Mr. Goldberg interviews Rev. Al Sharpton after his power breakfast.

A breakfast meeting at the see-and-be-seen Loews Regency Hotel has always had its hazards. Diners risk Page Six sightings and uncomfortable run-ins with political foes. Losing a coveted window seat spells professional disaster.

Now, two more dangers lurk outside.

Huffington Post front page editor Adam Goldberg and associate video editor Hunter Stuart have taken to loitering outside the Park Avenue hotel one morning each week in hopes of snagging an impromptu interview with the newsmakers inside. They’re taping their efforts for a new Huffington Post video series, “Power Breakfast.”

The series quietly launched in March but gained traction last week, when the pair landed a serendipitous chat with Newsweek editor Tina Brown, whose stirring gay Obama cover was on newsstands and in the news.

“It wasn’t obvious that it would work,” Mr. Goldberg told Off the Record in an e-mail Q&A. “I didn’t realistically think that just standing outside of this place on a random morning would net any actual newsworthy interviews.”

Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim knew better. He came up with the idea for “Power Breakfast” in February, brainstorming ways to get Mr. Stuart, then mostly making video mash-ups, out of the office.

Mr. Stuart recalled: “He said, well, there’s this place right in New York where everyone eats—it’s called the ‘Power Breakfast’—and I bet if you just hung out outside you’d catch some pretty big people walking out of their breakfasts.”

“That was news to me,” admitted Mr. Goldberg.

Mr. Grim had told them to expect Loews regulars Harold Ford, Jr., and Al Sharpton, but on day one they spotted David Patterson.

“Suddenly we’re talking talking to someone who had reached the pinnacle of politics,” Mr. Goldberg said, “being parodied on Saturday Night Live.”

The series is “very likely” to be featured on the new Huffington Post Streaming Network, now called HuffPost Live, and the pair’s high-brow paparazzi act has revealed challenges foreign to the news site’s nap machine-enabled newsroom.

In the seconds it takes a newsmaker to get from the hotel to their Town Car, they have to identify them, run them down, hopefully with a timely question by the time they secure their attention. (Although occasionally, the mere mortals among the restaurant’s clientele, seeing their camera and microphone, serve as casual tipsters, alerting them to the bold face names inside.)

“We call our tactic ‘the polite ambush,’” said Mr. Stuart, who leaves his camera on during the entirety of the three-hour stakeout.

They’ve only run into trouble with hotel management once—filming on the sidewalk is within their rights—which they got out of with some sweet-talking.

“We tried to interview him, and I think he was flattered that we wanted to,” Mr. Stuart said. (He eventually declined.)

And then there are the tourists and passers-by, for whom a video camera and a guy with a microphone are like a beacon for a celebrity sighting to write home about.

“They ask ‘Who are you waiting for?’ and we say, ‘Anyone, really.’”

In addition to Ms Brown, Haley Barbour, Lewis Eisenberg and Cornel West have given interviews. Many more have passed, including actor Willem Dafoe.

“We’re interested in talking to regular bankers, even if they’re not CEOs,” said Mr. Stuart, “but they usually just ignore us or crack a joke as they walk past us.”

Still, they say few outings yielded no interviews.

As for Mssrs. Goldberg and Stuart, they indulged the power breakfast only once, on their first outing, March 7. They were seated in the upstairs dining room, The Library.

“They brought us fresh squeezed grapefruit juice and a pitcher full of coffee as soon as we sat down,” recalled Mr. Stuart, who ate a $14 bowl of oatmeal and a side of thick-cut bacon. Mr. Goldberg had the salmon benedict, which comes with caviar garnish. They expensed the $70 meal.

Now, they just meet on the sidewalk outside at 7 a.m.; Mr. Goldberg toting McDonald’s coffee.

“Powerful people seem to like early meals, so we get there early too,” he said.

“Sometimes I bring something for Adam to eat because he never eats breakfast,” Mr. Stuart added.

The film centers around a successful painter (Eion Bailey) whose decorative, abstract canvases hang from the walls of hotels and office buildings, and the ambitious Chelsea gallerist (Marley Shelton) who represents his work even though she favors avant-garde conceptual art. The painter, Josh, and the gallerist, Madeleine, are entangled not only professionally but romantically, which gets complicated because she secretly finds his work pedestrian and regressive, and handles his dumb little pictures only because they do well with her corporate clients. To Josh’s chagrin, Madeleine refuses to exhibit his work in her gallery, preferring instead to keep it in the back where no one can see it. The film reaches its climax when Josh interrupts one of Madeleine’s openings by barging in and asking, despairingly, “When did beauty become so fucking ugly?” 

