I thought very reluctantly, however, that its talented creators, Peter Ullian and Robert Lindsay-Nassif, weren’t quite there yet with their imaginative piece. But when the cast, led by the wonderful Donna Lynne Champlin, took its curtain call to enthusiastic applause, I found myself feeling guilty and asked myself, “What if I’m wrong?”

What if Flight of the Lawnchair Man is the greatest musical since West Side Story and I missed it? The original producer of West Side Story was Harold Prince, then a young man at the start of his career. His creative team—Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins—would become as legendary as the show. Their new musical literally changed the world—the musical world, anyway.

But wait! Flight of the Lawnchair Man was premiered at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where Harold Prince was its original director. Mr. Prince surely saw the talent at work in Flight of the Lawnchair Man and, at the very least, he wanted to nurture it. Perhaps he saw what I couldn’t see—a miracle in the making, the future.

“There is no substitute for talent,” wrote a resigned Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point. “Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.”

What we know about the mysteries of talent is that dedication to an artistic cause—the magnificent, honest endeavor and effort of it all—doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Eugene O’Neill used to emerge from his workroom exhausted and pale, his eyes bleary with the tears he shed in the struggle to exhume his ghosts and make sense of life’s wreckage. But the tortured O’Neill was a natural stage poet. He had no choice. He was born one.

I’ve found, in the reviewing game, that it also takes as much effort to fail in theater as it does to succeed. The most affecting, appalling scene in Citizen Kane comes when the suicidal Susan Alexander Kane finally confronts her Svengali husband, Charles Foster Kane, for trying to turn her into an opera star when she had no talent.

“Charlie,” she begs him after another humiliating appearance in the opera house he built for her, “you don’t know what it means when the whole audience doesn’t want you.”

“That’s when you’ve got to fight them!” he replies.

Like everything in his life, the millionaire Charles Foster Kane wanted the public to bend to his will. But you cannot fight an audience that’s found you out. An audience in revolt puts an unusual limit on the power of money. For Kane could buy anyone and anything he wanted in life—except the creation of God-given talent.

Kane’s terrified wife is like John Osborne’s mythic failed comic, Archie Rice, who’s dead behind his eyes. Archie is a comic who just isn’t funny. He hasn’t the talent for it. He tries. Oh, how he tries! But he knows it’s no use. He craves laughter and dies every night in the unforgiving spotlight.

Where does talent come from? Talent is kissed by God, who remains perversely democratic about it. He bestows talent without moral judgment on both the good and the bad. Poor old Salieri! That upright patron saint of the mediocre could never accept the capricious injustice of it all. Why not him? Why did God choose an idiot savant named Mozart?

On the other hand, talent needs luck, the helping hand of Fate. Or as Robert Benchley explained about his own success, “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

I was struck last season by a very odd and bold play for Broadway, Souvenir, which told the true story of the society lady, Florence Foster Jenkins, who became a famous opera star precisely because she had no talent. Ms. Jenkins could scarcely hold a note. Yet when she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1944, some 2,000 people were reportedly turned away from her sold-out recital.

We can only assume that Jenkins was either unaware that she was singing blissfully off-key, or she was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was on the floor with laughter at Judy Kaye’s straight-faced impersonation of her. So was everyone else around me. Not meaning to laugh at the disastrously flat notes—we therefore howled. Or worse, tried our utmost not to.

In their bizarre way, Jenkins’ legendary recitals were no different from Leonard Bernstein’s manically discordant “The Wrong Note Rag” in Wonderful Town. But here the deliberately crappy makes us happy. Jenkins’ unself-conscious talent was for singing badly, but you could claim her real talent was for making a public idiot of herself. And yet she was touching. She was treated as a freak show, but she was doing her best. Florence Foster Jenkins yearned in her soul to be the real thing. She wanted to be an artist.

Her contemporary version would be Rufus Wainwright, the popular singer-songwriter, who sold out Carnegie Hall in early summer giving a song-by-song recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 concert, Judy at Carnegie Hall. It mattered little—if it mattered at all—that Mr. Wainwright reportedly sounded nothing like Garland. He had his fantasy in the sun. He had a 40-piece orchestra accompanying him. He had his mother on piano during “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And he had an adoring audience who wanted to be up there like Judy, too.

It takes all sorts, as Wittgenstein used to say over tea and crumpets. Joseph Pujol—a.k.a. La Petomane or “The Fartist”—literally farted his way to great fame and fortune. His astonishing innate talent, which at the height of his powers earned him more than Sarah Bernhardt, was first noticed at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, when he appeared poker-faced, dressed in immaculate evening wear to fart at will in perfect pitch to various classical concertos and popular songs.

Women in the audience fainted from laughing so much. They had to be carried out on stretchers by attendant nurses. La Petomane’s farts could also render a perfect imitation of the sound of several yards of cloth being slowly ripped or, if he felt like it, of rapid machine-gun fire, and all while he accompanied himself on the violin.

Say what you like about him, he was like a breath of fresh air blown through the bourgeois theaters of Paris. He was a true genius of wind who proved the old Broadway adage, “You gotta have a gimmick.”

But the gift of convulsive, unearthly talent is never a mere gimmick. In Brian Friel’s magnificent Faith Healer, the hero lives in agony because he doubts his miraculous gifts. “Precisely what power did I possess?” the tormented faith healer demands time and again of himself. “Could I summon it? When and how?” And then one day, a day he predicted would happen, his gifts vanished overnight and the mob tore him to pieces.

As I say, I felt badly that I didn’t enjoy the New York Theater Festival Flight of the Lawnchair Man as much as some. I thought its talented creators revealed great promise, though—which is something, a lot even, but exactly what the talented never want to hear anyone say about them.

I thought very reluctantly, however, that its talented creators, Peter Ullian and Robert Lindsay-Nassif, weren’t quite there yet with their imaginative piece. But when the cast, led by the wonderful Donna Lynne Champlin, took its curtain call to enthusiastic applause, I found myself feeling guilty and asked myself, “What if I’m wrong?”

What if Flight of the Lawnchair Man is the greatest musical since West Side Story and I missed it? The original producer of West Side Story was Harold Prince, then a young man at the start of his career. His creative team—Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins—would become as legendary as the show. Their new musical literally changed the world—the musical world, anyway.

But wait! Flight of the Lawnchair Man was premiered at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where Harold Prince was its original director. Mr. Prince surely saw the talent at work in Flight of the Lawnchair Man and, at the very least, he wanted to nurture it. Perhaps he saw what I couldn’t see—a miracle in the making, the future.

“There is no substitute for talent,” wrote a resigned Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point. “Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.”

What we know about the mysteries of talent is that dedication to an artistic cause—the magnificent, honest endeavor and effort of it all—doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Eugene O’Neill used to emerge from his workroom exhausted and pale, his eyes bleary with the tears he shed in the struggle to exhume his ghosts and make sense of life’s wreckage. But the tortured O’Neill was a natural stage poet. He had no choice. He was born one.

I’ve found, in the reviewing game, that it also takes as much effort to fail in theater as it does to succeed. The most affecting, appalling scene in Citizen Kane comes when the suicidal Susan Alexander Kane finally confronts her Svengali husband, Charles Foster Kane, for trying to turn her into an opera star when she had no talent.

“Charlie,” she begs him after another humiliating appearance in the opera house he built for her, “you don’t know what it means when the whole audience doesn’t want you.”

“That’s when you’ve got to fight them!” he replies.

Like everything in his life, the millionaire Charles Foster Kane wanted the public to bend to his will. But you cannot fight an audience that’s found you out. An audience in revolt puts an unusual limit on the power of money. For Kane could buy anyone and anything he wanted in life—except the creation of God-given talent.

Kane’s terrified wife is like John Osborne’s mythic failed comic, Archie Rice, who’s dead behind his eyes. Archie is a comic who just isn’t funny. He hasn’t the talent for it. He tries. Oh, how he tries! But he knows it’s no use. He craves laughter and dies every night in the unforgiving spotlight.

Where does talent come from? Talent is kissed by God, who remains perversely democratic about it. He bestows talent without moral judgment on both the good and the bad. Poor old Salieri! That upright patron saint of the mediocre could never accept the capricious injustice of it all. Why not him? Why did God choose an idiot savant named Mozart?

On the other hand, talent needs luck, the helping hand of Fate. Or as Robert Benchley explained about his own success, “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

I was struck last season by a very odd and bold play for Broadway, Souvenir, which told the true story of the society lady, Florence Foster Jenkins, who became a famous opera star precisely because she had no talent. Ms. Jenkins could scarcely hold a note. Yet when she made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1944, some 2,000 people were reportedly turned away from her sold-out recital.

We can only assume that Jenkins was either unaware that she was singing blissfully off-key, or she was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was on the floor with laughter at Judy Kaye’s straight-faced impersonation of her. So was everyone else around me. Not meaning to laugh at the disastrously flat notes—we therefore howled. Or worse, tried our utmost not to.

