Errol Morris (Getty Images)

Errol Morris, the beloved documentarian currently promoting his nonfiction film Tabloid, about a famous British tabloid story involving the alleged kidnapping and female-on-male rape of a Mormon missionary, is planning ahead. He's collaborating with Ira Glass on a film based on Sam Shaw's This American Life report--"one of the best things that they’ve done—that's not my opinion, but many, many people are aware of it."

Was this Mr. Morris's first non-documentary film? "Essentially it will be. It’s a long story." (He also directed 1991's The Dark Wind, starring Lou Diamond Phillips.)

The film, as previously reported, is an adaptation of a 2008 report on Bob Nelson, a self-styled cryogenics pioneer. Mr. Morris claims the film, not listed on IMDB, will be written by Zach Helm, writer of the aptly titled Will Ferrell vehicle Stranger Than Fiction. This American Life previously spawned the kids'-movie adaptation Unaccompanied Minors, but Mr. Morris's pedigree--and unique interests--promise to make this a bit more highbrow, and simultaneously more intriguingly tabloid-y.

"Bob Nelson wrote a book called We Froze the First Man," marveled Mr. Morris, whose work has long been enamored of the weird corners of human experience. "Now I will submit to you: Is that a tabloid story?" (We agreed that it was.)

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Felix Gillette looks at CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips, "a seasoned, London-based reporter. But he is also—thanks to the thinly spread news-gathering operations at CBS News—the lead reporter on most of the network’s stories in Israel. It’s a beat that spans more than 2,200 miles."

Leon Neyfakh writes, "Drenka Willen was just one of many individuals—including one woman seven months pregnant and another on maternity leave—to be hastily laid off last month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt amid budget cuts. She is, however, the only one among them whom the severely troubled company’s CEO, Tony Lucki, has since asked to please come back." Plus: Baker Blitzes Bush Fam for Bloomsbury, Has Big Bash!

John Koblin checks in with Condé Nast and its chief Si Newhouse (not his brother Donald, as the photo in our print edition suggests) , where "This was a particularly nervous holiday season—what would Si do in this scary, unprecedented, in-the-toilet media year?" Plus: Change We Can Subscribe To.

Plus: Twitter... The Knit That Ate Manhattan... Harold Pinter.

In the middle of November 2008, at a time when the New York Times Company stock number was falling off the face of the earth, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was in the ballroom at the Plaza Hotel, getting a beating.

He was there watching Tribune chief Sam Zell address a crowd of media moguls and advertisers at his close friend Steve Rattner’s FourSquare conference. Mr. Sulzberger didn’t have time to find a seat, so he stood in the back of the room, and that’s when Mr. Zell, from the dais, ripped into him.

“As of last night, the entire market cap of the New York Times was $1.2 billion,” said Mr. Zell. “And my question to Arthur, who I think is out here someplace, is, if you want to be a charitable trust, be a charitable trust. If you don’t want to be a charitable trust, then you’ve got to focus on producing a return for investors’ capital, and it’s just that simple.”

For journalists, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the media mensch of the year; for the hard-nosed business class, for Mr. Zell, he was media’s biggest chump.

It’s true, 2008 was a rough year for Mr. Sulzberger. At the conference, he was standing next to Tribeca Film topper Jane Rosenthal listening to Mr. Zell, and he smiled. It’s that smile, that uncomfortably spoiled and cocky smile, that makes you want to scream: It’s smug and yet defensive, superior and yet somehow a little bit scared. There’s no getting through it.

It was that same dreadful bearing that led to his embarrassing moment in the heart of the Jayson Blair scandal. In 2003, when the Times was at its knees in the darkest newsroom crisis the paper ever faced, Mr. Sulzberger convened a Times-wide meeting at a 44th street theater and opened the meeting by pulling a toy moose out of a bag to discuss any “moose issues”—his adaptation of “the elephant in the room” metaphor, which struck staffers as shockingly tone deaf to the gravity of the situation.

And it was the same misjudgment about appearances that made the Judith Miller morality play so hard to watch. The image of Mr. Sulzberger storming her SUV as she came out of prison—“Judy! Judy! It’s me!” he gleefully said as he tapped on the dark glass of her car, reported The New Yorker—is representative of the picture of a well-intentioned yet woefully clueless publisher.

It’s been a bad year for Mr. Sulzberger. The paper’s stock lost more than half its value. He’s put out a call for someone to buy a sale-leaseback on his headquarters (you know, the one he had to build after he sold his old one on 43rd street for $175 million in 2004, three years before it sold again for three times that amount). The dividend that brought the Sulzberger clan a pool of money was slashed by 75 percent.

Besides Mr. Zell, Henry Blodget seemed to speak for the entire world of media finance when he urged Mr. Sulzberger to cut 30 percent of the newsroom. Several of them are even board members at the Times Company, and they wasted no time in 2008 making sure the public knew what they thought of the financial decisions Mr. Sulzberger has made as the media industry tumbles around him.

Through it all, again, there is that smugness again. But if that has made him a villain in the business world, it’s made him a hero to lots of journalists, and not just on Eighth Avenue.

The future of The Times—who will own it after he’s forced to sell it, how will it survive—is a favorite parlor game of media observers now, and it’s all happened on Young Arthur’s watch. All over newspaper land last year, newspaper owners were stampeding over the cliff in a mass panic. And Mr. Sulzberger, unlike every single other newspaper boss in the world, didn’t pillage or dismember his paper. He cut 100 jobs from the newsroom in February—well before we even began to understand how bad this year would be—and he hasn’t touched it since. The New York Times’ newsroom has a head count of 1,200, putting it far ahead of even its remote competitors.

To save journalists jobs he’s had to close the newspaper’s storied newspaper distributing plant, City & Suburban, to save money. He had to eliminate a stand-alone city section and sports section. The front-page of The New York Times now has a strip ad at the bottom, which is probably only the beginning on its inexorable roll toward looking more like a Minor League Baseball team’s outfield fence. But the news remains essentially the same.

For years we thought his legacy would be defined by how he screwed things up: How badly he seemed to weather the inevitable if ultimately disposable newsroom crises; how he lost the family’s direct and complete control of The Times for the first time since 1896.

But in 2009, it’s time to evaluate Mr. Sulzberger differently. The boy with the obnoxious and unsubtle demeanor may have found the crisis that will finally make him a hero, and an equal to his predecessors in the publisher’s chair. His black-and-white devotion to the ethics of journalism that his dad taught him is precisely what’s defining his legacy now, and for the best. His devotion to The Times and recognition of what it means to New Yorkers, and the world, is now defining him. His chapter in the next edition of The Trust or The Kingdom and the Power is shaping up to be far more complex than a portrait of a Prince Hal.

And whenever that day comes, that one day that everyone in the newspaper world is praying and clinging to, the day when those Internet pennies turn into dollars, it’s Mr. Sulzberger who has a Secretariat-lead on every other big paper. NYTimes.com is a machine—a powerful Web site that is nimble, handsome and, most importantly, delivers the news.

Now when one imagines that trademark, schoolboy sneer directed at the Sam Zells of the world, print media sees not an embarrassment but one of its great champions. Civilized readers everywhere hope The Trust is safe with him.

—John Koblin

Fred Wilson
Venture Capitalist, Tech Entrepreneur Mentor

If the New York tech community has a mensch in its midst, it’s Fred Wilson, the 47-year-old demure managing partner and co-founder of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. Just don’t call his community by its historical nickname, “Silicon Alley.” “We are not an alley,” he said this summer, pacing on a stage in the basement of the Javits Center. Mr. Wilson was delivering a keynote speech to hundreds of young Internet entrepreneurs from all over the world at the Web 2.0 Expo, just two days after newspaper headlines announced Wall Street’s collapse. “Let’s bury the name ‘Silicon Alley’. I’ve hated it from the minute it first came out. We are one of the largest cities in the world. We’re one of the largest Internet development communities in the world. Let’s drop the name ‘alley’, at least, let’s call ourselves Broadway—or just New York. That’s what we are.”

Mr. Wilson’s popular blog, avc.com, is a live snapshot of the burgeoning start-up scene in New York from a venture capitalist’s point of view. He often offers sage advice for young entrepreneurs and investors in his simple, even prose, peppered with one-liners. He recently wrote about investing during the economic downturn: “Like the lottery, ‘you got to be in it to win it’ and staying on the sidelines is not a wise approach in any market environment.” But he’s not just a daddy figure, either; like the kids he mentors, Mr. Wilson Twitters and Tumblrs (Union Square Ventures invests in both companies), and is known to get personal, writing about his three children and wife (who also blogs as Gotham Gal) and living in the West Village. But even when doing that, he usually works in his experiences as an early adopter of the latest online software, from Last.fm to Boxee, and offline hardware (he’s tried the iPhone and Google’s new G1 phone, but he calls the BlackBerry his “quill pen” because he ends up writing his entries on it so often). He also writes on his company’s blog, telling stories about deal developments and setting an ethical standard for his followers by disclosing connections and friendships. In other words, Mr. Wilson, who tends to shy from the media spotlight, doesn’t just profit from New York’s tech community, he lives it.

Because he has survived Web busts over the last two decades, Mr. Wilson has become one of the tech community’s most trusted figures. In 1987, after studying mechanical engineering at MIT and getting his M.B.A. from Wharton, he became an associate for Euclid Partners, a New York–based early-stage venture capital firm. He co-founded his own investment company, Flatiron Partners, in 1996. He co-founded Union Square Ventures in late 2003, and many of their portfolio companies have made successful deals during difficult economies. In 2005, their Del.icio.us was sold to Yahoo for a reported $30 million. Google bought FeedBurner, an RSS feed service for bloggers, for a reported $100 million in 2007. That same year, AOL bought online ad company Tacoda for a reported $275 million.

