would come. It was about a half hour into his sold-out motivational speech at

Congregation Rodeph Shalom on West 81st Street, and Mr. Lewis-unaided by notes

or the stricture of any discernible order in the things he talked

about-swiveled his neck to hear the question being shouted out from the third

row at the opposite end of the stage. By the time he was interrupted, he'd

already uttered nine of the evening's 30-odd " wondehful s." A few minutes earlier, Mr. Lewis had made it through

the story of the time he'd rushed to the bedside of a kid with muscular

dystrophy, who, upon his hero's arrival, said, "Jerry, I'm feeling a little

tired. Can I rest now?" Mr. Lewis choked out the words, "Of course,

sweetheart." At this point in the story, the boy closed his eyes and died.

A few in the audience snuffled un-self-consciously.

Then Mr. Lewis was walking to the other end of the stage,

squinting, cupping his hand to his 75-year-old show-business ear, trying to

hear the question that half the auditorium, blessed with better hearing, had

already heard.

" The Day the Clown

Cried ," the man, who appeared to be a shaggy blond about 30, bellowed up at

him from 10 feet away. He was talking, of course, about the unreleased 1972

film that became emblematic of Mr. Lewis' 13-Percodan-a-day downfall years. It

was the last film he would make for more than a decade. In it, Jerry Lewis

played a circus clown in a Nazi concentration camp, entertaining Jewish

prisoners before they were delivered to their execution. That was not a

particularly happy time for Jerry Lewis.

Jerry Lewis straightened up, took a step back and narrowed

his eyes. "Yeah, what about it?" he said.

"I've heard that it might come out," the man called back.

Jerry Lewis took a breath. "Well, let me tell you

something," he said gingerly, "and this is only because sometimes we recognize

an attitude that might be different than people you care about."

"Exactly," the man said.

"Right," Jerry Lewis said, fixing the man with a

heavy-lidded, increasingly lethal stare. There was a moment of silence. "None

of your goddamned business!" he shouted, and stiffly strode back to the safety

of a cheap wooden podium affixed with a sticker from the Learning Annex. He

picked up his can of caffeine-free Coke and took a monster swig, while also

drinking in his first deafening ovation of the evening. A rotund woman wearing

a crown made out of yellow ping-pong balls imprinted with smiley faces cheered.

Jerry Lewis looked out over the audience, smiled, and gave

the crowd of 700 a robust O.K. sign.

In spite of the evening's previous Oprah-isms, it was as

though he wanted to reassure them that Bad Jerry was still in there, but in

check, in control and safely away from the deep end. A good chunk of the

audience-solidly white and middle-aged, sporting a surprising number of

sequined berets and baseball caps-watched him worshipfully.

People say that Jerry Lewis is a changed man. To people of a

certain age who do not remember his early movies, the smoking, stalking Jerry

Lewis of the 70's and 80's M.D.A. telethons is a pretty scary character,

carrying with him the sort of dark psychic impact of an uncle who shows up at

Thanksgiving in a cloud of cologne, handing out $50 bills to all the kids, but

by day's end is yelling at the dog in the backyard, chasing it with a shovel.

Jerry Lewis, being Jerry Lewis, didn't remark on the oddity of being a guy who

admits that, at one point in the 70's, he had the barrel of a gun in his mouth,

and yet is still instructing others in how to talk to their kids, how hugging

heals, how a crank call a day keeps the doctor away. But Desperately Despondent

Jerry, just like now-ancient Monkey-Boy Jerry and Percodan-Jerry, was one of

the Jerrys of yore, before the new, improved old codger. Call him Nearly-Zen

Jerry.

He's certainly changed physically. When he walked out on the

stage in his rose-colored shirt, unbuttoned, double-breasted pinstripe suit and

patent leather shoes, there was no doubt it was him. He still has those gold

aviators, that black hair (though he doesn't appear to sop it with Brylcreem

anymore), and he still walks with the Jerry swagger, a weightiness offset by

the odd rolling of his left hand, with that strangely fey turned-out pinky that

seems, every time he swings his arm, to be trying to escape his body. But he's

heftier, especially compared to the 20-year-old photo that accompanied his Learning

Annex course listing. The weight seems to have settled strangely on the sides

of his face, around his ears, giving him the aspect of a grandfatherly python

mustering the attack mode one last time.

But more than any physical deterioration that arrives with

age, Jerry Lewis has changed mentally. After a heart attack, prostate cancer

and a nasty bout of viral meningitis two years ago, many think that Jerry must

have found his own mug face-to-face with death's, and it scared the bejeesus

out of him. If Jerry Lewis has had Seven Ages in his career-the Dean years; the

Paramount boy-auteurist years; the pill-addled years of financial and spiritual

ruin; the Scorsese-directed resurrection of The

King of Comedy ; his reacceptance as the Tony Bennett of yuks; and finally, The Nutty Professor franchise being

taken over by Eddie Murphy-just where exactly is Jerry Lewis now? Jerry Lewis,

who for years represented one of Hollywood's darkest souls, seems hell-bent on

a redemption that necessitates revisiting his past and cleaning it up, and

recasting himself in his dotage as the kind of guy who thinks there's nothing

more amusing than cleaning up baby shit and building sand castles.

But maybe Jerry Lewis has not really changed all that much.

Maybe just his focus has changed: He used to obsess about being Darryl F.

Zanuck, control freak and autocrat. Now he seems obsessed with being a softer,

more philosophic comedian-pre-Jerry-atric, a kind of Jewish Bill Cosby.

For the new Jerry Lewis, here, apparently, is where the

Learning Annex brand of motivational speaking comes in. The organization's

literature promised that "in this unforgettable evening, you'll have the rare

opportunity to get to know Jerry Lewis the man," a rarity only mildly offset

when Mr. Lewis proudly announced that it was his 646th such speaking

engagement. The literature also promised that Mr. Lewis would be addressing,

among other things, "making the tough decisions" and "learning from success and

difficulty."

But it quickly became apparent that Jerry Lewis was not

doling out any peppy, Tony Robbins–style self-improvement, but rather sweating

through a three-hour lesson on how you too can be a better Jerry Lewis, mixed,

naturally, with a healthy dollop of Jerry-ana. (" Time magazine printed the 10 most recognizable people on the planet

three years ago," he said. "No. 5 was the Pope, and Jerry Lewis tied! And it

was wondehful .")

"I'm just-oh, I'm such a pain in the ass," Jerry Lewis said.

Mr. Lewis was knee-deep in one of several monologues about his 9-year-old

daughter, Danielle, the product of his 1983 marriage to his second wife,

SanDee. Mr. Lewis was extolling the joys of fatherhood and cautioning parents

not to say things to infants like "I wish you were never born." "You get

Jeffrey Dahmer from that little kid!" he exhorted. (Mr. Lewis did mention his

six sons from a previous marriage to Patti Lewis once, but not that the

youngest, Joseph, had sold a Jerry

Dearest –style account of family abuse to the National Enquirer in 1989.)

He had gotten breathy, and his eyes were moist. "I'm always

kissin' her. I took her to New York last month, just she and I-no Mommy," he

said. "We had our date. I said to her, 'You're going to put on white gloves,

cute little black patent-leather shoes, a gorgeous dress, a hat and a cape, and

we're going to walk together in Central Park."

The audience emitted a delighted sigh.

"So we come to New York, check in at the Waldorf," he said,

"and we're walking in the park the next morning, and I can't contain my limbs!

My joints, that should be moving like this as a normal person, they were locked

up-I couldn't move! The ecstasy of having her holding my hand!" Jerry Lewis, in

full revival-tent mode, was grabbing at the imaginary love swelling in his

legs, his arms, looking stricken to the point that it appeared he was in the

midst of yet another heart attack. But he bounced back; the love angina passed.

Even though Mr. Lewis spent a good deal of his lecture time

extolling the virtues of random acts of kindness, including kissing other men

for the hell of it, hugging strangers and just telling people "I love you," he

seemed a bit discomfited, and stood silently for a moment, after a

curly-haired, middle-aged woman in the front row asked if she might lay a

smacker on his lips. "I save those kisses for my daughter and my wife," he

explained, not unkindly. But he proceeded to grow frustrated that he had lost

his place.

"So now I don't know where the hell I am," he said. "Where

was I?" Mr. Lewis discovered where he'd been, then proceeded to amend his

previous statements about loving absolutely everybody, which seemed to mean

that the mad kisser down in front was the kind of loony the crowd might want to

steer clear of. "People in general, on the whole, are terrific," he said, "But

you find one or two who are ill-mannered, that don't particularly care, are

ignorant, and they just will spoil a room of 100 people." The woman in front

appeared so clearly crushed that it seemed she might never, ever be the same

again. "Was it me ?" she could be seen

mouthing to her female companion.

"If I hear about a man who's sick in a hospital," Mr. Lewis

went on, "I swear to God, in under 90 seconds I've changed that man's life.

'Hi, it's Jerry Lewis. I hear you're not feeling well. You O.K.? ….' And the

man's life has changed in a microsecond. In the next few months, all he's going

to do is to tell his friends and the guys at the plant that he got a call."

And there were points when Mr. Lewis' stories strained

credulity. He said that when he comes to New York, just to cut himself up, he

likes to jump on board city buses as they're picking up passengers and, from

the front, yell in his " Hey Laa-aady! "

voice, "I'm a famous Jew! You know me?" and quickly jump off. John F. Kennedy,

he said, had pleaded with him not to

go out on the stump for his 1960 campaign, which elicited a few initial laughs

and seemed, perhaps, to be  leading up

to Mr. Lewis' first self-deprecating moment of the night. But he continued.

"I said, 'Gee, I didn't think that I was going to be that bad, Jack.' He said, 'No, no, no,

you'd be wonderful for me, but you'd not be wonderful for yourself. Come Labor Day and you have to turn to an entire audience

of people for help, you can't have 50 percent of them turning you down because

you went with the Democrat," he said. Several in the crowd nodded.

Anybody who has ever seen the first live telecast of his

1963 ABC variety show, during which Mr. Lewis nearly jumped over his desk to

throttle a producer, might find it even more hard to swallow Mr. Lewis'

mini-anger-management seminar. "My philosophy is," he announced, "if you think

it's easy to get rage, it's a hundred times easier to get … silly !" Mr. Lewis elaborated, apparently

drawing on some personal experience as a retail shopper: "How many times have

you wanted to say to somebody, 'You hold your finger up to me once more and I

will blow your face off with a bazooka?'" The crowd murmured.

"You're not going to be as annoyed with the lazy sales girl

at Kmart if you seek your own personal esteem," he said, "and if you recognize

that you're better than her because you

recognize your value. We should feel

sympathy for her."

Mr. Lewis said that at one point, rather than get angry, he

had 3,000 cards printed with sayings like "I love you anyway" that he planned

to give out to people who had infuriated him in traffic. But then he had

trouble finding the right card: "I couldn't get the card I needed because

they're all over the seat. It never worked! I'm stuck with 3,000 cards."