In their bizarre way, Jenkins’ legendary recitals were no different from Leonard Bernstein’s manically discordant “The Wrong Note Rag” in Wonderful Town. But here the deliberately crappy makes us happy. Jenkins’ unself-conscious talent was for singing badly, but you could claim her real talent was for making a public idiot of herself. And yet she was touching. She was treated as a freak show, but she was doing her best. Florence Foster Jenkins yearned in her soul to be the real thing. She wanted to be an artist.

Her contemporary version would be Rufus Wainwright, the popular singer-songwriter, who sold out Carnegie Hall in early summer giving a song-by-song recreation of Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 concert, Judy at Carnegie Hall. It mattered little—if it mattered at all—that Mr. Wainwright reportedly sounded nothing like Garland. He had his fantasy in the sun. He had a 40-piece orchestra accompanying him. He had his mother on piano during “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” And he had an adoring audience who wanted to be up there like Judy, too.

It takes all sorts, as Wittgenstein used to say over tea and crumpets. Joseph Pujol—a.k.a. La Petomane or “The Fartist”—literally farted his way to great fame and fortune. His astonishing innate talent, which at the height of his powers earned him more than Sarah Bernhardt, was first noticed at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, when he appeared poker-faced, dressed in immaculate evening wear to fart at will in perfect pitch to various classical concertos and popular songs.

Women in the audience fainted from laughing so much. They had to be carried out on stretchers by attendant nurses. La Petomane’s farts could also render a perfect imitation of the sound of several yards of cloth being slowly ripped or, if he felt like it, of rapid machine-gun fire, and all while he accompanied himself on the violin.

Say what you like about him, he was like a breath of fresh air blown through the bourgeois theaters of Paris. He was a true genius of wind who proved the old Broadway adage, “You gotta have a gimmick.”

But the gift of convulsive, unearthly talent is never a mere gimmick. In Brian Friel’s magnificent Faith Healer, the hero lives in agony because he doubts his miraculous gifts. “Precisely what power did I possess?” the tormented faith healer demands time and again of himself. “Could I summon it? When and how?” And then one day, a day he predicted would happen, his gifts vanished overnight and the mob tore him to pieces.

As I say, I felt badly that I didn’t enjoy the New York Theater Festival Flight of the Lawnchair Man as much as some. I thought its talented creators revealed great promise, though—which is something, a lot even, but exactly what the talented never want to hear anyone say about them.

When last we met on the Harvey Weinstein–Martin Scorsese field of battle, it was about two years ago; the producer and the director were in their own street fight, and it had gone beyond the "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" stage. It wasn't. But like a screwball comedy in which a couple falls in love, splits and remarries, they're back together.

But this time, the plot has a bunch of knots that the drunkest story conference in old Hollywood couldn't have come up with: Mr. Weinstein is on the verge of dissolution with the film company he built, Miramax, with a $115 million gamble he's co-producing with a phalanx of partners, including Warner Brothers and Initial Entertainment Group. Mr. Scorsese is back in Mr. Weinstein's embrace. Everybody's reputation is on the line. The picture is two hours and 48 minutes long, about a manic-depressive, obsessive-compulsive billionaire whose glamorous Lindbergh- and Valentino-like reputation was hidden by his mad-hatter old age-and who nobody under 45 can remember. The chairman of Disney, which owns Miramax, can't stand Mr. Weinstein and would like to see him boil in oil; Mr. Weinstein, likewise. There is no longer a T.W.A. or a Pan Am Airways.

It's a gamble Hughes would have loved. You could even sell tickets to it. The notorious entrepreneur, film director and test pilot's story-beginning with the making of his own crazy movie gamble, Hell's Angels, to the flight of the world's biggest aircraft and his ensuing loves' insanity-will begin its campaign to win your heart Dec. 17, courtesy of Warner Brothers and Miramax.

Harvey Weinstein is not Howard Hughes. He has no mustache. But he can relate. For the last six months, the co-chairman of Miramax Films has been engaged in a very public imbroglio over the future of the mini-studio he and his brother Bob founded almost 25 years ago. He has gone to the mattresses with the only man more disliked in Hollywood than himself, Michael Eisner-the surprisingly tall, monomaniacal titan of Disney, recently playing himself in a Delaware courtroom .

But the street-fight gusto of Mr. Weinstein's Fahrenheit 9/11 stand in May, when Disney refused to distribute the controversial documentary, has dissolved into a roiling story that he will be leaving Miramax by early next year, that he is already dismantling his crack staff-thus making The Aviator the de facto last stand, the last big-budget hurrah in the Weinstein era of Miramax.

"This is the first of many swan songs for Harvey," said one longtime film publicist. "We all should expect an infestation of swans."

And on Dec. 17, the Oscar race with Mr. Weinstein, Mr. Scorsese and Mr. DiCaprio as protagonists, plus: Clint Eastwood's female boxing picture, Million Dollar Baby, and James L. Brooks' Adam Sandler movie, Spanglish. Five days later, Joel Schumacher's $60 million version of The Phantom of the Opera. Alexander Payne's Sideways, which has generated the most attention up to this point, and Bill Condon's Kinsey will be in wide release. Mike Nichols' Closer shows up, with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman and Jude Law, and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic will already have had a small head start.

Hollywood awaits it all, but The Aviator jacked up the stakes Nov. 24, when Variety hit the Internet with Todd McCarthy's review: "An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama," Mr. McCarthy wrote to every agent, producer and Academy voter in town. " The Aviator flies like one of Howard Hughes' record-setting speed airplanes …. Martin Scorsese's most pleasurable narrative feature in many a year is both extravagant and disciplined, grandly conceived and packed with minutiae. Although he was not exactly born for the role, Leonard DiCaprio is in terrific movie-star mode."

Socko!

Suddenly, the morning line was set in Hollywood. This wasn't Gangs of New York, a bloody film they had been dragged into kicking and screaming. This was a retelling of one of their own, the most mythologized and remythologized man in Hollywood history, the hero of The Carpetbaggers and Melvin and Howard!

The Aviator is a two-hour-and-48-minute pedigree production-culled from Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Weinstein's thoroughbred stable-that speaks to every branch in the Academy and explains the man who owned R.K.O. and produced the first Scarface. It was directed by America's Greatest Director Who Never Won an Oscar, a topic Mr. McCarthy spoke to: "If Gangs of New York felt heavy and never found its rhythm, The Aviator runs like a dream on all cylinders with scarcely a sputter or a cough."

And although the company has high hopes for Marc Forster's J.M. Barrie biography, Finding Neverland, bringing home the gold for Mr. Scorsese after his four nominations would satisfy Mr. Weinstein in a kind of special way.

Asked if this was his swan song, Mr. Weinstein purred-and growled. "No," he said, adding that negotiations between him and Mr. Eisner continue to be amicable.

"But that sounds good, doesn't it?"

Mr. Weinstein wants this picture to work. Both he and Mr. Eisner have had their share of difficulties lately. Mr. Eisner has had to endure the trial brought by Disney shareholders regarding the $100 million or so severance package received by former CAA boss Michael Ovitz when he was fired from the No. 2 spot at Disney in 1996. And even though Mr. Weinstein's Miramax is on course to match last year's domestic box-office total with fewer films, Miramax's internal disintegration has provided ample fodder for tabloids, trades and blogs, which are waiting for his departure from Disney. There were layoffs, defections-the most recent was chief operation officer Rick Sands, who went to DreamWorks-expired contracts and leaks of internal memos regarding vacation days. The company has been whittled down to Mr. Weinstein's inner circle, a tight group of upper-echelon executives he has cultivated over the years.

A big Oscar night would do wonders to erase a year that Mr. Weinstein would love to forget, and it would have him leaving on top on an evening that Hollywood formerly resented his ownership of, as Miramax won barrels of Oscars for prestige pictures starting with The English Patient's Best Picture in 1996.

But Mr. Weinstein cautioned the Hollywood community not to expect a massive Weinsteinian onslaught this year.

He has, he said, changed.

"Overaggressive marketing and over-pushing-and I'm not saying that I haven't been guilty of that in the past-I'd rather not have it," he said. "Our plan is definitely low-key for me and Marty. If it happens"-he meant winning an Academy Award-"it happens. And if it doesn't happen, both of us are proud of the movie."

Mr. Weinstein did, however lament that the Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater would not match Mr. Hughes' for Hell's Angels, which was attended by 500,000 Los Angeles residents and visitors: "I think in the post-9/11 era the idea of one of us going to the State Department and saying, 'Listen, we've got this very fun movie about airplanes. Can we just have like 100 airplanes fly over New York City, fly over Los Angeles?' Even us who have unlimited chutzpah can't ask for that."

Miramax, which up until this point has put most of its marketing mettle behind Marc Forster's Finding Neverland-especially pushing Johnny Depp's portrayal of the Peter Pan creator-finds itself now gearing up its Aviator campaign. And Mr. Weinstein's message has trickled down.