On Jan. 4, Mr. Wilson wrote a blog post on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York, returning from a holiday trip to Europe. “2009 will be a difficult year on many levels,” he wrote. “But I am optimistic because I believe in the work that I do and I believe in the people I work with and the people we’ve backed and the people that we will back this year. Starting companies, particularly technology-based companies, is something we need even more of today in our country and our world and I am proud to be an active participant in the venture capital/startup ecosystem that makes this happen.” Written like a true mensch.

—Gillian Reagan

Errol Morris
Documentary Filmmaker

As 2008 limped along to its economically tattered finish line, one industry had at least a little good news: According to The New York Times, ticket sales at North American movie theaters racked up $9.6 billion (down less than 1 percent from 2007). The commonplace thinking is that it was thanks to those big shiny superheroes: that growling, swooping Batman! That oh-so-droll Iron Man! Indiana Jones, James Bond, that impossible-to-escape robot Wall-E, a Kung-Fu Panda and—of course—Will Smith.

And then there’s Errol Morris, a different kind of superhero. In late April, the 60-year-old acclaimed filmmaker released his eighth feature-length documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, a gripping and incredibly disturbing in-depth investigation into the infamous 2003 photographs that depicted American soldiers abusing and torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Mr. Morris described his film as a “nonfiction horror movie” and so, indeed, it is. As he did before with his riveting probe into a police officer’s murder in The Thin Blue Line and his Oscar-winning look at Robert McNamara and the what-ifs of Vietnam in The Fog of War, this film went there, delving deep and unflinchingly into a deeply uncomfortable subject—in this case, a chapter of our history that many of us would gladly ignore or, worse, forget. The film demonstrates Mr. Morris’s astonishing capacity for detailed research (it’s not for nothing that The Thin Blue Line helped get a man off of death row) as well as his ability to coax seemingly recalcitrant subjects to open up for his camera (the much despised leash-holding-while-giving-a-cheerful-thumbs-up Lynndie England talks bitterly and unselfconsciously of her love affair with a fellow guard gone wrong).

But, also characteristically, Mr. Morris isn’t concerned with who might be the obvious villains and victims. He’s not a polemicist, but a facilitator for information; in Standard Operating Procedure, he deftly illustrates the context and atmosphere that led to such horrific events, and raises rather unsettling questions, particularly: Were these terrified and stir-crazy kids left to torture without supervision, or were they were merely a link in the chain of command of a corrupt and power-hungry post-9/11 U.S. military?

Movies about our current war have been box office poison, and Standard Operating Procedure was no different—it earned a measly total of $229,117 (a Friday night sneeze for The Dark Knight). However, we’re certain that it wasn’t for commercial gain that Mr. Morris made this movie, but a determination to tell important truths and histories that might otherwise fall through the cracks. In the past, Mr. Morris has made controversial subjects entertaining. This time, he went straight for the truth, and made one of the most important movies of 2008.

—Sara Vilkomerson

Lorin Stein
Senior Editor, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lorin Stein got rid of half his books during the holiday break. His East Village apartment, he said, had a tendency to overheat, and a lot of what he had on his shelves, especially the really ancient stuff left to him by family members, was in miserable shape. “I was reading Life on the Mississippi, one of my favorite books, but it was so depressing, because my whole bed was full of decayed bits of grandfather Stein’s Mark Twain,” the book publishing mensch of the year said on Sunday night. “It was like dandruff. It was just like the book exploded. You don’t have to watch them die.”

The next morning, Mr. Stein, age 35, would be back at his desk at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he has been working happily for the past decade, beginning as then editor in chief Jonathan Galassi’s assistant and moving quickly up through the ranks. Even as more and more attention has been paid to book editors scrambling for the latest celebrity tell-all or headline-grabbing instabook, Mr. Stein has kept his feet planted at FSG, where he’s edited some of the most respected works of literary fiction to be published in the last few years. In 2007, he edited three National Book Award finalists, including the book that won, Dennis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke. And though his 2008 was somewhat quieter in the awards department, he still had his fingerprints all over some of the most buzzed over titles of this year, among them James Wood’s How Fiction Works, Richard Price’s Lush Life and the English translation of Roberto Bolaño’s massive 2666.

That last, the second and final long novel from the late Chilean author, was the really big one for Mr. Stein this year. While working on it, he took Spanish lessons from a friend so that he could argue “half-intelligently,” he said, with the book’s translator and have “some idea what the issues were for her.”

Who said editors don’t edit anymore! Mr. Stein does, at least.

In a note to booksellers and critics printed in the advance reader’s copy of 2666, Mr. Stein explained its structure, told the author’s brief life story and offered a concise but sophisticated description of Bolaño’s style that would not be out of place in a dissertation. The ARC hit the streets early—New York’s professional culture workers had it something like five full months ahead of publication—but even so, when Mr. Stein and his assistant, Georgia Cool, started a Facebook group called “Waiting for 2666” in October, more than 300 people joined. And when they threw a release party in the East Village a few weeks later, so many came that a line stretched around the corner. Somehow, Mr. Stein took a massive, challenging work of experimental fiction and not only made it popular, but made it cool.

And although that night got a bit messy and crowded, it made Mr. Stein happy, because one thing that matters to him is knowing there are other people in the world who are moved by the same things that move him. A literary community, according to Mr. Stein, is crucial—not just for the sake of lonely readers but as a business model for publishing houses like FSG, which nowadays find themselves having to create a new market each time they issue a book. A readership that does not form and break apart each time but instead remains intact, Mr. Stein said, is essential to FSG’s survival.

“Nowadays, we live or die, at least a literary publisher, based on our ability to create and hold on to readers’ trust,” he said. “It’s our whole marketing strategy. Without a community of readers who feel like we all belong together, we’d have no reason to exist.”

In March, Mr. Stein wrote a letter to Harper’s in response to an essay in which Ursula Le Guin suggested that instead of seeking mass sales, publishers might think about focusing on their ‘own people,’ and catering to those who don’t need any prompting to pay attention to literature. “Without a critical mass of readers, you don’t have a reading culture,” Mr. Stein wrote, in what was the most scathing of several letters from publishing people that Harper’s printed that month. “That’s bad for journalism and for our political discourse, but for literature it’s fatal.”

Instead of assuring themselves of their invincibility and using it as an excuse to do their work as they always have, Mr. Stein said Monday afternoon from his office, modern editors and publishers must try aggressively to recruit readers if a thriving literary culture is what they seek.

“You have people who say, ‘Great books will always exist,’ and I find this completely specious, because it takes a shitload of readers to create the culture you need for a good book to be written,” Mr. Stein said. “I don’t have much faith that history gets it right, or that good things last and bad things don’t.”

It’s at least in part thanks to Mr. Stein that, for now, one need not worry. Judging from the books he’ll be working on in 2009—new novels by Sam Lipsyte and Denis Johnson, a poetry collection from Frederick Seidel, an English translation of Vladimir Sorokin, a short story collection from Lydia Davis—that culture is rather alive and well.

—Leon Neyfakh

Jeffrey Fager
Executive Producer, 60 Minutes

On the afternoon of June 17, CBS News’ mercurial foreign correspondent Lara Logan appeared on The Daily Show, where over the course of a seven-minute interview, she proceeded to eviscerate the American media’s coverage of the war in Iraq. The armchair academics on TV were phonies, she said. They might have visited the Green Zone once. They knew nothing. If she had to watch the stories about the war on American TV, she’d blow her brains out. “It would drive me nuts,” she said.

TV producers were apathetic about our conflicts overseas, she said. She once did a piece once on Navy SEALs taking down high-value Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan. Afterward, her bosses suggested that all guys in uniforms looked the same. Ditto, radical mullahs. Unless it was Osama bin Laden, who cared? Sometimes it felt like she had to aim an armor-piercing RPG at the bureau chief just to get her stories on the air.

Ms. Logan mentioned one exception. She praised Jeffrey Fager, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, noting that “he always says to me, ‘Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Afghanistan, Afghanistan. We don’t see enough of it. I want people to know more. I want people to see more.’”

When Mr. Fager took over the reigns of 60 Minutes from legendary producer Don Hewitt in 2004, some of the saber-toothed correspondents on the show worried that the Young Turk (then a mere puppy of 49 years), would soften up the vulcanized newsmagazine in search of younger viewers.

Mr. Fager did no such thing. Rather than tart up the weekly telecasts with stories about, say, teenage sex rituals and celebrity hijinks, Mr. Fager did the improbable—he restored the aging institution to ratings prominence by mixing in a new cast of talented reporters (including Lara Logan, Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper) and bulking up on serious, timely, intelligent stories.

Under Mr. Fager’s steady hand, 60 Minutes had a breakout year in 2008 (some 40 years after initially breaking out), finishing consistently among the top 10 most watched shows on television. During back-to-back weeks in November, 60 Minutes pulled in larger audiences than any other program on the air.

Along the way, Mr. Fager’s team of correspondents filed hard-charging, elbow-swinging stories on the economic crisis, the presidential campaign, and—yes—on America’s pair of largely ignored wars overseas. Lara Logan reported stories from the Pakistan border. Leslie Stahl from Iraq. Scott Pelley from Afghanistan. At a time when long-form journalism is an increasingly hard sell to network programmers, Mr. Fager managed to make a strong case for spending the money on painstakingly reported, carefully polished stories often taking place overseas.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Fager keeps a low profile. He manages his high-strung team of star correspondents with a low-key, conflict-free management style. The cerebral son of a doctor is known for his calming bedside manner, which can come in handy given the bouts of hysteria known to afflict many a star TV correspondent.

As a result, many TV insiders consider Mr. Fager the CBS News president in waiting. And he got there not by showing the network how to scrape and bow to a low common denominator, but how to lead in the news, how to bring the audience around to what’s important rather than bringing the network around to what isn’t.

Should CBS chief Les Moonves get around to moving current prez Sean McManus back to the sports division full-time, Mr. Fager, goes the theory, would be first in line to take over the job. That is, if he wants it.

