Mr. Black may have been scathingly accurate in his assertion that he'd "talked to the numbers guys" and determined that the Gothams-which will air on the Independent Film Channel Sept. 25 and on Bravo Sept. 28-will be watched by 300 people. But just one night after a stultifyingly dull Emmys presentation, the party that has of late secretly been the industry's most relaxed and unscripted festival of insular back-scratching felt weightier than ever.

Always more profusely grateful to the likes of director-actor-writer Nick Zedd and Focus Features co-president James Schamus than to Steven Spielberg and Paramount chairwoman Sherry Lansing, the nerdy Gotham Awards kicks off the unglamorous IFP film market in Oscar-Siberia September.

But the industry's ungainly hustle to the starting gate in light of 2004's month-early Oscars has meant that Monday night's ceremony actually fêted filmmakers who already have horses in the race.

David Linde, the co-head (with James Schamus) of Focus Features, which released Lost in Translation , received a Gotham Award. The low-budget Lost , which was directed by Sofia Coppola, has produced the season's surest Academy bet yet-Bill Murray's performance.

As the Gothams' usual crowd of rowdies grazed and schmoozed during the cocktail hour before the festivities, the names of the movies that were being thrown around were films that will continue to be mentioned as we move through awards season: American Splendor for its lead performance by Paul Giamatti and screenplay by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini; the small but chilling Thirteen , for Holly Hunter's lead; and screenwriter and director Peter Hedges for Pieces of April .

Perhaps it was this sense of hope, or the summer success of small-budget films like Spellbound , 28 Days Later and Swimming Pool ; or perhaps it was the martinis. But the Gothams felt buoyant and cheerful-and much higher-budget than they have in past years.

Which is not to say that they weren't still earnest and self-righteous and incestuous. All of the usual suspects were in attendance: Alec Baldwin, Sigourney Weaver, Glenn Close, Steve Buscemi, Oliver Platt, Matt Dillon, Aidan Quinn, Rosie Perez, Matthew Modine, Fisher Stevens, Sam Waterston, Illeana Douglas, Olympia Dukakis, Giancarlo Esposito, Eric Bogosian, Denise Rich, James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, James Schamus. There was the god of punky New York cinema, Jim Jarmusch, and the criminally cute teen star of Roger Dodger , Jesse Eisenberg. And then there was Le Divorce actress Naomi Watts-who looked like she had some inner light bulb that was making her blonder and more translucent.

Once they'd taken their seats at the 100 tables set up at Pier Sixty, they supped on summer rolls with little glasses of cucumber dipping sauce; shrimp and scallops atop mounds of risotto; cinnamon mini-doughnuts and chocolate-dipped strawberries. The Turning Leaf wine flowed copiously.

"This is getting flashier," said Mr. Bogosian, who is in the upcoming film about porn star John Holmes, Wonderland . He was seated at the Lion's Gate table, which was very close to the stage.

He was waving his hand around the room to indicate the mingling crowd, in which the women looked shiny and bare-shouldered and the men looked like an army of dark-jacketed, bright-collared troops.

"Ten years ago, this thing was empty," he said.

Actor Alec Baldwin, there to present an award to ContentFilm co-founder Edward Pressman, sat next to his date, Nicole Seidel. Mr. Baldwin is currently surfing a wave of admiration for his performance in ContentFilm's The Cooler , which will be released on Nov. 19. Mr. Baldwin plays a compellingly repellent casino owner in the smart little Vegas movie, which also features a scene in which William H. Macy goes down on ER 's Maria Bello. Hello.

Mr. Baldwin is about to reteam with Mr. Pressman, who has produced everything from Conan the Barbarian to Hoffa to Badlands , to remake The Swimmer , the 1968 Burt Lancaster movie based on the John Cheever short story.

"As long as I have a movie being released [by Mr. Pressman] that is getting a good response, I am going to suck up to Ed as hard and as long as I can," said Mr. Baldwin. "I e-mail him with story ideas and script ideas on a weekly basis. I am not going to let this relationship go down the drain. Why do you think I'm giving him this award?"

Mr. Baldwin claimed, however, that even if he can participate in ritualized carnivals like the Gothams, he himself has become immune to the plaudits and the vicissitudes of his chosen profession.

"I'm 45. I've been doing this for 20 years," continued Mr. Baldwin. "I still love acting under certain circumstances. I love to do a play when it all comes together. But as far as the business part of it-success and failure-I actually feel like I've gone deaf and dumb to it.

"When a friend tells me, 'Man, you were great in that,' or 'Man, you're going to win something for that,' I say, 'Great-whatever happens,'" said Mr. Baldwin. "I really don't care about success in the movie business anymore."

At that point, songwriter and Clinton supporter Denise Rich came over and enclosed Mr. Baldwin in a bear hug.

The Gotham Awards, which features a full dinner before anyone gets onstage and round tables where unsuspecting actors can be seized from behind by eager networkers, are big on bear hugs.

They're also family-friendly. Lynn Pressman, Mr. Pressman's mama and the former head of Pressman Toys, who hovers near 90, was just behind Ms. Rich. She was dressed in a black sequined dress that was 20 years old, according to Ms. Pressman, as well as a fur stole and a black sequined wide-brimmed hat that she said was a copy of a Mr. John design.

"The thing about Eddie," she said immediately, without even demanding an introduction, "is that we wanted him to be in the [toy] company. But he didn't want to; he wanted to be a movie producer. So we gave him a little bit of space in the company, you know, he and his friends, and they made $75 a week or something. And you know Eddie went to Stanford and then the London School of Economics, and that's how he became a filmmaker. He made his first movie in London! And every day the bank called me up and said, 'Eddie's short!' Well, he was making a movie and I didn't know! So I gave him my beach house, and he had all of these actors-big actors, but of course no one knew who they were then-sleeping in my basement. And when they were done with the movie, they trashed my house! But it was the best investment I ever made. I lost the house, but Eddie became a movie producer."

It was about then that Mr. Black took the stage to kick off the awards portion of the evening and guests were asked to turn off their cell phones and settle down at their rose-petal-strewn tables. After his crack about the New York Oscars, Mr. Black insisted that the awards were not without glamour.

"I'm going to Jim Jarmusch's after-party," he said. "It's at Applebee's. And we are going to shut that Bee's down! Does the phrase 'all-you-can-eat potato skins' mean anything to you?"

Mr. Black then warmed up to some of the audience members who were seated at tables closest to the stage.

"We may never be in the same room again," said Mr. Black to Glenn Close, whom he called "gorgeous."

"And so I ask this with the utmost respect: Can I tap that ass?"

Mr. Black then introduced Mr. Jarmusch by reciting a list of things he imagined the Stranger Than Paradise 's dark director might say at a dinner party: "Do you know what this salad reminds me of? Death." And: "I bet Tom Waits would love this salsa."

"Tom Waits would love this salsa," said the lemon-haired Mr. Jarmusch as he presented an award to Steve Buscemi, whom he said he remembered waving to from the back of a fire truck when the two men lived in the East Village in the early 80's and Mr. Buscemi was part of Engine Company No. 55 in Little Italy.

As tends to happen at the Gothams, which purport to celebrate bare-bones, gritty New York filmmaking, a lot of the clips from Mr. Buscemi's reel were from Adam Sandler movies.

"If one more 9-year-old calls me 'Crazy Eyes,'" said Mr. Buscemi after thanking Mr. Sandler, in reference to the character he played in Mr. Deeds . "What, he couldn't have named him 'Normal Eyes' or something?"

Mr. Buscemi kicked off the inside-baseball vibe of the Gothams by joking: "I know what we all thought when we saw Stranger Than Paradise : sellout!"

In case you missed it, Mr. Jarmusch's esoteric 1983 film about a hipster New Yorker and his Hungarian cousin was not exactly Mr. Deeds . Mr. Buscemi went on to plant the evening firmly in familiarly incestuous ground, thanking practically every member of New York's film-and-theater underground cabal: Nick Zedd, Sara Driver, Willem Dafoe and Liz LeComte, Stanley Tucci, the Coen brothers and even the late Joe Strummer.

The cartoon-voiced, puggy Mr. Buscemi, who was in a blue-collared shirt, purple tie and black jacket, said that he was nervous while accepting his award.

"Not just about this-about everything," he said. "[President George] Bush and [French President Jacques] Chirac have this big meeting tomorrow. I can't stop thinking about it. I keep thinking that Bush is going to be influencing him in subtle ways-like playing 'My Way' on the stereo."

Mr. Buscemi's imagined political scenario went on to include an image of Dick Cheney dressed as a waiter, telling Mr. Chirac that he should pick from "Italian, ranch or freedom" salad dressings, before he announced that because his father was in the audience, he would "lay off the Bush stuff." (Tell that to William H. Macy.)

Later, Mr. Black returned to the stage and, when faced with introducing actress Naomi Watts, recited a poem: "Naomi Watts, you rock / You're smart and saucy / My second-favorite Aussie / Behind the guy from Men at Work."

Ms. Watts introduced Focus Features co-president David Linde, who was fêted with a reel of clips with congratulations from people like his Focus partner James Schamus, former Good Machine partner Ted Hope and Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola-who cryptically said, "He's been like a father to me all these years"-as well as clips from his movies, including Lost in Translation , Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , The Ice Storm and The Pianist .

American Splendor co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini won one of the only two competitive prizes of the evening, the Open Palm award. In their speech, they said that they had left New York after Sept. 11 to film their movie, and that they had at the time "wondered if it would still be here when we returned."

"And our movie opened on the day of the blackout," said Ms. Berman, "and so we are bookended by New York disasters."

They also have a movie with Oscar aspirations: for their screenplay and Paul Giamatti's performance, though he would be competing in the lead-actor category against Bill Murray. One of their fellow competitors for the Open Palm award was another long-shot Oscar hopeful-Peter Hedges, whose screenplay for his directorial debut, Pieces of April , is being talked about for an Oscar.

Mr. Baldwin next took the stage to suck up long and hard to Mr. Pressman, recalling that the "man who launched the career of the future governor of California" by producing Conan the Barbarian with Arnold Schwarzenegger "would do anything to get a film made," remembering a call he got one day from Mr. Pressman, who was drinking at 5 p.m. at a place called Whiskey-A-Go-Go with Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara.

"Whiskey-A-Go-Go at 5 o'clock in the afternoon in Los Angeles with Abel. That is a suicide run right there," said Mr. Baldwin, referring to Mr. Ferrara's fabled tippling prowess.

In his introduction to the director and producer team James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, Mr. Black joked that they would soon try to update their image by making How to Lose a Guy in a Fortnight and by casting Dame Judi Dench in a shot-by-shot remake of Jackass .

Mr. Ivory then took the stage and gave a thorough introduction to actress Glenn Close, instructing his partner, Mr. Merchant: "Ismail, you can say something later."

Ms. Close's film reel played to the tune of "With One Look," the glass-shatterer from her onstage run as Norma Desmond in the musical Sunset Boulevard , and featured one inexplicably long clip of the actress as a dung-covered Cruella DeVil in Disney's 101 Dalmations .

A scene from Fatal Attraction in which Ms. Close's character, Alex Forrest, asks Michael Douglas' character whether he expects her to like being treated like someone who can be dropped after one night of passion received a smattering of applause from the boozy audience, and it again became clear that the world is divided between people who believe that Alex had a point and those that don't. (That is: between women and men.)

After the reel played, Mr. Merchant made everything more mysterious by stepping up to the mike and offering "the congratulations of the 1.1 billion people of India to the goddess of cinema."

A poodle-haired Ms. Close then made the final speech of the night, thanking her friend and World According to Garp co-star, Mary Beth Hurt, who recently swam the Hudson River-yuck!-and her agent, Kevin Huvane of CAA.

After some fairly standard drama-school theory about how good acting is about reflecting and she's had incredible reflections and reflectors, Ms. Close got down to the real nuts and bolts of being an eccentric diva by thanking her dogs.

"I've forgotten all these people-and my dogs," sputtered the actress. "God, anyone who has dogs knows what they bring to your life. Gosh, our house is full of them! And when I brought Petey"-who played Flaubert the dog in Merchant-Ivory's Le Divorce -"to the set of The Stepford Wives , we had everyone playing fetch."

And so concluded the Gotham Awards, an event that remains unscripted, unpolished, increasingly fancy and determinedly nerdy.

As the crowd rushed out the door to openly paw through their gift bags-a rarer and rarer commodity these days-bow-tied professor- cum –Focus Features co-president James Schamus was being whisked through the scrum by Ms. Watts. The excitement on his face fought awkwardly with his professorial demeanor as he passed a friend shouting, "We're going to Bungalow 8!"

"They have different kinds of ambition," said Mr. Christensen about Anakin Skywalker (who about now should be one rattling voicebox away from turning into Darth Vader), and Stephen Glass, the disgraced former New Republic writer, whom the actor portrays in the upcoming Lion's Gate film Shattered Glass .

"Annakin's ambition is an all-dominating, rule-the-galaxy type of ambition," continued Mr. Christensen. "But yeah, they are both people who allow their sort of moral integrity to become questionable so that they can get what they want."

The comparison will flatter journalists who picture themselves as great protagonists in the epic sweep of history. But not since the pit-stained drama of All the President's Men -and the Watergate reporting that was its basis-has that picture been transposed to the silver screen with the dramatic effort of Shattered Glass . The film, which will be released by Lion's Gate on Oct. 31-but had its world premiere on Aug. 30, at the Telluride Film Festival-is set in the heart of journalism's roiling schism of self-love and self-doubt, and arrives in time to put a starry exclamation point at the end of a year in which that schism has taken up more self-referential column inches than ever before.

Whether anyone out there is watching-whether the last year's soft revolution in the fourth estate really matters to the public-remains to be seen.

Journalism: The Treatment

What a year it's been for journalism. First was the process of embedding reporters with coalition troops during the United States' invasion of Iraq, which produced almost as much reporting on the war as it did reporting on the reporting on the war. Then came the sad deaths of several journalists in the Middle East, including Atlantic and former New Republic editor Michael Kelly, who played a major role in the Stephen Glass story and is portrayed in Shattered Glass by Hank Azaria. But the self-flagellating climax of the media's year came in the form of Jayson Blair. The ambitious New York Times reporter's errors and lies led to the June resignation of top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, and shot Mr. Blair to the tippy-top of journalism's 10 most wanted list, above plagiarist Ruth Shalit, Pulitzer Prize–winning fabricator Janet Cooke and, of course, former New Republic scribe and con artist Stephen Glass.

His story, and therefore ours, begins long ago (1998) in a galaxy far, far away (Washington, D.C.), when a sparky young journalist wrote a series of too-good-to-be-true stories for The New Republic . Envied by his colleagues and competitors, Mr. Glass was a much-sought-after hotshot, juggling freelance gigs from Harper's , George and Rolling Stone . But Mr. Glass was making up his stories, and the fabrications made it past the magazine's fact-checking department and by Mr. Glass' mentor and New Republic editor, Mr. Kelly. Forbes "Digital Tools" reporter Adam Penenberg, whose investigation of Mr. Glass' story about a nonexistent hacker convention and an imaginary company called Jukt Micronics precipitated his downfall, comes into the story after he is chastised for not having gotten the piece himself. Expecting to find the story he had missed, he found the story of his career: a reporter for the vaunted New Republic making up every word of his stories. Mr. Lane, who took over TNR when Mr. Kelly was fired by publisher Marty Peretz, pressed Mr. Glass for explanations to satisfy Mr. Penenberg, and the two men wound up in a narratively satisfying dénouement in a Maryland hotel lobby, where a nervous Mr. Glass' elaborate stories crumbled.