Jokingly, he suggested that if he couldn't find the

appropriate card, he could always "kill their dog."

See what I meant about the uncle with the $50 bill?

"Is it hot in here?" Mr. Lewis asked the audience. It really

wasn't too bad. "I'm schvitzing." Mr. Lewis pulled at the body of his jacket,

fanning himself, and revealed a bib-shaped sweat ring stretching from his neck

to his belly that could have passed for a gunshot wound. "Good spirits," Jerry

Lewis said, quoting Albert Einstein, "have always encountered violent

opposition from mediocre minds." He repeated the quote like an incantation,

like an epitaph.

"Good … spirits … have … always

… encountered … violent … opposition … from … mediocre … minds!"

"Albert Einstein," he said, "saw the incompetence factor,

the corporate factor, the Ayn Rand factor. You get a bunch of people in a

corner like robots, get 'em to do what you want! You've got industry! You've

got this. You've got that. And all of a sudden they're accusing her of

Communism, and she was just a very great, marvelous, wonderful, talented lady

that knew the human condition to the core and to the very marrow of her bones,

and that people meant something." Was

that Ayn Rand in The Ladies' Man , or

Kathleen Freeman?

Jerry Lewis was tired, you could tell.

Without the aid of notes, he had made a few unwise choices,

like positioning a string of Polack jokes right before reciting his acceptance

speech for his 1977 Nobel Prize nomination. The talk of his aching bones of

love were gone. He was talking about Dean and Frank and Sammy. "Nobody knew

them better than I," he recalled. He told about hoisting little Sammy Davis Jr.

aloft and thanking the NAACP for the award.   And maybe "retard" wasn't

the best word to use.

Jerry Lewis began winding down the clock with questions as

Stephen Schragis, the Learning Annex booker, hoofed around the audience with

the microphone. A man ran up onstage and showed him the smiling Jerry Lewis

cartoon head tattooed on his arm. A woman up front said she'd never speak

harshly to her child again. Mr. Lewis jumped offstage and put his arms around a

tearful, and attractive, single mother. And just as the goodwill and warmth

were beginning to turn the hall into a warm, gooey, Jerry-healing place, a

woman with distressed blond hair in the center aisle got hold of the mike. She

had a thick Russian accent, seemed petrified, and spoke with difficulty.

"I cannot believe I am talking to you now," she exclaimed.

Try as she might, she couldn't quite get all the elements of her story-a

sister, a kid with cerebral palsy and a trip from Russia 22 years ago-together

coherently. "I cannot believe I am talking

to you," was all she could get out.

" O.K. !" Mr. Lewis

said.

She tried again, and couldn't manage to make sense.

"Lady," Jerry Lewis said, in the voice. She pressed on. " Laa-aady! Laa-aady! " he was shrieking, motioning for the Learning Annex's Mr.

Schragis to take away the mike. There was a smattering of applause, but the

woman sat down, looking like she'd just been sucker-punched.

Jerry Lewis told the audience to return to their seats so he

could finish up. They did. He finished 10 minutes ahead of schedule.

What would Tom Brokaw say about him on that night's evening news?

In a grave Midwestern drawl, Mr. Brokaw would say that Miles Jaffe was 42 years old and had a wife and a daughter. He might describe him as an artist, or a carpenter or home designer. He would note that his late father, Norman Jaffe, was an architect who had built some of the strangest and most palatial houses on Long Island's East End. Mr. Brokaw might call the Jaffe family home a "compound," given that there are three squat buildings sitting on Mr. Jaffe's property, north of the Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton.

The NBC anchor would note that, in April, Mr. Jaffe had gone live with a Web site called Nuke the hamptons.com, on which anyone with a modem and some free time could simulate dropping a one-megaton bomb on the Hamptons and get an accurate read-out of the damage it would cause.

And most certainly, Mr. Brokaw would say that there was something about the Hamptons that made Miles Jaffe very, very angry.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Jaffe sat cross-legged on a plastic patio chair outside his metal shop. The grass under his feet was spotty in places. A short-haired collie named Lucy, with one blue eye and one brown one, trotted around the yard and barked occasionally at imagined enemies, prompting Mr. Jaffe to lose track of his thoughts. "Quiet, you dog," he said.

Since the fall of last year, Mr. Jaffe has toiled in an office above his metal shop to show the world that there is something very foul going on in the Hamptons. He trolled the Internet for satellite photos of Long Island's South Fork, for statistics on the effects of nuclear blasts. He "busted [his] ass" learning the programming language Javascript–then, when he realized it wouldn't allow the site enough flexibility, scrapped it and learned how to program using Flash animation.

The result of his efforts, he said, has people in town whispering about him. The parents at his daughter's school wonder if he's a crank. The Bridgehampton Historical Society, which Mr. Jaffe said was ready to display a sculpture of his on their lawn–three headstones reading "Modesty," "Patience" and "Charity"–recently pulled the plug. They were worried, he explained, about the ramifications of hiring Mr. Nuke-the-Hamptons.

But Mr. Jaffe persists, unbowed. "I've got to pay my bills," he said. "But the reality is, this is a big problem. We're talking about the fall of Rome here!"

Mr. Jaffe acknowledged that there is a strange self-cannibalism to his quest. In fact, his own home lies about a quarter mile from the Candy Kitchen, the Bridgehampton greasy spoon that he lists on his site as a possible detonation target. "Nuke the Hamptons," Mr. Jaffe intoned, "is really the equivalent of calling in an artillery strike on your own position when you've been overrun by the enemy.

So who, or what, is the enemy? "The enemy is not wealth. It's not the wealth that's bad," he said. "It's the values associated with the kind of wealth that comes here."

On his Web site, Mr. Jaffe assails targets large and small. He's affecting Holden Caufield-style indignance, but there's something classist about his wiseass patter. Starbucks is "the latest uninvited intrusion of corporate America into suburban life"; Ron Perelman "mastered the art of legal theft"; Martha Stewart "built an empire creating a behavioral guide for insecure social climbers who desperately seek to achieve the look of the class they aspire to belong to."

Mr. Jaffe said that he once considered packing it all up and vacating the Hamptons. Now he receives e-mails from people requesting that he blow up Crested Butte, Palm Beach and Washington, D.C. One site visitor asked that Mr. Jaffe train a missile on his daughter's school, Columbine High. Mr. Jaffe read the e-mail aloud: "Please wait another year until she's graduated. Every day that goes by makes me realize more and more that maybe Eric and Dylan were on to something." It was unclear from his knowing nod whether Mr. Jaffe's skin was crawling. It didn't really look like it.

"Every spring," Mr. Jaffe began, "we start to think, 'O.K., where are we going to move to, because here comes the invasion again.' But now I'm starting to realize that there is nowhere to move to. The values here are the same as everywhere–it's just that this is sort of concentrated."

So was there ever a time when the Hamptons weren't poisonous? Mr. Jaffe ran his hand over his graying, ponytailed head and pondered the question. "It's interesting," he said. "With my father's coming, it really started to deteriorate."

In 1965, Miles Jaffe, then 7, didn't really know his father, Norman Jaffe. His father and his mother, the former Barbara Cochran, had separated three years before, and young Miles was living in a house with his mother and her parents in Glen Ellen, Ill., while his father was attempting to make his way as an architect in Manhattan. He saw his father only occasionally and called him "Norman" when he did.

Then, one night, his mother had an accident. "Night, icy road, head on, killed instantly, or so I was told," Mr. Jaffe recalled via e-mail. Norman Jaffe showed up at his grammar school at lunch time toting a dog on a leash, which Mr. Jaffe said he'd borrowed that day to avoid appearing in the schoolyard like a child molester. "So we go to the pound, drop off the dog and get on a plane to New York," he said.

At that point, things hadn't quite taken off for Norman Jaffe. He was living in a tiny room with a fold-out couch in his office at 962 Park Avenue. For a while, Miles and his father shared that fold-out bed. Mr. Jaffe describes the relationship as one of "comrades" rather than father and son.

In the late 60's, Norman Jaffe started building houses in the Hamptons. They were mostly small affairs, not much more than 1,200 square feet, commissioned by successful artists and creative executives. In 1972, when Miles was 14, Norman moved his whole operation, and his son, there. By the time his father died in 1993, Miles estimated that some 60 Norman Jaffe designs could be found on the East End.

For Mr. Jaffe, the late 60's and early 70's were the last idyllic moments in the Hamptons. Then "all the social climbers who wanted to improve their status and pretend that they were avant-garde came here," he said.

By the late 70's, Mr. Jaffe was busy enough to turn down nine out of 10 clients, and the 1,200-square-foot jewel boxes had become a thing of the past. He was building palaces for movie executives, spaceship-shaped homes for arrivistes. "Jaffe was … interested and deeply moved by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright," Paul Goldberger, the architectural critic, wrote in his book Houses of The Hamptons , "and in the late 1960's and early 1970's Jaffe's work seemed to lose its connection to the farmhouse vernacular and struggle to reflect Wright's architecture …. Jaffe's work became grander, splashier, and in a number of cases almost bombastic and not a little vulgar."

"He was quite right," Mr. Jaffe said of Mr. Goldberger. "I mean, how personal can a 7,500-square-foot house be?"

Norman Jaffe began referring to his larger 8,000- and 9,000-square-foot commissions as "pig-outs." "It really became a game for Norman to really take them down a notch," Mr. Jaffe said, referring to his father's clients, who "assumed their wealth translated into knowledge and taste. But all they had was money. So they would … tell him what to do and he would … end up doubling their budget and doing exactly what he wanted to do."

The son worked on and off for his father up until he died. "He would throw me this scribbly drawing and tell me to make something out of it," Mr. Jaffe explained. "He'd come back … look at what I'd done, crumple it up, and I'd have to start over. He was never satisfied with his own work, which always led him to push me to do better."

Mr. Jaffe said that near the end of his father's life, he felt that his dad had in some ways renounced the "pig-outs," especially in his design of the Gates of Grove, a sweeping glass-and-wood structure that he'd designed for the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton.

Meanwhile, after barely graduating from East Hampton High School, Miles Jaffe kicked around a bit doing some carpentry work and finally ended up enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied industrial design and jewelry design. Then he went back to Bridgehampton. But in the early 90's, Miles Jaffe enrolled in a graduate computer-science program at the University of Delaware.

Two months later, he got the call. On August 19, his 61-year-old father went out for an early-morning swim at the beach on the end of Ocean Avenue in Bridgehampton, and never came back. His clothes were found. His Mercedes was found. And a month later, a pelvic bone washed up onshore that was identified as his.

