Bryan Greenberg.

The second annual brunch fund-raiser benefiting the Olevolos Project, a nonprofit organization that helps orphans and disadvantaged children from the Olevolos Village in Tanzania, is hosted by actor Bryan Greenberg, fellow trendy thespians like Gina Gershon, Jena Malone and Justin Long, and blonde supermodel Julie Henderson. It’s the perfect Saturday wake-up call—the daytime fun includes a deejay, a raffle and a silent auction—all at Lower East Side hipster haven Sons of Essex.

133 Essex Street, (212) 674-7100, 1-4pm, tickets from $150.

Cindy Sherman. (Adriel Reboh/Patrick McMullan)

“Look who it is: it’s Edwina, the Edwina,” Isaac Mizrahi exclaimed to The Observer this past Saturday, as he approached Edwina von Gal, the designer who, Ross Bleckner told us, “did the landscaping at my house in Sagaponack.”

We were at Cindy Sherman’s new East Hampton home at a benefit for the Azuero Earth Project, the Panama-based ecological nonprofit of which Ms. von Gal is president. It was a cozy beginning-of-the-end to the Hamptons summer season. Guests sat on benches under a white tent to eat empanadas and watch performances by Suzanne Vega, Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. Children climbed into pendulous bamboo cocoons, stuffed with pillows, that swayed from the trees.

“I live just up the road,” Ms. Vega, who had been asked at the last minute to replace Rubén Blades, told us. “I originally came as a guest of Laurie’s, and I thought I was going to see Rubén Blades!” Wearing a top hat—a “tip of the hat to Marlene Dietrich”—Ms. Vega performed “Marlene on the Wall” and “Gypsy,” written when she was a “folk-singing and disco-dancing counselor” at a summer camp in the Adirondacks. She had M.C. Bob Balaban serve as an impromptu music stand, holding a handwritten lyric sheet for a new Dylan-inspired number about the tarot’s Queen of Pentacles.

“I probably shouldn’t have kissed her,” Mr. Balaban confided to us afterward. “It’s rude to kiss somebody you’ve just met.” Mr. Balaban told us about his upcoming appearance as Lena Dunham’s psychiatrist on Girls, and recommended we visit Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner’s former home down the road. “It’s just a little hut,” he explained. “They didn’t have any money.” (We read that Ms. Sherman paid $4.65 million for her estate, though we weren’t invited inside.)

Gorgeous in two shades of blue mufti (a baby blue wrap over a navy dress), the chameleonic Ms. Sherman told us that though she had just moved in a month ago, “There’s just a few little things that need to be tweaked, but I’m pretty settled.” Was this party a little housewarming, then? “A big housewarming,” she corrected us. Ms. Sherman also talked about transplanting her career retrospective from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to San Francisco’s MOMA, where it’s currently on view. “The space is different; it was hard to edit out some of the work.”

We watched Gina Gershon and Martha Stewart, both in pre-Labor Day white, run around taking pictures, and stood by as Mr. Mizrahi introduced Mr. Bleckner to his husband, Arnold Germer.

“We’re married, you know,” said Mr. Mizrahi.

“I didn’t know!” Mr. Bleckner replied

“Now we’re moving in together,” Mr. Germer went on.

“That’s exactly what married people do!” Mr. Bleckner pointed out. “Usually it’s the step before, but I guess you’re playing it safe.”

Messrs. Germer and Mizrahi (whose bandana matched that of Bruce Weber, also in attendance) weren’t the only couple at the party to have taken advantage of New York’s new same-sex marriage laws. David Maupin and Stefano Tonchi brought their twin girls, Maura and Isabella.

We asked Mr. Tonchi about changes at The New York Times’s T Magazine, which he left two years ago to edit W, specifically about the recent departure of his successor, Sally Singer. “Oh, please. Old news,” Mr. Tonchi answered summarily.

Mr. Wainwright brought his husband, Jörn Weisbrodt, whom he had married the week prior. He opened his performance with what he called a “really Hamptons-y song about a bored housewife ... which I have become. Love it!” Later, he sang about his own Hamptons domesticity in “Montauk”: “This next song is about my daughter, Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen, and also my incredible new husband, Jörn Weis-” he caught himself and laughed. “Jörn Wainwright. Or Rufus Weisbrodt, however you do it. In fact, his name is Weisbrodt, which means ‘white bread’ in German, and what is it, there’s something about a honeymoon? In Dutch, a honeymoon is called a ‘white bread,’ white bread weeks. You can get fat, basically, now that you’re married.”

Lou Reed, married for four years but with his wife for a decade prior, came off a little less enchanted. “Are you done? Jesus. And we’re related,” Mr. Reed muttered jokingly, as Laurie Anderson plugged in her violin next to him, generating a loud electronic buzz.

“I would cut my legs and tits off/When I think of Boris Karloff,” Mr. Reed sang, in a song from last year’s much-maligned Metallica collaboration Lulu. He next performed a monologue in the voice of his mentor Andy Warhol: “Lou Reed got married and didn’t invite me ... you know I hate Lou, I really do.”

Ms. Anderson performed a monologue of her own, about observing the Amish in Western Pennsylvania—“Gee, I wonder what it’s like to live that way,” she mused—which nearly cleared the tent, though her political criticism drew some laughs. “Ever since hearing Clint Eastwood talk about optimism the other night at the Republican Convention,” Ms. Anderson narrated, her voice electronically shifted several octaves down, accompanied by slow synth chords, “I actually became extremely pessimistic about the future. I mean, look at the odds for a second. You have more chance of getting hit and killed in a car crash than dying in a plane crash.” (Here, she lost us again.)