You get to see a lot of Josh’s paintings over the course of (Untitled)—which also stars Adam Goldberg as an avant garde composer—but it’s easy to forget, while you’re watching it, that every canvas attributed to the fictional artist had to have been painted by a real one. But what artist would allow his work to be used in such an unflattering fashion? Who would agree to paint dozens of professional-grade pictures only to have them denigrated, for 90 minutes, as disposable, commercial kitsch? 

That someone, it turns out, is the neo–Abstract Expressionist painter Frank Holliday, who came out of the 1980s Lower East Side art scene. Mr. Holliday said he was recruited by the film’s producers because someone who worked with the art director had used one of his paintings in a student film.

Mr. Holliday wasn’t chosen for the job because his work naturally resembles Josh’s—in fact, the paintings Mr. Holliday made for (Untitled) have almost nothing in common with his actual art, which he said tends to be much more aggressive.

“They said the paintings had to be colorful and beautiful and kind of traditional abstractions,” Mr. Holliday said. “They needed to be good but not great, and they needed to have kind of an edge to them—like, is this artist good or is he deluded? Because that’s kind of the conflict: Is this beautiful and meaningless, or is it beautiful and important? I had to walk the line.” He added: “One thing I asked them was, ‘Are we making fun of this guy? Are we?’ And they said, ‘Well, not really.’” 

So what does Mr. Holliday think of Josh’s paintings? Are they good or what?

“There are aspects that I like,” he said. “They’re nothing like my paintings, but I stand behind them. What’s so funny is that I have incorporated some of what I learned into my own work since I did those paintings. They did make me shift a little bit in what I was doing—not on purpose, but, you know, I wasn’t just hacking them out—I still got involved in color and light and layering, and it did teach me something about my own work.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris, from her own screenplay, turns out to be as strenuously mean and anti-romantic as her screenplay for Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, in which she co-starred with Ethan Hawke, is stirringly romantic. If I much prefer Before Sunset, it may be because I have always been a hopeless romantic, but I don’t think so. Ms. Delpy’s problem arises from a seemingly haphazard sequencing of moods and incidents as two supposed lovers, Ms. Delpy’s Marion and Adam Goldberg’s Jack, spend two days in Paris after a desultory vacation in Italy. She is a French photographer, and he a bearded non-gay interior designer, both living in New York. As it turns out, Paris is too much Marion’s old stamping ground—not to mention a city in which he does not speak the language—for Jack to be comfortable, and he therefore suspects everyone of at least duplicity, dishonesty and insincerity. At the home of Marion’s parents, Jack is mischievously served a bunny’s head in the lapin dish prepared by Marion’s playful father (Albert Delpy), in the hope that Jack, like all Americans, will be repelled by being served Peter Rabbit. Marion’s mother, Anna (Marie Pillet), like her father, is played by Ms. Delpy’s real-life parent.

Even less amusing to Jack are Marion’s three encounters with her ex-lovers in only two days, both on the street and in a series of overcrowded parties. On one occasion at a restaurant, Marion gets into a wild brawl with one of her old flames. Jack begins to think somewhat justifiable that Marion is a raging nymphomaniac. Not that Jack is any angel himself. On their first moments in Paris while standing on a long line for taxis, Jack shortens the line considerably by misleading a large group of American tourists into thinking that the Louvre is just a short walk from the airport, and they really don’t need a taxi to get there. Much later in the film, Jack encounters the same group of tourists giving him reproachful looks. This is not a bad gag setup as these things go, but Ms. Delpy never establishes Jack’s character sufficiently to get her laugh, if indeed she is even trying to make her audience laugh. No comfortable rhythm for the film ever materializes even for such surefire targets as rude and racist Paris taxi drivers. Ms. Delpy and Mr. Goldberg are clearly talented and versatile enough to make a more plausible and convincing couple, but the helter-skelter view of Paris in this film never gives them the chance. Another problem with the film may be its arbitrary alternation between English and French with subtitles.

