But end it has.

At one point in the 1990s, NBC had 16 half-hour sitcoms on the air. This fall, it has four. And two of those four—The Office and 30 Rock—though critically beloved (both are up for Best Comedy Emmys on Sunday, Sept. 21), are struggling to be embraced by mainstream audiences.

CBS’s Two and a Half Men, also nominated, is one of the most successful show on televisions, but it’s an anomaly: sitcom scribes have become such an endangered species that it’s not even clear that the job title exists anymore. “‘I’m a writer’ has become very prevalent.” said Howard Klein, executive producer of The Office. Or, alternately, “I’m a comedy writer.” And seven months after the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike settlement, “comedy writers” have turned into a kind of lost tribe, which one such displaced person described as “a lot of depressed people wandering around Silver Lake.”

Sitcom writers are “suffering from malnutrition, and they’re actually getting shorter,” joked Dan O’Keefe, a former Seinfeld and Drew Carey writer who makes a living selling pilots and screenplays (“nothing big,” he admitted). “We’re devolving into a species of Morlocks. As the work continues to vanish, we’ll vanish as well.” In his typical uniform of black-framed glasses, untucked dress shirt and jeans, Mr. O’Keefe still looks the part of the Hollywood scribe. But “I’m a lot skinnier, because people aren’t bringing me lunch every day at one o’clock,” he said.

Nowadays, to be a TV comedy writer means, essentially, to be a diversified dilettante: to pawn your wares on the Internet in “Webisodes,” and, perhaps, to host radio shows or dabble in theater. “My partner and I are working on some pilots; I have a play and a musical I co-wrote. I write a blog, and I’m hosting Dodger Talk on KABC,” said Ken Levine, a Cheers and Frasier alumnus. With his considerable residuals, Mr. Levine doesn’t exactly need to break a sweat to pay his bills.  “I’m lucky in that I don’t have four ex-wives and seven homes that are going to go into foreclosure and stuff like that,” he said.

But even younger writers are feeling pressure to “be flexible right now,” as Maggie Bandur, a former Malcolm in the Middle staffer currently in between jobs, put it. Ms. Bandur said she is “branching out” by applying to late-night shows and yes, working on a screenplay. She also spent six months in England working on a comedy, Clone, starring British actor Jonathan Pryce, which will debut on BBC Three this fall. The show was created by Adam Chase, a former Friends writer. “It used to be that England was nowhere near the money here,” Ms. Bandur said. “It’s still not as good, but it’s getting better in comparison.”

As networks have readjusted their lineups in favor of more cheaply produced reality and game shows, TV money has plummeted from levels described by one writer as “sick” (1994-1998) to “crazy” (1999-2003) to “appalling” (2004-2008). Writers’ per-episode quotes have been cut in half, and far less people are drawing seven-figure salaries; these days half a million is considered a coup. As for the once not-unheard-of $10 million development deal plus a cut of syndication profits? Forget it.

Not that writers are starving, exactly. As one agent remarked: “It’s hard to say, ‘Wow, you made $700,000 in six months—poor you.’” But the entire sitcom ecosystem is suffering. Staffs now feature typically five to eight writers, down from as many as 15 a decade ago. “When you had 18 people on a staff, you could have someone who was just a great joke guy, and that alone,” said an agent at Endeavor. “You can’t just have a great joke guy on staff anymore. Writers have to be able to check off more boxes. You have to be an excellent writer, you have to play well with others, you have to be inspired. … ”

Making the transition from “multi-camera” sets to the increasingly popular single-camera format of shows such as The Office is not always easy. “It’s a different skill set,” Mr Klein said. “The single-camera format isn’t as reliant on the hard joke; it’s more about storytelling.”

But perhaps the most challenging feat is just getting in the door.

“It used to be that people came out here, they sent spec scripts around, got an agent—a bunch of people were brought in every year,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “Then, for a while, people were saying, O.K., if you get a writer’s-assistant job on a sitcom, they’ll throw you a script. Now, I’m hearing rumors that some agents are trying to get [clients] assistant jobs and it’s impossible.”

Peter Mehlman, a former Seinfeld writer who signed a multimillion-dollar development deal at DreamWorks TV, where he created the short-lived series It’s Like … You Know, ventured that maybe the old inflated system was in need of a correction “The whole thing about signing someone to a development deal was really nutty in a way,” he said. “These companies, they would woo you, and they would never ask, ‘Do you have any ideas?’ or anything like that.”

These days, Mr. Mehlman has plenty of forums for his ideas. “I write a lot of essays and stuff for newspapers, op-eds,” he said. He’s written two screenplays and producing a show for the Web called Peter Mehlman’s Narrow World of Sports, which consists of “a little essay on something—some would say it’s a rant—and then I relate an interview to it.” But while Mr. Mehlman appreciates the freedom of the Internet, where all that’s required to “break in” is a camera, he misses the structure of more traditional formats. “I don’t like that there are no barriers,” he said. “There are no walls of authority to push against at all. It’s like writing for some alternative, downtown newspaper as opposed to The New York Times. It’s just like—anything goes.” 

editorial@observer.com

“Want a coffee?” asked Josh, Mr. Weiss’ assistant—or “entourager,” as his boss jokingly introduced him.

“No thanks, man,” Mr. Weiss said in a Long Island accent unmellowed by almost 20 years in Los Angeles. “That’ll get me too amped up. Who knows what’ll come outta my mouth.” He was wearing black sunglasses and a red U.S. Marine Corps baseball cap turned backward, and fingering an unlit Romeo y Julieta cigar.

Mr. Weiss’ nervousness with the press dates back to his days as the badly behaved writer-director of Amongst Friends, a film about young, affluent, aspiring gangsters (“Goodfellas meets Metropolitan”) that was the darling of the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. The film put Mr. Weiss, then 26, in the full glare of the media spotlight (he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz and Bruce Weber), but his self-important, swaggering tough-guy persona didn’t always come across well in print.

In one profile published in now-defunct Premiere magazine, Mr. Weiss, a former club promoter and dropout of the New School’s film program, coyly suggested—or at least did not deny—that he may have killed someone. He told The Observer he was misquoted, though, he allowed, “I’ve had some interaction with some unsavory characters in my life.”

Mr. Weiss does not deny that he has—or had—a temper; he once shut down the set of Amongst Friends over a lost cellphone and admits to “massive, screaming” fights with Mira Sorvino, who starred in the film. Now such youthful antics are being immortalized on the small screen via the fictional “suit”-hating auteur of Queens Boulevard and Medellin.

“We came up with the idea of putting a director in, and I wanted it to be Rob Weiss,” said Doug Ellin, the show’s creator, who went to high school with Mr. Weiss in the Five Towns section of Long Island and described him as “an extremely funny, slightly crazy, good-looking nutjob.”

Mr. Ellin even asked Mr. Weiss if he’d play “Walsh,” but Mr. Weiss declined. Instead, the role went to the Vincent Gallo-esque Rhys Coiro, to whom Mr. Weiss bears little outward resemblance. “I’m more Johnny Drama,” Mr. Weiss said, referring to Kevin Dillon’s physically well-maintained character. “I’m into grooming and metrosexual kind of shit. I’m the guy with like 900 products.”

In recent months, Billy Walsh has emerged as a surprise standout among Entourage’s ensemble of scenery-chompers, so much so that while the plan was to write him into five or six episodes this season, he will end up in nine or 10. According to Mr. Ellin, the character was becoming so dominant that he has received notes from HBO executives, warning him to “be mindful” about not overshadowing the show’s core cast: the buddy-family quartet of Vince, Drama, Turtle and “E,” and agent d’horreur, Ari Gold.

Mr. Ellin stressed that his own experience as a novice director (credits include Phat Beach) also informed the Walsh character, along with reading about Directors Gone Wild in books such as Final Cut and The Devil’s Candy. “I’ve taken all the crazy stories I’ve ever heard about directors,” he said, sitting in his Beverly Hills office, his blue and gold LeBron James Nike sneakers (“I only wear Nikes”) propped up on a coffee table. The Entourage episode in which a documentary filmmaker visits the haywire set of Medellin in South America was “an homage to Hearts of Darkness”—the documentary chronicling Francis Ford Coppola’s breakdown while making Apocalypse Now.

Nonetheless, it is Mr. Weiss who lies at the heart of Billy Walsh. And it’s not the first time filmic homage has been paid. He appeared as himself in Barry Levinson’s movie Jimmy Hollywood and surfaces, less flatteringly, in John Pierson’s indie-world tell-all Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes as, among other things, a “posturing director” and “Vanilla Weiss.” (Mr. Weiss had a falling out with Mr. Pierson in the aftermath of Amongst Friends, for which Mr. Pierson provided financial backing. “I have bad feelings about that guy,” he said of Mr. Pierson.)

And what do people have to say about Rob Weiss?

Actor Louis Lombardi (24, The Sopranos), who got his first acting break in Amongst Friends (his wardrobe of XXL track suits was provided courtesy of Mr. Weiss’ dad’s closet) recounted the grandiose, hyperbolic—indeed, Billy Walshian—way Mr. Weiss would carry on while making Amongst Friends, which had a cast of unknowns and was shot on a budget of just under $1 million (part of which was raised through gambling buddies of Mr. Weiss’ dad, who ran a casino junket business).

“His famous line was: ‘It’s gonna be epic!’” Mr. Lombardi said on the phone. “‘It’s gonna be huge, it’s gonna be unbelievable! You don’t know how fucking big this is gonna be! We’re gonna go to Sundance, you know how fucking big Sundance is, Lombardi?’

“He was a passionate person speaking in a crazy, exaggerated way,” Mr. Lombardi continued. “That’s why we loved Rob. He’s psychotic! He’s totally Billy Walsh.”

Amongst Friends never made much money—Mr. Weiss estimated he’s made about $35,000 from the film—but led to a three-picture deal at Universal; a bungalow adjacent to Ron Howard and Brian Grazer; Vogue photo shoots; “high-profile girls” such as Shannen Doherty, to whom Mr. Weiss was briefly engaged; and offers to direct films such as Good Will Hunting and American Psycho, which Mr. Weiss turned down because he wasn’t interested in projects that “didn’t come out of my head.”

Mr. Lombardi and other members of the L.I. crew followed Mr. Weiss out to L.A., moving into his West Hollywood apartment and assuming entourage-ish jobs, such as shuttling Mr. Weiss around to meetings with agents and producers. “Turtle is a little bit like me,” Mr. Lombardi said. “I would pick Rob up and drive him to meetings with, like, Oliver Stone. I’d be sitting in the meeting with him and Rob, and Oliver would say, ‘Go through my library of scripts! Any movie you want to make, I’ll make!’ Rob was like, ‘I don’t know what I want to do, I want to make a big movie.’ … He had a big ego, and he’d let people know.” Still, he said, “he is a loyal guy. He’s a good friend to have.”

Indeed, Mr. Lombardi and the actor Frank Medrano, another Amongst Friends alum, would often help themselves to Mr. Weiss’ expense account at Universal and run up $300 lunches at the studio commissary.

The gravy train was short-lived, however. Although Mr. Weiss wrote another script—Milk Bar, based on his experience as a club promoter—he never again directed a film, a fact he blames largely on his then-belief that nothing was good enough for his outsized talents.

“There are a million things from my past that were great opportunities and I didn’t step up,” Mr. Weiss said regretfully.