A 1998 Vanity Fair article by Buzz Bissinger made it clear that Mr. Glass' downward spiral had itself become the story too good to be true. (The story is the basis for this movie.)

Mr. Glass went into hiding and completed his law degree. He resurfaced this year with his novel The Fabulist , about an ambitious journalist who makes up his stories. He also granted a clammy mea culpa – cum –book-tour appearance to 60 Minutes , and was rewarded for his time on the circuit with an assignment from Rolling Stone , one of the magazines in which his fabricated stories once appeared. (The same week, Mr. Blair received assignments at Jane and Esquire , a double-play that inspired struggling freelancers with its boldness.)

The Hollywood Reporter

Screenwriter Billy Ray, who had done a semester's tour of duty at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism before returning to his native Hollywood, was commissioned to adapt Mr. Bissinger's piece into a screenplay for HBO-completing the story's journey from The New Republic 's scrappy D.C. offices to the Death Star of the New York magazine world to the Great White Way.

A regime change at the cable network left the project dormant for several years. When Mr. Ray wrested it back from HBO, he teamed with Mr. Christensen and his brother Tove, who had also been entranced by the Vanity Fair piece. They took the project to Tom Cruise's production company, Cruise/Wagner, and got funding from Lion's Gate.

What they created was a quietly ambitious movie that takes journalism very, very seriously. At one point, a full two minutes is spent on an explanation of The New Republic 's editorial process. The Glass character describes to a classroom full of high-school students how a story goes through two editors and back to the writer, then through a fact-check, a copyeditor, lawyers, the publisher, production, and finally back through all of these steps again. He also explains how a dry policy story about ethanol subsidies can be checked for discrepancies against "the Congressional Record , trade publications, LexisNexis or footage from C-Span."

It's not often that an independent film could double as a J-school seminar.

Mr. Ray was also spot-on when it comes to the youthful strivers who populate the media. In a scene set during a party at Mr. Glass's apartment, one beer-swilling man observes to another, "If they stoop any lower, pretty soon you won't be able to tell the difference between Time and People !"

Har!

Jealous glances between co-workers as Mr. Glass gets phone calls from other magazines help to flesh out the needy insecurities of the film's characters.

One of the most poignant moments in the film-at least on the journo-narcissism meter-comes after just such an episode, when one of Mr. Glass's fictionalized female colleagues abandons her dry business-writing style and aims for Mr. Glass's breezy, beer-keg bardic rhetoric.

"Is that what you want, Amy?" asks the reporter's colleague, Caitlin (played by Chloë Sevigny), when she's read Amy's freshman effort to remake herself as a journalist with more flair. "To get a bunch of smoke blown up your ass by a bunch of editors?"

"Yes," Amy replies without hesitation.

Mr. Ray said that his efforts to capture the spirit of journalism were so strenuous in part because he wanted to "apply the standards of journalism to the writing of the movie." He flew to Washington to meet with Kelly and Mr. Lane and everyone from TNR who was willing to speak to him, some of whom did so "off the record."

"Billy would make a really good journalist," said Mr. Penenberg. "Even information you couldn't get as a journalist, Billy either managed to get or deduce" from talking to as many of the saga's players as he could.

What he came up with was a portrait of Mr. Glass that-as played by Mr. Christensen-is sweaty, anxiety-stricken, self-impressed and self-doubting.

"Are you mad at me?" asks the unctuous Mr. Glass of his friends and superiors over and over again, until an audience-of journalists or regular humans-will want to choke him with his necktie.

No doubt those same people will warm to the compelling characterization of Mr. Kelly, who cooperated with Mr. Ray on the project before his death.

"There are good editors and there are bad editors," Mr. Glass' character tells his rapt audience of high-school students. "My hope for you is that once-at least once-you get a truly great one. A great editor defends his writers against anyone. He stands up and fights for you. Michael Kelly was that kind of editor. He had that kind of courage."

Mr. Azaria plays Kelly with a muzzy warmth and solidity that seems to serve as a tribute to the late, great editor-and makes it hard to believe that the film was entirely written and shot before Kelly's death.

"Kelly is the most principled man I have ever met in my life," said Mr. Ray. "It's sickening that he's dead." Mr. Ray also claimed that the late Kelly "would never have seen the completed film" and was "desperate to see it derailed," since it told the story of how he missed the signs of Mr. Glass' fabrications.

Kelly's TNR replacement, Mr. Lane, is portrayed by the soft-maned Peter Sarsgaard as a humorless pill who is reviled by his young staff of Kelly loyalists. Ultimately lionized for catching and firing Mr. Glass, Mr. Lane served as a paid consultant on the film, visiting the Montreal set on the day they were shooting a scene in which the young TNR reporters rip him to shreds.

"I was two feet from Chuck, and I said, 'Do you want to stop watching this?'" said Mr. Ray. "He said, 'No, it's probably a pretty accurate description of what they were saying about me.'"

"I was worried that I was coming off as this stiff, humorless guy who nobody at the magazine liked," said Mr. Lane about his characterization in the film. But then he thought: "First of all, you are a little bit stiff and a little bit humorless, so just get used to it. Secondly, the movie reaches a conclusion that if it wasn't for this stiff and humorless guy, the magazine would have been much worse off."

The characterization of the prim Mr. Lane as the ultimate savior translates very well into Hollywoodese. We feel sorry for the obviously unpopular but attractive Mr. Sarsgaard, having to take over a viper's nest of overachieving children after Kelly's firing by a particularly Mephistophelian Marty Peretz, as portrayed by Ted Kotcheff.

"I'm not gonna sit around and be a bullshitter. If I come off well, I'm not going to complain about it," said Mr. Lane. "For me, personally, this isn't the bad episode. I can see that for some people-not just Mike or somebody like Marty, who obviously comes off very badly-it's not such a great thing."

As could be expected of fusty journalists unused to seeing their names in type larger than 10 points, let alone their Hollywood simulacra on a real movie screen, most of them are just psyched to be in the movie.

"My wife says Steve Zahn does me better than I do me," said an obviously impressed Mr. Penenberg, who spoke to the actor by phone during production.

"I just wanted to know how he reacted when he figured it out," said Mr. Zahn of his interactions with Mr. Penenberg. "I asked, 'Did you go "Oh my God!", or is it something you expect every once in a while?' And he said, 'No, man'-and he was talking in layman's terms for me-'this was a very big deal!'"

Anonymous sources

Mr. Glass' closest female colleague, Hanna Rosin, preferred not to have her name used. The result is that while the movie features 20-foot versions of Mr. Glass, Mr. Lane, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Peretz, Mr. Penenberg and even Forbes editor Kambiz Foroohar, the only actual woman played in the film is Mr. Lane's wife Katrina, who appears in approximately one and a half scenes.

The female characters played by Chloë Sevigny, Melanie Lynskey and Rosario Dawson are fictionalized amalgams of any number of peripheral characters.

"There weren't very many women at The New Republic , just as a plain fact," said Mr. Lane after thinking for a minute about this point.

Mr. Ray has another explanation: "There were a couple of sources that wanted to remain anonymous," he said. "Some of them were male, and the best way to protect their anonymity was to make their characters female. It also added to the notion subtextually that people mothered Glass."

Mr. Glass himself did not speak to anyone involved in the film, though an Aug. 21 Daily News item reported that Lion's Gate was so eager to have Mr. Glass' input that they offered him a job.

"I can confirm that the script was sent to Stephen Glass as a courtesy," said Tom Ortenberg, the head of Lion's Gate, "in case he wanted to make any comment. We sent it only as a courtesy. We never followed up; he never responded."

Mr. Ortenberg insisted that even if Mr. Glass had responded to the script, "we would have listened respectfully and acted appropriately in addressing any thoughts he might have had, but we never, ever would have allowed him to profit from this."

But why shouldn't he have profited? He was certainly allowed to publish his novel and promote it on national television. The kind of concern that Mr. Ortenberg and the rest of the team behind Shattered Glass are showing for journalism's rules-much as Mr. Ray had promised early in the project-comes off as sort of sweet. It's usually journalists and their readers who are obsessed with the scandals and mores of Hollywood players.

But if the lesson of Stephen Glass is that solid journalism, not popular success, is the high road, it's a lesson the filmmakers hope they don't come to exemplify. After all, popular success is what movies are all about. Will anyone other than J-geek Romenesko readers be able to appreciate the implications of Mr. Glass's ethical transgressions? Will they care about the delicately balanced relationship between Mike Kelly, Chuck Lane and Marty Peretz?

The filmmakers sure hope so. They're opening the movie in a mixture of art houses and multiplexes, and planning Oscar campaigns for Mr. Ray, Mr. Sarsgaard and Mr. Christensen.

"The story makes for a very good film, like a Brontë novel where the woman harbors a tragic secret," said Mr. Sarsgaard.

But it doesn't need to be Brontë. It just needs to be compelling. And it is.

No matter how freighted with inside-baseball LexisNexis talk, the movie traces the rise and fall of one hell of a needy kid. Journalism is a good place for those kinds of stories; the power of the recent Jayson Blair scandal should testify to that.

Even the players in the film, like Mr. Sarsgaard, realize that much.

"I wish it had come out three months ago," he said.

"I just want every little girl to know that the Upper East Side has magic. The park, it's magical, right?" she said. "The brownstones, the embassies, the architecture, those buildings on the park?"

Ms. Jacobs was describing her upcoming film Uptown Girls , which will be released by MGM on Aug. 15. The movie is Ms. Jacobs' story, more or less: The tale of a wifty social princess who becomes a nanny to a neurotic 8-year-old, the plot of Uptown Girls will be as familiar to viewers as Mary Poppins , if Mary's umbrella had accidentally run aground at Brearley.

Ms. Jacobs is not the star of Uptown Girls , nor did she direct it. Brittany Murphy and Boaz Yakin took those roles. In fact, Ms. Jacobs didn't even officially write the film; Julia Dahl, Mo Ogrodnik and Lisa Davidowitz were the scribes.

But it's her fairy tale-as old as It Should Happen to You or Breakfast at Tiffany's , as old as New York, perhaps; but new to every girl who ever steps up to the taxi stand at La Guardia Airport or Penn Station and breathes in New York's singular aura for the first time.

"As far as my life, if [the movie] was a strawberry pie, it was my strawberries and their recipe," said Ms. Jacobs, effortlessly plucking the metaphor from her girlish image repertoire to describe the "story by" and producing credits she earned for the movie.

And here's where it gets meta: While Ms. Jacobs' two-week stint as an Upper East Side nanny provided the narrative device for the film, the triumph of her life (so far, at least) has been getting this movie made.

Courtney Wagner, Ms. Jacobs' best friend from her L.A. days, called from the Four Seasons hotel where she and Ms. Jacobs were staying for the L.A. premiere of Uptown Girls .

Ms. Wagner, co-owner of Wagner & Ko jewelry design and the daughter of Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, said that watching the film is "like watching a friend be able to put on an art show of her personal triumph."

"If there had been anything annoying about the character, it would not have worked," she said. "But Allie and Brittany both just encapsulate this total individuality. And there is nothing annoying about Molly, just like there's nothing annoying about Allie. She is a true, honest person, also funky and great, but there's no baloney."

Dressed in faded vintage Levis and a cream button-down with pale pink embroidery, the 5-foot-2 Ms. Jacobs looked tiny and nearly transparent. Her translucent, freckled face resembles Katharine Hepburn's, complete with defined cheekbones, a sloping nose and a mass of red hair that she pulls into a top knot.

During a dinner of Cobb salad and Budweiser with Ms. Jacobs, it's clear that it's her fast-talking passion for Gotham-as-playground that has brought the Molly Gunn character-spoiled but not entitled, ditzy but wise, pretty but not bitchy-to the screen. Both Ms. Jacobs and Molly treat New York, with its designer clothes, exclusive clubs and mad romps in teacups at Coney Island, like a frothy drink that is mixed exclusively for beautiful, privileged young women.

In 1992, at age 20, Ms. Jacobs landed in New York City after having dropped out of Marymount College in Los Angeles and spent three months studying acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

"I had the time of my life, living on the Upper East Side, the Upper West," she said over dinner. "I had all these friends from L.A. Now most of them have moved back to L.A., but 10 years ago …. " She trailed off, remembering a time in New York which she called "way, way, way P.H." (for "pre-Hiltons").

"We went to Café Tabac every night, where I had the opportunity to meet so many different people. And after Cafe Tabac, we'd go to Bowery Bar and Spy and whatever, Moomba …. Now, I don't do any of that. Nothing. Never. I barely even drink anymore. I haven't had a drink in two months," she said, eyeing the bottle of Bud in front of her.

"I'm nostalgic about my past here," Ms. Jacobs continued, her eyes squinching into happy half-moons, her shoulders hunched with the giddy memories.

"I used to go parties at museums and stuff-and not that I have anything against them, but I was just so different. I'm an outsider. I was born an outsider," said Ms. Jacobs.

This ambivalence is worked out in Uptown Girls , as Molly's friendships with some of the tighter-laced children of privilege are strained. According to the film, the stuffier of Manhattan's socialites-the ones who have cookie-baking parties and at-home yoga instruction-are not ready for a free spirit with a pet pig.

Ms. Jacobs didn't have a pet pig. That's a Hollywood-exaggerated riff on her golden retriever puppy, who used to lock himself out of her apartment and terrorize her uptight, uptown neighbors, just like the movie's pig, Moo.

The puppy was also there when she met director Gary Winick, then 34, at a Ralph Lauren Polo store, "Double RL" department.

Ms. Jacobs was trying on a coat and Mr. Winick approached her, offering to buy her the coat if it fit her. It was too big.

"You'll grow into it," Mr. Winick told her, according to Ms. Jacobs. She retorted that she was 23 and wasn't growing anymore. So he asked her out-after he checked to make sure she wasn't an actress.

In fact, she was more of an actress than anything else.

It was a dream that had begun during her childhood in suburban Bethesda, Md., the daughter of a real-estate developer and a flower designer.

"I always wanted to be an actress, always, and I did plays at the Kennedy Center-at the White House," she said, at dizzying speed, about her days as a child actor.

Ms. Jacobs also started coming to New York several times a week for commercial and television auditions, firm in her belief that she was worth noticing.

"My mom was always, 'You're not the best dancer, you're not the best singer, you're not the best actress, but you've got something !" she said, perhaps channeling Baby June Havoc.

But something made her-right there, in the Double R L section, confronted by Mr. Winick-renounce her career.

"I was like, 'No,' because love is more important to me than work," said Ms. Jacobs with a firm nod. "So I guess because of love, I dropped acting."