As the wind off of Accabanac Harbor picked up (“I’m getting the best hairdo of my life thanks to this body of water,” Mr. Wainwright joked), guests began to wrap their shoulders in complimentary green picnic blankets.

Patrizia Pinzon, visiting from Panama, bemoaned the absence of Mr. Blades, the one Panamanian who had been scheduled to perform. “Everybody’s here, but they don’t know what it’s about.”

Hirsch and McConaughey in Killer Joe.

Director William Friedkin has always been attracted to lurid movie material. From the gruesome, overcooked The Exorcist to the vile and unhinged Cruising, he craves plots about deeply conflicted characters who are hopelessly alienated, disconnected from both the society that surrounds them and even their own lives. One craves another well-crafted action nail-biter like his Oscar-winning The French Connection, but at 76, his view of the world just gets darker than ever. Small wonder, then, that he has found his literary soulmate in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, whose twisted, controversial and fascinating work has found its way to the screen through Mr. Friedkin’s jaundiced camera twice—first in the repellant schizophrenic thriller Bug, and now in the toxic trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe. When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as “the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino.” For shock value, cut to Gina Gershon, crawling across a filthy kitchen floor covered in blood to perform fellatio at gunpoint on a Colonel Sanders drumstick, and you have a high-water mark in tastelessness that gives depravity a bad name.

The inbred lowlifes in this B-movie black comedy are members of the Smith family, a clan of troglodytes in a seedy Texas trailer park replete with vicious barking dogs on chains, who swing into ruthless high gear from the very first scene, when penny-ante drug dealer Chris Smith (a game turn by Emile Hirsch, who has grown from the appealing, open-faced kid in The Emperor’s Club into a scabby, hirsute roughneck) arrives in a torrential rainstorm and is greeted at the screen door by his father’s new wife Sharla with a female full-frontal. Following a drug deal that went sour when his own mother stole the cocaine and kicked him out of her house, Chris is broke, desperate and not exactly lit by all four burners on the stove, on the lam from the good ole boys on motorcycles who want money or murder. But Chris has a plan: his mother’s $50,000 life insurance policy. If his mentally challenged, beer-swilling father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), who works as a grease monkey at Bob’s Muffler Shop, and his sluttish stepmom Sharla, a former stripper who works in a pizza parlor, will help, they can knock off Chris’s drunken mom (and Ansel’s ex-wife), pay off the debt, split the profits, and have enough dough left over to improve their lifestyle—maybe get out of the trailer and move up in the world, to a tract house with aluminum siding near a 7-Eleven.

To make sure the job goes off without a hitch, Chris has even hired a contract hitman who never fails—a psychotic cop in a Stetson hat and skin-tight jeans called Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who moonlights as an assassin. The first problem: they can’t pay his $25,000 fee until they collect the life insurance, so Killer Joe agrees to take Chris’s nubile, thumb-sucking, baby doll sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a retainer for his services. Chris and his dad are reluctant to pimp out their nubile Lolita for a killer’s bounty, but their survival instincts outweigh all feelings of morality and guilt. Besides, her daddy says, “It might just do her some good.” Second problem: What they don’t know is that Dottie’s mom (who is talked about but never seen) has made her the secret recipient of the insurance policy, and Dottie has her own ideas about what to do with the money. Nor does she completely mind the idea of losing her virginity to the swaggering, seductive and studly Joe and keeping the money herself. As the plot turns brutal, the psychopaths turn greedy—especially Ansel’s wife and partner-in-crime, Sharla (Ms. Gershon, shedding more than just her underwear and baring all)—lying, ruthlessly cheating each other and facing the ultimate consequences, in a curdled, rampaging splatterfest finale that sprays blood all over the walls and leaves almost the entire cast on the floor with their guts hanging out. Because the characters are all equally loathsome and stupid, you are never sure if the hilarity is intentional, but I guarantee you the antics of this dysfunctional chicken-fried family will make you gasp and laugh at the same time. Oddly enough, it’s the juxtaposition of comedy and horror that keeps Tracy Letts’ screenplay balanced between entertainment and nausea and highlights the highs and lows of Mr. Friedkin’s fast-paced, pulp fiction, film-noir direction. They can both thank the fearless cast for their passionate willingness to do anything—and everything—for maximum effect. Kicked and beaten by a man’s fists to human hamburger, Ms. Gershon is both amusing and appalling as she pushes the degradation of women beyond the boundaries of political correctness. Even Mr. McConaughey, a terrible actor with no craft or range who whistles through his teeth like a tea kettle until you climb the wall, seems more natural than usual, staggering around in his birthday suit, with his whining Texas accent used to good advantage. He even manages to give Killer Joe a mix of kink and tenderness, finding unexpected down-home joy in something as simple as a home-cooked tuna casserole. Ms. Temple’s thumb-sucking Dottie has erotic moments, but nothing Carroll Baker in a nightie didn’t think of first in Baby Doll. Mr. Friedkin imparts an ugly Texas landscape of convenience stores, pizza joints, auto repair shops and cheap motels to show the downfall of decaying blue-collar America with harrowing effect.

In the final analysis, the atmosphere overwhelms the logic. There is no subtext to the carnage; we hold out no hope that these clueless wretches will learn or grow or stretch beyond the depth of a mug of Lone Star draft. The narrative ideas come from better movies as varied as Double Indemnity, Tobacco Road and Fargo. I confess I found the uncompromising trashiness perversely riveting, until the ending, which pours on the gore like barbecue sauce. It sends you home reeling, but wondering what the point of it was, and why so many worthwhile people bothered to do it in the first place.

rreed@observer.com

KILLER JOES

Running Time 103 minutes

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by William Friedkin

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple

2/4

This is all to say that Huey Calhoun—the blues-loving DJ with a fast-paced, high-pitched drawl who’s at the center of Broadway’s Memphis, which opened at the Schubert Theatre Monday night—is apparently based at least a bit in historical truth. But onstage, unlike in court, truth is not a defense. That’s a problem, because the indictments against this misbegotten musical are many. And Huey Calhoun, played by Chad Kimball, is chief among them.