After spending his late 20’s living off rewrite jobs and TV scripts, Mr. Weiss found himself “fucking dead” at 30, at which point he made an effort to turn his life around (and mellow out). He started by enrolling in therapy.

“There were long stretches of sadness,” Mr. Weiss said. “You know, a lot of internal work.”

Professional salvation came in in late 2003, when he received a call from Mr. Ellin asking him to work on a pilot the latter man had written that had just been picked up by HBO. Mr. Weiss, still hanging on to his directing dream, at first said no, but capitulated when his agent reamed him out.

Now, he has his own production deal at the cable network (Milk Bar may yet see the light of day)—not to mention some perspective. “At the end of the day, I’m just a middle-class Jewish guy who writes for a living,” he said, and lit his cigar. “I mean, I’m a 40-year-old man now. I go ballistic now in my life probably because my blood sugar level’s low from not eating lunch. Billy Walsh is supposed to be the retro Rob Weiss, the guy who couldn’t be controlled, the rebel, the guy acting out of insecurity, fear—neurotic, passionate, volatile. I’m not that guy anymore.”

“Everyone brings a bottle of wine, and one of the rules is that no one can leave until all the bottles are empty,” Mr. Zarnow said. Besides wine, “milk-and-honey cocktails” are served—honoring the Promised Land, if not Passover per se. Close enough!

Welcome to the Haggadah of Hollywood—a place where Passover is an excuse to orchestrate a production worthy of a credit roll. In this respect, you might say it’s a night not so different from any other night.

For Courtney Kivowtiz, a manager and regular of Mr. Zarnow’s rock ’n’ roll–themed gathering, the tweaked Seder is a benign and beautiful thing—“a group of friends making the most of a tradition,” she said.

“A lot of us growing up went to Seders where we felt it was a bit of a torture chamber,” Ms. Kivowtiz continued. “Because you’re going to read this book, you have to wait to eat the food—basically, your parents have dragged you to one of those family events that isn’t necessarily anything other than a drag.”

Over in the Valley, Woodland Hills, to be precise, veteran TV producer Larry Einhorn’s family-centered, slightly Disneyfied Seder is anything but a drag. The 30-odd guests (comedians Larry David and Sandra Bernhard have been known to drop by) are encouraged to sing irreverent Passover songs set to revamped show tunes such as “Afikomen!” (to the tune of “Oklahoma!”) and “There’s No Seder Like Our Seder” (pace “There’s No Business Like Show Business”; the lyrics are distributed). “We started doing the songs about five years ago,” Mr. Einhorn said, “but even before that, we always had a bit of a lighthearted approach to Seder—without mocking or denigrating the tradition.

“If I was back home at my parents’ house”—in Chicago—“and we did this, people may say this is a little disrespectful. But here—is our group a little more hip? Who knows, but I guess we think so.”

MADONNA: ‘QUITE MOVING’

Certain Hollywood Seders are the stuff of legend. When Roman Polanski was shooting Chinatown and wanted to return to his native Poland in order to celebrate Passover, the film’s producer, Bob Evans, intervened and threw one of his own. The Kiddush was read by Kirk Douglas.

These days, the Passover invitation of note is issued by music mogul Guy Oseary, who lives in Beverly Hills. Guests have included Madonna (Mr. Oseary’s former partner at Maverick Records), comedian Chris Rock, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “It” director McG.

“There were previous years where I felt like shit about myself because I wasn’t invited to Guy Oseary’s Seder, but I’m over it,” said Jill Soloway, a Hollywood screenwriter and comedian who wrote for Six Feet Under before it went off the air, and who called Mr. Oseary’s bash “the seminal power Seder.”

Comic actor Jerry Stiller, late of Seinfeld and The King of Queens, customarily breaks matzo on the Upper West Side with relatives and friends, which back in the day included Rodney Dangerfield and Andy Kaufman. But he’s still reeling from the celebrity-soaked Seder he went to in L.A. some years ago; it was probably Mr. Oseary’s, though Mr. Stiller isn’t quite sure. “I went to a Seder that had Madonna,” he said. “It was huge. Madonna read one of the four questions. She would get into it. Then she talked about Kabala and why she was very involved and influenced by it. She was quite moving that night.”

Serenity now!

For decades, meanwhile, legendary manager turned real-estate consigliore Sandy Gallin has been drawing the likes of Barbra Streisand, David Geffen and other Malibu majesty for his First Night celebrations. In this town, generally, the only Seders worth doing are on the First Night. Second-night Seders are so … tomorrow.

One exception is the dinner organized by Tom Sherak, a partner at Revolution Studios, who for years has been inviting about 40 industry people to his Calabasas home. “The reason we don’t do it on the First Night is because my rabbi is one of my closest friends, and he has one on the First Night,” Mr. Sherak said. “We try to invite people who might not have someplace to go and who we think would like to be asked, but who wouldn’t ask themselves. It’s like the old adage,” he added gallantly: “You ask a pretty girl to go out, and she says yes because everyone else is too afraid to ask her.”

So far, Mr. Sherak has hid the Afikomen with agent Arnold Rifkin, Blazing Saddles producer Michael Hertzberg and Los Angeles Times movie columnist Patrick Goldstein. Mr. Goldstein “always comes late,” Mr. Sherak said. “When he rings the bell, we think it’s Elijah.” Then there was that glorious year Warren Beatty and Annette Bening showed up.

“You know the part in the Seder where you have to say it in one breath?” Mr. Sherak said, intoning: “‘The father of the father, the mother of the mother …. ’ No one ever did it better than Annette Bening! She got applause.”

CHAROSET SET PIECE

Ms. Soloway, the former Six Feet Under writer, may not be traveling in quite such exalted circles (though her next project stars Anglo-Semite Oscar winner Rachel Weisz), but her holiday will still have a peculiarly Hollywood inflection: Rather than having someone narrate her Seder live, she will open the DVD player and pop in a movie she made for the occasion with her 9-year-old son, Isaac. “We just went and shot it,” Ms. Soloway said. The filming of this Seder script took place near her Silver Lake house, in the Brosnan Caves in Griffith Park. “It totally looks like Ten Commandments land,” Ms. Soloway said. “I think 50 years ago a set designer built the caves there, and when you go there you think, ‘This is every cave I’ve ever seen on every TV show I’ve ever watched.’ It looks totally prehistoric in a cheesy way.”

In the movie Passover with Ronna and Bev, baby Moses is represented by an E.T. doll. “Instead of Moses in a basket, we have E.T. in a strainer,” Ms. Soloway explained. Not at the expense of current pop culture, of course. “When Moses comes in and says, ‘Dad, guess what? I’m a Jew,’ the Pharaoh is like, ‘Not now, I’m watching American Idol.’ And Moses goes, ‘You’re not supposed to be worshipping false idols.’”

Moses gets a better reaction when he reminds his father that Idol contestant Elliott Yamin is also one of the Chosen People.

“I remember Seders were dreadfully dull,” Ms. Soloway said, explaining her endeavor. “I have tedious memories associated with Judaism, so that every chance I get to make it fun, I take advantage.”

Lest all these shenanigans confirm the conventional wisdom that this city is filled with flakes or something: Mr. Zarnow, the rumrunner, stresses that despite the bacchanalian atmosphere, his gathering has properly pedantic underpinnings. Speaking fluent Hebrew, he sticks to the traditional Seder script and insists that his guests do the same. “We do the whole book,” Mr. Zarnow said. “I didn’t want to turn it into a party with no religious merit.”

He did confess that “we skip some stuff, the songs sometimes,” and that “usually the second half of the Seder falls apart because people are having too much fun.”

For many Hollywood goyim, meanwhile, Passover is when the town shuts down. “It’s like dead everywhere,” said one agent of the Christian persuasion. “It’s kind of like being left alone at college when everyone goes home for Thanksgiving. You’ve got nowhere to go.” Once, he was invited to the Seder of a prominent studio executive—a rather catholic affair, for lack of a better word. “It was a mixture of family and kind of like the strays,” the agent said. “It wasn’t super-religious. We ran through the thing in like 10, 15 minutes. It was like, ‘Bless the food, bless the meat—let’s eat!’”

And at least one Hollywood veteran has scaled back and is thinking about a more sober Seder. “The last time I did a big one was maybe 10 years ago,” said producer Peter Guber, who ran Columbia Pictures in the 1970’s. “Once or twice I turned it into a circus, and I felt like it was blasphemous. There were too many business people. The four questions that were asked were: Why don’t I have the deal? Why is this deal not as good as my friend’s deal? Am I going to have a better deal next time? And what can you do about my agent’s deal?

“I realized it had become something other than what it was supposed to be,” Mr. Guber continued, adding that, to him, Passover is now “a spiritual renaissance—something that has personal, emotional meaning to me.”

Just then, a woman walking a white Maltese, both of them in coats, marched by in the general direction of the gift shop. “The comedians are like poor children with their noses pushed up to the windows of restaurants where rich people are dining on pig and lamb,” Mr. Swardson said. It was a leitmotif he would explore during his performance the following night, during which he likened Aspen to “fuckin’ Narnia.” (“There are trees. Everything is white. There are little people with hooves passing out Turkish Delight.”)

Yet few comics would turn down the opportunity to take part in this annual ritual, in which slick Hollywood commerce and the scruffy stand-up circuit collide for four days of shtick, schnapps and snow. “It’s a ski vacation for suits,” is how one attendee put it.

Aspen has subtler effects on its participants than the Sundance Film Festival, which can make an artist’s career overnight. Though Aspen is where Ray Romano first got noticed, and where Sarah Silverman sold her film Jesus Is Magic, it’s rare that someone walks away from here a bona fide star. “It’s not like American Idol,” Mr. Swardson said. “It’s not like Comedy Idol. You’re not gonna explode out of here. It’s a mistake to come here thinking, ‘I’m gonna be discovered.’”

A select few do walk away with TV development deals, and almost everyone goes home with the promise of “meetings” back in L.A. For example: Chris Fleming, a 20-year-old theater and dance major (“because I’m a guy’s guy”) at Skidmore College, who skipped out of school to perform in an Aspen showcase and met two entertainment lawyers in a sandwich shop. “They thought my name was John Fleming,” he said—but still! “We’re gonna have a little meeting today,” he said, practically rubbing his hands.

The biggest fuss this year was made over the Australian musician-cum-comedian Tim Minchin, who looks like a cross between Eddie Izzard and Dave Navarro. Though agents were lining up to sign him, Mr. Minchin is booked for a year of international shows and not ready for movies or TV yet, so he declined all suitors.

Charlyne Yi was considered one of the “It” comics even before she arrived, based on her absurdist, cute-little-Asian-girl shtick. Backstage before one of her rehearsals, sitting on a couch covered in tossed winter wear, Ms. Yi, who turned 21 in January (she could pass for 13), wore black-framed glasses, a pale gray Puma sweatshirt and cuffed jeans, her long black hair pulled messily back. “It’s free food and it’s free fun,” she said, giggling.

Ms. Yi wasn’t staying at the palatial St. Regis, but rather at the relatively more downscale Aspen Mountain Lodge, a shuttle’s ride away. She knew what she was missing. “There’s a guy who accidentally got a presidential suite, and I went in there,” she said. “He had a baby grand piano and a chandelier!”

A native of Fontana, Calif., in the Valley, where she got her start performing in A.A. rooms, biker bars and veterans’ homes, Ms. Yi now lives in the Koreatown section of L.A. and plays “theaters and clubs and coffee shops,” she said. “Oh, laundry rooms—and ice-cream shops.”

