Ain't no party like a Gatsby party.

Great Giggling Gatsbys! After taking a hit for over-romanticizing the gaudy decadence of the roaring twenties in hist latest film (and subsequent press tour), director Baz Luhrmann spoke to The Observer at Lamb's Club Tuesday night during The Cinema Society, Brooks Brothers and Town & Country's after party for The Great Gatsby. Apparently, we should just all chill out and not think so hard about the implications of reveling in the excesses of high society, despite the film's moral statement against such extravagance.

"Sometimes a party is just a party," said the Australian director, co-opting the famous Freudian-attributed quote. Mr. Luhrmann had spent the night prior attending the much more oblivious, irony-laced Met Gala.

Whether or not he was including that night's function into his analysis, or merely talking about the bacchanals provided in the 3-D film is something we were left wondering: The director had flitted off to a new subject before we had time to say "We love Moulin Rouge!"

It should be noted that the not all attendees had the same hangups that we did about living in the moment: Lady Gaga showed up late to the screening, and according to at least one attendee, was carrying a six-pack of beer in her posse.

“Do you come to these parties often?” asked my companion, her lips at my ear.

Jay-Z was now bouncing to “Who Gon Stop Me,” as Jake Gyllenhaal and Florence Welch rapped along, standing on a table, towering above Carey Mulligan, Tom Hardy, Jamie Foxx and other Hollywood royalty.

Perhaps I do go to a lot of parties, but I had not been invited to this one. In school at Duke, I became close with a man who had gone into film and went on to work on The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And just as Fitzgerald got a lot of leverage from his Princeton chums, my friend had smuggled me into The Darby, which came after the film’s world premiere, earlier that night at Lincoln Center, and the official after-party, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel.

No, I don’t often come to parties like this, I told my companion.

Corks popped from the flaming bottles, champagne spilled into glasses and the glasses overflowed. I approached Leo in his little nook.

“We spoke earlier, on the red carpet,” Mr. DiCaprio said, his oceans of blue eyes twinkling at me.

“And there are more events to come,” I responded.

And what a string of events it was: a spree of cocktail functions, high-fashion fetes at fancy boutiques, exclusive screenings in secret locations, a sprawling red-carpet premiere that attracted crowds for blocks, a boozy lunch at the New York Public Library, a boozy lunch at the Fitzgerald Suite at the Plaza Hotel, a boozy dinner at the ballroom in the Plaza Hotel, a breakfast at Tiffany, a champagne supper at Brooks Brothers, a star-studded bash at Prada, a Peggy Siegal screening at MoMA followed by a giant bash at the Boom Boom Room, and a Cinema Society screening at HBO headquarters followed by a giant bash at The Lambs Club.

The parties seemingly never ended, as Warner Bros.—thanks to an unimaginable promotional budget (though representatives would not disclose an exact figure) and countless corporate tie-ins—managed to recreate a run of blowouts similar to those that took place on West Egg.

It made sense that they had spun off the movie’s party-heavy storyline into actual glamorous bashes. Mr. Luhrmann took 1920s New York City and made it his own, running the then-emerging skyline through his saturated filter and engineering a boisterous, three-dimensional, thoroughly vibrating version of our city (though the film was shot not on our streets but in Australia, the director’s native land).

With that same approach—one not too different from Jay Gatsby’s own Icarus-esque hubris—applied to the film’s promotion, he’s turned the actual metropolis into a Gatsby-themed pop-up, a traveling party that’s the best possible billboard for the film, a series of super-fancy luxury events that eclipses any movie’s promotional roll-out in recent history.

For two weeks, The Great Gatsby has overtaken NYC.

The first shindig was at Brooks Brothers, the store where two New Haven men in Fitzgerald’s novella May Day go shopping for Welsh Margotson collars. Mannequins bestrode the sloped plaster centerpieces and seemed to be sashaying to the music, which at the moment played Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful,” the love theme from The Great Gatsby.

After a few coupes of Moët champagne I spotted Mr. Luhrmann, looking dapper enough to have stepped off his own movie’s set. We chatted about my friend from college, and then I asked about this impressive run of Gatsby-esque parties.

“A little partying never killed anyone—or, well, maybe it did,” he said, referring to (spoiler alert!) Gatsby’s death at the end of the movie. “Immediately, the parties and the glamour is what’s attractive. But when we find out that Gatsby’s doing that for a different reason, it’s why the book is so enduring. You’re attracted to it, you’re seduced by it, but then you find yourself going on this human journey.”

This human’s journey took him next to a screening at Warner Bros. headquarters, one of a few screenings set up for those who could score seats. The film is massive, a sensory overload, a wildly kaleidoscopic spectacle that somehow manages to stay relatively faithful to the Great American Novel, all building to that monumental party scene, set to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

After the credits rolled, I raced downtown to the party at the Prada flagship.

