The brothers agreed to temporarily retain some oversight of the Miramax imprint when they left Disney in 2005, in order to properly follow through on all the books they’d signed up before they left.

According to Weinstein Books president Rob Weisbach, he and his staff moved out of Miramax’s offices at 99 Hudson Street on September 30^th and are now operating out of a new location at Cortlandt and Church Sreets.

But the look on Ms. Westheimer’s face as she looked up—way up—into Mr. O’Neal’s puffy, sleepy eyes was one of sheer joy; a joy that, were this any other place, would have been suspect on a day that reacquainted America with the real costs of war.

But this was not just any place. This was the Vanity Fair Oscar party in chilly Los Angeles, a tent pitched adjacent to the paradigmatic Hollywood insiders restaurant, Morton’s, in which the considerable forces of Condé Nast had been marshaled to provide a coolly coddling environment where none of the plasma screen televisions that punctuated the pastel-Mondrian-esque décor were tuned to the 24-hour news channels, and where hawks and doves, ex-lovers and mortal enemies could co-exist. In a world which creeps evermore toward the acidically divisive black-and-white world espoused by The New York Post and the Fox News Channel, the Vanity Fair party—even in its admittedly pared-down state—seemed, on the surface, a surreal microcosm of ignorant bliss in which the owner of those media outlets, Rupert Murdoch, his heir Lachlan, and their wives could be seen lolling on couches near the rear of the tent while a crowd of what their tabloid would call “peaceniks”—acting couple Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, Oscar winner Adrien Brody, Buddhist Richard Gere and Best Supporting Actor winner Chris Cooper—prowled the party space.

But even though the effervescent laughter and small talk that rose up in the tent suggested that the crowd was grateful for these few hours of escape, the war still managed to infiltrate the party. Like the butterfly that beats its wings in one part of the world and causes a thunderstorm in another, the great fetid beast of death and carnage had dug its talons into the desert of Iraq and set off an earthquake that rattled the cosseted wards of Bel Air, Beverly Hills and Los Feliz during the hallowed festivities of Oscar week.

Step out of LAX after a plane flight from New York and suddenly your tension feels like a suit of medieval armor. The fear of terrorism that permeates our city is as hard to find in Los Angeles as a good newspaper. But a different kind of tension was palpable as the war in Iraq and the 75th Oscars ceremony headed for a collision.

It was the kind of tension that results when an event that is both the most resonant and the most frivolous celebration of American culture takes place, for the first time in almost 30 years, while, thousands of miles away, a city of barely legal men and women were amassing for a prolonged risking of their lives for this country. As Talk to Her director Pedro Almodóvar told the Los Angeles Times, “The Oscars and the war will always be at odds.”

And you could feel that tension ratchet to a formidable level on the evening of March 19, when, shortly after the first anti-aircraft fire was spotted in the green, nightscope-lit sky of Baghdad, NBC’s Tom Brokaw said that what was about to unfold was “probably the most televised event in the history of mankind.” That was a boast that once belonged to the Academy Awards—but no longer.

And, in the days that followed, as the brave journalists in Iraq and Kuwait adjusted their body armor and readied their broadcasts, the reporters who annually embed themselves in the fleshy flanks of Hollywood’s Oscar pageant began to get the calls informing them that because of the situation in Iraq, the press was no longer invited to cover the main events that surrounded the Oscars. Just as the Academy had decided to roll up its red carpet, so did Vanity Fair and the forces at InStyle.

Hollywood has a disregard for the press that’s pretty comical—when you’re not suffering the brunt of it—and suddenly there was a legitimate reason to give us the back of their hand.

At least in one case, the political situation was used as an excuse to disinvite reporters in the same way that Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David used his mother’s death to duck his social responsibilities. On March 20, the day that The New York Times reported that art dealer Larry Gagosian and three business associates—including newsprint mogul and art collector Peter Brant—had been sued by federal prosecutors for allegedly “cheating the government of $26.5 million in unpaid income taxes, interest and penalties on art they bought using a shell corporation,” Mr. Gagosian’s publicist, Nadine Johnson, left a message about an art opening for Ed Ruscha at his Beverly Hills gallery that evening: “It’s just too crazy with the war escalating and the current political climate—we didn’t think it was appropriate,” Ms. Johnson said.

Oddly enough, one of the few companies that didn’t bar the press from their events was also the company that, this year, took a lot of guff from the press: Miramax. On March 22, the company held its annual pre-Oscars cocktail party at the St. Regis Hotel in Century City, where, instead of holding their annual Max Awards skits in which they lampoon the movies they made, Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, speaking in a quiet voice as if that’s what the times dictated, showed a “Best Of” reel of skits past, which exhumed the ghost of Tina Brown and Talk magazine. At the end of the evening, cabaret singer Michael Feinstein came onstage and tried to encourage the audience to sing along with him to “God Bless America.” There was some eye-rolling, but at least one person joined in with gusto: tycoon Marvin Davis, who was wheeled into the hotel auditorium in a wheelchair and then transferred to the throne-like chair that seems to follow him wherever he goes. Frankly, Mr. Davis did not look like a man who was making a run for Universal. He looked frail and thin and his dark head of hair had gone gray. But he sang along with Mr. Feinstein.

And when it was over and the crowd began filing back out into the party, we asked Mr. Davis if his presence at the party meant that if he acquired Universal he would attempt to hire the Weinstein brothers.

“Who?” Mr. Davis said.

Instead of canceling their parties, Hollywood’s elite just canceled the press. “Nobody wants to go out and be the happy idiot waving in their ruffled dress while there’s bombs dropping over Baghdad and our helicopters are crashing,” said Howard Bragman, a Los Angeles–based public-relations executive—his firm is called 15 Minutes—who has done work for Monica Lewinsky, among other clients, and now teaches his profession at the University of Southern California.

“And it’s taken for granted that the media’s a pain in the ass,” he said, before adding with a little smile: “So when you power guys come from New York it scares us small-town people here.”

Mr. Bragman had one other observation. “If Bill Clinton were President he would have delayed the war until after the Oscars,” he said.

But the luxurious, Hollywood-centric 90’s were long gone, and while a CNN report said that President Bush was urging Americans to take a load off and “embrace” the NCAA basketball tournament, no official voice seemed to be sticking up for the Academy.

By Sunday, March 23, the producers of the Academy had found the appropriate response. The dresses and the jewels were a little more tasteful, but hardly the Amish wear that was predicted to be modeled. And though the red carpet was eliminated, the press was not. Rather, they were pruned back to useful still photographers and a few ABC stand-up reporters interviewing mostly the home team Disney and Miramax stars.

However, if there is one thing that saved the Oscars on March 23 it was Steve Martin and the stage patter that he and the writers put together. “Well I’m glad they cut back on all the glitz,” Mr. Martin said of the vanished red carpet. “That’ll send them a message.”

Although the chill Mr. Martin lost some of that cool when a few jokes into his opening monologue, he realized that the crowd was with him. He had an intimidating—even brutally scary—task on a day when the bloody, gritty reality of the war had first faced American viewers. “I thought I’d rather be Saddam Hussein than Steve Martin,” writer Fran Lebowitz said later. But Mr. Martin’s face seemed to flush with relief and gratitude as he turned the theater into a kinder, gentler and cleaner version of a Friars roast, replete with anachronistic jokes about the shortest guy in the house, still Mickey Rooney (“Stand up, Mickey!”) and the horniest guy in the house, still Jack Nicholson. Mr. Martin’s comeback to Best Documentary winner Michael (Bowling for Columbine) Moore’s “Shame on you, Mr. Bush!” rant was a keeper: “The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo,” Mr. Martin said. And among the memorable unplanned moments was the freaked-out look on Michael Douglas’ face when he saw the mug shot of a strung-out looking Nick Nolte. That’s not funny, Mr. Douglas seemed to be thinking. That’s how I look in the morning.

As went the Oscars, so went the Vanity Fair party. The organizers did away with the red carpet, pared down the guest list, kept the glitz quotient medium cool, and in either a stroke of counterintuitive brilliance or just plain forgetfulness, left a yellow can of Original Scent Lysol in the men’s-room stall. Which may have been the McGuffin indicating that at the last minute, they had decided to let some reporters cover the post-show proceedings.

But first there was dinner. Mr. Murdoch, his pregnant wife Wendi Deng, son Lachlan and his wife Sarah, rocker Elvis Costello and his new musical girlfriend Diana Krall, Mr. O’Neal, Ms. Fawcett, Tonight Show host Jay Leno, writer Gore Vidal, Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, his date for the evening, Marisa Berenson, and Mr. Gagosian dined on steak and French—not Freedom—fries. Mr. Gagosian’s presence was especially interesting given that, in the days leading up to Oscar week, former New York Post editor Vicky Ward had been calling art-world sources and telling them she was writing a piece on the beleaguered art deal for the magazine.

