(Getty Images)

You’ve played Harry Crane on Mad Men since the first season and have two young children. What do you do to make ends meet?
You’re right. Kids are expensive, and I’m on basic cable, so you do what you can. I heard there’s a lot of money in plays, in doing the stage, so I thought I would come here and try that. I may have to try and squeeze in another play before Mad Men starts up again—the ends are still a good several inches apart.

Harry is the media buyer at Sterling Cooper. What’s your most hated TV ad campaign that you secretly love?
Those Sonic ads. I think on paper I should hate them, but the actors in them are so funny. I sort of roll my eyes when they come on, but I always laugh.

Ever do any ads yourself?
It’s been a long time, but that was truly how we made ends meet when we lived in New York. There was a Bud Light ad out there for awhile, a couple Sprint ads, Cingular, when that existed. And I did one for Stop & Shop.

You’re starring in Harvey on Broadway. Have you ever had an imaginary friend who was a Bunny, and was she a blonde, brunette or redhead?
Um, brunette.

By the way, how do they make Jessica Paré so lifelike?
[Laughs] She takes care of a lot of that on her own. I really like her.

Harry Crane almost joined the Hare Krishnas a few weeks ago. What cult would you join, and why?
I don’t know where the line between cult and religion lies. I knew somebody who was a new member of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I was asking them what it was about. And I remember him telling me, ‘Some people are just evil, you can see it when you look at them. Like Stephen King, you don’t have to read his books to know he’s evil. Just look at a picture of him.’ I’m not sure if this person was such a good representative of the faith.

Personal question: Do you ever blame yourself for Lane’s death?
I would have to imagine Harry could have done something to stop it. He seemed pretty happy to vamoose when all the partners stuck around. I imagine he was like, ‘Office emergency—I’ll just go...’ I’m sure if Harry had done a better job as a media buyer Lane would still be alive. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to believe when your parents get a divorce?

Mayor Bloomberg wants to ban large drinks. What seemingly innocuous thing would you like to ban and why?
I would like to ban people being allowed to text while in a crosswalk. Because we usually live in LA, and certainly you can’t text when you drive, and since walking is the main transportation here in New York and you get two or three folks shooting a quick text as they slowly amble across the street. It is a very frustrating endeavor to get around them. Also, let’s ban being allowed to look above a 50 degree angle as you’re walking walking. Peoples’ speed tends to go down with each degree above 50. Keep your eyes on the prize, people!

From: Ari Gold

Subject: Your Oscar Speech

Dear Al:

Before I go any further here, allow me to apologize in advance for calling you “Al,” as opposed to “Mr. Vice President.”

Sure, it might seem overly familiar.

But Al—dude—VeepMan—now that you’ve got the Oscar nomination and you’re officially in show business, the local working rules apply. We call everybody by their first name, whether we know ’em or not: Jack. Marty. Steven. Harvey. Gustav. (The G-Man is my biofuels connection over at the Benz dealership over on Beverly. If you’re looking for an ethanol conversion, just say the word, I’ll hook you up.)

Anyway, Al, let me come to the point: As you, of all people, know, few things in this life are certain. Marty for Best Picture this year? Done. Borat II? In the works. Your Oscar for Best Doc?

It’s in the swag bag.

So, as you and Flipper fly out here (and no, that’s not a typo—one of my partners represents the dolphin, and I hear he’s booked to present the award), I’m sure you’re looking forward to the free jeans, the free iPods and the free pedicures at one of the celeb lounges (just go with it, dude). But I’ve got two words of warning for you:

Roberto Benigni.

Who’s Roberto Benigni, you ask? Precisely my point: He’s the Italian guy who climbed over the seats to pick up the Oscar for Life Is Beautiful in 1999—after which he vaporized and disappeared into the ozone like yesterday’s carbon emissions. (Yeah, I know that’s not exactly right. But you know what I mean.)

The thing of it is, Al, the morning after you get the statue, every studio in this town is going to be asking: What do you want to do next? A sequel? A remake? Another Inconvenient Truth? But this time, they’re going to expect you to do it bigger, and better, with lots of special effects: Change the carbon emissions to meteorites; switch out the oil lobby for aliens; tweak the McGuffin, from man-made environmental catastrophe to the Big Bang theory and the impending collapse of the universe. Bruce Willis and Michael Bay, here we come.

But somehow, Al, I know it’s not you. It’s not where your career should be heading.

All of which is why I think you should skip the usual Oscar speech and announce that you’re running for President—even if I can’t commission the salary.

C’mon, Al. Don’t laugh. You know you’re thinking about it. And it’s a hell of a lot better than making the announcement on (please, somebody stop them!) The Daily Show. So bear with me here:

Sure, Obama just got in the race. And he’s got some support. But on the ground out here in L.A., outside the old “Friends of Bill,” Hillary’s campaign is a non-starter. Too divisive, too much baggage, too much triangulation. When she kicked off her campaign with the line “Let the conversation begin” (written by a New York ad guy), we groaned, because it sounded as if it was written by a New York ad guy. When she said she’d “resent it” if George Bush didn’t get us out of Iraq by January 2009, she sounded petulant. In the age of viral marketing and the Internet (no joke here, just take credit already), where voters want to feel empowered and power bubbles up, it feels like she’s running an old ward-boss campaign. And when she says “It’s time for a woman president,” we agree—but answer “Yes, but not you.” Entitlement is not a job qualification. (And before you ask: Yes, Marty is “entitled” to the Oscar this year, and he’ll probably get it. But not because he said so.)

Moreover, we still don’t know where she stands on the war. And while we’ll always have a soft spot for Bill, it’s time to move on. We don’t want to relive the 90’s; we don’t want to get dragged through the mud over every dime he’s taken over the past eight years in speaking fees. (Remember when Hillary was bewailing the proposed takeover of our ports by a Dubai-based firm while Bill was advising the company? It’s something we’d rather forget.)

