Didion.

Joan Didion's new memoir, Blue Nights, about her relationship with her daughter, was released yesterday. The Daily Beast has posted an excerpt from a film made by Ms. Didion's nephew, Griffin Dunne, with the author reading the first passages of the book interspersed with family photos and Final Cut Pro video effects. It's very nice.

Then, only yesterday, city records revealed that the apartment has sold to a German couple, George and Saskia Glatzel for $1.2 million (the last listing price was $1.25 million). Mr. Glatzel is the CEO of the German commercial real estate company IFM Immobilien Group, with headquarters in Heidelberg, suggesting the über-terraced one-bedroom may function as a pied-à-terre for the couple.

The apartment may not have the lebensraum that Manhattan luxury real estate is accustomed to--the petite midtown penthouse is a one-bedroom one-bathroom with, gasp, the bathroom accessible only through the bedroom--but the wraparound terrace (of almost equal square footage to the apartment itself) more than compensates for any bedroom-crossing discomfort. The sumptuously planted terrace is accessed through beveled glass French doors and wraps around the study and living room, which boasts a real-live wood-burning fireplace.

The deed listed Dunne's son, actor Griffin Dunne, as the lead grantor of the estate, noting the younger Mr. Dunne's recently purchased apartment on Lafayette Street as his address. The deed also lists a Paul Wolfowitz as a seller of the estate but we presume this Mr. Wolfowitz is a lawyer involved in settling the famously liberal author's estate, rather than the war-mongering former Bush adviser.

Dunne's Lyme, Conn., estate remains on the market at $1.495 million.

cmalle@observer.com

We stay up way past our bedtime (especially on school nights), being kept company by movies we've seen a billion times.... until we literally can't keep our eyes open. We know we're not alone: maybe you need a movie to sleep to, too! So join us tonight when we pass out to After Hours (starting @ 12:35 on @MAX)

Why we'll try to stay up and watch it: This past weekend, the L.A. Times released their list of 25 Best L.A. films of the last 25 years. If we were inclined to make a similar list about New York, After Hours would certainly be in the top-10. This is a perfect late night movie -- a fever dream that gets more absurd and confusing the more tired you are. We know, it's minor Scorsese; but it also seems like the first movie he totally had fun making. The tone is lighter than anything Scorsese had done previously (even the hilarious King of Comedy had a layer of darkness) and it all percolates with a great sense of humor. After Hours is also paced to within an inch of its life -- fast and jarring cuts populate the film, a clear forebearer to the coke-fueled finale of Goodfellas.

Griffin Dunne is the lead here -- he gets stuck in the Kafka-esque world of New York nightlife following a visit with girl he met in a coffee shop -- and his performance is so wired and unhinged that you'll probably lose your breath just watching him manuever; Dunne spends the film literally running from scene to scene. He's so endearing and empathetic that eventually you just want to see him get home safe.

When we'll probably fall asleep: As much as we like the film, it does devolve into a John Carpenter knock-off before things wrap up (complete with the cheesy synth score. We'll probably only last until Teri Garr shows up around 1:40 and spends five minutes creeping us out with sheer insanity and a bee hive hairdo.

Penotti, 37 and bleary-eyed, slathered ketchup on a turkey wrap in the kitchen

of the company's Tribeca office. Titus, his yellow Labrador retriever, tracked

the sandwich's every move.

Mr. Penotti reached for a

baggie filled with white powder. "In a film office 10 years ago, this would

have been a baggie full of cocaine," he said. "Now it's vanilla Coffeemate."

On the counter was a

copy of Variety , which carried a

full-page "For Your Consideration" Oscar ad for In The Bedroom, the first movie to which GreeneStreet Films gave a green

light.

"We have to change our logo," Mr. Penotti said. He was focusing

on the minuscule white square at the bottom of the ad. Standing near him was

his partner, Fisher Stevens, who showed up in the kitchen.

"They shrunk ours," said Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens, who is also an

actor- Short Circuit, Reversal of Fortune -was recognizably

bespectacled and floppy-haired. "Look how big Miramax's is." Miramax

distributed In the Bedroom . 

"Well, Harvey is a big guy," Mr. Penotti said of Miramax's

co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein. "Bigger than us." Then Mr. Penotti and Mr.

Stevens, shoulder to shoulder, copped Hans-and-Franz tough-guy poses.