The official premiere, the following night, engulfed the whole of Lincoln Center’s grand arcade. An army of photographers and journalists jockeyed for snaps and quotes. Attendees in black tie downed cocktails on the balcony overhead, laughing and waving to people who couldn’t see them, as a giant banner for Samsung, one of the movie’s (many) sponsors, hung below, visible to the masses. And finally the stars, each one positively gleaming, showed their famous faces.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Carey Mulligan.

I caught Mr. DiCaprio as he was about to go in and watch himself enthrall the audience.

“What I loved about Jay Gatsby was this idea of this iconic American dreamer,” Mr. DiCaprio told me, his eyes wandering up to the sky. “We all can identify with the American dreamer—the man coming from nothing and manifesting his own destiny.”

With no entrée into the party at the Plaza Hotel, I passed the time with cocktails at the Whitney Museum’s annual Art Party, sifting through crowds of young strivers who had purchased tickets and budding socialites with enough connections to land a spot on the host committee. It was the next generation of upper-crust New York grabbing cocktail after cocktail.

“Darby if you can swing it,” came the text message from my college friend, and I hopped in a cab that zoomed between the monolithic towers of Midtown and down into the West Village. The feverish party rang out for hours. I drank scotch from Mr. DiCaprio’s table. I dipped a girl low dancing to Roaring Twenties jazz.

Somehow, the cast (sans Mr. DiCaprio, who had hit 1OAK following The Darby) made it to a lunch the next morning at the New York Public Library, looking fresh as ever. Event host David Remnick was nice enough to take a break from editing The New Yorker to chat with Mr. Luhrmann about the research that he and his wife, Gatsby costume designer Catherine Martin, had done into the inner workings of Fitzgerald’s soul.

“C.M. and I, we imagined we were Scott and Zelda,” Mr. Luhrmann said to the room, where Anna Wintour sat with literary heavyweights like Jeffrey Eugenides, Maureen Dowd, Calvin Tomkins, Philip Gourevitch and Téa Obreht. “C.M. went a bit too far with the champagne exploration ...”

“Baz, you have a much bigger problem with the bottle than I do!” his wife said.

Everyone reached for his or her wine glass.

Then it was time for a panel discussion with the cast moderated by the biographer Dr. Amanda Foreman, who commenced perhaps history’s most glamorous book club with Ms. Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Mr. Maguire and Isla Fisher.

Not long after the movie-star book club ended, I ran into Mr. Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan.

“You read Fitzgerald’s letters, and it’s clear he just wanted so bad to be famous,” the actor said. “He just wanted to get laid and be famous.”

I wondered, aloud, who doesn’t want to get laid and be famous?

Jay-Z.

Mr. Edgerton shrugged.

“I haven’t met anyone.”

Mr. Luhrmann then grabbed me and walked me through the grand hallways of the New York Public Library and out the towering front entrance, where a handful of fans stood beside the two lions calling out for the director, asking for autographs.

“Wasn’t The Darby so fun last night, Nate?” Mr. Luhrmann said, walking down the massive steps. “It just felt like the Jazz Age again?”

The director bounced as if fully refreshed. He was the perfect perennial host for The Great Gatsby. On the street, a car was waiting for him. It would take him to a television interview. Before he ducked in, he went for a double-pump handshake.

“I’ll see you Sunday at the Boom Boom Room,” he said. “Another party!”

I arrived early on Sunday night only to find the space empty, devoid of famous faces. Through the Boom Boom Room’s floor-to-ceiling windows was a glittering panorama: the Empire State Building to the north, and to the south the Hudson River snaking down to lower Manhattan and the unfinished Freedom Tower.

Then things picked up. As the cast took their time to arrive from the screening at the Museum of Modern Art, Katy Perry showed up wearing a colorful outfit she claimed was inspired by Frida Kahlo. (Ms. Perry had been at the Prada event, too.)

“It’s very of Gatsby, it’s very befitting,” she told me, speaking about the run of parties.

Ms. Perry later joined Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Mulligan, Cuba Gooding Jr. and others in a back section of the Top of the Standard, surrounded by bodyguards. I walked in and saw Baz Luhrmann, who pulled me over to his booth. The director began talking about The Great Gatsby in an intelligent way. I smiled. It was a conversation I had been searching for amid the two weeks of glad-handing, petty arguments, studio politics and celebrity publicists. Mr. Luhrmann talked with stunning earnestness about how The Great Gatsby is the American Hamlet, about how Hamlet is the Bible, about how the New Testament is the first cinematic document, and about how, in the Gospels, Jesus Christ dies at 33, much like the protagonist of his newest film.

What more could I ask of this director, after all of these events at posh places in New York City devoted to his movie, all of them masterminded on some level by Mr. Luhrmann himself, the ringleader, the puppeteer—the boy from Australia who changed his name and became famous?

It’s like you’re Gatsby yourself, I said.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” he said. Then he pointed to a man a booth over, a man at the center of this golden top-floor canopy above New York City, sitting with Dasha Zhukova—the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich—the actress Kristen Wiig and No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani. He was pointing at Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “He is.”