It was at El Cid in Silver Lake that she was discovered by Judd (The 40 Year Old Virgin) Apatow, who called her a “genius” and cast her in his next film, Knocked Up. She’ll also appear as a wheelchair-bound character in the upcoming Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro, and is developing a pilot for NBC called The Doo Doo Show.

“People keep inviting me to parties, but I’m really scared to go,” Ms. Yi said, and she appeared serious. “Because, I don’t know, people are”—here her voice rose and became a question—“scary?

“I don’t want to walk in there like, ‘Hey, how ya doin’?’” she said. “And if no one comes up to me, it’s gonna be awkward. Or even if they do come up to, it’s probably gonna be awkward.”

But Aspen lacks the intimidation factor of Sundance (after all, it’s Disney chairman Michael Eisner and Dell Computer founder Michael Dell who have chalets down the road, not Robert Redford), as well as the hordes of celebrities, the swag, the orchestrated schmoozing. Indeed, the parties—hosted by the likes of the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade and the medium-sized talent agency APA—seemed practically open to the (gross!) public.

On Friday night in the Sierra Mist Lounge at the St. Regis, where a round of beer pong was commencing after midnight, the only A-level star in sight was an entourage-less Jeremy Piven, lining up like everyone else for a plastic cup of beer to go with his pork shumai.

The night before, at Matsuhisa, a minimalist chic Japanese restaurant in town, Mary Lynn Rajskub, a stand-up who plays the nerdy problem-solver Chloe O’Brian on 24, was getting bathed in adulation by the festival’s C.E.O., Bob Crestani. “He loved you,” Mr. Crestani gushed of Ms. Rajskub’s recent appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. “I could tell. I repped him in the early days, and I can tell who he likes. Have you gotten a date back?”

Ms. Rajskub said that she had.

“See? I knew it!”

Ms. Rajskub then excused herself to go have a picture taken with Don Rickles, who was being honored that night with a lifetime achievement award.

On Saturday night, Ms. Yi sang a few numbers, brought audience members up onstage to enact a Dadaesque version of The Dating Game, and otherwise killed.

After the show, she stood by the exit door with her pink-and-white electric guitar slung over her shoulder, anxiously looking around the room at the crowd that was filing by, making its way back out into the cold.

When asked if anything was wrong, Ms. Yi looked bashful and said she was looking for “Fred,” as in Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live.

“I saw him a year ago, and he was incredible,” she said. “He said he was coming tonight.”

More people walked past, offering their congratulations, but still no Mr. Armisen.

Two college-aged young men came up to Ms. Yi and told her how good she was. They looked genuinely impressed.

“Is that sketch that you do, or improv?” asked one.

“Um, I don’t really know,” Ms. Yi answered, giggling.

“Do you have a Web site?” asked the other one.

“No, but I have a MySpace page,” Ms. Yi said, and gave them the address.

The men promised to e-mail her and then reached out to shake her hand. “Congratulations,” one said. “You’re a star.”

The two men, both 29, were quietly celebrating a screening of their first movie, Pride, about an inner-city swim coach in Philadelphia played by Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow), which will be released by Lions Gate in March. “It was very surreal,” Mr. Forbes said of the experience. “I got choked up.”

While legendary Hollywood producers such as Robert Evans and the late Don Simpson were as famous for their boozing and broads as their movies, Mr. Forbes and Mr. Rizzotti are emblematic of a new breed: in bed before midnight, lest they miss that 8 a.m. E.S.T. conference call with Wall Street investors.

Never before has the phrase “hedge fund” been uttered so frequently west of the Hudson. The sobering economics of the movie business today has caused risk-averse studios to increasingly rely on outside financing, and so producers are showing up not just with a Hot! High concept! Better than Borat! pitch and a vague notion that Angelina Jolie is “attached,” but with actual dinero. “We will pay for everything up until the point where we walk in and they say, ‘O.K., good job, guys—we’ll make the movie,” said Mr. Rizzotti, who worked part-time at various hedge funds as an undergraduate at California State University in Northridge, near where he grew up.

He and Mr. Forbes, who majored in communications at Loyola Marymount, met on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe in 2001 and entered the film business two years later. Rather than working the phones for a boss-zilla such as Scott Rudin, or in an agency mailroom, they went looking for money to fund a new company, Fortress Entertainment, the idea being that potential investors would invest relatively modest amounts into a fund that would support the development of multiple movie projects. “Everybody goes around town trying to raise $3 million per movie or $5 million for a movie,” said Mr. Rizzotti in his Jerry Maguire–esque patter. “We created a formula where we only went to individuals asking for $20,000 to $30,000. So it was never huge risk money for anybody. We would just say, ‘Give us a little—a small fraction, just a little bit.’”

After an ill-fated partnership with another production company, Fortress went out on its own in 2004, creating the American Film Capital fund, which now represents over 100 private investors. The company has raised over $6 million. In the case of Pride, which was made for $15 million, Fortress funded the film’s development; hiring screenwriters Michael Gozzard and his partner, Kevin P. Smith, on the basis of a spec script (Mr. Gozzard is a former Fortress development executive); optioning the life rights of Mr. Ellis; hiring the director, Sunu Gonera; and attaching Mr. Howard—before bringing the project to Lions Gate.

It’s all too fast, said one veteran agent disdainfully. “It used to be that wannabe producers would start off as assistants and then become C.E.’s (creative executives), and read and read and read, and start sitting in development meetings, seeing how movies are put together, how notes are given to writers—learning the tools of the industry.” He added that the latest generation “is all about the formula, the numbers. It’s the conglomeratization of the business, and it’s why movies are getting worse.”

Yet “if you have money, the studios show you the red carpet,” the agent acknowledged.

‘Make Me an Offer’

“I always knew I wanted to produce,” said Mr. Forbes, who grew up in Beverly Hills and whose mother was a TV producer (perhaps you remember 1981’s Twirl, starring Heather Locklear) before she left the business to raise Mr. Forbes; now she has a deal with Fortress and oversees the company’s TV development. “But I knew that if I was a successful financier first, then I could do anything else. If I wanted to direct, if I wanted to write—no problem. If I finance my own movie, I can do it.”

And yet the pair has had their share of scrappy start-up moments. The screening of Pride earlier that day, for example, was not exactly a silk-pajama’d, Evans-esque affair, but rather foldout beach chairs in the living room of the film’s editor, Bill Fox. “We were thinking we were walking into an editing bay,” Mr. Rizzotti said. “Brett was like, ‘It’s a house, dude! We’re going to a house!’”

Making it onto agents’ call sheets was a hurdle for the up-and-coming producers. Mr. Forbes recalled trying to talk to one about a film property the agent controlled. “We called and called, but there were no return phone calls,” he said. “So I started faxing over the press release about our company that explained who we were—I faxed it, faxed it, faxed it, three or four times. Finally, he called me up and screamed, ‘I know who the fuck you are, I just haven’t gotten to your fucking phone number yet!’ He was screaming. We’re buddies now. It worked out fine. But, yeah, we definitely had to get noticed.”

When Lions Gate and the William Morris Agency, which represents Mr. Howard, were stalling over Mr. Howard’s deal, Mr. Forbes and Mr. Rizzotti began to panic.

Knowing that Mr. Howard would be at the Sundance Film Festival, Mr. Gonera instructed the producers to carry the film’s script with them at all times at Park City.

One afternoon, when Mr. Forbes and Mr. Rizzotti were piling up on free swag at one of the infamous hospitality suites, in walked the man himself, trailed by Entertainment Tonight cameras.

“We’re like, ‘What do we do? How do we get to him? We’ve gotta do something!’” Mr. Forbes said. “When there was a break, we walked up to him and said, ‘We’re doing this movie, Pride.’ And he’s like, ‘I love that movie—I want to do it!’ And we’re like, ‘Well, that’s what we want you to do—we just need you to sign on’ …. He said, ‘I want to do it, man—get ’em to make me an offer. I want to do it.’

“Then it was: Great—job’s done. He walks out, we walk out. And then Ben Weiss, who runs development for us, starts yelling: ‘Terrence! Who do we call? What do we do? Who do we call?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing?’ And then someone standing next to me goes: ‘Talk to me.’ And it was his agent. Negotiations started the next day.”

‘More Day Killings’

It all sounds very Entourage, doesn’t it? But sometimes working in the entertainment industry is just another day at the office.

One weekday morning, Mr. Forbes was sitting with Mr. Weiss in Fortress’ office on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, reviewing films the company has in development. The office is in the former Girl Scouts of America headquarters, which has been remodeled into an industrial-chic beehive of workspaces rented by film, publicity and special-effects companies. The digs are temporary because Mr. Forbes and Mr. Rizzotti want to move closer to the beach. “I hate Hollywood, and I’ve hated it since the day I moved here,” Mr. Rizzotti said. “We’re not those people who go out every night and go to clubs like L.A.X.”

A handful of interns rounds out Fortress’ staff of four. One night at Cabo Cantina in Hollywood, on two-for-one margarita night, one intern got sick at the table; another punched the mirror in the men’s room. But that’s about as wild as things tend to get. Mr. Forbes is in a long-term relationship with a snowboarder named Brita who used to handle Fortress’ bookkeeping and now markets designer jeans. Mr. Rizzotti isn’t dating anyone at the moment.

Mr. Forbes and Mr. Weiss, a lanky 25-year-old with dark hair and eyes and a computer-science degree from Hobart College (“I made robots for my thesis”), were both sitting at a large conference table, staring into shiny G4 laptops. Outside a window that took up the length of one wall, skinny palm trees swayed like mops in the distance and a sign for the French Cottage Motel blinked on and off.

As Mr. Weiss rattled off projects—a movie described as “Ordinary People in reverse” and Lucky Thirteen, based on Mr. Forbes’ stepfather’s experience as one of the first 13 men to be admitted to Sarah Lawrence College—Mr. Forbes would say things like “Writer still working on a draft” or “We’re setting up the meeting next week.”

Suddenly, Mr. Rizzotti burst through the door, a can of sugar-free Red Bull in one hand. (Normally he downs four to five cans a day; lately he’s been on a “Red Bull diet,” limiting himself to two.)

“Dude, I was just on a fucking amazing conference call!”

The call had been with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, with whom Fortress is talking about producing a TV show as well as interactive online content for an upcoming event in San Diego.

The subject changed to another movie, an untitled teen horror flick set in a shopping mall. “There need to be more day killings,” Mr. Forbes said matter-of-factly. “Right now, all the killing takes place at night, during off-hours, when the girls are closing up, turning out the lights. That’s been done before.”

Mr. Rizzotti and Mr. Weiss nodded in agreement.

“We want it to be like a Jaws thing,” Mr. Rizzotti explained. “If you’re going to go to the mall, you’re going to get killed.”

Of course, in Los Angeles, a day at the office can mean a lot of different things.

Friday rolled around. Mr. Forbes and Mr. Rizzotti left work after lunch and headed to Marina del Rey, where they dock their Wellcraft Cabin Cruiser, christened Easy Rider. The producers bought the boat last December with the help of Mr. Forbes’ stepfather.