At a time when much of the traditional news media has taken to chewing its nails anxiously and tossing precious money at charlatan news consultants, it would be understandable if he didn’t. But if he’s the mensch we think he is, he will.

—Felix Gillette

Errol Morris’s latest, Standard Operating Procedure, quite frankly freaked us out. The documentary is an in-depth investigation into those infamous 2003 photographs that depicted American soldiers abusing and torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. In past films like The Thin Blue Line (about the 1976 murder of a Dallas policeman, and which resulted in helping get a man off death row) and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, Mr. Morris has shown a great capacity for detailed and surprising research, and a compellingly simple, equitable and unblinking approach to filming his subjects. This time around, the filmmaker was able to coax into telling their sides of the story most of the soldiers featured in the photographs, including the much-loathed Lynndie England—of leash-holding, thumbs-up fame (who, interestingly, was caught up in a romantic triangle within the prison; “I was blinded by being in love with a man,” she bitterly eye-rolls)—as well as investigators and witnesses.

It’s the context of what happened outside the pictures that clearly interests Mr. Morris—and just think, what if the images we saw weren’t the worst of it? As Mr. Morris deftly illustrates (and considering the subject matter, rather beautifully), there’s something even more terrifying than the fact that these young kids—going stir-crazy and scared out of their own minds in a war zone—were left to abuse and torture without supervision: They might have been merely a link in the chain of command of a corrupt and power-hungry post-9/11 U.S. military. By the end of this deeply unsettling film, you’ll realize you have more questions than answers about what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Morris himself describes Standard Operating Procedure as a “nonfiction horror movie.” We couldn’t agree more.

Standard Operating Procedure opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center.

Courtesy of IndieWIRE.com:

True, it’s more a comic episode, a mix-up, an Eric Ambler opening rather than a le Carré. Nonetheless, when heavily armed cops poured out of state-police cruisers to detain me at the approach to the C.I.A. in Langley, Va., on suspicion of … something, I guess, the comedy didn’t make itself immediately apparent. Maybe you have a better sense of humor. I’m still processing it.

Really, it was all a big misunderstanding, you see, but one that required some explaining. I wasn’t on an espionage mission, I tried to convince the state troopers. Ultimately, they believed me, though it took what seemed like a long time being told to remain motionless in the car to check my extensive rap sheet. (I kid, I kid.) I think maybe I just look guilty; I’d suspect me. It didn’t surprise me that a friend wrote me last week to say he was looking up “transgress” in the online dictionary.com and found my name cited as “the authoritative source.” (Well, it was a citation from my work. Still, I’m kinda proud of it—I’m BAD, look it up.)

Or maybe it was the Curse of Angleton—the long-ago warning the C.I.A.’s notorious counterintelligence chief gave me when he was still in a position to put a chill on you with a warning. Angleton—James Jesus Angleton, feared mole-hunter—was, after all, the reason I was down there on the road that passes in front of C.I.A. headquarters, taking certain photographs that certain heavily armed state cops took exception to—and confiscated.

You know the Angleton legend, right? I’ve written about him enough over the years (see The Observer, Feb. 24, 2003, for instance). A legendary C.I.A. figure, educated (like many fellow spies) at Yale, steeped in the culture of modernist literary criticism before he joined the O.S.S.—criticism exemplified by William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, the sort of ambiguity-riddled analysis he applied to espionage questions.

That and Angleton’s involvement with the legendary British “double-cross system,” which was the high modernist peak of espionage deception operations (the disinformation operation that may have made the difference between success and failure on D-Day), gave Angleton a reputation as a savant (if you don’t count the fact that he was double-crossed by double-cross-system genius and British mole Kim Philby).

Angleton’s career is all the more relevant now, since Angleton was responsible for the C.I.A.’s warrantless mail-intercept program at the height of the Cold War and was eventually forced to resign for it in 1974 (no one claimed it was legal back then). Or was he fired because insidious moles and “false defectors” had taken over the C.I.A., as the Angletonians persist in believing? (Check out the full flower of this persistent theory in William F. Buckley Jr.’s 2000 novel Spytime.)

And it’s perhaps not irrelevant that the leading journalistic advocate of Angletonian thinking, Edward Jay Epstein, has been the most persistent pursuer of “the Prague connection” theory of 9/11: the belief that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague in April 2001, a belief that persists despite widespread claims that it’s been discredited. (You be the judge: edwardjayepstein.com.)

In any case, Angleton is best known as the mole-hunter counterspy extraordinaire whose rampant suspicions of Soviet “penetration” virtually paralyzed the entire Soviet intelligence capability of the U.S. for two crucial decades of the Cold War. It’s one of the great intelligence scandals of the century—whoever was right—because the C.I.A. essentially failed to resolve it definitively when it counted most. (I’m inclined to accept British journalist Tom Mangold’s conclusion in his 1991 Cold Warrior that Angleton’s Philby-induced mole paranoia in the 60’s and 70’s was largely baseless—this was long before such paranoia discredited legitimate suspicion and allowed real moles like Aldrich Ames to flourish. But it’s not a “slam dunk.”)

In any case, it wasn’t surprising that Angleton would warn me away from pursuing my “notional mole” theory of the entire contretemps when I was writing about it for Harper’s back in 1983. But I took his warning seriously; I realized I had wandered into somewhere I was not welcome, the way I had stumbled into that near-bust in Langley a little while ago.

After all, when the man who was once the most feared spy in the C.I.A., certainly the most feared spy within the C.I.A.—feared for the ruin he could bring to lives with a mole accusation against an innocent agency operative or a hapless Soviet defector—gives you a warning, you listen. And this was a particularly cryptic, resonant Angletonian warning.

“The danger,” Angleton told me several years after his resignation, with disclosing, even acknowledging, anything about the past, is that “the past telescopes into the future.”

The past telescopes into the future! The superb historian of the espionage wars, Tom Powers, once told me Angleton’s phrase—for the past, for history, the actual truth— was “deep chrono.” The past telescopes into the future …. Stop and try to visualize that. It’s kind of … well, trippy, no? Had the most feared spy hunter been dipping into the C.I.A.’s overstock of MK-ULTRA mind-altering drugs?

No, there was a logic about it, too—the telescoping of “deep chrono.” It had to do with intelligence operations that unfold over years, usually involving disinformation and deception—operations that may have been begun while Angleton was in power, and whose “deep chrono” continued to unfold after he was officially out.

The logic of Angleton’s warning against exposing “deep chrono” didn’t escape me, though it also didn’t prevent me from speculating, as far back as 1983 (in Harper’s), that Angleton’s mole paranoia had been the product of the “notional mole” ploy developed within the “double-cross” system he himself had worked on during World War II. A ploy in which the suspicion of a highly placed mole—one who doesn’t exist—is planted to sow confusion and paranoia. “Notional” is a term from medieval logic referring to entities that can be conceived but don’t exist. Thus, I suggested that Angleton had been hoist by his own petard, so to speak.

The Cop Stop

So perhaps I was being punished in my scary brush with the law by the specter of Angleton, still lingering around his old haunt. For ignoring the Angleton warning. Indeed, Angleton (dead now since ’87) and the deep chrono of Angletonian mysteries were the reason I was down there outside of C.I.A. headquarters in the first place.

I had been working on a screenplay for the filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line, etc.) that involved Angleton, the spy with the rep as grandmaster of the three-dimensional chess of counterintelligence. One that involved concepts that all three of us, Errol, Angleton and I, shared a fascination with: ambiguity, epistemology and the often-tragic impossibility of ever knowing the truth—the deepest of deep chrono. The script focuses on one emblematic moment in Angleton’s career of master-spy ambiguity, a moment which shall be nameless for the time being.

But I thought it would help the writing if I went down to D.C. and refreshed my mind with visuals, various official and unofficial spy haunts of the Angleton era—not just C.I.A. HQ but hangouts like Rocco’s and the bar at the Key Bridge Marriott.

I’d brought down my trusty spy camera, a bulky Polaroid Spectravision that had served me well in some tight spots in Moscow (kidding!). And I’d asked a friend to drive so that I could take some photos to refresh my memory as we cruised through the neighborhood around C.I.A. headquarters.

It didn’t work out that way. There we were, proceeding along the highway in Langley, when we passed a giganto sign that read:

GEORGE H.W. BUSH CENTER FOR CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE NEXT RIGHT

(Sorry, I might not have it exactly, because this photo has been CONFISCATED. But that’s the official name of C.I.A. headquarters these days. It didn’t seem they were making too much of a secret of it.)

And then there was another C.I.A.-related sign that said something like “C.I.A. Offloading” or something. (Sorry, I don’t want to give away any of the sensitive national-security information on that photo of the huge public road sign, a photo which was also CONFISCATED.)

Then it seemed, just seconds later, that we were passing an unmarked dirt-road-like driveway that led off the highway. I wondered if it was an entrance. It could easily have been a horse trail or a jogging path. With no criminal intent, I aimed the Polaroid and set off a flash—which set off a siren-wailing, light-flashing posse of state-police cars, with us as the center of well-armed attention. I don’t know where they’d been lurking, those state-police cruisers, but when the sirens and the flashing lights brought us to a stop, we wondered how much trouble we were in.

The officer on my side of the car asked me what we were doing there. I tried to explain I was working on a script for a filmmaker about C.I.A. history. “Old history,” I lamely tried to explain. I was just taking location shots to “help the writing process,” I said. It was true, but it didn’t sound immediately, intrinsically convincing, I’ll admit.

“Who are you working on this film for?” the state trooper asked me skeptically.

“This guy Errol Morris—he won an Oscar for Fog of War?” I said.

Mistake! It turns out the state trooper was more of a fan of the earlier, more frankly metaphysical Errol Morris films such as the underrated Vernon, Florida. Kidding! He hadn’t seen Errol’s work. That wasn’t working any magic. Nor was my extremely impressive Observer business card.