"We're planning a full, strong campaign on The Aviator," said Cynthia Schwartz, Miramax's veteran Oscar maven. Ms. Schwartz was on her way to the airport to catch a flight to L.A. for tomorrow night's premiere. "It's going to focus very much on the performances-in particular on Leo's performance."

Still, who can forget Mr. Scorsese's pained expression when he lost to Roman Polanski with The Pianist. It was an indelible Oscar moment, one terribly crystallized when Chicago- incidentally released by Miramax as well-a glitzy, old-fashioned musical, beat Gangs for Best Picture. Sitting in an aisle seat off the center row of the Kodak Theatre, Mr. Scorsese looked crestfallen, matched by Mr. Weinstein and actor Daniel Day-Lewis. It was supposed to be Mr. Scorsese's night. He had finally ushered his 20-year pet project to the screen, but the nominations it received proved to be a Pyrrhic victory-by time the Oscars came around, the Gangs of New York marketing had sputtered. The Gangs campaign had focused heavily on Mr. Scorsese. This year, however, the campaign will not.

"We're not focusing specifically on Marty as much as we're focusing on the overall movie," said Ms. Schwartz. "It's not that we're not focusing on Marty or ignoring Marty, obviously. But I think that the movie speaks for itself so beautifully that we're focusing beyond Marty."

With The Aviator, the waning empire that was Miramax is content to let the picture glide into Oscar night, letting Mr. Scorsese's career speak for itself. And the studio will do the same for the film: The movie looks like a $115 million, which it reportedly cost. The Hughes saga took place in a glorified period in moviemaking, cherished by the silver-haired Academy.

And Mr. Hughes, loved or hated, is being resuscitated as the emblem of that period: Hollywood's noble gambler, who bucked the studios. The very first indie-he gambled with money, with women, with his life.

He virtually created the big-budget action picture with Hell's Angels, the most expensive directorial debut in history. He flew around the world in four days, which would be like Mr. Weinstein climbing into a space shuttle and going around in four hours. His romantic escapades are the stuff of legend-Hepburn, Gardner, Harlow, Terry Moore, Jean Peters, Bette Davis. Wow! The relationships with Hepburn (stunningly played by Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) are the only sentimental moments in the picture.

It is clear that Mr. Weinstein would hate to see Mr. Scorsese go out the same way Stanley Kubrick did, without the little gold man. And given Eisner-Weinstein war, this could very well be a fitting farewell to Miramax, the company that Hollywood loved to hate but, as it is with all movie renegades, can learn to love once it's croaked. It may be the final marketing spin necessary to make them champs once again. By taking on Mr. Eisner, Mr. Weinstein is an underdog once more-a position he hasn't been in since Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan in 1999.

"If they stay, great," said Tom Bernard, co-head of Sony Pictures Classics. "If they don't, they're going to get a billion dollars to start a new company. So I don't know if this is the last hurrah."

There is one thing that's certain, though: Wherever Mr. Weinstein ends up, he plans on sticking to what's worked. "I don't want to be limited by anything," he said, adding that he was proud of the big movies and, he said, "I'm proud of the small ones. I think you have to grow with your filmmakers, and you have to keep an eye on the bottom line. I think all of that's important. We've had such success."

Contact!

In this lively, rather tender account of his first 33 years, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. presents a happy, steady progress from heir to arriviste . After growing into his father's profession and politically moderate temperament, the precocious scion goes on famously to define the "vital center" as the sweet spot of American ideological life; but more personally, the coinage might stand for "the thick of things," which is where the younger Schlesinger so plainly loves being.

He spent a "generally sunny" childhood in Midwestern university towns and then Cambridge, Mass., where his father's eminent friends and acquaintances, from Felix Frankfurter to H. L. Mencken, expanded young Arthur's horizons and autograph book. Overcoming shyness and acne at Exeter, along with wistful regret about coming of age in the earnest 30's instead of the glamorous 20's, Mr. Schlesinger was soon careering from credential to credential. As an undergraduate in his father's Harvard domain, he ended up more cocky than cowed. A Henry Fellowship took him to the other Cambridge to witness the appeasement year of 1938-39. The Society of Fellows brought him briefly back to Harvard; then it was time for service with the Office of War Information–where he became "deplorably adept" at ghostwriting–and the O.S.S., whose work got him to London for the buzz bombs and Paris after liberation, but whose operation in Foggy Bottom seemed "so terribly remote from the political scene." The first years of peace found him newly well-known for The Age of Jackson (1944), busily moving between journalism ("The Fortune piece led to lasting friendships with Welles, Berle, Morgenthau and Rockefeller") and, once more, Harvard, with time out to be special assistant to Averell Harriman, over in Europe running the Marshall Plan.

Mr. Schlesinger's taste for moderation leaves him right about most of the big things–a detestation of Communists, particularly the American kind; a preference for "liberalism without mawkishness"; a zestful appreciation of "FDR's ironical achievement to rescue capitalism from the capitalists." Taking pride in his progressivism, he insists that, politically, the "middle of the road" runs not through the vital but the "dead" center.

Alas, that's smack-dab where he winds up in a number of other respects. He spends a lot of pages on his formative cultural consumption (he gave some early thought to being a drama critic) and reveals his tastes to be thoroughly canonical. A visit to Venice makes it "then and thereafter my favorite city next to Paris"; Billie Holiday is a "matchless" singer; and although bad eyesight and tipsiness gave him an imperfect first view of Citizen Kane , he writes that "Later, of course, I came to admire Kane too."

Along with the "brevity of American history"–he remembers hearing Harvard's A. Lawrence Lowell "reminisce about the election of 1860"–Mr. Schlesinger takes the "circularity of life" as one of his themes. But he often ascribes to coincidence the nearly inevitable results of simple proximity; if you get out as much as he has, you're bound to keep running into yourself and everybody else. Mr. Schlesinger seems never to have been near someone who isn't famous, or soon to be famous, or whose children will someday be famous. His closest English friend, for example, Charles Wintour, would father Anna, "the smart and stylish editor of the American Vogue ."

Most of the dropped names come with toastmastered encomia. John Kenneth Galbraith is "a man of true originality of mind and generosity of spirit"; Isaiah Berlin took "an unquenchable pleasure in the vagaries of human experience"; and the Janeway family gets saluted with a brace of approving appositives: "Later Eliot Janeway, an entertaining fellow, and I became pretty good friends, and his wife, Elizabeth, an excellent novelist, and his son Michael, a thoughtful journalist, really good friends." There are moments, it must be said, when a reader feels he's in the middle of some egghead version of Natural Blonde .

It's hard to think of an intellectual's memoir with less score-settling than this one. When it comes to his ideological opponents, Mr. Schlesinger prefers to forgive and forget–assuming there was any unpleasantness in the first place. He's got favorable things to declare about Philip Johnson, William Casey, Richard Helms, Joe Alsop and Henry Luce, and is even up to the near-impossible job of finding something nice to say about Randolph Churchill: "I found him, most of the time, courteous, entertaining and no more disagreeable than the occasion demanded." From time to time, the author takes gentle note of his own flaws–a "taste for luxury," a tendency toward glibness, a susceptibility to flattery–but what gives his book a great deal of charm is not so much this self-deprecation as his own evident ability to be charmed, something much rarer than a delight in being flattered.

Mr. Schlesinger often quotes from his appearances in the memoirs of other people quite a bit less famous than himself. Squibs from Woodrow Wyatt, Henry Ferns and Felix Gilbert dapple the page like factlets in a pop-up video. These reminiscences and estimations are typically favorable to Mr. Schlesinger, but the overall effect is something like the opposite of self-aggrandizing. An insecurity haunts the effort; a reader senses the author's more-than-normal compulsion to validate his own experience in terms of other people's. Mr. Schlesinger's dislike of cauliflower must be compared to Bush the Elder's aversion to broccoli; that youthful acne, "if not so disfiguring as the psoriasis that John Updike recalls so feelingly from his own boyhood, still was demoralizing." When he reappraises The Vital Center a half-century after writing it, the historian spends his most fascinated paragraphs pointing out how Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich both came to appropriate the phrase or quote from the book.

Whatever its psychological implications, the constant attempt to see himself in context makes this, admirably, less memoir than honest-to-God autobiography, that neglected genre in which the author tries to assess his life in the world rather than enumerate the ways in which the world has let him down. Mr. Schlesinger has made use not only of those self-validating memoirs, but also of journals, letters and contemporary press accounts. We learn that, on the day of his birth in 1917, men's shoes were selling at Saks for $5.95 and Mata Hari was executed in Paris.

