Chace Crawford's name, misspelled by the post on the Post's header (top) in the same way the Sprock press release misspelled it.

On Saturday, Off the Record received a press release from Los Angeles-based celebrity PR firm Sprock. It was pretty thin gruel: “Actor Keith Collins & Actor John Stamos” were spotted at Westside Tavern, with Mr. Stamos “discussing his performances in his always sold out Broadway Play ‘The Best Man On Broadway’ [sic, throughout].”

“Also at the Tavern that night shooting pool was Gossip Girls Chase Crawford & Brandon Ruckdashel from ‘Co-Ed Confidential,’” noted the press release.

As we say, not much to run with. Imagine our surprise to see the exact item on The New York Post’s Page Six the next day. Granted, it was a late-summer weekend when most celebrities are in the Hamptons, but this was information many New York journalists had already found in their inboxes. “The Gossip Girl star [Chace Crawford] was seen at Westside Tavern in Chelsea on Wednesday night playing pool with Brandon Ruckdashel from ‘Co-Ed Confidential’ and a handful of beauties,” indicated Page Six in an item titled “Tavern Appeal.” Mr. Stamos, Mr. Collins and the play The Best Man also got name-checked in the 80-word item.

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

At a crowded movie premiere in Midtown recently, The Observer witnessed a young movie and TV star—a dashing young man who’s been involved with several starlets despite whispers about his close relationships with other men—sitting for the entire party in close conversation with a well-groomed gent, even as his co-stars circulated. As we passed, the plus-one stared us down, as if to say, "Step off," or perhaps, "Don’t you dare write about this."

Nor did we, since the question of whether it is news that a virile young actor was enjoying the company of one man—if not the company of men—is very much still open.

For decades, the practice of aggressively outing well-knowns was largely forsworn. Jim McGreevey, former governor of New Jersey, didn’t get the gay rumors swirling around him put into print until he declared himself a "gay American." Jodie Foster’s long relationship with a female movie producer only went public when Ms. Foster acknowledged it in a 2007 awards acceptance speech. By that time, the pair had already raised two children together.

But with the increasing acceptability and mainstreaming of gay culture, the texture of how and why people come out or stay in the closet has become a more complicated issue, as has the media coverage surrounding it.

With the number of prying media outlets—TMZ, Perez Hilton, Gawker, TV newsmagazines like Extra, a vivified set of glossy tabloids—growing seemingly by the week, celebrities have come up with a new strategy to decline discussing their personal lives until they’re good and ready. Living in the so-called "glass closet," they can forestall the legitimate press inquiring after their home life while also ensuring that their orientation is hardly breaking news. It’s being basically out, without having to answer any questions.

For instance, Queen Latifah’s representatives did not respond to a request for comment on this article, even after her performance at a gay pride event in Long Beach, Calif., raised eyebrows ("Queen Latifah didn’t make any big announcements at the Long Beach Lesbian
& Gay Pride Festival this weekend, but it seems she invited the world to read between the lines," began one article on BET’s website). She was able to monetize the gay market with a wink and a nod, but actually coming out—if she is indeed gay—was out of the question. "I’ve never dealt with the question of my personal life in public," Ms. Latifah told Entertainment Weekly this month. "It’s just not gonna happen."

Or take Anderson Cooper. He’s built his brand by dishing on-air with gay icons Andy Cohen and Kathy Griffin, all while leaving his personal life very, very personal. Never mind all the photos of his trawling lower Manhattan with gay-bar owner Benjamin Maisani—or the fact that his revealing memoir omits any mention of a love life.

The "nobody’s business but my own" argument—which Mr. Cooper rarely if ever has even had to verbalize, despite being the author of a soul-baring memoir on many other subjects—may be familiar. It’s a cannier, more media-trained dodge of the question than Clay Aiken’s elision, in Rolling Stone in 2003. "One thing I’ve found of people in the public eye," he told that magazine, "either you’re a womanizer or you’ve got to be gay. Since I’m neither one of those, people are completely concerned about me." Or when Latin singer Ricky Martin told Barbara Walters in 2000, without gendered pronouns, in response to questions about his sexuality, "I live la vida loca!"