Didn’t I know, the trooper said, that the C.I.A. cooperated with people making films involving them. I did vaguely know this, but (although I didn’t think it was a good time to express it) the reporter side of me didn’t feel comfortable cooperating closely with (thus potentially being co-opted by) an intelligence agency.

I didn’t want to get into a discussion of the philosophical and ethical questions involved. Neither did the cop. No photographing C.I.A. headquarters, he said. In fact, the headquarters was invisible from the highway; I was just taking a photo of some dirt driveway, as far as I knew. (And, in fact, as far as I know, maybe it was just a horse trail; they just wanted me to THINK it was the entrance to C.I.A. headquarters, thus throwing me off the trail, so to speak).

The state trooper examined the photos on my dashboard of the “GEORGE H.W. BUSH CENTER FOR CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE” sign, and of the other C.I.A. sign, and confiscated them. And eventually let us off with a warning.

Later, I checked with two local ACLU people, who said they knew of no law against taking pictures from a public highway, although one had heard of incidents of people being pulled over in front of C.I.A.

If what I was doing wasn’t illegal, this is not to say that I wasn’t being, let’s say, unwise in cruising past the C.I.A. snapping pictures in the current climate. This is not to say that I wasn’t needlessly asking for trouble, some might say. And I’d agree. Still, there was something puzzling about the incident.

A Pizza Hut Ploy?

In fact, as we drove off, I got into a, well, discussion with my companion, whom I’d needlessly put through a scare without thinking things through. Why don’t they put up a sign saying “NO PHOTOGRAPHS”? I asked.

My friend said there was a sign saying “NO PHOTOGRAPHS,” which is why my photographing had come as much a surprise to her as the state troopers. I hadn’t seen any such sign and, in fact, when she went back the next day, she couldn’t find one. It’s unlikely it was removed overnight.

So we sought to analyze the intelligence purpose of not having a sign. Then the people taking photographs would be either terrorists or tourists, and you’d have the right to pull anyone over to find out—I guess that could be the rationale.

True, but wouldn’t it be smarter to put up a sign? Then you’d filter out the tourists and could identify the true suspects by their surreptitious attempts to violate the signage.

But if you put up a sign saying “NO PHOTOGRAPHS,” wouldn’t you be drawing attention to the place you didn’t want photographed?

But didn’t everyone in the world know where C.I.A. headquarters was anyway? And why put up giganto signs announcing where it was on the open roadside, and then make it (apparently) illegal to photograph the signs?

There must be some Angletonian double-think going on behind this, right? A double-super-secret logic that we aren’t meant to grasp.

I mean, in intelligence matters, there almost always is. Maybe trying to figure out the logic of my near-arrest sensitized me in an Angletonian-ambiguity way to the deep-chrono questions raised by the N.S.A. intercept leaks.

In particular, I found the stories that appeared after the N.S.A. surveillance story broke, the ones about how the N.S.A. intercepts didn’t turn up anything useful but “calls to Pizza Hut” and like trivia, just the kind of thing they’d want everyone to believe, don’t you think?

It could be that the pizza-delivery story is true, but it also could be a deliberate leak of disinformation to disguise the fact that they were getting lots of stuff they just don’t want to tell us about. Or it could mean they want to lull the foe into thinking our data-mining intercepts were NOT able to compromise their plans and communications (when they really are).

Or if the targets are doing Angleton double-think themselves, the “calls to Pizza Hut” leak could convince them that we want them to think we’ve failed when we’ve actually succeeded, and thus that their plans are compromised (when they’re not). Then the false fear of compromised communications—“notional compromise,” let’s call it—would be just as good as actual compromise, because it would have the same result: in one stroke paralyzing the targets’ confidence in their ability to make plans using any electronic devices.

And it would mean that the plans they’ve already made would have to be abandoned. And for fear of compromised communications, they’d have to disable themselves from all real-time electronic relatedness. You might as well have burned every wire and chip in their possession. Could the pizza-delivery leak accomplish all this? Who’s the real Angleton in this game? What’s the real deep chrono?

ANGLETON AND I ONCE HAD A BRIEF PHILOSOPHICAL discussion of Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, a work we both admired. There are more than seven types of ambiguity, if you want to know the truth, but only 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights. Sacrificing my blurry Polaroids of the “GEORGE H.W. BUSH” highway sign and that horse trail or whatever it is for whatever national-security purpose their confiscation represented may not be a big deal. It was, as I’ve said, unwise on my part to be so blithe in the current climate.

But I’m not ready to sacrifice the Fourth Amendment for a mess of cold pizza, notional or otherwise. It doesn’t seem blurry on this issue. The Bush administration hasn’t convinced me that the only way to accomplish legitimate security and intelligence objectives requires lawlessly dismissing the Bill of Rights as an irrelevant anachronism.

Someone said the ACLU’s lawsuit against the N.S.A. warrantless intercepts was “litigate first, ask questions later”—but in intelligence matters, alas, you rarely get the chance to ask questions until you sue. Indeed, you often don’t know what questions to ask even if you do get to ask. The lesson of Angleton is that intelligence agencies can be too clever by half and have often deceived themselves as well as us. I’m on the side of the people who want to know the deep chrono.

Support the ACLU and the N.S.A. lawsuit!

As the film begins, Harry and Marin are driving to her mother's beach house in the Hamptons, thinking that they will be blissfully alone. When Marin's mother, Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), arrives unexpectedly with her sister Zoe (Frances McDormand), Harry is literally caught with his pants down-though not in flagrante delicto -foraging in the fridge. Since this is a farce constructed at least partly on misunderstandings, Erica immediately assumes the worst and starts calling the police on her cell phone to report a crazed burglar in her home.

By the time Erica realizes that Harry is actually her daughter's boyfriend (with said daughter wearing nothing but a rather fetching bathing suit), everyone decides to be grown-up about the situation and go about their business.

This may not constitute "meeting cute" for the two stars, but Ms. Keaton at 57 and Mr. Nicholson at 63 are considerably older than Hollywood's romantic couples of yesteryear-seldom did they stray beyond their 20's and 30's, and not even within hailing distance of 40. You have to go back to Marie Dressler (62) and Wallace Beery (only 46) in Min and Bill (1930) to find two Oscar-winners of such advanced age engaged in any kind of onscreen relationship. By contrast, Oscar-winning lovers Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable were 31 and 33 when they appeared in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934). Fortunately, neither Ms. Dressler nor, for that matter, Ms. Colbert were allowed to appear in the nude, as Ms. Keaton does fleetingly here, and neither Mr. Beery nor Mr. Gable were required to bare their backsides in a hospital gown, as Mr. Nicholson does in a daze-though Mr. Gable temporarily damaged the men's undershirt industry when he took off his shirt and bared his manly chest. One final note on then-and-now attitudes toward movie aging: Doris Day was only 31 when she was first ridiculed for playing an onscreen virgin, despite the filmmakers' attempts to conceal her "agedness" using filters on the camera lens.

How then do Ms. Keaton and Mr. Nicholson get away with a hot sex scene and a generally passionate relationship that concludes with a traditional happy ending? Simple: by sharing a complementary onscreen charisma. Ms. Keaton projects her wondrously warm personality, and the erstwhile Jake Gittes keeps us entertained with a sense of irony that keeps things from getting too sticky. The two oldies are also comfortably and reassuringly upscale, like the Depression era's sheltered screen playboys and playgirls. So it is that Harry just happens to control a pop-music empire, and Erica is a successful Broadway playwright with a beach house in the Hamptons-hardly slummers on Poverty Row.

Still, everyone around them seems to be conspiring to get them into bed together without ever betraying the slightest trace of annoyance, impatience, disbelief or even jealousy. First, Erica's daughter bows out of her own relationship with Harry with almost a sigh of relief. Then, when Harry suffers a heart attack from his overindulgence in Viagra, the young presiding physician, played by the 39-year-old Keanu Reeves, is immediately attracted to Erica. The fact that he's seen all her plays and is impressed with her writing should mark him as potentially gay, but instead it establishes him as a younger heartthrob (tadpole) attracted to an older woman.

Mr. Reeves has regularly courted younger women in most of his recent movies, but when the time comes for him to step aside for Harry, he does so without any fuss, albeit offscreen. He's apparently seen the way Erica looks at Harry, and that's enough for him to realize that he's not the one (even though he has slept with Erica, and taken her to Paris on a pre-marriage honeymoon of sorts).

Erica's sister Zoe, a professor of women's studies, seems a little out of step by egging Erica on to respond favorably to the young doctor's advances, but she exerts a cheerfully benign influence in getting Erica back into the sexual marketplace. All in all, Ms. Meyers retains her feminist credentials by humiliating Harry in ever-ingenious and amusing ways-she gets him off his sexist playboy perch and into the toils of True Love for a Good Woman. That's as Old Hollywood as one can get.

Miss July Rocks!

Nigel Cole's Calendar Girls , from a screenplay by Juliette Towhidi and Tim Firth, is based on a true story, and though it's thematically more ambitious than its male counterpart, The Full Monty , it's also less emotionally effective. Whereas The Full Monty ends at its peak, so to speak, with the unemployed male workers attaining a communal epiphany with their socially redeeming striptease, Calendar Girls goes beyond the amusing spectacle of Yorkshire housewives shedding their modesty for charity to an anticlimactic rendezvous with notoriety in flesh-peddling Hollywood. Whereas The Full Monty tends to pull an impoverished community together, Calendar Girls shows a more comfortable, if not more complacent, community coming closer to unraveling than pulling together. Part of the difference can be attributed to the deplorable double standards for men and women when it comes to the sacrifice of dignity and propriety for a perceived higher good.