Now in his 80's, Mr. Schlesinger remains a clear, fast-paced writer who can make even his ancestry–that bane of all biographical opening pages–a lucid pleasure. Famous for decrying the absence of social history amidst the political variety, the elder Arthur Schlesinger would be pleased by his son's recollections of how an undergraduate went to bed and got up in the 1930's: "[W]e had to wind our watches; the battery-powered watch was still to come. When we dressed in the morning, some began by putting on BVDs, a form of one-piece underwear now extinct …. After putting on pants (no khakis or jeans), we had to button our flies; the zipper did not appear till the late thirties." Schlesinger Sr. wondered why historians left to novelists so much of what might be their own province, and here again Jr. does him proud. Consider this Trollopian comparison of F.D.R.'s functionaries and Truman's Fair Dealers: "New Dealers were typically people extruded from American life, too highly charged for the towns that produced them and to which so few of them ever returned. Fair Dealers seemed to spring straight from the common life of the country. Most could sink back into it without leaving a ripple on the surface. With their pink cheeks and bland, unlined faces, their healthy, handsome daughters and their warm family lives, their affable extroversions and their boisterous practical jokes, they were part of the American landscape."

Mr. Schlesinger's Life is full of nostalgic grace notes and gentle cultural complaint. He mourns the "high noon of the print culture" in which he did his childhood reading; laments the dilution of cocktails into white wine and the recent doubling of the social kiss to involve both cheeks. Several years ago, he did the state some late yeoman service with The Disuniting of America , a book that looked out over a Balkanizing P.C. landscape that was hardly his idea of diversity. In this new volume, despite a few swipes at "multicultural busybodies" and "political correctness cops," Mr. Schlesinger seems less in the mood for confrontation than twilight resignation and polite mea culpa . He sighs a bit guiltily over the childhood pleasure he took in fireworks and freak shows, and expresses relief at being told, by other boldface names, that it was all right to have liked Amos 'n' Andy : "In 1997, dining with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stanley Crouch and the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, I was cheered to learn that many black Americans also enjoyed [the program]."

Mr. Schlesinger confesses to a "weakness for sequels" in his own reading. Having enjoyed this first volume of autobiography, I must confess that I'm not quite looking forward to the second. It's not so much a matter of the darker personal currents that are bound to flow–in this first installment, the author is quite discreet about the ups and downs of courting Marian Cannon, his first wife, and so decorous about his wartime "Paris girl" that a reader can't be sure how much of a fling got flung–but rather, of what's in store once the professor's crossover dreams are fulfilled in the red-hot center of the Kennedy White House. The previews in volume 1 are not promising. J.F.K. occasionally looms and shimmers ("a young fellow I distantly remembered from Harvard named John F. Kennedy"), and when recounting his first meeting with one of the clan, way back in December 1931, Mr. Schlesinger is actually inspired to spin Rosemary's lobotomy: "Her personal tragedy was terrible, but it yielded immense dividends in the crusade the Kennedys, especially Jean Smith and her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, later led on behalf of the handicapped and the retarded." For those who prefer The Age of Jackson to A Thousand Days –in both literature and life–a certain gritting of teeth will be required.

Thomas Mallon's In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing will be published in January by Pantheon .

"What traces do you leave behind? What signs of life? What do you say before you go? At the end of the day, who will know you? Who will know what you really were? You see, I don't think any one word can explain a man, all that he was. And facts, I think facts are less important than truth...."

Welles, the myth and master magician, might not have agreed. I can only imagine, of course, but he would have surely believed that it's more or less true that there's no such thing as truth. Besides, life and Rosebud theories are more imaginatively playful than literal, boring facts and "truth." Do we care if Citizen Kane is meant to be about the life of William Randolph Hearst? Nah. It's arguably the greatest film ever made-ever created -about someone like Hearst. Why reduce a masterpiece to the rules and dulling obligations of mere docudrama? I am for whopping lies told in great artistic causes.

Or, as the line goes in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance : "When the truth becomes legend, print the legend." Ms. Bogart's version of Orson Welles, however, is closer to "Print the mess." That Welles' life was a bloated, tragic mess, I've little doubt. But Ms. Bogart and her writer, Naomi Iizuka, are woolly about which Wellesian story they're actually telling.

Let it pass that the title War of the Worlds -the production opens this season's Next Wave Festival-misleads us into thinking the piece is about Welles' renowned radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel. The 1938 broadcast astonishingly panicked America into believing the Martians had landed, and Ms. Bogart's important question about the blurring of news and entertainment-or fiction and reality-results in a witty scene sparked by the original radio show. We might also assume the title implies Welles' war of the worlds with Hollywood. But the piece is boldly based, with mixed results and amusing cheek, on Citizen Kane .

It's the life and art of Orson Welles as Welles himself explored the life and megalomania of Hearst in the film. They're doing to Welles what he did to Kane, mirroring re-created scenes from Citizen Kane along the way. Kane's assistant, Mr. Bernstein, turns up again (in a brilliant impersonation by Will Bond); Welles' estranged best friend here clearly echoes Kane's betrayed friend Jedediah, originally played by Joseph Cotten. The concept itself isn't new-the million articles and biographies of Welles in search of their own Rosebud!-but Ms. Bogart handles it well, until she drifts surprisingly into a conventional biopic decked out as avant garde.

"Excuse me, I'm looking for Mr. Orson Welles," one of the characters announces breezily. "Has anyone seen Mr. Orson Welles? He's come directly from New York, New York City. He's a director, a writer, an actor as well, theater and radio. I'm sure you've heard of him. The voice behind Mercury Theatre, Mercury Playhouse, War of the Worlds . He's come to Hollywood to make a movie, a motion picture. He's a large man. Six-two, six-three. His weight-well, his weight, it's hard to say with his weight…"

What was that about preferring monumental invention to prosaic facts? But Ms. Bogart somehow assumes that the legendary Welles is scarcely known here! She writes in a program note that "In America he is mostly remembered as a fat man on talk shows who also appeared for advertisements for wine." She therefore rescues him from oblivion! But it's an absurd claim to make about Welles. It conveniently suggests that he was a mystery, like Kane. And it saddles the stage with a landlocked march through familiar territory when it needs most to take creative Wellesian flight.

I'm not certain how clearly Ms. Bogart sees Welles. "He wasn't a tragic character," she told The New York Times . "He had a fantastic life, full of traveling and people and love and great restaurants." Great restaurants, eh? Then he must have been happy! "Some people think he's a tragic character," she also told Newsday . "But I don't. Here's a guy who had a fabulous life-he traveled, he went to great restaurants…"

It so happens that I used to see Welles toward the end of his life paddling into an exclusive Hollywood restaurant named Ma Maison. It was briefly another life for me, and a friend of Welles' would buy me lunch at the restaurant where the great man ate lunch every day. I was naturally fascinated to see him, and felt something approaching awe. He was badly overweight and moved slowly, in stately fashion, to his discreet table toward the back, carrying a miniature poodle under an arm. I think it was a poodle. It yapped at strangers, which seemed to amuse him. But my point is that he was invariably alone. In all the times I saw him, he was almost always keeping his own company.

I didn't meet him, though I had the opportunity. For some insane reason, I preferred the myth to the reality. I was afraid to meet him and I've regretted it ever since.

It's a cliché, I guess, that Welles was an American tragedy, a willful genius who self-destructed or was cast aside like some Falstaff of Hollywood. But some clichés are true. This much I know, anyway: Restaurants do not maketh the man. Ms. Bogart believes Welles wasn't a tragic figure-yet that's how she ends up presenting him onstage! The last image of him is of a dying man surrounded by the wreckage of the set, a rubbish-tip monument to a wasted life.

It's not much of a monument. Not crates of Xanadu piled like a staggering city skyline. The pile of tables and chairs at the close of War of the Worlds is unavoidably a small-scale affair, as much of the piece lacks epic size and sweep. Ms. Bogart's talented ensemble is only seven strong. When they try to re-create Citizen Kane 's intoxicating dancing-girls scene-"Here is a man. Here is a man "-two girls aren't enough. Welles had about 40, or so it seems. The talky Hollywood scenes (accompanied, if you please, by "Hooray for Hollywood!") are fuzzy and predictably vaudevillian. A later soundtrack of Albinoni and thunder must be ironic. The re-creation of the famous mirror sequence from The Lady from Shanghai is, I'd say, a particular impossibility.

Welles once said of Hamlet that he was impossible to play. His grounds were that Hamlet's great poetry proved that he was a genius, and it takes a genius to play one. He had an original mind, you see! It's hard on Ms. Bogart, but I tend to think it would take a genius like Welles to re-create his genius.

Then again, there are intimate moments in War of the Worlds when the evening takes on a spooky, echoing life of its own, beyond his enveloping shadow. Ms. Bogart and her team have invented a Rosebud for him, too, and it's fun. They're mixing fact and fiction, of course. Or Wellesian illusion with the grand illusion of theater.

His last word, apparently, was "Thorne." The enigma of its meaning and the last seductive scenes are the best things in the piece, ending neatly on a rewind of its own narrative and the farewell of a fading Merlin: "My name was Orson Welles. Good night."

