Roger Ebert in 2005 (Photo by Scott Harrison/Getty Images)

When Roger Ebert died last week at age 70, it seemed that everyone had a story or a fond memory to share about him. It’s rare for a critic to be so beloved, but Mr. Ebert—much like Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011—had a reputation for kindness, even if his writing could sting.

“It’s a very sad day for anyone who cares about newspapers,” said Robert Kurson, who worked with Mr. Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times (and is also the brother of this newspaper’s editor). “I started out as a lowly agate clerk, but he was as happy to talk to me about the business and about writing and storytelling as he was the legends who had been in the game for decades.”

And so, as the news of Mr. Ebert’s passing spread, we took to Twitter and Facebook to mourn—which is what we do when famous people die. But for Mr. Ebert, the digital landslide of grief felt highly appropriate. Mr. Ebert—who, for better or worse, pioneered the “thumbs up, thumbs down” reviewing system with the late Gene Siskel—was a populist, and he embraced blogs and social media with zeal.

“Every medium he made use of was, above all, a tool of communication, a way of talking to people,” wrote A.O. Scott in a tribute to Mr. Ebert in The New York Times this weekend. (In 2006 Mr. Ebert lost part of his lower jaw—along with the ability to speak and eat—to cancer, and so the need to communicate was perhaps more pressing than ever in his final years.)

Mr. Ebert often responded to his fans by mail before electronic correspondence took over. Slate’s Dana Stevens, who, as a girl, asked Mr. Ebert in a fan letter how to become a movie critic and received a thoughtful reply, recounted such an experience on Friday.

“I know I am one of many people whose life was changed, not just abstractly but concretely, by Roger Ebert’s passion for movies and his conviction that talking and writing about them with other people (even pretentious 12-year-olds in suburban San Antonio) truly mattered,” Ms. Stevens wrote.

In his long tenure at the Sun-Times, Mr. Ebert—the first movie critic to win the Pulitzer Prize—was prolific, writing more than 200 reviews a year on average, and his cancer didn’t seem to slow him down. He published a memoir and a cookbook and wrote post after post on his website.

But in the last entry he wrote for his blog, which, as of this writing, has 1,001 comments, Mr. Ebert told his readers he would be taking a “leave of presence” to relaunch his website and review “only the movies I want to review.”

“The immediate reason for my ‘leave of presence’ is my health,” Mr. Ebert wrote last Tuesday. “The ‘painful fracture’ that made it difficult for me to walk has recently been revealed to be a cancer. It is being treated with radiation, which has made it impossible for me to attend as many movies as I used to.”

Mr. Ebert died two days later—46 years, almost to the day, after he started as a film critic at the Sun-Times—but he ended his post on an optimistic note: “I’ll see you at the movies.”

With relatively brief screen time in The Paperboy, Ms. Kidman takes over the film; a lurid mélange starring Zac Efron as a young man who stumbles upon conspiracy and evil, the film tips all too often, as did Mr. Daniels’s last effort, Precious, into excess. But the Australian actress, playing a past-her-prime beauty with a deadly attraction to things that are just plain wrong, clarifies the film’s Baroque obsession with violence.

In her polymorphous perversity, Ms. Kidman’s character humanizes the film’s nastiness. She puts a face on its obsession with the depraved, and through a conscious dulling of her intellect and her stock-in-trade melancholia, makes that depravity seem almost sweet. A scene in which she takes a near-naked Mr. Efron, 21 years her junior, into her arms and waltzes with him is the communion of two broken souls; when she urinates on him to relieve a jellyfish sting, it’s is an act of pure, frenzied love. “She gets her—she understands this woman,” Mr. Daniels told The Observer. “And she understands my insanity.”

That is precisely what, at least since her reinvention as a serious actress 11 years ago, Nicole Kidman does for every serious movie in which she chooses to act. She personifies the human consequences of directors’ intellectual arguments. And of all the actresses working today, she has the riskiest attitude when it comes to her collaborators. Among her contemporaries and past co-stars, Meryl Streep has winnowed her stable down to a few subpar directors who let her to do her thing. Meanwhile, few directors seem to have any idea what to do with Julianne Moore, who’s largely moved to TV. By contrast, Ms. Kidman has worked with Mr. Daniels, John Cameron Mitchell, Noah Baumbach, Jonathan Glazer and Lars von Trier, among other iconoclasts, and in each case she hasn’t merely been a part of an exacting vision, but pushed it to new places.