After the dessert plates were cleared, many of the guests repaired to the couches and ottomans in the tent where D.J. Steve McMahon was laying down a low-key, jazz- and swing-inflected vibe. Among those who stayed in the restaurant proper were producer and The Kid Stays in the Picture documentary subject Robert Evans, who stood talking to agent Jeff Berg as Mr. Evans’ wife attempted to phone director Roman Polanski—who directed Chinatown for Mr. Evans when he ran Paramount in the 1970’s—in Paris, from the reservation phone. Mr. Evans wasn’t able to reach the director, whom he used to refer to affectionately as the “Polack.”

In the tent near the D.J. booth, Fran Lebowitz sat on one of the couches, enjoyed a post-prandial cigarette and gave Mr. Martin’s performance a thumbs-up.

At that moment, recently departed USA Networks chief executive Barry Diller bounded up to Ms. Lebowitz. The media mogul looked like he’d just come from the office after a day of crunching Expedia’s numbers. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and a tie.

“Do you know what this is?” Mr. Diller said triumphantly to Ms. Lebowitz.

The writer squinted at Mr. Diller and said she couldn’t see what he was brandishing.

“This is the order I placed for In-N-Out Burger,” he said, then walked away. Though some frills had been sacrificed in the interest of decorum—press line, live band, Mike Ovitz—the In-N-Out burger counter at the back of the tent, apparently a favorite of the magazine’s editor in chief, Graydon Carter, had been spared.

Ms. Lebowitz said nothing as Mr. Diller high-tailed it back to his burger.

What did she make of Mr. Moore’s speech?

“Michael Moore was right,” she said. “But the amount of self-regard …. ”

Just a few feet away, on the other side of Mr. O’Neal and Ms. Fawcett and her Zang Toi dress with the replica of the American flag sewn into one fold of the train, Mr. Vidal was struggling to his feet using his cane to steady himself. What did he make of the disconnect between the Oscar hoopla and the war in Iraq?

Mr. Vidal gave a perturbed look, but then he said: “Weird similarities.” He fiddled a bit with his cane, then added: “You know the U.S. could lose this war.” He mentioned Korea, Vietnam. “But the boastfulness,” he said, “of the President and the media.” Then he headed for the exit.

Passing Mr. Vidal on the way into the tent were singer Aimee Mann and her husband Michael Penn, brother of Sean. Ms. Mann seemed to hesitate a bit when she spotted Mr. Costello and the pleasingly zaftig Ms. Krall in the slowly growing crowd. Back in the early 90’s, Ms. Mann was known as Mr. Costello’s protégé—they co-wrote “The Other End of the Telescope” and there were always those rumors—and when she spotted the singer, she whispered something to her husband before plunging over to give Mr. Costello a big hug. Introductions were exchanged and then suddenly, Ms. Krall looked a little sullen and Mr. Costello reached out and massaged her back reassuringly.

It was a small gesture, in a night of small gestures. There were few abrupt moves, loud squeals, demonstrations of dirty dancing or excessive public displays of affection, save for Ms. Kidman—a bit too giggly and daft under pressure to be a real movie star—who, upon seeing the determinedly tweedy Royal Tenenbaums director Wes Anderson screamed, “Wes, OH MY GOD!” and dragged the pie-eyed director into a more private corner of the room.

Otherwise, it was wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and lots of discreet magic-finger massages, like the one that Sheryl Crow gave to Mr. Carter, even though Mr. Carter spent a lot of the evening with a petite beauty named Anna Scott, whose father was once in the employ of Queen Elizabeth. (“She’s a friend,” Mr. Carter said the following day.) Later in the night, Mr. Diller and his wife Diane von Furstenberg held hands as they walked through the tent, and in what seems like a case of stepfather worship, Ms. Von Furstenberg’s son Alex appeared at the party with a shaved head.

About the most brazen sexual display all night involved the model Iman and Vanity Fair fashion director Elizabeth Saltzman Walker taking turns licking a lollipop that bore the photographic image of Dennis Quaid, just one of the magazine’s cover guys that had been turned into a celebrity sucker. The second-most brazen involved Heather Graham, who seemed intent on making a connection with U2’s front man Bono, though he had come with his wife, Ali Hewson. At a moment when the Mrs. didn’t seem to be around, we saw Ms. Graham batting her eyes at Bono and overheard her telling him, “me and my friends were saying we’re not going to the bathroom, we’ll miss U2.”

Ms. Graham also seemed to be commiserating with the singer over the band’s loss to Eminem for the Best Song Oscar. “This town loves success,” Bono could be heard saying as he explained that the rapper’s movie, 8 Mile, had not cost that much to produce and had made a lot of money whereas Gangs of New York, for which U2 had written “The Hands That Built America” had cost more and not fared as well.”

As midnight approached, Oscar winners began to tumble in: Ms. Kidman, Adrien Brody, Peter O’Toole and Chicago producer Marty Richards, who still seemed to be a little gaga from the experience. Mr. Richards, who had the Democratic committee’s Robert Zimmerman following him with his Oscar in hand, seemed to be realizing all the people he had forgotten to thank in the heat of his ecstasy. “It’s going to cost me a fortune in Variety ads to make it right,” Mr. Richards said. Vince Vaughn came, and Secretary’s Maggie Gyllenhaal said she found it “interesting” that Chelsea Clinton had told her brother Jake in Interview magazine that Hillary Rodham Clinton had liked her movie. A lot. But then Ms. Gyllenhaal added a bit of a caveat to the Senator’s coolness quotient: “Although Hillary Clinton seems to have taken all sorts of weird uncommitted political strategies lately,” she said. She meant, it seemed, the war.

Nominee Martin Scorsese came and left like a ghost. Jack Nicholson didn’t come nor Warren Beatty, who’s been a regular there for years, and the party seemed a little light on the kind of heavy hitters—like Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts—that have appeared in the past, although Mr. Cruise didn’t seem to be at the Oscars.

Near the airlock where the tent connected to Morton’s, Mr. Cruise’s former Days of Thunder producer Jerry Bruckheimer stood nursing a Heineken. Given that Mr. Bruckheimer is producing Profiles from the Front Line, a Cops-like series following the exploits of our armed forces in Afghanistan, we asked him how he felt about Iraq coverage he had seen on television.

“It’s rough,” Mr. Bruckheimer said. The sad thing is those kids don’t make the policy. They enforce it. And, he said, “I was just saying that this is the first war to be shown in living color.” The producer added that because of the relationships forged with such Bush administration officials as Donald Rumsfeld, “we could have gone right into Iraq with them,” he said, “but we couldn’t get ABC to pay for it.”

It was the most direct conversation about the war overheard all night. And Mr. Carter concurred that once the party started, he didn’t hear much about the war either. “I heard a lot about it at dinner,” he said. “But I think people were relieved not to have to talk about it.”

But there were moments when the tension caused by the situation in Iraq seemed to manifest itself in other ways. As reported in dailies, ICM agent Ed Limato threw a vodka drink on Page Six editor Richard Johnson over items he had written about his former client Jennifer Lopez and a current one, Mel Gibson. Mr. Johnson said Mr. Limato seemed drunk. Mr. Limato denied the war had anything to do with his actions, but said: “I hope he likes vodka.”

And Tim Robbins took Washington Post Reliable Source columnist Lloyd Grove to task. Mr. Robbins declined to comment about it at the party, but, as Mr. Grove wrote, the peacenik’s comments to the reporter were: “If you write about my family again, I will fucking find you and I will fucking hurt you.”

Jennifer Lopez and her fiancé Ben Affleck showed up without any bodyguards in tow. A Vanity Fair source said that there was never a discussion over whether Ms. Lopez, who usually travels with an entourage the size of a football team’s offensive line, would arrive with any more muscle than Mr. Affleck. The couple stayed a long time, too, lounging on couches across the room from Mr. Murdoch and near the back of the tent. One guest said that he heard the couple talking about real estate in Savannah, Ga.

Hovering near them was the hip-hop artist Eve, who sported what looked like a tattoo of a bear paw above each of her breasts. They were real, she said, “and they hurt” when she got them. This being her first Vanity Fair party, Eve said she was “buggin’” because “I’m a fan of the movies and I’m studying acting right now and these actors keep coming up to tell me that they love my stuff.”

Like who?

“Like Ben Affleck,” Eve said.

Did that mean that Ms. Lopez was throwing some shade her way?

“No, I love J. Lo,” Eve said.

But the celebrity who seemed to be spreading the most love was Ms. Hudson, who seems destined to be the future mayor of Hollywood. The star of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days seemed cover all the bases in the tent. Toward the beginning of the night, she could be seen chatting with fashion designer Donna Karan.

“Men, you know,” Ms. Hudson said to the designer.