First, though, the script. It’s a formulaic premise for a baldy commercial show (the music is by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, with lyrics by Bryan and Joe DiPietro, who also wrote the book), a saccharine civil-rights story of love and sex and race and music. A ne’er-do-well white redneck—that would be Calhoun—is a fan of black music in 1950s Memphis. He falls in love with Felicia, a beautiful black R&B singer, becomes a successful DJ, introduces black music to white people, makes Felicia a star and, thanks to his own hubris and intransigence, ends up sad, lonely and relegated to a third-tier radio station. Which is, somehow, played as a happy ending.

That nonsense ending is but one of the script’s problems. Why does Huey’s mother, who can’t stomach the notion that her boy is dating a “colored girl,” suddenly go to a black church to see the error of her ways? (“My boy is stupid/ He’s been shot by cupid/ So we gotta change our intolerant ways,” she sings, managing not to grimace at the lyrics.) When Felicia leaves Huey—she has an offer in New York and the promise of a non–Jim Crow life there—why does Calhoun sing a love song not to her but to Memphis, which has just pushed them apart?

Calhoun drives the show, and he is nearly unwatchable. The character is smarmy, lazy, entitled, controlling and, in the second act, just mean. (He’s also ridiculously dressed, in costumes by Paul Tazewell—whose eye-catching designs were one of the few high points of the recent Guys and Dolls.) As portrayed by Mr. Kimball, he’s also whiney, oddly unable to stand up straight—his knees are always bent a bit—and has an inexplicable tendency to play his scenes with his back turned downstage, looking at the audience over a shoulder. You don’t want to spend two hours in the same room with the guy, let alone root for him.

The rest of the cast, however, does its best to help. Montego Glover, as Felicia, the black singer Huey loves, makes the forgettable songs she’s given soar, and J. Bernard Calloway, as her protective brother, gives his character a convincing mix of pride, anger and compassion. The standout is James Monroe Inglehart as Bobby, a heavyset, reserved janitor who discovers he can sing and dance. (Oh, can he dance!) Serjio Trujillo’s choreography is the best part of the show—athletic, propulsive rock ’n’ roll moves for both the white kids and the black kids. But none of it is enough.

There is such a thing as a high-energy, in-your-face, commercial, cynical show that works—a good bad musical. (Legally Blonde comes to mind.) But Memphis isn’t one of them. It’s set on Beale Street, but it’s got no soul.

FOR SOME, the rock ’n’ roll revolution was about race. For others, it was about generation. Bye Bye Birdie, which inaugurated the Roundabout Theatre Company’s brand-new Henry Miller’s Theatre last week in the musical’s first Broadway revival since its original 1960-1961 run, is about the rock ’n’ roll generation gap—and, oddly enough, it comes down on the side of the parents.

I mean that in two ways. First, the musical is the rare pop-culture piece that celebrates the parents’ viewpoint: that something’s the matter with kids these days, that teen idols are loutish frauds and that happiness is to be found teaching English in Iowa. But, also, this production is your parents’ production—it’s a calm, sedate, respectful reconstruction of the original production that more often than not leaves the 2009 audience flat. (Including, I should say in their defense, my parents, who were kids back in the Birdie era.)

That’s too bad, because while one is reluctant to put Birdie in the same category as Casablanca or, more ridiculously, Hamlet, it shares with those two classics a permeation throughout popular culture. It’s filled with moments when you say, “Oh, right, this is where that comes from”: “We Love You, Conrad,” “Put On a Happy Face,” “Kids,” “The Telephone Hour.” Charles Strouse and Lee Adams’ music and lyrics are delightful, nostalgic and insinuating. (Michael Stewart wrote the sappy but effective book.) Your toes tap and your head bobs for two hours.

Or, at least, your toes tap and your head bobs though the big production numbers, which are fantastic. Robert Longbottom, the director and choreographer, keeps his many dancers moving sexy, witty, ’50s-style steps. (Although it can be disconcerting to admire some well-executed teenage hip swiveling and then realize the hip-swiveler doesn’t yet shave.) The mod Mad Men set by Andrew Jackness is sleek and clever—especially the rotating booths in “The Telephone Hour”—and the color-coordinated pastel costumes by Gregg Barnes add to the vibrancy and visual pleasure.

But the book scenes—and even the more intimate songs—are duds, sapped of energy, conviction or, in many cases, the dialogue’s humor. “It’ll make Birdie the hottest soldier since Joan of Arc,” to pick one example, got not a titter on the night I attended.

(A quick recap of the plot, for those who’ve somehow missed it: Albert Peterson, an erstwhile aspiring English teacher, is a songwriter and manager with an overbearing mother, a secretary-slash-girlfriend and one big client, Conrad Birdie, an Elvis-inspired teen idol about to be inducted into the Army. In an inspired PR gimmick, they pick a member of Birdie’s fan club—Kim McAfee, of Sweet Apple, Ohio, who has a nutty father flummoxed by teenagers—to be the recipient of one final kiss from Birdie, bestowed on The Ed Sullivan Show. Hijinks ensue.)