Part of her uniqueness, as has been widely observed, is her appetite for a kind of chic suffering. Before 2003’s Cold Mountain came out, New York Times critic A.O. Scott, in an essay on Ms. Kidman, noted of her characters, “Their misery is a sign of her independence, her courage, her victory over unpleasant circumstances, and our applause is the measure of our compassion.” This view of the actress’s career took into account her then-recent divorce from Tom Cruise and all the subsequent tabloid attention. In the years since, Ms. Kidman’s celebrity has dimmed—her name is no longer, as Mr. Scott’s put it, “inscribed at the very top of the Hollywood A-List.” With her name coming up only in the context of a paycheck movie, like 2007’s The Golden Compass, or a magazine spread on alleged plastic surgery victims (remember last year, when she claimed her beauty was natural, then admitted having used Botox by saying she’d stopped?), her audience’s compassion has waned commensurately. “Everyone was against hiring her. How could you hire her? She’s an ice princess,” said Mr. Daniels. “But those are the roles Hollywood offers you. They put you in a box. And she refuses.”

Through it all, though, she’s kept on trucking, with the loud flops of 2007 (The Invasion was the other one) reminding her that the Hollywood route is not exactly for her. There’s something deeply unsympathetic about Nicole Kidman both on- and offscreen. She’s uninterested, in a chilly way, in the give-and-take of Hollywood. Her Oscar acceptance speech for The Hours, delivered while wearing a deeply un-belle-of-the-ball, downright funereal black gown (granted, it was the beginning of the war in Iraq) and while taking out for a spin an increasingly, ahem, immobile visage, is a case study in elegant boredom. “Art is important,” the actress intoned. We may have really liked her, but did she really like us? During her two-year window of extreme fame, Mr. Scott argued that Ms. Kidman wanted to suffer for a broad audience. But the period since the fading from collective memory of her divorce from her famous Scientologist ex has proved that the more apt formulation might be that she wants a very limited art-house audience to suffer alongside her.

Her directors are, broadly speaking, known for contorting their performers into uncomfortable or compromising positions, and yet, in every case, Ms. Kidman has taken the initiative, pushing her movies further than, it would seem, even their directors intended. (Mr. Daniels said he was initially embarrassed before she urged him to direct her forcefully, at which point he told her she’d need to sit on a washing machine and spread her legs.) No moment in Mr. Daniels’s work, which has gained two performers Oscar nominations and one a win, has ever been so deeply felt as the scene in which his Paperboy star pushes younger women out of the way so that she might pee on Zac Efron.

So too do her performances in other movies push the bounds of what their directors might have intended: people remember Birth, her 2004 psychodrama about a woman united with a child she believes is her reincarnated husband, not for its directorial flair, but for a minutes-long shot of Ms. Kidman silently emoting as she watches an opera. The actress is feeling the consequences of the action more deeply than her director, who tosses away the plot of the movie in a dumb, poorly paced finale, and far more deeply than her audience, who greeted Birth with disdain and negligible box-office returns.

And consider The Hours, the film that earned Ms. Kidman an Oscar. Out of a triple-lead miasma in which two of the actresses, though credible, projected vague, early-2000s mumbly indie-film disdain for their surroundings, Ms. Kidman, playing Virginia Woolf, wrenched the film into melodrama through her sheer dogged commitment to the emotional, despite director Stephen Daldry’s clinical detachment. Or Rabbit Hole, in which director John Cameron Mitchell’s clear hope for another indie triumph—complete with animated interstitial segments—was waylaid by Ms. Kidman’s dogged earnestness in the face of losing a child. Or Dogville, in which Ms. Kidman, nearly alone among Lars von Trier’s long line of tortured leading ladies, manages not to transform into something more or less virtuous than that which she essentially is. Mr. von Trier’s other favored actresses, including Björk and Charlotte Gainsbourg, usually fall somewhere within a dull, nihilistic Scandinavian good-bad dialectic, whereas Ms. Kidman presents the sort of reactions a real person might have to being held captive and enslaved in an isolated Western town. Mr. von Trier’s films, generally, are meditations on broad themes, but with Ms. Kidman in place, Dogville became the story of a woman under duress. Amid a stream of postmodern ideas, she was, implacably, that most conventional of devices: a character.