At 3 p.m. sharp, a group of half a dozen young Hollywood types, along with Robert Stein, head of the motion-picture department at the talent agency Paradigm, which represents Fortress, boarded the boat for an afternoon spin around the Santa Monica Bay. Mr. Rizzotti passed around a paper plate with a slab of Brie and crackers and then descended into the cabin to retrieve bottles of Stella Artois. Lindsay Girardot, an actress wearing dark sunglasses, denim shorts and tall, black boots, settled into her seat and tilted her head back to most effectively soak up the sun. Jamie Linden, who wrote McG’s next movie, We Are Marshall, about a plane crash that killed most of a West Virginia college football team in 1970, nervously inquired how long it would take for the Dramamine he’d taken to kick in. Dallas Sonnier, a manager wearing an untucked oxford shirt and a Texas baseball cap, tapped an e-mail into his Blackberry.

Mr. Forbes steered the boat out of the harbor and stepped on the gas. It was a typical October day in Los Angeles: sunny and 80 degrees.

Mr. Forbes’ black sunglasses glinted in the light; the wind had turned his hair into a wild tangle of curls. Mr. Rizzotti sat on the boat’s bow, his face blasted by the ocean spray.

When asked how it felt to have his first movie under his belt, Mr. Forbes said that he was pleased that Pride had been produced (if not released) before he turned 28. “I needed to hit something big when I was 28—either make millions or make a movie,” he said. “I don’t know where 28 came from, but that was my goal. Maybe it’s that you leave the house at 18, and in 10 years you make it. I don’t know—28 always felt naturally like an age when, whatever it was gonna be, I was gonna do it. And I did it.”

He paused. “I would have taken 29.”

There are those who see tennis as a quaint vestige of the late 1970’s, all calf-high tube socks and tight little shorts, but in Hollywood the pastime is still thriving—not just as an activity that goes well with Los Angeles’ relentlessly sunny weather, but as a critical social barometer. In this status-obsessed city, how you swat a fuzzy yellow ball around is as important as what kind of car you drive and where you get seated at the Grill for lunch.

Within the tennis caste system, there is the gold standard, a private game at a private home like Mr. Zanuck’s; the next-best option, membership at a private club; and finally ( eww!) playing on public courts with the rest of civilization.

Every Friday afternoon, phones jangle around the city as assistants place calls to round up sufficiently qualified players for Saturday a.m. matches at the homes of hosts like actor Dustin Hoffman (owner of one of the city’s few clay courts), producers Mike Medavoy and Irwin Winkler, former Columbia Pictures president Peter Guber and Las Vegas entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian. “If you’re doing business with someone else in the group, they tend to invite you more,” said one producer. “I think they use it because it’s not an explicit thing. Like everything in Hollywood, which is such a people-driven industry, the subconscious thought is: The more interaction I have with X, the better.”

And the level of play? “It is competitive, but most people know that they’re O.K. players, they’re not incredible players—so they do it for the social aspect of it,” said Benedict Carver, president of Crystal Sky Pictures. “I’ve never really met anyone who took it ridiculously seriously, because the fact is that none of us are really that good. We can all hit the ball over the net and we can all serve.”

Of course, it’s also nice to have someone who can actually stay within the lines—hence the popularity of frequent invitees Matthew Perry, late of Friends, former 007 Pierce Brosnan, Rocky and 1980’s sitcom dad Alan Thicke. (Just as in the industry, the circuit tends to be dominated by men.)

The games are almost always doubles and tend to include one or two pros brought in to keep the ball in play, often claimed by the host for his team. One well-known enthusiast had his court customized with a rubbery surface to slow the ball down and take off its spin. This is Hollywood, after all, where everyone needs to feel like a winner.

Lobbing With Robert Redford

Nowadays, Mr. Zanuck doesn’t play much with people in the business—with the exception of Sharon Stone’s former manager, Chuck Binder—but he waxed nostalgic about past games with Robert Redford. “Somehow, in his white outfit, he looked like the perfect member of a college tennis team,” Mr. Zanuck said. “He’s a leftie, and he had a good kind of twisting leftie serve that would come in close to your body.” There was also bonding over backhands with Charlton Heston at the latter’s manse atop Coldwater Canyon, during the filming of Planet of the Apes. “It was a wonderful house,” Mr. Zanuck said. “Referred to as the ‘House That Ben Hur Built,’ because it had been such a hit.”

The current apex of private aces is the court of legendary producer turned raconteur Robert Evans, next to the blue-tiled, egg-shaped pool at his 1940 French Regency mansion, which was once owned by Greta Garbo. Over the years, Mr. Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Ted Kennedy have all scuffed its surface. (The umpire chair is a gag gift from Mr. Hoffman; apparently, Mr. Evans has been known to take liberty with his line calls.) “I’d be playing there on Friday evenings and see Nicholson or Sumner Redstone come through the gate to go to a screening that Bob was having of the latest studio releases,” said one longtime visitor, a producer. Alas, Mr. Evans’ screening room burned down in 2003, and since his 1998 stroke he no longer personally hosts his own games. But the court is still open to others seven days a week, and no one seems to mind that it isn’t in the spiffiest shape. “It’s not very well maintained; it’s very uneven,” one regular player said. “It’s a bit like playing on broken glass.”

At the city’s top private clubs, however, the clay is dewy and the lines are sparkling white. Some Hollywood machers shell out a total of $30,000 in entrance fees to join both the Beverly Hills Tennis Club (formed in 1929 by Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin as an alternative to the Los Angeles Tennis Club in Hancock Park, which didn’t admit Jews at the time) and the Riviera Tennis Club, located across town in the Pacific Palisades and nicknamed “the Riv.”

The BHTC is a stubbornly nostalgic ode to old Hollywood. The walls of the clubhouse, which hasn’t been renovated since the 1960s, are lined with photos of Barbara Stanwyck and Chaplin, rallying in tennis sweaters and long trousers. The nametag of the late Walter Matthau, who once quipped that he’d only joined to have lunch with baseball player Hank Greenberg, is still attached to his locker. The club’s lunch menu includes grilled-cheese sandwiches, B.L.T.’s and the $7.25 Beverly Hills Tennis Club Hot Dog (fries included). Three years ago, a Chinese chicken salad was added to the menu. There are only five tennis courts and one pool.

Despite a growing number of younger members in their 30’s and 40’s, such as ABC president Steve McPherson, ICM co-president Chris Silbermann and agent Nicole Clemens, Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence and screenwriter Adam Leff, the club’s average age hovers around 65. “It’s getting to be a bit of an old-age home,” as one member put it.

Over at the Riv, meanwhile, a relatively spryer group—including William Morris president Dave Wirtschafter, Happy Gilmore director Dennis Dugan and The Young and the Restless hunk d’un certain age Eric Braeden—enjoys a sprawling and sparklingly modern facility that includes 24 tennis courts (22 lighted hard-court, two clay), two ball-machine courts and an adult Jacuzzi. There’s also the option to join the club’s golf course, a lush emerald pasture the size of a small principality.

If the BHTC is where you go for a lazy-afternoon iced tea, the Riv is where you go for a hard-core workout. “At the Riv, they take themselves a lot more seriously,” says one BHTC member. “They’re more uptight and into their own excellence.”

Kevin Lake, an independent producer (he was also president of disgraced star Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions until February), devotedly plays at the Riviera Club four mornings a week, 7:30 sharp. “I’m there for the workout,” Mr. Lake said. “It’s economical. You can kind of just get in, do your thing and get to work early.”

And the ladies? “The women’s leagues are very competitive,” said Wendy Levy, a music supervisor who plays at the Riviera. “They have some controversies. It’s very serious tennis—they show up to win. It’s not hit and giggle.”

Several miles east of these highfalutin establishments lies the public courts of Griffith Park, where a slightly scruffier group convenes every Friday evening during the summer for a game of “loosey-goosey round robins,” according to Everybody Hates Chris writer Chuck Sklar. “Just a bunch of aspiring people and independent filmmakers who’ve made a couple movies,” said Mr. Sklar, an Emmy winner. “Probably nobody you’ve ever heard of.” Annual membership is $50, but court time is free on weekdays until 4 p.m.

After playing until around 10 p.m., the posse heads to the Edendale Grill in Silver Lake for beers and dinner. “Because we’re sweaty and you can sit outside,” explained Mr. Sklar, who just finished filming an independently produced TV pilot called Come to the Net, inspired by his games with John Ennis, an alumnus of the HBO comedy series Mr. Show. “We had this ongoing thing where we would start hitting and talking about what was going on, and we’d eventually get to a point where we couldn’t be yelling—because it would get too involved; we’d be talking about taxes or personal stuff—so we’d go, ‘Come to the net,’” Mr. Sklar said. “We’d talk for 10 minutes and start playing again. We would sometimes talk for about 40 minutes and play 20.” The pilot re-enacts this ritual. “It’s a traditional sitcom,” he said, “but instead of a living room, we have a tennis court.”

Mr. Sklar has his work cut out for him: On the big screen, at least, despite Hollywood’s enthusiasm for the sport, tennis has never been a box-office winner in the way that baseball and football have. George Cukor tried in 1952 with Pat and Mike, a romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn as a gifted tennis and golf player whom Spencer Tracy, a sports promoter, takes on as a client. In 1978, when Mr. Evans proposed making a love story set at Wimbledon with former wife Ali MacGraw, Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, told him flatly, “You can’t sell a tennis picture” (a tale that Mr. Evans recounted to The Guardian in 2002). Mr. Eisner was right—Mr. Evans’ Players was a dud. More recently, there was the dismal Wimbledon, with Kirsten Dunst. Only Woody Allen’s Match Point has managed to score any, well, points, and it’s debatable whether that had to do with the film’s vague tennis theme or with the scenes of Scarlett Johansson in a rain-drenched white shirt.

Still, work and pleasure will find a way to mix in this town.

Rick Sands, chief operating officer of MGM, plays in many weekend tennis games here, including one at the Brentwood home of Ashok Amritraj, the founder of Hyde Park Entertainment and a former tennis pro unanimously considered as the best player in this set. In between points of late, Mr. Sands has been discussing a few picture deals with Mr. Amritraj. “We’ve had one lunch, but the rest of the negotiations have been during tennis,” Mr. Sands said. “Ashok’s banker is often there, so it just makes it easier.”

It was not always ‘easy’ for Mr. Amritraj. When he first moved to Los Angeles from his native India in 1975, it was to play for the city’s World Team Tennis team, which won the world championships in 1978. He was subsequently invited to many upscale private homes, where he got to know several studio heads, agents and actors.

When he eventually decided to trade in his tennis whites to be a producer, Mr. Amritraj figured: How tough can this be? “I know a lot of people, and I have reasonably good taste,” he said. “But I quickly found out that while everybody was very keen on playing tennis with me, nobody quite wanted to make a film with me. I’d send scripts around to studio execs who were friends, and they would call and spend 20 minutes on the phone. But it was about the person’s forehand or his backhand or his serve. The last 10 seconds, as the conversation was winding down, I’d say: ‘What about my script?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, we passed on that last week.’”

“Everyone brings a bottle of wine, and one of the rules is that no one can leave until all the bottles are empty,” Mr. Zarnow said. Besides wine, “milk-and-honey cocktails” are served—honoring the Promised Land, if not Passover per se. Close enough!

Welcome to the Haggadah of Hollywood—a place where Passover is an excuse to orchestrate a production worthy of a credit roll. In this respect, you might say it’s a night not so different from any other night.

For Courtney Kivowtiz, a manager and regular of Mr. Zarnow’s rock ’n’ roll–themed gathering, the tweaked Seder is a benign and beautiful thing—“a group of friends making the most of a tradition,” she said.