As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo.

Let’s face it. The Great Gatsby never has been—and probably won’t ever be—successfully turned into a great motion picture. Many have tried (four flop movies, not to mention various small-screen attempts, including a truncated but memorable Playhouse 90 with Robert Ryan and Jeanne Crain in the golden days when TV still knew what quality programming was). Robert Redford was a perfect Gatsby in the pretty but boring 1974 version by Jack Clayton, but the movie was dead on arrival. The best I’ve seen is still Elliott Nugent’s black-and-white 1949 version, with Alan Ladd at the top of his form as the screen’s most glamorous Gatsby to date, heading a cast that included Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters. Mired in mysterious litigation for six decades, it has never been released on home video, is never shown on any cable or network channel, and cannot be appreciated by the legions of F. Scott Fitzgerald fans who have never seen his work properly adapted to the screen. And so his literary masterwork remains nothing more—an elegant but elusive triumph of words over images, best savored on the written page.

You don’t realize just how much misguided damage can be done to a great novel until it is vaporized by a pretentious hack like boneheaded Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Some critics, through the years, have put forth the unpopular theory that Fitzgerald specialized in style over substance, but as any college English major knows, he was famous for pruning away the clutter. With the cinematic meat cleaver that Mr. Luhrmann wields in one bloated misfire after another (I still haven’t recovered from the nausea-inducing Moulin Rouge), style is all there is left, and in The Great Gatsby it looks alarmingly like clutter. Budgeted between 105 and 127 million dollars, depending on which Hollywood trade journal you read, with every inflated expense aimed at your eyeballs in awkward, totally unnecessary and stomach-churning 3-D, this is one of the most maddening examples of wasted money ever dumped on the screen. Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic figure in the excessive Roaring Twenties who came from poverty and devoted his life to becoming a self-made millionaire to win over a superficial girl named Daisy, buying an ostentatious mansion on Long Island across the lake from her rich husband Tom and infiltrating high society with lavish, loud and impossibly overproduced parties masquerading as social events. Racking up his 3-D budget to the credit-card limit, Mr. Luhrmann turns these dinner dances into drunken confetti-drenched orgies. The sumptuous, vulgar Gatsby estate, overflowing with gangsters, movie stars, flappers, wisecracking alcoholics, voluptuous tap dancers, people falling from trapezes, clowns, acrobats and an orchestra in the middle of a swimming pool full of inflatable rubber zebras, looks like a high-school costume party on prom night invaded by Cirque du Soleil.

Is it any wonder, in all the slobber and confusion, that the acting is so bad? With the phoniest set of performances this side of an Ed Wood flick, you might as well be watching Plan 9 From Outer Space. As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo. Worse still, he is no longer the centerpiece of the story, a task that falls into the incapable hands of the incompetent, miscast Tobey Maguire as Jay Gatsby’s friend, neighbor and all-seeing matchmaker and Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway. He might suffice as a callow Spider-Man, but as the film’s narrator, saying campy things like “They were careless, Tom and Daisy ... they smash people and then retreat back into their vast world of money and carelessness ...” Even with these masterful lines from the book, he just sounds like he’s reading from a college yearbook. Mr. Maguire is supposed to be the camera through which the tragedy unfolds, but he is light years away from possessing the range, craftsmanship and experience required to play a Fitzgerald hero. Mr. DiCaprio has the experience, and we know he can act, but he’s not beyond the need for a director’s keen guidance. Without proficient direction, he comes off like he has no stamina to give the role of Gatsby the stature it demands. That kind of direction would imply the kind of wisdom and insight Baz Luhrmann lacks. He’s too busy directing the confetti.

Carey Mulligan is another artist who knows how to pop the cork on bottled emotion, but her Daisy Buchanan is so trite and myopic you wonder what Gatsby ever saw in her in the first place. Only the terrific Australian actor Joel Edgerton has the proper grip on the material as her handsome, shallow, two-timing husband Tom. It’s supposed to be a story about fate and irony, but the jealous garage mechanic Wilson and his sluttish wife Myrtle (so soundly and wrenchingly played by Shelley Winters in the 1949 version), who gets mowed down by Gatsby’s Duesenberg, have been all but relegated to bit players. This dilutes the dramatic impact that builds to the story’s feverish climax, rendering the big finale impotent. This version of The Great Gatsby has the narrative strength of tap water.

