The movie’s star, Jennifer Aniston, spent the weekend in the company of her favorite accessory, her gay hairdresser, Chris McMillan; for press interviews, she was accompanied by her co-star, Catherine Keener.

And the crowds, normally more blasé, literally chased her limousine down the street at the end of the screening.

But while the film is attracting raves and may be one of the more viable products at the festival this year, it was quite possible to believe that Ms. Aniston’s followers were chasing after the Jen of “Who Told Jen?” and “It Should Have Been My Baby!” tabloid-headline fame, not the frumpy stoner maid and man-stalker of Ms. Holofcener’s film.

Because Sundance isn’t about films.

Sure, Gwyneth Paltrow was also in Park City—for five minutes, give or take a few, to promote a short she directed. Yes, Sting stopped by a Motorola party on Saturday night with his wife, Trudie Styler, who is promoting A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. Absolutely that was Rob Lowe—whom Hollywood is buzzing about once again for his cameo as an agent in Thank You for Smoking—at the Self magazine swag suites, scoring a new BlackBerry.

But what about the biz? “Film Fest Flurry,” cried yesterday’s Variety—but that supposed flurry only confirmed news of the second film acquisition of the festival. Not quite a blizzard.

Between the C-list Hollywooders and the outer-industry culture hoboes, the real celebrity set and the few folks actually buying films must have been a bit lonely.

All around town, you could find Lizzie Grubman with her Power Girls; Trista and Ryan from The Bachelor; Jason from Laguna Beach; James Van Der Beek, late of Dawson’s Creek and not much else; Shannon Elizabeth from American Pie; Minnie Driver, who is supposedly performing a few songs at a party; the fabulous Bai Ling, who has been out every night till at least 2 a.m.; and that woman who plays Dr. McDreamy’s wife on Grey’s Anatomy, who went straight for the Kooba bags at the Marquee Hospitality Suites. And those are just the strivers you recognize.

There were plenty of transplanted New Yorkers just hanging out, too: Dori Cooperman, a friend of Ms. Grubman’s and a New York girl about town; Mandie Erickson, the proprietor of Seventh House P.R., who’d brought her friend Simon Hammerstein, the grandson of Oscar; Dani Stahl of Nylon magazine, who was hawking her Lia Sophia collection of costume jewelry and supporting her boss, who’d made a documentary about Good Charlotte in Japan; John McDonald of Lever House; and enough fashion and lifestyle publicists to found a new, heavily publicized country.

“Hi, I’m calling to get a car for Emile Hirsch and Carmen Electra,” one publicist squealed into her cell phone on Main Street. “I need the nicest one you’ve got.”

“I’m just here pushing myself,” said linebacker Dhani Jones of the Philadelphia Eagles. No real celebrity would ever be so blunt, but in a nutshell, he described exactly what everyone was doing here: getting photos of themselves out there, getting their names in In Touch, reminding everyone that they exist. After all, wouldn’t we forget that girl from the San Francisco Real World if she didn’t show up time and again to show her face?

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" THE D.J. SAMANTHA ROSEN ASKED an entertainment editor from Condé Nast. They were both enjoying a free lunch up at the Café Yahoo in Park City this weekend past. The entertainment editor was actually working, looking for future story ideas and cover subjects. Indeed, Ms. Ronson was working too, D.J.-ing at a party at Tao.

Everyone’s working on everything, and everyone wants you to know it. Movies, sure. But also: books, electronics, music, life-story rights and that most ephemeral product of all, lifestyle.

In other words, the tangible commodity being exchanged at Sundance is publicity. And Sundance is now just another blip on the cross-platform festival circuit, a stop on the party train, where people in the less-glamorous industries go to try to rub a little stardust on their cheeks, and hope it sticks.

Hollywood, in comparison to the other, less-hefty culture industries, clearly has the real money—no matter how loudly the trades claim it was a bad year. So publishers and agents and club promoters and musicians and restaurateurs and art dealers glom onto Sundance, hoping for some of Hollywood’s spare change. And get some they will, because every idea is fungible now in another form.

Case in point: Back in Manhattan on Monday night, up at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sundance Theatre Laboratory presented a preview of Grey Gardens, the musical by Doug Wright, Michael Korie and Scott Frankel that will open at Playwrights Horizons next month.

Sure, the authors admitted to a conceptual struggle with their adaptation of the famous 1975 documentary by the Maysles brothers. “As far as I know, a documentary has never been translated into musical theater,” said Mr. Frankel from behind the piano. “Once something is sung, it can no longer be fact,” said Mr. Korie. And the expert: “It must be historical,” the film’s (and musical’s) star, Edie Beale, who died in 2002, had written to Mr. Maysles of the forthcoming work. But come now: Fact? Fiction? In the post-Frey world, does it matter? Let’s sell an idea!