Both of those singers are, by now, completely out of the closet, though they were allowed to emerge, by the large media outlets, on their own terms—testament to the fact that outing is still the third rail of old-school print media. For instance, New York’s story about the city’s "trophy boys," which listed attendees at an all-gay party on Fire Island, prompted a number of angry letters and to this day is not on the magazine’s capacious website. Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg’s marriage is treated as legitimate—and, hey, maybe it is! *NSYNC singer Lance Bass’s coming-out in People in 2006 was treated as breaking news, though gossip blogs cited photos of him in Provincetown, Mass., with a gay reality-TV star as meeting the burden of proof quite some time before.

Lance Bass.

The politics and ethics of outing, and indeed what constitutes outing, are, as ever, a subject of significant debate in the journalistic community.

Michelangelo Signorile, whose outing of celebrities became a flashpoint in 1990, when he reported for the now-defunct OutWeek upon the sex life of the late Malcolm Forbes, has seen the debate shift. "The Daily News got the exclusive from us and they wanted to put it on the front page. They killed it and instead went with Marla Maples—an acceptably heterosexual scandal," said Mr. Signorile, who is now a news commentator on the Huffington Post and SiriusXM Radio.

When is outing in the media acceptable? "There were two criteria journalistically that had to be met," said Mr. Signorile. "Is the sexual orientation relevant? And is it a public figure? If you’re a public figure where you open up your life for dissection by the media, and it’s relevant to the story, journalistically, that’s something that is perfectly acceptable. At the same time, I have also talked about how culturally, as a journalist working for a journalistic outfit, it’s not a tabloid, I see it as you report on it when it’s relevant to a larger story."

In other words, "Anderson Cooper is gay," were it verified, is not a story; "John Travolta sued for same-sex sexual misconduct" is.

But this sort of thinking leaves wide-open any number of loopholes. A.J. Daulerio, the current editor of Gawker, told The Observer, "Everything’s on a case-by-case basis. If you saw a story about a public figure and it’s someone newsworthy and someone interesting, there are so many different variables that I can’t say across the board." We were discussing Gawker’s recent article about ABC anchor Robin Roberts’s purported lesbianism, a story with valences both in her recent gay-rights exclusive interview with President Obama and good old-fashioned prurience.

"I don’t take exception to Gawker," said Howard Bragman, the publicist who is known for ushering closeted stars out of the closet (notably, 1980s TV star Meredith Baxter, who made a big announcement on Today after blogs noted her presence on a lesbian cruise). Referring to the practice of calling out stars who seem to be out to everyone but the public, he said, "They’re the ones who say the emperor has no clothes."

Blogs like Gawker and Perez Hilton (the latter having sworn off outing celebrities in 2010) have lately played the role that OutWeek occupied in its brief existence—after all, Mr. Signorile’s story was as much about testing the limits of what could be reported and written about an individual as it was the specifics of Mr. Forbes’s sex life. In comparison to the OutWeek 1990s, though, today "there’s nothing disparaging about saying someone’s gay," said Mr. Bragman. Indeed, an Albany appellate court recently ruled that claiming someone is gay, even falsely, is not libelous.

Just as for some media outlets, the sexuality of an individual who chooses not to comment can never be a news story, for others it will always be a news story. Kevin Naff, editor of the gay newspaper the Washington Blade, refuses to call writing about closeted individuals "outing": "I call it truth telling."

"If a celebrity is gay, it’s a fact," he explained. "We should report it. What you do behind closed doors is private. The fact of being gay is not a private fact. Being straight is not a private fact."

(If he were gay, would Mr. Cooper ever come out? "Probably when he needs a ratings boost on his talk show," Mr. Naff replied.)

One need only look at Gawker’s persistent if not incessant coverage of Mr. Cooper’s Downtown antics to see the end of the old decorum.