Like Orson Welles, Mr. Luhrmann chooses interesting material to shape into movies, but then his colossal ego does ridiculous things to doom it. This catastrophe has actors who roll their eyes and raise their eyebrows in perpetual uncertainty about what kind of literature they are supposed to be interpreting—a trashed-up revision of the original with the narrator now echoing the inner voice of Fitzgerald from an asylum where he is writing a book called ... The Great Gatsby? The jazz and big band swing of the ’20s has been replaced by hip-hop music supervised by Jay-Z and songs by Beyoncé and Fergie with the historical significance of a tuning fork, and there are so many close-ups that it sometimes looks like a movie about ears. I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

rreed@observer.com

THE GREAT GATSBY

Written by Baz Lurhmann and Craig Pearce

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire

Running Time: 145 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

Jay McInerney at Observer's 25th Anniversary party. (PMc)

"Are you sure?" We prodded.

"Well," he amended. "In the sense that most [stories] are The Great Gatsby, then yes, I'm working on a book that's like The Great Gatsby." Currently involved in several projects--both fiction and non--the author cited Fitzgerald as a major influence on his (and most people's) writing style. He also mentioned that he had once spoken in a PBS documentary about Fitzgerald. Not mentioned was the fact that he has written on the subject several times, or that his novel The Last of the Savages was once compared to Gatsby by The New York Times. (You can see why we'd be confused.)

"Is Brightness Falls also The Great Gatsby?" We joked.

He laughed. "Sure ... no, no. Maybe it is."

And before we could ask if he saw himself as more of a Gatsby or Carraway, he had switched gears. "So, what do you think of that Baz Luhrmann adaptation?" he asked, referring to the summer release of The Great Gatsby movie.

"Oh, every generation has to have its own Gatsby," we replied. "Ours just involves more Kanye West music."

At the landing, visibly breathless and sweaty, their eyes lit up. They had entered the penthouse loft of Edward Scott Brady, the boyishly handsome world traveler, former classical cello virtuoso and “retired entrepreneur,” who was throwing a “Welcome Back Bash” to honor his return from his seventh trip around the globe.

(Jason Seiler)

Demonstrating a generous spirit, he had posted news of the party to Facebook and Guest of a Guest, luring in hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends, the more the merrier, and plying them with premium booze.

The apartment had all the trappings a wayfaring bachelor requires: the cello, a relic from Mr. Brady’s days playing at the Kennedy Center and Avery Fisher Hall; the African ceremonial masks, collected on his jaunts to the subcontinent; the large antique globe; the red-felt billiards table; the framed photos of Mr. Brady from his journeys.

It was, in the estimation of one female guest, “shit-tastic.”

“He’s, like, famous dude,” said Dmitry Astafev, a Russian entrepreneur who learned about the party through his girlfriend, who had been forwarded a Facebook invite and actually didn’t know Mr. Brady, either.

No matter. Sooner or later, it is safe to say, we will all know Mr. Brady.

“My boyfriend met him in the Hamptons,” said a blond-haired woman in her early 20s.

“I met him at Cyril’s,” claimed another woman.

The place was packed with bros in suit-coats and more babes in slinkier-than-thou dresses, in the appraisal of Justin Ross Lee, than one could shake a stick at.

“Unfortunately for these ladies, I’ve already shaken my stick at most of them,” he added with a wink.

Mr. Lee is an entrepreneur and shameless self-promoter, whose reputation, like Mr. Brady’s, preceded him.The day before, he had been the subject of of a comical New York Times Styles Section profile that depicted him, among other things, tussling with a doorman at The Dream Downtown and bragging about his first-class travels to the Middle East and Europe (“Jew Jetting,” as he proudly refers to it on his Facebook page). Mr. Lee hadn’t made Mr. Brady’s acquaintance either—not yet—though their meeting seemed preordained.

“Unlike me, Edward seems to be very well-liked and a lot less controversial, which means he sleeps better at night than I do,” Mr. Lee quipped.

Then Mr. Lee went over to greet Tabber Benedict, a slick-haired attorney whose khaki suit and classic looks gave him the appearance of an attendee at a convention of Patrick Bateman impersonators. If you squinted, he even resembled a clean shaven Clark Gable, or a more avuncular upgrade of reality TV-rake Scott Disick.

Edward Scott Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

As the two stopped to pose for a Guest of a Guest photographer, people in the crowd discussed the size of Mr. Brady’s loft. “This loft is, like, biggest loft in New York City,” said the impressionable Mr. Astafev.

Still, was one loft—whatever its size—big enough for all three men, for their grandiose personalities? The presence of the trio, all in one place, seemed to signal a small if meaningful shift in the city’s cultural history: After a long, dire post-Lehman cold snap, during which ostentatious displays of wealth, social bravado and dandyish fashion gambits were put into deep hibernation, something was stirring. Wall Street was no longer occupied. The impassioned battle cries of the stringy-haired sleeping-bag brigade, fulminating about the ample chasm separating the 99 and 1 percents, had faded. A socially ambitious lad no longer had to hide his Cartier cufflinks or Stubbs & Wootton slippers under a bushel. Suddenly it was okay again to venture into the limelight, okay to aspire to notoriety and social prominence.