How long will it be until a movie is made of the musical of the movie? After all, didn’t we just see a film from the play from the film of The Producers? And how long until the one-woman-show version of Joan Didion’s nonfiction The Year of Magical Thinking is re-brokered by Scott Rudin and rewritten by Michael Cunningham for Christine Vachon?

Tina Brown and the Weinsteins and Talk magazine had it right about synergy and platform-agnostic and all that. They were just too early. Now anything can be anything, and anyone can be anyone. Polymorphous publicity.

AROUND 4 P.M. ON SATURDAY IN PARK CITY, AMANDA DEMME WAS RUNNING around the W Hotel Lounge at the Village at “The Lift” at the bottom of Main Street. A bi-level heated tent—the kind you find in Bryant Park during Fashion Week, where W Hotels gives out free drinks and, in the case of Utah, white golf pencils as well—the W Lounge was going to be the place to be Saturday night of the Sundance Film Festival.

Ms. Demme, the widow of the late Ted Demme, is a West Coast fixture, their Amy Sacco. With Teddy’s at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, she has made nightlife in Los Angeles hot again. Recently, she sealed a deal with W to create lounges in many of the chain’s hotels. She had flown in specifically for this event (reported cost: $700,000) tied to the Sundance Film Festival, which was being used—go figure—to publicize and market the W Hotel’s new residences in Las Vegas.

Ms. Aniston’s co-stars—Catherine Keener, Jason Isaacs, Scott Caan and the experimental-theater guru Simon McBurney—posed for photographs and chatted with journalists on the makeshift stairwell, while Ms. Demme prepared vigorously and obliviously on a couch, surrounded with various headset-clad assistants.

A small-hipped woman with wavy, dark, curly hair, she had winnowed the list down to 110, telling people there would be “absolutely no plus-ones” and that she would vet everyone at the door if necessary. (Her own publicist was apparently not even invited.) Ms. Demme had also flown in several New York party promoters: Richie Akiva, Scott Sartiano of Butter and Eugene Remm. Meanwhile, their rival, Noah Tepperberg of Marquee, had opened a version of Tao in a huge dive bar a few blocks up.

“They’re all here doing this one little party,” said Mr. Remm as he surveyed the movie publicists, photographers and hangers-on, who were equally oblivious to the preparations going on for that evening. A handsome twentysomething with a shaved head who has previously been linked to Shannen Doherty, Mr. Remm works for Level V in the meatpacking district, getting the Lindsay Lohans and Wilmer Valderramas into the club—and then, of course, into Us Weekly.

And the fact that there were probably more people planning the W Hotel event than had supposedly been invited to attend was not lost on him. Nor was the idea that he had traveled across the country to attend a film festival with no intention of even seeing a movie.

“I don’t even know where they take place,” Mr. Remm said. “I honestly wouldn’t know where to start.”

THE W LOUNGE IS ALL PART OF A LARGER COMPLEX for which celebrities and their entourages must be credentialed. There is a Yahoo diner, where the food (naturally) is free and, while the celebrities snack on mac ’n’ cheese, a publicist keeps tabs on the spellings of their names in order to feed what they ordered to the gossip columns; a Philips Electronics lounge, where select celebrities receive things like Sonicare toothbrushes and electronic razors; a Fred Segal “store” offering Le Tigre, Timberland and Rocawear products; and an Uggs “showroom.”

When an unsuspecting couple strolled up to the Uggs store on Sunday afternoon, hoping to just purchase a pair—they were perhaps the only couple in Park City for the weekend who didn’t know the meaning of schwag—a security guard laughed in their faces. “There is nothing for sale here,” he said, then turned them away.

Likewise, Americans, in general, seem nonplussed about what they’re going to buy and what they’re going to see—how else to explain the $26.8 million weekend intake of Underworld: Evolution? Despite critical acclaim, last year’s Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, Forty Shades of Blue starring Rip Torn, barely even received distribution. As for this year’s festival line-up, so far only Little Miss Sunshine, a comedy about a dysfunctional family at a children’s beauty pageant starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear, seemed poised to truly break out after it was purchased for $10.5 million by Fox Searchlight.

As crowds exited a packed screening of Wrestling with Angels—a staid, unthrilling film about Tony Kushner which emblemizes the idea that to be truly successful these days, not only must you be a widely admired playwright, write a musical and work with Steven Spielberg, but you must also be the subject of a documentary—a small gathering of people were sitting on the tented ground outside the theater, eating cold cuts out of a Ziploc bag and playing travel Scrabble. They were waiting in the cancellation line for a screening of the Shorts Program IV.