Brian Moylan, now a Hollywood.com writer once responsible for Gawker’s coverage of Mr. Cooper, views the longstanding media prohibition on outing to be a rights issue. "You don’t write a profile about Chris Evans being in The Avengers without asking who he’s dating. You ask Daniel Craig about his recent marriage—and he gets pissed off, but you report the answer. Not asking people about who they’re dating is discrimination. Plain and simple ... Reporters are under the obligation to ask that question and report the answer. [Mr. Cooper] needs to answer it, and they need to ask it like they would Katie Couric."

Neil Patrick Harris.

At a recent panel discussion on gossip, Gawker proprietor Nick Denton went even further. "Does everybody here know that Anderson Cooper is gay?" he asked the audience.

"Noooo!" yelled out a woman in mock horror as the rest of the room laughed knowingly.

Mr. Denton went on. "People will tell you, ‘Why would you want to report that? Everyone knows it already.’ No, they don’t! Most people in America do not know that Anderson Cooper is gay. So if you judge the differential, the gradient, between insider knowledge and public knowledge, there is still a gigantic gap. It will be erased. Probably in the next five years. And what’s going to happen in the next five years will be much more significant than what’s happened so far."

What does that look like? Sunny Bates, the panel’s moderator, asked.

"Everything open," said Mr. Denton. "All secrets out there."

The question arises: Is there no sphere of privacy for the celebrity anymore? After all, straight celebrity couples from Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem to Beyoncé and Jay-Z don’t acknowledge any element of their love in public, though they’re also not asked if they’re heterosexual. Why should Anderson Cooper or Queen Latifah have to dish about their love lives—or even acknowledge their sexuality?

But such a question seems academic, given the inclinations of Mr. Denton and others of like mind: regardless of the answer, the scrutiny will only mount in the future.

In response to such pressures, recent celebrity comings-out have been well-managed, low-key affairs—not nearly splashy enough to damage a career in the manner of Ellen DeGeneres’s years in the wilderness: Jim Parsons, star of the hyperpopular sitcom The Big Bang Theory got a mention of his sexuality squeezed in at the very end of a long New York Times profile recently. It clearly wasn’t the story—that would be his current starring role in Harvey on Broadway—but it got him enough cred to present at the Tonys. Star Trek’s Spock, Zachary Quinto, mentioned his sexuality in a New York interview about a new indie film he was promoting. Matt Bomer, star of the upcoming male-stripper movie Magic Mike, thanked his partner at an awards ceremony in February; he’s by now able to reference his and his partner’s children in interviews and still remain the object of the female gaze. All three stars had never hidden their sexuality—they’d lived in a glass closet whereby they never needed to say anything until they were comfortable doing so. But then why waste years of your career dodging questions when the truth will be unveiled nevertheless?

It is perhaps a question John Travolta has entertained, in the wake of his recent public relations disaster.

Mr. Travolta, who has long dodged rumors, recently uploaded a video slideshow of family photos to the site Vimeo just as the tabloid story of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by a male masseuse reached critical mass.

As his longtime acquaintance Carrie Fisher said in The Advocate, "We know and we don’t care. Look, I’m sorry that he’s uncomfortable with it, and that’s all I can say."

As with all matters of sexuality, it’s not that simple, though.

"It does bother me when I see some of these closeted actors deny that they’re gay or lesbian and I see them out at the bars and the clubs," said Dustin Lance Black, the openly gay screenwriter of Milk and J. Edgar. "And they’re taking advantage of the bravery of men and women so we can have bars. When I see these people who vocally deny their sexuality, who they are, and then take full advantage of the hard work of others ..." But he acknowledged that outing is not always a net good. "For those who are leading a private life because that’s their preference ... well, we have a right to privacy."

But he added, "When I have these conversations with actors who are closeted, they’re yearning to be a part of this movement that’s experiencing such progress."