Still, on its own, Calendar Girls is amiable enough as a frothy entertainment, with darker overtones rendered with emotional effectiveness. The acting is superb throughout, particularly with Julie Walters' Annie, who loses her husband (John Alderton) to leukemia. This provides a cause for her best friend, Chris (Helen Mirren), to persuade the local Women's Institute to sponsor a nude calendar discreetly posed by an assortment of age-challenged members of the group, with the proceeds going to the leukemia wing of the local hospital. Much of the histrionic appeal of the film arises from the inventive anti-type-casting of the usually vivacious Ms. Walters as the quietly emotional one, and the usually vulnerable Ms. Mirren as the tactless, extroverted go-getter of the pair. It reminds me of the miraculous switch-casting by Max Ophüls of the Austrian tragedienne Luise Ullrich as the flirtatious good-time girl, and the musical comedy star Magda Schneider as the quietly tragic heroine of Liebelei (1933).

Unfortunately, the worldwide celebrity that follows the publication of the calendar leads to a temporary rupture between Annie and Chris. It also generates domestic problems for Chris with her husband, Rod (Ciarán Hinds), and her conflicted son, Jem (John-Paul MacLeod). Indeed, the barroom portraits of neglected husbands brooding over the freakish fame of their unveiled wives become curiously oppressive as the movie lumbers slowly toward tentative reconciliation. Against this accumulating angst is the welcome relief of a suitable revenge by calendar girl Celia (Celia Imrie) against her two-timing husband. Ultimately, the one overwhelmingly satisfying feeling expressed in this film is the pleasure that women can derive from escaping their bourgeois isolation within family life to share with their sisters in spirit the outside world.

Hindsight 20/20

Errol Morris' The Fog of War emerges as a fascinating enterprise that evokes nothing so much as Victor Hugo's "dialogue of the deaf" in The Hunchback of Notre Dame . At one point, Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, now 87 years old, confides to Errol Morris, now 55, that he learned long ago not to answer the questions asked of him, but rather the questions that should have been asked. Still, despite the generation gap and the ideological differences between Mr. McNamara and Mr. Morris, The Fog of War is a more ambiguous viewing experience than I would have expected from a former anti–Vietnam War protester at the once-incendiary campus of the University of Wisconsin.

Mr. McNamara pinpoints one of the sources of the ambiguity: "I know what many of you are thinking. You're thinking, 'This man is duplicitous.' You're thinking that he has held things to his chest. You're thinking that he did not respond fully to the desires and wishes of the American people. And I want to tell you: You're wrong."

One can surmise that the elaborate precision with which Mr. McNamara has always parted his hair suggests a structured personality ever sensitive to the pecking order in the chain of command. His severest critics would argue that he was loyal to his superiors to a grievous fault, but that's an easy charge to make when the accuser's never been in a position, like Mr. McNamara's, that's so close to the awesome decision-making of a superpower in a tense conflict of wills with a rival superpower.

Judging by the rhetoric emanating from the White House these days, it would seem that the "lessons" of Vietnam mean very different things to different people. What's most interesting about The Fog of War is Mr. Morris' humility as an insightful filmmaker, reflected in the neutral, non-judgmental footage of war that he selects, as if to illustrate the maddening inevitability and inexorability of humanity's eternal addiction to war.

It's Robert McNamara-the former Secretary of Defense who presided over the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War-who should be worried, if you ask me. I know Errol and I sometimes differ about his films because I'm more judgmental, let's say, and he takes a more, well, generously complex approach to his subjects. So this is my take, not necessarily his, but I see The Fog of War as a devastating portrait of self-deception (Errol Morris' great theme). Nonetheless, as Errol put it in his conversation with Mark Singer at one of the New Yorker Festival events, "We see what we believe," and evidently Robert McNamara doesn't seem to be worried by what he sees of himself. He's already, I'm told, scheduled a showing of the film at the Kennedy Center at Harvard for what someone described as "the remains of Camelot."

But that makes sense: Even in his purportedly confessionalmode,Mr. McNamara is quick to absolvehimself. Even when he appears to accuse himself of being a war criminal (for engineering the World War II firebombing of Tokyo, whichcaused 100,000 civilian casualties). Even in his damningsilence about his silence when he knew the war in Vietnam was a losing proposition (at the time, 25,000 Americanshadbeen killed-but Mr. McNamara kept silent, and another 35,000 American soldiers, as well as hundreds of thousandsmoreVietnamese civilians, died as well). Despite this, Mr. McNamara's supreme self-confidence, his unassailable self-regard, seems unshaken. With every confession he makes in this film, he has a wonderful capacity to grant himself absolution almost simultaneously, just for having confessed. He is the High Priest of Self-Absolution.

Which is why I don't think Errol Morris has to worry: Nobody who watches this film with any sensitivity to this dynamic of self-deception and self-absolution will see it as a vindication of Mr. McNamara's conscience. Not when they factor in the shocking epilogue.

The one person who really has the most to worry about may be Donald Rumsfeld. Rummy has nothing-explicitly-to do with the film. But his resemblance to McNamara-the impervious McNamara-like demeanor, the unshakable McNamara-like self-confidence, what Leon Wieseltier recently called Rummy's "clinical euphoria," even his McNamara-like hair -will revive the question: Is Rummy McNamara 2.0? Will "postwar" Iraq be Vietnam 2.0?

The full title of the film is The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara , and it is one of the most complex, thought-provoking films I've seen in a long time-and I think that's something I'd say even if I hadn't become a friend of the filmmaker (he wrote an introduction to my collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune ). If I weren't a friend, I probably wouldn't have had the temerity to suggest to Errol that the film should be retitled-albeit with a phrase I took from Errol's own words.

This was back in April, when he'd sent me a videocassette of the version of the film he was taking to Cannes, which was then subtitled "Eleven Lessons of Robert S. McNamara." After I'd watched it, I had suggested a somewhat different subtitle to Errol. Not a better subtitle necessarily but, to me, a more fully descriptive one: not "Eleven Lessons of Robert S. McNamara," but "Eleven Excuses of Robert S. McNamara." At which point, Errol came back with a typically brilliant-and also typically funny-meditation on the complex moral ambiguities to be found in the difference between explanation and excuse:

"I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin. And is there a difference between excuses and explanations … is an excuse a bad or self-serving explanation? I don't know. Maybe Newton's Law is an excuse for why bodies just stay at rest or in motion unless acted on by some external force. I look at the McNamara story as the-fog-of-war-ate-my-homework excuse. After all, if war is so complex, then no one is responsible."

"The Fog of War Ate My Homework." Yes! Precisely. He's touching on a particularly difficult question: Is it true that "to understand all is to forgive all"? Toward the close of the film, summing up the various forms of havoc he's wreaked on cities, civilians and nations, Mr. McNamara says, "We all make mistakes. We know we make mistakes…. There's a wonderful phrase, 'the fog of war.' What 'the fog of war' means is, war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding are not adequate, and we kill people unnecessarily."

The Fog of War Ate His Homework. That's why I don't think Errol needs to be worrying about people "calling me a shill for McNamara," as he put it during a lunch after the New Yorker event. I think Mr. McNamara ought to be worrying that he comes across as "a shill for McNamara," despite his trademark crocodile tears.

At some point during the New Yorker conversation, someone-I can't recall whether it was Mr. Morris or Mr. Singer-called crocodile tears, deliberately or inadvertently, "alligator tears." I like the notion of "alligator tears." In this film, McNamara reinvents crocodile tears, you might say; he transcends the more obvious crocodile tears and gives us- alligator tears . Alligator tears aren't insincere, not in the same way crocodile tears folklorically are. I'd define alligator tears as tears of equanimity, of self-righteousness posing as self-criticism: The fog of war ate my homework.

Errol Morris' most well-known film is The Thin Blue Line , which someone described as the only murder mystery to actually solve a real murder-he got a wrongfully convicted man on Texas' death row released when he convinced the real killer to confess. But I think it could be said that all of Errol Morris' films are mysteries in one way or another. His first film, Gates of Heaven , ostensibly about dueling pet cemeteries, can be seen as a film about the mystery of love in its Lucretian disguises. His most difficult and arcane film, Vernon, Florida , could be said to be about the mysteries of epistemology, how can we know what we know, what's beneath the surface of things. A Brief History of Time -about Stephen Hawking-is about the mysteries of the universe itself. Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is about the mystery of obsession.

And Mr. Death , his 1999 film about Fred Leuchter, the electric-chair designer turned tool of Holocaust deniers, was about the mystery of Mr. Leuchter's motivation, the mystery of self-deception. Was Mr. Leuchter merely a technocrat, whose pseudo-science happened to serve the agenda of Holocaust deniers, but who harbored no anti-Semitic animus himself? Was he deceiving himself, or did he know exactly whose purposes his discredited tests (which purported to prove that cyanide wasn't used to kill inmates at Auschwitz) were serving?

In a limited way-Mr. McNamara is much smarter-there are similarities to the Leuchter film. The mystery in The Fog of War also revolves around the deceptions and self-deceptions of a technocrat who uses rationality as an evasion of morality. It's the mystery of what is really going on in Mr. McNamara's mind. Is it true, as it seems to me, that the surface self-condemnation he engages in covers a far deeper self-satisfaction?

Is the real key to Mr. McNamara a recurrent habit that Errol shrewdly captures in the film, his repeated "offhand" boasting-of how brilliantly he did in tests in grade school, how high his grades were in college, how well he did on the intelligence tests they gave him in the Army and at the Ford Motor Company. Did Mr. McNamara regard this film, his self-exculpation, as just another test he thinks he's aced?

At lunch, Errol reminded me of something I'd said when he was describing to me Mr. McNamara's wavering about whether to cooperate on the film. Something about how, after each interview he gave, he felt he had to give one more to justify what he'd said in the last one. "It makes no sense to do it," Mr. McNamara said to Errol. "It's stupid. But I'll do it anyway." "Isn't that the way we got into Vietnam?" I'd asked. But up until the very end, Mr. McNamara seems to think he can ace this particular exam, although I came away with the impression that he was digging a far deeper hole for himself. The question is: Did he know this? Was he being deceptive, even self-deceptive, in the self-condemnation that becomes self-exculpation?