These were not your typical Sundancers. Indeed, your typical festival-goers wouldn’t know that Bobcat Goldthwait premiered a movie called Stay (about what happens after a woman performs oral sex on her dog) or, perhaps, even who Michel Gondry is (Mr. Gondry’s follow-up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, called The Science of Sleep and starring Gael García Bernal, has been another festival favorite).

Those festival-goers exist in the Sundance of Robert Redford myth: a place of discovery, a place where filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh could make their names.

THE NIGHT OF AMANDA DEMME'S PARTY WAS FRIGID COLD; it had snowed all day. Indeed, Ms. Aniston and her compatriot had worried they wouldn’t be able to get back to L.A. that night—remember, the real celebs don’t actually want to spend time in Sundance. But at 1:30 in the morning, Ms. Demme’s event was still hopping.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was on her way out the door, and one must give her some credit: Though she’s been popping up lately in Reebok ads, she was in Sundance in actual support of a film. In Sherrybaby, she plays a convict released from prison who wants to reconnect with her child (and, in the old Sundance tradition, she shows her breasts perhaps eight times).

Representatives for Levi’s would later boast that Ms. Gyllenhaal hadn’t taken any free clothes. As per their “gifting suite” regulations, she had given money to charity in exchange for the new slim-cut jeans. “That’s our exclusive,” the publicist said.

There were no other celebs, however, left at Ms. Demme’s party, but as D.J. AM mashed the Verve with Beyoncé, the room was full of dancing New York and Los Angeles transplants. The Bungalow-style filler was certainly not, one might think, part of Ms. Demme’s original 110 invitees, mostly because they wouldn’t exactly be recognizable to a Wireimage photographer.

But still, they filled a room, just as they’d filled the Motorola party up Main Street, and just as they’d filled Tao, which was at least five times the size of any other event space. And they’d all been there, privileged enough to go from Art Basel in December to Aspen for New Year’s and then straight to Sundance. It’s not the worst kind of life.

Indeed, Dori Cooperman—caught on her way into the Fred Segal schwag suite—might have summed it up best. “Babe,” she said, a glimmer of humor in her eyes, “would I ever miss a great party?”

The movie’s star, Jennifer Aniston, spent the weekend in the company of her favorite accessory, her gay hairdresser, Chris McMillan; for press interviews, she was accompanied by her co-star, Catherine Keener.

And the crowds, normally more blasé, literally chased her limousine down the street at the end of the screening.

But while the film is attracting raves and may be one of the more viable products at the festival this year, it was quite possible to believe that Ms. Aniston’s followers were chasing after the Jen of “Who Told Jen?” and “It Should Have Been My Baby!” tabloid-headline fame, not the frumpy stoner maid and man-stalker of Ms. Holofcener’s film.

Because Sundance isn’t about films.

Sure, Gwyneth Paltrow was also in Park City—for five minutes, give or take a few, to promote a short she directed. Yes, Sting stopped by a Motorola party on Saturday night with his wife, Trudie Styler, who is promoting A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. Absolutely that was Rob Lowe—whom Hollywood is buzzing about once again for his cameo as an agent in Thank You for Smoking—at the Self magazine swag suites, scoring a new BlackBerry.

But what about the biz? “Film Fest Flurry,” cried yesterday’s Variety—but that supposed flurry only confirmed news of the second film acquisition of the festival. Not quite a blizzard.

Between the C-list Hollywooders and the outer-industry culture hoboes, the real celebrity set and the few folks actually buying films must have been a bit lonely.

All around town, you could find Lizzie Grubman with her Power Girls; Trista and Ryan from The Bachelor; Jason from Laguna Beach; James Van Der Beek, late of Dawson’s Creek and not much else; Shannon Elizabeth from American Pie; Minnie Driver, who is supposedly performing a few songs at a party; the fabulous Bai Ling, who has been out every night till at least 2 a.m.; and that woman who plays Dr. McDreamy’s wife on Grey’s Anatomy, who went straight for the Kooba bags at the Marquee Hospitality Suites. And those are just the strivers you recognize.

There were plenty of transplanted New Yorkers just hanging out, too: Dori Cooperman, a friend of Ms. Grubman’s and a New York girl about town; Mandie Erickson, the proprietor of Seventh House P.R., who’d brought her friend Simon Hammerstein, the grandson of Oscar; Dani Stahl of Nylon magazine, who was hawking her Lia Sophia collection of costume jewelry and supporting her boss, who’d made a documentary about Good Charlotte in Japan; John McDonald of Lever House; and enough fashion and lifestyle publicists to found a new, heavily publicized country.