Christophe Honoré’s Dans Paris (In Paris), from his own screenplay, presents a more somber, wintry view of Paris than is provided by Ms. Delpy in her comparatively touristy excursion into the city. In a very strangely backward look at the earliest days of the French nouvelle vague, the writer-director begins his film by having one of his major characters speak directly to the audience about the subject of the story, which is the frantic effort by one brother named Jonathan (Louis Garrel) to persuade his beloved sibling Paul (Romain Duris) not to commit suicide over a failed love affair with a beautiful and outspoken girl named Anna (Joana Preiss). The two brothers live with their always dying-to-be-helpful father, Mirko (Guy Marchand), who is estranged from their voluptuous mother (Marie-France Pisier). It is Christmas time and Mirko has dragged a Christmas tree through the streets to help celebrate the holidays with his two sons and any of their girlfriends who happen to drop in at any time of day or night. I know this sounds very strange, and that is because it is very strange. Structurally, it is mostly windup with very little delivery. The actors are all very persuasive from moment to moment, but by the time the end credits come on, one cannot see that very much has changed in any of the lives on limited display. We do learn in a roundabout way that a sister has died of her immense sorrow, and the two brothers have never really gotten over the loss. She smiled through her tears, says one of the permanently bereaved brothers, which could serve as the key to the overall morbidity of Dans Paris.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art Film Division is presenting a program of rarely screened films from French director Claude Chabrol from Aug. 17 through Aug. 27 at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater, beginning at 6:15 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 17, with 2007’s Chez Maupassant: La Parure (The Necklace), a 29-minute short, followed by a William Irish Jr. story adaptation, 1979’s Les Histoires Insolites: La Boucie d’Oreille (Unusual Stories: The Earring), with a running time of 52 minutes. Next, at 8:15, is Fantomas: L’Echafaud Magique (1979). For information on other films in the program, call 212-708-9480. Since I have never seen any of these films, I can recommend them only to hard-core Chabrolians like me.

In person Mr. Goldberg, 36, is pretty much what you’d expect him to be like after seeing him over the past 15 years in films like Dazed and Confused, Saving Private Ryan, and A Beautiful Mind, or on a handful of television shows (he was Chandler Bing’s deranged roommate on Friends and is currently out-outraging Jeremy Piven on Entourage, playing rehabbing rich-boy producer Nick Rubenstein). He’s bright and hyper-articulate, his thoughts tumble out in rapid run-on sentences straight out of a Woody Allen script. He’s tall and lanky—downright rangy—and was clad in black pants, a fitted denim shirt and black boots that occasionally tapped in time to some mysterious inner rhythm. Mr. Goldberg smoked Camel Lights cigarettes and sported an impressive moustache that looked to be completely un-ironic.

In 2 Days in Paris, Mr. Goldberg plays Jack, an American bundle of hypochondriac neuroses, who sees black moldy spores in every damp corner and feels the onslaught of germs from every direction (Mr. Goldberg has referred to this particular quality of Jack’s as being a thinly veiled slice of himself). He can’t speak the language of the titular city, and he’s discovered that his girlfriend, Marion (Ms. Delpy), has some anger management issues and a bit of a checkered romantic past as they continually bump into her flirtatious ex-lovers. To add insult to injury, he learns that the balloon photo has been shown to her family. The film is funny in the best kind of romantic comedy way—smart, attractive, eloquent and deeply flawed people struggle with the somewhat unpretty realities of grown-up love. Ms. Delpy, who cast her own parents (and cat!) in the film, has said she wrote the part of Jack with Mr. Goldberg, a real-life ex-boyfriend, in mind.

“We were involved, for about a year-and-a-half, years ago,” Mr. Goldberg said. “She told me about the idea of the movie. We always had this sort of funny energy that I thought could be parlayed into a film.” Like his character, Mr. Goldberg didn’t seem to particularly enjoy the France experience, and his own French language skills are just about as bad as his character’s. “I now have incredible empathy for people who come to America and have to learn the language,” he said. “I have really, really terrible language retention skills.” (Said Ms. Delpy to The New York Times: “He hated Paris. I mean, I think he’s a Method actor. Let’s say that he was so Method that he hated France and every French person except my parents.”)