Mr. Scott’s appraisal of Ms. Kidman’s career, for the Times, concluded that suffering was the essential element in bringing audiences to love and idolize her. Lincoln Center tributes aside, those fans have largely moved on after an unrewarding period between 2004 and 2008. Suffering is Ms. Kidman’s alienation effect—she manages to turn every picture she is in into a woman’s picture. Hers is a very particular talent, one not seen since the heyday of Joan Crawford, and Ms. Kidman’s icy public persona—buffed, polished and impervious to both age and negative press—is its perfect complement.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Ms. Kidman has never been a whiz with accents, and viewers of The Paperboy will have to forgive her tortured attempt at a Southern one. She’s never, in any sense, disappeared into a role (leaving aside The Hours, in which makeup and special effects rendered her unrecognizable). When she plays an American, as in, for instance, Margot at the Wedding, her Australian lilt comes to the fore, but it works as an aid to her portrayal of hauteur, rather than an impediment. It’s not range in the sense of breadth of possible roles that Ms. Kidman seeks—she can play a very narrow slice of the roles offered to 40-something actresses—but in the range as depth of emotion. And she has succeeded in conveying a shocking depth of emotion to an unfeeling audience in our post-ironic age. “I now know what those old-time directors felt like while working with Bette Davis or with Greta Garbo—one of the legends,” said Mr. Daniels. A director like Michael Curtiz would know exactly what to do with Ms. Kidman. As it stands, she’s had to make her own way—a vaguely defined mission that Lincoln Center honors even as audiences remain puzzled.

A. O. Scott: The Man, The Tumblr (Twitter)

Yesterday we wrote about the second-best movie critic fan Tumblr (besides F*ck Yeah, Rex Reed, of course): A.O. Scott Zingers. After noting that The New York Times' reviewer had only been quoted on the site twice this year, we sent a message to Mr. Scott on Twitter and asked what he thought of a whole Tumblr dedicated to his movie take-downs.

Imagine our surprise when we received not one but two responses from Mr. Scott regarding his fan page.

"Flattered and tickled!" The newspaper's chief film critic responded late yesterday evening, before following up with a quick, "tho when they don't update I worry that I've lost it."

We assuaged Mr. Scott's fears, as anyone who could write such a scathing take-down of Ted ("The sin...is not that it is offensive but that it is boring, lazy and wildly unoriginal") has obviously still got "it."

Really though, we read every A.O. Scott review secretly hoping he hated the film, so we can giggle over his  hysterically funny take-downs. (See: Shutter Island, perhaps our favorite non-Observer movie review of all time.) And now there's a Tumblr for that, too!

Updated too infrequently for our liking--seriously, if you are the owner of this blog, please allow us to send in submissions or at least take a look at F*ck Yeah Rex Reed to see how it's done-- A.O. Scott Zingers take the best one-liners of the critic's reviews and posts them without comment. A typical example will read something like this:

Semi-abandoned(only two updates in 2012!), A.O. Scott Zingers could be a great Tumblr...nay, a brilliant Tumblr...should it start aggregating a little more from its source. We call upon whomever is running this thing to start updating with more frequency...or at least post something from his review of Katy Perry: Part of Me, in which the critic deftly sums up the experience:

"You would not believe how much Katy Perryness there is in the world."

Mr. Scott will host a Times Talks panel with Mr. Crewdson in October and, at the artist's invitation, penned an essay to preface the eponymous book featuring the series.

"In my ordinary line of work I tend to keep a distance from the artists that I write about and not really talk to them and engage them, just because it's not really how it's done," he told The Observer, eyeing the room.  "It was really a treat for me to just kind of to be writing as a critic in a slightly different, more sympathetic way."