“Hi, I’m calling to get a car for Emile Hirsch and Carmen Electra,” one publicist squealed into her cell phone on Main Street. “I need the nicest one you’ve got.”

“I’m just here pushing myself,” said linebacker Dhani Jones of the Philadelphia Eagles. No real celebrity would ever be so blunt, but in a nutshell, he described exactly what everyone was doing here: getting photos of themselves out there, getting their names in In Touch, reminding everyone that they exist. After all, wouldn’t we forget that girl from the San Francisco Real World if she didn’t show up time and again to show her face?

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" THE D.J. SAMANTHA ROSEN ASKED an entertainment editor from Condé Nast. They were both enjoying a free lunch up at the Café Yahoo in Park City this weekend past. The entertainment editor was actually working, looking for future story ideas and cover subjects. Indeed, Ms. Ronson was working too, D.J.-ing at a party at Tao.

Everyone’s working on everything, and everyone wants you to know it. Movies, sure. But also: books, electronics, music, life-story rights and that most ephemeral product of all, lifestyle.

In other words, the tangible commodity being exchanged at Sundance is publicity. And Sundance is now just another blip on the cross-platform festival circuit, a stop on the party train, where people in the less-glamorous industries go to try to rub a little stardust on their cheeks, and hope it sticks.

Hollywood, in comparison to the other, less-hefty culture industries, clearly has the real money—no matter how loudly the trades claim it was a bad year. So publishers and agents and club promoters and musicians and restaurateurs and art dealers glom onto Sundance, hoping for some of Hollywood’s spare change. And get some they will, because every idea is fungible now in another form.

Case in point: Back in Manhattan on Monday night, up at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sundance Theatre Laboratory presented a preview of Grey Gardens, the musical by Doug Wright, Michael Korie and Scott Frankel that will open at Playwrights Horizons next month.

Sure, the authors admitted to a conceptual struggle with their adaptation of the famous 1975 documentary by the Maysles brothers. “As far as I know, a documentary has never been translated into musical theater,” said Mr. Frankel from behind the piano. “Once something is sung, it can no longer be fact,” said Mr. Korie. And the expert: “It must be historical,” the film’s (and musical’s) star, Edie Beale, who died in 2002, had written to Mr. Maysles of the forthcoming work. But come now: Fact? Fiction? In the post-Frey world, does it matter? Let’s sell an idea!

How long will it be until a movie is made of the musical of the movie? After all, didn’t we just see a film from the play from the film of The Producers? And how long until the one-woman-show version of Joan Didion’s nonfiction The Year of Magical Thinking is re-brokered by Scott Rudin and rewritten by Michael Cunningham for Christine Vachon?

Tina Brown and the Weinsteins and Talk magazine had it right about synergy and platform-agnostic and all that. They were just too early. Now anything can be anything, and anyone can be anyone. Polymorphous publicity.

AROUND 4 P.M. ON SATURDAY IN PARK CITY, AMANDA DEMME WAS RUNNING around the W Hotel Lounge at the Village at “The Lift” at the bottom of Main Street. A bi-level heated tent—the kind you find in Bryant Park during Fashion Week, where W Hotels gives out free drinks and, in the case of Utah, white golf pencils as well—the W Lounge was going to be the place to be Saturday night of the Sundance Film Festival.

Ms. Demme, the widow of the late Ted Demme, is a West Coast fixture, their Amy Sacco. With Teddy’s at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, she has made nightlife in Los Angeles hot again. Recently, she sealed a deal with W to create lounges in many of the chain’s hotels. She had flown in specifically for this event (reported cost: $700,000) tied to the Sundance Film Festival, which was being used—go figure—to publicize and market the W Hotel’s new residences in Las Vegas.

Ms. Aniston’s co-stars—Catherine Keener, Jason Isaacs, Scott Caan and the experimental-theater guru Simon McBurney—posed for photographs and chatted with journalists on the makeshift stairwell, while Ms. Demme prepared vigorously and obliviously on a couch, surrounded with various headset-clad assistants.

A small-hipped woman with wavy, dark, curly hair, she had winnowed the list down to 110, telling people there would be “absolutely no plus-ones” and that she would vet everyone at the door if necessary. (Her own publicist was apparently not even invited.) Ms. Demme had also flown in several New York party promoters: Richie Akiva, Scott Sartiano of Butter and Eugene Remm. Meanwhile, their rival, Noah Tepperberg of Marquee, had opened a version of Tao in a huge dive bar a few blocks up.