Ms. Jacobs insisted over dinner that her choice to temporarily abandon her inner bug for a boy still makes sense to her.

"For me, love was everything in life …. And what I thought about love was that I can always do anything, but now I'm focusing on a relationship, [which] is equally hard work as a job-a good one, anyway," she said.

"But he was like, 'What are you doing?' He didn't get that. He thought I was a loser or something," said Ms. Jacobs. So she admitted to the young director that she was a thespian, emphasizing that she'd had both S.A.G. and AFTRA cards since childhood. Then, in an effort to get Mr. Winick to take her more seriously, she began to look for jobs like nannying.

Uptown Girls focuses on this period, plot-wise, though it takes some liberties. For one thing, it diminished the part about Ms. Jacobs trying to impress her boyfriend. In the film, Molly is forced into the child-care services when her accountant runs off with all the money left to her by her dead rock-star parents.

Also, Ms. Jacobs' first real-life stint as a nanny-to a "very, very precocious" little girl with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, who is the model for Uptown Girls ' Ray-lasted only two weeks.

But other jobs followed.

Ms. Jacobs stuffed envelopes at the theater company Naked Angels, and took classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse. She was a hostess at Jo-Jo, where she accidentally fell down the delivery chute. (She got the job because she ate there so much.) She was a telephone operator at the Mercer Hotel, had a brief stint at HSI management company and another gig at Network PR. She answered phones at Danny DeVito's film company, Jersey ShoreFilms.

"I almost took a job at E.A.T., but they wanted me to drive a bread truck. Can you imagine? A bread truck!" she shrieked about the posh East Side eatery owned by Eli Zabar. Ms. Jacobs doesn't drive.

It was around that time that Ms. Jacobs, through Mr. Winick, met Fisher Stevens, the actor, director, producer and former swain of Michelle Pfeiffer. She took him up on a job answering phones at GreeneStreet Films, the production company owned by Mr. Stevens and John Penotti, and during her tenure at the GreeneStreet switchboard, she paid attention.

"I saw Fisher hire this writer and tell him a story, and I saw Gary hire this writer and tell him a story, and I was like, 'Oh, I can do that,'" said Ms. Jacobs. "As long as I don't have to type it out! I have so many stories!"

"I would much rather sit and talk to a person than read a book to hear a story," Ms. Jacobs said. "Unless it's a book about Gilda Radner. Talk about a woman of positivity! That's the only book I've ever read in my entire life word for word."

Now, her first big story is hitting the screen-but much that made it possible has changed. She and Mr. Winick have parted ways; he's in production on Thirteen Going On Thirty , starring Jennifer Garner.

"I thought that if I had the love, if I found my family first, I could work on everything later. But"-Ms. Jacobs took a reflective bite of cake-"it just didn't happen that way, you know, so …. "

But the message of the movie, Ms. Jacobs said, fits better with her present circumstances than with the period of her relationship with Mr. Winick. What she went through in their break-up, and her realization that putting her ersatz life on hold for a man was not going to produce the happy family she wanted, is part of what she hopes Uptown Girls conveys to audiences.

"Growing up and becoming a woman is so confusing," she said. "For me, it was about when I realized that my light makes other people uncomfortable. By instilling a dimmer, I could make other people comfortable, but I was making myself miserable."

In the movie, she said, Molly has to learn to live without her downer boyfriend Neal. "Neal is really an asshole to her. He can't stand your bright light, and you're happy and fun and all you want to do is give and give love, and he wants to be career-driven. Whatever. When you become an adult, it's not going to be broken in you …. Never let anyone take that away from you, because I let someone almost take that away from me. And people said, 'Allison, you used to be such a happy person.'"

She's now at work with writers on two other screenplays she "created," as well as on a one-hour television pilot for a show called Bounty Hunting Babes , about some coeds whose loans are threatened unless they attend an accredited program which teaches, yes, bounty hunting. One of her neighbors, a " magna cum laude crazy-writer guy who has written so many screenplays," is helping her to revise her pitch.

She also picked up a single delivery shift at Westville, where we're eating. (It's blocks from her apartment.) Ms. Jacobs has, in fact, eaten there almost every day since it opened, and our dinner is her second meal of the day there.

"My mom and dad support me and believe in me," she said. "That doesn't mean I can buy a brownstone. And it doesn't mean you don't want to succeed and do things."

Ms. Jacobs smiled. "I always say I have a Birkin bag, but next week I'm going to be asking for pennies up in Harlem."

She produced this season's Louis Vuitton Murakami design purse and, from that, a Murakami wallet. She opened the wallet. Inside, it was naked: no credit card, no receipts, no Blockbuster membership.

"You can't see what I have in my bag," she said. "It's a little love, a little luck and a whole lot of faith." She grinned. "It's my tool box."

Mr. Lyons' hiring on July 14-as well as recent appointments made by DreamWorks and Fox-indicates that Hollywood is once again looking to New York for creative inspiration. In the late 90's, virtually every Los Angeles–based movie studio cut back or eliminated the New York–based creative and development staffs that mostly monitored the publishing and theater industries for film fodder. But now that trend seems to be reversing.

For instance, though Mr. Lyons will take the reins from Focus' previous chief of production, Glenn Williamson, he will not be taking his predecessor's office. Mr. Williamson was based on the West Coast, but Mr. Lyons-who has long worked in New York, both as a producer and a casting director for the Coen brothers, the Manhattan Theatre Club and Playwrights Horizons-will operate out of Focus' Bleecker Street offices, further bolstering the company's already substantial New York presence. The company's co-presidents, David Linde and James Schamus-late of the New York production company Good Machine-are both based in New York as well, and with so many high-ranking executives ensconced on the Hudson, Focus is beginning to resemble Miramax, the Disney-owned company that has dominated the New York film scene for two decades.

But Focus is not the only entity to be staking out Gotham real estate.

DreamWorks SKG, the Hollywood studio co-owned by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, is creating a New York–based development office by hiring Lisa Hamilton as its new book scout.

That job was previously done by independent scouts on a freelance basis. Ms. Hamilton, who has a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard, was most recently an editor at HarperCollins, and before that worked at the New York office of Mike Ovitz's now-defunct management company, Artists Management Group. She'll work out of an office on East 59th Street and Madison Avenue.

Ms. Hamilton confirmed by phone that she would be taking the DreamWorks position, but refused to elaborate on the details of her deal. A DreamWorks spokeswoman confirmed Ms. Hamilton's hire.

Over at Fox, another A.M.G. graduate, Drew Reed, has taken over a recently resuscitated position as Fox's New York book scout. Mr. Reed, who had been working for Forrest Gump producer Wendy Finerman when she had a production deal with Fox 2000, stayed on at the company when Ms. Finerman's arrangement was terminated and she moved her company to Sony. Mr. Reed declined to comment for this story. Representatives for Fox, which has not had a full-time New York development arm in three and a half years, confirmed Mr. Reed's hire.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. has just renewed a two-year contract with independent book scout Maria Campbell. According to a Warner Bros. spokeswoman, the company, which pulled its last full-time creative executives out of New York in 1998, is also in the early stages of considering expanding its New York presence by adding a mid-level creative executive to augment Ms. Campbell's work.

The tides that wash studios into Gotham and then carry them out again are as old as Hollywood itself. Interest in New York tends to reflect the industry's attitudes about the kinds of movies it wants to make, and its always-fluctuating relationship with the book-publishing industry. Increasing studio presences in New York, even in the form of a single executive, means that Los Angeles is sniffing around for source material on the pages of books and the stages of Broadway.

Mr. Lyons told The Observer that the current rush back to the city may reflect a mood shift in Hollywood.

"I think there is a little sense of exhaustion creeping in with all the high-concept action-sequel movies that have dominated the box office for the past year,' said Mr. Lyons. He did not mention titles, but could have been referring to movies like The Matrix Reloaded, Charlie's Angels 2, X2 and 2 Fast 2 Furious .

"I think it's one of those moments where we want to turn back to storytelling, and for that you come back to New York, back to the theater and to the book business," said Mr. Lyons by phone.

In the past, even one successful film adapted from a book-such as 1994's Forrest Gump , based on the Winston Groom novel-has sent Los Angeles–based moguls scurrying to the publishing companies that dot Manhattan.

But the fever inevitably breaks, as it did in the late 1990's, when Warner Bros., Universal, Sony, Disney, Lion's Gate and Fox Searchlight diminished their presences in New York, or shut their offices entirely.

The current rekindling of Hollywood's relationship with the book business shouldn't be too arduous, since publishing is looking more and more like the movie business every day. In recent years, many publishing companies have merged and been purchased by international business conglomerates in a process that has mirrored what's happened within the film business.

Then there are the summer blockbusters (J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix , Hillary Clinton's Living History ), sleeper hits (Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones ) and big advances (the $8 million for Cold Mountain author Charles Frazier's second novel).

Last year's great Oscar successes included New York–produced films based on books and staged work, including the Scott Rudin/Paramount adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours , and Miramax's adaptation of the Broadway musical Chicago . This fall, literary adaptations like Miramax's Cold Mountain , directed by Anthony Minghella, and The Human Stain , an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel directed by Robert Benton, are likely to garner attention and awards.

And we haven't even mentioned the third installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings .

But when the usually chipper Mr. Lee took the stage, he looked wary. Glancing out at his producing and writing partner, Focus Features co-president James Schamus, Mr. Lee said in heavily accented English: "I guarantee you that's the biggest independent film ever made."

Many in the room glanced uncomfortably from Mr. Lee to Mr. Schamus, whose doughy face, horn-rimmed glasses and ubiquitous bow tie make him look like a Keebler elf with a Ph.D.

With the June 20 release of The Hulk , a $137 million film about the Marvel Comics character, Mr. Schamus faces a complex reckoning. The screenwriter, low-budget-film pioneer, Columbia University professor and now studio executive's radically diverse experiences must gel perfectly. A summer blockbuster that he wants everyone to know is a really smart film, The Hulk will be Mr. Schamus' attempt to prove that a professor can make an action movie, that an action movie can be a thoughtful movie, and that a thoughtful movie can make millions.

Just six weeks ago, advance word on The Hulk was bleak. Press access had been limited, with one prevailing foghorn blaring Mr. Schamus' message- It's a smart movie! It's a smart movie! -with an urgency that led many to wonder how much the explosions must suck.

They don't suck.

The Hulk is a wad of Bazooka bubble gum for the eyes. Its spectacular desert shots and Marvel-accented wipes and cut-ins are arresting. Bruce Banner's transformations are satisfyingly violent moments of physical rupture.

No one should lose sleep over whether The Hulk will make money-even though some reports have placed the budget close to $150 million. Mr. Schamus is already at work on a sequel script, and the Variety headlines are probably already printed: " Hulk Sees Green!"

And yes, it's true: The Hulk is a very smart movie. If it doesn't quite leave us thinking about The Iliad and Nietzsche-as Mr. Schamus' recent New York Times piece nudged us to do-it surely offers a stunning lens through which to view a set of binaries: innocence and knowledge, rage and pacifism, the human and the inhuman.

But let's not get carried away. No matter how pretty or deep it is, it has its own binary to contend with: It's a big summer tentpole movie about a large green fellow who hurls helicopters to the desert floor.

"Releasing the no-expectation sleeper hit of the year is frequently a better feeling than [releasing] the single most highly anticipated [movie] of the year," said Lauren Zalaznick, who co-produced some of Mr. Schamus' earliest films with him. Ms. Zalaznick runs the TRIO network for Vivendi Universal, the same company that employs Mr. Schamus, as co-president of Focus Features, Universal Pictures' specialty-films unit.

Things Evolve

Until now, Mr. Schamus has been best known as the co-founder, with Ted Hope, of Good Machine, a film-production company that with Miramax, the Shooting Gallery and October Films, helped to transform the economics of moviemaking in the 1990's.

Founded in 1991, Good Machine's downtown offices gave birth to scrappy, inexpensive films by young directors like Todd Solondz ( Happiness ), Todd Haynes ( Poison , Safe ), Hal Hartley ( Simple Men ) and Nicole Holofcener ( Walking and Talking , Lovely and Amazing ).

The company's most reliable find was Mr. Lee, whose first film, Tui Shou ( Pushing Hands ) was co-written by Mr. Schamus, and produced by Good Machine. Eat Drink Man Woman ; The Wedding Banquet ; The Ice Storm ; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ; Ride with the Devil ; and The Hulk were all Good Machine movies, and Mr. Schamus had a co-writer credit on all of them.

In 1997, Mr. Schamus and Mr. Hope added a third partner, former Miramax International vice president David Linde, who founded Good Machine International, a division that made real money handling the international sales of movies like Talk to Her , The Apostle , and-improbably but lucratively- Bride of Chucky .

The new division helped its parent company remain technically autonomous for longer than most of its contemporaries. By the late 1990's, Miramax had been sold to Disney, October to Universal. In 2001, the Shooting Gallery folded in a flurry of finger-pointing.

But on May 2, 2002, Mr. Schamus and Mr. Linde stunned their film-world colleagues by announcing that they would merge Good Machine with Universal's specialty-films unit, USA Films. Mr. Hope would start a new production company called This Is That and have a first-look deal with Focus.

In The Village Voice , Anthony Kaufman called it "a date on which to pin our grief" about "the death of American independent film."

IFP/New York executive director Michelle Byrd, who has a vested interest in the proliferation and health of New York's small production companies, was not surprised at the move.

It was a defining moment. Mr. Schamus, after all, always had a stronger stomach for industry politics. Some even suggested that this move might lead to Mr. Schamus' ascension to the top of a whole studio like Universal.

"When one company is seen as a life force of an industry, it can only carry the weight of that mantle for so long," she said. "Things evolve."

"James Schamus is an incredible writer and producer and a man who truly loves movies," said Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein through a spokesman. "So it is only natural and fitting that he would run a film company. He and David Linde are terrific partners."

"James has always followed me slavishly," said a garrulous Tom Rothman, who has run an independent film company (Samuel Goldwyn), a studio specialty division (Fox Searchlight), and is now chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment.

In the course of his wheeling and dealing, Mr. Schamus maintained his reputation as Hollywood's resident intellectual. Fluent in Danish, he last year finished his Ph.D. on the Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. Taking pleasure in good cooking, good cigars and good Scotch, Mr. Schamus is very much the Upper West Side academic; he has lived in the neighborhood since 1988 and has an energy-efficient home in increasingly trendy (and edgy) Columbia County.

Director Bart Freundlich said that his most lasting impression of Mr. Schamus came during the editing on Mr. Freundlich's 1997 movie The Myth of Fingerprints . Mr. Freundlich remembered visiting the producer at home. The two sat outside on Riverside Drive with glasses of Scotch and talked about the films that they loved: Nashville , Five Easy Pieces .

"It was so hugely civilized," said Mr. Freundlich. "I know it sounds pretentious, but it wasn't. It was wonderful."

Richard Peña, Mr. Schamus' Columbia colleague who runs the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said that in December 2001, when the society celebrated Marlene Dietrich's 100th birthday by screening four of her films, Mr. Schamus was so excited that he called him personally.