Mr. Crewdson was the man of the hour, with Gagosian photographers circling him to document his interactions, occasionally chatting with the throng ("Your hair is beautiful." "Oh, do you want me to turn around so you can take a picture of it?")

The photos on the wall were shot at the empty, decaying sets of Rome's Cinecittà movie studios — a departure from Mr. Crewdson's usually populated pictures, which are staged to look like stills from movies that never existed. "I just wanted to do something that felt very restrained and empty," he told The Observer. "Something that felt particular to the moment we're in, and I feel like these pictures reflect a certain kind of fragility and sadness, and beauty."

"I think this might be my favorite work of his," said Noah Baumbach, who made quite the entrance, accompanied by his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wes Anderson. "In some ways the artificiality almost makes them more real which is I guess what movies are like, right?"

The blurring of the lines can be, to use Mr. Scott's word, uncanny. "This is why, if you read the essay, it's got Freud all over it," he said. "I jumped into psychoanalysis, which is not my usual idiom, to kind of figure out what these pictures were doing."

As personalities poured in and out, the groups mingled. Mr. Scott could be seen chatting enthusiastically with Mr. Baumbach at one point ("We were talking about kids," the director later told The Observer). Among the attendees was the writer James Frey, and The Observer asked him what he's been up to.

"Working away, man," he said, chewing a green piece of gum. "Got a book coming out in April. It's about the messiah."

Is it a novel?  

"Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't really matter," he chewed. "I don't care what people call it, it's just a book. Doesn't matter."

Sanctuary runs at the Gagosian Gallery through October 30.

dduray@observer.com

Reason No. 68 why the disconnect between film critics and moviegoers is bigger than ever: The elitism of the old guard. Over the course of the past week, well known and nominally intelligent film critics Roger Ebert and A.O. Scott both wrote that the decline of the film industry is in direct proportion to the increasing stupidity of the audience. (Jeffrey Wells, hysterical blogger and all around curmudgeon, had written the same thing previously, albeit in more breathlessly hyperbolic terms.) Apparently, if you thought the culture war was reserved for political campaigns and Fox News talking heads, you were mistaken.

Of course, the funny thing is that these critics are waging this culture war on what seems like the entire population of the United States. Their consternation lies mostly with the wild success of two movies: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. The latter, with close to $400 million in total grosses is one of the worst reviewed movies in the history of Hollywood to reach such lofty financial heights; the former was famously left unscreened for major film critics and scored a $54 million opening over this past weekend despite that fact. To Messrs. Scott and Ebert, the thinking seems to be that if crappy movies are making big bucks, the audience—particularly the young and impressionable—are to blame. (Mr. Ebert has even gone so far as to say that film critics are more “evolved” than regular moviegoers; this from the man who gave Knowing four-stars [Editor's Note: Some of us here also think that Knowing is pretty awesome.]). What other reason could there be for the perceived “failures” of ostensibly highbrow films like Public Enemies and The Hurt Locker, two critically beloved summer entries that have supposedly underwhelmed? Never mind that Public Enemies is actually kind of successful (Michael Mann’s gangland epic has grossed $94 million to date) and The Hurt Locker hasn’t been shown in more than 535 theaters at any point this summer (by contrast, G.I. Joe opened in over 4,000 theaters). The real reason Hollywood continues to put out a crappy product is because of you! This is all your fault.

And therein lies the problem: It’s not your fault! Was it your fault when Slumdog Millionaire grossed well over $100 million, or when Up and Star Trek, two of the best reviewed movies of the year, grossed over $250 million, each? Sure some great movies (like The Hurt Locker) will inevitably fall through the cracks, but most of the time, we audience members do see the good movies, if we’re given the opportunity. Of course, we see the crap movies too. That’s issue with these film critics: Somewhere along the way they forgot that people just fundamentally like going to the movies. This has nothing to do with intellect—or lack thereof—but a wish to escape the rigors of daily life for a couple of hours. The person who paid to see G.I. Joe this weekend isn’t necessarily dumb, just like the one who paid to see The Hurt Locker isn’t necessarily a Rhodes scholar. It’s time to separate the quality of the films from their paying audiences. The sooner film critics do this, the better.