In 1916, at age 53, William Randolph Hearst–already a media tycoon whose publishing empire included newspapers such as the New York Journal and San Francisco Examiner , magazines such as Cosmopolitan and some of the first motion picture newsreels; a congressman who became an arbiter of Democratic party politics; a social reformer who forced Tammany Hall to take on the New York City utility trusts; and a philanderer known for carousing with two teenage showgirls at his side (he eventually married one of them)–was forced to borrow $350,000 from his mother. His total debt to her now stood at nearly $2 million.

This detail pops up on page 233 of David Nasaw's exhaustive biography, in a paragraph about Hearst's finances–it follows a short passage about his art collection and precedes a discussion of syndication services and their role in the expansion of the Hearst publishing empire. What does it mean when a middle-aged millionaire grovels for money from his mother? Mr. Nasaw doesn't ask. Again and again in his 687-page tome, he presents telling bits of information; and just as often, obvious questions are ignored.

Mr. Nasaw was granted unprecedented access to Hearst family and business archives, including files the Hearst Corporation has kept in a Bronx warehouse since the 1920's. Mr. Nasaw writes that his biography is based on "hundreds of thousands of letters, telegrams, memoranda, transcripts of phone messages, articles, and editorials." He adds: "There were some fine biographies dating from the 1950's and 1960's, but none had been able to call upon the vast archival resources that have become available since then. I was able to start fresh, to detour around the anecdotal information that my predecessors had had to rely on." The detour seems to have led him straight past the point of interest.

In a recent review for The Wall Street Journal , Conrad Black, who, as chief executive of Hollinger International, publishes 379 newspapers and magazines around the world, gushed that The Chief "is unlikely to be surpassed as the definitive study of its subject." In the next breath he added approvingly, "Mr. Nasaw takes no psychological liberties and leaves it to the reader to judge."

We learn a lot from Mr. Nasaw's study, including, of course, the bare-bones riches-to-fabulous-riches story. The son of a miner from Missouri who headed west during the California gold rush, Hearst grew up in San Francisco, a product of Gold Coast wealth. He was raised by his mother while his distant father took care of business, and because his mother harbored high social aspirations, he was packed off to boarding school at St. Paul's (which he left after a bout of homesickness) and then to Harvard College, from which he failed to graduate. Rather than study, he spent his time funding clubs, managing the Lampoon and throwing decadent parties in his suite of rooms–which his mother had redecorated in Harvard crimson.

Hearst was not yet 24 when he went to work as publisher of the San Francisco Examiner , a small paper his father had purchased to further his political ambitions. In time, young Billy Buster (as his father called him) expanded circulation with a lively mix of sensational headlines and lavish illustrations, a formula borrowed from Joseph Pulitzer's New York World . After his father's death in 1891, Hearst convinced his mother to finance the purchase and expansion of the New York Journal and began a money-losing competition with Pulitzer's World . As his publishing empire expanded, Hearst shamelessly employed his media outlets to bolster his own political career–which helped him win a Congressional seat in 1902, fight unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination, win re-election to Congress in 1904 and then, also unsuccessfully, campaign for New York governor in 1906.

Always a populist in both his newspapers and his politics, Hearst helped Franklin D. Roosevelt win election in 1932 and then attacked him and his New Deal policies later in the decade. In a shameful episode in 1934, Hearst visited Hitler and called him a "Moses leading [the German people] out of their bondage"; he dismissed the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime as "such an obvious mistake that I am sure it must soon be abandoned. In fact, I think it is already well on the way to abandonment."

At the end of his life, in 1950, Hearst's son Bill Jr. shared files on American Communists with Senator Joe McCarthy and Hearst columnists, including Walter Winchell. The family newspapers were full of enthusiastic redbaiting. But Hearst himself found the Red scare a bit overboard. He sent the following telegram to his editors: "The Chief instructs not, repeat not, to press the campaign against Communism any farther."

We learn all this and much, much more–but we never learn about Hearst the man.

For instance, Mr. Nasaw tells us at the very beginning of his biography that Hearst believed "there were no 'silver spoons' in [his] family," and yet everything about his life flows from the fact of George Hearst's mining fortune–the ore, rich in gold and silver, dug from the ground near Virginia City, Nev. What kind of "self-made" man is bankrolled by his parents?

Hearst's mother even put his "oldest and dearest friend," Orrin Peck, on the payroll–she "supported his art studies"–so that Peck would keep an eye on his pal. Hearst never had many friends, and yet this is all Mr. Nasaw has to say about the combined effect of Peck's death in 1921 and the demise of his Harvard friend Jack Follansbee, who died of drink in 1914: "They had always been there when he needed them. He would sorely miss them."

Mr. Black is right about the absence of psychologizing in The Chief –and it's a shame. Since at least 1941, when Orson Welles released Citizen Kane , the psychology of William Randolph Hearst has been a topic of much speculation. But Mr. Nasaw won't play. In his chapter on Citizen Kane , which describes in detail the attack Hearst mounted against the film (the Chief even dispatched an editor to gather material on Welles' leftist leanings), Mr. Nasaw concludes that Charles Foster Kane is nothing like Hearst: "Welles' Kane is a cartoon-like caricature of a man who is hollowed out on the inside, forlorn, defeated, solitary because he cannot command the total obedience, loyalty, devotion, and love of those around him." When Mr. Nasaw turns to the subject of his biography, we get a string of negatives: "Hearst, on the contrary, never regarded himself as a failure [and] never recognized defeat.... He did not, at the end of his life run away from the world to entomb himself in a vast, gloomy art-choked hermitage."

Mr. Nasaw has made heroic efforts with his research and compiled an impressive documentary record. But the result reads like a dictionary: reliable, comprehensive, well-ordered and bone-dry.

Gabriel Snyder writes Off the Record for The New York Observer.

One Manhattan night in 1969, Orson Welles and I had dinner at Frankie and Johnnie's Restaurant with Norman Mailer, whom Welles had just met on a talk show, and as soon as we sat down, Mr. Mailer asked about a particularly memorable shot in Orson's famous and infamous first film, that still-amazing 1941 explosion of genius, Citizen Kane [Wednesday, May 6, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 8 P.M.] . Welles groaned slightly, saying, "Oh, Norman, not Citizen Kane …" Mailer looked surprised for a moment and then, with a tiny smile of recognition, connected this to his own first novel, "Mmm, yeah-it's like me and The Naked and the Dead ." Welles nodded, laughing loudly: two American artists acknowledging the terrible stigmatic burden of early success and how it had often been used against them.

The celebrated Broadway entrepreneur Billy Rose had immediately recognized this with Welles; right after seeing Kane he had told Orson, who had been an unbelievable 25 when he directed, produced, co-wrote and starred in the movie: "Quit, kid-you'll never top it." Indeed, throughout the rest of his life, Welles would read or hear that tired line of attack: "What did he ever do after Citizen Kane ?" The painful irony here is that although Kane initially received nearly unanimous critical praise, the film was blacklisted by the Hearst Corporation newspaper chain because it was partially based on press lord William Randolph Hearst's life. The movie received poor distribution therefore and was by no means a financial winner. It really wasn't until the late 50's and early 60's that the picture began to gather the kind of immortal legend of priceless quality it now carries, internationally acknowledged as either the best film ever made, or certainly high among the 10 best of all time.

Generally, the work was used as a truncheon to beat up Welles, even after many simultaneous attempts to take as much credit as possible away from him: Photographic marvel Gregg Toland really did all those striking compositions, old-time screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz really wrote it, and numerous other mistaken, envious efforts to reduce the monumental weight of Welles' achievement. All right then, who acted the title role? Perhaps this was all some trick of mirrors, too, and it isn't really Welles giving one of the most astoundingly complex and layered performances-from youth to old age-ever captured on film. An awful aspect of human nature: how true greatness seems to humiliate and threaten the vast mediocrity of most work in any medium.

Of course, the most subversive aspect of Citizen Kane , in 1941 and now-because it is still relevant thematically and still devastating in its implications-is the dark light it throws on fame, success, wealth and the heritage of plutocracy. Imagine how its negativity seemed to an American establishment about to enter World War II; its uncompromising picture of loneliness at the top is absolutely without any feature of redemption or spiritual survival. Impossible to think of an American film as essentially bleak in outlook, and yet the exhilarating freshness of its pace, wit, construction and directorial style create a kind of optimistic counterpoint, as if to say that only through the poetry of art can we hope to survive.