John Stamos does his best Dick Van Dyke impression as Albert Peterson, and Gina Gershon, who lacks the skills to impersonate Chita Rivera, is at least eager and game as the secretary Rosie. (Game enough to strip down to lacy black underwear for no particular reason near the start of the second act.) The kids are more than all right, especially Allie Trimm as Kim McAfee.

Jane Houdyshell is, as always, funny and charismatic as Albert’s mother (though it’s tough to understand why the all-American Mae Peterson, horrified that her son might marry Spanish Rose, is played as a Yiddische Mama). Bill Irwin is hilarious, employing his clowning shtick liberally and making Harry McAfee sound like Paul Lynde, who originated the role, as channeled by Martin Short, arms waving, legs caving, voice flying high and low. He’s also in a different show, performing a vaudeville that seems to have wandered in from another theater, or a different decade.

That sloppiness in Mr. Longbottom’s direction is evident throughout the show. (When Sweet Apple goes weak at the knees for Birdie’s first performance there, should it really be the one black teenager who gets the line about being reduced to “a snarling, raging, panting jungle beast?”)

Birdie is a silly, light-as-air construction, but his version rarely takes flight.

I’VE NEVER TAKEN an acting class, and after seeing Annie Baker’s terrific new Circle Mirror Transformation, which opened early last week at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, I can’t decide if I’m desperate to enroll in one or terrified of what might happen there.

This small, meticulously constructed and very funny drama transpires through six weekly community-center acting classes in the small (and fictional) town of Shirley, Vermont. Four students and one New Agey instructor engage in a series of acting exercises, trying to count to 10 aloud and undirected without speaking over each other; reciting each other’s life stories; completing each other’s sentences; impersonating beds, trees and baseball mitts; and, in one wrenching scene, writing down secrets, shuffling the slips of paper, and then each reading a secret from a slip of paper.

What starts as surreal and lightly funny becomes first comprehensible and then serious and then heartbreaking. Nothing happens—it’s just a bunch of community-center classes—and yet huge things happen: The characters bare their psyches, break down, rebuild themselves.

The five skilled actors give tightly controlled but accessible performances, allowing you to see them as they realize they’re exposing themselves. Tracee Chimo as the 16-year-old Lauren is extraordinary, channeling the smart, awkward teenager’s discomfort and resentment with tiny bits of body language and facial movement, occasionally loosening up and allowing the sullen shield to fall. (The others are Dierde O’Connell as Marty, the instructor; Peter Friedman, as her husband, James; Reed Birney as Schultz, recently divorced and installed to the local condo complex; and Heidi Schreck as Theresa, an actress in her 30s who has moved to Vermont after leaving a bad relationship in New York.)

The direction, by Sam Gold, is nimble: The actors move gracefully through the sometimes-sprawling exercises; the tension builds expertly and then finally releases. There’s no action here, but there’s a huge emotional punch.

editorial@observer.com

“Fisher’s like a good-time guy,” said Gina Gershon, who’s been to more Fisher Stevens get-togethers than she cares to count. “He’s like the catalyst for a lot of stuff that happens.” 

Mr. Stevens, now 45, no longer eats meat after a pilot he did for a show called The Green Team, filmed on location at a slaughterhouse. He’s cutting back on fish too, after co-producing The Cove, a new documentary about the dolphin slaughter in Japan, and the reason for tonight’s celebration. He wasn’t drinking, either. He’d just returned from a week at Sting and Trudie Styler’s villa in Tuscany, where they host an annual, very intimate documentary film festival each year.

“It’s this incredible week,” Mr. Stevens explained to his friends, as they contemplated the wine and organic saki-based cocktail lists. “But every night was like, ‘Let’s go have a drink, let’s go drink wine!’ They make their own wine, and it’s insane!”

He’d made some new friends at Sting and Trudie’s, like Bobby Sager, a wealthy businessman–turned–full-time do-gooder upon whom the NBC show The Philanthropist is loosely based, as well as an amazing guy called Pablo who doesn’t speak any English and was involved in a doc about his fight with the oil companies responsible for a spill in the Amazon. Bobby and Pablo probably do not yet realize what that new friendship will entail—they’ve been entered into the human networking service that is Fisher Steven’s brain. 

“I’m so proud of Fish,” Ms. Gershon purred. 

I asked her if they had ever dated. 

“Our story is way too complex,” she said. “We met at Naked Angels, we didn’t like each other much at the beginning. And then one time we were having martinis and it just flipped and we were in love with each other.”

“Fisher and I were engaged for about a day,” offered playwright Nicole Burdette, also a founding member of Naked Angels, a downtown theater group that is still active. Ms. Burdette had come up with the name.

“I was the guy who got everyone together,” Mr. Stevens asserted. There remains some debate as to who exactly the original crew was, but aside from the ladies at the table, the other thespians Mr. Stevens brought together were Rob Morrow, Marisa Tomei, Ron Rifkin, Pippin, Tim and Sarah Jessica Parker, among others. 

The Cove is the first film that Mr. Stevens has been involved in since stepping down from his role at Greene Street, the production company he co-founded with producer John Penotti in 1996. There, too, his skills as connector were key. His good buddy Matt Dillon introduced him to the billionaire financier Louis Bacon, with whom Mr. Stevens started hanging, and who later invested $30 million in Greene Street. But life as a studio executive had lost its appeal for Mr. Stevens. More and more, money was getting in the way of his creative instincts. 

Just the other day, he told me, while filming a scene with Forrest Whitaker and Adrien Brody in Das Experiment, he thought to himself: “God, this would have been a great one for Greene Street, if only I had known then what I know now.” 