In The Bedroom is

2002's quality sleeper, what You Can

Count on Me was last year. An honest, brutal family drama starring Sissy

Spacek, Tom Wilkinson and Marisa Tomei, and directed by a first-time feature director,

Todd Field, the film had the pedigree, reviews and general grown-up feel to

take charge of the art-house market in Oscar season. And it has: In the Bedroom has landed near the top

of the winter's short must-see movie list. It has also installed GreeneStreet

Films as a comer in an otherwise disastrous year for New York's film industry.

GreeneStreet has been quietly developing movies and keeping a low

profile since its inception five years ago. "It puts a lot of pressure on us,

and on our investors," Mr. Penotti said. It's a lesson that he and Mr.

Stevens-who has spent a decade living down the hype he earned 12 years ago for

being a promising actor and the

boyfriend of Michelle Pfeiffer-learned well.

"We've been waiting," Mr. Stevens said. "We were waiting for

something good to happen." In the Bedroom -about

the disastrous fallout of an affair between a college student and married

woman-was adapted from Andre Dubus' short story "Killings" by Mr. Field. With

Miramax marketing behind it became the small, deeply felt movie of the year.

With astonishing performances by Ms. Spacek, Mr. Wilkinson and Ms. Tomei, each

of whom has a shot at an Academy Award nomination next month, as does Mr. Field

for writing and directing, the movie became the art-house hit of the year.

GreeneStreet suddenly found itself in an extremely hot spotlight.

Which makes sense for a company housed in a converted lighting

factory on Desbrosses Street. GreeneStreet's lofty space is held up by

weathered wood columns and filled with stubbly film-school grads and lithe

assistants. Its two floors of offices are already home to a passel of renters

("buddies" is Mr. Penotti's film-mafia euphemism): writers Jon Robin Baitz and

Frank Pugliese, actor Rob Morrow and actor–director Griffin Dunne. Actor John

Turturro, who had Illuminata

production offices here, said he's considering setting up shop here again, and

Bruce Willis' New York production office is in the building. Matt Dillon will

soon move in.

There's also a P.R. firm (Mara Buxbaum's I/D Public Relations);

Track 9 Recording Studios; Red Scare special effects; Mr. Stevens' Naked Angels

Theater Company; as well as post-production suites and production office space.

All in all, the troupe adds up to a kind of triple-A threat to the Tribeca Film

Center, Robert De Niro's converted coffee-factory Death Star, just three blocks

south-not to mention the unspoken name of Miramax.

The two companies are structured differently. Miramax started out

20 years ago as a distributor, then began making its own pictures. GreeneStreet

produces pictures and gets other companies, such as Miramax, to distribute

them. The two companies have one thing in common, however. They each have a

kind of family, a stable-in Mr. Penotti's terms, "buddies": in-house actors,

writers, producers, flacks, sound– and special-effects teams that function as

an ad-hoc, miniature version of the studio system.

New York, said Mr. Dunne, has "never been a real film community,

like in Los Angeles. So it's nice to have a mini-studio, with a little

commissary." Mr. Dunne directed Lisa

Picard Is Famous , GreeneStreet's first release, a mock-documentary tracking

the burgeoning careers of two starving actors. It was released to warm reviews.

"It was also released on Sept. 14," said Mr. Stevens. "No one saw it."

GreeneStreet's next two films were the Benjamin Bratt vehicle Piñero , which received pretty

spectacular reviews for the actor, and In

the Bedroom .

"It was the first thing we technically committed money to, and it

was after every other studio and every financier had passed," Mr. Penotti said

with a broad grin in one of GreeneStreet's brightly lit conference rooms. Mr.

Penotti had gotten started as a production assistant and assistant director to Sidney Lumet on five films, including

one produced by Mr. Dunne, who also gave Mr. Stevens his first acting role, as

"one of the Jewish kids who's too nerdy to go out with Rosanna Arquette" in

John Sayles' 1983 Baby, It's You .

In those early days, Mr. Stevens was being touted as the Next Big

Thing-an energetic, promising character actor whose Naked Angels theater group

generated conversation. He was also, in either a Woody and Diane or Julia and

Lyle kind of matching, the unlikely beau of Michelle Pfeiffer. But his career

sputtered out sometime after Short

Circuit 2 , and his girlfriend wound up married to Ally McBeal creator David E. Kelley.