“They’re all here doing this one little party,” said Mr. Remm as he surveyed the movie publicists, photographers and hangers-on, who were equally oblivious to the preparations going on for that evening. A handsome twentysomething with a shaved head who has previously been linked to Shannen Doherty, Mr. Remm works for Level V in the meatpacking district, getting the Lindsay Lohans and Wilmer Valderramas into the club—and then, of course, into Us Weekly.

And the fact that there were probably more people planning the W Hotel event than had supposedly been invited to attend was not lost on him. Nor was the idea that he had traveled across the country to attend a film festival with no intention of even seeing a movie.

“I don’t even know where they take place,” Mr. Remm said. “I honestly wouldn’t know where to start.”

THE W LOUNGE IS ALL PART OF A LARGER COMPLEX for which celebrities and their entourages must be credentialed. There is a Yahoo diner, where the food (naturally) is free and, while the celebrities snack on mac ’n’ cheese, a publicist keeps tabs on the spellings of their names in order to feed what they ordered to the gossip columns; a Philips Electronics lounge, where select celebrities receive things like Sonicare toothbrushes and electronic razors; a Fred Segal “store” offering Le Tigre, Timberland and Rocawear products; and an Uggs “showroom.”

When an unsuspecting couple strolled up to the Uggs store on Sunday afternoon, hoping to just purchase a pair—they were perhaps the only couple in Park City for the weekend who didn’t know the meaning of schwag—a security guard laughed in their faces. “There is nothing for sale here,” he said, then turned them away.

Likewise, Americans, in general, seem nonplussed about what they’re going to buy and what they’re going to see—how else to explain the $26.8 million weekend intake of Underworld: Evolution? Despite critical acclaim, last year’s Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, Forty Shades of Blue starring Rip Torn, barely even received distribution. As for this year’s festival line-up, so far only Little Miss Sunshine, a comedy about a dysfunctional family at a children’s beauty pageant starring Steve Carell and Greg Kinnear, seemed poised to truly break out after it was purchased for $10.5 million by Fox Searchlight.

As crowds exited a packed screening of Wrestling with Angels—a staid, unthrilling film about Tony Kushner which emblemizes the idea that to be truly successful these days, not only must you be a widely admired playwright, write a musical and work with Steven Spielberg, but you must also be the subject of a documentary—a small gathering of people were sitting on the tented ground outside the theater, eating cold cuts out of a Ziploc bag and playing travel Scrabble. They were waiting in the cancellation line for a screening of the Shorts Program IV.

These were not your typical Sundancers. Indeed, your typical festival-goers wouldn’t know that Bobcat Goldthwait premiered a movie called Stay (about what happens after a woman performs oral sex on her dog) or, perhaps, even who Michel Gondry is (Mr. Gondry’s follow-up to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, called The Science of Sleep and starring Gael García Bernal, has been another festival favorite).

Those festival-goers exist in the Sundance of Robert Redford myth: a place of discovery, a place where filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh could make their names.

THE NIGHT OF AMANDA DEMME'S PARTY WAS FRIGID COLD; it had snowed all day. Indeed, Ms. Aniston and her compatriot had worried they wouldn’t be able to get back to L.A. that night—remember, the real celebs don’t actually want to spend time in Sundance. But at 1:30 in the morning, Ms. Demme’s event was still hopping.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was on her way out the door, and one must give her some credit: Though she’s been popping up lately in Reebok ads, she was in Sundance in actual support of a film. In Sherrybaby, she plays a convict released from prison who wants to reconnect with her child (and, in the old Sundance tradition, she shows her breasts perhaps eight times).

Representatives for Levi’s would later boast that Ms. Gyllenhaal hadn’t taken any free clothes. As per their “gifting suite” regulations, she had given money to charity in exchange for the new slim-cut jeans. “That’s our exclusive,” the publicist said.

There were no other celebs, however, left at Ms. Demme’s party, but as D.J. AM mashed the Verve with Beyoncé, the room was full of dancing New York and Los Angeles transplants. The Bungalow-style filler was certainly not, one might think, part of Ms. Demme’s original 110 invitees, mostly because they wouldn’t exactly be recognizable to a Wireimage photographer.

But still, they filled a room, just as they’d filled the Motorola party up Main Street, and just as they’d filled Tao, which was at least five times the size of any other event space. And they’d all been there, privileged enough to go from Art Basel in December to Aspen for New Year’s and then straight to Sundance. It’s not the worst kind of life.