“Men I don’t know,” replied Ms. Karan.

Mr. Brody arrived with his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy. He was besieged the moment he arrived at the party. His speech had struck a nerve, especially the part in which he talked about his friend from Queens, Tommy Zarabinski. Mr. Brody said his buddy was serving in the Army, but he seemed reluctant to offer up more information about his friend. He said he didn’t know if Mr. Zarabinski was seeing action. And when we asked him if anything his friend had said to him had influenced his articulate speech, Mr. Brody gave a sharp look and said, simply, “No.”

And then the crowd swallowed him up.

Harvey Weinstein toured the party in a rumpled tux, but, unlike previous years, where he presided over intimate after-parties in some secret location, he was only good until 2 a.m. “I don’t think anybody was in the mood,” Mr. Weinstein said on March 25. “The show had to go on, and the show did go on,” he said, “and if you saw Entertainment Tonight, you saw that some of our guys in Iraq watched the Oscars and they were why the show was worth doing.”

A year ago, after trying to sell Chocolat at the Oscars, Mr. Weinstein and Miramax officials had vowed to return to making and acquiring the movies that had made their reputation in the first place. And that’s pretty much what they did with Gangs, Chicago, Frida and The Quiet American.

“It feels great,” Mr. Weinstein said of the company’s performance. “He even took some credit for Ms. Kidman’s Oscar given that, he said, Miramax owned half of The Hours.” “And we won the Big One,” he said.

But they also lost a big one, when Mr. Scorsese didn’t get the Best Director Oscar despite a heavy campaign that rankled some Academy members. “Listen, I think that Marty was pleased that Roman won,” Mr. Weinstein said. “But what can I say. Gangs is the quintessential New York movie. We’ll get it more than $80 million. It’s a profitable picture for us.” And that, Mr. Weinstein said, rankled the West Coast establishment. “They don’t want Marty to succeed,” he said, his voice taking on some heat. “I don’t care what kind of campaign is run. When Raging Bull was released, practically nothing was done for his Oscar campaign. And he didn’t win then either.

“It’s more about Marty and his maverick filmmaking style, which, I think, scares the shit out of people,” Mr. Weinstein said. “Maybe I fought too hard, but when I talked to Marty about previous campaigns virtually nothing had been done for him.”

And Mr. Weinstein called the flap over the Robert Wise column endorsing Mr. Scorsese’s nomination as best director of Gangs “bullshit.”

“With Marty it’s always the same thing. Los Angeles versus New York,” Mr. Weinstein said. “And he does not march to that beat.

“They want people to bleed without blood,” Mr. Weinstein said, then added that he had asked a “high-ranking” Academy official why they do this to us, and that the official replied, “Because you can take it.”

But then Miramax’s co-chairman seemed to calm down a bit. He said that Miramax was going to sit down with the Academy and seek the formation of “some oversight committee” that would clarify the rules about Oscar campaigns and put an end to the backbiting.

“Look, I love the Oscars. I love the Academy. I love all of it,” he said, sounding like a man who was looking at a medium-rare T-bone steak with all the trimmings. “The Oscars,” he said, “were good for the movies this year. This year, the Oscars grew up.”

Mr. Weinstein actually looked pensive.

“Yeah,” Mr. Weinstein added. “We did too.”

As the clock passed 2 a.m. the tents began to empty.

Near the airlock, Colin Farrell barreled up to Peter O’Toole and asked if he could be photographed with him. Dark-haired and twitchy, Mr. Farrell put his arm around Mr. O’Toole and said something to him about the Lawrence of Arabia star being “the elder statesman.” Mr. O’Toole listened as he clumsily inserted a cigarette into his posh holder and then put the contraption in his mouth. The cigarette hung at a 45-degree angle from the holder, but Mr. O’Toole made no effort to fix it. Instead, he stroked the back of Mr. Farrell’s neck as the amateur photographer snapped the photo.

And then it was over, Oscar night 2003.

The crowd moved onto the sidewalk. Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones star Natalie Portman stood with a group of friends, talking about school reunions. One of the valets—a strapping, unkempt Jason Schwartzman doppelganger—looked into the crowd of V.I.P.’s and nudged one of his fellow footmen. “She was checking me out,” he said, with a smile.

Hope springs eternal, but somehow, even in this heady setting hope seemed out of reach. It was impossible not to think that halfway around the world, girls and boys their age in fatigues were probably talking about something else.

Over in Century City, at the St. Regis Hotel, the Miramax party, usually an until-dawn affair, was already closing down and Harvey Weinstein, though his team’s Chicago had won the Best Picture, was nowhere to be found. Upstairs in the hotel’s penthouse, trays laden with sausage, eggs and other forms of breakfast went untouched. A few journalists walked forlornly through the empty rooms looking for star power, but there was none. Down in the St. Regis lobby a hotel employee stood cutting open freshly delivered bales of the next day’s New York Times. The headline read: “ALLIES AND IRAQIS BATTLE ON 2 FRONTS; 20 AMERICANS DEAD OR MISSING, 50 HURT.”

The episode lasted what seemed like a good 30 seconds. Mr. DiCillo stood there, his head bowed, choking back sobs, while the audience sat in stunned silence. Who could blame him? Mr. DiCillo came to Sundance knowing that he would have to confront the anxiety-inducing chasm that exists between his considerable professional achievements and--the standard by which all filmmakers are increasingly judged--his minimal box-office performance. Although Mr. DiCillo’s four previous films, including the critically lauded Living in Oblivion, have all been small-budget affairs (Double Whammy cost $5 million to make), not a single one has made money. And at 47, an age which he disclosed with reluctance, rejection isn’t the character-building experience that it used to be. When he came to Park City, Mr. DiCillo was painfully aware that if he wanted to continue in this profession that bedeviled and beguiled him, he had to convince some distributor to take a chance on his new film.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow for a guy whose résumé should put him in the New York wing of independent filmmaking’s hall of fame. Back in the 1980’s Mr. DiCillo, a former actor, served as the cinematographer for Jim Jarmusch’s dark ground-breaking hit, Stranger Than Paradise. Then he set out on his own, using New York as a backdrop in every one of his five films. He gave a young Brad Pitt one of his first screen roles as a pompadoured would-be Ricky Nelson in Johnny Suede. He virtually made the career of actress Catherine Keener, who co-starred in three of Mr. DiCillo’s films before moving on to big-budget Hollywood pictures and an Academy Award nomination for Being John Malkovich. And, most significantly, critics often rank Living in Oblivion, Mr. DiCillo’s wry spoof about an independent-film shoot (which starred Ms. Keener), among the best independent comedies of the 90’s.

Certainly, Mr. DiCillo is not some starving artist living in a Williamsburg walk-up. He and his wife, Jane Gil, a successful horticulturist, share a three-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive that overlooks the Hudson River. And the long blue overcoat he wore throughout the festival looked like it came straight from Barneys.

Yet when it comes to his professional life, Mr. DiCillo has never stopped struggling. The process of funding, producing and marketing his films remains fraught with misery. A good part of Mr. DiCillo’s difficulties stem, no doubt, from the fact that his four previous movies opened to general indifference. When it comes to the unprofitability of his films, Mr. DiCillo tends to lay the blame--in angry heaps--at the feet of his distributors. “My films aren’t hip and underground, nor are they Hollywood movies. They’re somewhere in between. I think people just don’t know quite what to do with them,” he said.

And even though Double Whammy, a comedy about a hapless New York City cop, was one of just a dozen movies that picked up distributors at this year’s festival, Mr. DiCillo left little doubt among the Park City crowd that the independent-picture business has been one long chain of pain for him. “I’m not being overly negative. I’m not being cynical. This is my fifth movie,” he said following the film’s premiere. “Every one of them has been an excruciating series of trying to get people to give me minuscule amounts of money.”

Although Sundance’s founder, the actor and director Robert Redford, and Mr. Gilmore are clearly fans of Mr. DiCillo, and have invited him to coach younger talent at Sundance’s summer institute, the festival they preside over has arguably become less hospitable to filmmakers like him. Mr. Redford conceived of Sundance in 1981 with the idea that grosses weren’t everything. The box office was Hollywood’s standard, and Sundance was different. The more personal the film, the better, the mantra went. But that perspective has faded in the 10-day buying and talent-hunting spree that Sundance has become. The term “independent” has been stretched to apply to anything from a no-budget hand-held video to high-budget spectacles such as Miramax’s Chocolat and USA Films’ Traffic. And the grosses and the promise of sell-through now mean a great deal.

Like the film industry, Sundance now focuses on youth--which Mr. DiCillo no longer has in his corner--and celebrity. Even though there was a relative dearth of stars at this year’s festival--not even Mr. Redford showed--Mr. DiCillo has never benefited from a cult of personality in Park City. While Quentin Tarantino and even Michael Moore are swarmed by fans and Entertainment Weekly reporters, Mr. DiCillo can walk down Main Street without much risk of being recognized.