Lance Bass, whose coming out in 2006 was occasioned by a number of tabloids threatening to run a story on his relationship with openly gay reality-TV star Reichen Lehmkuhl, told The Observer that it never occurred to him to come out in public before his hand was forced. "I had a boyfriend. My friends knew, my family knew, I didn’t think it was a big deal.

"I thought I would just casually reveal it—get married or something."

That performers like Mr. Quinto and Mr. Bomer have been able to "casually reveal it" in recent years indicates just how far public acceptance of homosexuality has come, even since 2006. However, major stars like Mr. Cooper, Mr. Travolta and Ms. Latifah—all of whom are at the forefront of their fields—have much more to lose than Mr. Bomer, an actor on a cable TV series, or Mr. Quinto, a still-emerging talent. The ridicule they and others face—"It comes to a point of silliness," said Mr. Bragman of various glass-closeted celebrities—is nothing compared to the definite loss of a fan base partially kept in the dark. (For every Neil Patrick Harris, who’s only gained credibility since coming out, there’s a Clay Aiken, whose female fan base was shocked and disappointed.)

Coming out is a potentially traumatic experience for anyone. Mr. Bass, for instance, recalled the two-day period between agreeing to People’s interview request and seeing the "I’M GAY" cover on newsstands: "It was 48 hours to tell the world your deepest, darkest secret."

Seemingly out of some remaining respect for the difficulty of making such an announcement, outing is still a delicate subject among the media community.

Cyd Zeigler, Jr., co-founder of the gay sports news site Outsports, said that he is sitting on knowledge of several famous athletes who are gay, but he did not expect them to come out anytime soon. "There’s a difference between breaking the news and getting the story. There are people I could write about but I don’t—because I want to know what their life is like, how they live. I want the story behind the news. People who just look at the news miss the story. There’s a lot of bad reporters out there who give us all a bad name."

Even Outsports’s policy is subject to subtle shading, though: Mr. Zeigler noted that the site has written frequently about rumors that Troy Aikman is gay. "Outing is knowing that they are gay and talking about the fact that they are gay against their wishes and explaining how you know they’re gay."

There’s also the simple matter of defusing the knowing laughter of a public that maybe just doesn’t care that much anymore. "If you’re in the closet," said Mr. Bass, "you get made fun of more than if you just come out!"

If he’s in fact gay, that’s a lesson Chace Crawford—the dashing, engrossed young man at the premiere—may do well to heed.

Additional reporting by Sarah Douglas

Fonda in Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding.

Jane Fonda is always a welcome antidote to the hackneyed drivel of today’s movies, even when she’s relegated to sharing the screen with also-rans like Jennifer Lopez and Lindsay Lohan. In her career zenith, she could always be counted on to bring both complexity and nuance to the least deserving roles. At 74, she hasn’t forgotten a thing. With a wonderful, careful and admiring director, she gives even a routine picture unbridled energy, craft and an extra dash of class above and beyond the script. All reasons to embrace Bruce Beresford’s warm, polished, feel-good comedy Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding. 

Jane plays Grace, a beautiful remnant of Woodstock, an aging hippie in upstate New York who long ago surrendered the ties that bind free spirits to conventional social acceptance. She tends her kiln, barters for supplies with her art, grows chickens while holding war protests every Saturday. She’s a vigilant flower child who has given up nothing including her marijuana plants. She grows it in a specialty plant-lighted room perfect for weed. This is not autobiographical material. When the hippies were blowing in the wind, Jane was living in Paris, married to Roger Vadim. But she is a perfect Grace. Like I said before, she has forgotten nothing—including the ability to bring even a homespun character with obelisk jade earrings and macramé Feng Shui.