"He just kept thanking me so profusely, saying that this has made his day, made his Christmas," said Mr. Peña.

An enthusiasm for Josef von Sternberg doesn't exactly guarantee a guy a seat at the Ivy these days, but Mr. Schamus' un-Hollywood demeanor is nevertheless accepted in a town where box office is the bottom line.

"The great thing about Hollywood, no matter what anybody tells you, is that it is an absolute, utter meritocracy," said Mr. Rothman, considering Mr. Schamus' unlikely dual role as urbane professor and Hollywood suit. "Nobody cares who you are, what you are, where you came from. If you make hits, that's all that matters."

Philosopher King

Mr. Schamus grew up in Los Angeles, and was briefly an undergraduate at St. John's College in Maryland. But the Great Books school, where students follow a prescribed course that includes Plato and Aristotle, didn't suit him, and he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. There, he almost specialized in Milton before going on to get his master's and eventually that Ph.D.

He was doing some adjunct teaching at Yale University in the late 1980's when he met Mr. Hope, then a script reader at New Line, and they began to build the partnership that would become Good Machine.

It was around then that he was hired as an associate professor at Columbia University. He created a class called "No-Budget Producing," which is still a part of Columbia's film curriculum. He has also taught classes on Hong Kong cinema, B-movies and the American western. His "Seeing Narrative" class, which is so popular that students must apply, requires reading Plato and Hegel.

Mr. Schamus, who lives with his wife of 14 years, acclaimed novelist Nancy Kricorian, and their daughters Nona, 11, and Djuna, 7, in a Columbia apartment-"He has great housing!" moaned Ms. Holofcener, the director and Columbia graduate-is still a full-time faculty member at the university, and his title is now "Professor of Professional Practice." Thanks to a special deal, he teaches a full schedule of classes in the fall and gets the spring semester off, and his pattern hasn't changed with his new job. Director of undergraduate film studies Annette Insdorf told The Observer that Mr. Schamus has volunteered to teach a senior seminar for the first time this fall, a responsibility that will require him to guide the projects of a dozen film majors.

"He uses his brain for good, not for evil," said Mary Jane Skalski, a producer who worked for Good Machine from 1993 to 1999. "He can talk to a 12-year-old about skateboarding stuff."

But a retiring, bumbling academic doesn't simply fall into a job as a studio executive.

"He's probably got the highest I.Q. of any studio executive," said producer Marcus Hu, Mr. Schamus' friend and frequent collaborator. "But he could be talking about something very intellectual and then just turn on a dime and he'll know all about marketing plans."

It's a thin dime. When asked once by a reporter whether his career had been accidental, Mr. Schamus replied: "I think the non-Darwinian approach to the narratization of one's professional life would stress the accidents-but at the same time, as we all know, if it is pure accident, then there is no narrative." A smarty-pants like that may be likely to rankle silicone-friendly Hollywood as much as he ups its average I.Q. statistics.

After Mr. Schamus' May 11 New York Times piece about The Hulk , a Variety story gently mocked him. After quoting a snippet of the Times piece about how The Hulk would provide "the opportunity to explore a particularly complex member of the heroic tribe," the Variety reporters wrote simply, "Whoah, dude."

And then there was the 2000 IFP/West Independent Spirit Awards, where Mr. Schamus gave an address- cum -film-seminar that had the sun-soaked audience rushing to the oxygen bar.

When Filmmaker magazine asked Mr. Schamus to reprint the address, he wrote that "since the speech was, if I do say so myself, a bit of a bomb," he would submit a revised version.

Mr. Schamus' printed speech now looks prescient.

Concerned with the growth of "super transnational global media empires"-likeAOLTime Warner- which had taken to releasing independent films, Mr. Schamus urged his cohort to stop "pretending to be storming the castle when in fact 'we' are inside it."

He also wrote of Todd Solondz's controversial Happiness , which was returned to Good Machine for distribution because "the Seagram company, which owns Universal … didn't want anything to do with the movie."

Mr. Schamus now runs part of that company, though Seagram itself was swallowed by Vivendi in 2000.

Mr. Schamus also suggested that his colleagues should worry "not so much about 'independent film'" as about independence itself: "the preservation of some form of civic space in which freedom of expression is … the exercise of a fundamental right."

Mr. Schamus declined to sit for an interview, but in an e-mail, responded briefly to some questions posed by The Observer . As for how his intellect is regarded in Hollywood, Mr. Schamus wrote, "My brain is tiny compared to [ICM chairman] Jeff Berg's."

Because Mr. Schamus declined an interview for this report, his Vivendi-Universal colleagues-including Universal Pictures chairwoman Stacy Snider, Vivendi Universal president and chief operating officer Ron Meyer, former Vivendi Universal Entertainment chief executive Barry Diller, Mr. Linde and Mr. Hope-also declined to comment, at Mr. Schamus' request.

Controlling the publicity around a major movie is not a unique endeavor in Hollywood. Nor is it unique for Mr. Schamus, who is known for his involvement in everything including the posters for any of the movies he produces or distributes.

A much-ballyhooed Super Bowl ad for The Hulk left fans fearing that their beloved creature would look like Donkey Kong-bulky but bouncy, altogether fake. Showing so much of the monster before the C.G.I. effects were finished was a mistake.

In his e-mail, Mr. Schamus responded to a question about the Super Bowl ad, writing: "The studio had an impossible task on its hands-how to sell a big summer blockbuster without having the film ready at hand. I think they've done a great job." Repeating a phrase he has used elsewhere, Mr. Schamus called the Super Bowl–age Hulk "a zygote."

His degree of involvement surely played into this year's Oscar race, during which Mr. Schamus found himself at the helm of a company with two real contenders, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and Roman Polanski's The Pianist . Far From Heaven had early buzz, especially for its performances, but lead actress Julianne Moore was also nominated in the supporting category, effectively splitting her chances of winning. The Pianist gathered unexpected steam midway through the Oscar season.

Focus was described in an April Variety story as having been forced to make "a Sophie's choice" between the two films, and as having "picked The Pianist " when it came to campaign support. Though a Focus spokeswoman maintained that the company gave equal support to The Pianist and Far from Heaven , weighing films against each other is a common responsibility for executives during Oscar season.

For Mr. Schamus, picking The Pianist would have meant a break from his past: His second film as a young producer was Mr. Haynes' Poison in 1991.

The Pianist scored major Oscar upsets with a Best Actor Award for Adrien Brody, and a Best Director award for the exiled Mr. Polanski.

Thousandth Limo

"Look, [making films with] no money isn't fun, despite the romance of it," Ms. Zalaznick said, reflecting on Mr. Schamus' rise. "You do it out of passion and ultimately joy and prestige. So now he's added money to the mix. That is an economic necessity. It's definitely a choice, but a necessary choice."

But, she argued, it is important to challenge the choices of any rising star.

"When you get out of your first limo you think one thing about yourself," she said. "When you get out of your thousandth limo you think something else. It's the film lovers' responsibility to challenge you. I don't think it's a bad thing to take the limo. And I don't think it's a bad thing to be challenged."

But perhaps the greater challenge for Mr. Schamus will come if The Hulk is judged a hit. Some old fellow-travelers in the low-budget film world will dismiss it as expensive hackery. Perhaps more importantly, there will be those in Hollywood who wonder how much money was left on the table, what with no sex and smallish explosions.

Quibbles aside, should The Hulk pass with philosophers and audiences alike, Ms. Zalaznick pointed out that Mr. Schamus will be faced with the hardest question that Hollywood asks of its most successful men: "Who do you want to be compared to?"

Ms. Zalaznick elaborated, "Is it David Puttnam? Is it Darryl Zanuck? Is it Irving Thalberg? It's all about the forever, you know."

The question is whether, when challenged, Mr. Schamus-writer, professor, producer, company man, family man, Dietrich fan-just might have to choose.

-Additional reporting by Jake Brooks

In July 2000, the Hollywood trades reported that Warner Bros., founded in 1923 by Jack, Sam, Harry and Albert Warner, would become the last of the major studios to create a specialty-films division devoted to the distribution of smaller-budget films. Yet almost three years later, Warner Bros. president of production Jeff Robinov, who took over the project from his predecessor, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, has yet to hire someone to head the fledgling division-though not for lack of trying.

Spurred on by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. president and chief operating officer Alan Horn's desire to complement his box-office receipts with some prestige-Warner will release two Matrix movies this year, but went home empty-handed at Oscar time-and filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who has a fruitful production deal with the studio but can't seem to get his movies properly marketed, the studio has intensified its search in recent months.

According to Tom Bernard, co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics, the little sibling to Sony's Columbia Pictures, the powers that be at Warner Bros. have called "every suspect available for a line-up."

The studio's short list has narrowed to Newmarket Films president Bob Berney and Scott Greenstein, who lost his most recent job, as the head of USA Films, in May 2002, when the company's owner, Barry Diller, renamed it Focus Features and hired Good Machine partners James Schamus and David Linde to run it.

Before those two, Warner Bros. twice considered former Miramax marketing chief and Los Angeles president Mark Gill. Mr. Gill negotiated with Mr. di Bonaventura in 2002 as his Miramax contract was expiring, but neither side was ready to put together a deal. The possibility was broached again in January, but Mr. Gill chose to remain with his new production company, Stratus Films. Mr. Gill, Mr. Berney and Mr. Greenstein could not be reached for comment.

Warner Bros. has also reportedly courted Sundance Film Festival head Geoff Gilmore, Fine Line Features co-founder and former president Ira Deutchman and former Artisan co-president Bill Block. And according to a recent article in Variety , New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell may have been considered, as well as Mr. Soderbergh and his production partner, George Clooney. Mr. Mitchell didn't return phone calls, and Warner spokeswoman Barbara Brogliatti denied that Messrs. Clooney and Soderbergh were ever really considered for executive positions.

And that's the extent that the studio is willing to discuss its executive search.

"It would be premature to talk about it now," Ms. Brogliatti told The Observer when asked about the studio's progress with its new division. She denied that the search had taken three years, calling the initial flurry of reports "pure speculation and fabrication," and said that the process had begun in earnest in February.

Ms. Brogliatti added that the Warner Bros. specialty-films division would be up and running "sooner rather than later," and only "when we find the right person."

Whether Mr. Greenstein or Mr. Berney fall into that category depends upon whom you ask in the film industry. Though Mr. Greenstein has a key supporter in Mr. Soderbergh-who liked the way Mr. Greenstein quarterbacked his USA-distributed cocaine opus, Traffic , to critical acclaim and Oscar attention in 2001-the currently unemployed studio chief tends to have a chafing effect on those who come into his orbit.

Mr. Berney, who last year released the independent hits Y Tu Mamá También and My Big Fat Greek Wedding , is known for his almost scary ability to identify and then market the hell out of a sleeper. His surprise move last year from I.F.C. Films to Newmarket probably means he'd have a hard time getting out of his current gig, even if he were offered the Warner Bros. job.

Like Buying a New Car

Part of the delay in launching the Warner Bros. division comes from the tricky definition of what it's supposed to do. Movies produced by this new arm will have a $15 million budget cap, and Ms. Brogliatti's first response to The Observer 's calls was to insist that the new company would not be a "classics division," but a "specialty-films division."

Aside from that, there are few clues as to what kind of animal the studio is looking to create. And, as Mr. Bernard suggested, if the studio brass hasn't yet defined the mandate of its new division, that will only make it harder to hire someone.

"Warner Bros. saying it's going to start a classics division is like me saying I'm going to buy a car," said Mr. Bernard. "I could buy a Volkswagen, a car that's broken, an expensive car. Until Warner's defines its business plan, no one has any idea what they're up to and whether it would be a desirable place to work. If they've described it to some of the people they've interviewed, and it sounds like a place that's not going to be comfortable for them, maybe [that's why] they are not going for it."

"Specialty film," like the term "independent film," is one of those murky, catch-all phrases applied to movies that have been produced for under $25 million and feature narratives about people instead of machines, employ few special effects and often compete on the film-festival circuit. These films also generally have a tendency to win Oscars.

As the chasm between these movies and big-budget tent-pole movies expanded, so did the differences between the strategies for releasing them. Entirely new companies were born to nurse these smaller films, and their importance to the film industry was ratcheted up nearly every year at Oscar time, such as when The English Patient took home nine Oscars in 1997, or when Miramax's Shakespeare in Love beat DreamWorks' Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture in 1999.

Throughout, Warner Bros. steadfastly refused to devote any part of its production or marketing structure to worrying specifically about the kinds of low-budget movies that companies such as Miramax (Disney), Focus Features (Vivendi-Universal), Fox Searchlight (News Corp.) Fine Line (a division of New Line, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, which also owns Warner Bros.), United Artists (MGM) and Paramount Classics (Viacom) had dedicated themselves to distributing.

Former Warner Bros. chairmen and chief executive officers Bob Daly and Terry Semel, who steered the studio through the 1980's and 1990's, insisted that the company was perfectly capable of tending to the needs of all kinds of films by using studio marketing mechanisms that had long been in place. After all, the big studios used to put out "quality films" just fine.

Warner Bros. movies that succeeded-at the box office and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion-under the stewardship of Mr. Semel and Mr. Daly included prestige pictures like Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and L.A. Confidential (1997), and such small films as Selena (1997) and Stand and Deliver (1988).

After the departures of Messrs. Daly and Semel in 1999, the studio's new leaders-Mr. Horn, who had come from Castle Rock Entertainment, and Barry Meyer, who moved from C.O.O. to C.E.O.-began to mull a new specialty arm. It was reported that they were courting Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Deutchman. Mr. Gilmore could not be reached for comment, and Mr. Deutchman declined to comment on the search.

Still, the company never got off the ground, and in the vortex of the AOL–Time Warner merger, eventually became dormant.

Recent developments, however, have put Warner Bros. under pressure to follow through on its plans.

Horn + Soderbergh = Pressure

First was the studio's now-annual back seat at the Oscar ceremonies. Mr. Horn declined to comment for this story, but he was recently quoted in the L.A. Times as saying, "With my tickets to the Golden Globes this year, they sent me binoculars."

With his gift, Mr. Horn probably had a pretty good view of Miramax's Chicago , Sony Pictures Classics' Talk to Her , United Artists' Bowling for Columbine and Focus Features' The Pianist racking up awards.

Additional pressure has come from Mr. Soderbergh, the man many credit with turning low-budget filmmaking into a new Hollywood business with his 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape . Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Clooney's production company, called Section 8, is based on the Warner Bros. lot.

Under the terms of his deal with the studio, Warner gets first look at Mr. Soderbergh's projects. But as the filmmaker's work has grown increasingly diverse, his recent pictures have fallen through the multiplex cracks.

Last year, Warner picked up Welcome to Collinwood , a caper comedy produced by Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Clooney. The film was not exactly Lawrence of Arabia , but it featured a cast of low-budget film fixtures that included Sam Rockwell, Patricia Clarkson, Jennifer Esposito and a cameo by Mr. Clooney as a wheelchair-bound safecracker.

Warner Bros., used to releasing blockbuster films on 3,500 screens, wasn't sure how to advertise a quirky comedy with a cast known for presenting at the Independent Spirit Awards. A poster for the film featured an antique postcard from Collinwood and the tag line "Five Guys. One Safe. No Brains."