“The independent film business has changed,” he explained. “I mean we were the first company to take hedge fund money to make money, and then there was this big influx and now it’s like over again. And all those independent film companies are gone; you know, Warner Independent and Picture House, and you know all those small companies that used to buy our movies, and now they’re just giving them away. 

“You know Harvey’s kind of out of the game now, and once Harvey went out, it really hurt,” he said, of fallen mogul Harvey Weinstein. “’Cause he was really driving this whole industry.” But that’s no longer Mr. Stevens’s business. These days he’s all about documentaries, where there is no money to be made. Period.

“So I’m doing a new one in Africa,” Mr. Stevens said of his new project, which involves a polluted lake, or some such. “Dylan, did I tell you I’m going to Africa a lot now?” 

Sitting down at the far end of the table, Dylan Tichenor, who edits all of Wes Anderson’s movies, did not appear to be interested. “Tell us about that story I heard once, when you were in a white suit and you went wondering around Seventh Avenue. …”

Long story short: He was 20, in a white suit, accidentally took mescaline, ended up talking to a homeless guy, who convinced him that money didn’t matter in life, and then, after Fisher had passed out, robbed him blind.

Mr. Stevens got involved with The Cove through his friendship with another billionaire, tech guru Jim Clark. It was a connection Mr. Stevens came close to missing.

A girl he’d been dating named Jo said to come meet this guy who’s got a boat. 

“I thought, ‘I don’t need to meet this rich guy and a boat,’” he recalled. “And she says, ‘Do me a favor and get this book called The New New Thing and tell me you don’t want to come.’ So I get the book by Michael Lewis and I say, ‘I’m coming.’ The book is about Jim and I think, ‘This guy is a maverick.’ The other truth is, I had a friend of mine was going as well, so we went together. The boat was in Antigua. So Jim goes, he’s leaving and I said, ‘You can’t go man,’ and he asks if I drink and I say yeah, and I don’t know much about wine but he opens this Volnay ’61, which we drank in like five minutes. And he goes, ‘Nobody here drinks, I was going crazy,’ and then he didn’t go and we ended up having the best week, and that’s how we connected, and we stayed friends.”

Funnily enough, the next time he saw Mr. Clark was in Papua on his boat, but it was a new boat. Turns out he’d sold the Hyperion to some British guy named Louis Bacon.

“I was like, ‘Louis is American! He’s my old partner,’” he said. On that trip, Mr. Stevens had brought along a copy of Crazy Love, another doc that he co-directed. Mr. Clark was impressed and not long after asked Mr. Stevens to help him with The Cove. 

“He has a lot of interesting friends,” said Griffin Dunne over the phone. He was out in L.A. working on a script and staying in Mr. Stevens’s apartment. “You’ll probably hear from everyone that no one tends to pack as much life in as Fish; he’s been grabbing it with both hands lately.”

Mr. Dunne gave Mr. Stevens his first acting job, a bit part in Baby it’s You. Mr. Stevens, he says, has returned the favor in spades. 

“He is certainly a well-connected and well-loved person by a lot of people, many of which don’t know each other—and if they do know each other it’s only through Fisher—who are all doing interesting things in their lives,” he said, adding that Mr. Stevens, Liev Schrieber and a set designer named Happy Massee have an ongoing tennis scene. “I think that is the best image I have of Fisher, his general enthusiasm that he has about life, the way he embraces life. He had a particularly nasty skin cancerous mole removed from his neck a couple of years ago, and they patched him up with tape, and it was pretty gruesome-looking, and it was one of those ‘keep it dry’ and ‘don’t move too much’ bandages, but it was a really hot day and he saw a pool and just went, ‘Oh my God, look at that pool, I gotta go in!’ And he just runs from about 20 yards away and dives into the pool with the bandages. And he hits the water and goes, ‘Ow! Ow! The water is so great, ow!’ It was like he had a choice, either go with the doctor’s orders or dive into the blue water; he’ll go for the blue water.”

Mr. Dunne said that it is Mr. Stevens’s joie de vivre that accounts for his remarkable success with women. Mr. Stevens, who’s probably best known for playing a quirky scientist in Short Circuit, dated Michelle Pfieffer.

“What will start off as just a one-on-one dinner on their first date will move on to these fantastic experiences,” Mr. Dunne explained. Like what? Skinny-dipping in the East River? 

“Well … yeah … usually they end up nude, in one environment or another!” Mr. Dunne said with a laugh. He said the diversity of the women Mr. Stevens has dated is also a reflection of his curious nature: doctors, editors, actresses, different races, heights, ethnicities. 

A few years back the Naked Angels held a fund-raiser. Mr. Stevens volunteered to be the subject of a roast. 

Mr. Dunne again: “Everyone got up and roasted the shit out of Fish. A lot to do with women and fucking … and it sort of transcends his physical appearance, which is not what one would associate a guy who looks like Fish being with such beautiful women, and how the fuck does he do it?? It was a noble expression of his to put himself in that position to raise money for this group. It was also pretty taxing on his identity, I think.”

“He’s been spending an awful lot of time at yoga studios—which I would normally say, ‘He’s trolling for victims’—but I guess not. I think he recently got into a serious relationship,” said another friend, Matt Dillon, on the phone. 

Mr. Stevens, currently dating a model and yoga instructor, said he’s looking to settle down. “There comes a time when you gotta grow up,” he said, when I pressed him on the issue at dinner. 

But that doesn’t mean no more dinner parties. 

“I go out a lot,” he explained. “My mother worked at night. Since I’m 13, I been eating out. I had an account at a Chinese restaurant—Jen’s Kitchen—across the street, when we lived on 13th street.”