Culture shock looms when Grace’s successful, anal retentive Manhattan lawyer daughter Diane (Catherine Keener), in the middle of a nasty divorce, arrives in Woodstock to visit the estranged mother she hasn’t spoken to for 20 years, bringing along her two children, Jake (Nat Wolff) and Zoe (Elizabeth Olsen), who have never met their grandmother. The reunion packs an instant wallop. Diane is appalled to find her mother sleeps around at will and plays town matriarch to what’s left over from the Flower Power movement, as well as local fertility goddess and revered dope dealer. She welcomes frequent visits from naked men in the middle of the night and dances once a month around a bonfire, playing weird instruments and howling at the moon. Instead of Diane’s feared negative effect of her mother’s liberal personality on her kids, they adjust quickly and embrace their eccentric grandmother’s force of nature with relish. Diane resists her mother’s primitive lures, but the kids discover a liberating energy they didn’t know they had. In no time, vegetarian Zoe falls for a handsome butcher (Chace Crawford). Jake becomes attached to a young waitress and turns into a filmmaker. Even Diane meets a handsome, hopelessly corny, guitar-playing carpenter (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who sings, writes songs and rekindles her lost interest in romance. While Grace reminisces about Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and threesomes with Leonard Cohen, her grandkids become enchanted with a way of life before their time. In time, they want to be just like her. Everyone learns something, in follow-the-dots movie predictability, but you like the characters so much you want them to smile and find peace in new beginnings and fresh family bonds. They bring their own hang-ups and learn to change gracefully. They all read too much Walt Whitman, and I would have liked it more if it wasn’t manipulated by so many of those old songs from the 1960s that seem so naïve and simplistic now. Still, it’s pleasant watching this uniquely cool grandmother share her pot with her uptight grandkids and encourage them to lose their virginity, presenting them with the raw material they need to look into their own souls.

Pop songs, beautiful bucolic scenery and the joy of watching Jane Fonda fizz in a fun role that looks like a no-brainer are elements that a skilled director like Australia’s polished Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) blends with perfection. Best of all, there is Jane Fonda, whose total investment of heart and soul lights up every corner of the screen. She is so much a part of Grace that you can only wonder if placing Ronald Reagan’s autobiography next to The Cannabis Grower’s Bible wasn’t her own idea. “Maybe he’ll learn something,” says Grace. Or is it Jane Fonda talking? No matter how you slice it, she still has a lot to give, and in  Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding, she gives it all she’s got.

rreed@observer.com

PEACE, LOVE, & MISUNDERSTANDING

Running Time 96 minutes

Written by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert

Directed by Bruce Beresford

Starring Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener and Elizabeth Olsen

3/4

Those operations may have been a drop in the bucket for the billion-dollar company, but they appeared to have an equal and opposite reaction in traditional media, setting off an e-commerce arms race across magazines in 2011.

Contrary to gender stereotypes, Conde Nast’s and Hearst’s rival men’s magazines emerged as some of the biggest players in the new hybrid game. This fall, GQ partnered with the Gilt Groupe full-price men’s store, Park & Bond, and Esquire opened CLAD, a luxury online store merchandised by J.C. Penney.

And now that magazines are in the business of retail, the month of December isn’t just “Best of the Year” lists and Four Seasons lunches. There’s inventory to move!

Park & Bond stocked an empty space in the Meatpacking District with items from GQ’s “Best Stuff of 2011,” feting the ephemeral store’s opening on Tuesday night.

Paul Sevigny DJ’d and a St. Germain, vodka, grapefruit juice cocktail called the Gentleman was served. The vodka was omitted from the Transom’s Gentleman, but we were too distracted by the bone structure of the gentleman serving it to complain.

In fact, the store was staffed such that an appearance by Gossip Girl star Chace Crawford might have gone unnoticed were it not for the cluster of women he attracted.

We asked Mr. Crawford what it had been like to act with Keith Gessen, the n+1 editor who recently portrayed the public boyfriend of Nate’s (Mr. Crawford’s character’s) secret lover.

Mr. Crawford smiled blankly. Who could blame him? Gossip Girl’s cameos (Jonathan Karp, Jay McInerney, Sloane Crosley, Hamish Bowles, Stefano Tonchi) had become a more detailed media and literary directory than the Michael’s reservation log.

“Everyone was great,” he concluded.