“A lot of us growing up went to Seders where we felt it was a bit of a torture chamber,” Ms. Kivowtiz continued. “Because you’re going to read this book, you have to wait to eat the food—basically, your parents have dragged you to one of those family events that isn’t necessarily anything other than a drag.”

Over in the Valley, Woodland Hills, to be precise, veteran TV producer Larry Einhorn’s family-centered, slightly Disneyfied Seder is anything but a drag. The 30-odd guests (comedians Larry David and Sandra Bernhard have been known to drop by) are encouraged to sing irreverent Passover songs set to revamped show tunes such as “Afikomen!” (to the tune of “Oklahoma!”) and “There’s No Seder Like Our Seder” ( pace “There’s No Business Like Show Business”; the lyrics are distributed). “We started doing the songs about five years ago,” Mr. Einhorn said, “but even before that, we always had a bit of a lighthearted approach to Seder—without mocking or denigrating the tradition.

“If I was back home at my parents’ house”—in Chicago—“and we did this, people may say this is a little disrespectful. But here—is our group a little more hip? Who knows, but I guess we think so.”

MADONNA: ‘QUITE MOVING’

Certain Hollywood Seders are the stuff of legend. When Roman Polanski was shooting Chinatown and wanted to return to his native Poland in order to celebrate Passover, the film’s producer, Bob Evans, intervened and threw one of his own. The Kiddush was read by Kirk Douglas.

These days, the Passover invitation of note is issued by music mogul Guy Oseary, who lives in Beverly Hills. Guests have included Madonna (Mr. Oseary’s former partner at Maverick Records), comedian Chris Rock, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “It” director McG.

“There were previous years where I felt like shit about myself because I wasn’t invited to Guy Oseary’s Seder, but I’m over it,” said Jill Soloway, a Hollywood screenwriter and comedian who wrote for Six Feet Under before it went off the air, and who called Mr. Oseary’s bash “the seminal power Seder.”

Comic actor Jerry Stiller, late of Seinfeld and The King of Queens, customarily breaks matzo on the Upper West Side with relatives and friends, which back in the day included Rodney Dangerfield and Andy Kaufman. But he’s still reeling from the celebrity-soaked Seder he went to in L.A. some years ago; it was probably Mr. Oseary’s, though Mr. Stiller isn’t quite sure. “I went to a Seder that had Madonna,” he said. “It was huge. Madonna read one of the four questions. She would get into it. Then she talked about Kabala and why she was very involved and influenced by it. She was quite moving that night.”

Serenity now!

For decades, meanwhile, legendary manager turned real-estate consigliore Sandy Gallin has been drawing the likes of Barbra Streisand, David Geffen and other Malibu majesty for his First Night celebrations. In this town, generally, the only Seders worth doing are on the First Night. Second-night Seders are so … tomorrow.

One exception is the dinner organized by Tom Sherak, a partner at Revolution Studios, who for years has been inviting about 40 industry people to his Calabasas home. “The reason we don’t do it on the First Night is because my rabbi is one of my closest friends, and he has one on the First Night,” Mr. Sherak said. “We try to invite people who might not have someplace to go and who we think would like to be asked, but who wouldn’t ask themselves. It’s like the old adage,” he added gallantly: “You ask a pretty girl to go out, and she says yes because everyone else is too afraid to ask her.”

So far, Mr. Sherak has hid the Afikomen with agent Arnold Rifkin, Blazing Saddles producer Michael Hertzberg and Los Angeles Times movie columnist Patrick Goldstein. Mr. Goldstein “always comes late,” Mr. Sherak said. “When he rings the bell, we think it’s Elijah.” Then there was that glorious year Warren Beatty and Annette Bening showed up.

“You know the part in the Seder where you have to say it in one breath?” Mr. Sherak said, intoning: “‘The father of the father, the mother of the mother …. ’ No one ever did it better than Annette Bening! She got applause.”

CHAROSET SET PIECE

Ms. Soloway, the former Six Feet Under writer, may not be traveling in quite such exalted circles (though her next project stars Anglo-Semite Oscar winner Rachel Weisz), but her holiday will still have a peculiarly Hollywood inflection: rather than having someone narrate her Seder live, she will open the DVD player and pop in a movie she made for the occasion with her 9-year-old son, Isaac. “We just went and shot it,” Ms. Soloway said. The filming of this Seder script took place near her Silver Lake house, in the Brosnan Caves in Griffith Park. “It totally looks like Ten Commandments land,” Ms. Soloway said. “I think 50 years ago a set designer built the caves there, and when you go there you think, ‘This is every cave I’ve ever seen on every TV show I’ve ever watched.’ It looks totally prehistoric in a cheesy way.”

In the movie Passover with Ronna and Bev, baby Moses is represented by an E.T. doll. “Instead of Moses in a basket, we have E.T. in a strainer,” Ms. Soloway explained. Not at the expense of current pop culture, of course. “When Moses comes in and says, ‘Dad, guess what? I’m a Jew,’ the Pharaoh is like, ‘Not now, I’m watching American Idol.’ And Moses goes, ‘You’re not supposed to be worshipping false idols.’”

Moses gets a better reaction when he reminds his father that Idol contestant Elliott Yamin is also one of the Chosen People.

“I remember Seders were dreadfully dull,” Ms. Soloway said, explaining her endeavor. “I have tedious memories associated with Judaism, so that every chance I get to make it fun, I take advantage.”

Lest all these shenanigans confirm the conventional wisdom that this city is filled with flakes or something: Mr. Zarnow, the rumrunner, stresses that despite the bacchanalian atmosphere, his gathering has properly pedantic underpinnings. Speaking fluent Hebrew, he sticks to the traditional Seder script and insists that his guests do the same. “We do the whole book,” Mr. Zarnow said. “I didn’t want to turn it into a party with no religious merit.”

He did confess that “we skip some stuff, the songs sometimes,” and that “usually the second half of the Seder falls apart because people are having too much fun.”

For many Hollywood goyim, meanwhile, Passover is when the town shuts down. “It’s like dead everywhere,” said one agent of the Christian persuasion. “It’s kind of like being left alone at college when everyone goes home for Thanksgiving. You’ve got nowhere to go.” Once, he was invited to the Seder of a prominent studio executive—a rather catholic affair, for lack of a better word. “It was a mixture of family and kind of like the strays,” the agent said. “It wasn’t super-religious. We ran through the thing in like 10, 15 minutes. It was like, ‘Bless the food, bless the meat—let’s eat!’”

And at least one Hollywood veteran has scaled back and is thinking about a more sober Seder. “The last time I did a big one was maybe 10 years ago,” said producer Peter Guber, who ran Columbia Pictures in the 1970’s. “Once or twice I turned it into a circus, and I felt like it was blasphemous. There were too many business people. The four questions that were asked were: Why don’t I have the deal? Why is this deal not as good as my friend’s deal? Am I going to have a better deal next time? And what can you do about my agent’s deal?

“I realized it had become something other than what it was supposed to be,” Mr. Guber continued, adding that, to him, Passover is now “a spiritual renaissance—something that has personal, emotional meaning to me.”

But it wasn’t until Reese Witherspoon arrived—gleaming blonde in an elegant black Alexander McQueen dress and posing readily with an unwavering smile—that a good old-fashioned rush of starlet energy swept the room. The actress was being honored for her performance as June Carter in Walk the Line, a performance that has, in both a commercial and an artistic sense, pushed Ms. Witherspoon to the front of the pack of actresses that the media, Hollywood and America’s movie viewers might very well anoint as the next Julia Roberts.

In fact, Ms. Witherspoon, with her strong whiff of box office, is all kinds of special after the dismal year for women that has just passed. It used to be that starlets opened movies, but those days are over. Remember the good old 90’s when Julia Roberts and her 88-inch legs sent Pretty Woman skyrocketing to $178 million-plus, and didn’t relinquish her grip on the box office for a decade? Notting Hill, $116 million; My Best Friend’s Wedding, $126 million; Runaway Bride, $152 million. America’s Sweethearts even got close to the $100 million mark. She also nabbed an Oscar for the $125 million-plus Erin Brockovich—see? She’s a real actress. Now what do we have? Diane Lane couldn’t save Must Love Dogs any more than Drew Barrymore could deliver on Fever Pitch. Shopgirl, which got great reviews and starred the fetching Claire Danes, only managed to eke out $10 million. Now imagine if it had been a young Julia Roberts beaming out at Steve Martin in all her chestnut-maned glory from behind a glove counter. Box-office gold!

Consider the other actresses receiving accolades this award season—Felicity Huffman from Transamerica, Woody Allen’s latest muse, Match Point’s Scarlett Johansson, A History of Violence’s Maria Bello, Memoirs of a Geisha’s Ziyi Zhang, Charlize Theron in North Country, perennial Oscar favorites Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench in Proof and Mrs. Henderson Presents. The cumulative grosses of all those films, by the end of 2005, was $89,129,354.

Come on! The latest installment in the Harry Potter trilogy took in $101.4 million on its opening weekend alone.

“I think it’s an interesting time,” Ms. Witherspoon said, poised and political, on that red carpet. “There’s a lot of interesting women’s roles, and there can be more, and there will be more. The success of each woman in this business creates more success for more women. I just try to do my best and try to create more opportunities for women.”

Well, perhaps in her newest role, that of frequent producer, à la Drew Barrymore, she’ll do just that—but she better get cracking.

Besides Walk the Line, projects with mainstream A-list actresses mostly landed with a resounding thud—or not at all—in 2005. Nicole Kidman—she of the No. 2 slot on The Hollywood Reporter’s most recent annual power list of actresses, with a reported per-picture fee of $16 million to $17 million—made Variety’s Top 250 Films of 2005 at No. 32 with The Interpreter and No. 42 with Bewitched. Renée Zellweger showed up nearby at No. 43 for her only appearance of the year, in Cinderella Man, the Ron Howard film that no massive advertising campaign could save. The tag team of Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette (pretty and serious!) in the chick flick In Her Shoes brought in over $32 million.

None of these films even came close to the $77 million hauled in by the G-rated March of the Penguins.

Only Jodie Foster, who ranks near the bottom of The Hollywood Reporter’s top 10 women at $10 million to $12 million a picture, brought home a little bit of bacon with Flight Plan, which took in nearly $90 million in the U.S.—just a little less than Walk the Line, at $95 million. Even hard-working and much-praised Keira Knightley had a hard year: Domino at $10,169,202, Pride & Prejudice with just $34,118,092, The Jacket at $6,303,762.

Starlets, where are you?

Julia Roberts, who is still allegedly Hollywood’s top-earning woman, opted out for 2005 in honor of her twins. Gwyneth Paltrow came out to do a little press at Harvey Weinstein’s request for Proof—box office: a little over $7.5 million, youch!—and immediately went home and enjoyed her reported second pregnancy.

It goes on and on: Kirsten Dunst, without her Peter Parker, with Elizabethtown sucking in over $26 million; Jennifer Aniston (who gets a reported $9 million a picture) going off the tracks in Derailed, with a box office of $35,701,396.

Even in the top-grossing films of the year, it wasn’t Hermione Granger or Princess Amidala or Katie Holmes as Batman’s love-toy that made the franchises profitable.

Naomi Watts wasn’t even the sell in King Kong—it was that damn pesky C.G.I. ape.