Not everyone was ready to put it all out there, of course, but this was the vanguard. Call them the Gatsbabies: three dandyish gentlemen—but straight, mind you, very, very straight—who seemed to come out of nowhere. In this, they were not unlike the former James Gatz himself, on whom they unconsciously styled themselves, the emperor of West Egg, the subject of a million high school book reports and any minute now, a glistening slice of Oscar bait starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Baz Luhrmann.

“They’re products of the zeitgeist right now, and that zeitgeist is one of social media and ability to be your own kind of publicist,” said Rachelle Hruska, the founder of Guest of a Guest, which has helped cultivate the personas of both Mr. Lee and Mr. Brady.

“I think never before have people been able to kind of be their own publicist,” she added. “You can just get a Facebook page and just put basically anything you want on it about yourself all day long, and I think that’s what these three people excel at, is using social media to pump up their brand.”
Photographer Patrick McMullan agreed. “They want to be known, they want to be out there, they want to use their profiles to get more work and more girls,” he said, “and more fun.”
Mr. Brady stood amid the throng, holding a magnum of Cristal in each hand, his long hair slicked-back and his dark tailored suit hugging his athletic form. He greeted his female guests with a kiss on the cheek, often pausing to give a Guest of a Guest photographer a cocksure smirk as the ladies struck poses with him.

Like Gatsby, he seemed a little too good to be true. The open bar and free canapes for his hundreds of guests? The National Geographic-quality photographs? The crowd of beautiful and seemingly available women? Surely there was more to this guy than met the eye—or less. We turned to Mr. Benedict and asked if the scene was real or illusion.

“Being in the industry that you’re in, you of all people should understand,” he said. “Perception becomes reality.”

Tabber Benedict (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

A few days after the party, The Observer received a terse text from Mr. Brady asking us to call him. We had been reaching out to those who RSVP’d for his party, asking how they knew him, and word had come back to him that we were snooping around. In a faltering, nervous tone, he said he was caught off guard by it.

We explained to him that this was just simple reporting. We were doing our due diligence.

“I guess I have to get comfortable with what this media thing is,” he said with a sigh.

We found his response curious, given his highly visible activities. We had seen snaps of him surrounded by a gang of Indian women in their native country, shooting the breeze with the Hmong on the China-Vietnam border, posing casually with a cheetah somewhere in the African Sahara. Downtown Magazine dubbed him “The Most Interesting Man in The World.” His life was like a Tina-era issue of Vanity Fair. Why so shy all of the sudden?

The son of Edward Alden Brady, a former ship captain and Chevron salesman, he was raised in the Larchmont section of Westchester. They shared a name—Mr. Brady goes by “Scott” to help differentiate himself—and a talent for the cello. They also shared a wanderlust: the elder Mr. Brady traveled extensively for work (“He’s been around the world on a boat four times,” the son recalled).

Mr. Brady’s talent for the cello landed him at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, where he studied under Norman Fischer, a noted classical music teacher. The brawny Mr. Brady said he also played on the hockey team, eventually bowing out to protect his hands from potential injury.
When Mr. Fischer left Oberlin for a new position at Rice University in Texas, Mr. Brady followed him there and received the Fondren scholarship, earning his degree in in 1995.

At 25, he was awarded the 1998 Panasonic National Young Performers prize. At 27, he became one of the first Americans ever invited to a residency with a Russian orchestra at the Moscow Symphony. There, Mr. Brady endured 15-hour bus rides, eight-hour practices and a measly diet of canned food and scraps while somehow maintaining his sturdy physique (his fellow students, according to a 2000 Times article, nicknamed him Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The next year he returned to New York and started Musika, a private-music tutoring service that targeted wealthy areas in Westchester County and New Jersey. Musika grew from 15 teachers to 800 nationwide, becoming profitable enough for Mr. Brady to retire at the age of 33. He would not comment on Musika’s annual profits. “I can do pretty much whatever I want at this point,” he said. “I can travel, I’m able to lead the life I want to have.”

On Musika’s website, his biography elaborates on his “World Most Interesting Man” pedigree, noting that he is a member of Mensa, “an organization of people with high-level IQs.” (A spokeswoman for Mensa confirmed that an Edward Brady from New York was a member in 2003–2004, but said that his membership had since lapsed).

After his retirement, Mr. Brady set out to travel the world. His travel itinerary reads like a list of locations for a Bond film: playing polo in Abu Dhabi, surfing in Bocas del Toro, Panama; traveling across Madagascar in an ox-led transport.

The photos of his travels are sweeping and sensational in composition and tone, which has led some to believe that he hired a photographer to document his adventures.

“Everyone’s so curious about who’s taking the photographs,” he told us with a laugh. “I have a tripod, I have a Canon 5d Mark II, and there is a device called the Giga T Pro.” The device, he explained, acts as a remote release that can be activated from a quarter of a mile away. He uses it to capture himself in tender, social moments, like speaking with the female members of the Maasai tribe, which he then posts to his Facebook page.