We surrendered him to a group of women with their iPhone cameras poised.

Revelers lingered around the tie display, where we watched a young MSNBC marketer drip cocktail condensation on a particularly fine wool specimen.

We cringed. We recognized the make, the signature wool in saturated rainbow cookie shades. They were made by that handsome Harvard graduate, the one who made that documentary. They were pretty expensive. Where had we read about those before?

Ah, yes, in GQ.

Retail was out of sight, if not out of mind, at the launch of Esquire's CLAD, nearly a week later on Monday. Esquire made the increasingly radical decision not to open a pop up store this season, and instead threw a party just a few cobblestones away from Park & Bond in the dim vault of Double Seven.

Esquire had been seeking a retail partner for years, editor in chief David Granger told the Transom, and has always been adventurous. He mentioned their pioneering augmented reality issue in December 2009, admittedly a one-off.

“You have to do these things before you know whether they’re going to be fun or good or profitable,” he said.

CLAD envisions its shopper, like the Esquire reader, as what Mr. Granger calls the “high normal American guy.” Educated but not pretentious, successful but still ambitious. The magazine’s fashion department reports back from shows in Milan and London to give CLAD executives a sense of where they see trends going.

“A lot of men lack confidence,” he said. “Taking part in CLAD is just another way to educate men about how to present themselves to the world.”

Mr. Granger’s sartorial road to Damascus moment occurred during his years as a sports reporter. He saw a photo of himself in the dugout with  David Parker, looking schlubby with long hair, a plaid short sleeve shirt and “some sort of nasty khakis.”

“Well, no wonder all these athletes hate us,” he remembered thinking. “It’s not because we’re reporters asking impertinent questions, it’s because we look like shit!”

The Transom silently blessed Mr. Granger for abiding our dingy jeans.

“I decided then that I would always be better dressed than the people I was reporting on, so they didn’t think ‘I don’t need to talk to this person.’”

It did the trick for Esquire great Gay Talese, we supposed.

Mr. Scanlan mentioned that it was Mr. Beresford's 70th birthday, which drew gasps and a burst of applause from the audience. Many of his friends and much of the cast of the film he's currently working on, Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding, turned out to fete Mr. Beresford. The Transom spotted child actor Nat Wolff, CNN correspondent Alina Cho, Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford and Catherine Keener, who appeared from the state of her hair to have gotten caught in the sudden rainstorm outside. (She still looked great.)

The role in Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding that has everyone talking, however, belongs to Jane Fonda: She plays a Woodstock-dwelling flower child now embarking on grandmotherhood. We suggested delicately that perhaps the role had given Ms. Fonda a chance to get back in touch with her hippie roots; she, of course, was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. "My what roots?" she asked, holding her remarkably well-behaved little dog in her arms. "Stoned hippie grandma?" Ms. Fonda insisted that she has little in common with the character, really. "I've never played a character like this before, and I never was like this character! Protests, yes, but not like her. She's very colorful!"

We asked about the funny, strange Scissors Sisters comedy video released earlier this month, in which Ms. Fonda appears along with Amanda Lepore, Kylie Minogue and Juliette Lewis. She explained she's a friend of the band. "And I went to the concert when I was in Paris. Un-friggin'-believable. Unbelievable. [Jake Shears] ended up almost naked, I might add. It was great."

Kyle MacLachlan had also been to Paris lately. "I did one trip to Paris, which is my wife's favorite city, and I love it, too," he told the Transom. "We happened to hit it right at the height of a heat wave, which is difficult-but we enjoyed that very much, took our son with us." Now that Desperate Housewives has wrapped up, Mr. MacLachlan has again been flexing his indie muscles. "I worked on a little thing for the Independent Film Channel with Fred Armisen called Portlandia a couple of months ago. That's been picked up, it's going to come out and that will be kind of fun." We looked it up-it is co-written by Carrie Brownstein of the indie rock band Sleater-Kinney.