Mr. Jaffe, who was named the executor of his father's estate, returned to the house on Corwith Avenue in Bridgehampton where Norman Jaffe had kept his office. He went home to put his father's affairs in order. He has not left since. These days, apart from the work of monitoring Nuke the Hamptons e-mails and filling T-shirt and hot-sauce orders from the online gift shop (neither of which he says he makes a profit on), Mr. Jaffe has been fashioning on his lathe a series of metal art objects he plans to sell, called "The Ritual Objects of Cosmology."

Mr. Jaffe seems unresolved about what happened to his father, especially the official explanation of his death. "I know perfectly well what happened to Norman," he said bitterly. "I know exactly what happened, but I'm not going to go there." He declined to elaborate further. He did, however, acknowledge that from 1993 to 1997, he was engaged in a bitter dispute over his father's estate with Sarah Stahl Jaffe, the woman his father married in 1986.

"Nuke the Hamptons is negative, but the story about my father is truly horrible," he said, his voice pinched in distress. "As bad as the values of wealth that we see here [are], the values that I saw as executor of my father's estate were infinitely worse. I found myself getting caught up in materialism, when that's not who I am or what I'm about …. I'm not entitled to anything!"

Then Mr. Jaffe said something that suggested he'd been thinking a lot about the mysteries of life and death. "I'm lucky to be walking and breathing on this earth," he said. "How many hundreds of millions of sperm were released that day back in 1958? How many? And I'm the one who made it."

Mr. Jaffe was behind the wheel of his 4-Runner, conducting what he promised to be a look into the Hampton's Heart of Darkness. Every so often, the S.U.V. would screech to a halt and Mr. Jaffe would point to something that offended him, such as the foundation of a new public toilet being constructed behind the Golden Pear in Bridgehampton. He railed against the traffic; the local farmer whom he once saw parking in a handicapped spot; the guy who hip-checked him in the Bridgehampton post office; the producer of action movies who never paid him for an addition he'd worked on; and the "S.O.B." who parked too close to his car at a yard sale seven years ago.

Houses that were set too far apart from one another in the potato fields, he said, looked like "turds that fell out of the tall cow's ass." He pointed out each of the estates in the distance. "Plop, plop, plop plop, plop," he said.

In Sagaponack, he took a sharp right down a dirt road with a foreboding sign posted at the road. "Private drive? No trespassing? Fuck you!" he said, and stepped on the pedal. He stopped the truck and gazed to the right. Looming before him was Ira Rennert's unfinished pink colossus. After theorizing that Mr. Rennert was going to use the 60,000-square-foot house not as a residence, but as an Orthodox Jewish retreat, Mr. Jaffe fell into silence, as if even he could not explain the size of this dwelling.

Eventually, Mr. Jaffe threw his S.U.V. into drive and doubled back to the main road. Then, by a series of turns, he ended up parked in the driveway of a house that he said his father had designed for The Onion Field director Harold Becker. It was made of stone, had no windows visible on the side and, like many of his father's homes, sticks up against the landscape like a space-age cowlick, albeit a very attractive one. Mr. Jaffe's tone lightened. "Norman did this when we came back from a trip to the British Isles," he said. "I was 11. It was 1969. We were visiting castles in Ireland. It's a modest house as well. The beauty of this is, when you drive up, you just see this wall. It's wacky! It's a wonderful, small, tight, inventive thing with some inspiration from another time."

Mr. Jaffe put his 4-Runner in reverse and headed home.

Mr. Tennant is 74 years old, with a smooth, tanned face and a pair of strangely outsized dentures. He was in New York for the American premiere of The Man Who Bought Mustique , an entertaining, if not particularly flattering, documentary about his life that opens at the Film Forum on May 9. Mr. Tennant seemed not at all concerned that, as of that night, any New Yorker with $9 would be able to experience the shock of watching 78 minutes of a very, very badly behaved British aristocrat running around in white Indian pajamas like Alec Guinness in an Ealing Brothers comedy playing Lawrence of the Caribbean, attempting to enslave a film crew into making a version of his life, assaulting the director of the film with his pocketbook, insulting his closest friend and describing, with no remorse, how he blew through the equivalent of $140 million–the whole of his family's 19th-century chemical fortune–buying, developing and throwing parties on the tiny Caribbean island of Mustique.

Mr. Tennant, once known in the British tabloids as "The Jet Set Monarch," tried and ultimately failed to create a colony from the days when the sun never set on the British empire. These days, poor Mr. Tennant is not even made to feel particularly welcome on Mustique.

No, Mr. Tennant was not embarrassed; he was doing his best to recover from his previous night's arrival at J.F.K. from the Caribbean, an event he referred to as a "ghastly failure" during which he'd been lost "somewhere in the back of Queens" in a car driven by "a big lout"–the cousin of his West Indian assistant, Kent Adonai. Mr. Tennant had to return to J.F.K. later in the afternoon to meet his wife and son, who were coming in from London to brave the premiere. There, Mr. Tennant handed off his 33-year-old son Christopher, who was severely handicapped in a motorcycle accident a decade ago, to Kent and his "big lout" cousin, who would be housing him in Hartford. "I couldn't possibly impose Kent and Christopher–neither of whom can read or write; both, you know, handicapped in one way or another–on my gracious hosts," he explained. "It's just too much."

His wife would not be sent to stay in Hartford, though her very presence was surprising: The morning after the film screened last year on Britain's Channel 4, Lady Anne, who is Lady in Waiting to Queen Elizabeth's sister, Princess Margaret, was offered condolences at work, as if her husband had been shown on Cops waving money at a transvestite prostitute.

"I'm very sorry, milady," Lady Anne was told. "I never knew that Lord Glenconner was like that."

As he was subjected to a not-particularly-polite sniffing by Hector, the Herreras' boxer, Mr. Tennant thought about the public reaction to the film for a second. In much the same way that he might have reacted when he was forced, not that long ago, to sell off his collection of Lucian Freuds, Watteaus and Fragonards when money got particularly tight on Mustique, he showed the emotion of the ruling class. That is, Mr. Tennant showed no emotion at all.

"I was quite interested in making the film as a kind of record. They saw an opportunity to make something rather more challenging ," he said. He punctuated the word "challenging" with an exaggerated eye roll. "Of course, the public had a wonderful time. Three and a half million people watched it in London. Taxi drivers recognize me!" Mr. Tennant seemed to think The Man Who Bought Mustique might put him back on top again.

Creating the filmed "record" wasn't a walk in the park for the film's producer, Vikram Jayanti, or the director, Joseph Bullman. Mr. Tennant proved to be a handful. "A nightmare" is how Mr. Bullman remembers the shoot.

In early 2000, Channel 4 sent the pair to the Caribbean in search of a documentary. Channel 4 was particularly interested in Mustique, a three-mile-long, one-and-a-half-mile-wide dot in the Grenadines, the island chain between St. Vincent and Grenada. The island has long had a reputation as a tightly guarded playground for celebrities and royals, a kind of floating reference point for British decadence, a moist refutation of the myth that the English love the desert: Mick Jagger and David Bowie had places there, Prince Andrew frolicked with porn star Koo Stark there, Princess Margaret carried on a scandalous affair with a 25-year-old gardener named Roddy Llewellyn there. As the young editor of Tatler , Tina Brown reported a scene in which Princess Margaret, her gardener friend Mr. Llewellyn and Reinaldo Herrera sang an off-key "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" for an island audience.

Even getting permission to go onto Mustique is difficult, but after Lord Patrick Litchfield, the famous royal photographer and longtime resident, learned that Mr. Jiyanti had been co-producer of the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings , Mr. Bullman and Mr. Jiyanti were welcomed. But after bumping into a vacationing Posh Spice and a departing Mick Jagger, they discovered that Mustique was not quite the place they'd imagined. And the locals weren't keen on having cameras around. The real story, they said, was Colin Tennant, the exiled founder of Mustique, who had settled down on St. Lucia, an island 60 miles to the south, where he had a plantation, a restaurant and a pet elephant.

"Every single person on the island said that the real story was Colin Tennant," said Mr. Jayanti, calling from a Starbucks in London. "People told us stories about his temper tantrums and his quarter-million-pound tent that he had hand-made in India and sets up whenever he's there because they won't let him build on Mustique."

Mr. Tennant, residents told the filmmakers, after inheriting the whole of his family's bleach fortune at 38, had shocked his peers by declaring what he calls "an affinity for black people." He bought the island in 1959, long before the idea of island resorts had come into vogue. "People of my background didn't actually work," he likes to say.

Mr. Tennant cleared the island of scrub, built roads, killed all the mosquitoes, planted lime trees, constructed a village for the indigenous islanders, put the old and infirm islanders on pensions. In 1960 he gave Princess Margaret, with whom gossips once linked him romantically, a 10-acre peninsula on which he built a house for her. To Mr. Tennant, Princess Margaret's happiness and comfort, it seemed, trumped just about every other of his life's concerns. Once the Princess was installed, Mr. Tennant started selling plots of land to rock 'n' rollers and anybody else he deemed worthy, which at first meant no Americans.

"It was this sort of Studio 54 philosophy at that point," said Ms. Brown, the editor of Talk . "He was the velvet rope, and you couldn't get into Mustique unless Colin blessed you. On his island, the passport was not just money or title, but that you were amusing, you were good-looking, you were attractive, you were fascinating or outrageous. That made you part of Colin's club." Mr. Tennant, the filmmakers were told, was a sort of Hef-as-Prospero character on the island.

Then, after a number of bad business decisions in the 70's, Mr. Tennant found himself in the grim financial straits he's in today, with only 10 acres of unbuildable swamp land. He started liquidating his vast art collection.

When Mr. Bullman and Mr. Jayanti, by freak coincidence, bumped into Mr. Tennant in the St. Vincent airport after leaving Mustique, he seemed happy to have been rediscovered. Not long after, he invited the crew to accompany him to Mustique. "Princess Margaret is coming in on Friday," Mr. Tennant told them. "We'll travel to Mustique together."

"We hung about on St. Lucia for about 10 days, while Colin did not arrange for us to meet Princess Margaret," Mr. Jiyanti said. "He kept saying 'Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow' and 'On Mustique it will be easier.' He proved irascible from the start."

Then there were the tantrums–"the wobblies," as the film crew referred to them. "We were going to shoot this sequence of him walking through this village," Mr. Bullman said of Mr. Tennant. "I asked him which way we were going to be walking, because we wanted to follow him with the camera. At that, he just flipped! He started screaming and stamping on the floor. He ripped his microphone off and was stamping on it repeatedly, screaming, 'I will not be herded like a goat! I will not be herded like a goat!' We were all just completely stunned."

"I've got many abilities , including irritability," Mr. Tennant said.

Mr. Tennant threatened to close down the production unless the crew followed him to New York to film a meeting with Tina Brown in the midtown offices of Talk . The director told him that a New York trip was not in the budget. "Well, then you can fuck off back to England!" Mr. Bullman said Mr. Tennant told him.

The crew came to New York.