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

David Denby, The New Yorker:

Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post:

Buried in Mr. Scott's take on what some people wryly call "Shoah Business" is an intriguing aside:

Whom can Mr. Scott be referring to? We have no clue. But in a September 16, 2005 review of a movie adaptation of an award-winning magic-realist novel by a young writer whose name, while it escapes us, seems synonymous with 'clever', Mr. Scott wrote:

Mr. Schaeffer, who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, seemed on the verge of a charmed career after his first movie, My Life's in Turnaround , was all the rage at the Sundance Film Festival in 1993. The critics liked him. But since then-through such films as If Lucy Fell and Fall -Mr. Schaeffer has suffered the slings and arrows of one vile review after another.

His latest movie, Wirey Spindell , didn't win him any new fans among the reviewers. The New York Times called it "banal, boring and confusing." The New York Post , in a zero-star review, made special note of its "inane dialogue, poor acting, static camera work and lethargic pacing," adding that it could be "the worst movie of 2000." According to The Hollywood Reporter , Wirey Spindell was a "particularly tasteless, self-indulgent affair." The Orange County Register called the movie "narcissistic and self-indulgent." The Village Voice renamed it Faulty Wirey .

"They're just working out their own personal shit," said Mr. Schaeffer over lunch at the Utopia Diner on Amsterdam Avenue. "It's like they're killing the messenger, because the message is too awkward and difficult for them to handle. That's what I've found. Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus, it's all about turning the light on yourself."

Mr. Schaeffer, 38, grew up in an apartment on Riverside Drive and 102nd Street and attended the Calhoun School and Columbia Preparatory School before studying acting and dance at Bard College upstate. After college, he returned to New York, got a job driving a taxicab and worked on his first screenplay, which was to become his first film, My Life's in Turnaround , a thinly fictionalized account of a certain cab driver's attempts to make a movie. The beautiful Phoebe Cates made a cameo. Janet Maslin of The Times liked it, and Mr. Schaeffer's career seemed set.

But then came the director's sophomore effort, If Lucy Fell . In that one, Mr. Schaeffer cast himself opposite Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson and pixie actress Sarah Jessica Parker. He did himself the added courtesy of scripting an elaborate make-out scene with Ms. Macpherson. After the make-out scene, he dumps her-only to end up with Ms. Parker's character in the end.

The Times was not amused. "In Eric Schaeffer's If Lucy Fell ," wrote Ms. Maslin, "Elle Macpherson swoons over Mr. Schaeffer and calls him 'a cute, sexy, good-looking guy,' perhaps laboring under the misconception that Mr. Schaeffer is the next Woody Allen. True, Mr. Schaeffer has made a bittersweet romantic comedy with a New York setting, but that's as far as the resemblance goes."

Usually, critics give makers of low-budget independent movies the benefit of the doubt, but not this time. The headline in the Daily News called If Lucy Fell "an unconditional flop," and critic Dave Kehr noted that Mr. Schaeffer shared with Mr. Allen the "bad habit of surrounding himself with morally flawed lesser mortals. And so, while he eventually gets to sleep with Macpherson's character, she must be revealed as unworthy of him." The Houston Press said it was an "obnoxiously smug little comedy." In the Chicago Sun-Times , Roger Ebert accused it of "voluntary dimwittedness."

Mr. Schaeffer is a trouper, and he was not going to let a couple of bad reviews put him off. He hired model Amanda De Cadenet for his next project and got right to work. The result, Fall , had Mr. Schaeffer in the role of a brilliant, funny poet-taxi driver who steals a beautiful model (Ms. De Cadenet) away from her boyfriend. He spends the rest of the movie making love to her while she laughs at his witticisms.

By the time of the movie's release, The Times gave the task of reviewing Mr. Schae-ffer to its No. 3 film critic at the time, Lawrence Van Gelder, and he seized the opportunity: "Have you ever harbored the suspicion that some men are drawn to filmmaking by the opportunity it offers to associate with alluring women?" wrote Mr. Van Gelder. "Support for that notion may be found in Fall ." The Village Voice called Fall a " Penthouse Forum -style male fantasy," adding that it was a "self-indulgent writer-director-actor-producer's ego trip."