Adam Goldberg was born and raised in Los Angeles. He was the kind of kid, he says, who loved Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch movies, and who got a video camera at 15 and spent his free time shooting movies and editing them. He went to Sarah Lawrence and lasted a year before dropping out. “I was really kind of burnt out on being in school,” he said. “I thought I should just drop out and make movies, so I dropped out with the intention of taking a year off and going to Cal Arts Film School.” He ended up dropping out of there too, after 10 days. “[The classes] were nauseating because I had been out of college for too long,” Mr. Goldberg said. “It was just like those dreams when you are suddenly back in school and you don’t know how you got there. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it anymore. Part of me sort of regrets that I didn’t complete my education, and part of me doesn’t because this is what my life is, and had I done that I would have a different life.” In the throes of depression after a breakup, Mr. Goldberg looked for something to occupy his time and joined an acting class (a classmate would go on to become Mr. Goldberg’s agent for 10 years).

In the early 90’s, Mr. Goldberg snagged the occasional small role on TV sitcoms like Murphy Brown and Designing Women, as well as a small part in the Billy Crystal film Mr. Saturday Night. But it was in Richard Linklater’s 1993 classic Dazed and Confused that most audiences discovered Adam Goldberg playing a pitch-perfect nebbishy wiseacre. (Remember? Asked what he wanted to do with his life, he exclaimed: “I want to dance!”) From there, Mr. Goldberg has comfortably flip-flopped between comedic turns and heavy drama (most notably in 1998, portraying Private Stanley Mellish in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan). That year he also took his first auteur turn, penning, directing and starring in Scotch and Milk, which later had the (dubious) honor of being part of the Sundance Channel’s 10 Best Films You Never Got To See. In the past few years he’s turned up in big glossy Hollywood fare like Edtv and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and in smaller projects like Mr. Linklater’s Waking Life and The Hebrew Hammer. In this past year he appeared in David Fincher’s Zodiac (says Mr. Goldberg of Mr. Fincher, “He’s the only guy who is doing something along the lines of what Kubrick used to do”) and Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu.

Of the roles he’s been cast in, he says, “they pick me for the most part. I wish I could say I have a lot more say in my career than I probably do. It sort of takes on a life of its own. When you are doing something that isn’t necessarily for the money, you want to try to find something that speaks to or that you can relate to on some level.”

In 2003 he made another of his own films, co-writing and directing the indie feature I Love Your Work, about a meltdown of a movie star (played by Giovanni Ribisi) done in by the strain of bright lights and nonstop attention. “It took some very superficial experiences that I had and blew them out of proportion,” Mr. Goldberg said, who added, “I’m not that famous. I think if I was really famous it would be really, really difficult for me.” A couple of nights earlier, he said, a large and drunk Irishman approached him in a bar to say “‘Saving Private Ryan is fucking shite.’”

“I normally have a pretty short fuse but he really, really outsized me by quite a lot, so I just gave him a thumbs up,” said Mr. Goldberg. “And then he said, ‘I was paid 20 bucks to do that. You’re magic,’ and then he walked away. That sort of thing makes me incredibly uncomfortable and it’s frightening on that level. But for the most part it’s just dealing with some stares and friendly people who want to tell you that they like what you do. Which, I think, anyone would be crazy to deny is one of the reasons that people get into the entertainment industry—to have some part of themselves sort of nourished by the accolades of other people.”

As of now he has no immediate plans for another foray into writing and directing. “I don’t do it for the sake of doing it,” he said. “It really has to resonate for me—you devote such an enormous amount of time and energy to it.” He said he was currently weighing the pros and cons of attempting to direct someone else’s work. “It’s appealing on the level that it would be nice to exercise the directing muscle without it being quite so personal, which my other films have been. When I write, I’m already directing it [in my head] so by the time the script is done, in a sense it’s already directed.”

Mr. Goldberg currently lives a rather low-key existence in Los Angeles (though he’s been linked for many years with the talented and gamine actress Christina Ricci, he firmly refuses to discuss her). “Los Angeles is my home, ultimately. The traffic is incredibly infuriating but other than that you can live a fairly placid and reclusive existence. It’s sort of by design—you’re in your car, or your house—and you’re sort of isolated. I guess there’s a certain amount of desire for that on my part.”

“It’s funny,” he continued, “because when I first moved out of my mother’s house I kept trying to find these kind of New York-type apartments. I tried to create this faux New York existence in L.A.” After living here between 2000 and 2002, he said, he realized he truly was an Angeleno. “I’m glad I lived in New York and got to experience it. But I feel like there is sort of too much New York in me already. It’s almost redundant for me to actually live here.”