What Welles did to the monied privileged class in Citizen Kane , he took to a more emotional level with the upper-middle-class Midwestern family of his second film, the equally audacious 1942 adaptation of Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Magnificent Ambersons [Wednesday, May 6, TCM, 82, 10:30 P.M.] . This picture, however, coming on the heels of Kane 's financial failure, was savagely truncated by RKO Radio Pictures, with almost the entire ending dumped and reshot by others. That it manages still to survive as a damaged but deeply disturbing and beautiful work, often also listed internationally as among the 10 finest films ever made, only increases the terrible sense of loss one feels that the original can never be seen. The first hour-plus of Ambersons , with certain omissions that are not crippling, shows the unique fluidity of the picture's portrait of an America now gone forever, destroyed essentially by the coming of the automobile, but the final 20 minutes is barely a ghost of what Welles had made. Nevertheless, I just saw it again recently and was overwhelmed by the profound impact the movie supplies to a sensitive viewing.

On May 6, Orson Welles would have been 83-he died in 1985 at age 70-and Turner Classic Movies is to be hugely commended for celebrating his filmmaking career on this day by showing four of his pictures, the two masterpieces above, as well as his brilliantly nightmarish 1963 adaptation (highly recommended here last week) of Franz Kafka's The Trial [Wednesday, May 6, TCM, 82, 2:30 A.M.] . Plus the one movie Welles directed in Hollywood that was a financial success, his 1946 thriller-the first movie he was allowed to make after Kane and Ambersons -starring Loretta Young, Edward G. Robinson and himself as a former Nazi hiding out in a small New England town, The Stranger [Wednesday, May 6, TCM, 82,12:30 A.M.] . It is also the least of all of his directorial efforts, but still pretty damn good, if only as an example of the kind of work he could have continued to do within the system if he had not been the restlessly iconoclastic and innovative artist he was, who, however sullied his acting career became, remained true behind the camera to his tragic, darkly poetic vision of life.

Wednesday, May 6

On the air for over a year, Hardball With Chris Matthews is the second-highest-rated show on CNBC, gaining on Geraldo . Today, Mr. Matthews takes on Bill Clinton in a town hall meeting from the University of Arkansas Law School in Little Rock. "I think it's pretty good TV," said Mr. Matthews. "You can see grandly the people who are so local in their loyalty that it's gotten to be all fight and no cause … This is about the President of the United States. If Nixon got caught, The Times would have said he's sick. He'd have been taken away in a straitjacket. You've got three approaches: the Frank Rich and Charles Grodin approach- I don't know, but who cares ; the Sid Blumenthal cloud nine approach- I don't know nothin' ; and the third group who believe what their eyes show them, that he's never told anyone that it didn't happen. But I think he really does, in some incredibly torturous way, try to tell the truth in a constant effort to avoid having to lie. It's like he knows there's one of those A.T.M. machine cameras running."…

Like Mr. Blumenthal and David Gergen, Mr. Matthews is one of these guys who has split his career between politics and journalism, having served as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, a spokesman for Tip O'Neill and the Washington bureau chief for The San Francisco Examiner .…

He thinks pretty highly of his TV show: "You don't need to slow everything down to the Sesame Street level, with blown-up New York Times letters. Capra proved this when he realized you can speak quickly in movies, and people will hear everything they need to hear … I think my show is the future, I think it's Frank Capra-he was right. McLaughlin's great strength was his speed-people really do have a very short attention span. I can't watch shows like Face the Nation ."…

Tonight, Mr. Matthews talks to old roommates, friends, supporters and detractors of Mr. Clinton, including Robert Reich, Doug Eakeley and Michael Medved. [CNBC, 15, 8 P.M.]

Thursday, May 7

In this penultimate episode, Seinfeld rips off a plot line from an early episode one last time: Jerry and the gang all get stuck in traffic. Kinda like the 1992 show in which Jerry and the gang all ended up having different adventures on the subway-only this time, they're in cars. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Friday, May 8

At the end of Tad Low's and Woody Thompson's VH1 cash cow, Pop-Up Video , a phone number flashes on screen for the Pop Line (212-846-2POP). If you dial it, a machine picks up and a voice asks for "juicy behind-the-scene stories about stars or videos." It is the job of Pop-Up interns to listen to the hours of taped messages and follow up on possible leads. This used to be Starlee Kine's job, but she has since been promoted to research assistant. Ms. Kine told NYTV that the roughly 30 calls Pop-Up receives a day (mostly from people outside New York City) fit into a few general categories: people who want jobs, people who are crazy and people who love Hanson. Like? "A guy who called and sang the entire Backstreet Boys album, he was 15 … A woman who wanted us to come and pick her up so she could meet Mariah Carey … A porn star from California who said she taped the Fiona Apple video and watches it over and over and is feeling depressed … A man calls drunk like once a day and yells at us that he wants people to shave their arms and stuff in the videos. It's really depressing, actually," said Ms. Kine. "The little girls are more level-headed. They just want us to know that they love Hanson. In one video you can see Taylor's boxer shorts, and they all call up and say, 'You can see his boxer shorts!' Tons of people call for jobs. They'll give a fact and then stick in a job pitch-'I have an empty brain full of nonsense-I'm full of useless information!' A physician called to say Fiona Apple came to him at Lilith Fair with a foot fungus. He said, 'If you notice, she does have bunions. I saw her at the music awards in bare feet, so I'm speculating …'" See 10,000 Maniacs, Natalie Merchant, the Go-Go's and more get popped. [VH1, 19, 4:30 P.M.]

Saturday, May 9

Bobby Van Ry has been the stage manager at Saturday Night Live for the last 23 years. He's done his job, making sure the sets are moved and put up in the right place, for 433 out of 445 shows. He says there have been no major disasters in over two decades except "a few times people will sneak onto the sets after we've cued the action." …

Mr. Van Ry's job includes working with the host and cueing the scenes, but he says he doesn't get nervous. He said the only time he got nervous was the time he had a chance to yell, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night ," and was cut out of the show just before air time. "I was a wreck for two days at home, wondering if my voice would crack or something," said Mr. Van Ry. In the 23 years Mr. Van Ry has worked on the show, he's only been to one wrap party.…

Tonight, it's the season finale, with David Duchovny, Puff Daddy, Jimmy Page and lots more Viagra jokes. P.S. A note to the writers: If you air one more sketch that's a parody of a talk show, we're going to have to put the hurt on you. [WNBC, 4, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, May 10

Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin meet cute and fall in love very convincingly over the very nice first 45 minutes of Prelude to a Kiss (1992). Then Meg Ryan kisses an old geezer and she and the old geezer switch souls , and the movie kind of goes downhill, but it's not a bad thing to watch on TV in the middle of the night if you're feeling incredibly depressed. Best scene: in the fern bar, when Alec Baldwin looks at the old geezer and realizes Meg Ryan is trapped inside. [TNT, 3, midnight.]

Monday, May 11

"Jerry Seinfeld: Master of His Domain" on tonight's edition of Biography . His thrilling upbringing in Massapequa, L.I. His college days. His hard times as a light bulb salesman. His budding stand-up career. His appearances on Benson . His own show. Don't worry-they'll find a way to fill the hour. [A&E, 14, 8 P.M.]

Tuesday, May 12

Fourteen-year-old high school freshman Taran Smith has grown up in front of the camera playing Mark, Tim Allen's youngest son on Home Improvement . For the show's seventh season, the writers have begun to unearth Mark's angry adolescent side. In two weeks, Mark's even going to shave his head, causing Tim Allen to cancel his trip to outer space. Young Mr. Smith says he loves being a child actor, but what he really wants to do is, you got it, direct. "At first it was fun because I was playing something different," he said, "but over a while it got tired and old and the fans weren't really liking it. I think it was time to change the character a little bit, but it doesn't last that long. I mean, I went through a two- or three-month phase in my life when I started wearing only black, but it didn't last …"…

He started acting at six months and did commercials until he was 7. "It's always been my decision," he said. "My mom has always given me the option of getting out and going back to being a regular kid, but I really do love it." He said he's going to stop acting after the show ends next season, finish high school and go to New York University. Seen any good movies lately? "The only movie I've seen lately is Titanic . I saw it twice and missed it both times." What? "Well, I was with my girlfriend …" Hey, hey, now we getcha. [WABC, 7, 9 P.M.]