“That’s why I identify with Scott,” said Mr. Lee, while seated in his Murray Heights office. “There’s no accidental postings. He’s methodical and I’m methodical.”

Perhaps, although that’s not the first term one might apply to Mr. Lee, who likes to say there are three things he never pays for: “parking, publicity and pussy.” His borscht-belt schtick and enormous bravado has brought him infamy (if Page Six still counts), sponsorships, and more publicity for Pretentious Pocket, his line of pocket squares, than might seem reasonable.
The day after his Times profile went online, he claimed he did three months worth of business in one day.

Justin Ross Lee (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

“I mean, I had them working through the Sabbath,” Mr. Lee said, nodding toward a quiet and severe-looking intern who was typing on a MacBook air. “I said, ‘No shul without drool.’”
He admitted that he played up his feud with the doorman at The Dream Downtown to provide some material for Bob Morris, the Times reporter who was following him around for the evening.
“I never would have gone to The Dream Downtown,” he said. “I was going there because I had a New York Times reporter behind me. I set him up and he’s stupid enough to walk right into the lion’s den.” [UPDATE: After this story was published, Mr. Lee wrote to say that he "misspoke and was referring to the stupid doorman," not to Mr. Morris. "Bob is a brilliant writer and journalist whom I respect."]

Such behavior is all part of the schtick. So is the peacockish attire—stylish and garish, in equal measure—guaranteed to draw glances. The Gatsbabies are not particularly concerned with how others see them, as long as they’re being seen.

“People look at me and they’re like, ‘That spoiled prick,’” said Mr. Benedict, a 35-year-old attorney who recently launched his own practice, Benedict Advisors LLC. He didn’t seem too concerned about that. Although there is one oft-made comparison he can’t abide.

“Don’t tell him he looks like Scott Disick. He hates that,” said one female friend. We brought up his resemblance to Clark Gable, and the woman paused. “I don’t know what Clark Gable looks like,” she said flatly.

Mr. Benedict says he has earned his pinstripe C. Oliver Custom Suits. At Mr. Brady’s party, he recalled a hardscrabble childhood in upstate New York, working lousy jobs at grocery stores and McDonald’s throughout high school while being raised by a single mom.

“I literally was using foodstamps,” he said. “Justin never did that. He wore nice Brooks Brothers clothes that his parents bought him, you know what I mean?”

He won a scholarship to Colgate while working in the school library, then went to Columbia Law School and put in time at White & Case and The ACE Group before eventually launching his own firm.

Mr. Benedict was at one time engaged to a woman he met through taxi driving matchmaker Ahmed Ibrahim (their pairing was featured in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article). He said he adopted the name “Thomas Pink,” a pseudonym he uses primarily on Facebook, in the interest of personal safety—to protect him from his now ex-fiancée.

“Girls would post on my [Facebook] wall funny things, and she would take it the wrong way,” he recalled.

There was also the enterprising stalker who broke into his Upper East Side apartment as he was attending a charity event. “She called and said, ‘I’m inside your apartment, Tabber. It’s really nice! My friend Tyrone is here, who has brought me some party favors,’” he said.

Nonetheless, he noted that getting his face out there as much as possible—attending the Seeds of Africa charity event, co-hosting the First Annual Post-Walk Celebration to Benefit Breast Cancer Victims—helps to shore up business.

“You don’t meet people in your bathroom, or like on your sofa, watching Game of Thrones,” he said. “I meet people out, and that’s how I meet my clients.”

Mr. Benedict and Mr. Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

We were at 286 Spring Street for the launch party of TheCityStreet.com, an “exclusive” global directory of bankers founded by former investment banker Vana Koutsomitis. Mr. Benedict did not know Ms. Koutsomitis, but as the party lagged, he pulled her aside and offered to call a photographer from Patrick McMullan’s agency. Within 30 minutes, the photographer arrived, Ms. Koutsomitis happily posed with friends and colleagues, and the vibe picked up considerably.

“He sort of looks like Scott Disick,” Ms. Koutsomitis whispered to us.

The night was a success for Mr. Benedict. He had walked in virtually a stranger, and had left with a few business cards of prospective clients. However, as he has learned, the more public the face, the less understanding the girlfriend.

“The last time I checked, I want my lawyer to be as discreet and dorky and smart as possible, not some philandering playboy,” said Elizabeth Stockton Howard, his blue-blooded, Princeton-educated paramour.

When asked what it’s like dating an internet personality, she replied, “It’s awful! I think about breaking up with him everyday because of that!”

Edward Scott Brady does not have a girlfriend to take issue with his activities. But he blanches at the idea that he is aggressively self-promotional.

“I never think I am actively necessarily promoting myself,” he said, sipping from a beer at the rooftop bar at the James Hotel. “I am just doing what I want to do, and traveling, and that is what I am becoming, and what people see me as. Why am I am traveling around the world? Because I want to do it. I’m not thinking about packaging.”