"WE SHOULD BE WRITING MORE GREAT ROLES for women, period,” said Ms. Witherspoon’s Walk the Line director, James Mangold, also on that red carpet on Sunday. “Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys—and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes. So the truth is, any movie, like all the ones being honored here tonight”—he gestured vaguely in the direction of Ang Lee and Philip Seymour Hoffman—“that makes it into reality, is a movie that made it despite the system that’s really built almost predominately and universally to make movies about comic-book heroes.”

And it’s not just action, it’s comedy, too: Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller and company clearly killed the female-led romantic comedy, in the year when The 40 Year Old Virgin ($109 million!) replaced the likes of There’s Something About Mary.

Certainly familiar heroes dominated the highest-grossing films in 2005: The final Star Wars was first on the list with a whopping $380 million-plus dollars, followed by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, War of the Worlds, Wedding Crashers, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Batman Begins all coming in over the heady $200 million mark. But none of these films had a juicy part for a woman—save a gloriously campy Tilda Swinton in The Chronicles of Narnia. In fact, the only film with a meaty role for a woman in the top 10 was Mr. & Mrs. Smith—which had the decided advantage of, well, Brad Pitt, and the prurient interest in the co-stars’ scandalous love affair off screen.

“This town does not discriminate,” said a Hollywood agent with a stable of solid film and television stars who wouldn’t speak on the record. (“This is the kind of thing that can get us fired.”) “I don’t there’s anything politically or biased behind [the lack of female roles]. I think the populace dictates it. The only thing that matters is money. The studios sit there every day and try to figure out how to make money. If they think there’s an audience for midgets, they’ll start making movies about midgets.”

But do certain stars still guarantee an audience anymore? “The days of the star vehicle just don’t exist anymore,” said another former big-time Hollywood agent that declined to be named. The ex-agent continued: “Julia Roberts couldn’t open Mona Lisa Smile any more than Tom Hanks could open The Terminal.”

“Do the studios feel that the extra 10 to 15 million extra for a major box-office name is always worth it, when they can use that money for special effects, or a sequel that already had a built-in audience? It’s probably a debate rather continually,” said casting director Amanda Mackey Johnson, of Mackey Sandrich Casting, who currently is at work on Robert De Niro’s 2006 project, The Good Shepherd.

“American studio movies tend to be about people moving, rather than talking. Other than Angelina, most of the top girls don’t do action—nor are they asked to.” (Let’s be kind and not talk about Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux here.) “Movies like Erin Brockovich,” Ms. Mackey Johnson said, “where you have a compelling theme, a very dynamic script and a real movie star doing a change-of-pace breakout performance … it’s an unusual combination, and it doesn’t come together all that easily.”

A FEW NAMES IN ADDITION TO MS. WITHERSPOON and Ms. Jolie—whose star status seems miraculously immune to bad reviews and poor attendance, as her films preceding Mr. & Mrs. Smith included the much reviled Alexander and the largely unseen Taking Lives and Beyond Borders—continue to crop up as contenders to Ms. Roberts’ throne, but the name repeated again and again is Rachel McAdams.

The 29-year-old dimpled beauty, who first appeared on the public’s radar in 2004’s Mean Girls and The Notebook, was one of the few women for whom 2005 was a very good year, with featured roles in Red Eye, the boys-club flick Wedding Crashers and The Family Stone.

And Ms. McAdams is playing it very, very carefully.

“Studios are not in the business of developing stars; studios are in the business of exploiting them,” said Ms. McAdams’ longtime manager, Shelley Browning. “The heat isn’t created by the studios, it’s created by the audience—unfortunately, talent is not the only component. There were plenty of times I couldn’t get Rachel arrested, and now the same people who wouldn’t take my calls to hear about her are calling me to say, ‘Well, what does she want to do?’”

Ms. McAdams’ success, Ms. Browning maintains, is due to a combination of “wild” talent, a level head and smart choices in material. “I think it’s about showing your range and your diversity as an artist. I think it’s hard to be bankable if you don’t have unlimited range, because not everybody has the ability to be brilliantly comedic and fantastically believable in a drama—that’s an unusual quality. Other than Reese Witherspoon, I don’t know who else out there can do it. I don’t think Scarlett does comedy, I don’t think Keira Knightly does big, broad Mean Girls type of comedy. A lot of these women are wildly talented, but finding those vehicles that are the appropriate showcase for the range and scope of somebody’s artistry—it’s hard to do,” she said.

So true. “While this year may not have had its Bridget Jones,” e-mailed Kelly Carmichael, vice president of production at the Weinstein Company, “I think there were a lot of tremendous performances from actresses.” She named the year’s usual suspects: Felicity Huffman, Michelle Williams, Judi Dench and Charlize Theron. As for the new crop of girls, Ms. Carmichael likes Keira Knightly, Amy Adams—from Junebug—Rachel McAdams, and Michelle Monaghan. But even the Weinsteins can see the value of the built-in audience: They’ll be releasing Clerks II, by Kevin Smith, and the fourth installment of the Scary Movie franchise.

And Ms. Browning also stressed the importance of what she calls “career architecture,” working across genres and audience demographics. But that approach can backfire. Jennifer Garner’s attempt at breaking a piece off the comic-book audience, Elektra, tanked. And fine, let’s finally mention that pink elephant.

Charlize Theron, an Oscar-winner and universally acknowledged bombshell, did two movies in ’05: the Academy-friendly North Country, in which she donned dowdy overalls and fought for women’s rights, and the adolescent-friendly Aeon Flux, which involved tight black leather outfits and guns and doing the splits. Neither delivered financially, and Aeon Flux barely cracked the top 100 box-office films of the year.

“There is much pressure on women,” said the former Hollywood agent. “Tastes change, culture changes. Aeon Flux, unfairly, sets back women in action roles by 10 years. Hollywood always learns the wrong lesson from it; what they take away is that women can’t do action roles, when what they should learn is that people didn’t see Aeon Flux because it was a really bad movie.”

“The irony,” said publicist Ken Sunshine, who represents Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Barbra Streisand, among others, “is that we’re in an era where the heads of many studios are women—and there are far more women in executive positions than ever before. As a wily veteran of the progressive political world who cut his teeth working for Bella Abzug—one of the great public figures of all time and one of the original feminists—I’m very sensitive to this. Unfortunately, the big bankable box-office successes have too few roles in them.”

Another problem facing the starlets of today is the risk of overexposure due to a barrage of tabloids out to illuminate every dark corner of their private lives. Lindsay Lohan currently appears on the cover of Vanity Fair and has spent the past year as a constant source of speculation among gossip columnists, the Internet and tabloids; her only film contribution in 2005 was Herbie: Fully Loaded (a not unrespectable $66 million).

“It gets boring,” said Ms. Browning of the tabloid saturation. “Once there is no mystery left, then I think you are in trouble. I told Rachel when we first started working together that to succeed in Hollywood is to be not seducible. No matter how much money or sparkle or visibility they throw at you, if it doesn’t have a strong and quality role for you, then you have to stay away. And that’s hard. They throw everything at you—director’s names, star’s names, money and all the accoutrements that come with celebrity. And it’s hard to say ‘no thank you.’”

“One piece of advice I would put out there is: Don’t take yourself so seriously,” said Mr. Sunshine. “I wish celebrity culture was more fun. Publicists take themselves so seriously, the game of P.R. is taken way too seriously. We’re not curing cancer here—we’re selling movies, just like people sell a lot of things.”

AFTER THE DISASTER THAT WAS 2005 for women, selling the world the next Julia Roberts might be even trickier. The franchise films will continue to sell big—and how many Narnias and X-Men do we have to look forward to?—while the romantic comedy genre languishes without a go-to leading lady, for now. Will it be Rachel? Will it be Reese? Or Keira? Will Dakota Fanning please report to puberty, stat?

Back on the red carpet, indie and stage actress Jennifer Jason Leigh was playing the role of date to new husband Noah Baumbach, writer and director of critics’ darling The Squid and the Whale ($5.6 million to date). “I think this year was a good year for movies,” said Ms. Leigh, “but maybe not particularly for women, actually, now that I think about it. But for men it was a very good year. The movies, for themselves, seem to be better—like I can think of five movies that I love, which I almost can never do. So that’s good news.”

While that may be true, in 2005 the marriage of commerce and art showed itself to be less stable than ever—and it’s actresses who suffered the most. “The high-grossing films are not all that interesting to me, I have to say,” said Edie Falco, who was there to present the Best Picture award to Brokeback Mountain’s producer, James Schamus. “It’s not stuff I would want to be in. Yes, you would want the big paycheck—but that’s never really been my concern.”

In the 1940’s, fledgling mogul Lew Wasserman instituted the combination of black sack suit, white Sulka shirt and skinny black tie at M.C.A., the talent agency which he was then running. M.C.A. agents subsequently became known around town as the “M.C.A. mafia.” (Mr. Wasserman didn’t abandon this penguin shell when he ascended to the role of studio head at M.C.A./Universal in 1962.) In the 1970’s, C.A.A. founding father Michael Ovitz, who idolized Mr. Wasserman, continued the tradition at his agency, where the black Armani suit became the unofficial uniform in which to slay enemies over gross points.

But as American fashion has relaxed into the cozy comfort zone of rumpled khakis and distressed T-shirts, so, too, has the Hollywood dress code. Today, Universal president Ron Meyer can often be spotted in jeans, as can Columbia Pictures head Amy Pascal. Toby Emmerich, president of production at New Line, is another denim devotee, and fond of padding around his office in white athletic socks—his Labrador, Bear, a few luggish paces behind. Even entertainment lawyers, traditionally Tinseltown’s most buttoned-up caste, have no qualms dining at West Hollywood’s Pane e Vino in T-shirts.

Make no mistake: The symbolism of power has not been lost in this industry-wide dress-down. But it’s been radically altered. In the same way that producers and studio execs regularly prop their feet up on tables and sofas in order to simultaneously convey the messages of a) I’m not a suit—I’m a creative!, and b) If you had as much influence as me, you could do this, too!, casual dress separates those who can wear whatever they damn well please from those who can’t.

Amazingly, there’s still one remaining citadel of old-fashioned civility—or, depending on how you look at it, one last group of suckers. Agents remain the only group left in Hollywood that still adheres to a professional, if unofficial, dress code, making them an anachronistic curiosity as they march down Wilshire Boulevard en masse at noontime—an orderly squadron of charcoals, navies and blacks—headed in the direction of Barney Greengrass (here, a chichi place at the top of Barneys Beverly Hills) or Mr. Chow. They’re like displaced refugees from Wall Street, dabbing at their dampened brows with Brioni handkerchiefs—a feeble attempt to combat the unforgiving glare of the Los Angeles sun.

But in recent years, the Egyptian cotton has begun to fray around the edges a bit. Though suits are still the standard at the Big Five agencies (C.A.A., William Morris, I.C.M., U.T.A. and Endeavor), fewer ties are showing up at the office, especially as the weekend draws near. William Morris even observes Casual Friday. According to a spy at Endeavor (the model for Ari Gold’s former place of employment on HBO’s hit show Entourage), partner Adam Venit regularly wears khakis and polo shirts—throughout the week. Ari Emmanuel, the model for the Ari Gold character, is a Friday jeans kind of guy. (Neither man wished to comment.) Things are getting more and more lax at U.T.A. as well, according to several employees. C.A.A., which has a reputation as corporate and sleek as its I.M. Pei–designed headquarters, remains the only agency whose employees are respectful enough, or paranoid enough, to adhere to five full days of jacket and tie.