Then there’s you, Al:

—You’re on the right side of the war.

—You own the environment.

—You’ve already won the popular vote once before.

So, for all of our sakes, give it a think. Make the speech short and self-deprecating (no reason to bring in Naomi Wolf; go with the classic black tux) and say something to the effect of: “I think I’m supposed to say it’s nice to be nominated. But having been ‘nominated’ once before, I’ve got to tell you: It’s a lot better to win …. Which is why, tonight, I’m announcing my candidacy for President. Together, with your help, we can return to the kind of people we once were, and go forward to become the kind of great nation were always destined to be.”

And that’s it. Over, done and out. And by the time you show up Graydon’s, there won’t be a full checkbook in the house.

Get back to me as soon as you can on this, Al. Obama is waiting in the wings. But in the meantime, keep one thing in mind:

There’s only one thing Hollywood loves more than a winner:

A comeback.

Hug it out, babe,

Ari.

Earlier this month, The Post reported that Ms. Eve Weinstein (ex-wife to mogul Harvey) had sold her renovated 15-room apartment at 88 Central Park West.

According to city records filed this morning, though, Mr. DeNiro did even better--his purchase price was actually $20,900,000.

Ms. Weinstein, meanwhile, is happily ensconced in her new full-floor co-op at 1133 Fifth Avenue. And she only paid $10.4 million!

Bargains for everyone.

- Max Abelson

Yesterday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission announced the landmarking of the Claremont Theater Building at 3320-3328 Broadway on Harlem, at the southeast corner of 135th Street. The neo-Renaissance building was opened in 1914 to show "photoplays," and was designed by Gaetano Ajello and commissioned by Harvey M. and Arlington C. Hall of Wayside Realty Company.

In the 1920's the building's storefronts were leased out to automobile-product stores, and in 1933 the theater closed and was converted to an auto showroom. Currently, it looks like it's being used for a furniture shop.

Thomaas Edison shot a short film in 1915 featuring the building's entrance (mpg).

-Matthew Grace

So join us now as we listen in on the top-seeded players in this week’s pan-Manhattan freestyle status-strutting competition:

Plutocrat I: “I’ve got a Park Avenue penthouse, a $2 billion hedge fund, a ranch in Montana, a condo in Beaver Creek, a cottage in East Hampton, a GV at Teterboro, a yacht in Saint Bart’s, a Renoir at the Met, a wing at Beth Israel, a string of ponies at Wellington, an ex-wife in Greenwich, and I’m dating a supermodel.”

Plutocrat II: “How nice for you. Steve Rattner got my kid in pre-school, David Boise handles my corporate litigation, Eddie Hayes takes care of the criminal stuff, Howard Rubenstein is my P.R. guy, Bill Clinton sits on the board of my private equity group and Harvey—you know Harvey, don’t you?—last year Harvey published my daughter’s tell-all novel about her insane mother, and this year he’s releasing my son’s first feature. He said that Marty said it’s going to go to Sundance.”

Plutocrat I: “I was on Page Six this morning.”

Plutocrat II: “I was on the front page of The New York Times this morning, in a story about how I was shaken down by Page Six.”

Point, set, match. Game over.

Your correspondent is filing this diary from Los Angeles, where —apropos of our own “tale of the tape” imbroglio, the Anthony Pellicano case— Variety’s Peter Bart has reported that “Private investigators say they now have a booming business in sweeping homes for suspected taps.” Commenting on this newest of status-driven trends, Mr. Bart mused, perhaps not altogether facetiously: “Remember, the guy you hire to check for taps may also be putting them in.”

I’ll have more to say about this in a minute. But in the meantime, as the children rush off from the Seder table to find the hidden matzo (and maybe turn up a wiretap or two), here’s the rest of what some of L.A. is talking about.

The Immigration Bill: As I write this, the streets are filled with protesting Latinos playing to the news cameras, demanding the decriminalization of workers who’ve entered the country illegally. At the same time, the airwaves are filled with right-wing radio talk-show hosts playing to their constituency, bashing George W. Bush and John McCain for their so-called “amnesty program” while spitting vitriol about overburdened emergency rooms, prisons filled with illegal immigrants, national security and jobs taken from bona fide American citizens.

What’s surprising here is that the talk-show trolls don’t seem to grasp the bigger picture, and what’s really in play: California’s emerging Latino majority. A group that’s religious, pro-military, pro-law, upwardly mobile and willing to cross party lines inside a voting booth.

Let me frame this in Hollywood terms: If you made Chico and the Man today, Chico would own a painting company with 125 employees and a contract for the Staples Center, and “The Man” would be his investment counselor at Wells Fargo.

In short, this ain’t about the borders. It’s about California’s 55 electoral votes and the 2008 Presidential election. And the really surprising thing here is that Karl Rove hasn’t been able to impart this notion to his talk-radio foot soldiers.

The Pellicano Case: Recently, I met with a talent manager who hired Anthony Pellicano during the mid-1990’s, on behalf of a movie-star client with a female-stalker problem. As the manager recounted it, their first meeting eerily foreshadowed Jared Paul Stern: “Pellicano offered us a laundry list—a menu—and asked exactly how far we wanted to take this,” the manager said. “Nobody can plead naïve here. We all knew exactly what we’d bargained for and what we were getting billed for.”

And now all of Hollywood waits, with a mixture of glee and horror, endlessly clicking on Nikki Finke’s DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com to see who’s getting indicted next. As the manager put it, “Everybody’s going to turn. These are wimpy white guys; they’re not going to jail.” He’s right. It isn’t like John Gotti and the Mafia. You don’t get to run a studio— greenlighting Ben Stiller pictures—from a prison cell.

As I’ve written before, Hollywood has become a meaner and nastier place over the past few years. Lots of little people chasing big, soul-crushing dreams. None of this is surprising. It used to be: “It’s not enough for me to succeed; I want my friends to fail.” These days, the expression is: “It’s not enough for me to succeed; I want my friends to get indicted.”

The Strike Zone: You hear it in dribs and drabs and whispers: from film directors over dinner, from screenwriters lingering at lunch, from actors killing time between takes: Hollywood may go to war next year over DVD payments. As Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood, explained to me: “These days, a typical picture earns 45 percent of its revenue from DVD’s and only 14 percent from its theatrical release. The rest comes from TV, cable and other forms of distribution. But the definition of profit—how much a movie actually makes—still comes from the days when box office was king.” There’s a growing sense that the time is ripe to address these issues, along with payments for iPods and Google. The call for strikes hasn’t reached a boil yet, but the pot is definitely simmering.

Hillary 2008? As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, the junior Senator from New York is losing her allure out here. Sure, in any group setting, everyone loves her and bemoans “those people out there” who won’t vote for a woman for President. But one-on-one, the litany begins: She’s an opportunist; she’s on the wrong side of the war. Enough of the Clintons already. Ultimately, we’re the people out there who won’t vote for her.

In any case, this is going to follow an entirely predictable story arc over the next two years: She’s invincible, she’s vulnerable, the front-runner stumbles, she’s the new comeback kid; Bill does something stupid to undermine her; it’s all a horserace.

Page Six, Anthony Pellicano and Hillary. Too bad you can’t TiVo ’em and fast-forward to the highlights.

When film mogul Harvey Weinstein and his now-estranged wife, Eve Chilton Weinstein, decided to separate in the summer of 2004, there were sure to be some loose ends to tie up.

Last November, the deed to the couple's Central Park West duplex was transferred into Eve's name.

Since Harvey had already relocated downtown to a ritzy Spring Street condo, Eve is now selling the place for $25 million.

The duplex apartment comes with mahogany French doors, a corner library, a great big dining room, and original ceiling moldings.

Not surprisingly, the apartment includes a few nifty features that you don't find in every Central Park West co-op: a 35-mm screening room with twin film projectors, Dolby sound, and an oversized roll-down screen.

The broker, John Sheets, is away on vacation, a representative from Brown Harris Stevens declined to comment on his behalf. Mr. Weinstein declined comment.

-- Michael Calderone

"Show me the blueprints. Show me the blueprints. Show me the blueprints," Mr. DiCaprio, as Hughes, repeats in a manic staccato to the chief engineer of his latest obsession. "Show me the blueprints. Show me the blueprints. Show me the blueprints."

At that moment, something clicked in the minds of Messrs. King and Schwartz. "Watching Leo perform that scene, I turned to Graham, and we knew we had the name for the company," said Mr. Schwartz, a tall man with dirty-blond hair and an easy smile. "It was kind of a metaphor for madness." They had the moniker for their own newly formed firm joint obsession-an independent film company.

And so, earlier this year, Blueprint opened its sparsely furnished offices in a second-story loft overlooking Mercer Street in Soho, marking the arrival of a new big fish in the small pond of Manhattan's film world. For, despite the apparent frugality of its offices, as a subsidiary of Mr. King's Santa Monica–based film sales company, Initial Entertainment Group, which just secured a $220 million credit facility from J.P. Morgan Chase, Blueprint just became the best-financed independent film company in New York.

Instead of using up their credit on fancy furnishings, the partners are spending their money on talent. They've signed development deals with Mr. DiCaprio, Mr. Scorsese, Johnny Depp and Nicole Kidman-all of whom were nominated for Golden Globe awards earlier this month. They are already developing the novel Shantaram for Mr. Depp. It's about a heroin addict who escapes prison to become a doctor in Bombay and then a gun-runner in Afghanistan.

All that talent and money puts plenty of pressure on the upstart company, and they know it. "My biggest worry is: Where do I get the next Aviator?" said Mr. King, a London native with an accent from the rough side of town and the physique of a soccer player. "I'm an independent guy. To protect myself, instead of waiting for an agent to send me the next big screenplay, I have to develop it with the talent."

Mr. King's earned this place as a top indie producer as a result of the respect he's earned as a top sales agent. He only applied to J.P. Morgan Chase for a $100 million credit, but when the bank went out to syndicate the loan, it was immediately oversubscribed.

Yet, despite the successful track record as a sales agent, it's a little daunting to be the new producer on the block. Over Christmas weekend, The Aviator-one of the most expensive independently financed films ever produced-opened wide in theaters across the nation, Messrs. King and Schwartz' nerves are being tested as much as Hughes was with the opening of his first independent film, Hell's Angels, in 1930.

"When we shot the Hell's Angels premiere, and Howard Hughes is told, 'You've got $4 million on the line,' I was sitting there thinking, 'I wish it was four million,'" says Mr. King, who is on the hook for over $70 million on The Aviator.

And the holiday weekend was stressful. While the film has been critically acclaimed-it's been nominated for six Golden Globes-it opened in an extremely competitive market alongside Meet the Fockers, Lemony Snicket, Fat Albert, Spanglish, Ocean's Twelve and Phantom of the Opera. And after three weekends, it's only earned $42 million against the Fockers' $204 million and Lemony Snicket's $105 million. But the film opened in fewer theaters, and while most films' box office immediately starts dropping after the opening weekend, the Aviator's box office has grown by over 40 percent each weekend.

Whatever the final box office turns out to be next week, a new player will be rising over the Manhattan-centered independent film business, just as the sun around which today's indie world once revolved-Miramax-is setting. And while Blueprint is poised to fill the vacuum left by Miramax's exit, Messrs. King and Schwartz are very different from Harvey and Bob Weinstein, though the two brothers can easily take credit as midwives for this new company.

Mr. King made the first step in his evolution from sales agent to producer when he took the tremendous risk of picking up the foreign-distribution rights to Miramax's Gangs of New York, directed by Mr. Scorsese and starring Mr. DiCaprio, for $65 million. Mr. Schwartz, a New Jersey native and former assistant to Harvey Weinstein, was the executive on the project. Additionally, Miramax is splitting domestic distribution of The Aviator with Warner Bros. And some have wondered whether the post-Disney Weinstein brothers could end up with their own deal at Blueprint, too.

Mr. Schwartz has wanted to be in the movie business since his days at CUNY's Queens College campus in the mid-1980's. After school, he applied to all the producers based in New York. At first, he settled for a job writing catalog copy for a computer-paper company. When the company was sold, the owner gave Mr. Schwartz a helping hand.

"The only person I know, I think she's a receptionist at this place called Miramax," he told Mr. Schwartz.

He soon learned Meryl Poster was head of production.

"I called Meryl, but never got a call back," says Mr. Schwartz. "I kept on calling and sent her gifts. I was shameless."

After a couple of months, he finally got a meeting. Ms. Poster immediately asked him: "Are you single? Are you straight?"

Newly married, Mr. Schwartz was deflated. "I knew right there that this was a business with no rules. I also understood what she was driving at: If you jump on board, your life would be this company."

Eventually, he was led to Mr. Weinstein's office. "Back then, Harvey had a very small office, and he was a much bigger guy. He was in the middle of a meeting. There were three people on the couch and he was on the telephone and smoking. The call was not a happy call."

After Mr. Weinstein hung up the telephone, he looked up at Mr. Schwartz and asked, "Why do you want to be in the movie business?"

"I stammered something," he recalled. "I don't really remember. Everything else he asked me about was my family, where I grew up, what kinds of things I like to do. I realized he wasn't going to test me on my knowledge of Godard. He was trying to get a feel whether he could spend an enormous amount of time with me."

When the interview was over, Mr. Weinstein growled: "You start Monday."

The beginning of the second week, Mr. Weinstein walked out of his office, gestured to Mr. Schwartz to follow him and said, "We're going to Chicago."

They drove out to New Jersey, where he joined Mr. Weinstein aboard his jet, without a change of clothes or even a toothbrush. "It was the beginning of two years of going all over the world with him. It was the beginning of the education, my film school."

Mr. Schwartz's timing was propitious. Miramax was just about to explode with the release of The English Patient.

He quickly gained Mr. Weinstein's confidence. "Information is the currency of this business. He learned very early on that he could trust me," said Mr. Schwartz.

He recalls one incident during pre-production of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. "They wanted Bob De Niro to play a lead in the movie. They were going back and forth with his agent but not getting anywhere. Then came that moment it was going to work or it wasn't going to work. Sitting in his car outside of his apartment [on Central Park West], he gets De Niro personally on the telephone and negotiates complicated figures like foreign grosses that to me, at the time, was all gobbledygook. He just cut through months of negotiating with agents and lawyers."

Like every Hollywood assistant, Mr. Schwartz also quickly learned to exploit his position. "I would read everything I could get my hands on. I was ruthless. I had access to the whole company."

He also used his position to cultivate his own contacts. "So many of my relationships started with Harvey. Even though you are someone's assistant, people will engage you because they know that you may become someone important some day."

Some would say that Mr. Schwartz exaggerates the depth of his relationships to power players in Hollywood. "He's a good guy, but he's got celebrity Tourette's-he's always name-dropping 'Charlize' or 'Leo' or 'Cameron,'" says one former coworker. "Just because he met Nicole Kidman a few times doesn't make them best friends."

Mr. Schwartz's moment to exploit those contacts came in London after nearly two years. "We were getting ready to go back to the States, and Harvey said, 'You're staying. You wanna be a producer, now you're going to act like one.'" The project was Kenneth Branagh's musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost.

"It was my graduate work," Mr. Schwartz recalled. "On that movie, I learned everything: casting, production, post-production, editing, testing and marketing through the release."

It was the next project that gave Mr. Schwartz a taste of his future. His assignment: Birthday Girl, starring Nicole Kidman.

He spent a lot of time in Australia with Ms. Kidman and her husband at the time, Tom Cruise. "I was essentially working on my own, 22 hours away from the company. I couldn't just pick up the telephone and call Meryl or Harvey; I had to make decisions on my own."

After Birthday Girl wrapped, he was sent to Italy and Morocco to supervise Giuseppe Tornatore's Malèna, starring Monica Bellucci, then Spain for Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, with Mr. Cruise producing and Ms. Kidman starring. While shooting in Madrid, he got a call from Mr. Weinstein. The company had taken on the biggest project in its history, Mr. Scorsese's Gangs, starring Mr. DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Daniel Day Lewis and Liam Neeson. "I cannot underplay the impact of working with Scorsese, my hero. It was just amazing."

Mr. Schwartz moved his family to Rome while he flew back and forth from Madrid, sometimes on commercial flights; other times, Mr. Cruise would fly them over in his private jet for lunch with Mr. Scorsese. It was all pretty glamorous: living in a townhouse just up the street from the Via Veneto where Fellini shot La Dolce Vita and flying around Europe with Mr. Cruise. Yet Mr. Schwartz was starting to become disillusioned with the role of a studio executive.

"I was always the 'suit,'" he said.

If getting hired by Mr. Weinstein would prove to be the inciting incident in Mr. Schwartz's professional life, Mr. Weinstein also would become responsible for the turning point at the end of Act I in his career.

"We were halfway through the film, and things were clearly going poorly," said Mr. Schwartz. "Harvey called and said, 'I'm coming to Rome.' I was waiting at the gates of Cinecitta when Harvey pulls up and his door swings open. I hear him screaming into his cell phone. Harvey hands me the telephone and says, 'Rick, this is Graham King. Graham, this is Rick Schwartz. Rick, tell him what I'm going to do to him."

"I hear this British accent on the phone, also screaming and threatening," said Rick. "They were apoplectic. Graham told me, 'Tell that fuck he doesn't know who he's dealing with!'"

A natural mediator, he tried to calm the tensions between Messrs. Weinstein and King. Mr. Weinstein ripped the phone from his hand and yelled at him, "Don't try and do that! Sometimes you have to go to war!'"

It was an inauspicious beginning for what has since turned out to be an extremely productive relationship for all three.

Mr. King started off as a sales agent. He went to UCLA from London. The first summer, he took a job in the international television sales department at 20th Century Fox. Mr. King never returned to school. In 1995, he formed IEG and made a name for himself after providing the financing for Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Shortly afterward, IEG partnered with a German company and went public on the Neuer Market.

Ken Kamins, then head of International Creative Management's international division, recalled, "All of a sudden, they were sitting on a big piece of money. Disney had stalled on Gangs. I called Graham and told him that there might be an opportunity: 'You'll get the project or you won't, but everybody will know who you are.'"

Mr. King was skeptical. "I read the script that night. The next day I told him, 'Let's do it.'"

Mr. King offered to pick up foreign-distribution rights for $65 million. "I didn't really think they'd accept. Next thing I know, Joe Roth from Disney called to tell me we've got a deal."

Shortly thereafter, Mr. King left for the London screenings, an international film market. "It was a frenzy," he said. "Buyers were sleeping outside my door. I remember one Japanese woman grabbing my ankles as I walked down the hall. I sold the territories to distributors for record amounts."

Mr. Kamins said this was the turning point for Mr. King. "When you're a foreign sales agent, the most you can be perceived as is an investor. But no one respects the investor. Even if you have creative issues, you don't have authority. Graham had gotten to the point where if he was investing all this money, he needed to be involved from the beginning. He needed to be a producer."

Messrs. Schwartz and King met in New York during Gangs' post-production. "We hit it off immediately," said Mr. Schwartz. "He had a lot of money on the line. He knew that he could trust me."

Mr. King said, "I joked with him that he should leave Harvey and come work with me."

Mr. King wasn't the only one who started to notice that Mr. Schwartz was blossoming. After Gangs, he went on to Robert Benton's adaptation of Philip Roth's The Human Stain, with Ms. Kidman. Then he became the executive featured on HBO's Project Greenlight. People in Hollywood now knew who he was, and the offers were coming.

Meanwhile, Mr. King had taken on a project that director Michael Mann had been developing with Mr. DiCaprio: a film about American icon Howard Hughes. On this one, Mr. King would finally be the producer in name and authority. Then Mr. Mann dropped out and Mr. Scorsese came on as director. Mr. Weinstein wanted the project, but Mr. Scorsese would only do it with Miramax if Mr. Schwartz was the executive. He couldn't say no. It meant deferring his plans for a couple more years at Miramax.

For Mr. King, The Aviator was a real test. Mr. Schwartz said, "The guys on the set were taking odds on how long before Graham would go back to run his company, but he stuck it out."

The project turned into a courtship for Messrs. King and Schwartz. "When you shoot until 6 in the morning, it's a real bonding experience," said Mr. Schwartz. "That's when we decided to combine forces."

"Harvey does it because he loves film." Some variation of that sentence has been uttered countless times by the rank and file of Miramax's marketing and publicity army, by friends and enemies of Harvey Weinstein, by members of the so-called Miramax "family," and by casual observers of his frequent public outbursts, rude behavior and raging anger. The refrain is meant to neutralize any complaint about the boss' modus operandi, and it works-up to a point.

Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), which chronicled the "New Hollywood" of the 1970's, has written a nuanced and thoroughly researched history of the independent-film movement that came of age in the 1990's. He interviewed hundreds of major and minor Hollywood players-including Harvey Weinstein himself-and the result is an evenhanded look at the making of the Miramax machine, its impact on the major Hollywood studios and the Disneyfication of Miramax.

A more realistic subtitle for his new book would have been "Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise and Fall of Independent Film." Mr. Biskind shows how Mr. Weinstein led greedy studio execs down a path paved with profits, promising and doling out Oscars with the help of megabucks publicity campaigns-and in the process, independent films became as commercialized as studio films.

In the mid-90's, when deficits were a thing of the past and million-dollar Wall Street bonuses were a healthy sign of the invisible hand at work, Miramax was in what Mr. Biskind calls its "Golden Age." Founded in 1979 and named after Miriam and Max, the parents of Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the company revolutionized the film industry. By creating an environment where unknown talent could flourish, Miramax gave birth to modern independent film. It bought and distributed dozens of films, many of them hugely successful, but also sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Or, anyway, the destruction of independent film as we used to know it.

Sure, Harvey loves film, but he hasn't always been a smart businessman. Miramax, which at one time employed over 500 people spread out in three Tribeca offices, was famously inept with its finances. Mail would sit unopened, bills went unpaid-some actors and directors claim to have been shafted. Miramax employees worked 13-hour shifts and had to drop everything whenever Mr. Weinstein called a meeting. Mr. Weinstein's assistants, some with families to support, had to survive on $27,000 a year-while Gwynnie flew from New York to Paris in a private jet.

Two movies launched Miramax's heyday. Mr. Weinstein initially passed up the chance to make The Crying Game, a love story with a big surprise at the end. After buying out the original investors in Neil Jordan's film, Miramax widened its release in 1992 (putting it on screens in the "red states")-and, largely because audiences kept the "secret," the movie went on to gross $62.5 million. The Crying Game blew away the $25 million indie box-office ceiling, ended Miramax's three-year slump with a windfall of cash, accounted for half of the company's 12 Oscar nominations that year and paved the way for Disney's purchase of the company in 1993.

The next smash hit, Pulp Fiction (1994), rewrote the rules. Mr. Weinstein has referred to Miramax as "the house that Quentin built," and Mr. Biskind evidently agrees: Quentin Tarantino, he writes, "cemented Miramax's place as the reigning indie superpower." Pulp Fiction, the first indie film to shatter the $100 million mark, eventually grossed $107.9 million in the U.S. and $212.9 million worldwide. Mr. Tarantino, with his wholehearted embrace of celebrity, his bizarre sense of humor and his sly, encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, was the perfect director for Mr. Weinstein's relentless publicity machine.

Things turned sour in the second half of the decade. Flush with Disney money, Miramax went shopping, scooping up everything in sight-sometimes finding a gem but often left with a flop. Although the company nurtured actors like Ms. Paltrow, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, it alienated or irritated a veritable A-list of the country's best and brightest directors and filmmakers: Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, Baz Luhrmann, David O. Russell, Larry Clark, Todd Solondz, Julie Taymor, Ron Howard, Neil LaBute, Kim Peirce, Pedro Almodóvar, Miguel Arteta and Martin Scorsese. After Shakespeare in Love's 1998 Oscar for Best Picture, Miramax didn't win a Best Picture Oscar again until Chicago (2003).

Miramax's market-research screenings, frequently conducted in New Jersey malls, were a bad omen for serious filmmaking. They allowed audiences to rate films numerically; Miramax would then recut or reshoot accordingly. Independent filmmaking had entered "an arid desert where nothing grows," Mr. Biskind writes, "save the TV networks with their lowest common denominator programming ruled by the Nielsen ratings."

Meanwhile, Bob Weinstein's Dimension Films had become a very profitable part of Miramax, with the Scream, Hellraiser and Scary Movie films. Now all the big studios have "independent" divisions: U.A., Sony Classics, Focus Features, Paramount Classics and Fine Line. Artisan, unaffiliated with a studio, beat Miramax at its own game with The Blair Witch Project (1999). Although the company always denied a dirty-tricks campaign against A Beautiful Mind (2001), it doesn't seem improbable that the nasty rumors Matt Drudge posted about the film were nurtured by Miramax. Mr. Weinstein's brief professional dalliance with Tina Brown cost him at least $27 million when Talk folded in January 2002. Miramax assistants grew accustomed to cleaning up after Mr. Weinstein's finger-pointing, spittle-spewing, obscenity-laced tirades. Business as usual.

Mr. Biskind spends a considerable amount of time on the Sundance Film Festival and Robert Redford's struggles and foibles. Sundance played a critical role in pictures like The Crying Game, Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), among many others. But, unfortunately, it wasn't long before Sundance became-to the dismay of young indie filmmakers everywhere-a farm team for the major studios. "Judged by one of its original, loftier goals, an institute to help outsiders, Sundance has failed," Mr. Biskind writes. "Women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the poor still don't have equal access to the camera." (Mr. Biskind's book is testimony to his impressive range: He switches easily between rank gossip and pious sentiment.)

In a postscript, he writes that Miramax killed the independent-film movement with success: Having taken things to a higher level, the company suddenly had to compete on the studios' playing field, where the question of which hot actor can "open" a film is always bandied about-not an arena in which the kind of indie film Miramax originally invented can be produced.

Down and Dirty Pictures is a smart, funny and depressing insider's look at the workings of a messy business. Peter Biskind deftly weaves money-shot quotes into the back story and has an eye for the perfect anecdote. It's a real roller-coaster ride: Harvey does it because he loves film-but after you've watched him do it for 500-odd pages, you just might need to light up a cigarette.

Christopher Carbone has reviewed books for The Washington Post and The New York Sun. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mr. Pekar lives in Cleveland, which sounds like a loser's punchline from the outset. Fittingly enough, he worked for many years at a dead-end job as a V.A. hospital file clerk, while moonlighting as a comic-book writer and a freelance jazz critic. After two failed marriages he met Joyce Brabner, a Delaware comic-store manager, who wrote to him asking for a copy of American Splendor . The two misfits soon after got married and adopted Danielle Batone, a child of hippie parents who couldn't handle the responsibility.

I'm not sure what I would think of Mr. Pekar's comic books if I ever read them, but Ms. Springer-Berman and Mr. Pulcini-who also happen to be married-have managed a triple play of almost miraculous dimensions by introducing Mr. Pekar first as a cartoon figure, then in the luminously uncanny incarnation of veteran character actor Paul Giamatti, and finally as the real-life Mr. Pekar, mainly through footage of his stormy appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman . Even Luigi Pirandello would have been impressed with this film's fluid transition between the real and the imagined.

The same tripartite process is followed for Ms. Brabner, with the ideally cast and magically gifted Hope Davis adding another exquisitely edgy characterization to her ever-growing gallery of no-nonsense spunky females. The letter-perfect casting of actors who project the grainy texture of real people extends to Madylin Sweeten as Danielle, Judah Friedlander as Toby Radloff, Mr. Pekar's spasmodically opinionated buddy, and James Urbaniak as Robert Crumb, the most celebrated of the several cartoonists who drew characters to accompany Mr. Pekar's glum thought-bubble dialogue. That Mr. Pekar was so graphically illiterate-he represented his characters with childish stick figures-reminds us that Walt Disney's dramatic genius was not dimmed by a drawing gift so feeble, according to Richard Schickel's biography, that he was forced to hire a more accomplished draughtsman to sketch out his patented signature.

American Splendor , in both its comic-book and movie manifestations, would seem at first glance to be a defiant burp at the conventions of the Hollywood hero. Still, celebrations of the earthly slob and the street punk are not entirely unknown in the Hollywood mainstream, vide Wallace Beery and Marlon Brando. But this film is about something much more interesting: a portrait of the artist as grumpy grown-up. Indeed, Mr. Pekar in all his guises never lacks confidence in his artistic goals, but all the while carries on grousing about his daily difficulties in picking the right line at the supermarket checkout counters or, with the same level of gravity and exasperation, finding the best treatment for his life-threatening cancer.

There have been many claims over the years by both industry-bankrolled and independent filmmakers that they were engaged in exploring the lives of the forgotten, the forsaken and the downtrodden. But very seldom were these rank losers and outsiders given intelligent things to say about anything beyond their most immediate concerns. There were the occasional exceptions, like John Schlesinger's Billy Liar (1963), and Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), in which otherwise disenfranchised characters displayed both wit and intellectual energy despite being on the outside looking in. In general, however, screenwriters find it more "realistic" to write down to the presumed imbecile level of most "real" people.

The point is that stories about bright people who have never been able to get it together have seldom been told on the screen. The bitter truths of these stories do not make audiences feel warm and fuzzy inside. Fortunately, Harvey and Joyce make us feel very warm because Mr. Giamatti and Ms. Davis transform a grotesque courtship scene into the beginning of a great love story under the inspired tutelage of the hitherto nonfiction-filmmakers, Ms. Berman and Mr. Pulcini. American Splendor is awash with feelings of understated love and affection, as reflected in the joyfully surprised expression on Joyce's face when she unexpectedly encounters Danielle in the apartment. You just know that she is never going to let this little girl out of her life, and the next time you see them, they are playing some sort of game that requires mutual concentration on each other. This is typical of the whole movie, as it weaves a sublime tapestry of seemingly small incidents.

At one point, Harvey tries with comic desperation to convince Toby that the movie Revenge of the Nerds (1984) is not worthy of his cultish worship, since the nerds in the movie are spoiled college kids with wealthy parents and not blue-collar drudges like Toby himself. There is no irony in Harvey's concern to set Toby straight, only a heartwarming expression of friendship from one outsider to another.

As it happens, I also identify with Harvey, Joyce and their friends because, like them, I spent many more years on the outside than the inside. And the truth of the matter is that I had a great many more interesting conversations before I "made" it than I have had since. There's a tremendous amount of cultural vitality out there in the land of the losers; American Splendor is one of the first and best films to capitalize fully on this phenomenon. Yet I'm still not sure that comic books (or should I say "graphic novels"?) can provide a reliable source of incisive, insightful movies on the lofty level of American Splendor . But even if it should prove to be a one-shot, I urge losers and so-called winners not to miss it.

Longwinded Complexities

Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies & Gentlemen , from his own original screenplay, with adaptation and dialogue by Mr. Lelouch, Pierre Leroux and Pierre Uytterhoeven, was the closing-night feature at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which attests to the high esteem in which Mr. Lelouch is held by the French film industry. Yet the much-honored director of A Man and a Woman (1966) has always been despised by the more esoteric film critics for what they perceived as his overly facile romanticism. Being a notorious romantic myself, I started out as one of his supporters back in 1965 at the Mar del Plata film festival, where I was a member of the critics' jury and voted for Mr. Lelouch's Une Fille et des Fusils as best picture, much to the dismay of my international colleagues. I've always respected his prodigious energy as a technician and as a virtually one-man production studio, with over 30 features in over 40 years. So what went so very terribly wrong with his latest film, which seems to disintegrate into delirium before one's eyes?

For starters, Jeremy Irons is a strange casting choice for a romantic love story when his forte has always been desicated eccentrics like Claus von Bülow in Barbet Schroeder's Reversal of Fortune (1990), which won him an Oscar, and his dual role as the creepy twins in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988), which won him a New York Film Critics Circle Award. Here he plays Valentin, a sly, velvety jewel thief, reportedly patterned after the French fictional master criminal, Arsene Lupin. Valentin begins his depredations in London, moves his operations to Paris and then winds up in Morocco, where he encounters Jane Lester (Patricia Kaas), a blond chanteuse who has lost much of her memory after breaking up with a jazz trumpet player. A weird symmetry, Valentin has lost much of his memory, too. There is much talk of C.A.T. scans and scenic pilgrimages up a magic mountain where a dead sultan's daughter has been buried after she was killed for an unsanctioned love affair. Indeed, as Bobby Clark once remarked in a Broadway revival of Victor Herbert's Sweethearts , "Never was a thin plot so complicated."

Much of the action dissolves into frequent dream sequences, and an unending concert across the continents with Ms. Kaas singing everywhere she goes. She has reportedly sold a huge number of albums of vintage French chansons worldwide. Nonetheless, Mr. Lelouch seems to have indulged Ms. Kaas and Mr. Irons beyond any rational narrative consideration. The English dialogue sounds as if it were made up as the characters went along. The disguises Mr. Irons devises to hoodwink gullible jewelers are so unconvincing that I began to wonder if I was missing the joke. I could go on and on and on, but I would be merely repeating the mistake of this and too many of the other "big" films of the summer by being needlessly, endlessly long-winded.

Darker, Wilder Days

The revival scene at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street) is getting a big boost with a new 35-millimeter restoration of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) from Aug. 1 through Aug. 7, and a new 35-millimeter print of Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) from Aug. 8 through Aug. 14. Both cinematic thunderbolts were well regarded at the time of their release, but their reputations have grown over the years to immense proportions.

From a screenplay by Wilder, D.M. Marshman and Charles Brackett, Sunset Boulevard is, after half a century, still the best film ever made about Hollywood, while Chinatown , with its politically and historically astute screenplay by Robert Towne, can still lay claim to being the best L.A. noir after almost 30 years. William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Eric Von Stroheim and Nancy Olson make up as spectacular an acting ensemble as there had ever been, while Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston do about the same for Chinatown . Though Sunset Boulevard was a contemporary film when it was first released more than half a century ago-with its pathetic "waxworks" of such faded stars as Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner and, for that matter, Swanson herself-the film plays today like a period film of the bygone Big Hollywood Studio era. Chinatown , set in the 30's, seems comparatively timeless in its depiction of corruption at every level of government in Los Angeles. So what, if anything, has changed in the interim?

Both films are much darker than any mainstream movie project today. And no wonder: Both Wilder and Mr. Polanski lost family members to the Nazi Holocaust, and the hovering shadow of this outrage against humanity has cast a stylistic shroud over both filmmakers. Both films also employ distinguished directors-Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard and Huston in Chinatown -to play crucial roles: Stroheim revisits his flamboyant role as the silent era's mad Prussian, and Huston projects a more sophisticated and more modern sense of evil. Both films are worth seeing. Enjoy.