Mr. Tennant apparently began arriving on the set with a list of scenes the crew would be shooting that day. "He would tell me when to turn over, when to cut, what we could shoot and what we couldn't shoot," Mr. Bullman said. "He had decided that we were going to be doing like one of those 1950's British colonial films, so he would arrange a pumpkin-picking scene and he'd get all the St. Lucians who work on the estate to pull pumpkins down from the mountain side, with him standing over them in his white robes, giving orders. As the days were going on, we were really beginning to panic, because we were getting all this desperate, you know, career-wrecking footage."

Mr. Tennant does not dispute Mr. Bullman's recollection.

"I did indeed suggest, direct and set up a lot of scenes for them," he said, "because I'm quick."

Once on Mustique, the crew felt that he was using their presence as a means of retribution on the residents who, he felt, had made it difficult for him to return. Mr. Tennant became gruff and threatening. "You wait until I tell them about you and your husband," he growled to an American woman in one scene. "You watch out, quite frankly."

But Mr. Bullman, Mr. Jayanti and the crew had developed a plan before they left for Mustique. "We had lost any sense of control over the film at that stage," Mr. Bullman said. "And … Lord Glenconner was doing all the bullying and lecturing. So we took a decision that the only way to do that tactically was to be [taping] pretty much all the time. I said to the crew, 'The moment he walks in the door, or the moment we get out of the truck, we need to be [taping].'"

They did, which made The Man Who Bought Mustique into a sort of meta-documentary: Mr. Tennant's desires–to govern, to stay on the good side of Buckingham Palace–are made entirely transparent. And despite Mr. Tennant's comic value, his life is essentially a tragic one: His two elder sons both died in the 90's, one of AIDS and the other, a longtime heroin addict, of hepatitis. The British tabloids have occasionally written that, after developing on top of a West Indian holy ground, Mr. Tennant was befallen by a curse. Mr. Tennant seems to suggest that the only curse he feels is the curse of being forgotten.

Towards the end of The Man Who Bought Mustique , Mr. Tennant swings his shoulder bag violently in an apparent attempt to clobber Mr. Bullman, who hasn't stopped rolling fast enough for Lord Glenconner.

"When I ask you to do something, just do it!" he bellows. "Is that clear?" Cowering in the frame, Mr. Bullman speaks up like a whelped school boy. "Well," he says, "we're making a film about you, Lord Glenconner."

But we here at The Observer decided to judge the hottest editors and writers by a different, more … literal standard. We went and posted the photographs of 23 National Magazine Award finalists in five top categories on the popular Web site HotorNot.com–asking thousands of teenagers, twentysomethings and probably more than a few bored media types online to pick the true winners of the magazine world's annual beauty contest.

Fortheuninitiated,here'showHot-orNot.com works: Visitors to the site both post and view photographs of themselves or their friends, and then grade the looks of each person on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the "hottest." When enough votes are tallied, the site assigns the photographed individual a number score based upon how he or she rated with respect to the scores of other people of the same sex. In other words, a man who scored a 5.5 is considered to be hotter than 50 percent of the men on the HotorNot.com site.

After posting the selected National Magazine Award nominees' photographs and monitoring several days of intense voting, The Observer tallied the winners. It is a handsome bunch. In the General Excellence category for publications with circulations ranging from 400,000 to one million, the winner was Jane Pratt of her eponymous Jane magazine, whose mug clocked in at J. Lo-like 9.2. In the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations greater than one million, first place went to Health magazine's Barbara Paulsen, with a health- y 7.4. The Design category featured what could fairly be described as an upset, as Entertainment Weekly 's Jim Seymore topped both Martha Stewart and W 's fashionable editor Patrick McCarthy for the top prize. In the Reporting category, Esquire 's fish-toting correspondent Sean Flynn took hottest honors, and in the Profiles category, William Langewiesche of The Atlantic Monthly set hearts ablaze with a robust 7.9.

Overall, a few trends emerged. The average rating of the nominees was 6.4–not exactly a bunch of Texas cheerleaders, but a respectable score nonetheless. As a group, editors were deemed hotter than writers, with a cumulative score of 6.5 versus the writers' 6.2. Malcolm Gladwell was rated the hottest of The New Yorker 's nominees at 6.5, a half-point higher than his boss, David Remnick. Replacement editors performed well, too: New Men's Journal editor Sid Evans, who replaced his departed predecessor and General Excellence nominee Mark Bryant, grabbed a crisp 9.0 rating, second-best overall. Teen People managing editor Barbara O'Dair was a solid 6.6.

* For reasons unknown to us, the HotorNot.com moderators chose to reject the photograph of New Yorker writer and Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh. Possible reasons for rejection, the Web site noted, included "the photo appears to be that of a model or celebrity" or that the individual was "wearing lingerie, underwear."

Midday on Wednesday, May 2, hundreds of media heavyweights will trundle into the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria for the presentation of the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine Awards. After cocktails, lunch and a few speeches, a lucky few attendees will receive the coveted Ellie, an Alexander Calder-designed elephant statuette that entitles the winner to a year's worth of bragging rights as one of the "hottest" editors or journalists in town.

But we here at The Observer decided to judge the hottest editors and writers by a different, more … literal standard. We went and posted the photographs of 23 National Magazine Award finalists in five top categories on the popular Web site HotorNot.com–asking thousands of teenagers, twentysomethings and probably more than a few bored media types online to pick the true winners of the magazine world's annual beauty contest.

Fortheuninitiated,here'showHot-orNot.com works: Visitors to the site both post and view photographs of themselves or their friends, and then grade the looks of each person on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the "hottest." When enough votes are tallied, the site assigns the photographed individual a number score based upon how he or she rated with respect to the scores of other people of the same sex. In other words, a man who scored a 5.5 is considered to be hotter than 50 percent of the men on the HotorNot.com site.

After posting the selected National Magazine Award nominees' photographs and monitoring several days of intense voting, The Observer tallied the winners. It is a handsome bunch. In the General Excellence category for publications with circulations ranging from 400,000 to one million, the winner was Jane Pratt of her eponymous Jane magazine, whose mug clocked in at J. Lo-like 9.2. In the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations greater than one million, first place went to Health magazine's Barbara Paulsen, with a health- y 7.4. The Design category featured what could fairly be described as an upset, as Entertainment Weekly 's Jim Seymore topped both Martha Stewart and W 's fashionable editor Patrick McCarthy for the top prize. In the Reporting category, Esquire 's fish-toting correspondent Sean Flynn took hottest honors, and in the Profiles category, William Langewiesche of The Atlantic Monthly set hearts ablaze with a robust 7.9.

Overall, a few trends emerged. The average rating of the nominees was 6.4–not exactly a bunch of Texas cheerleaders, but a respectable score nonetheless. As a group, editors were deemed hotter than writers, with a cumulative score of 6.5 versus the writers' 6.2. Malcolm Gladwell was rated the hottest of The New Yorker 's nominees at 6.5, a half-point higher than his boss, David Remnick. Replacement editors performed well, too: New Men's Journal editor Sid Evans, who replaced his departed predecessor and General Excellence nominee Mark Bryant, grabbed a crisp 9.0 rating, second-best overall. Teen People managing editor Barbara O'Dair was a solid 6.6.

* For reasons unknown to us, the HotorNot.com moderators chose to reject the photograph of New Yorker writer and Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh. Possible reasons for rejection, the Web site noted, included "the photo appears to be that of a model or celebrity" or that the individual was "wearing lingerie, underwear."

These are particularly glorious days to be a Columbia guy, because this year, the usual male hormonal stew in Morningside Heights is blessed not just by girls bearing tank tops but by movie stars , and two of them: Julia Stiles, star of Save the Last Dance and a recent Rolling Stone cover girl, and Anna Paquin, a 1993 Oscar winner for The Piano , who recently appeared in the hits Almost Famous and X-Men. Both Ms. Stiles and Ms. Paquin are members of Columbia's freshman class; and if that duo weren't potent enough, Dawson's Creek star Katie Holmes was supposed to be here, too, but she deferred her enrollment.

This Hollywood invasion has made the men at Columbia–like the boys at Yale who went ga-ga for Claire Danes and the guys at Harvard who dreamed of Natalie Portman–starstruck and a little bit nervous. Back in high school, these guys probably fantasized about these actresses, watching them 10 feet tall at some suburban multiplex, and now they're sitting next to them in class, in the library, in the dining hall ….

Of course, they're still guys, and so they try–rather unsuccessfully–to play it cool, all Fonzie and Fight Club , like it's not such a big deal to see Anna and Julia around.

"People crowd around them, but that's all the dorks , man," said a Columbia men's soccer player named Brian as he sat on the steps of Low Library with his friends, most of them soccer players, too. "You got so many dorks at this school who want to go up and touch them and smell them. Us, we don't really give a shit , to tell you the truth."

Brian's buddies looked at him blankly.

"At least I don't," Brian said.

A brawny Asian guy on the steps named Dave reported that Ms. Paquin was in his French class. How's her French? "Alright," Dave said. "She's an actress. She likes to embellish ." He pronounced "embellish" with a fancy-pants cadence.

The guys on the library steps recognized one of their posse crossing the quad in the distance. "Jason!" they called out. Jason Colombo, a dark-haired sophomore in a DKNY sweater, loped over.

Mr. Colombo was unabashed about his interest in Ms. Stiles. He said he met her one night late in the fall semester at the West End, the popular campus watering hole on Broadway.

"She was pretty cool," Mr. Colombo said. "She's always there … I talked to her for, like, 45 minutes ."

Suddenly, Mr. Colombo's soccer pals–some of whom had professed ambivalence about Ms. Stiles just minutes ago–were hanging on his every word. It was like that scene in the beginning of Grease where John Travolta returns to high school and tells a rapt audience of T-Birds about his summer fling with a beauty named Sandy.

"I made fun of her a little bit, and she was cool with it," Mr. Colombo continued. "I told her that when she smiles, her lip is weird. I seriously said that to her! She told me that her father told her that, too. She has a really good face, so I told her that …."

You could almost hear the T-Birds singing "Summer Nights." Tell me more, tell me more / Was it love at first sight?

"It was pretty good," Mr. Colombo went on. "I talked about all the things I didn't want to talk about, like her being famous."

Mr. Colombo said he made a lot of new friends because of his courage that night. "There were people coming up like the whole time, talking to me while I'm talking to her," he said. "People that I'm friends with, but not really friends with, just 'cause I'm talking to her–like, ' Yo, Jay! What's going on? ' and tapping me on the shoulder."

Alas, Danny–er, Mr. Colombo–didn't manage to get Ms. Stiles' telephone number.

"I was expecting to, but no–like, everybody kept jumping in and out," he complained. "I got tired of everybody coming up talking to me while I was talking to her, so that was that. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and left."

I gave her a kiss on the cheek. You could practically hear a pin drop.

"That was a long time ago," Mr. Colombo said. "She's in one of my classes now, and we like give each other the head nod now, but not like anything else."