"Look, I've always had beautiful, wonderful, smart, funny women in my life," Mr. Schaeffer said at the diner over a bowl of Greek salad. "I can't understand why someone would look at me and think that I make movies to pick up women. I mean, it's jealousy. It's only a jealous person that would look at anyone and question their motives about why they do art. I make art because I'm an artist. I've never gotten any relationship out of filmmaking. I love beautiful women. I see a beautiful women on the subway and I'll say, 'Hi, my name's Eric,' and I'll say some funny thing. I met one of my girlfriends on a plane. I saw her, I walked over to her, and I said, 'Aquarian.' She goes, 'How did you know that?' I go, 'I can just tell.' Boom. Two-year love affair. My last girlfriend, I saw her in a hallway of an agency I was working at. I said, 'What do you do here?' She said, 'I work here.' I said, 'Hi, my name's Eric. Want to have lunch?'"

And then came Wirey Spindell , which is now on its way to video after a three-week run at the Village East. Before it made it into the theater, two new film critics in town used it to show what they were made of. Lou Lumenick of the Post said Mr. Schaeffer was "at least as narcissistic as [Woody] Allen but without a fraction of his talents in any area." New Times film critic A.O. Scott showed that, although he made his name as a rather high-toned book critic at The New York Review of Books and Slate , he could be as bitchy as his new role in the wilds of pop culture might demand. "Being endlessly interested in yourself is not the same as being endlessly interesting," wrote Mr. Scott. " Wirey Spindell is as deep as the average male bellybutton, and its contents are about as appealing."

He wasn't done. "According to its publicity material," wrote Mr. Scott, "the film was adapted from a novel Mr. Schaeffer wrote some years ago, which was greeted with 'rejection letters and return-to-sender postmarks.' This useful information allows me to end on a positive note. Wirey Spindell is a movie that will restore your faith in American publishing."

And still, Mr. Schaeffer believes in himself and his art.

"I don't know any of these people," he said. "I know A.O. Scott used to be a book critic. Did he go to book critic school? I don't know. Somebody would have to ask him. Did he want to be a writer? I don't know. Has he written books? Now, I know that Wirey is a very literary movie. I know that people that have liked it-Cameron Crowe, Richard Lewis-people I respect, have said that they felt like they were watching some kind of amazing, beautiful hybrid of literature unfolding on film. So if you're somebody who maybe wanted to be a writer and maybe didn't have the balls to go out and do it, or wanted to be a filmmaker but didn't have the balls to risk it, I don't know. There's a sense of incredible honesty and risk taking in my work, and whether you like the art of it or not is neither here nor there. That intangible essence, it's what gets to the core of these people and reviles them."

He considered the matter some more.

"It's so cliché to think that people involved in the business and promotion of art are all frustrated artists. But it's true. I guess some of them actually want to do what they do. But nine out of 10 times, they're scared. They can't do it, so they say you're an asshole. It's like Psych 101. Man, the shit is so fucking obvious."

So Mr. Schaeffer plows on. He is busy writing his next movie (working title: Never Again ), about two 52-year-old single New Yorkers who, until they meet, have all but given up on finding true love. Mr. Schaeffer, perhaps in an effort to assuage his angry critics, said he does not plan to act in the film. In fact, sometimes he wonders if he should put his name in the credits.

"If Paul T. Anderson's name is on Wirey Spindell , it fucking gets nominated for an Academy Award," Mr. Schaeffer said, referring to the director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia . "If Miramax distributes it, it's nominated for an Academy Award. If a black lesbian woman named Uganda Sharif is the director of that movie, it wins Sundance. Guaranteed."

Mr. Schaeffer has a daydream-more of a revenge fantasy, actually.

"One day pretty soon," he said, "if this shit keeps up, there's going to be a movie that I'm not going to be in, made by Uganda Sharif, that's going to win Sundance, and it's going to be bought by Miramax for $15 million, and then I'm going to hold a press conference, and I'm going to be the one who made it, and people are going to shit in their fucking pants."