"I think I made a lot of mistakes," said Mr. Stevens. "I turned

down jobs, I was trying to be an artist. Now I'm in a place where I feel more

grateful, and respect and appreciate any kind of success."

Mr. Stevens and Mr. Penotti, friends for a decade, founded Madcap

Films in 1996 in tribute to their hero: writer, director and producer Preston

Sturges. "We had a hard time getting people to take us seriously with a name

like Madcap, and the time it was taking to explain the Sturges reference was

just not worth it," said Mr. Penotti.

Madcap shared Sixth Avenue offices with the Shooting Gallery, the

company that made Slingblade and was

a mainstay of New York's independent film world until its ugly 2001 bankruptcy,

which included allegations of dirty bookkeeping by its co-founders.

"It was a very big lesson to us," Mr. Stevens said of the

Shooting Gallery's demise. "We really liked those guys. They tried something

audacious." In early 1997, Madcap moved to an office on Greene Street, where

they changed their name. A year later, they set up shop in the raw Desbrosses

Street space, and began to build GreeneStreet's film center.

The company was originally backed by arts patron and Jones

Apparel Group chief Sidney Kimmel. "He was great for our development phase,"

Mr. Penotti said. Though Mr. Kimmel is no longer a GreeneStreet investor, both

partners were careful to emphasize their good relationship with their original

sugar daddy.

Their investing partners of the past two years, whom Mr. Penotti

and Mr. Stevens described as "extremely private," are Louis Bacon, Christopher

Pia and Michael Garfinkle, three principals from the Moore Capital Management

hedge fund who took personal positions in GreeneStreet. Mr. Bacon, the futures

and currency trader, was in his single days a fixture on New York's club scene,

but has since become increasingly reclusive and increasingly wealthy.

The company has three more films slated for release in 2002.

There's Just a Kiss , a feature

directed by Mr. Stevens, starring Ms. Tomei. It was purchased by Paramount

Classics and will be released this summer. The

Château , starring Paul Rudd and directed by Jesse Peretz (son of New Republic publisher Marty Peretz)

will be distributed by IFC in March. Then there's Swimfan- "We're changing it," Mr. Stevens said grimly of its title - a teen thriller starring Traffic 's Erika Christensen and Bring It On 's Jesse Bradford.

"We didn't want the girl from 90210, "

Mr. Stevens said, dating himself. "Or Buffy, "

Mr. Penotti added quickly. The film was just purchased by 20th Century Fox 2000

and will be released in the summer. 

This year, GreeneStreet will go into production on a 70's

coming-of-age film, The Italian , with GreeneStreet tenant Frank

Pugliese directing. And Molly Gunn 's

production offices will soon move in. The film is about an Upper East Side

socialite who takes a job as a nanny to earn the respect of her boyfriend. Mr.

Dillon will star in the GreeneStreet project Tough Guy: The Eddie Maloney Story .

If there's one consistency within the GreeneStreet crew-Ms.

Tomei, Mr. Dillon, Mr. Dunne-it's of being, like Mr. Stevens, hype victims who

never quite lived up to their imagined star potential.

"It's not like we're looking to reinvent people's careers," said

Mr. Penotti, acknowledging that many in the stable have been around the

Hollywood block. "We're just looking for people to work with who are very

talented, and let their work speak for itself.

"These people are artists who have integrity," said Mr.

Stevens-who said that running the company has "killed my acting career." "We've

all done terrible movies, sure … but there is a sense with these artists that

they are not just trying to become stars, and have really struggled to make the

right choices, to do art and make a living. Now hopefully we can provide them

with a place where they can do both."

Hamlets to the Merchant of Venice as a Prohibition gangster, to Leonardo

DiCaprio playing Romeo like Henry Aldrich, directors of stage and screen have

been literally knocking themselves senseless making history's greatest poet and

playwright more accessible to the unwashed masses. In his day, the Bard voiced

his own disdain for the cognoscenti, and might, almost 400 years after his

death, welcome a few contemporary opinions from the proletariat at the local

multiplex. But I think he would draw the line at O .