“Edward Scott doesn’t have the same media focus that Justin does, obviously,” said Mr. Benedict. “That’s Justin’s life. I would of course argue that I have a different focus than Justin, too. My focus is on more of the high-end charity events, because that’s what I care about. Justin does a lot more club parties.”

Differences aside, all three of them owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Fitzgerald’s indelible playboy.
“That was one of my nicknames,” Mr. Brady admitted. “‘Gatsby, what are you doing tonight?’ Especially in the Hamptons.”

“We tickle people’s curiosity,” Mr. Lee said. He’s found that, as it was for Gatsby, a certain air of mystery can be useful. “The first question I get is ‘What do you really do?’” he said. “And that’s how I know I’ve garnished their attention, and that’s how I know it’s a three-pointer.”
drosen@observer.com

Bicycle! Bicycle!

Last March The Observer investigated the fight for the right to bike, and discovered that it's fierce enough to be considered New York's last culture war. Cars are exhaust-y but bikes are annoying! Oh no, which side to choose.

Well, thanks to a photo snapped last Saturday, that war may just have been won for the pedal pushers. Soap opera actress Blake Lively and Leonardo "Gatsby, old sport!" DiCaprio -- yes, ladies, he's taken! -- were spotted riding the pesky wheeled contraptions around our fair city.

Where exactly are they! Well, it's hard to tell, as the background is blurry, and it looks like it could've been taken literally anywhere. Feel free to spend hours analyzing it, though! Keep us posted!

In other, non-culture-war news, this means the couple have most certainly not called it quits. But will they stay together once Leo packs up his stuff and sets sail for Australia, where Baz Luhrmann thinks Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby? What, no valley of ashes over there? He's in for a surprise!

Anyway, bike-hating gas-guzzlers, if you see two wildly attractive blonde humans riding their bikes, try to resist the urge to run them over. Blake and Leo appear to not be fans of helmets, and we need another ten seasons of Gossip Girl.

UPDATE: Our eagle-eyed Matt Chaban noticed that the happy couple were biking against traffic. Don't try this at home kids!

Carey! Get back to reading!

Last time we ran into Carey Mulligan, outside an event she was hosting at the roof terrace of the Gramercy Park Hotel, she was in good spirits. She was riding the wave of breathless raves of her performance in Through A Glass Darkly, which was then in the middle of its run at the New York Theater Workshop. "The 26-year-old Ms. Mulligan," Ben Brantley wrote in The Times, "more than confirms her promise as one of the finest actresses of her generation."

She was also gearing up for her role in a over-the-top 3D extravaganza helmed by Baz Luhrmann.

“Oh, I’m doing this little known thing, The Great Gatsby,"  she told The Observer.

“Oh, my god, that’s amazing!” her friend, actress Zoe Kazan, said. “Are you playing Gatsby?”

“Yes,” Ms. Mulligan said. “I’m playing Jay Gatsby. It’s a really big role for me, I’m gonna wear a sock down my trousers, give it everything.”

This was fun, but it seems the kidding around has ended. In an interview during the Comic-Con mania going on in San Diego, she explains the stacks of reading material she's been studying in preparation for her role as Daisy Buchanan. Hopefully she's also taking speech lessons with someone who will make her voice sound like money.

So, what's on the reading list?

"I went to Princeton, where they keep all of his papers, and I got to look at Zelda Fitzgerald's medical records and the first manuscript of The Great Gatsby," Ms. Mulligan said in a video shot by Empire Online. "I was, like, 'Can I take a photo?' and they were, like, 'No.' We all have research files so, like, six books to read and a folder this thick ,and we got little iPods with videos on it, and all the music"

Presumably, "all the music" refers to period ditties all the kids would listen to as they Charleston the night away. Though considering Mr. Luhrmann's history of mashing up period drama with modern music, it could really be anything. Perhaps even the director's own "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)." No, Baz, we haven't forgotten.

Blake Lively, single and loving it!

For Leo, Blake was the ultimate rebound from Bar Refaeli. They met over dinner at The Lion in November, with Baz Luhrmann, who had DiCaprio as his Gatsby and toyed with the idea of Ms. Lively as Daisy (the part went to Carey Mulligan). In May, Mr. DiCaprio was, again, single, and it wasn't long before he was canoodling with Karl Lagerfeld's number one girl by the sea at Cannes. She was wearing white, he was wearing a baseball cap. Everything seems nice and shiny.

Now it's all over. In a bright moment during a bad few weeks for British gossip rags, Now magazine has the scoop on the heartbreak, explaining that it was Mr. DiCaprio's mom, Irmelin, who instigated the split.

"Blake's a total mess," a close friend tells Now.

"She tried hard to impress Leo's mum when they met but Irmelin couldn't stand her.

"She told Leo that Blake was far too up herself for him.

"Blake was nervous so she did talk a lot.

"But his mum says all she did was talk about Gossip Girl and how she's a Chanel model."

Chin up, Blake! If you check out observer.com in the next few days, you'll see a list of single men in a certain profession... The best profession, too. And it might be a slideshow. Just saying.

But today the man who gave us the that satin-soaked orgy-musical Moulin Rouge tossed Gatsby fans a curve ball. What if, Baz wondered to himself, I drank the Kool Aid and did my Gatsby in 3D? Avatar in The Jazz Age! Great plan, right?

Luhrmann told The Hollywood Reporter that he's "workshopped" the film in 3D, in case he decides that the action needs that extra, um, dimension. He hasn't made a call on which format to use, but no doubt the studio will push for 3D, which would allow them to push the ticket price up.

Let's get this out of the way: Filming The Great Gatsby in 3D is an astoundingly stupid idea that we sincerely hope never happens. This is a given.

But what if it actually does happen? Scott Fitzgerald will certainly be rolling in his grave, but here's what we'll have to look forward to!

• Everyone kicking their legs to The Charleston at Gatsby's party. Watch out! That flapper's heel almost hit you in the face!
• Meyer Wolfsheim's cuff links made from human molars. You can almost touch them. How gross! Bonus: in 3D, the metaphor here is even more obvious.
• When that cheating golfer Jordan Baker tees off, the ball flies right by your head. Oh, Jordan. You're so charmingly bad at that silly sport!
• Nick Carraway's collection of bond books. In 3D, they're almost not terrible dry and boring!
• Ah! Gatsby! Look behind you! George Wilson has a gun! You know this because it's an inch away from your face!
• Tom Buchanan punching Myrtle Wilson: it's like you're there in that hot New York apartment. And you're the one getting punched.
• Two words: green light. It will be the greatest light of any kind ever captured on celluloid. You want to try and make that powerful of a light in a 2D movie? 2D is the past, man, we have 3D for that kind of stuff now. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... and one fine morning --

Excited yet? You better be, because this movie is already not going to be cheap -- Baz has to pay Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan for their parts. So if it's in 3D? Let's just say Daisy's voice isn't the only thing full of money.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Click for Scandal Report: And Then The Model At Diddy's Party Burst Into Flames

Mr. Luhrmann revealed that during filming on location, the temperature was so high, and the scenes so action-filled, that both actors suffered fainting spells. Ms. Kidman, wearing a black and gold sequined dress, confirmed her director’s story.

“I did! I fainted, which was not the most fun part of filming. But, for the record, Hugh fainted too so it wasn’t just the girl,” said Ms. Kidman, whose husband, country singer Keith Urban, was standing behind her.

“Yes, I fainted the first day. I’m man enough to admit it,” said Mr. Jackman. “I was on the horse, waiting, and they said, ‘We’ll be another five minutes.' A half hour later, they said, 'Another five minutes.' I said, ‘Really, five minutes, because I’m getting pretty hot.’ Forty-five minutes later, I had a hand in my back. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And [Baz] said, ‘What am I doing? You’re at a 45 degree angle to the horse!’ So I guess I just sort of slid off, but, technically, didn’t faint!”

Socialite Lydia Hearst had been assigned the curious task of wearing a dress “inspired by the film” that evening. But even Ms. Hearst appeared to be confused about the whole thing.

“It’s a limited edition collection at Bloomingdales that was inspired by the film. But I don’t know that I know the designer… They literally just gave it to me right before I got here!” said Ms. Hearst.

The Daily Transom wasn't clear as to how the dress, a light purple color with Japanese-style buttons running up the side and a sheer neckline, was a representation of the film about a country on the brink of World War Two.

“There were actually a lot of Asian seamstresses in Australia during the pre-WWII era. And you don’t see dresses like this anymore,” Ms. Hearst said. Besides, she added: “I feel really elegant in it.” 

Among the guests coming out to see the film that evening was actress Lauren Bacall, who was peeved by a television reporter who asked her the fairly benign question of, “What brings you out tonight?”

“What brings me out tonight?” Ms. Bacall snapped. “I’m not even going to answer that question because it is too dumb. What brings me out tonight? That is so dumb. Don’t ever ask a question like that.” (The scorned reporter politely backed off.)

Ms. Bacall’s facial expression seemed to brighten when asked about Mr. Jackman.

“I love Hugh Jackman, though he doesn’t really know it,” confessed Ms. Bacall. “I think all the women in the world love Hugh Jackman.” 

“Oh, I didn’t know he made sexiest man! Well, I always thought so,” conceded Kelsey Grammer, who was accompanied by his wife, former Playboy model Camille Donatacci. (Ms. Hearst, actress Lynn Redgrave and designer Rachel Roy also concurred regarding Mr. Jackman's appeal.)

Mr. Jackman, for his part, seemed to enjoy the attention his cover photo was getting him, informing the Daily Transom: “I’ve been sending those photos in wallet size, poster size, all that, to my friends back in Australia.”