Indeed, Dori Cooperman—caught on her way into the Fred Segal schwag suite—might have summed it up best. “Babe,” she said, a glimmer of humor in her eyes, “would I ever miss a great party?”

Mr. Riedel had been questioning the casting of Ms. Peters as the hard-charging Mama Rose. He was spoiling for a fight, and he soon got it. While industry wags were heaving blissfully about the new production of the Arthur Laurents–Stephen Sondheim–Jule Styne classic, the 36-year-old Post columnist was preparing to report that Mr. Laurents had "charged up the aisle" at the first preview and given the show's producers an earful about the production and its casting, later sending a " War and Peace" –sized sheaf of production notes to Mendes & Co.

"ANGRY CREATORS WONDER IF PETERS IS REALLY A … 'GYPSY' WOMAN," read the April 4 headline, a throwback to the old-fashioned waspish, heard-on-the-Rialto Broadway columns.

"Putting tender, vulnerable, lovely Bernadette Peters in the role gives new meaning to the phrase 'non-traditional casting,'" Mr. Riedel wrote. "Whether Mendes can pull ferocity out of a woman who is frequently compared to a kewpie doll remains to be seen."

Before long, Ms. Peters started missing shows, and Mr. Riedel's assessment that the revival was in full sprawl appeared prescient. Gypsy 's producers said that Ms. Peters had contracted a respiratory infection. (Neither Ms. Peters nor anyone associated with the present production would speak to The Observer .) But theater gossips-who had questioned whether Ms. Peters' gossamer cords would snap under the pressure of a role championed by heartier types like Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly-found a champion in Mr. Riedel who, on May 7, published a column with an image of Ms. Peters on the back of a milk carton bearing the legend: "Have You Seen Me?" and trashing the show for charging premium ticket prices for regular understudy performances.

Mr. Riedel is no Addison DeWitt, the acid-tongued stage gossip who made and broke stars in Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve . The theater is no longer so dramatic a place, though it's not for lack of trying. It is arguably a sign of Broadway's resurgence that after 14 years on the beat, Mr. Riedel's moment-in which he can at least simulate just such a figure-is near. Perhaps DeWittedly, the controversy over Mr. Riedel's Gypsy Love Song-the first real fun a reporter has had with a Broadway show in a long, long time-may have brought it closer.

"I like being able to go after someone's show. I like the battle, a little swordplay," Mr. Riedel said on a recent evening in the top-floor dining room of Angus McIndoe, a popular spot for theater heavies that also happens to be down the block from the Shubert.

A David Hyde Pierce look-alike in a gingham Polo shirt and chinos with a woven belt, Mr. Riedel was eating a burger with a side of steamed vegetables and drinking a Diet Coke. The actor and comedian Eddie Izzard was sitting by the window; the New Jersey Star-Ledger theater critic Michael Sommers was filling out his Tony Awards ballot at the bar; and the choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who worked on Gypsy , ate with two friends at a nearby table. It was almost like Sardi's in the old days. Mr. Riedel waved at Mr. Mitchell, and Mr. Mitchell waved back.

Mr. Riedel brought up Gypsy . Mr. Mitchell didn't deter Mr. Riedel; on the contrary, he seemed to look in Mr. Mitchell's direction and raise his voice.

"I went to the first preview of Gypsy ," he said. "Everyone was wondering: Could Bernadette pull it off? Once I saw it, I could tell that she was really going to struggle through the run of the show. I think the Mendes production is very pedestrian. It's a tired old boring production of Gypsy ."

Even critics who disagreed with Mr. Riedel couldn't help but address his reporting in their reviews.

"You can tear down the black crepe, boys!" raved The New York Times ' chief drama critic, Ben Brantley, in his own review of Gypsy , as if to acknowledge the dark mood that ushered the musical onto Broadway, inspired by Mr. Riedel. He called Ms. Peters' performance "the surprise coup of many a Broadway season."

"Ben Brantley wrote his review of Gypsy from on high, and it was obviously a slight at what I was writing," Mr. Riedel said recently. "'Don't listen to the vultures,' he said. That kind of exchange is fun. I was taking on a much-beloved figure in the theater world. I was not reporting on bad behavior; I was saying she was taking off performances. You're asking people to shell out $100! It's legitimate to report, and quite unfair to the paying customers. It was a tremendously exciting story."

In August, Mr. Riedel angered the producers of Movin' Out when he wrote that negative buzz surrounded the show's pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago; in January, he irritated Barry and Fran Weissler when he cracked Helen Keller jokes on behalf of their production of The Miracle Worker , which closed out of town; in March, he reported with glee that the box-office receipts for Baz Luhrmann's staging of La Bohème were quickly dropping.