Yeah. No box office, either.

The movie, which had a reported budget of $12 million, grossed a total of $333,000 before it left the theaters.

Next up for Section 8 was Mr. Soderbergh and Mr. Clooney's joint labor of love, the abstract science-fiction film Solaris . Warner Bros. passed on the movie, a remake of a 1972 Russian cult classic, which itself was an adaptation of a novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem. Twentieth Century Fox picked it up. An esoteric exploration of human identity and consciousness that polarized critics, Solaris might have been the kind of release that art-house audiences argued about over glasses of merlot. But art-house audiences never received the memo. Instead, Solaris was sold as a sci-fi skin flick, with a poster that used an image of Mr. Clooney and Natascha McElhone sucking face. Released on a mind-blowing 2,400 screens, Solaris disappointed fans expecting Aliens meets Out of Sight .

Another blow for Section 8 came with the release of Mr. Clooney's directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind . The film was purchased by Miramax, a company that knows its way around an eccentric low-budget picture.

But Miramax co-chairmen Bob and Harvey Weinstein save their best films for the last quarter of the year, carpet-bombing multiplexes with their arsenal of nomination-worthy fare.

Confessions , a likable movie adapted from Gong Show host Chuck Barris' "memoir," starred Sam Rockwell, Mr. Clooney, Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts. It was well reviewed. But it fell off the radar at theaters, where audiences were lining up to see Oscar contenders like Chicago , The Hours and Lord of the Rings .

The film was so badly trampled in the Oscar stampede that Miramax plans to re-release it this spring.

"We feel it was a crowded time," said Miramax chief operating officer Rick Sands. "But it's got a lot of potential, and we want to give it another opportunity."

T.L.C. for Eros

Mr. Soderbergh is now understandably invested in a division at Warner Bros. that can give the proper T.L.C. to his mid-size projects. And based on his current production schedule, that division had better be up and running pretty soon.

Mr. Soderbergh has taken over from Pedro Almodóvar as director of one of the segments of Eros , a collaborative exploration of "love and sexuality" which will also feature segments directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and Wong Kar-Wai. Then there's the Section 8 production Criminal , a remake of Nine Queens that will be directed by Mr. Soderbergh's long-time first assistant director Gregory Jacobs, with whom Mr. Soderbergh will write the script. These movies seem to be earmarked for Warner's new division.

It is perhaps a mark of how much Warner Bros. values its relationship with the prolific Mr. Soderbergh, who is also at work on Ocean's 12 , that they are scrambling to do his bidding and allowing him a hand in the selection process.

The proposed division would also allow Warner Bros. to create more binding and flexible relationships with favored directors like The Matrix 's Wachowski brothers, who made their directorial debut with the small-budget 1996 Gramercy Pictures film Bound , and Christopher Nolan. Newmarket released Mr. Nolan's low-budget 2000 debut, Memento , but when Section 8 produced his follow-up, Insomnia , Warner Bros. distributed it, and has now installed him as the director of its upcoming Batman installment.

But even if Warner's specialty-films division is carefully crafted to complement the studio's big-budget production apparatus, how it distinguishes itself in a multimedia conglomerate that owns not only Warner, but New Line-which has its own specialty-films offshoot, Fine Line-is another thorny question that Mr. Horn & Co. must answer.

Adding a specialty division to Warner Bros. could fuel the tension between Warner and New Line, which has escalated ever since the two companies began releasing installments of competing blockbuster fantasy franchises, New Line's Lord of the Rings trilogy and Warner's Harry Potter films.

But that kind of competitive tension can be good for business. As Ms. Brogliatti observed, "AOL Time Warner is a company that encourages multiple brands in the same category."

Only after Warner Bros. names a leader for its new division, and gets specific about the company's structure, will it begin to really compete for the first time with the other "brands"-both inside and outside the AOL Time Warner family.

Competing specialty-film companies, including Miramax, Fine Line, United Artists, Sony Pictures Classics, Focus Features, Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics, are run so differently that it's hard to compare or even group them together.

Based on any of these models, Warner Bros. could elect to create an arm that would produce its own small-budget movies, acquire independent features from other companies, release a mostly international slate, focus exclusively on marketing artier pictures produced by its parent company, or any combination of the above.

Even Miramax, the original specialty-film company, continues to evolve. On May 19, the company announced plans to produce big-budget tent-pole movies of its own, in partnership with studios and through equity financing-essentially reversing the Warner Bros. expansion model.

"We feel comfortable getting into the business of making bigger-budget movies, especially since the larger studios-and Warner Bros. is the latest example-are coming onto our turf, as long as we manage our risk appropriately," said Miramax's Mr. Sands from the Cannes Film Festival.

Paul Brooks, the president of Gold Circle Films-which, with Playtone, marketed My Big Fat Greek Wedding -described himself as "one of many people that has an opinion and has chatted generally with [Warner Bros.]" about the developing division. He told The Observer that the deliberation period hasn't surprised him.

"The reason that they're taking so long is that they are just very careful in terms of how they do business and how they set things up," said Mr. Brooks.

If taking their time means that Warner Bros. is taking the project very seriously, it may be good news for directors of Mr. Soderbergh's ilk.

"Warner's is the studio that historically let Stanley Kubrick do whatever he wanted," said one producer. "Here's an opportunity for them to let another generation of filmmakers take risks with them."

"I can't wait," said Mr. Pastore with a Cohiba-enhanced growl, adding that a good deal of his anticipation was due to the festival's closing picture, Paramount's The Italian Job. "I was in Serving Sara for Paramount, so Paramount puts me on the A-list, I guess.

"There's a lot of buzz about it, but I'm also excited it's here, at our festival. It's exactly what New York needs-a nice shot in the arm, you know?"

In it's sophomore year, the festival created by Tribeca Films' Jane Rosenthal and Robert De Niro is poised to be a pretty big shot. Those who follow the papers will know that it has signed up bigger sponsors (NBC and General Motors have joined American Express), more movies (200, according to press materials, which is approximately double last year's slate)-and, somehow, acquired Mr. Pastore as a vocal cheerleader. And suddenly Ms. Rosenthal, who has emerged as the real muscle behind the party, is beginning to look a lot more like an architect of New York's future-or at least its post–Sept. 11 recovery-and a lot less like the woman who produced Rocky and Bullwinkle .

But the festival's surprise slam-bang success in its first year has some skeptics questioning how Ms. Rosenthal can move the ball forward this year. The answer seems to be: with a mix of big-budget comedies ( Down with Love, Daddy Day Care ), a caper flick ( The Italian Job), some classics ( The Night of The Hunter, Once Upon A Time in America ), and a slew of gritty independents ( The Shape of Things , Pretty Dirty Things ). The festival will crank up the feel-good early 1960's-style frippery, and steer clear of the Sundance-style wheeling-and-dealing. There will be fewer Sept. 11 memorials, less Marty Scorsese, but more Al Pacino.

Mr. Scorsese, who seemed to be everywhere at last year's festival-remember the Food in Film panel?-is busy prepping The Aviator in California and Canada. His spokeswoman, Leslee Dart, assured us that "schedule pending," he's going to try to make it back for the end of the party.

Many of the films on the slate have already premiered at Venice, Sundance and Toronto. But that's fine by Variety editor Peter Bart, who said that Tribeca provides "more of a pure film experience. The merchants have not taken over."

Apparently, neither have the publicity wizards. One portion of the paper schedule decoded the festival's cryptic symbols as follows: *F means "Feature"; *D means "Documentary Feature"; *>2 means "Documentaries > 2."

But, hey-Mr. Pastore's not complaining!

When we asked him if he would be seeing anything besides The Italian Job , he thought for a second before remembering "Oh, yeah. My friend's movie!"

He rustled through the schedule and carefully spelled the name of Begonya Plaza, whose documentary Souvenir Views will screen on May 9.

"I'll actually be down there a couple times," said Mr. Pastore. "It depends on who else invites me."

For Mr. Pastore and everyone else who's wondering what invitations they should wheedle, here are the events that, according to our festival sources, are worth attending or avoiding. But it should be noted that, at press time, the schedule was still changing and some of the events listed may be either moved, canceled or sold out.

May 1

Don't be fooled by Tribeca's press department, which keeps hooting about the Tuesday, May 6, Down With Love premiere as the "opening- night" hoo-ah that kicks off the festival. On May 1, Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter and festival co-founder Robert De Niro-two men who have very different opinions about hair styles-host a kickoff dinner at the State Supreme Courthouse on Centre Street. What, is somebody expecting a lawsuit or something?

May 3

See May 1. The festival begins three days earlier than announced with a Family Film Festival. At noon, The Maldonado Miracle , directed by Salma Hayek, will premiere. It stars Peter Fonda, Mare Winningham and Rubèn Blades, and it's about a miracle involving a statue of Christ and an illegal immigrant. Somebody alert John Ashcroft!

If you prefer your children's fare Christ-light, check out Shaolin Soccer . The Miramax-distributed Stephen Chow comedy is supposed to be wonderful and features Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon minx Bai Ling, and made $60 million in Hong Kong alone.

[ The Maldonado Miracle : U.A. 5 at noon; Shaolin Soccer : U.A. 10 at 12:45 p.m.]

Saturday also marks the first day of the I Spy Tribeca Interactive Scavenger Hunt , recommended for children ages 5-9. Players will scurry around the neighborhood in groups, armed with riddles and workbooks inspired by photographer Walter Wick's series of books and games for Scholastic.

Hey, kids! I Spy fatty toro for $15 apiece! I Spy Bob (The Secretly More Intriguing Brother) Weinstein! [Tribeca Film Center, 3 p.m.]

May 4

Sunday features the sold-out world premiere of Daddy Day Care, the Eddie Murphy comedy that is as close to a sure-fire hit as anything at this year's festival. The film has tested through the roof, and its ubiquitous trailer-pee-pee on the ceiling!-has left audiences and Joe Roth's Revolution Studios shpritzing with hope.

"Our previews have indicated that it's for everybody, parents and the children alike," said Revolution partner Todd Garner. "Eddie is right back where people love to see him-funny and heartwarming."

Those of you whose funny and heartwarming memories of Mr. Murphy include his telling Bill Cosby to "have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up!"-not to mention co-star Anjelica Huston's turn as Maerose "Right here. On the Oriental. With all the lights on" Prizzi-will be as surprised as we were to learn that Mr. Murphy is now a veritable kid franchise, what with Dr. Doolittle I and II , The Nutty Professor and Shrek.

Daddy Day Care was one of the first festival movies to sell out, and producer Christine Vachon said, "That's the one I can't wait to see. [My daughter] Guthrie and I are there like the first weekend! That, and the pixilated fish movie!"

Alas, Pixar's Finding Nemo won't be screening at Tribeca.

For those who were shut out, the company that brought you Shakespeare in Love is here to present an alternative- Pokémon Heroes!

Not only will Miramax screen the latest movie about the weirdly species-ambiguous creatures, they will also present Pokémon characters roaming Tribeca's broad avenues. Give a wave to that yellow ball of fur streaking past you to get to Bubby's-it just might be Miramax spokesman Matthew Hiltzik in his Pikachu costume!

For Manhattan teens who get all smirky when they hear the word Squirtle, there's another offering: rock star Dave Matthews, making his film debut in the adaptation of Wilson Rawls' novel, Where the Red Fern Grows . But forget him! Dabney Coleman, next in line at the Bill Murray Career Renaissance Ride at Six Flags, is also in the movie.

[ Daddy Day Care: 2:30 p.m. at U.A. 5; Pokémon Heroes : 12:15 at U.A. 10; Where the Red Fern Grows : 10:15 p.m. at U.A. 4]

If you're over 12 and not a pervert, Tribeca might not be for you this weekend.

Consider marching across the Brooklyn Bridge-sing that Björk "Quiet" song like the Sex and the City women and see how many people try to stab you-to check out the Brooklyn International Film Festival.

On Sunday, catch the BIFF's grand finale: a screening of the Ben Stiller executive-produced Crooked Lines . "It's not exactly star-studded," said BIFF spokesman Matt Heindl. Pshaw! The film's stars-Colin Quinn and Burt Young-will be there. Mr. Stiller won't be.

May 6

The Black Filmmakers program provides a double bill of Spike Lee. At 6:30 p.m. is She's Gotta Have It (1986), Mr. Lee's breakthrough film. At 9 p.m., there's Do the Right Thing , the 1989 movie that you think about on every sweltering summer day in Brooklyn, or whenever you want to think nice thoughts about Danny Aiello. At 8:30, check out Charles Laughton's masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter , the screenplay of which was written by that master of bull's-eye brevity, James Agee. According to press materials, the festival is presenting a version replete with all kinds of cuts and outtakes. Hope that the "extras" don't include a mini-documentary on all the boneheads and ex-cons who were inspired to get "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on their knuckles after seeing the picture.

Those knuckles belong to the extremely creepy Reverend Harry Powell, played by Robert Mitchum, who does battle with Lillian Gish and a couple of kids and has loads of memorable lines, such as the one-sided conversation with God in which he says: "There are things you do hate, Lord: perfume-smellin' things, lacy things, things with curly hair."

The bad reverend also says, "Salvation is a last-minute business"-but if you're watching Mitchum at 8:30, chances are you weren't asked to be part of the rapture at 6 p.m., wherein Ms. Rosenthal and Mr. De Niro invite all their perfume-smellin' friends to the premiere of Fox's Down with Love , the kicky homage to Rock Hudson–Doris Day movies that stars Ewan McGregor, Renée Zellweger and the two spring peepers that reside in her cheeks.

Director Peyton Reed made 2000's smart, fun Bring It On . Down with Love reverses those priorities, but Mr. Reed makes 1963 Manhattan-the Pan Am Building, Brentanos, Ed Sullivan-as much of a character as Mr. McGregor or Ms. Zellweger, and boy, it feels good-even if, in his New York, the United Nations building sits across the street from Grand Central Terminal.

[ She's Gotta Have It : 6:30 p.m. at U.A. 2; Do The Right Thing : 9 p.m. at U.A. 2; The Night of the Hunter : 8:30 p.m. at Pace University; Down with Love : 6 p.m. at U.A. 5, 7:30 p.m. at Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 8 p.m. at U.A. 10]

May 7

Today, Tribeca resembles Sundance, with a host of much-talked-about independent films. Attention self-obsessed, self-loathing, self-abusers, have we got a cautionary tale for you! Turn off Six Lays, Seven Nights and check out Love Object , about a lonely guy who buys a $10,750 silicone sex doll and dresses it up like the object of his affection. Hey, didn't we see that on HBO's Real Sex ? Not this part: When his real crush starts talking to him, the deflowered doll is not happy-and who can blame her?

Ed Pressman, head of Content Films, which produced Love Object , said, "[Director] Robert Parigi is the new Brian De Palma." He should know. Mr. Pressman worked with Mr. De Palma on Sisters . Hey, didn't he say that about Wendigo director Larry Fessenden a few years ago?