Talking to young men at Columbia that afternoon, it became clear that, despite some mild pooh-poohing of their movies, there is, in fact, a great deal of speculation about the campus lives of Ms. Stiles and Ms. Paquin. Some of it is cute. Some of it is mean. Some of it is creepy. Some of it is just … speculation.

A few consensus observations emerged, however:

1. Anna Paquin smokes like a chimney, frequently enjoying cigarettes right outside the doors of her no-smoking residence hall.

2. For a while, Julia Stiles dated Joseph Gordon-Levitt, another freshman at Columbia, who played Tommy Solomon in Third Rock From the Sun and also had a part alongside Ms. Stiles in her film 10 Things I Hate About You .

3. Ms. Stiles and Mr. Gordon-Levitt are no longer an item.

4. Anna Paquin is–or at least until recently, was–dating a fellow Columbia freshman named Alex. Alex was described by a fellow Columbia male as a "total urban hipster."

5. Ms. Stiles created a little campus brouhaha when, during a recent appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien , she apparently referred to the cafeteria workers at John Jay Hall as "mole people."

But generally speaking, the Columbia boys seemed kind of flummoxed about how to deal with these celebrity classmates. After all, these are 18-, 19- and 20-year-old men, many of whom have trouble talking to the opposite sex, period, never mind a pair of movie stars. Still, a few had taken a page from Jason Colombo's book and swooped in to make a bold approach.

"At the beginning of the semester, I was actually nice to Anna Paquin," said a sophomore named Will Murphy. "I complimented her on her movies, on winning an Oscar at 11. She was just sort of reaching over and taking the cherries [from behind the bar] at the West End. I said, 'You can't do that,' and we started talking. I was just trying to give her a hard time, but she was cool about it."

Mr. Murphy pretty much bombed with Ms. Stiles, though he tried to put a favorable spin on the story. "It's so awful," he said. "Me and one of my roommates were at [the bar] Jake's Dilemma, right? I had heard that she was there, so I sort of got up and started screaming her name … and she was having none of that."

Mr. Murphy continued. "Jake's Dilemma has an upstairs and a downstairs bar, and we were downstairs doing all these shots, and so I walk upstairs and she's standing right there, and I give her a tap on the shoulder and I say, 'What's your name?' and she says, 'Julia,' and I say, 'Julia what ?' Then–this is what I was told, I don't really remember the conversation–but she wanted to talk more, and I sort of blew her off."

As Mr. Murphy's wild tale showed, even when the Columbia boys try to profess detachment or even distaste for Ms. Stiles or Ms. Paquin, they end up sounding a little like, well, college boys. Later that afternoon, The Observer encountered two 19-year-old freshmen, Richard Rosenblum and Patrick Luhan, and a friend of theirs, Josh Clark, who was visiting from the School of Visual Arts. They were smoking cigarettes on their way to get a bite to eat.

Mr. Rosenblum, who said he had met neither Ms. Stiles nor Ms. Paquin, nevertheless offered that Ms. Stiles was known for talking to the "nerdiest, ugliest kids" in the student dining hall. Mr. Luhan said that he, too, had seen Ms. Paquin puffing away on cigarettes around campus and at bars.

Then Mr. Rosenblum launched into a long impression of Ms. Paquin in a Columbia dining hall. "You see her out and hear her saying, 'All I've had to eat today was these fava beans , but I wish I could have the pizza ,'" he said, trying to imitate Ms. Paquin's Kiwi accent. "I'm like, 'Why don't you have the pizza?' And she's like, 'I don't eat cheese .'"

Then Mr. Rosenblum and Mr. Luhan proceeded to say some flatly awful and unprintable things about both Ms. Stiles and Ms. Paquin, most of them plainly untrue.

But then, when asked if they might be interested in hooking up with either Ms. Stiles or Ms. Paquin–as if that was ever the faintest of possibilities–both Mr. Rosenblum and Mr. Luhan said that yes, of course they'd be interested. (Mr. Clark, the School of Visual Arts student, said that he, too, would be interested, except that instead of "interested" he used a rather unfortunate turn of phrase.)

Mr. Rosenblum then launched into another impromptu fantasy sequence. "I'd love to be in the paper with [either Ms. Paquin or Ms. Stiles] talking about how she met this fantastic guy, Richard Rosenblum of Florida, math genius , and she'll have a quote saying, 'Yeah, Richard changed my life, the way his face spoke to me when I met him, and I was just more intrigued with him than any of my directors.'

"If they hit on me, I would be either one of their boyfriends."

But if there is an epicenter of weird Julia Stiles emotions on the campus of Columbia, it is a junior named Benjamin Letzler. Mr. Letzler, a self-appointed "smear-job artist" who writes occasional editorials for the Columbia Spectator (in his prouder moments, he has called Professor Edward Said "fat" and boasts about labeling a handful of university administrators "drunks" in print), got all bent out of shape when he heard that Ms. Stiles had dissed Columbia men and the cafeteria workers on Conan O'Brien's show.

Mr. Letzler responded with a piece in the Feb. 20 Spectator in which he referred to Ms. Stiles as a "sloe-eyed Hollywood wench." That column prompted Ms. Stiles to pen a retort in a subsequent op-ed column in the daily, in which she pretty much apologized for her cafeteria-staff quote on Conan but accused Mr. Letzler of mudslinging. "Even lunch ladies and Hollywood wenches have feelings," Ms. Stiles wrote.

Mr. Letzler, a somewhat nervous and cerebral young man with glasses, was still upset with Ms. Stiles nearly two months later. He explained his enmity over a beer at the West End.

" She complains that I'm insulting her to get in with people," he said. "Am I insulting her and saying horrible things about her to make friends? At some level I surely am, because I can't just make a teeny-bop comedy and have no end of teenage boys who admire my body. Those avenues just aren't open to me. It's probably some sort of complex I have from being a short, bespectacled Jewish man."

Mr. Letzler said he hadn't met Ms. Stiles personally, and he confessed that when he did catch sight of her in J.J.'s Place, a campus eatery, he ran away.

"I'm honestly a little afraid of her," he said. "For all I know, she'll slug me, or use her jujitsu chop to crush my liver or something." Mr. Letzler said he has now become a big Anna Paquin fan in reaction to the outcry.

Somehow, however, it seems that Julia Stiles–a young woman who's kissed both Heath Ledger and Ethan Hawke on-screen–has managed to get over Mr. Letzler. In a brief e-mail exchange with The Observer, Ms. Stiles wrote that her Spectator piece pretty much spoke for itself.

As for the college guys at Columbia University, Ms. Stiles sounded like she was pretty well-adjusted to them, too.

"I have no problem with them, and I don't really know why they have a problem with me," Ms. Stiles wrote. "Probably those who do have a problem with me have never actually talked to me."

Men Seeking Women

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Women Seeking Men

YOU'RE ON THE LIST!

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Well, let's get together and try and deconstruct Robin Finn's "Public Lives" profiles. Rakish linguistics prof, DWF, 66, seeks like-minded translator for long weekends drinking tall glasses of chocolate milk and unraveling code (and whatever else needs unraveling!) No kids or kinky types.

TIMESMEN MAKE ME HOT.

SWF, 29, freelance Brooklyn writer, seeks hairy, flabby editor-type to whip my prose into shape. You: Clyde Haberman sensible, Rick Bragg HOT!, with a ready satchel of Neil Straussian knee-slappers and a Brantley-esque talent for arriving at the mot juste. MUST get home delivery 7 days a week, agree with A.O. Scott all the time, disagree with Elvis Mitchell half the time. No druggies, sports section readers.

Men Seeking Men

EAT MY SHORTZ!

GWM cruciverbalist seeks same w/ big vocab (in a way) for possible ecdysiasm. You: primrose hair, phthalocyanine eyes. Me: 9-across. Sundays, we pour mimosas and do the acrostic. Send pix.

JUST CALL IT MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION!

30-ishGWM,copyeditor turned musical genius, seeks GWM for doomed love affair, martinis, clove cigarettes. I enjoy watching: building demolitions, films of Douglas Sirk, anything by Rodgers and Hart. You enjoy watching: short men "doing" Nancy Walker imitations.

IMAGINE ANDREW SULLIVAN … IN ASTORIA!

Me: SWGM, had enuf of "the boys," out of clst, Wall St, ready for lazy Sundays w. Fashion of Times, Home Design of Times, Home Entertaining of Times. U: SGAM, NOT lkg for sugar daddy, respctble, CLEAN (a must!).

Women Seeking Women

HOWELL REIGNS!

GWF, 27, I know I'm not the only one who read Thomas R. Skrowlnick of Grand Rapids, MI's letter on attaching more conditions to U.S. aid to Egypt. If you = GBF, 20-something, and thought Skrowlnick's proposal for improving relations with Hosni Mubarak was indecent, I have an "indecent proposal" for you! Discreet.

Variations

SISTERS, NO BLISTERS:

Blondes, 18, 20, with worldwide hotel privileges, seek twin brothers 20-30 to take them seriously. World sees: wild heiresses with madcap tendencies, baring chests, nethers in glossies, puking in plant pots. You see: girls who are related and just want to live! Our fave books: anything by Brontë or Collins sisters. Fave movies: Sisters, Parent Trap II, Full House, anything with twins. Fave activity: rainy-day harpsichord restoration. No famous actors, musicians.

MIRA … MEET MAX!

Want to be an English Patient? Are you a Talented Ms. Ripley? JMWN/SM's, two husky film buffs, seek directors, writers from N.Y.U., Columbia Film School, clerks at Kim's Video, for lively movie chats. We bring: downtown screening room, fresh sushi … meet Tom Stoppard! You bring: ideas for movies with Oscar potential, story ideas for monthly glossy mag. We own it. Really! (50 bucks to first 100 respondents.)

Announcements

DESPERATELY SEEKING BIG SHE.

When: Knicks-Lakers game 4/1. You, patriot, with simple blue jeans, big hair, excellent chestal, looking for new ways to honor America. Me, distinguished silver-haired, blue-eyed statesman in tan gabardine suit standing with Warren Beatty and fella with earpiece, nacho cheese on chin. We reached for the same napkin. I bit my lip, you squealed. Meet for long hugs/DreamWorks flicks?

ANNIVERSARY HAIKU FOR E.B.

In our Sea of Love

You made me feel skinny in

Those jeans you bought me

RON

DESPERATELY SEEKING THAT WOMAN, II …

4/1 Lakers/Knicks game. Me: dapper, unjustly castigated handsome American in gabardine suit, standing next to Steven Spielberg, waiting at microwave pizza vending mach. You: Knicks girl in Spandex shorts, half-time, running past you knocked my Coke to the floor. "Pardon me," you giggled, as though you'd made a joke. Gone! Dinner after next home game with me and Kevin Spacey?

- Additional reporting by John Kearney and Jason Gay.