White Jeans at William Morris

At William Morris, the good ol’ boy 10-percentery whose image is still colored by memberships at the Hillcrest Country Club on Pico Boulevard, cigar-smoking sessions and day-long games of pinochle, things first started to slouch toward dishevelment in the mid-1990’s, when former president Arnold Rifkin—despite his personal fondness for Armani—introduced Casual Fridays.

This was a dramatic shift from the way Rifkin’s predecessor, Jerry Katzman, ran the ship. “I always felt that you looked a lot more professional if you dressed professionally,” Mr. Katzman said in a telephone interview. “That the creative side of the business could dress however they wanted, but that agents were really representing talent, and they were the business side of the agenda.”

One veteran W.M.A. agent who wished to remain anonymous (the agency biz can be a bit like the Gestapo when it comes to the press) recalls attending a staff meeting during the Katzman era on the day before Thanksgiving. Because the agent was getting on a flight in the afternoon, he wore jeans and a black turtleneck.

Upon taking his seat at the conference table, Mr. Katzman, seated at the head, stared icily at the agent before asking: “How far do you live from here?”

“The question just dropped in the air. Everyone knew what it meant—that I should go home and change,” the agent said. “I was terrified.”

Mr. Katzman relaxed a bit when he was told about the flight.

In 1999, the bar at W.M.A. was lowered further with the arrival of David Wirtschafter, now president, who schleps around the agency’s hallowed halls in a positively Kurt Cobain–esque ensemble of faded jeans, work boots and flannel shirts, according to one colleague; another cited “flip-flops, jeans, athletic stuff—T-shirts and sweatpants.”

“He always did it, and nobody ever stopped him,” Mr. Katzman said. “I think that’s his personality.”

To the bewilderment of Mr. Wirtschafter’s colleagues, W.M.A. chairman Jim Wiatt, a sartorial stickler who’s known for his aversion to facial hair—“What are we selling, refrigerators?” the agent scolded one employee sporting a 5 o’clock shadow—looks the other way. (Mr. Wirtschafter, perhaps understandably wary after his unusual candor in a New Yorker profile blew up in his face, declined to discuss his style choices with The Observer.)

These days, W.M.A. agents are more likely to confuse Hillcrest for a hot new bar on Melrose. When it comes to clothes, they favor pale blue button-downs (staff meetings are often a sea of powder blue) and simple ties, affecting the look of overgrown prep-school boys whose weekend plans lean toward Palm Springs—as opposed to Vegas, the destination of flashier types from C.A.A. and Endeavor.

On Fridays, however, staid decorum gives way to misguided creativity. “The Casual Friday thing is a disaster, because a lot of people who try to do it—it’s pathetic,” said one high-level W.M.A. agent. “One of my associates comes in with white jeans and a big, oversized shirt—a long-sleeved button-down that looks like it’s his dad’s shirt. He looks like a farmer. He’s trying to look cool and hip, and it’s down to his knees …. The trick is how you pull off the casual part and look decent.”

Mr. Katzman marveled at the current relaxed environment. “Even Arnold was not a casual kind of person,” he said. “Casual Friday meant that you didn’t have to have a tie! It didn’t mean that you could come in in jeans and a T-shirt.”

(Luckily, we have Anna Wintour to whip these slackers into shape: high-rollers at William Morris received free copies of Men’s Vogue when the magazine launched earlier this month.)

Members of the establishment aren’t the only ones who’ve been rolling up their sleeves lately. In July, Paradigm—an up-and-coming agency that earlier this year swallowed Writers & Artists and has been rumored to now be eyeing I.C.M.—had its first-ever dress-down day. “People were mostly wearing a lot of jeans, polo shirts—everyone kind of looked the same,” said a spy. “You could tell right away who had some style and who just didn’t have a clue. A couple of people had flannel shirts tucked into their jeans—kind of dorky. It was revealing. A couple of the male agents looked incredibly thin, like a little boy. Very skinny.”

According to Leslie Kaufman, a personal shopper in the men’s department at Barneys Beverly Hills on Wilshire Boulevard, suits haven’t exactly been flying off the racks for her agent clientele in recent years. “The agency business used to be much more prominent,” Ms. Kaufman said. “With the advent of going to casual office days, there’s been a big change in the suit business.”

Whether the fall will bring an uptick in sales remains to be seen. “Our season has not quite started,” Ms. Kaufman said. “September just deals with Labor Day and the High Holy Days and the Emmys.”

Ian Daniels, who owns a discount men’s-clothing warehouse in Santa Monica from which he supplies agents and other Hollywood “clotheshorses” (such as the permatanned actor George Hamilton) with marked-down Kiton, Borrelli and Cesare Attolini garments, said that his clients are increasingly looking for “crossover” attire, or things that can be worn both at work and at play. Mr. Daniels is a strong believer in “casual elegance,” he said on a recent afternoon, looking like a 21st-century Don Johnson in an untucked pink Barba shirt, white Borrelli pants and Prada Sport loafers without socks. “I think there’s way too many guys running around in jeans and T-shirts,” he said. “Instead of dressing like grown men, they’re dressing like kids.”

Spit ’n’ Shine at I.C.M.

A few members of the old guard are still carrying the torch of formality. I.C.M. president Ed Limato, a flamboyant iconoclast who brings to mind both the late George Plimpton (whom he somewhat resembles) and Elton John (a client), keeps the ranks in line at I.C.M.—even though at his famed pre-Oscar party, Mr. Limato goes shoeless.

“I’m the holdout,” Mr. Limato said over the telephone in a baritone voice that allows no letters to escape unenunciated. “I wear a shirt and suit every day, and I expect everybody else to. As long as I’m here, that’s the way it’s going to be. It’s a business and you represent talent, and I don’t think talent wants to see their agents dress like their best buddies. I think they think of the agents as people who represent them. I think they want to see spit and shine.

“I don’t believe in—what did you call it?—Casual Friday,” he said disdainfully.

According to an observer, when Mr. Limato spotted a female employee wearing culottes once, he gasped in horror: “Clam diggers!” On another occasion, when an agent entered his office without any stays in his collar, Mr. Limato cried: “You’ve forgotten your bones today!”

When Mr. Limato spies an agent who doesn’t live up to his standards of tailoring, a company-wide e-mail is fired off, reminding agents that no day is Casual Day. According to several sources, Mr. Limato is also known for sending out e-mails directing that if agents’ window blinds aren’t fully deployed, they should be three-quarters of the way down, in order to preserve a look of unity from the sidewalks of Wilshire.

(Mr. Limato denied any fenestral preoccupations. “When you’ve been here a long time, you hear things that add to the color of the person,” he said with a chuckle. “There’s nothing to that.”)

Of course, boys will be boys.

“If Limato’s in town and you come in on a Friday, you’ve gotta be smart about it,” one mid-level male I.C.M. agent said. “Often I don’t wear a tie on Friday, and I usually don’t shave on Friday.”

He added, sotto voce: “I’ve had two days of growth and been able to get away with it!”

Said one former I.C.M. agent about the agent-suit relationship: “Jeff [Berg, chairman of I.C.M.] once said to me that one of the reasons he liked the company to dress up was that if a client makes $20 million a picture, then in the office that means we make $2 million off them. ‘So I think you can get dressed up for them,’ he said.

“All things agency-driven are anxiety-, fear-driven,” the agent continued. “One of those [fears] is that you might lose a client if the client thinks for a second that the person taking care of them isn’t dressed to the nines and a complete business man.”

But this fear may be unfounded. Luke Greenfield, who wrote and directed The Girl Next Door, and who is represented by Philip Raskind, an Endeavor agent and partner, said, “I’ve never seen Phil not in a suit, but if he did show up in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt, I’d love it. Especially in a creative environment, everyone needs to relax.”

He paused. “If he was dealing with my back-end [gross] and quote, maybe it would be a little disconcerting.”

Then again, not all agents are complaining about an enforced dress code. “I actually feel more comfortable in a suit,” said one U.T.A.’er. “I like a division between what I wear on the weekend and what I wear to work.” The Casual Friday hater from W.M.A. concurred. “I personally wouldn’t want to be repped by someone who wears a T-shirt,” he said.

Female agents have it both better and worse. On the one hand, they have greater latitude in interpreting the definition of professional dress. “As a woman, we have a teeny bit more leeway, because it’s not about always wearing a power suit,” said one Endeavor agent in her 30’s. “A woman can get away with wearing a great T-shirt and a skirt, whereas no man can wear a great T-shirt.”

Yet when the workday ends and it’s time for premieres or work drinks, women are stuck in their limbo attire—not quite banker, but not quite urban chic, either. “I never go out in my same clothes,” said one female I.C.M. agent. “I just feel uncomfortable. I always bring a pair of jeans and change in the bathroom. I’ll wear whatever—a blouse and blazer with jeans and my pumps.”

Joe Rosenberg, formerly of C.A.A. and now an executive at Radar Pictures, is one of those frowning on agents in T-shirts. “From a client’s point of view, they’re handling your business and they’re out there speaking for you, and I think you want someone to be, as a human being, professional in who they are and how they say what they say, but also to look the part,” he said.

On a recent weekday morning, Mr. Rosenberg paid a visit to Jack Taylor, the 89-year-old Russian-born Beverly Hills clothier, whose handmade suits start at $3,200. Black-and-white photos of former clients Cary Grant and Jack Lemmon were hanging on one of the shop’s walls. Legendary former William Morris president Abe Lastfogel was also a customer.

Dressed for work—orange cashmere sweater, faded jeans, gray New Balance sneakers—Mr. Rosenberg picked out fabric for a new suit and bantered with Mr. Taylor, small and natty in velvet slippers. Then the younger man left the store.

Seated at his paper-strewn desk, Mr. Taylor shook his head and closed his eyes behind his enormous Wassermanesque, black-framed glasses.

“Did you see him?” he said, his voice softly hoarse. “That’s the way they all dress. It’s terrible.”

In the 1940’s, fledgling mogul Lew Wasserman instituted the combination of black sack suit, white Sulka shirt and skinny black tie at M.C.A., the talent agency which he was then running. M.C.A. agents subsequently became known around town as the “M.C.A. mafia.” (Mr. Wasserman didn’t abandon this penguin shell when he ascended to the role of studio head at M.C.A./Universal in 1962.) In the 1970’s, C.A.A. founding father Michael Ovitz, who idolized Mr. Wasserman, continued the tradition at his agency, where the black Armani suit became the unofficial uniform in which to slay enemies over gross points.

But as American fashion has relaxed into the cozy comfort zone of rumpled khakis and distressed T-shirts, so, too, has the Hollywood dress code. Today, Universal president Ron Meyer can often be spotted in jeans, as can Columbia Pictures head Amy Pascal. Toby Emmerich, president of production at New Line, is another denim devotee, and fond of padding around his office in white athletic socks—his Labrador, Bear, a few luggish paces behind. Even entertainment lawyers, traditionally Tinseltown’s most buttoned-up caste, have no qualms dining at West Hollywood’s Pane e Vino in T-shirts.

Make no mistake: The symbolism of power has not been lost in this industry-wide dress-down. But it’s been radically altered. In the same way that producers and studio execs regularly prop their feet up on tables and sofas in order to simultaneously convey the messages of a) I’m not a suit—I’m a creative!, and b) If you had as much influence as me, you could do this, too!, casual dress separates those who can wear whatever they damn well please from those who can’t.