Another midnight show, 28 Days Later -not to be confused with the Sandra Bullock rehab snoozer, 28 Days -wins this year's Grim Zeitgeist award. This thriller about an apocalyptic virus called "Rage" - not to be confused with the Scott Rudin employee-training seminar - concludes with a Q&A with screenwriter Alex Garland.

"It's just a paranoid film, a film about paranoia," said Mr. Garland.

Note to Mr. Garland: Don't get too friendly with festival attendees who show up for a 2 a.m. schmooze session.

For self-abusers of a different variety, there's My House in Umbria , another movie featuring Maggie Smith in Italy. See also: Tea with Mussolini, A Room with a View and The Honey Pot . No, wait. Don't see Tea with Mussolini .

You're already too late to score tickets for Step Into Liquid , the surfing documentary directed by Dana Brown, the son of Endless Summer director Bruce Brown. A screening of the film in Santa Barbara drew 4,000 viewers. And director Forest Whittaker, "a friend of the film," brought it to NoDance, the alternative to SlamDance, which is the alternative to Sundance - all of which take place in January and are pretty much becoming the same commercial rat-fuck so why don't you all get over yourselves already.

The movie doesn't just have incredible word of mouth. It also has megolithic financial backing from Microsoft, which Peter Newman, the film's producer's representative said will include trailers on 6 million units of product this fall as part of its bid to get into digital distribution.

And there's The Shape of Things , the latest in writer-director Neil LaBute's blood-curdling portrayals of relations between the sexes. The movie screened well at Sundance.

[ Love Object : midnight at U.A. 12; 28 Days Later : midnight at U.A. 10; My House in Umbria : 9 p.m. at Pace University; Step Into Liquid : 9 p.m. at U.A. 9; The Shape of Things: 6 p.m. at Pace University]

Today is the beginning of the very best and weirdest part of the Tribeca Film Festival - the Panel Discussions!

For those who just can't get enough of the warmth and wisdom of Mr. LaBute, welcome to Directors on Directing , a conversation between Mr. LaBute and Liev Schreiber. Expect Mr. Schreiber's small Jack Russell terrier, Chicken, to show up, once again throwing his sexuality into question.

[Directors on Directing, 8:30 a.m. at the Prada store]

May 8

Tribeca screens one of the week's most lauded films, Jim Sheridan's (My Left Foot ) semi-autobiographical In America . The movie got a great Toronto reception, but it's been kicking around for some time. You've probably saw previews at Christmas time, though the film won't open until Thanksgiving.

"It's been around for a hell of a long time," said Mr. Sheridan from Dublin. "[Fox Searchlight] wanted to release it this Spring, but I thought it more an Autumn film."

Mr. Sheridan will be here for the Tribeca screening, where he says he hopes it goes over well. "Sometimes, at film festivals, they like them to be more intellectual. This is heartwarming and optimistic. Sometimes people don't like that so much."

Oh, buddy, are you coming to the right festival.

Particles of Truth , directed by a woman - mirabile dictu! - is about the relationship between a woman dealing with her father's drug-addled decline and a recluse who spends all his time writing in a car.

"It's a nice car," said Queer as Folk actor Gale Harold, who plays the scribe. "I mean, it has really nice wheels and tires and leather seats and a sun-roof."

What you won't see today is Comandante , Oliver Stone's movie about Fidel Castro, which was yanked due to the changing political climate in Cuba. Whoops! Too late for the festival guide, which described the movie as "an incomparable snapshot - as compelling for what is revealed as for what is not." So canceling it just makes it more compelling, right?

"I thought that Ramones movie was fantastic," said Magnolia Pictures head Eamonn Bowles, in reference to tonight's screening of End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones . Mr. Bowles is in a garage-punk band the Martinets and said he's also heard good things about the other Ramones documentary, Hey Is Dee Dee Home , which showed May 7 at midnight.

Il Buono, Il Bruto, Il Cattivo , also known as Sergio Leone's 1965 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is fifteen minutes longer than it used to be, and if he makes it back in time, Mr. Scorsese's going to introduce it.

At 6 p.m.-hoo-ah!-Mr. Pacino sits down to talk about Chinese Coffee , his adaptation of Ira Lewis' stage play, in which he starred with Jerry Orbach and which has been an obsession of his since long before he started saying, "Hoo-ah!" Speaking of Pacino catch phrases, expect some wiseacre to start shouting, "And Harry, Jimmy, Trent, wherever you are out there, fuck you too!" Trust us, he's heard it before."

We almost forgot. Panel time! From the people who brought you yesterday's Directors on Directing comes today's Actors on Acting -paging Jon Lovitz! The panel will be moderated by Variety editor Peter Bart, and feature actors Paul Rudd, Helen Hunt, John Turturro, and the sublime (and newly erotic) Edie Falco.

Mr. Bart said that he'd moderated a panel last year and "found it was a really very stimulating audience. I liked the energy of the place."

Finally, tonight kicks off Tribeca's 1950's Style Drive-In on Pier 25. In this post-Lizzie Grubman-at-Conscience Point world, however, the press release for the Drive-In event, which is co-sponsored by General Motors, stresses the following: "pedestrian traffic only."

[ In America : 9:30 p.m. at Pace University; Particles of Truth : 9:30 p.m. at U.A. 16; End of the Century : midnight at U.A. 16; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly : 6 p.m. at Pace University; Chinese Coffee : 6 p.m. at Tribeca Performing Arts Center ; Actors on Acting: 1 p.m. at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center; 1950's-Style Drive-In: 8 p.m. at Pier 25.]

May 9

It's a slow movie day at Tribeca, but take a lunch break and catch the newly restored Barefoot Contessa with Bogie and Ava Gardner. Go back to work and feel ugly for the rest of the day.

Later, check out An Amazing Couple , the second installment of Lucas Belvaux's trilogy, all of which are screening here. Each film is stylistically different, but the characters are interwoven.

"There will be a character in one movie who's a real asshole," said Mr. Bowles, whose Magnolia Pictures is distributing the films, "but then in the next you'll see the events from his point of view." Sounds like a Ken Auletta story.

Tonight at the Drive-In from which cars are banned: Diner ! See Mickey Rourke before he had a little dog like Liev Schreiber's.

[ The Barefoot Contessa : noon at Pace University; An Amazing Couple : 4 p.m. at U.A. 12; Diner , 8 p.m. at Pier 25]

May 10

It's Saturday; do you love Tribeca yet?

You will by the time you've roamed the street fair , where at an American Express activity center-attention, Tom Ridge!-kids can create their own festival credentials.

But if you really want to have a laugh-hoo-aah!-at the expense of your 6-year-old, take her to Professor Pacino's workshop, where he'll be teaching secondary school students all about understanding, directing, and acting in Shakespeare. This will be followed by a screening of Looking for Richard.

Miramax's Dirty Pretty Things has garnered terrific reviews in Europe. Director Stephen Frears ( My Beautiful Laundrette ), at work in London on a television film about Tony Blair, said "I have no idea how it will do in America. You're so peculiar over there." As for what his film-which is about Nigerian immigrants making their way in London and also includes the non-Nigerian Audrey Tatou-is doing at the Tribeca Film Festival, Mr. Frears said: "I have no idea. You'll have to ask Harvey."

A message to all you boys who harbor obsessions with Jack Kerouac and dreams of driving forever and writing your endless masterpiece on a roll of toilet paper: Please stop dating; you're polluting the gene pool. That, and you'll probably dig today's documentary, Bukowski: Born Into This, about poet Charles Bukowski.

"There's this one scene where he breaks down and starts crying, and it's like seeing Darth Vader helping an old lady across the street or something, said Magnolia's Mr. Bowles, who's distributing the film.

You think it's heresy to remake the side-splitting Peter Falk comedy The In-Laws ? Blame the success of Tribeca Films' Meet the Parents . Imagining Michael Douglas yelling "Serpentine! Serpentine!" does make you want to cry, but at least his co-star Albert Brooks will be dodging the bullets. If it's all too sad for you, the original comes out on DVD on May 13. In the meantime, look for Mrs. Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones to steal the spotlight from both men-and anyone else who gets in the way-at the premiere.

[ Looking for Richard , 10 a.m. at U.A. 15; street fair, 10 a.m. at Greenwich Street; Dirty Pretty Things , 7 p.m. at U.A. 16; Bukowski: Born Into This , 5 p.m. at U.A. 5, The In-Laws , 8 p.m. at U.A. 5]

For the uber -nerdy, Law & Order producer Dick Wolf presides over a panel called Solving the Mystery: Forensics On Film. "Join us to explore the world of forensics on film," reads the press release. Join us to laugh our asses off at the nearest bar. The panel's sold out anyway. Meanwhile, our invitation to Stranger than Fiction: The Politics of Journalism & Film must have been lost in the mail.

Over at The Indies Go To Hollywood panel, actors Sam Rockwell and Patricia Clarkson, writer Kenneth Lonergan, and producer Christine Vachon will be jawing away while beanstalk lawyer/producer John Sloss "moderates," which is not a term that has ever been used to describe how Mr. Sloss finds distributors for his clients' films.

Tonight, hoof it to Pier 25, where the final drive-in movie is a Grease Singalong . If Mr. Pacino shows up sporting a pompadour, look out!

[Solving the Mystery, 1 p.m. at Tribeca Performing Arts Center; Stranger Than Fiction, 8:30 a.m. at Tribeca Rooftop; Indies Go to Hollywood, 10:30 a.m. at Tribeca Performing Arts Center; Grease Singalong, 7 p.m. at Pier 25]

May 11

It's Mother's Day, and we're almost done. But not before some of the wackiest events yet!

Before a screening of The Princess Bride , there's going to be a fencing demonstration in Icarus Plaza to launch the activities leading up to the Fencing World Cup on June 12-15.

Who had to sleep with whom here?

For your mother who loves Robert De Niro -a lot-there's the 229-minute cut of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time In America . For our editor in chief, there's more of Jennifer Connelly.

And finally, there's The Italian Job.

Actor Ed Norton fought Paramount chief Sherry Lansing tooth and nail to get out of this movie, but The Italian Job is getting some remarkably good word of mouth.

"When I got to Paramount as VP of Production," said Mr. Bart, "the first picture they were making was the original Italian Job . It was sort of a curmudgeonly caper picture with a lot of attitude. The heavy was Noel Coward, which is slightly perverse. I don't think this picture has got that special perversity."

Maybe not. But it does close the Tribeca Film Festival; [Princess Bride : noon at Tribeca Performing Arts Center; Once Upon a Time in America : 2:30 p.m. at Pace University; The Italian Job , 4 p.m. at Tribeca Performing Arts Center]

And yet, if you've noticed, the jockeying, spending and melodramatic inter-studio feuding that should be giving us succor has been strangely muted.

It's not that the movies are bad or few in number. On the contrary, 2002-at least in its last month-turned out to be a good year for fine films. "This is a year where there has not been a really clear front-runner," said Far From Heaven producer Christine Vachon.

The thing is, they're not really a feel-good bunch. Producer Scott Rudin told The Observer that his movie The Hours stood out as "irony-free" in "an era of mostly fluffy or postmodern tricky movies." But in truth, many of last year's finest practically beg for a Wellbutrin prescription, dealing as they do with suicide ( The Hours ), closeted homosexuality and bigotry ( The Hours and Far From Heaven ), bloody Civil War–era Manhattan (Gangs of New York) , America's troubled foster-care system ( Antwone Fisher ), naked Kathy Bates ( About Schmidt ), self-loathing writers ( Adaptation) , an evil, soul-sucking trinket ( Lord of the Rings ) and-oh, yeah-the Holocaust ( The Pianist ).

No wonder the exuberant, big-breasted musical Chicago is at the top of everyone's Oscar list.

But the depression factor isn't the only thing tamping down the spirit of the Oscar horse race. So far, it lacks the increasingly bitter infighting-usually involving Miramax and DreamWorks-that peaked last year over the biographical authenticity of A Beautiful Mind .

Maybe last year just tuckered everyone out, left too many Hollywood suits bloodied.

Or maybe it's that this year, one of the alpha dogs doesn't need to attack. Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein is sitting as prettily as he ever has. He's not the underdog that he was in 1999, when he shepherded Shakespeare In Love to victory over Saving Private Ryan . Four years later, he's armed to the gills. Miramax's lead picture, Chicago , is seconded by Gangs of New York , and those two movies are supported by a phalanx of backups that Mr. Weinstein could have used in a pinch: Frida, The Quiet American and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind . There's not a Chocolat in the bunch.

Mr. Weinstein even has a stake in his biggest competition: Paramount's Scott Rudin–produced picture, The Hours , which may have something to do with his quietude as of late.

These movies, along with Far From Heaven , are part of 2002's unprecedented weight on the East Coast end of the Hollywood seesaw. Sure, California stalwart DreamWorks is in the game, with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg on their books for Catch Me If You Can , but with none of the glitzy steam of past years. Disney, outside of its stake in Miramax, is out of the Oscar picture; Paramount is only around thanks to Mr. Rudin and his gang of smarty-pants intellectuals; even Universal is represented by its New York–based division, Focus Features. The former USA Films released Far From Heaven and The Pianist , and is co-headed by bowtied Columbia University professor James Schamus.

If you haven't noticed, virtually all of the films nursing an Oscar buzz were released in the fourth quarter of 2002. The classic Hollywood timeline has been in flux for several years, in no small part because of Miramax's habit of hoarding its "quality" pictures for December. But this year's Oscar December crush seemed more lopsided than ever, and the result has been the nearly complete exclusion of other well-regarded films from earlier in the year. What happened to Bebe Neuwirth's Best Supporting Actress buzz from the box-office dud Tadpole ? And what about The Road to Perdition , a movie that in other years would have its tux pressed and ready to go, but was unwisely unspooled in July?

This year, the end-of-the-year slate was so logjammed that even Frida and Far From Heaven -released in late October and early November, respectively-have seen their Oscar chances suffer because their "early" openings left them forgotten in the deluge of great movies premiering in the final weeks of December.

They're not the only ones who could feel shafted, either. George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind had good reviews, proven Hollywood glamour (Clooney! Roberts! Barrymore!), a rising star (Sam Rockwell), and a quirky pedigree ( Gong Show host Chuck Barris), but died on the vine, never generating the slightest bit of interest, Oscar or otherwise.

In this mean season, the smallest stumble can spell doom for an Oscar hopeful. "There are now so many prognosticators on the Web," said Nancy Utley, the head of Fox Searchlight's marketing department, which faced disappointment this year with Denzel Washington's directorial debut, Antwone Fisher . "With everyone handicapping the race, it's hard to account for the elements of mystery."

The Observer 's heat index attempts to quantify the unquantifiable-the buzzy paths of Oscar's leading contenders. After canvassing the studios, marketers and public-relations generators, we chose the 10 films that have taken their long, strange trips from the days of pre-release excitement to the crashes or crescendos that followed their premieres. We factored in box office, press, critics' awards like the Golden Globes, and local word of mouth.

Based on our calculations, put your money on Chicago , but don't count anyone out yet. Just this week, an article in the Los Angeles Times reported that Miramax was boosting the box-office takes of Confessions and Gangs of New York by piggybacking the films with free "sneak previews" of Chicago , which is in limited release around the nation.