Midday on Wednesday, May 2, hundreds of media heavyweights will trundle into the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria for the presentation of the American Society of Magazine Editors' National Magazine Awards. After cocktails, lunch and a few speeches, a lucky few attendees will receive the coveted Ellie, an Alexander Calder-designed elephant statuette that entitles the winner to a year's worth of bragging rights as one of the "hottest" editors or journalists in town.

But we here at The Observer decided to judge the hottest editors and writers by a different, more … literal standard. We went and posted the photographs of 23 National Magazine Award finalists in five top categories on the popular Web site HotorNot.com–asking thousands of teenagers, twentysomethings and probably more than a few bored media types online to pick the true winners of the magazine world's annual beauty contest.

Fortheuninitiated,here'showHot-orNot.com works: Visitors to the site both post and view photographs of themselves or their friends, and then grade the looks of each person on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the "hottest." When enough votes are tallied, the site assigns the photographed individual a number score based upon how he or she rated with respect to the scores of other people of the same sex. In other words, a man who scored a 5.5 is considered to be hotter than 50 percent of the men on the HotorNot.com site.

After posting the selected National Magazine Award nominees' photographs and monitoring several days of intense voting, The Observer tallied the winners. It is a handsome bunch. In the General Excellence category for publications with circulations ranging from 400,000 to one million, the winner was Jane Pratt of her eponymous Jane magazine, whose mug clocked in at J. Lo-like 9.2. In the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations greater than one million, first place went to Health magazine's Barbara Paulsen, with a health- y 7.4. The Design category featured what could fairly be described as an upset, as Entertainment Weekly 's Jim Seymore topped both Martha Stewart and W 's fashionable editor Patrick McCarthy for the top prize. In the Reporting category, Esquire 's fish-toting correspondent Sean Flynn took hottest honors, and in the Profiles category, William Langewiesche of The Atlantic Monthly set hearts ablaze with a robust 7.9.

Overall, a few trends emerged. The average rating of the nominees was 6.4–not exactly a bunch of Texas cheerleaders, but a respectable score nonetheless. As a group, editors were deemed hotter than writers, with a cumulative score of 6.5 versus the writers' 6.2. Malcolm Gladwell was rated the hottest of The New Yorker 's nominees at 6.5, a half-point higher than his boss, David Remnick. Replacement editors performed well, too: New Men's Journal editor Sid Evans, who replaced his departed predecessor and General Excellence nominee Mark Bryant, grabbed a crisp 9.0 rating, second-best overall. Teen People managing editor Barbara O'Dair was a solid 6.6.

* For reasons unknown to us, the HotorNot.com moderators chose to reject the photograph of New Yorker writer and Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh. Possible reasons for rejection, the Web site noted, included "the photo appears to be that of a model or celebrity" or that the individual was "wearing lingerie, underwear."

Mr. Barris, who is something of a hugger, stood by the cash register greeting the staff and touching each waiter and waitress like a beloved collection of dark-skinned mezuzahs. After creating The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game in the late 60's, creating and hosting The Gong Show in the late 70's, and then spending most of the last 20 years in the south of France because he felt like a big chunk of America hated his guts, Mr. Barris got a reception at the Midtown Diner like a beloved and triumphant general returning from years of battle. When George, the diner's burly proprietor, was later asked how often Mr. Barris appeared like this in the establishment–a place that Mr. Barris refers to as "The Greasy"–he said: "Oh, three, four times a day."

After his round of hugs, Mr. Barris sat down and ordered a cup of Yankee bean soup. "Angel! Angel on my shoulder!" he cried to a young waiter, named Angelo, who came over to the booth. Mr. Barris thrust his right fist out next to Angelo's. Both men wore similar gold wedding bands, but the wide-eyed look on Angelo's face suggested that this was a new thing for Mr. Barris. "I'm trying it on, seeing how it feels," he said. Angelo raised his eyebrows, apparently impressed.

The ring was a surprise. Until very recently, most everybody thought that the Chuck Barris story had been written, finished, sent to the presses. Twenty years ago, when he stole off to St. Tropez after selling his share of Barris Industries, his publicly held production company, it looked like Chuck Barris was one of the few that had been able to live out the Hugh Hefner-era fantasy: Jewish kid from South Philadelphia makes a huge pile of dough, becomes a star in the States; then, when it looks like his moment has passed, he just says "Fuck it" and embarks on a third marriage with a flame-haired Gong Show staffer almost half his age named Red whom he loves desperately, and splits to the south of France with his girl and a shred of dignity. There, he was supposed to live out his days playing boule with the local fishermen and sausage makers, putting around the Mediterranean in his Arriva and trying to write the Great American Novel, fulfilling, as he calls it, the F. Scott Fitzbarris fantasy. And he came close.

But recently, word got out among the few fans who still keep track of him that Mr. Barris' story was growing a messy little epilogue, that Red was out of the picture, that he was back in New York, that he had cancer, that he returned to the country he at one point had grown to hate so much to die a slow, lonely death on the Upper East Side.

But now, all of that seemed to be changing. He was talking about a new woman named Mary Clagett Kane, a Kentucky girl living in Atlanta, 30 years his junior, whom he said he'd been dating on and off for three and a half years. And he was wearing a wedding ring he had lying around, just to get the feel of it again, even though he was feeling very hesitant. "The best way to avoid divorce is to not get married," he pronounced. "I think all my major problems in life have all come from marriage."

Mr. Barris said that lately, Ms. Kane had been pushing him to get married, and had even dragged him–a 71 year-old Jewish fellow–down to Bowling Green, Ohio, to meet her extended Methodist family. "I went down with great intimidation–very high caution," he said. "But they were really great–really lovable, nice people. Even the Kluxer was a good guy: He showed me his pistols."

Last year, before the thoughts of marriage had crossed his mind, Mr. Barris stared out over the Hudson from his bed at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he was recuperating from an operation that had removed a cancerous growth in his lung. His marriage was over. His mother had died. His only child, Della, had died a couple of years before of a drug overdose. The cancer was gone. Chuck Barris knew he would live, but he started thinking about dying.

"I had started writing a book called Pismire's Salvation ," he said, forgoing his soup and reaching for my fries. "In that book, every once in a while the guy thinks of his epitaph–you know, he gets these flashes. My epitaph in real life would be 'The Man Who Thought of The Gong Show .' What a horrible thing! But when I was in the hospital, what bothered me was that I had to do something, that the years left in me were going to be a big zero …. I mean, what's going to happen? Do you take a slow American Flyer ride out? That seems boring as shit!"

In his hospital bed, Mr. Barris made a few plans. One involved getting his pilot's license and flying a plane somewhere spectacular–he didn't know where, but he used as a model the case of the West German teenager who landed his single-engine Cessna in Red Square. The other plan involved just disappearing, going into the Middle East and wiping himself off the map. "I'd fly Paris to Geneva, Geneva to Istanbul, Istanbul to Tel Aviv, and then just poof !" he said.

He got out of the hospital, went home to his 61st Street penthouse and, after contracting a post-operative staph infection that put him back in the hospital and nearly killed him, he settled into a squishy green armchair he'd bought at Shabby Chic, and began reading–all day, every day. And he didn't get up much. "I kept saying, 'This is wrong, because I should be doing something.' I couldn't write. I didn't want to. And then the 'go' on this movie just shot me out."

"This movie" is Confessions of a Dangerous Mind , based on the memoir Mr. Barris wrote on a mammoth I.B.M. computer in the Wyndham Hotel in 1980, where he and Red lived together before flying off to St. Tropez. St. Martin's Press published the book in 1984. Though the book was hardly a commercial or critical success–Mr. Barris said that of the 100,000 copies printed, only about 7,500 copies sold–the book soon developed something of a cult following. Half of Confessions is a comic retelling of Mr. Barris' life in show business

The book includes the story of Mr. Barris' inauspicious beginnings as a not-particularly-driven young man right out of Drexel University, skipping from job to job, selling teleprompters, paging at Rockefeller Center, chasing girls and getting head. Then there's the story of trying to develop his disastrous first game-show idea, People Poker , which involved contestants using human beings as playing cards. Then there's his ascent as a game-show producer, beginning in 1965 when ABC picked one of his show ideas.

Mr. Barris' show involved allowing a cute coed to ask questions of three bachelors who were hidden from her view, a group that generally consisted of one stud and two duds. Based on their answers, the bachelorette would choose one with whom she would go on an all-expenses-paid vacation. It would be called The Dating Game . Then there was The Newlywed Game , cranked out by a successful, growing company of free-wheeling hipsters. Then there was the $1.98 Beauty Show and Three's a Crowd, in which executives' wives were pitted against their secretaries and which may have been– Queen for a Day excepted–the cruelest game show ever created.

Finally, Confessions told the tale of how Mr. Barris, through his decision in 1976 to step in front of the camera and host The Gong Show , was crucified by the public and press as an unseemly and obnoxious hand-clapping menace in a tux; a man who would allow his heavyset black stage hand, "Gene, Gene, the Dancing Machine," to shake his pubis in decent American homes; a man who would air an act called "The Popsicle Twins," a nubile duo who simulated fellatio on frozen treats. The book recalled a man who had the hubris to direct and star in The Gong Show Movie , a flop that stayed in theaters for three days in 1980 and which, combined with death threats from a defeated Gong Show contestant, hastened Mr. Barris and Red's departure for France.

But that was just half the story. The other half of Confessions was about how Chuck Barris, starting in the early 60's, also had a side gig of traveling to foreign cities under the name of "Sunny Sixkiller" and murdering people for the Central Intelligence Agency.

"I … jammed my automatic into his mouth," Mr. Barris wrote of one hit that he supposedly performed in London while chaperoning a Dating Game couple on their free vacation. "The front of the silencer broke teeth as it went in. The man's eyes became immense …. I pulled the trigger three times. The man's eyes remained surprised while the back of his head splattered against the wall of the church."

On the way out of the Midtown Diner, I broached the topic of the Central Intelligence Agency, which most readers of the book–and reporters–assumed was a literary convention, a gag, especially since Mr. Barris had included the names of agents and of some of his hits, and even a couple of photos of operatives. (Mr. Barris later said that the names had all been changed, and the photos "were not of the people I was writing about.")

"Do you have assassin fantasies?" I asked him.

Mr. Barris didn't turn back to answer. "You could wait all day and you're not getting anything there," he said icily.

"I assumed that stuff was made up out of whole cloth."

"You can assume anything you want," he said, walking towards his apartment building and quickly changing the subject. He took a detour so he could walk by a pet shop called Le Chien on Third Avenue. "Let's just look at the dogs," he said. Mr. Barris stood on the street and watched a couple of bichons frisés frolicking. "I hate those dogs," he said, but he seemed to be eyeing them with affection. "These little chi-chi things. Look at that little guy."