Still, as he wiped away his tears at the Eccles Theater, Mr. DiCillo told the crowd that Sundance had been “one island of security in this vast ocean of emptiness.” But once he regained his composure, the director returned to a familiar refrain. He told the crowd how funding for Double Whammy had collapsed repeatedly over three years and had experienced a financing meltdown as recently as nine months ago. “I was in an extremely dark state of mind,” he said.

Slight, handsome, with a shock of dark hair, Mr. DiCillo has an actor’s careful grooming and bearing--from certain sides he resembles François Truffaut’s alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud, complete with Mr. Léaud’s distrusting look. But Mr. DiCillo’s European-film-star looks are offset by a Rodney Dangerfield–like demeanor. Despite his many liabilities, he continues to make films.

And he has a knack for talking about how little respect he gets. At the Double Whammy premiere, Mr. DiCillo told the crowd that he approached the festival expecting the worst. “In my defense, I would say that the essence of my films was never presented to the public,” he said. It is something that he has often said about his career.

Double Whammy is much like Mr. DiCillo’s other comedies, which tend to be of the screwball variety. Set and shot entirely in New York and New Jersey, the film opens with a serial killer ramming his pickup truck through the glass façade of a burger joint and opening fire. Detective Ray Pluto (Denis Leary), a customer, pulls out his gun, but slips and injures his back. It’s left to a young boy to pull the trigger on the psychopath. Pilloried in the press as a “loser cop,” Pluto fights depression, while his partner (Steve Buscemi) decides to come out of the closet. To keep his job, Pluto seeks out a chiropractor (Elizabeth Hurley), and a love affair blossoms.

Meanwhile, Pluto’s West Side building seems to have a subplot in every apartment. Downstairs, two screenwriters dressed like Tarantino-esque hoods assemble a script from independent clichés, and the irascible super’s daughter, whose father won’t let her get a tattoo, arranges for two drug dealers to murder him in exchange for her dad’s Christmas tips.

The crime takes its cues from actual headlines. In October 1995, Arelis Batista, 18, a student at Mother Cabrini High School, arranged for two neighborhood toughs to kill her overprotective father. In a twist worthy of a student’s caper script, the armed duo showed up at the family’s 152nd Street apartment when the father, William Batista, was still at work. Their visit ended with Arelis shot and her mother and brother murdered in their sleep.

But though Double Whammy features Mr. DiCillo’s comic take on a New York story, it is also holds a funhouse mirror up to his career. “This film was in reaction to some of the ways people had responded to my films,” Mr. DiCillo said as he attacked a plate of eggs following the second sold-out screening of his film. It wasn’t just that Pluto, like Mr. DiCillo, has a bad back that can turn on him any second, or that the director has had to cohabit with Tarantino clones. “When the lieutenant says at the beginning, ‘Do I have your attention now?’, that’s me asking: ‘Is that what it takes to get your attention, to have a guy walk into a burger joint and blow people away? Is that what it takes?’” He shook his head in anger, then added: “I don’t see this as just a cop movie. It’s about how our emotional life can keep us from seeing things.”

By the time Mr. DiCillo reached Park City, Double Whammy had already tasted rejection. The script left distributors cold, even with Ms. Hurley and Mr. Leary attached. (Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges and Michael Keaton were among the actors considered to play Pluto. Mr. DiCillo insisted Mr. Leary was the best.)

No mini-studios raced to produce the quirky tale. Sony Pictures Classics, Fine Line Features, the Shooting Gallery and Fox Searchlight passed on the project, as did Mark Urman, president of Lions Gate Films, which ended up buying North American rights to Double Whammy for $1 million and agreeing to commit another $1 million in advertising. “A script is all promise and a movie is a finished product,” Mr. Urman said when asked why he had changed his mind.

“We weren’t sure what kind of performance Denis Leary would give,” said Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics. After the premiere, he conceded that Mr. Leary “gives a good one.”

Fox Searchlight vice president Joe Pichirallo also chose not to produce it. “As a former reporter who covered cops, I would love to find a police story, a procedural,” he said. But in Mr. Pichirallo’s opinion, Double Whammy was not the kind of project that “the critics and others are going to say … is a distinctive, unusual piece of work that ordinarily Hollywood wouldn’t make or that the mainstream studios are not making.

“I loved Living in Oblivion,” Mr. Pichirallo added. “Here, I just didn’t find the story that compelling. I wasn’t afraid of it. I just didn’t know where it was going to find an audience.”

That kind of talk infuriates Mr. DiCillo, who has been lectured repeatedly that Living in Oblivion died at theaters between New York and Los Angeles because it was an inside joke presented to a largely ignorant public. “Isn’t that the distributor’s job, to make people aware of the film?” Mr. DiCillo asked. “Is Apollo 13 only a film for astronauts? Is Backdraft only a film for firefighters?”

“DiCillo’s had four films with four distributors, so it’s always their fault?” wondered Eamonn Bowles, president of the Shooting Gallery, a film company that also passed on Double Whammy.

Annoyed that distributors snubbed his project on the front end, Mr. DiCillo refused to screen Double Whammy for them before Sundance. The movie’s fate was too fragile to risk any rumors stigmatizing it in the marketplace. He had reason to be wary. Johnny Suede, which Miramax bought sight-unseen on the advice of a stringer who saw it at a European festival, died after a tepid review from the New York Times film critic at the time, Vincent Canby. Living in Oblivion, initiated with money loaned by the actors who believed in it, failed to reach an audience beyond the critics.

Mr. DiCillo’s last two films, 1996’s Box of Moonlight and 1997’s The Real Blonde, also suffered from brief runs in theaters. The latter film, a $10 million entertainment-business satire that starred Ms. Keener, Matthew Modine and Daryl Hannah, was perhaps the bigger disappointment. After producers at Lakeshore Entertainment “bullied” Mr. DiCillo into cutting a scene of frontal nudity, the distributor, Paramount, pulled its ads when the movie opened weakly. “I still wake up at night thinking about that,” Mr. DiCillo said. “I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

After several tries, Mr. DiCillo found a protector to guarantee that Double Whammy would get made. Nine months earlier, when financing had dried up for the third time, Mr. Leary’s agent showed the script to a new company, Gold Circle Films, a three-person firm in Beverly Hills that links investors to film projects. Much of the money behind Gold Circle comes from former Gateway Computers executive Norm Waitt, who is listed as the firm’s executive chairman and one of the film’s executive producers. Gold Circle president David Kronemyer told The Observer that Mr. DiCillo’s track record wasn’t a problem. “I think the elements were being criminally undervalued by everybody who looked at it,” he said.

Indeed, he had enough faith in Mr. DiCillo’s script to add another million to the $4 million budget. Early indications proved him right. A company called Myriad Pictures recently paid Gold Circle $5 million for the foreign rights to Double Whammy, a price justified partly by the physical comedy and New York locations, but mostly by Ms. Hurley’s international salability. By the time Double Whammy premiered at Sundance, the Myriad sale had already earned back the film’s entire budget.

During the question-and-answer session that followed the Jan. 20 premiere of Double Whammy, Mr. DiCillo, without naming names, denounced his previous distributors and the financiers who had abandoned him as “the sleaziest, freakiest people I have ever encountered in this business.” Then he headed to the post-premiere party at the River Horse Café, where bidding for the film intensified.

With Miramax retreating from the aggressive, scorched-earth acquisitions strategy it has used in past festivals, other buyers could afford to take more of a wait-and-see posture. (Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein made a brief appearance, most visibly in the lobby of the Eccles, wearing a hat from the effects-heavy suburban drama Donnie Darko.) Still, according to Mr. Kronemyer, Miramax was interested in the film, as were Universal Focus, Lions Gate and HBO. “All the people who turned it down beforehand came back,” he said.

At a post-screening question-and-answer session the following morning, the cheering crowd revived Mr. DiCillo from the effects of the previous night’s revelries. When someone asked him whether he had thought of working in Hollywood, a sly expression crossed the director’s face. He responded that he had passed on a number of teenage vampire films that were offered to him after Johnny Suede opened. He said he had also foregone a chance to direct Mr. Pitt’s actress wife, Jennifer Aniston, in a script in which she dies and comes back to life as a prostitute. “I thought it was too complicated,” Mr. DiCillo smirked, and his adoring audience laughed away.

Though Double Whammy was still unsold at this point, Mr. DiCillo indulged his penchant for distributor-bashing at the screening. “I cannot in any way comprehend why The Real Blonde did not play in theaters as long as five other movies released at that time,” he told the appreciative crowd--although when asked to name those films, he could only recall Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy.