Suddenly, it feels like February.

But that's about to come to an end. Though it's been two years since the Whitney ceased functioning as a kind of Blockbuster of American art for its well-heeled donors, the museum has since set a deadline of June 30 for all loaned artwork to be returned-which could leave some tony Manhattan apartment walls with questionable tan lines.

Whitney spokeswoman Mary Haus told The Transom that the museum's current director, Maxwell Anderson, and its board of trustees decided to end the art-loan program not long after Mr. Anderson took the reins from David Ross in 1998.

"Max got here in 1998 and realized the Whitney was one of the last to have this kind of program," she said. Later she amended her statement, saying the Whitney was the last museum in New York with a lending program, and that most of the city's other art museums had phased out such programs years ago.

In any case, since Mr. Anderson took over, letters have been going out to donors telling them that their privilege has expired. The program was grandfathered for two years, but the end of this fiscal year is the absolute deadline.

Ms. Haus said she didn't know how many of the Whitney's paintings were still outstanding, but she did say that, so far, the board has gotten no complaints from members.

At least one donor, though, was nostalgic about losing his favorite decorations. "I was very sorry to see [the program] go, because for years we've had Whitney paintings in our home," said Douglas Leeds, a former trustee of the museum and currently president of a marketing company called the Tori Group. "It's a wonderful program, because it allows art that's usually in storage to be seen. And it reduces the museum's cost, because to store art is very expensive," Mr. Leeds added. And the borrowers also had to pick up the cost of insuring the works they brought home.

When the program was in effect, donors would go to the Whitney's storage facility in Chelsea and meet an escort who would take them through the warehouse to choose art they could borrow indefinitely, or until the museum called it back to use in an exhibition. Certain works were designated specially for the loan program.

Mr. Leeds, for instance, had borrowed numerous Alexander Calder paintings over the years, and had just returned Randall Davey's The Start-Steeple Chase . "It was a perk for the higher members," he said, as well as a way of attracting new donors. Mr. Leeds added that during his 20-year membership with the museum, he would "rave to people about raising their membership level. They would get invited to all the parties and functions, but more importantly, they'd get to have an actual work of art."

But before the borrowers could invite their friends over to gawk at their new "acquisition," they had to submit to a series of understandably anal-retentive conditions set down by the museum. The Whitney would supervise the hanging of the painting in its donors' homes-nothing over the fireplace, in direct sunlight or with a picture light attached-and checked up on the artworks once a year. Fern K. Hurst, a Whitney patron, thought it was "wonderful to be able to borrow wonderful paintings, but I mean you can't touch it, you can't move it, you can't do anything to it," she said. "There are all these conditions on it."

But those conditions weren't always maintained once the Whitney's representatives left the premises-and, as Mr. Leeds admitted, there was a downside to the program. "In the world of museums, it is frowned on," he said. "At people's homes, art is not protected as well as it is in the museum. It's the general trend in all museums to do away with those programs."

It was also a huge responsibility for the people borrowing the works. They had to be fully insured, which is expensive. Also, "if people donate or loan works of art to the museum, then discover them in their friend's house, then they don't feel very good about it," Mr. Leeds added.

Indeed, Ms. Haus said that the Whitney's decision was part of a "sea change in the way museums are viewing this particular policy," because of concerns over how the artwork was being cared for.

"You never know how people treat them," art collector and Whitney trustee Melva Bucksbaum said of the works on loan. "We don't know how they're being kept in other people's homes," she added. Since the value of art has gone up so much in the past two decades, "from $5,000 or $10,000 to $200,000 or $300,000," Ms. Bucksbaum said it's become much more important for artwork to be kept in a museum setting-especially the collection's staples, such as the Edward Hopper pieces.

Indeed, the most valuable parts of the Whitney's collection were reserved for either the museum itself or for big corporate sponsors. Though Mr. Leeds had access to some Calders, he acknowledged that the "Edward Hoppers would be harder to borrow."

With another round of letters scheduled to go out to the stragglers this week, did Mr. Leeds think the end of the borrowing privileges would affect the Whitney's coffers? Not as long as the museum's cocktail parties keep coming. "People always took advantage of the parties more than the art," he said. "A lot of them thought it was a hassle to trek all the way down to the [storage facility] to pick something out."

-Alexandra Wolfe

Mol's Altar-ed State

Actress Gretchen Mol is getting hitched. Ms. Mol's publicist, Leslie Sloane, confirmed to The Transom that the actress is engaged to former New York Times reporter Tod (Kip) Williams, best known in Hollywood for directing The Adventures of Sebastian Cole and having previously been married to tall Dutch model, actress and "Bond Girl" Famke Janssen.

According to Ms. Sloane, Mr. Williams proposed to Ms. Mol on her 30th birthday, Nov. 8, somewhere "not on American soil." Ms. Sloane said that the couple-both New Yorkers-have been together for a year and a half, and that they have not yet set a date for the wedding. Ms. Mol, who rose to fame in 1998 when she and her nipples graced the cover of Vanity Fair for no apparent reason, is winging her way to Sundance for the premiere of her new film The Shape of Things , which Neil LaBute adapted from his play of the same name, which also starred Ms. Mol.

-Rebecca Traister

Blossom Gooses Bruce

On Sunday, Dec. 22, jazz singer Blossom Dearie performed at Danny's Skylight Room in front of an audience that included Vogue magazine editors Grace Coddington and Hamish Bowles, who were sharing a table with the bearded, kerchief-wearing photographer Bruce Weber. Mr. Weber took time out from his usual activity of photographing frolicking all-American muscle boys to write a piece on Ms. Dearie for the Nov. 10 New York Times Magazine . A blow-up of the photograph that accompanied the story-of Ms. Dearie seated at a piano next to a white standard poodle-served as a poster outside the door of the club.

According to one member of the audience, Ms. Dearie's set included such standards as "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top," "Peel Me a Grape" and "The Ladies Who Lunch."

But after the intermission, the audience member said, Ms. Dearie pointedly announced that her next number was "not about Bruce Weber" before launching into a song called "Bruce," about a hulking transvestite who has taken to calling himself Marie. The audience member recalled that the lyrics were "pretty funny" and included the line, "Don't be a goose, Bruce."

The source's own search for the lyrics of the song turned up the tune's composer, John Wallowitch, who could not be reached for comment.

-R.T.

'Springsteen Palace' For Sale

The smell of decay was already in the Asbury Park air when Bruce Springsteen sang in the title track of his 1975 album, Born to Run : "Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard / The girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors / And the boys try to look so hard." But 28 years later, the amusement park doesn't rise so bold and stark from the town that Mr. Springsteen put on the map, and the 115-year-old Palace Amusements arcade's last hope for survival may come down to a listing on eBay.

Save Tillie, the Palace Preservation Campaign-an organization dedicated to saving the Palace-has placed an "advertisement" announcing the sale of the Victorian carousel house, which is located two blocks from the Asbury boardwalk and was recently featured in Mr. Springsteen's "Lonesome Day" video. The price: $2.5 million.

Yet Asbury Partners, the joint partnership that currently owns the structure and plans to raze it, says that even if a buyer is found, there's no guarantee they will part with it.

"They don't have a right to sell it," said Larry Fishman, Asbury Partners' chief operating officer. "I have never authorized it to be sold on eBay, and I don't know if it's a realistic thing to do." Mr. Fishman said Asbury Partners intends to incorporate the "spirit of the Palace"-but not the building itself-into its redevelopment of the waterfront property.

After their heyday in the early 20th century, Asbury Park and the Palace Amusements fell into disrepair. In the mid-1980's, the property's penultimate owner, Joseph Carabetta of Connecticut, filed for bankruptcy and abandoned the property entirely. Last year, the Palace and 1.25 miles of the beachfront property surrounding it was purchased by Asbury Partners, a joint venture between MD Sass Municipal Partners of New York City and First New Jersey Realty Property Management of Lakewood. The company plans to give the site a $1.25 billion facelift that will include luxury condos, 450,000 square feet of retail space and a renovation of the historic Paramount Theater, the Convention Hall and the carousel section of the casino. On the demolition list was the 19th-century historic funhouse.

Enter Save Tillie, a national nonprofit organization that has been working to save the palace since 1998, when it was originally slated to be demolished. The outfit's name was inspired by Tillie, the dapper, toothy and slightly creepy clown painted on one of the Palace's exterior walls. Tillie's name was, in turn, a tribute to amusement impresario George Cornelius Tilyou, founder of Coney Island's Steeplechase Park, where the first Steeplechase face appeared in 1897. The Coney Island face was later destroyed in a 1907 fire. Tillie is believed to be the last surviving original Steeplechase face.

According to Save Tillie president Bob Crane, "The new owner has little interest in Asbury Park history and the music history." With the help of City Councilwoman Kate Mellina, Save Tillie managed to get a city ordinance passed to conduct a search, headed by Save Tillie, for a more historic-minded buyer.

Save Tillie has until April 23 to find a new buyer. With a non-negotiable $2.5 million price tag, $4 million to $6 million worth of renovations are needed to make the funhouse fun again-and the demand for abandoned amusement parks being what it is these days, eBay seemed like the way to go. The property was listed under the heading "Asbury Park Landmark-Springsteen Palace."

"We had 300 hits in the first eight hours," said Mr. Crane, who added that one response was serious enough to pass onto Asbury Partners. "It's sort of fun to have it on eBay," said Ms. Mellina. "Anything that'll bring attention to the palace is wonderful."

Even the Boss himself has joined the fight, contributing financially to the organization on three separate occasions. He's had Save Tillie come meet with him personally and used the palace in his "Lonesome Day" video, as well as on the cover of the single. But he's shown no interest in taking a crack at the commercial real-estate business and buying the building himself. "That is totally out of character for Bruce," said Mr. Crane. "We have never asked him to [buy the building], nor do we intend to."

If no one jumps at the offer by April 23-the final day of the ordinance-Mr. Fishman, who "believes that what the building stands for is more important than the building itself," need no longer consider an outside buyer. But "the ordinance doesn't say there'll be a bulldozer at the door on April 24," said Mr. Crane, who is confident that the developers will come to love Springsteen's famed Palace as much as he does. "I'm assuming that it's going to be saved," said Ms. Mellina. "It's one of the last funhouse buildings left on the shore. It brought people from all over the world to see it."

-Ronda Kaysen with additional reporting by Jerome Keel

Still Golden Girls

At the Planet Hollywood launch party for the NYC Pet Project book, four young men in extremely tight shirts were taking turns having their photo taken with the evening's biggest draw, Golden Girl Rue McClanahan.

"My friends are going to die," said one of the men.

"I watch you every morning and every night!" said another.

Ms. McClanahan, sporting a blue sequin pant suit and stocking feet, flashed a smile.

"Oh!" she said, "just like I watch Seinfeld every night!"

Later in the evening, the 68-year-old Ms. McClanahan-who has been married six times-reflected a bit on her long-term appeal among the gay community. "They have always loved the show, always loved my character, always dressed like the Golden Girls on Halloween," she said, shaking her head. "I don't know what it is about the show that makes it so popular with that particular group. I have always wondered."

Just then, a young man knelt next to the seated Ms. McClanahan and asked her to sign his copy of NYC Pet Project .

"I just love your work," he said. "Especially the episode where you bear a striking resemblance to Ms. Cheryl Tiegs, except your bosoms are perkier. I just relate to you so much!"

Ms. McClanahan raised an eyebrow at The Transom.

"That is just what we were talking about," she said. "Why do you relate to the show so much?"

The man again mentioned Cheryl Tiegs, but offered no further insight.

Perhaps it has something to do with Ms. McClanahan's acting itinerary. The actress said that she'd soon be heading to Miami, another homosexual hub, where she'll star with Mark Hamill-seriously-in a stage production of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks , which she said will come to Broadway later in the year. She's also got a new movie, The Fighting Temptations , with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Beyoncé Knowles, set for release in August.

By the time Ms. McClanahan finished talking to The Transom, she had some competition in the room. Several of the men who had been talking to the actress were now congregating on the opposite side of Planet Hollywood, where a flash of red ringlets announced the arrival of Broadway actress Bernadette Peters. The petite, poodle-haired actress had joined the party to talk about her pit bull Stella and her upcoming role as Mama Rose in Sam Mendes' revival of Gypsy .

"I toured in the chorus [of Gypsy ] when I was a little girl-I imagined singing all the songs, I knew it inside and out," trilled Ms. Peters, who was decked out in black ruffles.

It was tough to imagine the pint-sized, squeaky Queens native belting the part of big, bad stage mother Mama Rose every night. "It is a rangy show, and an emotional role, and it will be physically taxing," said Ms. Peters, before turning away to greet a firefighter.

-R.T.

The Transom Also Hears …

NY1 correspondent George Whipple III sat atop a table piled with photography books at Aperture magazine's 50th Anniversary Golden Gala at Sotheby's. "At these rich-people parties, you usually can find a bargain, but not tonight. You're not walking out of here with a photograph for $50," Mr. Whipple told The Transom. He was right. By the time dinnertime rolled around, many of the photographs that were being offered by silent auction had jumped from a starting price of $200 to more than $3,000-thanks, in large part, to the event's co-chairwoman, Susan Gutfreund, who bid up at least five of the photographs. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York Post columnist Cindy Adams and Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz were also in attendance.

-A.W.

"The M.L.A. is about a different kind of performance anxiety," Ms. Holdstein said with a laugh.

Two days earlier, nearly 11,000 English literature and modern-language professors had descended on midtown Manhattan for the start of the Modern Language Association's annual conference, the place where intellectual superstars like Stanley Fish, Elaine Scarry and Kwame Anthony Appiah share hotel space with hundreds of desperate Ph.D.'s interviewing for a meager handful of jobs. The jittery orgy of power, insecurity and angst is the other academy's answer to the Cannes Film Festival, except that as these strivers fan across the city between standing-room-only panels, instead of Anita Ekberg emerging from a fountain, they strain to catch a glimpse of aging Harvard nymph Marjorie Garber emerging from Barneys.

The bacchanal of the bespectacled was back in New York for the first time in a decade, thrilling all those Ph.D.'s who had really planned to find jobs near the city, until the job market crashed and that tenure-track spot at Ball State started looking pretty appealing.

But this year, as the stratified masses of academic hot shots and wannabes made their reservations at Esca (or Pasta La Vista) and scored tickets to La Bohème (or The Lord of the Rings ), even an alcohol-soaked weekend in New York did nothing to calm the anxiety. It was palpable among more than just the job-seekers. Tension over the future of the profession could be felt all the way to the top of the pecking order, in the person of dashing M.L.A. president, Harvard professor and well-known Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt, who in May sent "A Call to Action" to every M.L.A. member, asking them all to begin to face a growing crisis in their industry: The academic presses that publish their esoteric work are shrinking, even as the publish-or-perish system of academic evaluation and promotion continues unabated, forcing lit professors to do some painful reckoning.