The mystery discloses itself in the little details, the subtle word usages Mr. McNamara employs. This is a film that repays close attention, because one is studying a master at work-a master at either deception or self-deception. (It's sometimes hardtodecipher,_since_Mr. McNamara is so clever at it.)

For instance, he takes us through the mathematical calculations he did for Gen. Curtis LeMay, who was supervising the bombing of Japan in World War II-calculations that led LeMay to change his tactics, in a way that resulted in the more terrifyingly efficient destruction of Japanese cities and civilians. It was civilian destruction so disproportionate, Mr. McNamara suggests, he and LeMay would have been indicted as war criminals had we lost the war. Then he interjects: "Now I don't want to suggest that it was my report that led to … the firebombings." How would we ever get that idea?

At another point, he says that he and J.F.K. were about to pull out of Vietnam in the fall of 1963, but a coup there spoiled the plan. He then goes on to virtually admit what everyone knows: that the U.S. itself sponsored the coup.

And when he talks about the decision to use Agent Orange in Vietnam to defoliate the forest cover, supposedly making it easier to get at the foe from the air, he speaks of how it was only discovered after the war that many of our own soldiers suffered death and disabilities from Agent Orange poisoning. He speaks philosophically at first of how one can't always know the consequences of actions taken in wartime-"The Fog of War Ate My Homework" again. And then, suddenly-as if the phrase "liability suit" has crossed his mind-he interjects, "I'm not really sure I authorized Agent Orange, I don't remember it, but it certainly occurred, the use of it occurred, while I was Secretary."

But for me, the great moment in the film is when Mr. McNamara's rationalization machine finally breaks down. It's in the epilogue, when Errol-who rarely interrupts the stream of rationalization, instead allowing it to deconstruct itself-asks the Big Question, the one about Mr. McNamara's silence.

Mr. McNamara has spent a goodly portion of the film's last half explaining how he came to the painful conclusion that the American effort in Vietnam was a futile waste of lives. How he told President Johnson this before he resigned (or was fired) in 1967. How he even naïvely embraced the propaganda of his onetime Vietnamese foes when they told him at a conference in the 90's that they were merely fighting for their independence, that the struggle had nothing to do with Marxism and the ColdWar. Something that would be nice to believe, but is belied by the release of documents from the Soviet archives, and the fact of the gulags for dissenters which the Vietnamese communist regime still maintains. (Let's face it: The war may have been stupidly conceived and executed by Mr. McNamara and his Camelot minions, but that doesn't make the North Vietnamese the harmless "agrarian reformers" many of us on the antiwar side wanted to believe they were. They turned out to be stone Stalinists.)

Does Mr. McNamara believe this propaganda, or is it his way of excusing the incompetent conduct of the war on our side: Nobody could have beaten them, because to Mr. McNamara's utter surprise-the thought apparently never crossed his mind-the North Vietnamese were fighting for their independence. So don't blame him for screwing it up at the cost of millions of lives.

But all of this is irrelevant, in a way, to that final silence. It comes in an epilogue in which you see Mr. McNamara driving a car. Almost all of it is in tight close-ups on his eyeglasses, or his eyeglasses in the car's rear-view mirror. The eyes themselves-the "I" itself, you might say-are conspicuously concealed.

As we watch this, we hear Errol in voiceover asking the questions that have been building in our minds (well, they certainly were building in mine). Mr. McNamara resigned or was fired in 1967 and went on to serve out the rest of the Vietnam War's duration in a posh sinecure as the World Bank's president. He'd told President Johnson that the war was futile but no one else, anyway not publicly-at a time when his voice, as the architect of the war, might have foreshortened it and saved hundreds of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives.

"Why," Errol asks, "did you fail to speak out against the war after you left the Johnson administration?"

Here's the final deciding question on the Big Test. How will this genius of ratiocination, this master of self-exculpation, handle this one? It is incredibly suspenseful.

And then … he punts. He just refuses to answer. "I'm not going to say anymore than I have," Mr. McNamara says. "These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You don't know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear."

No shit, Sherlock. It's not just your words that were inflammatory, it was your napalm. That's the point-especially if you knew it was pointless and you didn't say anything and allowed the body bags to keep on coming.

And then Errol presses the point. He asks the question we all want him to ask: "Do you feel personally responsible for the war? Do you feel guilty?"

And this time … he punts again. "I don't want to go any further on this question. It just opens up more controversy …. "

And then Errol, in his wonderful "I'm just curious" voice, asks: "Do you get the feeling that you're damned if you do [talk] and if you don't, no matter what?"

"Yeah, yeah, that's right," Mr. McNamara says. "And I'd rather be damned if I don't."

It's a deal.

few seconds of film in Mr. Death -by an interview nobody had thought to do before Errol did-an interview buried in the middle of the documentary.

What astonished me on first watching Mr. Death is that Errol barely draws attention to the crushing refutation in the film; it's never commented upon, even though it is the pivot of the film, I believe, the lens that places everything else in the film in perspective, a lens that permits Errol to engage in what might otherwise be a disturbingly intimate exploration of the mind of a Holocaust denier.

Why such an exploration in the first place? Why devote time to an idiot like Mr. Leuchter? "The Holocaust is the central mystery of the 20th century," Errol remarks in one of several phone conversations after I'd seen a semifinal version of Mr. Death , "The mystery isn't, 'Did it happen?' but 'How could it possibly happen?' And by looking at someone like Leuchter, maybe we can learn something about that." Learn something about why ordinary Germans became Hitler's willing executioners by learning how apparent schnooks like Mr. Leuchter can, half a century later, become implicit accessories after the fact to mass murder by denying the crime happened.

But Mr. Morris has done more than explore the mind of Mr. Leuchter-he's exploded his bogus science. "Has this been reported before?" I asked Errol about the devastating testimony Errol evokes from the lab scientist who did the chemical analysis that Mr. Leuchter and the Holocaust deniers brazenly and ignorantly misused to give "scientific credibility" to their hateful no-gas-chamber lies.

"No one had ever asked him before," Errol said, adding once again, "but I don't want this to be about proving the world round."

Over the course of our recent conversations he almost reluctantly disclosed the investigative odyssey that underlies Mr. Death , including the archival detective work behind an important historical deduction and a stunning discovery he didn't even bother to include in the film.

When it comes to Holocaust denial, is it worth proving the world is round? It's a question Errol and I had frequent occasion to discuss and occasionally argue about in the past six years or so as he was working on Mr. Death and I was finishing the manuscript of Explaining Hitler in which I address the relationship between Holocaust deniers and Holocaust perpetrators-the origin of the former in the latter. And it might be worth sketching that context as a way of explaining why I think Mr. Morris' investigative achievement is more important than he is willing to acknowledge.

Holocaust denial is such a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon-both an expression of, and a refutation of, the key postmodernist dogma that there is no such thing as truth, historical or otherwise, there are only "constructions," "competing narratives" with no reason to "privilege" one over the other-so postmodern that it's often forgotten that the very first Holocaust denier was the chief Holocaust perpetrator: Adolf Hitler. (It would be somewhat unfair to call Hitler the first postmodernist.)

In fact, in reading through the 1,000-page stenographic transcripts of Hitler's wartime dinner-table conversation, a chore I undertook in the course of researching my book, I came across what I believe is the first recorded moment in which Adolf Hitler, Holocaust perpetrator, becomes Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denier. Of course, we know he pursued a strategy of denial from the beginning: never, so far as we know, putting his signature on a written order (relying on oral Führer -orders) never allowing himself to be glimpsed in the vicinity of a death camp, disguising his intentions in what Lucy S. Dawidowicz, perhaps the most acute analyst of Hitler's denial strategy, has called "esoteric language." All of which gave would-be deniers like David Irving the excuse to make bogus deductions that since Hitler's signature could not be found, he never signed off on mass murder, and mass murder thus never happened.

But that's a kind of passive denial; there's a moment when one can see Hitler formulating an even more outrageous active denial strategy. It's a moment I came upon in the stenographic account of Hitler's "table talk" on Oct. 25, 1941, when his guests at dinner in the Führer 's command bunker on the Eastern front, the headquarters for his invasion of Russia, were Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's two chief partners in genocide.

The hands of all three were already steeped in blood; already hundreds of thousands of Jews had been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the roving killing squads. And yet over tea and cakes down in the command bunker, with the stenographer present to take down Hitler's spin on history, Hitler called the notion that there's "a plan to exterminate The Jews" just a "rumor" being spread to slander him. Of course, he added the Jews deserve to be murdered, and he was glad the rumor was being spread, but it was just a rumor: the Jews were just being "parked" in "the marshy parts of Russia."

It is in this remarkable aside, preserved for us only by accident, that Hitler captures and epitomizes what I believe is the secret, unexpressed attitude of Hitler's successors, today's Holocaust deniers: They know it happened, they're glad it happened, the Jews deserved it, but they've found an ingenious way to twist the knife in the backs of the dead victims-by denying it happened, claiming their death is only a rumor, "propaganda," a lie, a myth. Confirmation that this is the true impetus beneath esoteric language of current Holocaust deniers can be found in the memoir of former neo-Nazi German skinhead leader Ingo Hasselbach ( Führer-Ex , with Tom Reiss).

Although this is, I believe the rule for most Holocaust deniers, is it true of Mr. Leuchter, the subject of Mr. Morris' documentary, the electric chair expert become gas chamber "debunker"? This is the key mystery at the heart of Mr. Death : Is Mr. Leuchter a gullible simpleton blinded by bad science or is he, beneath the aura of an aggrieved innocence, a more calculating and sinister figure little different from the vicious hatemongers who have taken him up as an icon of their cause?

It's a question-deluded true believer or cynical manipulator-that persists in scholarly debates over the mind of Hitler himself. A question that arises in the case of Mr. Leuchter: the calculus of delusion, self-deception and evil, a question I'd been discussing, sometimes arguing about, with Errol ever since he first showed me some of the early footage he'd shot of Mr. Leuchter. He'd been following Mr. Leuchter, observing him at close range (close enough to observe that the geeky fellow drinks upward of 40 cups of coffee a day). Following Mr. Leuchter from death row execution chambers where he plied his day job as an electric chair consultant, through his growing celebrity among the Holocaust revisionists who use The Leuchter Report as "scientific proof" that no gas chambers existed-and thus no mass murder transpired-at Auschwitz.