He said that during the time he’s lived with women, he has eaten at home in Dumbo.

So you’ve lived with women before? 

“Yes,” he said. “And I’d like to again.”

“I like to cook, Fish,” Ms. Gershon said.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Weinstein, originally a Hillary Clinton supporter, looked on giddily with wife, designer Georgina Chapman (clad in a glittery cocktail dress), as Barack Obama took the presidency. But Ms. Mosbacher, a well known Republican fundraiser, who served as the co-chairman of John McCain's 2000 campaign and is the co-chair of the Republican National Committee's Finance Committee, was not so thrilled.

“I am so upset, you have no idea,” she told the Daily Transom last night. “But I will not show it. I will not give my other friends the satisfaction of seeing me melt down!”

The election results may not have been going the way Ms. Mosbacher would like them to, but the party seemed to be a success as celebrities like James Franco, Taylor Momsen, Gina Gershon and Jessica Alba arrived at the party to push their way past the crowds and say hello to "Harvey." (At one point, there literally seemed to be a line of famous faces waiting in line as if to see the Pope.) 

See the slideshow for photos from the party and our personal favorite: The one where Ms. Alba chats up former Governor George Pataki. 

Predictably, she used the opportunity to once again share some thoughts about Vanity Fair's recent article that made allegations about the actress and Bill Clinton.

Ms. Gershon told the hosts,

Since the article's publication, Ms. Gershon and her lawyers sought a retraction from Vanity Fair. The magazine has refused.

The Huffington Post has the video.

Ethan Hawke and pregnant fiancée Ryan Shawhughes, who used to be the nanny of his two children with Uma Thurman, were seen applying for their marriage license and are getting ready to wed. [P6]

Thom Browne, despite being swooned over by the fashion world at the CFDAs this year, is reportedly having trouble pitching his short-legged suits to consumers. [P6]

Ellen Barkin likes it when bike messengers tell her she looks hot. [P6]

The City is reluctant to approve Robert DeNiro's penthouse atop his new Tribeca hotel because he failed to ask for adequate permission before building it. [Rush & Malloy]

Tatum O'Neal went off to an AA meeting after getting released from jail. [NY Daily News]

No one wants to buy Bill Cosby's sweaters on eBay. [The Cut]

Variety reports:

One more flight attendant remains to be cast in the play, about an architect who juggles romantic relationships with three stewardesses on different travel schedules.

Helmed by Matthew Warchus, "Boeing-Boeing" was a 2007 hit on the West End, where it played for about a year and closed in January.

In the Gotham incarnation, Bradley Whitford plays the architect with Christine Baranski as his housekeeper. Brit thesp Mark Rylance, playing a visiting friend of the architect, reprises the role he played in London.

<

]]> Gina Gershon, who sat down with the Observer's Spencer Morgan for some chicken soup last October, is prepared for a landing on Broadway with Mary McCormack, who played Kate Harper on The West Wing. They'll play flight attendants in the upcoming revival of <'s 1960s farce Boeing-Boeing, set to open May 4 at the Longacre Theater. Ms. Gershon freely acknowledged to Mr. Morgan she’s been frustrated in her acting career. "Despite recent TV roles as the libidinous Orthodox dry cleaner on Curb Your Enthusiasm ('The most fun acting job I’ve done in my entire life.') and Rescue Me (her friend Dennis Leary wrote her into the script), the kind of parts she would like don’t come around often. 'I like very complicated complex characters,' she said. 'A lot of the movies that I tend to love, people don’t want to make those kinds of movies these days.'" Will Boeing-Boeing be her big acting breakthrough?

Variety reports:

One more flight attendant remains to be cast in the play, about an architect who juggles romantic relationships with three stewardesses on different travel schedules.

Helmed by Matthew Warchus, "Boeing-Boeing" was a 2007 hit on the West End, where it played for about a year and closed in January.

In the Gotham incarnation, Bradley Whitford plays the architect with Christine Baranski as his housekeeper. Brit thesp Mark Rylance, playing a visiting friend of the architect, reprises the role he played in London.

<

]]> http://observer.com/2008/03/gina-gershon-to-play-stewardess-on-broadway/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver http://observer.com/2007/10/chicken-soup-with-gina-gershon/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:23:08 -0400 http://observer.com/2007/10/chicken-soup-with-gina-gershon/ Spencer Morgan http://www.observer.com/2007/10/chicken-soup-with-gina-gershon/ On Sunday, Oct. 7, Gina Gershon premiered her new act—a one-woman musical about her search for her cat, and so much more. Two days before the big night, the 45-year-old actress joined me for a bowl of chicken soup at Bubby’s.

She arrived at the Tribeca eatery from a rehearsal in classic rocker style—lugging an enormous guitar case, wearing blue jeans, boots and a white V-neck. Her hair was girlishly barretted off to one side. Her arms were muscular and lithe. The venue of her show, “In Search of Cleo,” is The Box. (Where else can a sex icon actress-turned-musician perform these days?!) It was on her mind.

“It’s not that I’m a perfectionist,” she said, pursing those Hollywood lips. “It’s just hard when things are technically challenging; you can’t keep creating on top of it, you have to keep fixing the problems, instead of moving forward and kind of taking it to a new level. It’s just like troubleshooting. Right now we’re in troubleshooting mode.”

Setting up the sound system was becoming a real drag, she said.

Ms. Gershon toured with a band while promoting her 2003 film Prey for Rock & Roll, but she says this is her first real show. This time it’s all her music.

“I’ve always been interested in music,” said Ms. Gershon, who grew up in the Los Angeles valley. “I’ve always had music around me, most of my family’s in the music business or they’re musicians. I was always being dragged to concerts or going to my uncle’s rehearsals; he had a big orchestra.”