And the critics who maligned him for, among other things, casting a celebrity such as Ms. Hurley in an “independent” film were even lower forms of life. “Why don’t they say that about Sean Penn’s stupid fucking shit with Jack Nicholson?” he fumed.

The next day, Jan. 22, Mr. DiCillo was vindicated. Before a midnight screening, the director announced that Lions Gate had bought the film for $1 million, plus a promise to spend at least $1 million on advertising. Mr. DiCillo’s team had turned down higher offers from HBO (to make sure the film got a strong theatrical release) and from Gabriel Films, a company no one had heard of. Mr. DiCillo would not risk being frustrated again by an inexperienced distributor. While his exhausted wife waited in the lobby nursing a cold that she blamed on the stress of selling the film, Mr. DiCillo stood proudly in the back of the auditorium, watching Double Whammy unspool. “Just look at that dissolve,” he said, as the image of a hash-zonked Leary watching a TV workout show played on the screen.

At that moment, Mr. DiCillo’s pain seemed endurable. His father, a Marine Corps colonel, had taught him to finish anything he started. “Sure, I’ve thought of opening a women’s lingerie store,” he said. “But what else am I going to do, work in an office somewhere?”

Lions Gate has plans for Double Whammy, which will probably hit theaters in the fall. Ms. Hurley, a photogenic darling of both men’s and women’s fashion magazines, should bring Mr. DiCillo the kind of press that could lead to a large, more mainstream audience. “You can put her on every talk show on the planet, and you can’t necessarily do that with Steve Buscemi or James LeGros,” Mr. Urman said. He should know. Though he is currently the co-president of Lions Gate, Mr. Urman was the publicist who handled Mr. DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion.

That wry look crossed Mr. DiCillo’s face again. Noting that the loser cop becomes a hero and lands Manhattan’s sexiest chiropractor, he predicted that Double Whammy would attract wider audiences than his previous films. “Even police might come to see Pluto’s story,” he said. “Look who he ends up with.”

After much death, mayhem and depression, and a few erotic spinal adjustments, everything turns out O.K. at the end of Double Whammy. But Mr. DiCillo has a way to go before he can say that everything’s copacetic with him as well. At press time, few critics had weighed in on his film, save for Variety’s David Rooney, who wrote that Double Whammy was “slight,” with “erratic energy levels and inconsistent rhythm,” and “fragile” commercial prospects. On the phone from New York, Mr. DiCillo was disappointed and, once again, angry: “This film’s going to be really dependent on reviews to build its audience. I’m just disgusted. I see the shit out there and people salivating. All I can say to him is, ‘Thanks, man.’”

“I feel O.K.,” the director replied wanly.

For a moment, I wondered how the bearded, fierce-eyed Scorsese of the 70’s--the one whom Los Angeles police once mistook for the Hillside Strangler--would have responded to Mr. Leno’s idiotic questions. But I chose instead to find perspective in the masterfully edited clip from Gangs that Mr. Scorsese had brought along to show.

In the scene, the terrifying Nativist Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) invites his former assistant, Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), up on the stage of a social hall so that he can throw some knives at her.

“One more time for the sweet souvenir,” Bill says to Jenny to coax her up.

Of course, what follows is far from sweet: It is terrifying and humiliating and, judging from the look in Jenny’s eyes, a departure from what she expected to happen. But she toughs it out because, really, there is nothing else she can do. Her relationship with Bill is complicated, but she agreed to the terms long ago.

Seen in the context of The Tonight Show, “One more time for the sweet souvenir” sounded like a mantra. Mr. Scorsese wants the sweet souvenir of filmmaking--the Oscar--for a movie that took 23 years to wrestle onto the screen. To better the odds that he will get it, he has allowed himself to become part of a white-knuckle sideshow run by a guy with whom he has an equally complex relationship: Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein. As Mr. Scorsese told Mr. Leno: “We’re the Sunshine Boys.”

It was much more complicated than that. After clashing during the production of Gangs, Mr. Weinstein was now down in the Miramax boiler room doing whatever he does to get Mr. Scorsese an Oscar. “I am gonna go door-to-door for Marty,” Mr. Weinstein told Entertainment Weekly in its March 7 issue. “Marty would like to get one of those golden guys.” In reality, he was trying to work even more ambitious magic by securing the Best Director statuette for Mr. Scorsese and the Best Picture Oscar for Chicago.

Meanwhile, Mr. Scorsese embarked on a Magical Mystery Media Tour that has taken him everywhere but the local Gristede’s to promote his film. On Feb. 13, he headed to Harvard for the Hasty Pudding award, where he was photographed next to undergraduates in gold wigs and massive bras; 10 days later he was in Britain, waiting to receive their Oscar counterpart, the BAFTA award. Roman Polanski won it. There he was shot nuzzling the cheek of Chicago star Catherine Zeta-Jones, looking like one of the Hasty Pudding boys. Three days after that, he headed to the Loews Cineplex Lincoln Square, where the American Museum of the Moving Image presented a discussion called “Martin Scorsese’s New York.”

Then it was on to Los Angeles for a whirlwind weekend. On Feb. 28, Mr. Scorsese got the 2,217th star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, following Eddie Murphy and Andy Devine. The following day, he received the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award (although Chicago’s Rob Marshall won as best director); then, on Monday, it was The Tonight Show. And on March 8--just 10 days before the Oscar ballots have to be in--Mr. Scorsese will be fêted back on his home turf, when he is presented with the Writers Guild of America East’s Evelyn F. Burkey Award “for one whose contributions have brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere.”

Dignity, always dignity.

Of course, when you’re that visible, some knives are bound to thrown. On Feb. 3, the screenwriter William Goldman drew blood with a column he penned for Variety. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am sick unto death of feeling guilty about Martin Scorsese,” Mr. Goldman wrote.

“This year, more than ever, it’s like there’s a Byzantine plot to get Scorsese the honor,” he continued. “The Hollywood parties he is attending must make him want to barf, but there he is, glad-handing anyone in the vicinity who is an Academy member …. ”

And then Mr. Goldman wrote that Mr. Scorsese did not deserve the Oscar this year because Gangs of New York “is a mess.”

Well, Mr. Goldman--who has won two Oscars for his screenplays--is the Bill the Butcher of screenwriting. He’s scary smart about movies, and he knows exactly where to stick the shiv for maximum effect. I remember a piece he wrote for Premiere magazine about Saving Private Ryan, right before the 1998 Oscars, that made me look at the revered picture in a much more critical light.

But his take on Mr. Scorsese, while it made some interesting points, didn’t have the same effect on me. It felt more personal than analytical.

I agree with one thing, though: I’ll bet Mr. Scorsese’s not enjoying his pre-Oscar tour. In some of the photos, he looks a bit like Jenny Everdeane during the knife-throwing spectacle. I’ve probably spent a few days with him over the course of four years--all in the context of an interview--and each time I’ve left feeling ashamed of myself. It’s hard to explain, but when you meet a guy who grew up with a fraction of the opportunities you had and yet somehow acquired a knowledge of film, literature and history that dwarfs yours, you can feel like that.

And people who are that smart--no matter how well they suffer fools--tend to die a little bit inside when they have talk-show hosts asking them: “You feel lucky?”

But cringe as I have at these encounters, I don’t feel guilty--or sorry--for Mr. Scorsese. If I may borrow a phrase from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Mr. Scorsese’s vanity is stronger than his misery. You don’t make movies the way Mr. Scorsese makes movies without a big, healthy raging bull of an ego.

And he’s operating in 21st-century media hell. Mr. Goldman won his Oscars in 1970, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and in 1977, for All The President’s Men--long before the media proliferation that brought us CNN, MSNBC, the Fox News Channel, the Drudge Report and dozens more cable channels and Web sites that ooze and blob their programming hours to Oscar white noise. For the producers, it’s imperative to create what one veteran of the Oscar wars called “momentum”: keeping the movie fresh in the minds of Academy voters, known to cast their votes for the last movie they saw.

Mr. Scorsese is hardly alone on this front. On Feb. 27, Chicago’s Mr. Marshall was fêted at the equivalent of a refrigerator opening when his caricature was hung on the wall at Sardi’s. And though Roman Polanski, Oscar-nominated director of The Pianist, can’t campaign in the States because of some outstanding legal troubles, others have helped carry the torch for him. In the last days of February, Samantha Geimer, the victim of the statutory-rape case that caused Mr. Polanski to flee the U.S. in 1977, rose out of the darkness to write a column for the Los Angeles Times and to appear on Larry King Live, suggesting in both venues that Mr. Polanski’s art should be judged separately from his private life.

