscars.
How did a once-bankrupt comic-book company take over Hollywood? And who *really* came up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe? For this week's New Yorker, I went long—as in, long!—on entertainment history's biggest franchise.
He was in a "place of despair" and thought he had failed as an actor. He was facing his ultimate test and didn't want to contrive emotion that wasn't there. He thought he had "come to the limits of what I can do."
"In 'The 2000 Year Old Man,' Carl says, 'What’s the secret to your longevity?' I say, 'Don’t die.' That’s it. Don’t die. And it gets the laugh."
My long conversation with Mel Brooks, who, at 95, has written his life story.
No one told me that "Drive My Car" was such a *theater* movie. You see "Waiting for Godot" in Japanese, "Uncle Vanya" in Korean Sign Language. I thought it was all about driving a Saab but it's also about play rehearsal?
Here's an Adam Driver thread for people who want hints on what happens in
#TheRiseOfSkywalker
. When I interviewed him in Belgium this fall, he said that J.J. Abrams originally persuaded him to play Kylo Ren by laying out his arc over the three films. /
Here's my list of ten great performances from 2020, including Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher, Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris, Michaela Coel in "I May Destroy You," and the pandemic comedy queen,
@sarahcpr
.
What does "The Whale" say about fatness, and how should we feel about Brendan Fraser wearing a fat suit? In my new column, I wrestled through these questions with the help of its writer, Samuel D. Hunter, and insights from
@yrfatfriend
and
@guybranum
.
Scotty Bowers, Hollywood's "Male Madame," has died at 96. I don't know what to make of all his wild claims about the sexual escapades of the stars, but he got me to use the phrase "foot-fucked" in The New Yorker, so God bless.