Mr. Riedel was having a ball.

"Last year he trashed my show, Sweet Smell of Success ," the theater and film producer David Brown said from his midtown office. "He took us on mercilessly, and I came close to getting a contract out on him from some of the boys I used to know. He has a tendency to destroy. He is the enfant terrible of the New York press."

But in Ms. Peters, Mr. Riedel had found Broadway's soft spot, and he drove the sword in to the hilt. "Bernadette's a trooper. She's done a lot of shows for a lot of people," said Emanuel Azenberg, who produced Movin' Out and La Bohème and worked with Ms. Peters on the musical The Goodbye Girl for 188 performances in 1993. "Everyone who's worked with her really likes her. Whether she's the perfect Mama Rose is irrelevant; she's a nice lady."

And taking care of your own is an important thing for producers, who count on stars like Ms. Peters to headline, whether it's Annie Get Your Gun , which ran for over 1,000 performances, or Gypsy , which has an estimated $8.5 million budget and may need to sell more than $525,000 worth of tickets a week to break even.

Liz McCann, a longtime New York producer who serves as managing producer of the Tony Awards, often fires off angry letters to Mr. Riedel, which he happily excerpts in the Post . "Michael's column has the power to make mischief rather than create trouble," Ms. McCann said. "Who's that little imp in fairy tales? He's kind of like Rumpelstiltskin stirring the pot. That gets to some people."

John Barlow, a publicist who worked on Dance of the Vampires , which opened and closed this season, doesn't entirely agree. Mr. Riedel reported that people were calling Michael Crawford, the star of Vampires , a "fat rooster" behind his back, and that Mr. Crawford didn't want his co-star, René Auberjonois, to get laughs.

"Michael does have a significant amount of influence," Mr. Barlow said. "Next thing you know, there are stories in The Times , in Newsday , the Daily News , Variety , sometimes even Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood . Michael Riedel doesn't work for the producers or the publicists; he works for the reader. Sometimes we're glad of that, sometimes we're not-but at the end of the day, that's the reality."

That evening at Angus', Mr. Riedel finished off his hamburger and ordered a cup of tea. He realized he was late to meet Ms. Haskins, his Theater Talk co-host, to record a segment on the Tony Awards for Batchelor and Alexander , a late-night radio talk show on WABC.

He grabbed his green Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker and umbrella and went over to kiss Jerry Mitchell, whose show he had just finished loudly trashing, on the cheek.

"Do you hate me?" Mr. Riedel asked Mr. Mitchell.

"I hate no one," Mr. Mitchell said.

On the walk to 2 Penn Plaza for the radio appearance, Mr. Riedel called Ms. Haskins. "Calm down, I'm coming," he said.

When he arrived, Ms. Haskins, a graphic artist who teaches English at Pratt University, was waiting anxiously in the green room.

"The interesting thing will be if Michael lets me talk on air," Ms. Haskins said. "The running joke on the show is that Michael won't let me talk, but it's because he has so much to say and has such a dominant personality. He's been learning to allow me to talk a little more, though. Now we just have to work on him paying the slightest attention to what I say."

Ms. Haskins and Mr. Riedel met on a public-access talk show discussing theater in 1992; she was 41 and working at La Mama, and he was 23.

"Susan was the Mary Tyrone of public access. She was addicted to it like a morphine drip," Mr. Riedel said. They wanted to make a theater program in the vein of Meet the Press or The McLaughlin Group .

Theater Talk premiered on public access in early 1993, and when they were moved to a 2:30 a.m. time slot in 1996, they submitted the show to PBS, where it airs directly after Charlie Rose on Friday nights. The show has attracted as many as 200,000 viewers, but the number regularly hovers around 60,000.

On a recent show, Mr. Riedel said how much he liked Movin' Out ; Ms. Haskins said viewers should know that it's not quite a musical, but really modern dance.

"Michael said, 'You're drunk-you don't know what you're talking about,'" Ms. Haskins recalled. "He just sort of flattened me out." Then she said, "I don't want to be rude in front of the company, so I can't flatten him back.

"At other times, people have said I was an abuse victim. Nathan Lane said I should join a 12-step program. Arthur Laurents said we're George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "

Ms. Haskins and Mr. Riedel went into the studio, where host Paul Alexander introduced them to his co-host, John Batchelor, who was preparing his notes for the show.

Mr. Alexander said that Mr. Riedel wrote a "vicious column" in the New York Post .