By the way, there’s another good reason for all of this: It fuels the box office. “If you go to the casino and you don’t put a lot of money down at the table, you don’t get a lot of money back,” one Oscar-tested friend explained. Gangs, which has made over $75 million in the U.S. so far, according to Miramax, received “the gift of 10 nominations.” That is “like getting 10 reasons to see the movie. And if they don’t put their earnings down now, they’re not going to double or triple what they can make back.”

That’s a factor that Mr. Scorsese, at age 60, can’t afford to ignore, given that Hollywood judges his work by its box office. As one senior-level studio executive in Los Angeles told me: “People criticize John Wayne for getting an Academy Award, but John Wayne, I think, contributed to this business in a heavy way. Aside from Marty Scorsese’s enormous talent, I’m not sure what he’s contributed. He’s contributed a lot to himself--he’s an enormously talented guy--but he doesn’t care about making money for anybody.”

That’s the kind of L.A. condescension toward New York that Mr. Weinstein has fought since he brought Pulp Fiction to the Oscars in 1995. And that’s got to be one of the reasons that Mr. Weinstein is throwing his extra-grande ass into getting Mr. Scorsese the Best Director award. Mr. Weinstein is a Gangs fighter himself. If this were the 19th century, he’d probably have a jar of severed ears on his desk--and mine would be among them--but he long ago made the conversion that takes place two hours and seven minutes into the movie, which Mr. Goldman cited as an example of bad storytelling: Leonardo DiCaprio, as Amsterdam, meets with Boss Tweed to turn his gang’s size into political clout by getting an Irishman on the ballot for sheriff.

I liked it. It reminded me of how Mr. Weinstein parlayed his power as the scrappy distributor and producer into an influential position with the Democratic party. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

This is another campaign. As Mr. Cocks said: “What Harvey’s stated ambitions are for Marty, I really don’t know. I know that he’s extremely fond of Marty and extremely respectful of Marty. That doesn’t mean that he’s not a rough and tough character around Marty but those things go side by side in a way that is sometimes very difficult to reconcile.”

By the way, there’s one more reason I don’t feel guilty for Mr. Scorsese. I think he’s made a great movie. I’m going to let him, Mr. Weinstein and the voting members of the Academy worry about the statue. I understand why Mr. Scorsese wants the Oscar. I remember when, on the night of the 1998 awards, Shakespeare in Love writer Tom Stoppard let me hold the statuette he’d won. While he ate scrambled eggs, I got to feel like James Cameron.

But, tell me, do you remember what year Titanic swept the awards? I don’t. But I will never forget Robert De Niro’s bloody fingers in Taxi Driver, his dressing-room speech in Raging Bull, the amazing Copacabana tracking shot in GoodFellas. Those moments have become part of the fabric and mythology of this country.

And Gangs of New York has scenes, moments exhumed and conjured, that are just as memorable--scenes that only Mr. Scorsese could have done. The opening scene, where the Dead Rabbits come up from the bowels of the Old Brewery is “the Irish literally marching out of history,” said Kevin Baker, the author of Paradise Alley, a novel about the Five Points district. “They’re coming up through a thousand years of darkness and oppression and neglect and they come up through these levels and they kick open the door … and there’s America. There’s nothing, no other attempt that I’ve seen on film to get quite so deep into the American historical psyche.”

Gangs is not a perfect movie--Ms. Diaz’s romance with Mr. DiCaprio is flimsy, and the movie doesn’t breathe--but it is hardly a mess. It is, as Mr. Scorsese told me back in November, “an impression of time.”

I like Mr. Cocks’ description even more:

“You can create the mythology of the Eastern just the way that people created the mythology of the old West,” he told me.

So Martin Scorsese and his writers and all his movie-besotted associates got together with Mr. Weinstein, and made an Eastern. First they lived it, then they made it, beautifully and bloodily, right down to its earned last shot. And now, way out west the Nativists are treating the violent, messy paean to New York and its director and producer exactly as a town under assault would react: with a little scorn and some sullen respect. Gangs may get it, and it may not. But Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Scorsese have named the time and the place.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s called gang warfare.

The other day, someone who will remain nameless accidentally left The Transom alone in an office. In that office was a copy of the Spy book, which comes out in a few months and will supposedly retail for 40 bucks or so.

The nice publicist from Miramax Books recently declined to send over a copy, claiming there just weren't any on hand. OH YEAH? WHO'S ON HAND NOW, SISTER?

Behind the Music: Inside the Editor's Studio....

It's big. It has lots of pictures. It's gorgeous. Great reprints, great photos. Can't wait. It's also got lots of opportunities for editors Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen and George Kalogerakis to autohagiographize. But really—if they don't, who will? And why shouldn't they? You should know, you've been ripping them off for years! (Yes you!)

Your Friends and Editors

The theme of the movie is sort of, You never know what can happen in life. Here were a group of schlemiels, the Cosmos, who were suddenly playing with the greatest soccer player in the world. The best of them, Shep Messing, accepted this sudden change with awe and humor.

The guy who covered the Cosmos for the Daily News, soccer rebbe David Hirshey, also shows up in the film, and makes the same point in his article about the movie on the ESPN site: "I realized my love of soccer was an easy pass to a life I would have never otherwise known. "

This World Cup has launched Hirshey (an editor at HarperCollins; he did my last book) as a writer. hen again maybe Dillon just wanted to get up close to the Gisele Bundchen doppelganger who was whispering in my ear as I scribbled my name on her program. Or perhaps he had overheard her opening line to me -- "I've heard so much about you, I always wanted to meet you." I'm just glad Dillon had moved on before the Brazilian bombshell uttered her next line: "My mother was Pelé's longtime assistant. I wasn't born when you were doing your book with him."

Following my lifelong policy of always being gracious to 19-year-old, thong-wearing daughters of old friends, I said, "I remember your mother," as memories of 1977 began dancing in my head like a Pelé stepover. There will never be another Cosmos. Big names may come over here eventually -- Beckham, Ronaldo, Zidane -- but they'll all be past their prime, and they'll be doing it for the money. We had guys who were at their peak -- Beckenbauer, myself, [Johan] Neeskens -- and we were on a mission."

Whether the Cosmos accomplished the mission is open to debate. Certainly, they planted the flag of soccer in the soil of the grassroots movement that today has 18 million American kids playing the sport in the United States.

And they did one other thing that may be even more enduring: They made me into a movie star.

If you want to employ the “Queen of Buzz,” you have to give her a good salary—something Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse is famous for. And you have to give her something Condé Nast is less famous for: a castle.

Because a million-dollar salary may seem like a lot. But when you’ve got Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz, Judith Regan, Salman Rushdie and Tom Brokaw to entertain, it’s just mad money.

And at Condé Nast, entertaining on that scale is part of the job.

But what happens when an editor leaves? The late, great Neal Travis used his column in the New York Post to try to get to the bottom of Ms. Brown’s domestic arrangements with Mr. Newhouse when she left the company to go work for the Weinsteins and Miramax.

“I couldn’t get any reliable guide to what Brown will be earning at the Disney-owned Miramax, but a figure of $2 million a year was being bandied about,” he wrote.

But that was nothing.

“More important, I understand the studio will pick up the paper on the $3 million East Side townhouse Newhouse financed for Brown and her husband, Harry Evans, when Harry was running Si’s Random House.”

And that’s still nothing.

“Miramax will also cover a parcel of other loans and advances Newhouse made over the years when Brown was his magazine star. (Remember, the studio’s parent company paid Mike Ovitz something like $130 million to go away after one year on the job—in comparison, Brown’s deal is pocket change.)”

When her new magazine debuted, it was called Talk. Who wants to talk in a mangy two-bedroom on West End Avenue?

And as anyone who has perused the real-estate sections in recent years knows all too well, that’s very likely where you might live on a million a year.

It happens all over the company. Over 20 Condé Nast executives, editors and even a couple of writers have either been loaned money directly by the company (sometimes listed as the overarching corporation, Advance Publications) or had the media giant secure mortgages in order to purchase properties, according to city records. With Condé Nast acting as the secured party, buyers can potentially get far better rates than going through the process as an individual.

And it speaks volumes about the differences between Condé Nast and its closest competitors that no other Manhattan media company seems to do as much to thrust its editors into whatever social milieu they are meant to be writing for and about.

Last week, The Observer reported that Ariel Foxman, the former editor of the recently defunct men’s shopping magazine, Cargo, got some help from Condé Nast in securing a loan to purchase a West Village co-op apartment. Indeed, in February 2005, about a year and a half after the magazine launched, Mr. Foxman bought an oversized one-bedroom spread that had listed for $625,000. That sounds about right for Cargo!

As one of the largest privately held companies in the country, Condé Nast does not have to justify real-estate loans to a roomful of nitpicky shareholders, like those who might fill a board meeting over at Time Warner. In addition, Condé Nast has no fiduciary duty to even turn a profit, leaving their (notoriously secretive) company practices their own business.

And they are unwilling to explain things to the press either.