In accordance with the new laws of sentimentality patented

by MTV, director Tim Blake Nelson uses Othello

to preach a bleak and bitter little sermon on the evils of teenage hedonism and

Southern bigotry, with Charleston

instead of Venice and a basketball

court instead of a battlefield. The ambition exceeds the talent. As a

self-indulgent actor, Mr. Nelson gave one of the worst performances of 2000 as

the mewling crackpot convict in the dismal Coen brothers haystack farce, O Brother, Where Art Thou? As a

director, his lack of subtlety behind the camera has the same pitchfork effect.

Despite a sincere performance by the enchanting Julia Stiles

as a dreamy-puss Desdemona in love with a black hip-hop Othello, nothing about O rings true. Setting Shakespeare's

classic tragedy of treachery and betrayal on the elitist campus of a South

Carolina prep school is a stretch, but is not in

itself the problem. An interesting interracial romance in an ante-bellum

setting could provide a cogent historical analogy, but the corny, symbolic

close-ups of cooing doves scared away by cell phones and rap songs evoke more

laughs than sympathy.

Othello is now Odin or O, the only black student in an

all-white old-boys school, played with streetwise ferocity by the charmless

Mekhi Phifer. Desdemona is now Desi, who is not only the most beautiful

magnolia in the Palmetto Grove

Academy but the daughter of the

dean (John Heard). The diabolical Iago is their classmate, Hugo (Josh Hartnett,

fresh from the dying fields of Pearl

Harbor ). Cunning, smart and smoldering with jealousy because

his father (the Duke of Venice is now a basketball coach called, simply, "The

Duke," played by Martin Sheen) pays more attention to O than he does to his own

son, Hugo sets out to wreck O's love affair with Desi, ruin her reputation and

manipulate everyone on campus to a violent end. Playing them all against each

other, Hugo plants doubts and suspicions in Odin's simple mind that build to a

psychotic obsession; he also gets a teammate grounded for fighting, murders one

of his best friends, reduces the sweet, all-American Desi to suicidal despair

and drives O to drugs and a slaughter-fest that piles bodies all over the

dormitory like sleeping bags.

The Othello text

is contemporized with lurid Columbine High warnings about school violence, the

dangers of steroids and corrupt values that place basketball trophies above

human rights, but the sad truth is there's nothing in O with the same lucidity, succinctness, depth of insight or energy

of expression I have seen in any previous production, including the flawed

Laurence Fishburne film version.

Character motivation is essential for Othello to work on any level. It is sorely missing here. Even for a

color-blind 18-year-old refreshingly damage-free from racial intolerance, it's

hard to believe that the most popular girl in school would defy her own family

and destroy her own future to fall under the sexual spell of a black student

who knocks her around with jiveass talk ("You get all hot an' shit, then I do

what I want witchoo"). An Othello who calls himself "nigger" in a distinguished

school that eagerly accepts him as an equal has no stature, and is therefore not

a noble, tragic hero. Mekhi Phifer's O is not a handsome, likable,

well-mannered class-structure invader like Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation , and Charleston

is not a park bench in Central Park. He's not in South

Carolina because he's a brilliant student from a good

family filling a quota, but because he can slam-dunk from 20 feet. Why would

Desi risk everything just to sleep with him? In real life, faced with the glare

of a scandal, the dean of the school would either expel the boy or ship his daughter

off to boot camp.

As the villainous Hugo, Mr. Hartnett makes even less sense.

Why would the brightest and most attractive guy in town feel so needy and

desperate for attention? Why does he envy O in the first place? When he says

"I'd give my left nut to be in your shoes" to a black teen with a dim academic

future, you sort of wonder why his own father doesn't pack him off to the

Austin Riggs Psychiatric Institute for Distinguished Breakdowns. And while

you're puzzling the lack of logic, the soundtrack lurches from nauseating rap

to the "Ave Maria" from-you got it-Verdi's opera Otello , just to remind you where you are and why you came. If the

filmmakers intended a revisionist Othello

for kids on a serious theme-the corrosion of hope, youth and innocence by

jealousy, ignorance and the pressures of society-they have failed badly. In

light of recent campus tragedies, marketing this gloomy film for a younger

generation unfamiliar with Shakespeare as "controversial" is merely a desperate

ruse to deflect attention from the fact that it's not a very good movie.

The last words spoken by Prospero in The Tempest -and, as far as we know, the last words penned by

Shakespeare-were "Let your indulgence set me free." There's plenty of

indulgence in O , but with all the teen

sex, cocaine and .38-caliber automatics, the Bard must be turning over in his

grave.