"Even I say he's vicious," Ms. Haskins said.

"He's determined to close Bernadette Peters," Mr. Alexander added.

When the show began recording, Mr. Riedel almost immediately piped up about Ms. Peters.

"I think Bernadette Peters is terribly miscast, and I also don't think she's capable of singing this score," he said.

"You were awfully nasty to her in the press. The Broadway world loves Bernadette Peters," Ms. Haskins said.

"You hear about her with such reverence. There is a Bernadette Peters claque that takes offense to everything," Mr. Riedel said.

When the taping was done, Ms. Haskins had to get home to give a shot of insulin to her diabetic cat, but she had a quick drink with Mr. Riedel on his walk home to the West Village. Mr. Riedel ordered a glass of red wine that he promptly returned because it tasted like "mouthwash." Ms. Haskins sipped from a seltzer with Rose's lime juice.

"Susan looks at everything in the theater through rose-colored glasses," he said. "Everybody's a saint; everybody loves everybody. We're always bickering. It's all an act. You gotta have a gimmick, as they say in Gypsy . We're like Burns and Allen. Or Leopold and Loeb."

Like so many of the city's verbal sharp-shooters, Mr. Riedel grew up in a small town-in his case, Geneseo, N.Y., population 8,000. His mother was a school librarian, and his father was the athletic director at SUNY Geneseo.

His first love-politics-took hold early. In elementary school, he was named president of "Fourth Graders for Ford."

"I wanted to be a Senator, or a Supreme Court justice, because that's where all the power is," he said.

Mr. Riedel left Johns Hopkins University after his first year because of a broken heart.

"I was in love with her; she wasn't in love with me," he said, recounting his transfer to Columbia University, where he acted in plays and appeared regularly on a radio show devoted to musical theater. The summer after his sophomore year, Mr. Riedel interned in Liz McCann's office while she was producing the Broadway production of Dangerous Liaisons . "I interned for Liz McCann, and I still didn't know what a producer did. I got coffee and was sent to find out whether Alan Rickman's air-conditioning was working. If my parents had left me with a $10 million trust fund, I would have been a producer."

Ms. McCann says she has only a vague memory of Mr. Riedel working as an intern. "He didn't make much of an impression," she told The Observer . Through friends, Mr. Riedel found a slot at Theater Week magazine, where he took the job of managing editor for $18,000 a year. But the job had its perks: He got free tickets to go to the theater and could write whatever he wanted.

In Mr. Riedel's case, that turned into a regular column about Alex Witchel, who wrote the "On Stage, and Off" theater column for The Times , and Frank Rich, the paper's chief drama critic.

"Walter Winchell said, 'The way to become famous fast is to throw a brick at someone who is famous.' And I threw my brick at Alex Witchel and Frank Rich. People think I'm mean, but I'm never as mean as she was. I was creating what we'd now call buzz," Mr. Riedel said.

Mr. Rich and Ms. Witchel, who are now married, didn't return phone calls seeking comment.

"I suppose, looking back, I should have sucked up to her. Maybe I'd be writing for The Times if I had," Mr. Riedel said. "I look back and think what a prick I was, what a prig I was. I've mellowed out, as they say."

After a three-year stint at Theater Week , Mr. Riedel found his way to George Rush's gossip column at the Daily News , which led to covering the theater beat, which landed him at the Post , where he says he now spits "spitballs from the sidelines."

In the best circumstances, Mr. Riedel makes more friends than enemies with his column. He'll say something nasty about a show or person in print; they spar, and then they become friends for life, or at least until that person's next show is on the boards.

"I don't think there's anyone I couldn't have a laugh or a drink with," Mr. Riedel said. "Except Frank Rich and Alex Witchel."

David Brown wrote Mr. Riedel a nasty letter during the run of Sweet Smell of Success , and Mr. Riedel printed it in the Post verbatim, without comment.

"It was a great ad for me," Mr. Brown said. "After the letter ran, Michael called me and asked if we could have lunch, and he and I have been friends ever since. It's long been the practice on Broadway for enemies in print to become friends. After a decent review comes reconciliation. Should he find favor with my next production, I'll take him to dinner."

Mr. Brown wasn't the first: When Liz McCann told the Tony committee last season that they were not going to be inviting Mr. Riedel to the Tony awards because he had written a series of articles about how bad the theater season had been, Mr. Riedel heard about it and the next day invited Ms. McCann onto the show. Ms. McCann happily agreed, and Mr. Riedel did attend the Tonys.

"Susan was eager for Liz to destroy me on air," Mr. Riedel said. "She lives in hope that someone will squish me like a bug."