“As a privately held company, we do not discuss our policy,” said Condé Nast spokeswoman Maurie Perl. (On a personal level, Ms. Perl did not feel obliged to discuss her own policy, including the purchase of a West End Avenue co-op in 2001, where Advance served as the secured party).

The practice stretches back at least as far as Alexander Lieberman, the renowned art director of Vogue who later became editorial director. His mortgage on an East 70th Street home was secured by the company.

Whether it goes much further back, into the era when magazines really were a gentleman’s profession, populated with people rich enough and influential enough to cover the spheres they lived in, rather than be moved into the spheres they were covering, is hard to tell: Records are spotty before the early 1990’s.

Back then, when James Truman—who quit his position as editorial director after not being given an art magazine to run (and subsequently fled to Andalucía)—purchased his West Village loft, the company secured the loan.

At the time of the purchase, Mr. Truman was still the editor in chief at Details; however, Condé Nast promoted him shortly after to editorial director (and Mr. Newhouse reportedly gave him a silver Porsche as a token of his affection).

Located in a prewar building, Mr. Truman’s 2,000-square-foot apartment includes three bedrooms and two baths, and was purchased for $715,000. Thankfully, Mr. Truman didn’t end up selling it when he left for Spain, because the 47-year-old editor is now back in New York working for the Canadian über-publisher of the art world, Louise T. Blouin MacBain.

Although Vogue editor Anna Wintour reportedly makes $2 million per year—and enjoys a clothing allowance, chauffeur and ritzy hotel stays—it costs a lot more to maintain a luxurious Manhattan lifestyle.

In 1983, Ms. Wintour and her future husband, Dr. David Shaffer, purchased a MacDougal Street townhouse. That same year, Ms. Wintour made the leap from senior editor of New York magazine to creative director of American Vogue.

After a stint in England editing the British edition, she returned to the States in 1988 to assume the helm of the American edition. That year, the couple took out a $200,000 mortgage on the Greenwich Village townhouse, with Condé Nast lending the money, according to city records.

A few years later, Ms. Wintour left MacDougal Street but stayed in the neighborhood.

In May 1992, Ms. Wintour purchased a four-story townhouse on Sullivan Street for $1.4 million. But the 22-foot-wide townhouse also provides; Ms. Wintour with access to the lush private garden that borders MacDougal and Sullivan streets.

In February 1993, Ms. Wintour took out a $1.64 million mortgage, with Condé Nast serving as the lender. To date, there’s no record of a mortgage being paid off, according to city records. (When the couple separated in 1999, after 15 years of marriage, the renowned doctor dropped $1.7 million on a four-story townhouse on Downing Street.)

Of course, while Ms. Wintour has a reputation for not partying late into the night, she has hosted a number of stylish soirées in the Sullivan Street home. Among the countless boldface names attending were Bill Clinton, David Bowie, André Balazs, Oscar de la Renta, Sarah Jessica Parker, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg and Richard Gere.

Despite the luxurious digs and famous faces chomping on hors d’oeuvres, things haven’t always gone smoothly on Sullivan Street.

In October 2004, Ms. Wintour’s former nanny, Lori Feldt, was awarded $2.2 million in a settlement over the inhalation of toxic fumes. The nanny was rendered unconscious due to fumes from the paint thinner used to remove red paint doused on the sidewalk and steps by animal-rights activists (who have hounded the fur-wearing editor for years).

According to city records, a top Vogue staffer also received loans from Condé Nast. Creative director Grace Coddington borrowed over $400,000 toward her West Village apartment.

For Graydon Carter, who ascended to the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, the Newhouse family has always been especially generous.

Through two loans, Mr. Carter and his wife Cynthia were reportedly able to live in a first-floor apartment in the Dakota, the legendary Upper West Side co-op whose most famous resident, John Lennon, was murdered outside of it in 1980.

But in February 1999, the couple gave up apartment living and headed downtown. They purchased a four-story townhouse on Bank Street for $2 million. At the time, the sprawling home had been listed for $2.5 million and had lingered on the market for about half a year.

Built in 1844, the Greek Revival townhouse includes six bedrooms, double parlor, sitting room, terrace and several fireplaces.

Shortly thereafter, the couple took out a $3.841 million mortgage, with Advance lending the money, according to city records.

But the good life didn’t last too long; in the summer of 2000, the couple separated. However, it took almost five years to figure out who would get the house.

In February 2005, Mr. Carter—who remarried a few months later—purchased the townhouse from his estranged wife for $3,018,076. And his dealings in the West Village have continued: In December 2005, it was reported that Mr. Carter is investing in a new restaurant, located at the now-closed Ye Waverly Inn.

In July 1998, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Remnick—who had been penning New Yorker features for the previous six years—took over the helm of the magazine after Ms. Brown left (and Michael Kinsley didn’t accept the job fast enough, according to a widely circulated e-mail at the time).

While Mr. Remnick and his wife, Esther Fein, were already living in an Upper West Side co-op, the couple decided to upgrade to a prewar building 14 blocks uptown.

Almost two years after taking over as the fifth editor in The New Yorker’s storied history, Mr. Remnick signed a contract for a West 86th Street duplex that had been listed at $3.25 million, according to a database shared by real-estate brokers. And Advance secured the loan, according to city records.

Built in 1905, the 14-story building includes a full-time doorman and concierge and a roof deck with exceptional views. Mr. Remnick’s 2,500-square-foot apartment features four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a wood-burning fireplace.

But Mr. Remnick is not the only New Yorker editor who has been helped by Si and Co.: Deputy editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy was lent $180,000 by Advance toward the mortgage on her Brooklyn home.

And when Adam Gopnik—best known for writing about bohemian life in Paris—purchased an Upper East Side co-op apartment, the company secured the mortgage.

While things haven’t worked out as well for Mr. Foxman, Lucky editor and company “It” girl Kim France continues to rule the magalog world.

Ms. France—who covered music and pop culture for the much-lamented Sassy and later at Spin—was first asked to create a prototype shopping magazine in the late 1990’s. By February 2001, Lucky became a monthly and started raking in the advertising dollars.

A little over a year later, Ms. France and her former husband, Michael Morse, purchased a three-story townhouse in Carroll Gardens. The 16-foot-wide home includes 2,960 square feet of interior space, according to city records.

Shortly after the deed was filed, the couple took out a $1.351 million mortgage, with Advance lending the money.

After splitting up, Ms. France and Mr. Morse sold the house in December 2004 for $1.793 million. On the same day, they paid off the mortgage.

In the summer of 2005, Ms. France—who has now moved back to Manhattan, on lower Fifth Avenue—discussed the divorce in her Lucky editor’s letter.

In 2003, Jim Nelson, who was then executive editor of GQ, took over the position of editor that was filled for years by the legendary Art Cooper.

About a year after taking over as editor, Mr. Nelson moved into a co-op apartment in a Chelsea brownstone, with Advance serving as the secured party, according to city records.

The five-story, 22-foot-wide building includes 10 residential units.

—additional reporting by Riva Froymovich

If you want to employ the “Queen of Buzz,” you have to give her a good salary—something Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse is famous for. And you have to give her something Condé Nast is less famous for: a castle.

Because a million-dollar salary may seem like a lot. But when you’ve got Tony Blair, Paul Wolfowitz, Judith Regan, Salman Rushdie and Tom Brokaw to entertain, it’s just mad money.

And at Condé Nast, entertaining on that scale is part of the job.

But what happens when an editor leaves? The late, great Neal Travis used his column in the New York Post to try to get to the bottom of Ms. Brown’s domestic arrangements with Mr. Newhouse when she left the company to go work for the Weinsteins and Miramax.

“I couldn’t get any reliable guide to what Brown will be earning at the Disney-owned Miramax, but a figure of $2 million a year was being bandied about,” he wrote.

But that was nothing.

“More important, I understand the studio will pick up the paper on the $3 million East Side townhouse Newhouse financed for Brown and her husband, Harry Evans, when Harry was running Si’s Random House.”

And that’s still nothing.

“Miramax will also cover a parcel of other loans and advances Newhouse made over the years when Brown was his magazine star. (Remember, the studio’s parent company paid Mike Ovitz something like $130 million to go away after one year on the job—in comparison, Brown’s deal is pocket change.)”

When her new magazine debuted, it was called Talk. Who wants to talk in a mangy two-bedroom on West End Avenue?

And as anyone who has perused the real-estate sections in recent years knows all too well, that’s very likely where you might live on a million a year.

It happens all over the company. Over 20 Condé Nast executives, editors and even a couple of writers have either been loaned money directly by the company (sometimes listed as the overarching corporation, Advance Publications) or had the media giant secure mortgages in order to purchase properties, according to city records. With Condé Nast acting as the secured party, buyers can potentially get far better rates than going through the process as an individual.