Who's Famous? Colin

Farrell

With this issue, I'm off to Maine

to work on my end-of-summer tan and crack a few lobsters. While I'm away, here

are some thoughts on two of the new films blasting onto a marquee near you. The

only reason to see American Outlaws

is the Irish actor Colin Farrell, who fulfills the promise of last season's Tigerland with a glam Jesse James that

redefines the term "budding supernova." Talented, imposing and suitable for

framing, this Dublin import may

give every appearance of being the next Mel Gibson, but he can also act. The

rest of the movie, poorly scripted by Roderick Taylor and John Rogers and

boringly directed by Les Mayfield, is a big yawn that only reminds us why movie

westerns are six feet under and not likely to make a comeback.

The story, which monkeys around with the facts, is the same

familiar saga from countless outlaw flicks about the embittered farmers who

returned home after the Civil War to find their land usurped by railroad

barons. The James boys, Jesse and Frank, formed a gang with their cousins, the

Younger brothers, to defend their land, robbed banks to help their struggling

neighbors survive and became Robin Hoods to the farmers and public enemies to

the government. In this revisionist version, the mythic stuff has more laughs

than thrills, which is pretty much what you'd expect from the director of Flubber . There's some high-powered

action in the saddle, plenty of fancy shooting and a horse stampede, but it is

doubtful that the gang paused in the middle of holdups to argue over who got

better billing in the "Wanted" posters.

Frank (Gabriel Macht) recites Shakespeare, Jesse learns to

square-dance and even his romance with a tomboy farm girl (Ali Larter, the

cheerleader from Varsity Blues ) has a

rosy ending. In real life, as realistically depicted in the far superior 1939

film Jesse James , starring Tyrone

Power, James was shot in the back of the head and killed at age 34 by one of

his own men while peacefully straightening a picture on the wall. In this

for-kids-only version, he happily survives, ready for the sequel. The rest of

the gang-including Will McCormack, Gregory Smith and James Caan's son Scott-are

a bunch of 8 x 10 glossies who appear to have

miraculous access to blow-dryers, manicurists and personal trainers unheard of

by young guns in the Old West for at least another 130 years. Since most of

them look exactly alike, you'll have no trouble concentrating on Mr. Farrell,

who, at 25, is only one year older than Tyrone Power was when he played Jesse,

and every bit as charismatic. American

Outlaws may be on its way to the video store before you finish this

sentence, but Colin Farrell is on his way to stardom.

In the fitfully amusing but ultimately inconsequential Lisa Picard Is Famous , an experimental,

partially improvised comedy directed by Griffin Dunne, a documentary filmmaker

(played by Mr. Dunne, mostly off-camera) trains his cameras on the daily

rituals of a New York actress struggling for her 15 minutes of recognition in

the get-famous business. Lisa (played with perky, wide-eyed naïveté by Laura

Kirk) is an unknown on the brink of public adoration. She's got a Wheat Chex

commercial and her own Web site, and she's ready for Broadway. While Mr. Dunne

interviews bartenders, casting directors and every star Lisa comes across,

serendipitous old New York forms a matrix (don't we all run into Sandra Bullock

in the Mail Boxes Etc. while sending off fliers?) that doesn't entirely

convince.

Everyone tells Lisa she looks like Penelope Ann Miller, so

Mr. Dunne captures the real Penelope Ann and asks her if anyone has ever told

her she looks like Lisa Picard. She looks dumbfounded. This sort of thing plods

on for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, Lisa's best friend, a gay actor with absolutely

no talent at all, played by Nat DeWolf, gets his own 15 minutes of fame with a

one-man show about gay life that attracts the unlikely attention of Spike Lee

and Charlie Sheen. Shot digitally from a script by Ms. Kirk and Mr. DeWolf that

was developed in Mira Sorvino's living room, the whole thing smacks of inside

parlor-game charades, but it does show the humor and humiliation that play

equal parts in the acting business while asking one basic question: How much

precious anonymity should a nobody sacrifice for public acceptance? The answer

comes in small, smart-alecky sips instead of one big, satisfying gulp, but in

the end I was still thirsty. Lisa Picard

Is Famous is to film what Off Off Broadway is to theater.