In addition to the uncle, Jack Elliot, other musical family members include her brother-in-law, who plays with Emmylou Harris. One cousin is a musician, another cousin’s a manager and her sister does A&R for country music.

Ms. Gershon’s first gigs involved song and dance: “I was like the dancing legs in Beatlemania, that was my first paying job. It was a long time ago, we were younger, we were the dancing legs, because I was a dancer in high school, so I danced in that. And I just always did musicals, and for a while I just put it aside to play guitar and play jew’s-harp.”

For those unfamiliar, the jew’s-harp is basically a weird little device with wires sticking out; you place it in your mouth and then flick the wires to produce various “boing” sounds. Ms. Gershon is one of a small number of people who can play it. As such, she’s jammed with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Paul Simon, Rufus Wainwright, the Scissor Sisters. “I’m the hired gun,” she told me. “So I’m trying to put it in the foreground. Give it the respect it deserves.”

It is indeed not unpleasant to imagine Ms. Gershon making boing sounds with her mouth.

Despite being titled In Search of Cleo, both the show and the album have little to do with her cat, Cleo, which she lost and then spent the next two months searching for.

“It’s really about loss and about bad relationships and about trying to find the right thing,” she said.

 

MS. GERSHON WAS GOING THROUGH a lot a year and a half ago when she was driven to write this music. Among other things, Uncle Jack had passed away and she’d broken up with a boyfriend of seven years. Then her beloved black cat went missing.

The actress acknowledged that her particular career track allowed for such a detour.

“I’m not a really good planner,” she said. “I’ve been told I should plan more.”

And Ms. Gershon freely acknowledged she’s been frustrated in her acting career.

Despite recent TV roles as the libidinous Orthodox dry cleaner on Curb Your Enthusiasm (“The most fun acting job I’ve done in my entire life.”) and Rescue Me (her friend Dennis Leary wrote her into the script), the kind of parts she would like don’t come around often.

“I like very complicated complex characters,” she said. “A lot of the movies that I tend to love, people don’t want to make those kinds of movies these days.”

She allows that the roles that made her infamous in the mid-1990’s—the butch lesbian in the Wachowski brothers’ Bound, a stripper in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls—might have something to do with where she is now.

“When I did Bound, all of my representatives said that I shouldn’t do this, because I would ruin my career,” she said between delicate sips of soup. “I was playing a lesbian, and it wasn’t quite acceptable yet to do that. And it did alter the course of my career in some way, but I thought the movie was amazing, and it kind of took me down an interesting path. Did it take me down a commercial path? I mean my tastes have never really been that commercial.”

Ms. Gershon said she thinks she’s yet to have her big break as an actress. But in the meantime she’s discovered a passion for the written word. She’s co-authored a children’s book called Camp Creepy Time with her brother. It’s on shelves now and was picked up by DreamWorks.

“I don’t want to call it a children’s book,” she said, “because I hate the label, because I think it hurts the book. It’s like saying Shrek is only for young adults. Well, no, everyone wants to go see it.”

These days whenever Ms. Gershon passes a bookstore in the city, she ducks in to see where her book is. If it’s hidden in the back or in the kid’s section, she’ll move it to a more visible place.

Ms. Gershon moved to New York in college and never left; she currently has an apartment in Tribeca.

“I think L.A. has been a little more intrusive; you have the weirdos when you’re hiking coming out and taking photos,” she said. “Or you come out to get your paper in the morning and all of a sudden you have a picture of it somewhere. I think that’s really creepy. I don’t find that in New York.”

New York was the obvious choice for where to unveil In Search of Cleo. The album cover features Ms. Gershon looking pale and unusual, with blood dripping from one eye.

Somehow I got around to asking Ms. Gershon if she’s a sexual person.

“I’m sure to some people, I’m really sexy,” she said. “I’m sure my boyfriend thinks I’m really sexy. To my nephew I’m not.”

“I have no idea what people think of me,” she continued. “I don’t really like to describe myself—I find it confusing, it’s an existential thing. You know, you have to really step outside yourself and you’re looking back, you are who you are, and as soon as I start saying, ‘Well this is who I am,’ I’m not really that anymore. Isn’t that like existentialism 101? I remember something like that.”

At the show, it was clear that Ms. Gershon is different things to different people.

“I’ve been following her career since Bound,” said Monica Barbaro of Long Island, who was seated on a couch with two lady friends. “There’s just something about her—she’s got that sex, bad-girl thing.”

The show began with a little diddy called “Lucky Lips.” Ms. Gershon strummed a ukulele in a white gown with a white fur collar. Other numbers included “Pretty Girls on Prozac” and “Peryle,” which climaxed with the line, “I’ll love you till the end, now suck my little friend.”

“Woo, go Gina! I hear you girl, I totally hear you!” screamed a tall blonde.

And she was pretty damn good on the jew’s-harp.

]]> On Sunday, Oct. 7, Gina Gershon premiered her new act—a one-woman musical about her search for her cat, and so much more. Two days before the big night, the 45-year-old actress joined me for a bowl of chicken soup at Bubby’s.

She arrived at the Tribeca eatery from a rehearsal in classic rocker style—lugging an enormous guitar case, wearing blue jeans, boots and a white V-neck. Her hair was girlishly barretted off to one side. Her arms were muscular and lithe. The venue of her show, “In Search of Cleo,” is The Box. (Where else can a sex icon actress-turned-musician perform these days?!) It was on her mind.