The man of the evening, Mr. Beresford, admitted to the Transom that he knew "virtually nothing" about ballet when he set out to direct Mao's Last Dancer. "I'd directed a number of operas, but I didn't really know anything about ballet! But then I've done a lot of films where I never knew anything about the subject. You know, you've got to research it," he said. But he didn't try out any steps himself: "None whatever! You know, you've got to be so fit, and it's one of the most rigorous things you can possibly do. To learn to be a great ballet dancer is years and years of training, you know, from childhood. Very tough."

We also inquired as to whether Mr. Beresford had rented any of the classic ballet movies-like The Red Shoes (yes) or Center Stage. "Oh yeah, Center Stage, I saw that one, yeah," he allowed. "There are a lot of 'em!"

It was Mr. Jackson’s third time at Sundance, but his first starring in a closing night film.

“Speedy turnaround, right?” he said.

In Twelve, which sold to Hanover House last week for $2 million, Mr. Jackson portrays a Harlem dealer named Lionel, who supplies a 17-year-old high school dropout—played, quite appropriately, by Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford—with drugs to sell to all of his privileged former classmates on the Upper East Side. In one scene, Lionel gets killed while a young girl exchanges her virginity for a new super drug.

“I don’t mind dying in films,” said Mr. Jackson, amid an explosion of flashbulbs, “’cause you get up after they say, ‘Cut!’”

Unlike Mr. Jackson, Mr. Schumacher, who is 70, said he had never been to Sundance before, and he was proclaiming over and over that he was “the world’s oldest student filmmaker.” His hair was streaked with gray to the chin, and he was dressed in a denim shirt under a double-breasted black wool blazer, and a hemp necklace a shade lighter than his tan.

Mr. Schumacher, who grew up in Long Island, said he was drawn to the material of Twelve, which has its violent climax inside an Upper East Side palace crammed with 400 Marc Jacobs-clad teens, as soon as he read the galleys back in 2002.

“It smacked of the truth,” he said. “It’s a story where the characters are concerned more with celebrity than accomplishments. It’s really a portrait of bad parenting. It’s the same story in every high school, in every town.” (The film ends with a quote from Camus’s The Plague: “After all…there is more to celebrate in the human being than to denigrate.”)

Twelve is ranked dubiously in a critics’ poll on IndieWire. But at Friday’s premiere, John Cooper, the new programming director of Sundance, introduced the film by proclaiming that its cast was perhaps “the most beautiful in the history of the festival.”

“That’s so sweet,” actor Chace Crawford said to a friend who showed off the freshly etched initials on the back of his phone. “I love to BBM!” Mr. Crawford told the Transom, referring to BlackBerry Messenger, the free service for BlackBerry users. “I can’t do anything else when I’m BBMing. I’ll be doing this”—he looked down and imitated typing with thumbs—“and my friend will be telling a story and I’ll be like, ‘What?’ It doesn’t even process I’m so focused on the BBM,” he said, laughing, before being whisked away. BB-bye!

The Transom turned and bumped into Ms. Shields. “BlackBerry was my welcoming party to the current century,” she siad. “I was a paper person before that! Now I’m addicted!” She paused, adding, “I refuse to have it cut into my family time.” No texting at the dinner table, then? “No, but my kids love to play Brick-breaker. My 6-year-old knows how to work it better than I do. It makes me feel like my father when I went to him with, like, VHS!”

Out on the terrace after the rain stopped, Chloe Sevigny talked to the Transom about her smartphone etiquette: “I like to put mine on quiet because I don’t want to reach for it every time it vibrates. I just check it periodically. It’s a much better way to live your life!” Ms. Sevigny said she doesn’t like to keep her phone out at all times, “Unless, maybe, a boy’s gonna call!” she said. “Or text.”

The Beautiful Life’s Nico Tortorella used his PDA to show off pictures of his new puppy, Mama, and her soon-to-be-adopted housemate, Madonna. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he gushed. If his BlackBerry could have one feature it doesn’t already have? “Make me fly. Or teleport—that would be cool, too. Or stop time, and then keep going faster!” Mr. Tortorella said he uses his phone at all times—including, shame on him, behind the wheel. “I’ve had way too many accidents,” he confessed. “Memorizing lines on my BlackBerry on the way to auditions.” On the way to death, sir ...