You may not be familiar with The Leuchter Report , a sad but sinister document in which Mr. Leuchter claims the analysis of stones and scrapings he vandalized from the walls of the crematoria at Auschwitz show no significant trace of cyanide gas. Which proves, Mr. Leuchter claims, that there were no gassings at Auschwitz. Ignore the massive testimony of Auschwitz eyewitnesses, inmates, guards and even the camp commandant because of my amateur chemistry experiment, Mr. Leuchter enjoins us. Yet millions of copies of this "report" have been distributed in dozens of languages by neo-Nazis all over the world, making Mr. Leuchter a celebrity name in that noxious company. He's made regular appearances at mock scholarly conferences of "revisionist historians." He's succeeded in converting once respected historians like Mr. Irving to Holocaust denial, on the basis of his so-called science. His credentials have been questioned, yes; he has no specialized training in chemical analysis. His sampling methods have been disputed (most of the original bricks and stones of wartime Auschwitz have been removed by local peasants in need of their own building materials.) But not until Mr. Morris looked into it did anyone check on Mr. Leuchter's lab work or look up the lab scientist who did the cyanide gas testing-and in one stroke refute Mr. Leuchter's pretensions to science.

Mr. Leuchter kept the lab man, Jim Roth, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Cornell, in the dark concerning exactly where the samples came from and what exactly he was testing for. In doing so, Mr. Leuchter remained in ignorance of a crucial fact about testing for cyanide gas. As Mr. Roth states in Mr. Death , cyanide gas would only penetrate to a few microns' depth in stone or plaster surfaces. And the fact that Mr. Leuchter took big chunks out of walls and floors, without telling the lab man that he wanted the outside surface analyzed, resulted in analysis of samples which, when pulverized, diluted upward of 10,000 times any cyanide that might have been found on the surface of the walls-even assuming Mr. Leuchter had the right surfaces in the first place.

Mr. Leuchter's test, his "proof," the whole Leuchter Report , then, was and is a joke, the product of ludicrously inadequate knowledge and slovenly reasoning, not science. Mr. Leuchter himself would be little more than a pathetic joke if his fraudulent thesis were not such a widely distributed, poisonously employed lie.

But again, as Errol asks, do we-does he-need to prove the world is round?

I don't know. It's a question that troubled me over the years Errol and I had been discussing this question. There are some in the Jewish community who believe in good faith that it's better to utterly ignore the Holocaust deniers, not give them legitimacy and publicity by "debating" their absurd premises. While I know it's a sincerely held point of view, I disagree with it: I believe Holocaust denial needs to be examined. All too often in the rhetoric of those who say to ignore them, I hear the echoes of those who said "ignore Hitler, he's too absurd to be taken seriously." (That's at the heart of my quarrel with film buffs who excuse Charlie Chaplin's trivializing film, The Great Dictator .)

The lesson I took from my study of the works of the heroic anti-Hitler journalists in Munich, who reported on his rise to power, was that Hitler and Nazism thrived on the counterfeiting of history and on the profusion of sinister conspiracy theories like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the "stab-in-the-back" theory (that Jews caused Germany to lose World War I). Munich journalists risked their lives to combat these theories because they knew that however absurd they were, they could have-and did have-profoundly evil consequences.

In addition, my notion of how to respond to Holocaust denial was shaped by my conversation with Prof. Berel Lang, the brilliant philosopher who had written about the idea of a "history of evil," a history in the evolution of human malignancy in which Hitler represented a new but not necessarily final chapter. What, then, might be the next chapter, the next step in the evolution of evil, if not Holocaust denial, a new demonically artful level of evil whose proponents find an ingenious way to murder the dead all over again? To relish the slaughter secretly while twisting the knife in the backs of the dead (talk about a stab in the back). To both erase the victims from history and yet assassinate their character and memory afresh. As such, it's a phenomenon, a mentality that deserves to be studied, and Mr. Morris' film represents a thoughtful, groundbreaking effort.

Still, when the time approached to see the film, I found myself worrying about my reaction to it, worrying whether it would strain our friendship. It was a concern I expressed in a column I'd done on the occasion of Errol's last film, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control . I'd spoken about my belief that what has made his work so distinctive, in Fast, Cheap , in Gates of Heaven , in The Thin Blue Line , was the tenderness, the genuinely loving attentiveness he lavishes on the often bizarre figures he films. That's what made Mr. Death "a kind of philosophical suspense story to me," I wrote. "Will these techniques work on a Holocaust-denying electric chair expert? Or will it be a film about the limits of humanizing explanation, the limits of the lens of love?"

Finally, I had to end the suspense: A British film crew was coming to New York to interview me for a television documentary they were making to be released in conjunction with Mr. Death and a retrospective of Errol's work at the Museum of Modern Art. And a MoMA curator had called me asking if I'd be the interlocutor in a "Conversation With Errol Morris" after one of the screenings. So I had to see what I felt about how he handled this potentially inflammatory topic.

What a relief it was when I finally saw Mr. Death . It's a film that demonstrates the philosophical sophistication Mr. Morris (a former doctoral student in philosophy) brings to the question. It's a film that does much more than refute the deniers: It unmasks them. I'm not going to speak of it in much detail this far in advance. (It's due to open in late December, though it's being screened at the Toronto Film Festival this month.) But I'm not reviewing it here in movie critic, film buff terms. There's plenty in the film for the esthetes to chew on. I just think it's important for the reception of Mr. Death to call attention to its achievement as investigative journalism. To point out, as someone familiar with the state of the art of Holocaust history and Holocaust denial, that this film advances the story in a way that a merely esthetic assessment of the film might miss.

In this respect, Mr. Death bears more than a casual relationship to The Thin Blue Line , a documentary about a Texas murder case in which Errol didn't merely play the esthete observer, he intervened to solve the murder and free the man wrongly convicted of it from a pending date with the executioner. Both films also are meditations on the questionable of scientific authority-in The Thin Blue Line , it's the testimony of the "forensic psychiatrist" Dr. James Grigson, a.k.a Dr. Death-and on Errol's recurring preoccupation with questions of epistemology: how do we know what we claim to know; how do we know what's inside each other's heads.

So there's certainly more in Mr. Death than a refutation of The Leuchter Report . Still, the refutation-and the precise weight and placement it's given in the film-is a key to its point of view. By slyly placing the refutation after we've watched smug self-satisfied deniers like Ernst Zundel and Mr. Irving cite it for its serious scientific authority, the film performs an act of revision: on the revisionists a kind of retrospective dunce cap is placed upon their heads, making them seem like sad clowns, somehow unaware of the funny hats that make them seem, for all their pretensions to rationality, like circus freaks. Errol doesn't even seem to say it; you just see it.

But there's more to Errol's investigative achievement in the film than this.

There is the remarkable archival detective story in which Errol, in conjunction with the brilliant historian of Auschwitz Robert Jan van Pelt (co-author with Deborah Dwork of Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present ) broke the Auschwitz code of esoteric euphemisms to prove that a rare explicit reference in a document to a "gas chamber" ( Vergasungskeller ) was not the "carburation room," as the Holocaust deniers claim, but in fact the killing chamber they can no longer deny exists. It's too immensely complicated for me to recount this detective story in its entirety here, but after I drew it out of Errol he did finally own up to a kind of satisfaction with his documentary detective work. "I am a creature of documents," he said. He loves nothing better than to find the hidden esoteric truth in the subtext of an archival fragment.

In fact, the more I talked to him, the more remarkable investigative achievements I was able to draw out of him, ones that he seemed reluctant to speak of at first because he didn't want to make it a film that "proved the world round." Including one stunning discovery he didn't even include in the final footage of Mr. Death: he'd found and filmed the hatches to the gas chambers, the hatches through which the SS dropped the cyanide gas, the absence of which had been used by quacks like Mr. Leuchter to deny gassing occurred. He'd found them decaying in an abandoned storage room at the death camp.

The hatches to the gas chamber-and he leaves them out! But I came to feel upon reflection that there was a kind of method to Mr. Morris' modesty. That by dropping the refutation of Mr. Leuchter's entire premise into the middle of the film and not commenting on it, not giving it any special billboarded, trumpeted attention, he is giving exactly the right weight to it. Exactly the right oh-by-the-way-in-case-anyone-is- so -deluded-as-to-take-this-guy's-pretension-to-science-seriously, it's all bogus. Now let's get on to the more interesting question of why anyone would choose to delude himself this way, and is it possible to believe such hateful nonsense in any kind of innocent way, the way Mr. Leuchter portrays himself-as a questing naïf.

I'm inclined to believe the best epitaph for Mr. Leuchter in the film was provided by David Irving, of all people, in an interview in the film in which he says that The Leuchter Report had "converted" him. Mr. Irving describes Mr. Leuchter as someone who exhibits "criminal simplicity." And he means it as a compliment, as a way of evoking Mr. Leuchter's supposed innocent scientific objectivity. Mr. Death could be said to be a portrait of that fascinating borderline realm between sinister innocence and criminal simplicity. It suggests that at a certain point even innocent stupidity becomes criminal, sinister, culpably evil. After Mr. Death , it will be impossible even for the criminally stupid to claim innocence again.

Errol Morris, everyone's favorite tormented documentarian, darling of this year's Sundance Film Festival with his new film Mr. Death , has a dirty secret. He not only works for Truth and Knowledge, but for Wieden & Kennedy, not to mention Chiat-Day, the two firms that handle the advertising for Miller High Life beer and Levi's jeans, respectively. Yes, Mr. Morris, the director of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and The Thin Blue Line , directs TV commercials. He did those Miller High Life spots–stylish takes on the guys-will-be-guys thing and the Levi's ads with young hipsters sittin' around talkin' about their alternative life styles.