The 1941 Academy Awards are often denigrated as the year Orson Welles' maverick Citizen Kane didn't win best picture, and usually overlooked, therefore, is the movie that did win-one of the finest classic American films, though it's about a Welsh coal-mining family, John Ford's profoundly touching visualization of Richard Llewellyn's best-selling novel, How Green Was My Valley [Friday, March 6, Turner Classic Movies, 58, 7:20 A.M. and Tuesday, March 10, 10:30 A.M.]. Coincidentally, both Kane and How Green are about the dissolution of family, but while Kane, in a modern way, seems to throw that part of the story away until the end, it is the essential plot of How Green . Both films were also made with the war in Europe about to expand into World War II, and the impermanence of the time is reflected in these two stories of impermanence and loss. It was Ford's last commercial film for five years-all those spent on active duty in the Navy and with the Office of Strategic Services-and, because it is so personal to Ford and so typical of his main themes (numerous Ford pictures are loss-of-family stories), How Green Was My Valley could easily have served as an indelible swan song had Ford been killed instead of wounded at the battle of Midway (a record of which was Ford's first of several war documentaries). For his work on How Green , Ford won the best director Oscar for the second year in a row, his third in seven years. As Ford pointed out to me, he was the youngest at a table of 13 children born to his Irish immigrant parents in Maine, and he clearly empathized with the character of the coal miner's youngest, whom Roddy McDowell as a child of 10 so eloquently played. The heart-rending emotions of the boy growing up in a family and a way of life that is falling apart are often conveyed in the simplest of moments, as in the one where Roddy is left alone at table with his father (a superb portrayal by Donald Crisp) after a family argument, and the boy clears his throat to get an acknowledgment of his presence. No other American picture-maker had the poetic temperament or the innate humanity to so movingly vivify the past, as well as the losing of it. That Ford and Katharine Hepburn had fallen deeply in love less than five years before and, because Ford was already a married father of two, the romance was never taken to the depth that both wanted, must have heavily contributed to the director's treatment of the forbidden love in How Green between the coal miner's only daughter (Maureen O'Hara, both incandescent and earthy) and the town's minister (Walter Pidgeon, played with great dignity). The degree of passionate feeling generated in the film for this relationship helps to reveal the intensity of Ford's feelings at that time. In fact, according to Barbara Leaming's recent biography of Ms. Hepburn, Ford put himself on active duty immediately after hearing that Hepburn had begun an affair with Spencer Tracy (also a married Irish father). Beyond that, the picture is a metaphor of man's loss of the Garden, as the war threatened to end the entire human family. I think How Green Was My Valley , superbly adapted by screenwriter Philip Dunne, is the best film ever to win the Oscar for best picture, which also makes the disparagement of the Academy's choice over Citizen Kane such a poor case. If these two films went up against each other today in the heart of the country, I believe the Academy vote would reflect the public's reaction for two basic reasons: Kane is about the rich and privileged, while How Green is about everybody else. As Welles himself-an ardent Ford admirer-said to me once, "With Ford at his best, you can feel what the earth is made of." The other reason why is hope, which Welles' film doesn't give, but which Ford's does. At the end of How Green , the final devastating loss of the father is reprieved from utter gloom by a belief in the survival of the spirit, and then memory-images take us back through the entire story in what is probably the most devastatingly moving finish in pictures. But this was at the peak of the sound era, which saw the greatest number of lasting works released between 1939 and 1942. If there was ever a serious picture to see with your family and friends you love, it is How Green Was My Valley ; my immigrant parents adored it, introduced it to me when I was about 10, and it has continued to hold a treasured place in our family's shared experience. Bring plenty of Kleenex.

Wednesday, March 4

With Party of Five , Fox whips out a few cheap TV tricks tonight. First of all, it's a "cliffhanger" episode, and that's never good. Give no credence to whatever seems to be happening (Charlie's gonna die!) in the last few minutes of the show; the first few minutes of the next Party of Five will make it clear (Charlie's not gonna die!) that what you thought happened was a bunch of jive, dig? Second cheap trick: On tonight's episode, the Salinger kids will reminisce-meaning we're sure to get lots of old Party of Five footage. Third cheap trick: The reminiscing takes place in the family's winter cabin, and winter cabins are never a good TV plot device (see almost any episode of Perfect Strangers ). Fourth cheap trick: Party of Five goes on hiatus after tonight's show, giving Fox a chance to try to hook you on some more prime-time junk-in the form of a show called Significant Others -in the coming weeks. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, March 5

Did you happen to catch that Seinfeld episode this season in which a young performance artist, played by Kathy Griffin, does a monologue calling Jerry Seinfeld "the devil"? Well, it looks like Obie Award-winning actor Danny Hoch, 27, was the basis for that one. He'll be doing a solo show starting March 30 at Performance Space 122, directed by Jo ("Don't Call Me Mrs. Eric Bogosian") Bonney, and in it he does a long monologue calling Jerry Seinfeld "the enemy." Mr. Hoch performed the Seinfeld-as-enemy bit in Los Angeles in November of last year and believes that word got back to the target of his rant, leading to the Kathy Griffin spot.…

Now why would Mr. Hoch hate America's Beloved Entertainer? He said it goes back to the time when he couldn't bring himself to play the part of a Latin pool boy in the stereotyped manner demanded by the Seinfeld star. It was a show from 1995 that involved Jerry and Newman swimming at a health club. Mr. Hoch was supposed to play an unsavory pool boy with a heavy Spanish accent; at the end of the episode, the pool boy has drowned, and neither Jerry nor Newman is willing to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.…

Mr. Hoch's experience gives a nice glimpse of how the show's cast, including Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Jason Alexander, Michael Richards and its ex-head writer, Larry David, work together in a minor backstage crisis.…

"I normally don't do sitcoms because they really have no substance and are about passivity rather than activity," said Mr. Hoch, beginning to explain why he originally took the gig, "but I had just gotten back from Cuba, and I was disoriented. I had never watched a whole episode, but my honest logic was that if this is the most watched thing on TV, and if I'm on it, more people will come see my theater. When I read the script, I saw what the part could possibly be, and so I called up and said, 'This isn't your stereotypical Spanish-speaking pool guy, is it?'-because otherwise, I wasn't getting on the plane. And they said, 'Not at all, it can be whoever you want to be.' But when I got there, I found out it was the stupid one-dimensional role that I didn't want to do.…

"During the table read-through, I did the part as a higher-strung version of me. And everyone laughed, and I think they were maybe embarrassed to ask me to do it in a Spanish accent with, like, 30 people sitting around. Once you finish the read-through, you get up and block it, and then it was just me and Jerry and Jason and Julia and Michael and the director, and I think they felt like they could ask me then. It's what they had in their mind, but it came as a surprise to me. When they asked me, I thought, 'Aaaah, I should have followed my instincts.' …

"We got into a discussion, which got into an argument. Jerry and the director Andy [Ackerman] came up to me, and they were like, 'Why not?' And I was like, 'The role is stupid and it's a clown and I have no problem doing it and it's funny, but I can't do the Spanish accent because it's one-dimensional.' I said, 'Why does it have to be in Spanish? Why can't it be Israeli?' And Jerry said, 'Because it's funnier that way.' Which is when it became obvious to me that there was nowhere else to go with the discussion. So he called Larry David on his cell phone, and 10 minutes later he came down and said, 'Why did you fly all the way across the continent for this? It's just a half-hour comedy show, what's the big deal?' And I said, 'It's a big deal to me because there's too many friends of mine who are highly trained actors that are Cuban and Puerto Rican and Dominican, and all they get asked to do are one-dimensional roles and here I am, not even Latino, and you're asking me to play a clown and I can't.' …

"Everyone was laughing when I was doing it as me, but it seemed to be a Jerry issue-he really believed it was funnier in a Spanish accent. And the sad thing is, maybe it would have been funnier to people in a Spanish accent. And what does that say about the American people? I don't do the work that I do to make fun of the people that I play, but to make fun of the audience. They tried to give me a guilt trip like 'You're just a kid from New York and we're Seinfeld ,' and, basically, they were like, 'You're ruining our lunch.' …

"Jason and Julia were really cool about it. They were very supportive, and they both said, 'If that's what your instincts tell you to do, then you shouldn't do it.' But Michael Richards was like, 'Just do it or else they're going to replace you.' And I was like, 'Who gives a shit! My life doesn't revolve around this shit!' I think Jerry thought I was challenging his position, like who the hell am I to question him. It was almost as if he was doing me a favor because every actor in the world wants to be on Seinfeld . But not me. So the next thing I knew, I got back to the hotel and they said the rehearsal the next day was postponed while they found someone else, and then they told me I could fly home as soon as I liked. And I never got paid for the day's work." …

Mr. Hoch's show at P.S. 122 has the very un- Seinfeld -esque title of Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop . A Seinfeld publicist said the Kathy Griffin episode may have been based partly on Mr. Hoch's experience on the show, but also included Ms. Griffin's own experience from her first time as a Seinfeld guest.…

On tonight's episode, Jerry goes on a "revenge" date. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Friday, March 6

For the rest of March, the kind people at Turner Classics go Oscar-crazy. Stay home tonight for a few best pictures from the 60's: In the Heat of the Night (1967), West Side Story (1961), The Apartment (1960) and Midnight Cowboy (1969). [TNT, 3, 8 P.M., 10 P.M., 1 A.M., 3:30 A.M.]