And it speaks volumes about the differences between Condé Nast and its closest competitors that no other Manhattan media company seems to do as much to thrust its editors into whatever social milieu they are meant to be writing for and about.

Last week, The Observer reported that Ariel Foxman, the former editor of the recently defunct men’s shopping magazine, Cargo, got some help from Condé Nast in securing a loan to purchase a West Village co-op apartment. Indeed, in February 2005, about a year and a half after the magazine launched, Mr. Foxman bought an oversized one-bedroom spread that had listed for $625,000. That sounds about right for Cargo!

As one of the largest privately held companies in the country, Condé Nast does not have to justify real-estate loans to a roomful of nitpicky shareholders, like those who might fill a board meeting over at Time Warner. In addition, Condé Nast has no fiduciary duty to even turn a profit, leaving their (notoriously secretive) company practices their own business.

And they are unwilling to explain things to the press either.

“As a privately held company, we do not discuss our policy,” said Condé Nast spokeswoman Maurie Perl. (On a personal level, Ms. Perl did not feel obliged to discuss her own policy, including the purchase of a West End Avenue co-op in 2001, where Advance served as the secured party).

The practice stretches back at least as far as Alexander Lieberman, the renowned art director of Vogue who later became editorial director. His mortgage on an East 70th Street home was secured by the company.

Whether it goes much further back, into the era when magazines really were a gentleman’s profession, populated with people rich enough and influential enough to cover the spheres they lived in, rather than be moved into the spheres they were covering, is hard to tell: Records are spotty before the early 1990’s.

Back then, when James Truman—who quit his position as editorial director after not being given an art magazine to run (and subsequently fled to Andalucía)—purchased his West Village loft, the company secured the loan.

At the time of the purchase, Mr. Truman was still the editor in chief at Details; however, Condé Nast promoted him shortly after to editorial director (and Mr. Newhouse reportedly gave him a silver Porsche as a token of his affection).

Located in a prewar building, Mr. Truman’s 2,000-square-foot apartment includes three bedrooms and two baths, and was purchased for $715,000. Thankfully, Mr. Truman didn’t end up selling it when he left for Spain, because the 47-year-old editor is now back in New York working for the Canadian über-publisher of the art world, Louise T. Blouin MacBain.

Although Vogue editor Anna Wintour reportedly makes $2 million per year—and enjoys a clothing allowance, chauffeur and ritzy hotel stays—it costs a lot more to maintain a luxurious Manhattan lifestyle.

In 1983, Ms. Wintour and her future husband, Dr. David Shaffer, purchased a MacDougal Street townhouse. That same year, Ms. Wintour made the leap from senior editor of New York magazine to creative director of American Vogue.

After a stint in England editing the British edition, she returned to the States in 1988 to assume the helm of the American edition. That year, the couple took out a $200,000 mortgage on the Greenwich Village townhouse, with Condé Nast lending the money, according to city records.

A few years later, Ms. Wintour left MacDougal Street but stayed in the neighborhood.

In May 1992, Ms. Wintour purchased a four-story townhouse on Sullivan Street for $1.4 million. But the 22-foot-wide townhouse also provides; Ms. Wintour with access to the lush private garden that borders MacDougal and Sullivan streets.

In February 1993, Ms. Wintour took out a $1.64 million mortgage, with Condé Nast serving as the lender. To date, there’s no record of a mortgage being paid off, according to city records. (When the couple separated in 1999, after 15 years of marriage, the renowned doctor dropped $1.7 million on a four-story townhouse on Downing Street.)

Of course, while Ms. Wintour has a reputation for not partying late into the night, she has hosted a number of stylish soirées in the Sullivan Street home. Among the countless boldface names attending were Bill Clinton, David Bowie, André Balazs, Oscar de la Renta, Sarah Jessica Parker, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg and Richard Gere.

Despite the luxurious digs and famous faces chomping on hors d’oeuvres, things haven’t always gone smoothly on Sullivan Street.

In October 2004, Ms. Wintour’s former nanny, Lori Feldt, was awarded $2.2 million in a settlement over the inhalation of toxic fumes. The nanny was rendered unconscious due to fumes from the paint thinner used to remove red paint doused on the sidewalk and steps by animal-rights activists (who have hounded the fur-wearing editor for years).

According to city records, a top Vogue staffer also received loans from Condé Nast. Creative director Grace Coddington borrowed over $400,000 toward her West Village apartment.

For Graydon Carter, who ascended to the editorship of Vanity Fair in 1992, the Newhouse family has always been especially generous.

Through two loans, Mr. Carter and his wife Cynthia were reportedly able to live in a first-floor apartment in the Dakota, the legendary Upper West Side co-op whose most famous resident, John Lennon, was murdered outside of it in 1980.

But in February 1999, the couple gave up apartment living and headed downtown. They purchased a four-story townhouse on Bank Street for $2 million. At the time, the sprawling home had been listed for $2.5 million and had lingered on the market for about half a year.

Built in 1844, the Greek Revival townhouse includes six bedrooms, double parlor, sitting room, terrace and several fireplaces.

Shortly thereafter, the couple took out a $3.841 million mortgage, with Advance lending the money, according to city records.

But the good life didn’t last too long; in the summer of 2000, the couple separated. However, it took almost five years to figure out who would get the house.

In February 2005, Mr. Carter—who remarried a few months later—purchased the townhouse from his estranged wife for $3,018,076. And his dealings in the West Village have continued: In December 2005, it was reported that Mr. Carter is investing in a new restaurant, located at the now-closed Ye Waverly Inn.

In July 1998, Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Remnick—who had been penning New Yorker features for the previous six years—took over the helm of the magazine after Ms. Brown left (and Michael Kinsley didn’t accept the job fast enough, according to a widely circulated e-mail at the time).

While Mr. Remnick and his wife, Esther Fein, were already living in an Upper West Side co-op, the couple decided to upgrade to a prewar building 14 blocks uptown.

Almost two years after taking over as the fifth editor in The New Yorker’s storied history, Mr. Remnick signed a contract for a West 86th Street duplex that had been listed at $3.25 million, according to a database shared by real-estate brokers. And Advance secured the loan, according to city records.

Built in 1905, the 14-story building includes a full-time doorman and concierge and a roof deck with exceptional views. Mr. Remnick’s 2,500-square-foot apartment features four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a wood-burning fireplace.

But Mr. Remnick is not the only New Yorker editor who has been helped by Si and Co.: Deputy editor Pamela Maffei McCarthy was lent $180,000 by Advance toward the mortgage on her Brooklyn home.

And when Adam Gopnik—best known for writing about bohemian life in Paris—purchased an Upper East Side co-op apartment, the company secured the mortgage.

While things haven’t worked out as well for Mr. Foxman, Lucky editor and company “It” girl Kim France continues to rule the magalog world.

Ms. France—who covered music and pop culture for the much-lamented Sassy and later at Spin—was first asked to create a prototype shopping magazine in the late 1990’s. By February 2001, Lucky became a monthly and started raking in the advertising dollars.

A little over a year later, Ms. France and her former husband, Michael Morse, purchased a three-story townhouse in Carroll Gardens. The 16-foot-wide home includes 2,960 square feet of interior space, according to city records.

Shortly after the deed was filed, the couple took out a $1.351 million mortgage, with Advance lending the money.

After splitting up, Ms. France and Mr. Morse sold the house in December 2004 for $1.793 million. On the same day, they paid off the mortgage.

In the summer of 2005, Ms. France—who has now moved back to Manhattan, on lower Fifth Avenue—discussed the divorce in her Lucky editor’s letter.

In 2003, Jim Nelson, who was then executive editor of GQ, took over the position of editor that was filled for years by the legendary Art Cooper.

About a year after taking over as editor, Mr. Nelson moved into a co-op apartment in a Chelsea brownstone, with Advance serving as the secured party, according to city records.

The five-story, 22-foot-wide building includes 10 residential units.

—additional reporting by Riva Froymovich

1:30 p.m.

6 pounds, 10 ounces

Mount Sinai Hospital

Little Ella Joy Hiltzik, 2, is totally in love with her new baby sister. “Sometimes we have to be careful about how she expresses her love, because she loves hugging and squeezing,” said the girls’ father, Matthew Hiltzik, 33, the C.E.O. of Freud Communications, a strategic-communications firm he founded after departing as longtime head of corporate communications at Miramax. Mom, his wife of two and a half years, is Dana, 33, a speech therapist. Their long, slender Molly, who’s teasingly sleeping through some nights in the family’s Upper West Side two-bedroom, is named for Mr. Hiltzik’s great-grandfather Morris. “He used to say: ‘If you have $3 million, you want more. If you have three daughters, you know you have enough,’” Mr. Hiltzik said. “I’m on my way to appreciating what he’s saying.”