Mr. Morris is not about to apologize for what he does on the side. "I like the ads," he said. "I might have edited some of them differently. But I like doing the commercials. I liked the people I was working with. There's this myth that people are doing things selflessly. I like to think I have some integrity as filmmaker, but I don't think it precludes doing advertising. I feel very grateful for it, actually. The pay is good. The budgets are also good, so that you have the ability to have the best imaginary tools."

What commercials does he like? "When I tell people what I like, they always seem appalled. For instance, I like the Old Navy advertising. Yeah, my son goes around the house singing it. Of course, they work."

The song immediately popped into NYTV's head: Old Navy, Old Navy, Old Navy performance fleece!/ Old Navy, Old Navy, Old Navy performance fleece! Yes! With Morgan Fairchild looking hot and the slick happy Euro-dude on the chairlift? All right!

Mr. Morris' Miller ads are very atmospheric, grainy, all-American and sleazy-lookin'. The filmmaker said he believed in the product. "I do not like Miller Lite," he said, "but I love Miller High Life. I've become a Miller High Life Man."

He believes the ads, which were aired during sporting events, should have been broadcast late at night, too. "I think they could have gone much wider with it," he said. "My choice, and, of course, no one asked me, I would have run them on things like S.N.L. and Letterman ."

But isn't that crowd into Heineken and micro beers?

"But that's because they haven't seen my ads yet."

Mr. Morris said he was proud of the scorn he got for those oh-so-hip Levi's ads. "I was surprised by the reaction," he said. "I felt that I had arrived, because I heard these commercials being dissed on NPR. I thought, this is not so bad."

As for the television, when Mr. Morris watches, it's with his 11-year-old son: Comedy Central shows like South Park and Dr. Katz , and of course, The Simpsons .

"You know in The Red and the Black , when Julien Sorel would show the fact that he was a culturally sophisticated person by reciting the Bible in Greek?" Mr. Morris said. "Today, you do that by showing your knowledge of The Simpsons ."

Freshen up your Simpsons knowledge tonight on a memorable episode in which Harvey Fierstein plays Homer's personal assistant. [WNYW, 5, 7 P.M.]

Thursday, Feb. 11

Friends is getting better ratings than Frasier .

Tonight on Frasier : Frasier is confused over whether he's on a romantic date or a business date with an attractive lady, then ends up not having sex; Niles has a disastrous date and ends up not having sex; in the C plot, Daphne laments having no sex life.

On Friends : Monica and Chandler have sex again, which leads to plenty of farcical situations.

Friends is getting better ratings than Frasier . [WNBC, 4, 8 ( Friends ) and 9 ( Frasier ) P.M.]

Friday, Feb. 12

Did Bobby Valentine, manager of the New York Mets, have anything to do with the team's giving announcer Tim McCarver the boot on Feb. 3? Mr. McCarver answered this one carefully. "As far as I know," he told NYTV, "Bobby had no involvement. But I don't know if we'll ever know that."

For his 16 years in the booth, Mr. McCarver made the Mets seem like a legitimate organization, even when the players and executives acted like chumps. He could also explain strategy in such detail that your head would implode. And his entertaining tales of his playing days (stories about Bob Gibson, Bob Uecker and Steve Carlton) and his occasional appreciations of Elvis Presley made uneventful games pass quickly.

Did Mr. McCarver and Mr. Valentine have a problem?

"He showed his discontent with what I said in various ways," Mr. McCarver said. "Our relationship was not cordial, but it wasn't a situation where we tried to avoid one another."

What does this incident mean?

"It's always said that the written word is the one that carries the most invective. But if this is true about Bobby, and Bobby is so annoyed at me about some of the things I said, maybe it's not true. Maybe it's not the written word. Maybe it's the spoken word by somebody who's been in the business before. I'm trying to figure this out psychologically. I don't understand it. But I'm not alone."

Mr. McCarver was replaced with Mets legend Tom Seaver. Another hero of '69, Cleon Jones, is the guest on today's Hot Stove . [Fox Sports, 26, 3 P.M.]

Sorry, men, ladies, TV lovers and fans of governmental investigations: There will be no video of Monica Lewinsky's sassy Senate deposition.

Natalie Olinger, spokesman for MPI Media Group, which put out The Grand Jury Testimony of William Jefferson Clinton , said there is not enough demand. The Clinton video has sold 170,000 copies so far, but MPI Media Group does not believe Monica would come close to that number.

"At the time, there was a lot of interest shown by law students and universities and libraries," Ms. Olinger said. "But since then, the public has become so desensitized that we feel there's no market for a Monica Lewinsky video."

All you scandal lovers, tune in to Hockenberry on perhaps the last night of the scandal, for one last dose. And if it is the last night of Clintonmania, well, remember what happened to Court TV after the O.J. Simpson trial ended? That's what's going to happen to MSNBC. [MSNBC, 43, 10 P.M.]

Saturday, Feb. 13

The President's a sleaze and all heroes are schmoes. So prepare for the destruction of one more institution–the dolphin!–tonight on NBC. On this National Geographic special, Dolphins: The Wild Side , the beloved sea mammals are shown to be vicious predators, skillful killers with hearts of ice. [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]

Sunday, Feb. 14

Snuggle up with your loved one for Striptease , the 1996 comedy starring Demi Moore as the noble G-string girl who must strip … for some reason or other. Look out for Burt Reynolds in Vaseline. [TBS, 8, 6:30 P.M.]

Monday, Feb. 15

The lines between sports, celebrity and commerce get tangled tonight at ESPN's Espy Awards . Comedian Bill Scheft writes the bits that the athletes and entertainers say before presenting the awards. He used to be a sportswriter. In Albany. Covering hockey. So he became a comic.

"I like writing the patter and the introduction," he said. "The Espys are a little better than other awards shows, because they don't want that incessant back and forth. Ideally, they like, if it's two people, the first person says something and you get the joke from the second person and then you introduce the nominee. We try not to do that bullshit thing where you have to connect the presenter with the award that he or she is presenting. Sometimes it works when it sort of makes fun of itself, but if you have Keri Russell (of Felicity ), you're not going to say, you know, 'I play a college freshman who falls in and out of love and in tennis there's love …' You save that for the People's Choice Awards."

Mr. Scheft swore that the winners will actually be caught by surprise this year–unlike in previous years, when they faked it.

"This year," he said, "for the first time, the show's not going to be fixed. In the past, with the Espys, it was like: 'Terrell, we'd really like you to show up because you're up for the pro football player of the year.' 'Well, I'm a little busy.' 'Wait! Did you know you're winning ?' 'All right, I'll be there.' This year, from what I understand, it's really for real." [ESPN, 28, 8 P.M.]

Tuesday, Feb. 16

Sweeps stunt of the week: The stately A&E network brings us a highly important, gripping documentary called New York Street Sex on tonight's edition of Inside Story . Includes: strippers, prostitutes. [A&E, 16, 9 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

I have to confess I'm a sucker for good visual slapstick, a riotous and difficult art which actually reached its peak on the screen in the era of non-talking pictures, circa 1915 to 1928: the glory days of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy, to name only the absolute best. Since sound, there have been terrific isolated moments or scenes in films directed by Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, among others, not to mention the Warner Brothers cartoons of such slapstick comedy geniuses as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. But in more recent years, the most consistently effective practitioner of the form has been Blake Edwards, specifically in his series of Pink Panther movies starring Peter Sellers as the Homerically incompetent and bumbling Inspector Clouseau.

Eventually extending to eight features over 30 years, the first two– The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark –both came out in 1964, the second somewhat better than the first because concentrating more on the Sellers character. Eleven years later came the third and best yet, with the slapstick allowed even fuller expression: 1975's uproariously irreverent joyride, The Return of the Pink Panther [Saturday, Feb. 13, American Movie Channel, 8 P.M. and 2 A.M.; also on videocassette] . This is the one with Christopher Plummer as a retired jewel thief out to prove he didn't steal the famous Pink Panther diamond, Catherine Schell as his wife sent to seduce Clouseau and breaking up in hilarity instead, and introducing the outrageously conceived Cato (Burt Kwouk), Asian valet to Clouseau ("My little yellow friend"), who violently surprise-attacks his boss whenever possible to test Clouseau's defensive skills.

Blake Edwards, who before the first two Panthers had had a couple of huge box-office successes (including the wonderful 1961 Audrey Hepburn romance Breakfast at Tiffany's ) hit a slump with a number of expensive but commercially disappointing films (like his elaborate 1965 slapstick homage The Great Race ), fell into Hollywood disrepute and left for Europe for a while. The Return of the Pink Panther marked not only a return to box-office grace but thereby also a return to power for Edwards who, with a kind of vengeance, made two further Sellers- Panther comedies in a row that were remarkably undiminished in uproariousness: The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976) and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), both huge commercial winners that gave Edwards the clout to make a script he had written nearly a decade before but couldn't get financed called 10 (1979) which also went through the roof.

A brilliant and sophisticated comic constructionist, Edwards (who had grown up in a show-business family, his grandfather a silent film director) has a mischievous, marvelously malicious sense of humor, and was most fortunate in his choice of Henry Mancini as composer for all the Panthers , as well as the aforementioned Friz Freleng, who did the actual Pink Panther cartoon work in the features, plus the superb Herbert Lom as Clouseau's long-suffering boss. Of course, the centerpiece for the Panthers is the utterly inspired satirical buffoonery of Peter Sellers doing the greatest British sendup ever seen of their old adversaries across the Channel. His French accent murdering English and his punctiliousness always out of step, Sellers is perfectly hysterical at every turn. His untimely death in 1980 made the three subsequent Panther attempts misfire. But the panache of The Return is as magnificently funny as ever, the three Panthers of the 70's being among the most enduring delights of that complicated though rarely amusing decade.