“It’s not that I’m a perfectionist,” she said, pursing those Hollywood lips. “It’s just hard when things are technically challenging; you can’t keep creating on top of it, you have to keep fixing the problems, instead of moving forward and kind of taking it to a new level. It’s just like troubleshooting. Right now we’re in troubleshooting mode.”

Setting up the sound system was becoming a real drag, she said.

Ms. Gershon toured with a band while promoting her 2003 film Prey for Rock & Roll, but she says this is her first real show. This time it’s all her music.

“I’ve always been interested in music,” said Ms. Gershon, who grew up in the Los Angeles valley. “I’ve always had music around me, most of my family’s in the music business or they’re musicians. I was always being dragged to concerts or going to my uncle’s rehearsals; he had a big orchestra.”

In addition to the uncle, Jack Elliot, other musical family members include her brother-in-law, who plays with Emmylou Harris. One cousin is a musician, another cousin’s a manager and her sister does A&R for country music.

Ms. Gershon’s first gigs involved song and dance: “I was like the dancing legs in Beatlemania, that was my first paying job. It was a long time ago, we were younger, we were the dancing legs, because I was a dancer in high school, so I danced in that. And I just always did musicals, and for a while I just put it aside to play guitar and play jew’s-harp.”

For those unfamiliar, the jew’s-harp is basically a weird little device with wires sticking out; you place it in your mouth and then flick the wires to produce various “boing” sounds. Ms. Gershon is one of a small number of people who can play it. As such, she’s jammed with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Paul Simon, Rufus Wainwright, the Scissor Sisters. “I’m the hired gun,” she told me. “So I’m trying to put it in the foreground. Give it the respect it deserves.”

It is indeed not unpleasant to imagine Ms. Gershon making boing sounds with her mouth.

Despite being titled In Search of Cleo, both the show and the album have little to do with her cat, Cleo, which she lost and then spent the next two months searching for.

“It’s really about loss and about bad relationships and about trying to find the right thing,” she said.

 

MS. GERSHON WAS GOING THROUGH a lot a year and a half ago when she was driven to write this music. Among other things, Uncle Jack had passed away and she’d broken up with a boyfriend of seven years. Then her beloved black cat went missing.

The actress acknowledged that her particular career track allowed for such a detour.

“I’m not a really good planner,” she said. “I’ve been told I should plan more.”

And Ms. Gershon freely acknowledged she’s been frustrated in her acting career.

Despite recent TV roles as the libidinous Orthodox dry cleaner on Curb Your Enthusiasm (“The most fun acting job I’ve done in my entire life.”) and Rescue Me (her friend Dennis Leary wrote her into the script), the kind of parts she would like don’t come around often.

“I like very complicated complex characters,” she said. “A lot of the movies that I tend to love, people don’t want to make those kinds of movies these days.”

She allows that the roles that made her infamous in the mid-1990’s—the butch lesbian in the Wachowski brothers’ Bound, a stripper in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls—might have something to do with where she is now.

“When I did Bound, all of my representatives said that I shouldn’t do this, because I would ruin my career,” she said between delicate sips of soup. “I was playing a lesbian, and it wasn’t quite acceptable yet to do that. And it did alter the course of my career in some way, but I thought the movie was amazing, and it kind of took me down an interesting path. Did it take me down a commercial path? I mean my tastes have never really been that commercial.”

Ms. Gershon said she thinks she’s yet to have her big break as an actress. But in the meantime she’s discovered a passion for the written word. She’s co-authored a children’s book called Camp Creepy Time with her brother. It’s on shelves now and was picked up by DreamWorks.

“I don’t want to call it a children’s book,” she said, “because I hate the label, because I think it hurts the book. It’s like saying Shrek is only for young adults. Well, no, everyone wants to go see it.”

These days whenever Ms. Gershon passes a bookstore in the city, she ducks in to see where her book is. If it’s hidden in the back or in the kid’s section, she’ll move it to a more visible place.

Ms. Gershon moved to New York in college and never left; she currently has an apartment in Tribeca.

“I think L.A. has been a little more intrusive; you have the weirdos when you’re hiking coming out and taking photos,” she said. “Or you come out to get your paper in the morning and all of a sudden you have a picture of it somewhere. I think that’s really creepy. I don’t find that in New York.”

New York was the obvious choice for where to unveil In Search of Cleo. The album cover features Ms. Gershon looking pale and unusual, with blood dripping from one eye.

Somehow I got around to asking Ms. Gershon if she’s a sexual person.

“I’m sure to some people, I’m really sexy,” she said. “I’m sure my boyfriend thinks I’m really sexy. To my nephew I’m not.”

“I have no idea what people think of me,” she continued. “I don’t really like to describe myself—I find it confusing, it’s an existential thing. You know, you have to really step outside yourself and you’re looking back, you are who you are, and as soon as I start saying, ‘Well this is who I am,’ I’m not really that anymore. Isn’t that like existentialism 101? I remember something like that.”

At the show, it was clear that Ms. Gershon is different things to different people.

“I’ve been following her career since Bound,” said Monica Barbaro of Long Island, who was seated on a couch with two lady friends. “There’s just something about her—she’s got that sex, bad-girl thing.”

The show began with a little diddy called “Lucky Lips.” Ms. Gershon strummed a ukulele in a white gown with a white fur collar. Other numbers included “Pretty Girls on Prozac” and “Peryle,” which climaxed with the line, “I’ll love you till the end, now suck my little friend.”

“Woo, go Gina! I hear you girl, I totally hear you!” screamed a tall blonde.

And she was pretty damn good on the jew’s-harp.

]]> http://observer.com/2007/10/chicken-soup-with-gina-gershon/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver