If you were drawing up a short list of the movies that grabbed the hearts and minds of New York's media elite this year, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, François Ozon's Swimming Pool and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's 21 Grams would all place. Oscar speculation aside, these were movies that felt fresh and aware of the world in which they were made.

And if you were looking for one person who was involved in putting all three of those movies into theaters, you would look no further than the Noho office of Focus Features executive Amy Kaufman, a 31-year-old acquisitions executive with great taste in filmmakers and smart ideas for bringing them into Focus' fold.

Since being named Focus' executive vice president of acquisitions and co-production in August 2002, Ms. Kaufman has put her degree in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania to good use. She played key roles in securing domestic-distribution rights for Swimming Pool and 21 Grams, and solidified a business relationship between Focus and Pedro Almodovar's production company, El Deseo. Most importantly, she cannily parlayed Focus' foreign-distribution rights for Lost in Translation into the coveted job of distributing the film domestically, a coup that should mean dividends for the company come Oscar-nomination time.

"I love the filmmakers that I work with," gushed Ms. Kaufman from behind her desk. She wore green cargo pants, a snazzy black pullover and her wavy hair below shoulder length. "I see myself not only as a tastemaker, but someone who has a good sense of what the marketplace is like."

The Needham, Mass., native's understanding of the marketplace began with an internship at MGM, followed by a stint as an assistant to producer Scott Rudin. From there she moved to Miramax, where she met her mentor, David Linde, who brought Ms. Kaufman with him when he moved to independent-film pioneers James Schamus and Ted Hope's company, Good Machine, where he ran the international division. There, Ms. Kaufman-who is fluent in Spanish-served as the executive producer of Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mamá, También and learned from Mr. Schamus' 11-year relationship with director Ang Lee, and from Good Machine's motto, that good business meant good relationships with filmmakers, not necessarily paying top dollar for them. When Mr. Schamus and Mr. Linde moved to Focus, Ms. Kaufman followed. "James and I have an innate trust in Amy's taste in talent," Mr. Linde said. "She's also a tiger."

Back in 2002, Ms. Coppola set out to finance Lost in Translation by selling international rights to the film in advance. The company acquired the foreign-distribution rights to the film in all countries save for France and Japan. According to Ms. Coppola's agent, Bart Walker, when it came time to make a deal on the North American rights, Ms. Kaufman "kept other companies away," ultimately creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. "It was very cagey and skillful," he said.

Mr. Linde hinted that Ms. Kaufman would be assuming a more production-oriented role in the near future, meaning perhaps a title that is smaller in length but bigger in heft.

-Jake Brooks

I happen to like and respect The Hulk more than most of my fellow reviewers, and it's not because Mr. Schamus happens to be a highly valued professor and colleague at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, where I also teach. Rather, it's because I think that many of my esteemed colleagues were much too hard on the prescribed adventure-comic performances: Eric Bana as research scientist Bruce Banner, who at angry times swells up into The Hulk ; Sam Elliott as General "Thunderbolt" Ross, the fanatical nemesis and tough-love father of Betty Ross (critically slighted Jennifer Connelly), Bruce's beloved; and Nick Nolte as his demented, megalomaniac scientist father, David Banner.

As it happens, I saw the film after I had read most of the reviews, and so I was prepared for more hamola than I actually saw on the screen. Come on, people, The Hulk is a tall tale, literally and figuratively, and requires at least a few morsels of expressionistic exaggeration, like the way Mr. Elliott always cocks his head as if it were a pistol ready to fire, and the way Mr. Nolte re-enacts the crucifixion as a fire-and-lightning suggestion of Christ being electrocuted on the cross, though spouting the curses of the devil.

This is wild stuff that goes far beyond poor Oedipus. Bruce is burdened with the repressed memory of a childhood horror that, when released, leaves the young scientist more alienated from himself than ever before. Now this kind of emotionally tangled case history is not likely to entertain the targeted kid audience in search of slightly less complicated power fantasies.

The difficulty with The Hulk as a blockbuster attraction is that his acquired prowess is more a problem than a solution. We are consequently thrust into the adult world of mental breakdown triggered by long-suppressed anger exploding when the protagonist is provoked. Despite the Hulk's "cool" green-giant coloring, he is red-hot with fury as he demolishes everything in his path with no clear strategy or purpose in mind, unlike the mission-driven Superman and Batman. Mr. Lee's editing tricks of simultaneity-which suggest multiplicity and complicity in the narrative where, at least on the surface, there isn't either-has led to critics demystifying the "Ang Lee" aura. I myself didn't particularly mind these flourishes, because at the very least, they kept the movie from becoming tedious and turgid, a fate from which its recent rivals in the genre do not entirely escape.

Yet, if The Hulk is at best a character study with enough angst to satisfy Ang Lee's inner demons, (on display in John Lahr's exhaustive profile of the director in the June 30th issue of The New Yorker ), still the question remains: How feasible is it to have so much interiority in a genre so dominated by the externals? That I was more than a little moved by the final eye contact exchanged between Bruce and Betty, betokening love and his need for absolution, does little but reconfirm Mr. Lee's sensitivity to themes of emotional displacement in such works as Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

Curiously, The Hulk seems to be considerably out of sync with what is perceived in many quarters as the public's triumphant pride in the feats of our armed forces. The biggest villain in The Hulk is neither General Ross nor Bruce's father, David Banner, but a corrupt government scientist, Glenn Talbot (Josh Lucas), whose cold-blooded search for the Hulk's chemical constituents (in order to develop a weapon of mass destruction, perhaps) makes him a likely candidate for C.E.O. of Halliburton, à la Dick Cheney and the rest of the military-industrial complex. Yet even though the usually subtle Mr. Lucas plays his part with cartoonish relish and abandon, he is disposed of rather easily by the energized Hulk, who then proceeds to take on the whole American Army-the tanks and the planes as well as the terrified soldiers. This isn't a foreign enemy or a traitorous domestic foe he's sweeping away like tenpins; it's our own glorious boys in uniform.

This anti- Zeitgeist hostility to the established order is less text than subtext, which may be why it hasn't been more widely noted. But trust Mallard Fillmore, in the comic strip of the same name-a rabid right-wing duck with an affinity for the more advanced thinking of the Republican National Committee in defending the noble rich from the ravenous rabble at the bottom of the ladder-not to be fooled by the Hulk's "inner demons." Mallard can spot a subversive troublemaker from a long way off: In the strip, he scornfully watches as one of his "liberal" simpleton stooges gets excited over the Hulk's roaring destruction of a U.S. Army tank. This may be another reason-albeit a subconscious one-why I enjoyed The Hulk more than did most of my esteemed colleagues. But I would add that it's not the only reason. The Hulk is hardly a great film; it remains entrenched in its genre and all the standard special effects that go with it. But it is nonetheless an interesting effort to give one of the staples of mass entertainment something extra in the way of insight and feeling.

Angels with Thongs

McG's Charlie's Angel's: Full Throttle , from a screenplay by John August and Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, and a story by Mr. August, would seem to have all the ingredients of joyous summer entertainment: three pretty women with saucy personalities and exuberantly playful flirtatiousness bounced hither and yon between delivering martial-arts drop kicks to the bad guys. Nonetheless, boyfriends for all three Angels seem to come out of the woodwork. These paramours are pointedly excluded from all this violent fun, like the schoolmarms of yore who waited on the sidelines while the old-time western heroes gunned down the varmints, or whatever. So is this a feminist statement? Not really.

The Angels still take orders from the unseen but much-heard Charlie (played forever by John Forsythe). When Charlie's Angels was an early tits-and-ass television entry, James Wolcott wrote a provocative essay about the double-entendre involved in Charlie's pimp-like command and control of three nubile females, the most notable and most memorable of whom was Farrah Fawcett with her glorious blond tresses. The show was a joke-at most, a guilty pleasure of the most condescending kind. Ms. Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith were pleasant enough at the time, though never as high-powered as the current trio, who each deserve better vehicles after two tries with Charlie's Angels , first in 2000, and now in 2003.

Though I hope never to see another, the first week's take will tell the story, as always. But I don't care; this is where I get off. A flimsy idea has been stretched to the point of truly offensive silliness and cynicism, with vulgar bumps and grinds and laborious double-entendres about what the Angels really do for a living.

Things get off to a rocky start in Mongolia when Cameron Diaz rides a mechanical yak, reminiscent of Debra Winger riding the mechanical bronco in James Bridges' Urban Cowboy (1980). I kept thinking how much sexier Ms. Winger was, and I decided that I was beginning to get tired of Ms. Diaz. From there on in, it's all downhill-bikini-beach teases, motorcycle races, Demi Moore making an ill-advised "comeback" as a "bad girl," cameo appearances by Bruce Willis, Eric Bogosian, Carrie Fisher and even Jaclyn Smith (appearing as the ghost of an Angel to give Drew Barrymore some institutional advice about the indestructability of their kind). Ms. Barrymore is given a more serious back story than Lucy Liu. Bill Murray has been replaced by his "brother," played by African-American Bernie Mac in a remarkably coy performance that was consistent with the low standard of humor throughout.

I hated it! I hated it! I hated it! And you can take my word for it or not.

A Valiant Code-Breaker

George Axelrod (1922-2003) has been honored in the obituaries primarily as the writer of the convoluted screenplay for John Frankenheimer's typically tortured The Manchurian Candidate (1962), based on the eerily prophetic novel by Richard Condon, which seemed to have anticipated the traumatized era of the Kennedy and King assassinations. The Manchurian Candidate was a critically underrated box-office flop when it first came out. As history has vindicated much of its political paranoia, there is a tendency to overrate this film because of its belatedly fashionable anti–Joe McCarthy message.

My fondest memories of Axelrod, whom I once met at a theater box office, have little to do with The Manchurian Candidate , or with the politics of the 60's generally. I prefer to remember him as the playwright, screenwriter and, finally, the director of comedies in which consenting adults managed to go to bed together at least once in three acts or nine reels, depending on the medium. This may sound like no big deal, but back in the 50's and early 60's, the Hollywood powers that be would not allow Marilyn Monroe, for example, to go to bed with Tom Ewell in Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955), adapted from Axelrod's Broadway play, with a screenplay by Axelrod and Wilder. In the stage version, Vanessa Brown played the Marilyn Monroe part and did go to bed with Ewell's summer-in-the-city-husband, whose wife and kids are out taking the fresh air of the country. (Wilder himself later failed to convince his backers that Felicia Farr's suburban housewife should consummate the sex act with Dean Martin's Vegas swinger in his 1964 film Kiss Me Stupid .)

People asked for so little back then, and the censors gave them zilch. Now the lid is off-sometimes to a sickening degree-but I still don't wish for a return of the Production Code. Axelrod wrote and directed only two films to his own specifications, Lord Love a Duck (1966) and The Secret Life of an American Wife (1968). Both are grown-up classics, and both have been ridiculously underrated. Catch them if you can on VHS or DVD.

But when the usually chipper Mr. Lee took the stage, he looked wary. Glancing out at his producing and writing partner, Focus Features co-president James Schamus, Mr. Lee said in heavily accented English: "I guarantee you that's the biggest independent film ever made."

Many in the room glanced uncomfortably from Mr. Lee to Mr. Schamus, whose doughy face, horn-rimmed glasses and ubiquitous bow tie make him look like a Keebler elf with a Ph.D.

With the June 20 release of The Hulk , a $137 million film about the Marvel Comics character, Mr. Schamus faces a complex reckoning. The screenwriter, low-budget-film pioneer, Columbia University professor and now studio executive's radically diverse experiences must gel perfectly. A summer blockbuster that he wants everyone to know is a really smart film, The Hulk will be Mr. Schamus' attempt to prove that a professor can make an action movie, that an action movie can be a thoughtful movie, and that a thoughtful movie can make millions.

Just six weeks ago, advance word on The Hulk was bleak. Press access had been limited, with one prevailing foghorn blaring Mr. Schamus' message- It's a smart movie! It's a smart movie! -with an urgency that led many to wonder how much the explosions must suck.

They don't suck.

The Hulk is a wad of Bazooka bubble gum for the eyes. Its spectacular desert shots and Marvel-accented wipes and cut-ins are arresting. Bruce Banner's transformations are satisfyingly violent moments of physical rupture.

No one should lose sleep over whether The Hulk will make money-even though some reports have placed the budget close to $150 million. Mr. Schamus is already at work on a sequel script, and the Variety headlines are probably already printed: " Hulk Sees Green!"

And yes, it's true: The Hulk is a very smart movie. If it doesn't quite leave us thinking about The Iliad and Nietzsche-as Mr. Schamus' recent New York Times piece nudged us to do-it surely offers a stunning lens through which to view a set of binaries: innocence and knowledge, rage and pacifism, the human and the inhuman.

But let's not get carried away. No matter how pretty or deep it is, it has its own binary to contend with: It's a big summer tentpole movie about a large green fellow who hurls helicopters to the desert floor.

"Releasing the no-expectation sleeper hit of the year is frequently a better feeling than [releasing] the single most highly anticipated [movie] of the year," said Lauren Zalaznick, who co-produced some of Mr. Schamus' earliest films with him. Ms. Zalaznick runs the TRIO network for Vivendi Universal, the same company that employs Mr. Schamus, as co-president of Focus Features, Universal Pictures' specialty-films unit.

Things Evolve

Until now, Mr. Schamus has been best known as the co-founder, with Ted Hope, of Good Machine, a film-production company that with Miramax, the Shooting Gallery and October Films, helped to transform the economics of moviemaking in the 1990's.

Founded in 1991, Good Machine's downtown offices gave birth to scrappy, inexpensive films by young directors like Todd Solondz ( Happiness ), Todd Haynes ( Poison , Safe ), Hal Hartley ( Simple Men ) and Nicole Holofcener ( Walking and Talking , Lovely and Amazing ).

The company's most reliable find was Mr. Lee, whose first film, Tui Shou ( Pushing Hands ) was co-written by Mr. Schamus, and produced by Good Machine. Eat Drink Man Woman ; The Wedding Banquet ; The Ice Storm ; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ; Ride with the Devil ; and The Hulk were all Good Machine movies, and Mr. Schamus had a co-writer credit on all of them.

In 1997, Mr. Schamus and Mr. Hope added a third partner, former Miramax International vice president David Linde, who founded Good Machine International, a division that made real money handling the international sales of movies like Talk to Her , The Apostle , and-improbably but lucratively- Bride of Chucky .

The new division helped its parent company remain technically autonomous for longer than most of its contemporaries. By the late 1990's, Miramax had been sold to Disney, October to Universal. In 2001, the Shooting Gallery folded in a flurry of finger-pointing.

But on May 2, 2002, Mr. Schamus and Mr. Linde stunned their film-world colleagues by announcing that they would merge Good Machine with Universal's specialty-films unit, USA Films. Mr. Hope would start a new production company called This Is That and have a first-look deal with Focus.

In The Village Voice , Anthony Kaufman called it "a date on which to pin our grief" about "the death of American independent film."

IFP/New York executive director Michelle Byrd, who has a vested interest in the proliferation and health of New York's small production companies, was not surprised at the move.

It was a defining moment. Mr. Schamus, after all, always had a stronger stomach for industry politics. Some even suggested that this move might lead to Mr. Schamus' ascension to the top of a whole studio like Universal.

"When one company is seen as a life force of an industry, it can only carry the weight of that mantle for so long," she said. "Things evolve."

"James Schamus is an incredible writer and producer and a man who truly loves movies," said Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein through a spokesman. "So it is only natural and fitting that he would run a film company. He and David Linde are terrific partners."

"James has always followed me slavishly," said a garrulous Tom Rothman, who has run an independent film company (Samuel Goldwyn), a studio specialty division (Fox Searchlight), and is now chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment.

In the course of his wheeling and dealing, Mr. Schamus maintained his reputation as Hollywood's resident intellectual. Fluent in Danish, he last year finished his Ph.D. on the Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer. Taking pleasure in good cooking, good cigars and good Scotch, Mr. Schamus is very much the Upper West Side academic; he has lived in the neighborhood since 1988 and has an energy-efficient home in increasingly trendy (and edgy) Columbia County.

Director Bart Freundlich said that his most lasting impression of Mr. Schamus came during the editing on Mr. Freundlich's 1997 movie The Myth of Fingerprints . Mr. Freundlich remembered visiting the producer at home. The two sat outside on Riverside Drive with glasses of Scotch and talked about the films that they loved: Nashville , Five Easy Pieces .

"It was so hugely civilized," said Mr. Freundlich. "I know it sounds pretentious, but it wasn't. It was wonderful."

Richard Peña, Mr. Schamus' Columbia colleague who runs the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said that in December 2001, when the society celebrated Marlene Dietrich's 100th birthday by screening four of her films, Mr. Schamus was so excited that he called him personally.

"He just kept thanking me so profusely, saying that this has made his day, made his Christmas," said Mr. Peña.

An enthusiasm for Josef von Sternberg doesn't exactly guarantee a guy a seat at the Ivy these days, but Mr. Schamus' un-Hollywood demeanor is nevertheless accepted in a town where box office is the bottom line.

"The great thing about Hollywood, no matter what anybody tells you, is that it is an absolute, utter meritocracy," said Mr. Rothman, considering Mr. Schamus' unlikely dual role as urbane professor and Hollywood suit. "Nobody cares who you are, what you are, where you came from. If you make hits, that's all that matters."

Philosopher King

Mr. Schamus grew up in Los Angeles, and was briefly an undergraduate at St. John's College in Maryland. But the Great Books school, where students follow a prescribed course that includes Plato and Aristotle, didn't suit him, and he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. There, he almost specialized in Milton before going on to get his master's and eventually that Ph.D.

He was doing some adjunct teaching at Yale University in the late 1980's when he met Mr. Hope, then a script reader at New Line, and they began to build the partnership that would become Good Machine.

It was around then that he was hired as an associate professor at Columbia University. He created a class called "No-Budget Producing," which is still a part of Columbia's film curriculum. He has also taught classes on Hong Kong cinema, B-movies and the American western. His "Seeing Narrative" class, which is so popular that students must apply, requires reading Plato and Hegel.

Mr. Schamus, who lives with his wife of 14 years, acclaimed novelist Nancy Kricorian, and their daughters Nona, 11, and Djuna, 7, in a Columbia apartment-"He has great housing!" moaned Ms. Holofcener, the director and Columbia graduate-is still a full-time faculty member at the university, and his title is now "Professor of Professional Practice." Thanks to a special deal, he teaches a full schedule of classes in the fall and gets the spring semester off, and his pattern hasn't changed with his new job. Director of undergraduate film studies Annette Insdorf told The Observer that Mr. Schamus has volunteered to teach a senior seminar for the first time this fall, a responsibility that will require him to guide the projects of a dozen film majors.

"He uses his brain for good, not for evil," said Mary Jane Skalski, a producer who worked for Good Machine from 1993 to 1999. "He can talk to a 12-year-old about skateboarding stuff."

But a retiring, bumbling academic doesn't simply fall into a job as a studio executive.

"He's probably got the highest I.Q. of any studio executive," said producer Marcus Hu, Mr. Schamus' friend and frequent collaborator. "But he could be talking about something very intellectual and then just turn on a dime and he'll know all about marketing plans."

It's a thin dime. When asked once by a reporter whether his career had been accidental, Mr. Schamus replied: "I think the non-Darwinian approach to the narratization of one's professional life would stress the accidents-but at the same time, as we all know, if it is pure accident, then there is no narrative." A smarty-pants like that may be likely to rankle silicone-friendly Hollywood as much as he ups its average I.Q. statistics.

After Mr. Schamus' May 11 New York Times piece about The Hulk , a Variety story gently mocked him. After quoting a snippet of the Times piece about how The Hulk would provide "the opportunity to explore a particularly complex member of the heroic tribe," the Variety reporters wrote simply, "Whoah, dude."

And then there was the 2000 IFP/West Independent Spirit Awards, where Mr. Schamus gave an address- cum -film-seminar that had the sun-soaked audience rushing to the oxygen bar.

When Filmmaker magazine asked Mr. Schamus to reprint the address, he wrote that "since the speech was, if I do say so myself, a bit of a bomb," he would submit a revised version.

Mr. Schamus' printed speech now looks prescient.

Concerned with the growth of "super transnational global media empires"-likeAOLTime Warner- which had taken to releasing independent films, Mr. Schamus urged his cohort to stop "pretending to be storming the castle when in fact 'we' are inside it."

He also wrote of Todd Solondz's controversial Happiness , which was returned to Good Machine for distribution because "the Seagram company, which owns Universal … didn't want anything to do with the movie."

Mr. Schamus now runs part of that company, though Seagram itself was swallowed by Vivendi in 2000.

Mr. Schamus also suggested that his colleagues should worry "not so much about 'independent film'" as about independence itself: "the preservation of some form of civic space in which freedom of expression is … the exercise of a fundamental right."

Mr. Schamus declined to sit for an interview, but in an e-mail, responded briefly to some questions posed by The Observer . As for how his intellect is regarded in Hollywood, Mr. Schamus wrote, "My brain is tiny compared to [ICM chairman] Jeff Berg's."

Because Mr. Schamus declined an interview for this report, his Vivendi-Universal colleagues-including Universal Pictures chairwoman Stacy Snider, Vivendi Universal president and chief operating officer Ron Meyer, former Vivendi Universal Entertainment chief executive Barry Diller, Mr. Linde and Mr. Hope-also declined to comment, at Mr. Schamus' request.

Controlling the publicity around a major movie is not a unique endeavor in Hollywood. Nor is it unique for Mr. Schamus, who is known for his involvement in everything including the posters for any of the movies he produces or distributes.

A much-ballyhooed Super Bowl ad for The Hulk left fans fearing that their beloved creature would look like Donkey Kong-bulky but bouncy, altogether fake. Showing so much of the monster before the C.G.I. effects were finished was a mistake.

In his e-mail, Mr. Schamus responded to a question about the Super Bowl ad, writing: "The studio had an impossible task on its hands-how to sell a big summer blockbuster without having the film ready at hand. I think they've done a great job." Repeating a phrase he has used elsewhere, Mr. Schamus called the Super Bowl–age Hulk "a zygote."

His degree of involvement surely played into this year's Oscar race, during which Mr. Schamus found himself at the helm of a company with two real contenders, Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and Roman Polanski's The Pianist . Far From Heaven had early buzz, especially for its performances, but lead actress Julianne Moore was also nominated in the supporting category, effectively splitting her chances of winning. The Pianist gathered unexpected steam midway through the Oscar season.

Focus was described in an April Variety story as having been forced to make "a Sophie's choice" between the two films, and as having "picked The Pianist " when it came to campaign support. Though a Focus spokeswoman maintained that the company gave equal support to The Pianist and Far from Heaven , weighing films against each other is a common responsibility for executives during Oscar season.

For Mr. Schamus, picking The Pianist would have meant a break from his past: His second film as a young producer was Mr. Haynes' Poison in 1991.

The Pianist scored major Oscar upsets with a Best Actor Award for Adrien Brody, and a Best Director award for the exiled Mr. Polanski.

Thousandth Limo

"Look, [making films with] no money isn't fun, despite the romance of it," Ms. Zalaznick said, reflecting on Mr. Schamus' rise. "You do it out of passion and ultimately joy and prestige. So now he's added money to the mix. That is an economic necessity. It's definitely a choice, but a necessary choice."

But, she argued, it is important to challenge the choices of any rising star.

"When you get out of your first limo you think one thing about yourself," she said. "When you get out of your thousandth limo you think something else. It's the film lovers' responsibility to challenge you. I don't think it's a bad thing to take the limo. And I don't think it's a bad thing to be challenged."

But perhaps the greater challenge for Mr. Schamus will come if The Hulk is judged a hit. Some old fellow-travelers in the low-budget film world will dismiss it as expensive hackery. Perhaps more importantly, there will be those in Hollywood who wonder how much money was left on the table, what with no sex and smallish explosions.

Quibbles aside, should The Hulk pass with philosophers and audiences alike, Ms. Zalaznick pointed out that Mr. Schamus will be faced with the hardest question that Hollywood asks of its most successful men: "Who do you want to be compared to?"

Ms. Zalaznick elaborated, "Is it David Puttnam? Is it Darryl Zanuck? Is it Irving Thalberg? It's all about the forever, you know."

The question is whether, when challenged, Mr. Schamus-writer, professor, producer, company man, family man, Dietrich fan-just might have to choose.

-Additional reporting by Jake Brooks