'Please Don't Talk to Me'

As the lobbies of hotels like the Hilton, the Sheraton, the Parker Meridian and the Waldorf-Astoria were transformed into nerd villages, the streets of midtown were littered with women in bright prints and chunky jewelry, talking loudly about post-docs and Homi Bhabha. Clusters of young men pulled their ties tighter as they paced by the elevator banks at the Hilton, waiting for job interviews to begin, folding and unfolding portfolios they'd been rearranging for the last year.

For recent Ph.D.'s looking for positions in the fields of language and literature, the frantic surroundings of the M.L.A. convention offer the only dusty rays of hope. It's a bleak landscape for academic job-seekers in any field, but this year, a flyer in the conference press room trumpeted "the sharpest decline in Language and Literature jobs" since the 1992 recession. The total number of English-language jobs fell from last year's 983 to 792. Only half of these are tenure-track. These jobs are all that are available for the 977 people who received English doctorates in 2000-2001, not to mention the hundreds of frustrated job-seekers from previous years, on top of those with so-so jobs who are looking to trade up.

"Please don't talk to me," said a fragile-looking woman crowned in long, dark corkscrew curls who stood near the orange-lit ballroom known as the "job barn" in the Marriott Marquis Hotel, where she was about to be interviewed on Saturday afternoon-presumably by one of the lesser-endowed schools that didn't spring for a hotel suite in which to conduct their interviewing sessions. "Go upstairs and talk to the people who are already drinking it away."

Already getting soused in the Hilton lobby bar were a group of three friends who had met in the Rutgers Ph.D. program. Julian Koslow, a 35-year-old Milton scholar, had just completed a job interview for a university he wouldn't name. "That's why I'm wedged into my suit," said Mr. Koslow, who was practically gulping his beer and said that he was looking forward to "getting drunk with the hedonistic masses."

One of Mr. Koslow's companions was Ryan Walsh, who has not yet completed his dissertation on Shakespeare's history plays and will not be on the job market until next year. Mr. Walsh, in a comfy sweater, surveyed the hundreds of potential colleagues chatting each other up in the bar and lobby. He was a little slack-jawed.

"I cannot imagine having to do this," said Mr. Walsh, who said that at least the attitude of the conference was "high-tension, high-release."

Their friend Tom Harris said that he'd dropped out of the Rutgers program to become a private investigator, a job which he characterized as "involving long periods of boredom punctuated by terror." Mr. Koslow, looking calmer now that most of his beer had disappeared and his tie was looser, agreed with The Observer that this description also applied to the academy, except "there's less terror, more despair."

Across the bar, two Columbia University A.B.D.'s ("All But Dissertation"), Penny Vlagopoulos and Stefanie Sobelle, were drinking, smoking and chatting with Maurice Lee, a UCLA Ph.D. who scored his current job at the University of Missouri during M.L.A. 2000.

Ms. Sobelle and Ms. Vlagopoulos, who were there to support friends who were giving papers or interviewing, had been to several panels already and found themselves bugged by the fakeness on display at the convention. "People aren't willing to admit it when they don't know something," said Ms. Sobelle.

"You get the sense that everyone's in on some big secret that you're not a part of," said Ms. Vlagopoulos.

"Or that they're all playing a practical joke on you," added Ms. Sobelle.

A Call to Action

In person, M.L.A. capo di tutti capi Stephen Greenblatt hardly seems well-cast in the part of the bringer of bad news. A solidly built man approaching 60, with salt-and-pepper hair, he still oozes the engaged, articulate charm that helped make him a Wunderkind scholar at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1980's. In 1997, Mr. Greenblatt moved east with his second wife, Ramie Targoff, whom imaginative gossips claim is an heiress and a former Chanel model. Ms. Targoff teaches in the English department at Brandeis University and gave a paper called "Resurrecting Donne" at an M.L.A. session that she led, called "Remaking the Metaphysicals."

"My emphasis this year [as M.L.A. president] has been about M.L.A. and the larger world," said Mr. Greenblatt, his warm, crinkly eyes looking like they belong to a man who knows how to appreciate life's aesthetic pleasures. Sitting back in a chair in a conference room on Saturday morning at the Hilton, Mr. Greenblatt explained his position on the crisis in the field. "We should not be thinking about looking inward but about the ways that literature and the teaching of language are intellectually and culturally and socially part of the larger world."

To that end, he hosted a series of panels that featured some of his close friends and colleagues from other disciplines. One included historian Natalie Zemon Davis, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, anthropologist Clifford Geertz and philosopher Bernard Williams-not one of them a member of an English department.

"We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club," said Mr. Greenblatt. "It's as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories."

But as Mr. Greenblatt tried to demonstrate the warm fuzzy openness of a field long written off for its remote, abstract self-absorption, fear still rumbled under the surface of the convention. Much of it stemmed from the fact that academic presses, the profession's organ for self-expression-and for anointing the next generation-are in serious danger. Funding cutbacks have taken their predictable toll. Inter-library loan systems now mean that libraries buy single copies of academic books, while professors routinely Xerox course pack materials rather than asking their students to buy expensive volumes. And after decades of steadily increasing expectations about scholarly productivity, there's a glut of books about the narrowest and most specialized of subjects-books that might professionally appeal to only a small handful of an author's colleagues. Some presses are cutting their humanities lines, leaving fewer and fewer spots for which prospective scholars must compete.

"The day may have passed when a scholar can just sit down and say, 'I think I'd like to write about this ," said one senior professor with a number of books under her belt. "It used to be that if the work was good, you could just assume that it would get published."

Mr. Greenblatt, who served as a consultant for the movie Shakespeare in Love and who is considered the founder of the lit-crit school of thought known as New Historicism, is himself at the head of his generation's class when it comes to publishing:

He's the author of eight books, including Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Learning to Curse . Mr. Greenblatt has also co-edited The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare .

The fact that the academic presses have been so good to Mr. Greenblatt made his May 28 call to arms even more bracing. The letter, which suggested a rethinking of the system by which departments evaluate young scholars for tenure and promotion based on how many books they have published, elicited hundreds of e-mail replies.

"The response was remarkable," said Mr. Greenblatt on Saturday morning, as he delicately began to explain what was wrong with the system of academic rewards that had catapulted him to celebrity status. "Universities have had the perfectly reasonable expectation that to get tenure-which is after all a very big commitment and not to be taken lightly-they want to see evidence of scholarly creativity and promise. An official way of showing that is to publish a scholarly book-or two or three or 12."

Indeed, benchmarks for young scholars to publish in order to get tenure have increased over the years. "It used to be that you had to have one book," said Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist and friend of Mr. Greenblatt who was part of one of his panels. "Now the expectation is for two or three."

"The question is," said Mr. Greenblatt, "What happens if there's a skrinking of the possibility of doing this? What happens to a person who has a Ph.D. who is five or six years into an assistant professorship and wishes to publish something and the press that would ordinarily publish something like this says 'I'm sorry we're not doing that anymore'-what is that person supposed to do?"

Gods and Monsters

There was no doubt at the conference that Mr. Greenblatt is onto an important question. It's just that no one can agree how things can possibly get better. One tenured associate professor at a major university explained that the dearth of publishing options is a problem even after someone gets tenure. In order to get a raise, promotion or a job at another institution, a scholar in the middle of his or her career has to publish a second or a third book. And, she said, with the rumors flying around the conference about presses closing their humanities divisions, or cutting down their lit-crit lists, the panic was high.

The result, she said, was a new power structure.

"The academic-press editors are gods," she said. "Everyone lines up to talk to them, to pitch them. You've got two minutes to pitch your book. And if they snub you, it's debilitating. [University of Chicago Press'] Alan Thomas, [Harvard University Press'] Lindsay Waters. These are the celebrities."

The modest, white-bearded Mr. Thomas was having none of that. "That's ridiculous," he said, when The Observer asked him about his "god-like" status. "What we do is serve the people who really matter, the scholars. And basically I think that we feel that we are all in this together."

William Germano, vice president and publishing director of Routledge Press, acknowledged the trouble in publishing but placed some of the blame for the current situation back on the academy. He said that academics had to stop writing books the way they wrote their dissertations-and that maybe the dissertations themselves are not just too "specialized" for a wide audience, but just plain bad.

"Most dissertations are badly written," he said. "They could be written much better, they could be written with a clearer eye. They're based on proving that one has done homework rather than creating something that can be read."

Mr. Germano, who has just finished work on Marjorie Garber's latest and is currently editing books by Judith Butler and bell hooks, said that he "wanted the pleasure to come back."

"I think there is pleasure in reading intellectual stuff, but the page has to be on the side of the reader," Mr. Germano added.

A few booths down, a marketing associate at another press rolled her eyes. "Do you know how many people have left their dissertations here for someone to look at?" she said.

Over at the Stanford University Press table a few paces down, publishing director Alan Harvey was combating rumors that the press was eliminating its humanities lists. He said that they were only cutting back by about two books a year, and that they had fired two editors and let two editors leave without replacing them. The last thing to go, he said, would be the publishing program itself.

"There is an overall crisis in academic publishing and it's going to be nasty and hard to break," he said.

Mr. Thomas had just spent hours talking to writers in the massive exhibition hall where hundreds of academic publishers shilled their brew of lit-crit and cultural criticism to a voracious crowd. Standing before a book by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Chicago's Mr. Thomas admitted that "editorially, the conference has gone well."

Mr. Thomas was more than eager to address the problems plaguing his business, and he admitted that the competition he once faced to sign celebrity academics has now been reversed-the competition is actually to sign with him.

On Friday night, Mr. Thomas read a paper which, he said, had raised some eyebrows: He recommended changes in teaching habits-like cutting back on course packs, and asking professors to convey to their students the importance of buying books for their personal libraries-that would help.

"Academic publishing is the backbone of independent publishing," he said, his voice conveying an earnest concern.

The Fat Cats Weigh In

For every one of Mr. Thomas' ideas about personal libraries and course packs, there were 10 other propositions circulating at the convention about how to get out of the publishing crisis.

On Saturday night, Mr. Greenblatt hosted a 10:30 reception in the penthouse suite of the Hilton. It was a tweedy-swank affair, with a lot of name-tag-staring and furtive over-the-shoulder glances to see who else was in the room. Partygoers angled to get near Mr. Greenblatt, as his wife glided around the room in a fuzzy, off-the-shoulder, skin-tight lavender sheath dress with matching fingerless gloves. ("Literary theorists are often the snappiest dressers," as Ms. Holdstein commented the next night.)

Retired Princeton historian and famous leftie Natalie Zemon Davis, whom one conventioneer called "the haute couture Communist," was schmoozing in an adjoining room with Clifford Geertz. This was not her first M.L.A., she said, adding that she was mostly there because of her close personal and professional connections with Mr. Greenblatt.

She said that despite having labored in a different discipline, she was well aware of the challenges facing the M.L.A. "It's also been talked about in history. The problem, in all fields, is whether departments will take it seriously," Ms. Davis said, echoing the common fear amongst academics that it will take ages before a generation of scholars hazed by rigorous publishing demands will begin to shift its standards to ease the way for their younger colleagues.

When she was the president of the American Historical Association, Ms. Davis said, she advocated some radical ideas about other ways to produce a body of scholarly work.

"I think that for historians at least, making films-and not just documentaries, but historical fiction-could be a wonderfully creative way of thinking about history," said Ms. Davis, who herself co-wrote the screenplay for the 1983 French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre based on her book about 16th-century rural France."

Ms. Davis acknowledged that the collaborative nature of filmmaking could make it difficult for departments to evaluate the individual intellectual contribution of any one academic but, she said that the idea was worth exploring, as was the idea of working and publishing using other multimedia tools like CD-ROM's.

"I'm retired," said Ms. Zemon Davis, whose short silver hair matched her tailored red and blue suit, "so I'm no longer on committees that make tenure decisions. But we need institutions to begin to take these chances. Maybe places like N.Y.U. or UCLA," both of which have strong film departments, "could be at the forefront of something like that."

"It's going to take a while," said Ms. Davis about ways in which departments need to change their standards. "But they'd better start thinking about it," she added forcefully. "It's like the early days of printing," she said. "There were some scribes who were interested in new printing technologies, and others, theologians, who didn't pay it any attention. That was a big mistake," she said.

Descending from the party in the elevator, the University of Texas' well-regarded Mark Twain specialist Shelley Fisher Fishkin was practically beside herself about the publishing question. "It is a crisis!," she said, widening her mascaraed eyes. "We must think about what other things besides publication can make scholarship get recognized." Ms. Fisher Fishkin said that she tells her students to make a practice of taking their work to community groups, to make it more broadly accessible, and that she now tells them to write different kinds of dissertations than she did 10 years ago, with a view to what will be marketable, accessible, practical.

Princeton philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah also spoke of the necessity of writing for more generalized audiences in his Sunday morning panel, which he shared with Homi Bhabha and Amitav Ghosh.

One group that took a break from selling books in the exhibit hall applauded when Mr. Appiah, who writes for The New York Review of Books , among other publications, implored the crowd to write for broader audiences.

"Somebody had to say it," one marketing executive from a big academic press said, satisfied.

But Mr. Greenblatt wasn't so sure about what he called the publishing industry's "predictable smart-ass response" to the problem, which was the imperative, "write for a larger audience!"

"It would be great to sell a lot of books," said Mr. Greenblatt, "but you don't say to a physicist or a chemist, 'Write for a larger audience!' Any serious profession produces specialized work that is obviously not going to sell tens of thousands or hundreds or thousands, but a very small number of copies."

Yet some of Mr. Greenblatt's own propositions seemed hardly likely to produce earthshaking results. They included Internet publication, which he acknowledged "is not the magic bullet we'd like it to be," and giving stipends to graduate students to promote their acquisition of personal libraries and boost the book business. He was on potentially more revolutionary ground when he advocated placing an increased importance on the publication of articles in journals over full-length books.

But will anyone really do it? It's a switch in priorities that would have a profound effect on individual departments, which for years have been trusting the stamp of approval of other major institutions (Harvard University Press! Routledge!) to convince them that one of their own employees was worth keeping on. Instead, those same departments would have to make tenure decisions based more seriously on their own gut instincts about a candidate's talents, work-ethic, and (let us not forget) teaching habits.

It's easy, of course, for academic fat-cats like Ms. Davis, Ms. Fisher Fishkin, or Mr. Greenblatt, all of whom have curriculum vitae as long as their arms, to chat about alternatives to publishing books.

As Clifford Geertz said at Mr. Greenblatt's party, "It's been a long time since I've been in any danger of perishing."

The Kids Stay in the Picture

Back in the Hilton Bar, Maurice Lee continued to gossip with Ms. Sobelle and Ms. Vlagopoulos. His shaved head and hip glasses stood out in the dingy hotel bar. He had his own thoughts on whether standards for getting tenure will change, at least in time to help him.

"The M.L.A. can issue statements about shrinking publishing, and encourage tenure committees to change their standards," said Mr. Lee. "But as long as you have a large number of people competing for limited spots, how much is going to change?" He smiled grimly over his drink.

And as one slightly sweaty job candidate at the other side of the bar, who did not wish to be identified, said about Mr. Greenblatt's "Call to Action," "It's not as though Harvard is going to start giving tenure to kids who have fewer than two books.