While Harvey the ho is running the streets looking for johns, the commission he heads is doing as little as it can to restore a degree of trustworthiness to the stock-and-bond business. The looting, the false books, the misleading information has, by most estimates, scared a significant number of investors, American and foreign, out of the market. If Wall Street is going to emulate Buenos Aires or Moscow, a certain number of investors are going to yank Harvey the ho's rings, snap his thong and hie themselves and their money elsewhere.

It's hard enough to pick winners even when accurate information on their financial condition and business operations are available. So many forms of deception, misdirection, sly confusion, mystification, collusion and trompe d'oeil bookkeeping are being practiced by major corporations that buying common stock is buying a pig in a poke. From Enron to Microsoft, every manner of company is being accused of indulging in practices meant to give would-be buyers a false impression of the firm's condition. It just never stops. Halliburton is accused of accounting flimflammery while Dick Cheney was running it, thus adding to the administration's growing reputation for probity.

With lobbyists and campaign contributors from the accounting, legal and securities industries tucking wads of green into the thong strings of Pennsylvania Avenue's hos, the chances of the immediate and dramatic rectification the situation calls for actually happening are somewhere between dim and nonexistent. Much has been made of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's extracting a $100 million fine from Merrill Lynch for touting stocks that it knew were dogs to its customers. The firm's dishonesty would have made its founder, Charlie Merrill (1885-1956), vomit.

Given who and what Charlie Merrill was, that the firm he started and which carries his name would cheat its customers this way is especially galling. More than any other single person, Merrill, who vowed to "bring Wall Street to Main Street," got the American middle class to buy securities. Under Merrill, salesmen were paid straight salaries so they had no incentive to lie to their customers; he ended all those tricky, secret service charges; and his was the first firm to print annual reports that explained what the firm was doing, what it owned and what its partners owned, so that any possible conflicts of interest were on the table for all to study. He put out a magazine, he staged a "How to Invest" show, and he made a point of seeing that the firm spoke in layman's English. As a broker, he did what a broker should do: Instead of playing sneaky, lucrative games, he channeled capital into new industries like the movies and chain stores, which needed start-up money. He had no peer as an honest straight-shooter. As for today's Merrill Lynch, let it be judged by its record.

Attorney General Spitzer is accepting compliments for the $100 million fine, but that's peanuts, and a small bag of peanuts, when we recollect that the hundred mil will be classified as a tax deduction. (In the tax collector's eyes, expenses associated with bilking one's customers is an ordinary cost of business.) The settlement by which Merrill Lynch admitted no wrongdoing doesn't bode well for future innocents who walk into the company's offices. The few changes agreed to fall far short of making sure the next wave of suckers gets an even break.

Merrill Lynch didn't flinch at the $100 million; that's what some C.E.O.'s make in a year. One of the parts of our business system that is badly out-of-whack is the compensation going to banks, brokerage houses, lawyers and accountants. It is insanely out of proportion to the services rendered, but an idea for fixing it is hard to come by, though there are steps which can be taken that will help raise the general level of transparency (the word that the big shots use when they mean "honesty" but just can't get it out of their mouths).

Standard & Poor's, one of the nation's important suppliers of financial info about companies, says that it's going to change its presentations so that the costs of these humongous stock options granted to executives will be taken out of the footnotes and put where investors can see them. The New York Stock Exchange is thinking about insisting that the boards of the companies listed on the exchange must be comprised of a majority of independent members-that is, people who don't work for the company and aren't financially connected with it.

That's a start, but more's needed. Some thought might be given to the creation of a corps of professional board members, who go to school to learn the work. One of these board pros would be placed on the boards of companies over a certain size. Since they will not have been chosen by the stockholders, they would have no power to vote, but they would have the power to speak at board meetings and serve on board committees. Whenever a significant decision is made by the board, the non-voting pros would be required to write a report or memo to the other members of the board, giving their opinions. A copy would also be filed with the S.E.C. and kept secret, but available as evidence in the event of a government investigation or a stockholder suit.

This person would not be sitting on the board to represent the "public." The public doesn't own these companies; the stockholders do, and it would be they whom the non-voting member would represent. Time was when company stock was in the hands of a few hundred people or less, and they tended to be geographically close to the company's headquarters. If they weren't active owners, they were cognizant owners-but that was a century ago. Today, owners-who number in the thousands, live around the globe and cannot be effectively organized-have no control over the executives who are robbing them blind by taking inordinate compensation, watering the stock to give themselves indefensibly large options, and jeopardizing the company's long-run strength in favor of short-term pro-management looting.

The list of corrective steps the government might take is long, but there's a limit to that kind of action. One thing the government can't do-but the securities industry can-is educate investors to look for stocks that pay dividends. We have a generation of investors brought up to believe that you buy stocks with "growth potential." Growth potential isn't the same as actual growth. Dividends can be iffy, too. The Pennsylvania Railroad eventually went belly up, but before it did, it paid a dividend every quarter for more than 100 years.

In flat market periods, stocks that pay dividends but don't appreciate are better than stocks that lie flat and pay nothing. For the millions who buy stocks for their retirement, having a portfolio that pays something four times a year is more appealing than one that keeps its owners on their knees praying the Market God has been kind to them.

Managements under pressure to produce regular dividends will not be able to play some of the games they've been playing these days. You can't announce phony profits when you're obliged to use some of them to pay the dividend. The burden of making real money for the owners will impose a significant degree of discipline on wild-ass managers.

These past weeks, the business press has been full of sensible proposals, new laws and measures the S.E.C. might undertake, but Harvey the ho is not at his desk. Harvey the ho is in mid-frolic; Harvey the ho is on Pennsylvania Avenue, bending over and wiggling his dasypygal and hirsute derriere-and boy, can that man stop traffic.