Saturday, March 7

All-Star Party for Aaron Spelling ? That's right. NTYV's Spelling correspondent Wendy Marston reports: Aaron Spelling has a special place in television and in our hearts. He created the floating singles club (a.k.a. The Love Boat ), revitalizing the career of Charo, as well as keeping Sonny Bono in the public eye during his darkest years when Cher was in ascendance and Chastity was in the closet. He showed us that a midget like Hervé Villechaize can spot an aircraft just as well as less vertically challenged people (see Fantasy Island ). Mr. Spelling helped young girls all over the country understand when a beautiful, braless woman holds a handgun, she must do it with two hands (see Charlie's Angels ). He made it O.K. for ladies who lunch to kick the living daylights out of one another ( Dynasty ). He showed us that if you find the right apartment complex, you can always get laid in Los Angeles ( Melrose Place ). But his finest moment-perhaps a burst of Jewish self-loathing-was casting his daughter as a cross-wearing Catholic on Beverly Hills 90210 . To Mr. Spelling's credit, he did keep Tori's character a virgin for many, many seasons.…

Honor him, America, and join Jennie Garth, Heather Locklear, Jaclyn Smith and other luminaries who owe him their careers. [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Sunday, March 8

Here's just what Hollywood needs: another awards show. It's the Fourth Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards . Subtitle: Another Empty Display of Decadent Western Culture. I mean, what's next, a tribute show to Aaron Spelling? [TNT, 3, 8 P.M.]

Monday, March 9

All self-proclaimed History Channel lovers are in for a treat: The Great Depression , tonight and every night this week, with host Mario Cuomo. [History Channel, 17, 9 P.M.]

Ah, David E. Kelley, a simple television craftsman, brings us more enchanting adventures of a kooky, sexy lady lawyer in Ally McBeal . Last time, Mr. Kelley's script made Ally say she loved her fingernail polish so much that she "had foreplay with the mirror." What unintentional idiocies will Mr. Kelley have her spout on tonight's episode? There's only one way to find out. Watch it-with gritted teeth and one hand on the remote-but watch it you will! [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Tuesday, March 10

Watch Sharon Stone manhandle Leonardo DiCaprio in The Quick and the Dead (1995), a crisp-looking Western from director Sam Raimi that is plenty dopey. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

To help this film that has lived up to all its critical hype, I have been tempted to contribute to the hysteria by flat-out designating it as the " Citizen Kane of the film noir genre," just as back in 1964 I tagged Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night with the Beatles as the " Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals." But I decided against this sure-fire blurb, partly because I am less mesmerized by Citizen Kane than I once was and partly because the excellences of L.A. Confidential are not so much revolutionary as classical: narrative thrust, psychological depth, acting virtuosity, emotional expressiveness and stylistic sobriety.

My own involvement with L.A. Confidential began when I was invited by Harlan Jacobson to participate in his series "Talk Cinema" at the Walter Reade Theater on Sept. 14, at which time L.A. Confidential would be screened before an audience of cinephiles. I had not yet seen the movie, and so I would be going on cold, except for some production notes and stills from Warner Brothers. I was already giving a course called "The Film Noir" at the School of the Arts of Columbia University, and so I could speak in general terms about the genre, but I decided to bone up more specifically on L.A. Confidential by picking up James Ellroy's novel and reading.

To my horror, I discovered when I got to Barnes & Noble that it was almost 500 pages long. The writing was dense, detailed and somewhat humorless, but the wild plot or, rather, plots made it a real page-turner. I had never read anything by Mr. Ellroy, and, consequently, I had anticipated something on the order of the lighthearted Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. Instead, I got a tortured American Balzac with a passion for conspiracy theories that would keep a dozen Web sites busy for years. Indeed, the book contains so many varieties of carnal congress and gruesome violence, besides the skeletons in just about every character's closet, that I ended up wearying of the obsessive depravity. For example, try to imagine a Walt Disney-like organization engaged in pornography and pedophilia, and you get some idea of the scandalous goings-on.

Mr. Ellroy is not into satire. His Hollywood of the 50's is a pit in hell, and every character is more or less a mortal sinner. Hush-Hush magazine, Mr. Ellroy's approximation of the old, unlamented Confidential , uncovers some of the dirt back then, but never enough to threaten the corporate establishment. Since reading the book and seeing the movie, I have learned that Mr. Ellroy has written a book about the unsolved and unpunished murder of his mother in sordid circumstances, and of his own ignoble exploitation of her demise to give him a "make-out" line with women. Hence, a torrent of guilt and shame seems to be the driving force behind his dark sagas of police corruption and culpability.

By using the sadistic gangster Johnny Stompanato and his battered mistress Lana Turner as real-life characters in his book, along with the knife-slaying of Stompanato by Turner's protective daughter, and by referring casually to Robert Mitchum's notorious marijuana bust, Mr. Ellroy adds just enough sleazy tabloid factoids to his fiction to create the illusion of a community chronicle with more audacity than Mario Puzo employed in The Godfather , a more marginal exploitation of Hollywood's longstanding ties to the mob.

Many of the critical raves for L.A. Confidential the movie compare it to Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), though Chinatown is more star-driven by Jack Nicholson, and Pulp Fiction is more comeback-star-driven by John Travolta. By contrast, L.A. Confidential is propelled by a triumvirate of not-yet-and-perhaps-never-to-be-stars, namely, Russell Crowe as Bud White, a mysteriously dedicated avenger of battered wives; Kevin Spacey, a cynical celebrity cop who is redeemed by his delayed realization that he has sold his soul so long ago he can't remember when; and Guy Pearce as Ed Exley, a smart cop with scruples that make him more faithful to an abstract ideal of justice than loyal to his fellow officers.

These three co-protagonists are introduced more simply and more efficiently in the movie than in the book, which in its early exposition does not display a Tolstoyan genius for making names jump off the page as vividly distinguishable individuals. But then good screen actors with distinctive personalities can surpass even the greatest writers in establishing dynamic contrasts.

What both the book and the movie have in common is a thrilling transformation of three characters from what they seem at first to what they eventually become through spiritual growth and greater self-knowledge. This process is so rare in movies today that it must be treasured when it appears. Neither Mr. Ellroy in his book, nor Mr. Hanson in his fluid direction, and in his brilliant co-adaptation with Mr. Helgeland of a cinematically unwieldy novel, choose to wallow in the mess caused by a malignant cancer inside the Los Angeles Police Department. Instead, the focus remains, in both the movie and the book, on the Trollope-like discovery by one character of the strengths and weaknesses of another so that former enemies become staunch allies to the death. This positive enhancement in character does not occur in either Chinatown or Pulp Fiction to the same extent. The dark humor in both genre pieces tends to diminish people by making them mere creatures of a chaotic absurdism.

Indeed, there is so much malaise in movie audiences these days that the triumph of decency and morality in L.A. Confidential may strike some moviegoers as too conventional, too reminiscent of old-fashioned movies that wanted you to feel good when you left the theater. On the other hand, the post-censorship liberties with language and violence in the movie may keep more-squeamish patrons away from a genre they have decided to boycott on general principles.

At the Q. and A. in the Walter Reade Theater, one or two women in the audience questioned the fact that the one central woman character, Kim Basinger's Lynn Bracken, happens to be a hooker. Ah, but there are hookers and there are hookers. Ms. Basinger's career has been spectacularly uneven but considerably better and subtler than one would think from the lurid reputation of most of her vehicles. She has never been as good, as sensitive and as moving as she is here as an unusual angel of mercy in her relationships with two of the three protagonists. James Cromwell, David Strathairn and Danny DeVito complete an ensemble cast that stays with you long after you have left the theater.

Some critics have professed to be surprised by Mr. Hanson's directorial epiphany after a track record that included such arguably superficial melodramas as The Bedroom Window (1987), Bad Influence (1990), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), and The River Wild (1994). I have been aware of Mr. Hanson's existence ever since he edited the now defunct Cinema magazine, and even then in the early 70's, I recognized in him the tastes of a kindred cinéaste . It is no surprise to me, therefore, that what Mr. Hanson achieves with a two-way mirror in a police station evokes the German Expressionist masterpieces of the 20's, and their stylistic resurrection in the 40's by Orson Welles. Perhaps the Citizen Kane blurb is not such a stretch after all.

A parlor game has already begun as to whether the supreme acting revelation in L.A. Confidential is provided by Mr. Crowe, Mr. Spacey or Mr. Pearce. The order in which I have listed the names is obviously my order of preference, though Mr. Spacey, an actor I have long admired, comes a very close second and has an Oscar on his mantelpiece for The Usual Suspects (1995) to press his case. Still, Mr. Crowe strikes the deepest registers with the tortured character of Bud White, a part that has had less cut out of it from the book than either Mr. Spacey's or Mr. Pearce's. I think all three deserve Oscars, but Mr. Crowe at moments reminded me of James Cagney's poignant performance in Charles Vidor's Love Me or Leave Me (1955), and I can think of no higher praise.

As for the noir film as a genre, its masterpieces in the 40's and 50's were ridiculously underrated at the time because of their allegedly trashy content without humanist "messages." In 1955, it would have taken a fearless revisionist indeed to express a preference for Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly over Delbert Mann's Marty . The big problem today is that just about everything on the screen is noir, and except in rare cases like L.A. Confidential , the kick is gone from the genre.