Amazingly, there’s still one remaining citadel of old-fashioned civility—or, depending on how you look at it, one last group of suckers. Agents remain the only group left in Hollywood that still adheres to a professional, if unofficial, dress code, making them an anachronistic curiosity as they march down Wilshire Boulevard en masse at noontime—an orderly squadron of charcoals, navies and blacks—headed in the direction of Barney Greengrass (here, a chichi place at the top of Barneys Beverly Hills) or Mr. Chow. They’re like displaced refugees from Wall Street, dabbing at their dampened brows with Brioni handkerchiefs—a feeble attempt to combat the unforgiving glare of the Los Angeles sun.

But in recent years, the Egyptian cotton has begun to fray around the edges a bit. Though suits are still the standard at the Big Five agencies (C.A.A., William Morris, I.C.M., U.T.A. and Endeavor), fewer ties are showing up at the office, especially as the weekend draws near. William Morris even observes Casual Friday. According to a spy at Endeavor (the model for Ari Gold’s former place of employment on HBO’s hit show Entourage), partner Adam Venit regularly wears khakis and polo shirts— throughout the week. Ari Emmanuel, the model for the Ari Gold character, is a Friday jeans kind of guy. (Neither man wished to comment.) Things are getting more and more lax at U.T.A. as well, according to several employees. C.A.A., which has a reputation as corporate and sleek as its I.M. Pei–designed headquarters, remains the only agency whose employees are respectful enough, or paranoid enough, to adhere to five full days of jacket and tie.

White Jeans at William Morris

At William Morris, the good ol’ boy 10-percentery whose image is still colored by memberships at the Hillcrest Country Club on Pico Boulevard, cigar-smoking sessions and day-long games of pinochle, things first started to slouch toward dishevelment in the mid-1990’s, when former president Arnold Rifkin—despite his personal fondness for Armani—introduced Casual Fridays.

This was a dramatic shift from the way Rifkin’s predecessor, Jerry Katzman, ran the ship. “I always felt that you looked a lot more professional if you dressed professionally,” Mr. Katzman said in a telephone interview. “That the creative side of the business could dress however they wanted, but that agents were really representing talent, and they were the business side of the agenda.”

One veteran W.M.A. agent who wished to remain anonymous (the agency biz can be a bit like the Gestapo when it comes to the press) recalls attending a staff meeting during the Katzman era on the day before Thanksgiving. Because the agent was getting on a flight in the afternoon, he wore jeans and a black turtleneck.

Upon taking his seat at the conference table, Mr. Katzman, seated at the head, stared icily at the agent before asking: “How far do you live from here?”

“The question just dropped in the air. Everyone knew what it meant—that I should go home and change,” the agent said. “I was terrified.”

Mr. Katzman relaxed a bit when he was told about the flight.

In 1999, the bar at W.M.A. was lowered further with the arrival of David Wirtschafter, now president, who schleps around the agency’s hallowed halls in a positively Kurt Cobain–esque ensemble of faded jeans, work boots and flannel shirts, according to one colleague; another cited “flip-flops, jeans, athletic stuff—T-shirts and sweatpants.”

“He always did it, and nobody ever stopped him,” Mr. Katzman said. “I think that’s his personality.”

To the bewilderment of Mr. Wirtschafter’s colleagues, W.M.A. chairman Jim Wiatt, a sartorial stickler who’s known for his aversion to facial hair—“What are we selling, refrigerators?” the agent scolded one employee sporting a 5 o’clock shadow—looks the other way. (Mr. Wirtschafter, perhaps understandably wary after his unusual candor in a New Yorker profile blew up in his face, declined to discuss his style choices with The Observer.)

These days, W.M.A. agents are more likely to confuse Hillcrest for a hot new bar on Melrose. When it comes to clothes, they favor pale blue button-downs (staff meetings are often a sea of powder blue) and simple ties, affecting the look of overgrown prep-school boys whose weekend plans lean toward Palm Springs—as opposed to Vegas, the destination of flashier types from C.A.A. and Endeavor.

On Fridays, however, staid decorum gives way to misguided creativity. “The Casual Friday thing is a disaster, because a lot of people who try to do it—it’s pathetic,” said one high-level W.M.A. agent. “One of my associates comes in with white jeans and a big, oversized shirt—a long-sleeved button-down that looks like it’s his dad’s shirt. He looks like a farmer. He’s trying to look cool and hip, and it’s down to his knees …. The trick is how you pull off the casual part and look decent.”

Mr. Katzman marveled at the current relaxed environment. “Even Arnold was not a casual kind of person,” he said. “Casual Friday meant that you didn’t have to have a tie! It didn’t mean that you could come in in jeans and a T-shirt.”

(Luckily, we have Anna Wintour to whip these slackers into shape: high-rollers at William Morris received free copies of Men’s Vogue when the magazine launched earlier this month.)

Members of the establishment aren’t the only ones who’ve been rolling up their sleeves lately. In July, Paradigm—an up-and-coming agency that earlier this year swallowed Writers & Artists and has been rumored to now be eyeing I.C.M.—had its first-ever dress-down day. “People were mostly wearing a lot of jeans, polo shirts—everyone kind of looked the same,” said a spy. “You could tell right away who had some style and who just didn’t have a clue. A couple of people had flannel shirts tucked into their jeans—kind of dorky. It was revealing. A couple of the male agents looked incredibly thin, like a little boy. Very skinny.”

According to Leslie Kaufman, a personal shopper in the men’s department at Barneys Beverly Hills on Wilshire Boulevard, suits haven’t exactly been flying off the racks for her agent clientele in recent years. “The agency business used to be much more prominent,” Ms. Kaufman said. “With the advent of going to casual office days, there’s been a big change in the suit business.”

Whether the fall will bring an uptick in sales remains to be seen. “Our season has not quite started,” Ms. Kaufman said. “September just deals with Labor Day and the High Holy Days and the Emmys.”

Ian Daniels, who owns a discount men’s-clothing warehouse in Santa Monica from which he supplies agents and other Hollywood “clotheshorses” (such as the permatanned actor George Hamilton) with marked-down Kiton, Borrelli and Cesare Attolini garments, said that his clients are increasingly looking for “crossover” attire, or things that can be worn both at work and at play. Mr. Daniels is a strong believer in “casual elegance,” he said on a recent afternoon, looking like a 21st-century Don Johnson in an untucked pink Barba shirt, white Borrelli pants and Prada Sport loafers without socks. “I think there’s way too many guys running around in jeans and T-shirts,” he said. “Instead of dressing like grown men, they’re dressing like kids.”

Spit ’n’ Shine at I.C.M.

A few members of the old guard are still carrying the torch of formality. I.C.M. president Ed Limato, a flamboyant iconoclast who brings to mind both the late George Plimpton (whom he somewhat resembles) and Elton John (a client), keeps the ranks in line at I.C.M.—even though at his famed pre-Oscar party, Mr. Limato goes shoeless.

“I’m the holdout,” Mr. Limato said over the telephone in a baritone voice that allows no letters to escape unenunciated. “I wear a shirt and suit every day, and I expect everybody else to. As long as I’m here, that’s the way it’s going to be. It’s a business and you represent talent, and I don’t think talent wants to see their agents dress like their best buddies. I think they think of the agents as people who represent them. I think they want to see spit and shine.

“I don’t believe in—what did you call it?— Casual Friday,” he said disdainfully.

According to an observer, when Mr. Limato spotted a female employee wearing culottes once, he gasped in horror: “Clam diggers!” On another occasion, when an agent entered his office without any stays in his collar, Mr. Limato cried: “You’ve forgotten your bones today!”

When Mr. Limato spies an agent who doesn’t live up to his standards of tailoring, a company-wide e-mail is fired off, reminding agents that no day is Casual Day. According to several sources, Mr. Limato is also known for sending out e-mails directing that if agents’ window blinds aren’t fully deployed, they should be three-quarters of the way down, in order to preserve a look of unity from the sidewalks of Wilshire.

(Mr. Limato denied any fenestral preoccupations. “When you’ve been here a long time, you hear things that add to the color of the person,” he said with a chuckle. “There’s nothing to that.”)

Of course, boys will be boys.

“If Limato’s in town and you come in on a Friday, you’ve gotta be smart about it,” one mid-level male I.C.M. agent said. “Often I don’t wear a tie on Friday, and I usually don’t shave on Friday.”

He added, sotto voce: “I’ve had two days of growth and been able to get away with it!”

Said one former I.C.M. agent about the agent-suit relationship: “Jeff [Berg, chairman of I.C.M.] once said to me that one of the reasons he liked the company to dress up was that if a client makes $20 million a picture, then in the office that means we make $2 million off them. ‘So I think you can get dressed up for them,’ he said.

“All things agency-driven are anxiety-, fear-driven,” the agent continued. “One of those [fears] is that you might lose a client if the client thinks for a second that the person taking care of them isn’t dressed to the nines and a complete business man.”

But this fear may be unfounded. Luke Greenfield, who wrote and directed The Girl Next Door, and who is represented by Philip Raskind, an Endeavor agent and partner, said, “I’ve never seen Phil not in a suit, but if he did show up in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt, I’d love it. Especially in a creative environment, everyone needs to relax.”

He paused. “If he was dealing with my back-end [gross] and quote, maybe it would be a little disconcerting.”

Then again, not all agents are complaining about an enforced dress code. “I actually feel more comfortable in a suit,” said one U.T.A.’er. “I like a division between what I wear on the weekend and what I wear to work.” The Casual Friday hater from W.M.A. concurred. “I personally wouldn’t want to be repped by someone who wears a T-shirt,” he said.

Female agents have it both better and worse. On the one hand, they have greater latitude in interpreting the definition of professional dress. “As a woman, we have a teeny bit more leeway, because it’s not about always wearing a power suit,” said one Endeavor agent in her 30’s. “A woman can get away with wearing a great T-shirt and a skirt, whereas no man can wear a great T-shirt.”

Yet when the workday ends and it’s time for premieres or work drinks, women are stuck in their limbo attire—not quite banker, but not quite urban chic, either. “I never go out in my same clothes,” said one female I.C.M. agent. “I just feel uncomfortable. I always bring a pair of jeans and change in the bathroom. I’ll wear whatever—a blouse and blazer with jeans and my pumps.”

Joe Rosenberg, formerly of C.A.A. and now an executive at Radar Pictures, is one of those frowning on agents in T-shirts. “From a client’s point of view, they’re handling your business and they’re out there speaking for you, and I think you want someone to be, as a human being, professional in who they are and how they say what they say, but also to look the part,” he said.

On a recent weekday morning, Mr. Rosenberg paid a visit to Jack Taylor, the 89-year-old Russian-born Beverly Hills clothier, whose handmade suits start at $3,200. Black-and-white photos of former clients Cary Grant and Jack Lemmon were hanging on one of the shop’s walls. Legendary former William Morris president Abe Lastfogel was also a customer.

Dressed for work—orange cashmere sweater, faded jeans, gray New Balance sneakers—Mr. Rosenberg picked out fabric for a new suit and bantered with Mr. Taylor, small and natty in velvet slippers. Then the younger man left the store.

Seated at his paper-strewn desk, Mr. Taylor shook his head and closed his eyes behind his enormous Wassermanesque, black-framed glasses.

“Did you see him?” he said, his voice softly hoarse. “That’s the way they all dress. It’s terrible.”