He hustled off towards home. Upstairs, on the 39th floor of the Trump Plaza, Mr. Barris settled into his green chair. In 1984, he and his friend Dick Clark bought adjoining penthouses–actually, Mr. Barris' is a cozy one-bedroom affair overlooking the East River, stuffed with books. When a high-rise was built a few avenues east of the building, Mr. Clark "couldn't stand it because they'd watch him get undressed," Mr. Barris said.

The apartment is all that's left of the Barris empire. Until returning to New York a few years back, he had kept a house and office in Beverly Hills, an apartment in Paris, two houses in St. Tropez, "a staff of a thousand," "countless cars," the 61st Street penthouse and an office at 76th Street and Madison Avenue. "When I came back, it dawned on me that I was happier when I was poor." He quickly corrected himself: "Poor- er . I realized that I didn't have this damned nut to worry about, so in the last two years I got it down to me, this apartment, a secretary, a housekeeper here in New York and a driver. That's it, and it's just fine. Two credit cards!" he said.

After getting out of the hospital, Mr. Barris tried to figure out something that would get him out of the green chair. He recently signed up for a course in criminology. He joined two temples in the hopes of getting the proper bar mitzvah he'd never had. After a couple of months, Mr. Barris wasn't satisfied with the answers he was getting from his two rabbis, tossed the whole bar-mitzvah idea and went back to his previous state of grumpy nihilism. "A plant, as far as I'm concerned, has as much of a soul as I do," he said.

So there he was, alone in the chair, reading, watching Oscar-consideration screeners that his friends lent him, and occasionally breaking up with Ms. Kane and sending her long, angry faxes–which became frequent enough that Ms. Kane, at one point, threw the fax machine in a ravine behind her house in Atlanta.

Living alone, Chuck Barris realized, sucked. "I can deal with the morning by either writing or doing things," he explained. "And then there's lunch. After that, around 4:00, I feel like it's O.K. now to take a nap. So I'll lay down on the couch and take a nap, or I'll read in the green chair. Then I'm in trouble. At night, I start to get a little crazy. I get to about 5:30, and then it's a long night." He sighed. "It's a long night."

Then, salvation from Hollywood–or at least what seemed like it.

For more than a decade, the idea of Confessions becoming a movie had broken Mr. Barris' heart over and over. Eleven years ago, the project was derailed when Dawn Steel, head of Columbia Pictures–which had originally bought the memoir–was pushed out. Then, Mr. Barris said, Bob Daly and Terry Semel, the co-chairmen of Warner Bros. who had gotten behind the film, resigned before greenlighting it, and the project died. Several months ago, Mike Myers was set to portray Mr. Barris in the film but, with a writers' strike looming, pulled out at the last minute, temporarily killing the project and forever assuring Mr. Barris' feelings about Mr. Myers. ("It's awesome in its evilness," he groused. "Who does that and fucks up so many people?")

Finally, in October, it all seemed to gel. Renaissance Films, a British production company, had arranged financing for the $38 million project. Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman had written a script. Usual Suspects and X-Men director Bryan Singer agreed to direct. Johnny Depp was to play Mr. Barris, with George Clooney as Jim Byrd, Mr. Barris' C.I.A. liaison. Uma Thurman, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Drew Barrymore were rumored to be mulling over the female roles. Mr. Singer, before heading to Toronto to begin location scouting, came to New York to have dinner at Rao's with Mr. Barris.

Five weeks before principal photography was to begin shooting, Mr. Barris was in New York, gearing up to be trailed for a few days by Mr. Depp. Then a fax rolled across his home machine from Mr. Lazar. "When I saw the words 'I regret …,' I didn't even need to read any more," Mr. Barris said. At the last minute, Renaissance had financing problems and the project died again. The day after he got the fax, Mr. Barris had his secretary Loretta call to tell me that the movie deal was off, and to see if I still had any desire to interview him.

Mr. Barris sat in silence for a moment. "People are calling up," he said, "and saying, 'I'm sorry. Geez, I'm sorry to hear about that.' They were sorry to hear about that , they were sorry to hear about my cancer operation, they were sorry about my daughter, sorry about my mother. I'm tired of 'I'm sorrys'!" Mr. Barris looked as though he might collapse into a mess of tears, then steeled himself. "It's just me in a strange place–you know, it's not a normal place to be. I'll kick it. I'll kick it, and I'll be back to where I was. I don't really know where that was, but it was O.K.–you know, on a boat, rocking back and forth or something. I'll figure it out."

Two weeks and a day later, Mr. Barris was sitting in the green chair, but he was not alone. His housekeeper was puttering around in the kitchen, and Mary Clagett Kane, who had come into town a week and a half before, was preparing to venture out into the snow to return a suit she'd bought at Barneys, and also to go shopping for a wedding dress. Ms. Kane is a stunner, considerably taller than Mr. Barris, with the look of one of those Southern women who probably wouldn't think of leaving the house without makeup, but also would never leave the house wearing too much.

Mr. Barris looked a little confused, a little older than he had before, and his hair was sticking up as if he'd been napping. He was wearing a gold band that looked identical to the one he had sported two weeks before, but this one was real. He said he had to make the interview quick; he was getting married tomorrow in the apartment and had some cleaning to do, which he said involved taking down some of the numerous pictures of Red hanging on his wall.

"You better be careful," he said to Ms. Kane, eyeing the snow and speaking in a higher voice than usual. She was putting on her hooded fur coat.

"I'm off to find a dress," she said.

"You better be careful," he said.

She was heading for the door.

"You going to be O.K.?" he asked. She turned at the door, smiled and left.

After Ms. Kane arrived in town, Mr. Barris resolved that they would go the easy way, just go to City Hall and do a quick and dirty job of it. But when they were getting a marriage license, they checked out the City Hall chapel. "I couldn't do it there," he said. "It looked like a subway station." So Mr. Barris had gone and gotten commitments from 20 of his friends to witness the ceremony. And when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani didn't respond to Mr. Barris' request that he perform the ceremony at his home, Mr. Barris found a judge who would.

I brought up the C.I.A. thing again. It was just too weird.

"There's no comment on that," he said, not quite so brusque as he had been before. "Whoever wants to check up on me can check. Call the C.I.A. They'll say they've never heard of me and say it's fiction. I don't give a shit. Just realize that the C.I.A. has never accepted the employment of anybody they've used as killers, or even spies for that matter."

Mr. Barris hopped to his feet to go to the Midtown Diner. Ms. Kane, said Mr. Barris, didn't like going there "as much as I do." The place was bustling. The day before, the waitress, named Maria, had gotten arrested for screaming at a cop. When Maria passed by the table, Mr. Barris, who had laid his wallet on the table, made a great gesture of putting it back in his pocket. "You can't be too careful when Maria's around," he said. The pair howled.

Rumors have been circulating that Miramax may come in and try again to make a go of Confessions . Mr. Singer, the director, said that in Charlie Kaufman's script, an epilogue read by the actor playing Mr. Barris "talks about a game show he's been thinking of called The Old Guy Game .

"He says, 'You put three old guys in a room; they recall their life, what they've done, and how close they came to achieving their dreams. The one that doesn't blow his brains out wins. He gets a refrigerator.'"

Mr. Lonergan knows that every creative person fantasizes about the kind of moment he is having right now: the moment when the planets align in such a way that everybody in the world, seemingly at the same time, arrives at the conclusion that you– you! –are spectacularly talented and deserve to be adored by the world. (Of course, the creative person, in order to maintain his or her own sanity, had arrived at that conclusion early on.)

Kenneth Lonergan, it seems, is armpit-deep in his moment: Once a guy who had to borrow money from friends and family, he now has three William Morris agents on two coasts working for him, which these days mostly involves turning work down. He's got a publicist at PMK, even though his number is still listed in the phone book.

And the thing is, Mr. Lonergan is the kind of person whom people think deserves such a moment. In 2000, a movie year that seemed particularly jaded in a pre-fab, star-stuffed kind of way–see What Women Want , Pay It Forward, Mission: Impossible 2 – You Can Count on Me was a cold drink of water, a character-driven, not overly plotted, inexpensive little film that made you cry without feeling that studio employees with clipboards and tear meters had overseen the production and decided, for example, that yes, a volleyball with a face painted on it can pull heartstrings, so long as it floats away in the second act. You Can Count on Me worked because it was unfailingly honest.

Now, of course, everybody in Hollywood wants Mr. Lonergan to unload his pack of tricks at their studio and make their audiences weep un-self-consciously, too–only this time he can do it with 10 times the budget, a happier ending and maybe Kate Hudson. Faced with this, Mr. Lonergan currently has a little bit of the paralytic fear that sucks most of the fun out becoming a big star.

"I have so many very talented friends in show business who just get murdered ," Mr. Lonergan said. He furrowed his brow for a second to think about it. "I don't want to be murdered," he concluded.

It was an hour and a half before the seventh preview of Lobby Hero , which opens on March 13, and Mr. Lonergan was sitting in the empty theater a couple rows behind where the Sick-Kid Man had sat the night before. He was fuming. The audience reaction to Lobby Hero had been strange and muted last night–there was silence during lines that had previously gotten laughs, Mr. Lonergan said–and the 38-year-old playwright felt that the Sick-Kid Man was partly to blame. About 20 minutes into the play–a four-character morality tale that takes place in the lobby of a Manhattan high-rise–the Sick-Kid Man's cell phone rang, and in part because of that interruption, Mr. Lonergan theorized, the first act just couldn't recover and the audience tuned out.

"That fucking asshole!" said Mr. Lonergan, laughing–which for him is more like a wry, nostril-launched wheeze. "Their child was sick, apparently. So stay at home! Someone said something to them, and [he] said, 'We have a sick child.' Well, turn your fucking phone onto vibrate or wait in the lobby ! Or don't go out!"

As Diana Ross as it may seem, Mr. Lonergan's outburst about a ringing cell phone should not be confused with the madness that comes when some experience their first moment. When some great talents have their moment, they go a little Hollywood wacky: like, for example, when screenwriter Robert Towne, after Chinatown , started surrounding himself with all those six-foot-tall naked volleyball players, or when Billy Bob Thornton, after Sling Blade , divorced his wife and began eating only orange foods.

Mr.Lonergan–whose friends all call him "Kenny," even though he doesn't look like a Kenny–has either completely avoided the moment mania, or else it just hasn't reached him yet. Despite the fact that he wrote and directed You Can Count on Me , he hasn't evolved into a meeting-taking Hollywood sharpie; he still maintains that sub-alpha-male writer's look, indiscernible from the look of a frustrated graduate student–the just-crawled-out-of-a sleeping-bag hair, the puffy blue parka, the Jansport green knapsack on his back and the half-eaten slice of pizza he drags around on a greasy paper plate. He was pulling at his black turtleneck like a hair shirt. And he cultivates his image as, in his words, "a bit of a grumbler."

"Kenny's brow is always knitted," said his wife of eight months, actress J. Smith-Cameron. "There's a photograph in our living room of him when he was 5. All pictures of kids when they're 5 have these big sunny grins and darling faces, but his has a big, deep frown and he's unmistakably Kenny. It's him, but shorter ."