It was 6:45 P.M. Mr. Schaeffer had to go to meet some friends. The next day, he was taking a plane to Dallas. He planned to rent a Chevy Blazer and just drive around the Southwest by himself for a while.

"I'm just gonna pick a place on the map and drive to it," Mr. Schaeffer said. "Maybe Texas, or I might drive north, because I love the cold. It's very therapeutic, it's very cleansing, it's very Zen. I love a road trip, and there's something about the solitude."

The text in question appears on page 125. Ms. Adler mentions a book by the Watergate judge that she might review. "In the course of research, I had found that, contrary to what he wrote, and contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime. I did not review the book."

"I would defy Ms. Adler to produce any evidence whatsoever to support her contention that my father was a 'corrupt, incompetent and dishonest figure,' or that he had 'clear ties to organized crime,'" reads Mr. Sirica's letter.

Mr. Sirica, 46, a longtime reporter who now is a special projects writer at Newsday , calls Ms. Adler's assertions "irresponsible and malicious." He first saw the book on Feb. 10.

In a telephone interview, he said, "I know the libel laws well enough to know that's in there because he's dead, but it's a disgrace. In this business, it's often wise to let something go, because it becomes a bigger issue. I can't let it go. It's portrayed as factual. You would think the lawyers would have vetted this more."

Mr. Korda was out of the office, and according to his assistant Rebecca Head, had not yet seen the fax by press time.

IF YOU BELONGED TO ONE of the biggest writers groups in America, would you trust Amazon.com Inc. to help screen entries for a literary award with your group's stamp on it? If you're PEN American Center, you would. On. Feb. 8, Amazon.com announced the launch of the PEN-Amazon.com Short Story Award. The winner gets $10,000 and publication on Amazon.com and in The Boston Book Review .

"Amazon.com editors will screen the stories we anticipate receiving, and will present the final judging panel with a short list of about 20," said Nicholas H. Allison, editor in chief of the division called Amazon.com Book Store.

The PEN writers Jamaica Kincaid ( Autobiography of My Mother ), David Guterson ( Snow Falling on Cedars ) and Sherman Alexie ( The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven ) make up the judging panel this year. "They will pick a winner," Mr. Allison said.

The new outside sponsor will be contributing $10,000 toward the expenses of the awards and the overall expenses of PEN American Center. This will come in handy; support for general operating expenses are difficult to come by in the nonprofit world.

And whose idea was it? "The short story contest originated with Amazon, but has definitely been developed in a collaborative way with PEN," Mr. Allison said. The new award, one of 16 literary prizes offered by the 2,700-member-strong organization, will help PEN cross-pollinate its brand name.

And keep Amazon.com's bookish features in fine fettle. "If you look at the history of bookselling, Scribner's was a bookseller and published Fitzgerald and Hemingway," said Boston Book Review president Kiril Stefan Alexandrov. "Amazon could follow that kind of pathway, be some kind of funder and publisher of new writing. There's certainly no reason why it shouldn't take more of a publisher's role, a legitimizing agent role for writers."

PEN American Center is part of the international group PEN, which stands for poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists. The organization is known for its dedication to free expression. Asked if Amazon.com is aligned with that mission, PEN executive director Michael Roberts said, "I understand this award supports their desire to support the advancement of literature."

According to spokesman Kay Dangaard, Amazon.com's mission statement is: "We want to be the place where people come to find and discover anything they might want to buy on line."

At least one PEN member was pleased by the announcement. "It sounds like excellent news," said writer Cynthia Ozick, "to give publication and notice and cash to a writer who hasn't been noticed. As far as I'm concerned, Amazon.com has no existence. It's a chimera. Yes, I hear it all the time, and we're surrounded by waves of verbal dot-com, but it's an ocean in which I've chosen not to row my boat. I think when they started up they put a notice in The Times and wished me a happy birthday, so how could I have anything but the most benevolent feelings toward Amazon.com? I suppose the commercialization [of a literary prize] could be something, but the main thing is the boost that is given to a young or unknown writer; that overcomes everything. Maybe if the devil were behind it, it would be a good thing. It's not genetically engineered tomatoes, and I don't think it's a pollution of natural resources, either. It's just America doing its thing with goodwill and corporate backing."