“They showed me how to use it,” said 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander of his maiden BlackBerry. “I didn’t understand one thing. It’s very complicated. I think I’ll have to take some classes. I’m not good at class, so I don’t know if it’s gonna work out.” How did he ever live without one? “Home phone, cell phone, and talking,” he said.

With their wide-set eyes, narrow noses, rounded jaw lines and carefully placed strands of layered hair, these faces, we said, have become eerily feminine. (See Chace Crawford, Zac Efron, and Ian Somerhalder in our slideshow.)

And because these actors have an almost identical look, they've even become interchangeable for various franchise films and romantic comedies. Could the actors' handlers be taking note. Today Gatecrasher reported that Mr. Crawford and Mr. Efron have sudddenly, unexpectantly cut their "man-bangs" to be seen as more masculine, grown up actors. "When stars drastically change their image, it’s usually because they want better or more mature roles," commented celebrity stylist Cecilia Care.

"There must have been a memo floating around Hollywood last weekend, ’cause they all flaunted their new ’dos for the Fourth," Gatecrasher speculated.

Yes, perhaps.

The movie is based on Nick McDonnell’s 2002 novel of the same title about a Manhattan teen who deals drugs at his private school. (Mr. McDonnell, son of Sports Illustrated editor Terry McDonnell, attended Riverdale prep and wrote the book when he was just 17.)

The film, set for release in 2010, has enlisted some of Manhattan’s less experienced young actors, including 23-year-old Chace Crawford, who is set to play the lead role of "White Mike"; the 20-year-old Zoe Kravitz, daughter of Lenny; Ralph Lauren model Cody Horn and—and!—Liam McMullan, son of party photographer Patrick, for whom this is a first movie role.

“Joel specifically wanted kids that would be believable high school kids,” said Jessica Kelly, the casting director for the film. “It was important from day one of casting to treat this like a documentary—over-privileged, under-loved teens in New York exist and, in order to care about these characters, they had to be 100 percent human and believable.”

Was Ms. Kelly nervous about casting Mr. Crawford, best known for his work on TV's Gossip Girl but otherwise lacking much big screen exposure, for the lead role?

“No,” she replied. “Chace definitely has star quality and is also a really good actor. I am excited for him to show what he can do with this character.”

Mr. McMullan had originally tried out for Mr. Crawford’s role.

“He wasn't right but he was too unique and colorful and ‘of this world’ to not bring him back for Joel,” said the casting director. “Joel thought of the character Royal for him right away.”

Reached by phone last week (Mr. Schumacher objected to having the Daily Transom visit the set), Mr. McMullan was sitting in his trailer—yes, he’s got his own—in a Thom Browne suit with a tutu sewn inside. He was waiting to shoot the next scene with Ms. Kravitz at a house party inside a brownstone.

“My character is friends with all the girls in the movie,” said Mr. McMullan. “He’s like the gay fashionista guy.”

The model Ms. Horn, also the daughter of Warner Brothers chief operating officer Alan Horn, was taking a break from the shoot, having just arrived in the Hamptons, when the Daily Transom caught up with her this week.

“I got the part through this photographer I work with,” she said, "Bruce Webber?" (Yeah, we might know that guy.)

One day, according to Mr. McMullan, the cast was shooting on the Upper East Side when a troop of tween girls gathered on the sidewalk to look on. Mr. McMullan asked if they might be waiting for a sighting of Mr. Crawford.

“They were like nooo!’” Mr. McMullan recalled,  “And I was like, 'Well, do you want him to come meet you?' And they were like 'Yeaaah!' So I called him up and all these girls jumped me and stole Chace Crawford’s number out of my phone!”

He added, "Joel is always joking that we’re going to win for the most attractive cast."