Many people think that with the release of You Can Count on Me, Mr. Lonergan was hatched, fully formed, as a successful writer-director, but he actually had his first dalliance with Hollywood 12 years ago–and it wasn't a happy one.

Mr. Lonergan grew up comfortable on the Upper West Side, the son of divorced parents–mom is a shrink, and dad is a doctor–and went to Walden, where he got involved in theater and became best friends with Matthew Broderick. He went through New York University's undergraduate dramatic-writing program and scored an internship at the Royal Court Theater in London. Then he came home and graduated from N.Y.U., and promptly fell headlong into an existential crisis.

"Nothing happened for two years," Mr. Lonergan said. "I was dead in the water."

He did work, however. Mr. Lonergan got a job as a script reader for MGM. He wasn't very good at it. "I was quickly fired," he said. "I was supposed to read scripts and recommend whether they should be read by someone higher than me or not, and decide whether they had commercial potential, and I had no idea whether these scripts had commercial potential or not. I thought they were all terrible."

In the meantime, Mr. Lonergan had started workshopping his own scenes and short plays with Naked Angels, the downtown theater troupe that over the years has included Sideman author Warren Leight, Marisa Tomei and Rob Morrow, as well as Mr. Lonergan's old friend, Matthew Broderick, and his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker. Later, he got a full-time stint as a speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency, which he kept for two years, but which didn't allow him much time outside the office to work on his own projects.

Then Mr. Lonergan discovered the beauty of industrial writing for a consulting firm called Cortez-Seidner. He began writing speeches, safety videos and little comedy skits that companies like Fuji could use at their big sales meetings. The money was good, and it was better than the E.P.A. job because he could do it on his own timetable.

"Then I messed up," Mr. Lonergan said, with what appeared to be real remorse. He was supposed to prepare four speeches for a big Weight Watchers franchise-holders' meeting. Mr. Lonergan said he did a "sloppy, lazy job" on the speeches. Cortez-Seidner called with work less and less.

So Mr. Lonergan did what any smart young man with a worthless degree and an ear for dialogue would do. He borrowed $30,000 from his mother, his stepfather and Mr. Broderick and decided to write a screenplay. Around 1989, Mr. Lonergan wrote a screenplay he called Analyze This , about an over-ambitious psychiatrist who gets entangled with a mob client.

His agent at the time sent the script out to "everybody in the world," Mr. Lonergan said. Owing to certain market factors–including what Mr. Lonergan perceived as a surfeit of Married to the Mob -type Mafia comedies–"everybody loved it and nobody wanted it," Mr. Lonergan said. At one point, the script made it to the desk of Jane Rosenthal, Tribeca Productions president and Robert De Niro's partner. "Kenny was interested in having Bob act in it," Ms. Rosenthal said. But at the time, Mr. De Niro hadn't done Casino and he hadn't done Cape Fear , Ms. Rosenthal said. "He wasn't ready necessarily to spoof his one franchise character."

Six months after Analyze This failed to sell, Illeana Douglas, who was then dating Martin Scorsese, auditioned for Suffering Colonel , a play that Mr. Lonergan had written for Naked Angels. Mr. Scorsese, who had also passed on Analyze This, read the play, liked it and decided to take another look at Mr. Lonergan's screenplay.

After the renewed flurry of interest, Spring Creek Productions, which had a production deal with Warner Brothers–and which had also passed on Analyze This –called to see if it was still available. Mr. Lonergan sold it to Warner Brothers. "I was $30,000 in debt, and they were offering more money [than Mr. Scorsese]," he said.

Of course, Mr. Lonergan is now kicking himself for not selling Analyze This to Mr. Scorsese. Spring Creek told Mr. Lonergan that he would have to rewrite the whole thing and turn it into a buddy movie. When he demurred, they hired other screenwriters to do it. Mr. Lonergan, though he lists the screenwriting credit on his published biography, has made a special point of never seeing Analyze This , the 1999 Harold Ramis-directed version of his story, with Mr. De Niro and Billy Crystal. He also turned down an invitation to visit the set during filming. "I don't know if the movie's any good or not, but I know from the notes I got from them … that they wanted it to end up being a buddy movie, and I basically thought it was dumb," he said.

But while Analyze This was shooting, Mr. Lonergan was starting another project for Ms. Rosenthal. This one didn't make it into the biography. Though he was paid handsomely for his efforts and is listed as the sole screenwriter on the project, Mr. Lonergan had issues once again.

"I think [ The Adventures of ] Rocky and Bullwinkle was injected with a saccharine sweetness which I tried too hard to keep out of it, even though they told me to put it in," Mr. Lonergan said. "That show [the cartoon] has no sweetness in it at all. I don't think the movie should have, either."

In the screenplay to The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle , Mr. Lonergan sought to skewer the banality of popular culture. His premise: Fearless Leader, played by an embarrassed-looking Robert De Niro, tries to pull a Rupert to reprogram the country's airwaves with RBTV, or Really Bad Television. In one scene echoing Mr. Lonergan's early experience at MGM, Janeane Garofalo, as a movie studio executive, tosses script after script into a shredder marked "Too Intelligent."

Still, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle lacked a solid plot, and it tanked. Mr. Lonergan isn't willing to take much responsibility for that one. "I could go on and on," he said, after enumerating some of the reasons it was such a terrible film, including a complaint that studio executives insisted the word "reruns" be substituted for "syndication" in the script.

"It's [director] Des [McAnuff]'s movie and Universal's movie," Mr. Lonergan said. "I wouldn't have done the animation that way. I just thought it should have been cheaper and more like the show. I think they should have spent a quarter of the money, used the script as it was written originally, not hired $20 million actors and hired really strong comedy actors, you know."

Mr. Lonergan thought about that proposition for a minute. "And, it might still be bad." (Mr. Lonergan might get another shot eventually: For Tribeca he also wrote a script for Sherman and Peabody , another cartoon by Rocky and Bullwinkle creator Jay Ward.)

While Mr. Lonergan was making money and suffering in Hollywood, he was making his reputation in the theater. In 1996, his play This Is Our Youth was produced at the INTAR Theater on West 53rd Street. Two years later, musical producers Fran and Barry Weissler produced the play, moving it to the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre.

Mr. Lonergan, with The New York Times on his side, became a downtown phenom. Like You Can Count on Me and his new play, Lobby Hero , This Is Our Youth is sparsely plotted and chatty, and all three display Mr. Lonergan's penchant for ennobling his loser-innocents–whether it's Jeff, the doorman from Lobby Hero , who was kicked out of the army for smoking dope; or Terry, Laura Linney's unredeemable fuck-up of a brother in You Can Count on Me ; or Warren, the 19-year-old dragging a suitcase of toys from his childhood through New York in This Is Our Youth . (Both Terry and Warren were played by Mr. Lonergan's loser muse, Mark Ruffalo.)

When This Is Our Youth became a hit, John Hart and Jeff Sharp of Hart Sharp Entertainment, who at that time were producing Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry , approached Mr. Lonergan about turning his play into a movie. Mr. Lonergan didn't know how to adapt the play into a film–to this day, he still doesn't–but by then he had completed the screenplay for You Can Count on Me , which grew from one scene that he had workshopped years before at Naked Angels. He asked if they wanted You Can Count on Me instead. They did.

But Mr. Lonergan hadn't forgotten the lessons he'd learned from Analyze This . He insisted on the final cut of the movie. For backup, he called an old friend, Mr. Scorsese. "My solution was to bring Marty in as an executive producer and he would have

final cut, which would basically mean that I would have final cut," Mr. Lonergan said.

And thus began the 28-day shoot of You Can Count on Me in the Catskills. According to Laura Linney, who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Sammy Prescott, Mr. Lonergan was chronically anxious on the set.

"He worries and worries," Ms. Linney said. "You can see him looking with a furrowed brow in a very concentrated way. You see him worry that way. He would check things and then recheck things. He does worry. He worries a lot." In fact, in an interview after wrapping the film, Mr. Lonergan said he never wanted to direct again.

He has changed his mind, with conditions. "I'm loath to do anything I'm not going to completely control now," he said. Mr. Lonergan is currently trying to wrangle the rights to adapt a few projects he didn't want to talk about, as well as converting This Is Our Youth and its follow-up, The Waverly Gallery, into shootable scripts.

Because of the success of You Can Count on Me and the Oscar nomination, of course, Mr. Lonergan can insist on such indulgences. He can be difficult if he so chooses. He can even throw tantrums and fling cell phones at assistants, and people will lap it up and come back for more. But Ms. Rosenthal said that Mr. Lonergan hasn't changed.

"Kenny has always been doing this, and the fact that everybody knows it now is great," she said. "But he's very much the same self-effacing guy. The only difference is that I called him to congratulate him on his nomination, and I got a call back from an assistant who said that Kenny would call me later. That was new."

But can someone with Mr. Lonergan's furrowed-brow take on the world ever go completely Hollywood? In his foreword to the published edition of The Waverly Gallery , fellow playwright and friend Jon Robin Baitz wrote that Mr. Lonergan's characters were "all parts of the Kenny Lonergan of the time: the recessive, the underachiever, the bright but inarticulate, the mismatched baleful lover, the melancholic champion of the underdog …."

In his seat at the Playwrights Horizons theater, Mr. Lonergan thumbed through the foreword and reconsidered Mr. Baitz's words. "Let's see," he said, narrowing his eyes at the text. "I don't feel like I'm particularly inarticulate, or ever was … I guess I'm a little recessive … I don't think I was an underachiever at the time … I don't think I was an over- achiever … mismatched baleful lover? I don't know what that means … melancholic champion of the underdog? Maybe so."

It was after 7:15 p.m., and the ushers were about to open the house. Tate Donovan, who plays Bill, Lobby Hero 's oversexed cop, was standing alone on the stage in his police uniform, running lines. A question was put to Mr. Lonergan: Was he worried about becoming ….

"A hack?" Mr. Lonergan interrupted. "Yes," he said. He eyed Mr. Donovan, who had heard him and stood smiling from the stage. "Look at this play ," he said. "That, trust me, that fear is legitimate," cracked Mr. Donovan, in cop character, pointing with his night stick.

Mr. Lonergan, no doubt, is familiar with the history of moments past, how Reservoir Dogs begat Jackie Brown , how China Town begat Personal Best , how Sling Blade begat All the Pretty Horses –and how it could happen to him, too, if he isn't careful.

"You do things like Rocky and Bullwinkle , you know, you just take jobs just for money, [and] you get too good at doing shoddy work, I guess," he said.

So Mr. Lonergan wades in his moment, edgy and tentative, hoping the first act takes care of itself. Then again, he said, "I've been really too busy to sit back and revel. But I'm not a big sit-back reveler type …."

Mr. Lonergan paused for a moment and furrowed that brow. "Because I'm the melancholy champion of the underdog."