IS A.O. SCOTT GETTING TIRED of sitting in the dark? Six weeks into a new job as film critic at The New York Times , Mr. Scott is already busy at work on a book proposal for Sanford J. Greenburger Associates agent Elyse Cheney.

"It's at the conceptualization stage," said Mr. Scott, who will also be writing for the Times magazine and the Times book review.

"The project is a very long-term endeavor and nothing that is coming out any time soon," Ms. Cheney said. "It will be a historical narrative based on key literary figures. The essence of the book is: What is an American classic?"

Wait: Haven't we heard this before? This is a fine time to be invoking T.S. Eliot's 1944 essay, "What Is a Classic?" Indeed, Andrew Delbanco, Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino have dilated upon this question in, respectively, Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (1997), How to Read and Why (coming in June from Scribner), and Why Read the Classics? (1999).

"I don't think Delbanco or Bloom are wrong, but I think one of the things that putting this in historical perspective might suggest is that what gets remembered is the product of always very complicated and specific histories," Ms. Scott said from his chair at 229 West 43rd Street. "One example is Melville. When Melville wrote Moby- Dick , it destroyed his career, and he dropped off the radar screen." He went on. "This book is attempting to participate in a conversation that they've [Mr. Delbanco and Mr. Bloom] advanced. I'm interested in how the literary culture got where it is today, the enshrining of personal experience, of the primary experience, the boom in memoirs. There's a tendency to be suspicious of anything that can't be verified."

And so Mr. Scott is paddling along the current Zeitgeist . In more ways than one, because mainstream trade publishing houses are also asking, "What is a classic?" And the answer goes something like: "A book that doesn't demand a new advance."

New York's biggest houses are putting a lot of muscle into repackaging the old books–in publishing parlance, the backlist–and gussying them up in new clothes. Sometimes there are new bells and whistles (photographs, author biographies, what have you).

Between 1991 and 1999, the Knopf Publishing Group, Scribner, Doubleday, Harper Collins, Penguin and the Modern Library all launched or relaunched classics lines.

"Publishers are seeing that they already own books that can work with retooling, repackaging," said one publishing executive. "If you throw on a nicely designed new cover … You don't have to pay an advance. You don't want to just do front-list publishing, or you'll die. Publishers are under pressure to increase their revenue every year."

Mr. Scott does not have to be concerned just yet about that kind of pressure. He'll be mulling the academic question as he tromps off to the movies. "The one thing I'm shocked about is that at press screenings there's no popcorn and they don't show any trailers. That's how I know it's a job."

WHEN IT COMES TO CHOOSING a suitable publisher, an author usually wants either money or love, but in a large, single-book deal on Jan. 31, an author chose the house of W.W. Norton on the rather unusual basis of company ownership.

"It was one of the reasons, and a significant reason," said Nicole Aragi, of Watkins-Loomis Agency.

Three publishers made it to the final round of bidding for a first novel called The Death of Vishnu , by Manil Suri, but Mr. Suri remained unimpressed even by Harper Collins' best bid of $405,000, going instead with Norton's $350,000 offer.

Mr. Suri likely reasoned that because Norton is an employee-owned company, his book will not be subject to the kind of tremors–in particular, the stampede of departing editors–that regularly rattle the mainstream publishers. Most of those are owned by publicly traded media conglomerates. If Norton's people are betting its own money, goes the argument, they will be that much more invested in an author's success.

The book is the first volume of a planned trilogy about the Trimurti, the three main gods in Hindu mythology. Still to come: the life of Siva and the birth of Brahma.

For Norton, it was also a first: The amount was the highest the house has ever paid for a first novel.

Where did Mr. Suri learn such attention to principle? Possibly the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where the 40-year-old author teaches numerical analysis.

So far, the literary life has been good to Mr. Suri. Days before he settled upon a home, he stopped into The New Yorker 's offices to discuss changes on an excerpt from the as-then-unsold novel. The story, "The Seven Circles," appears in the Feb. 14 issue. Norton plans to publish the book in January 2001.

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.