McGregor: "sparse butter-yellow hair"?

HBO already announced that Dianne Wiest and Chris Cooper will be playing the parents in HBO's forthcoming adaptation of Jonathan Franzen's novel The Corrections. Now director Noah Baumbach has named Ewan McGregor to play their son Chip, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

At the beginning of The Corrections, Franzen describes Chip this way: "Chip was a tall, gym-built man with crow’s-feet and sparse butter-yellow hair; if the girl had noticed him, she might have thought he was a little too old for the leather he was wearing." That sounds about right, except for the sparse hair part.

Richards.

British GQ gave Keith Richards its "writer of the year" award for his autobiography Life. The award was presented to Mr. Richards by Johnny Depp, whereupon Mr. Richards disclosed that Life was being made into a film. This is funny because there really is only one actor who might be qualified to portray Keith Richards in a film. Also Keith Richards looks so tan and healthy!

Add Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections to the list of novels by New York writers currently being fashioned into a series for HBO. What kind of series (mini?) is as yet unclear, but Noah Baumbach has reportedly signed on to direct.

Keith Gessen's play by play of the creation of his n+1 co-editor Chad Harbach's new novel, The Art of Fielding (out today), is in the print edition of the October issue of Vanity Fair. An expanded 17,000-word version is also available as a $1.99 e-book, where publishing gets glamorous Vanity Fair treatment: "In this e-book of sweeping scope and fascinating, behind-the-scenes detail, Gessen pulls back the curtain on the insular, fiercely political, and cutthroat literary world of Manhattan—a place where the 'Big Six' publishing houses, owned by multinational conglomerates, reign supreme, while smaller houses are left to fend for themselves."

At The Paris Review, Maurice Sendak speaks about the publication of his first book since 1981, Bumble-Ardy.

Mr. Scott will host a Times Talks panel with Mr. Crewdson in October and, at the artist's invitation, penned an essay to preface the eponymous book featuring the series.

"In my ordinary line of work I tend to keep a distance from the artists that I write about and not really talk to them and engage them, just because it's not really how it's done," he told The Observer, eyeing the room.  "It was really a treat for me to just kind of to be writing as a critic in a slightly different, more sympathetic way."

Mr. Crewdson was the man of the hour, with Gagosian photographers circling him to document his interactions, occasionally chatting with the throng ("Your hair is beautiful." "Oh, do you want me to turn around so you can take a picture of it?")

The photos on the wall were shot at the empty, decaying sets of Rome's Cinecittà movie studios — a departure from Mr. Crewdson's usually populated pictures, which are staged to look like stills from movies that never existed. "I just wanted to do something that felt very restrained and empty," he told The Observer. "Something that felt particular to the moment we're in, and I feel like these pictures reflect a certain kind of fragility and sadness, and beauty."

"I think this might be my favorite work of his," said Noah Baumbach, who made quite the entrance, accompanied by his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wes Anderson. "In some ways the artificiality almost makes them more real which is I guess what movies are like, right?"

The blurring of the lines can be, to use Mr. Scott's word, uncanny. "This is why, if you read the essay, it's got Freud all over it," he said. "I jumped into psychoanalysis, which is not my usual idiom, to kind of figure out what these pictures were doing."

As personalities poured in and out, the groups mingled. Mr. Scott could be seen chatting enthusiastically with Mr. Baumbach at one point ("We were talking about kids," the director later told The Observer). Among the attendees was the writer James Frey, and The Observer asked him what he's been up to.

"Working away, man," he said, chewing a green piece of gum. "Got a book coming out in April. It's about the messiah."

Is it a novel?  

"Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't really matter," he chewed. "I don't care what people call it, it's just a book. Doesn't matter."

Sanctuary runs at the Gagosian Gallery through October 30.

dduray@observer.com

Of course with the limited June release date (it hits theaters on June 5th, up against The Hangover) and indie rock music cue (Alexi Murdoch’s "All My Days", for collectors), Away We Go is being positioned as more like a sequel to Garden State than Kicking and Screaming. We guess that's fine for marketing purposes, but considering Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida wrote this new film, we assume the script has a little more meat on its bones than something written by Zach Braff—in a race for which movie has aged worse during the last ten years, Garden State narrowly beats out American Beauty. Speaking of which, there is also the matter of Mr. Mendes. We'd venture to guess the director has never even seen Garden State, but what he's obviously studied endlessly are Mike Nichols' The Graduate, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers, Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-drunk Love and the aforementioned Noah Baumbach oeuvre—the two-minute trailer features homage's and outright lifts from all of those movies and directors. Hey, if you’re going to steal, you might as well steal from the best.

Originally announced last May as Greenburg (with a "u"), with Mark Ruffalo and Amy Adams in mind to star, the film ran into some difficulties when Mr. Ruffalo was forced to bow out of consideration after the tragic death of his brother; Ms. Adams soon followed suit. The Wes Anderson-approved Ben Stiller replaced Mr. Ruffalo, and just yesterday, mumblecore stalwart Greta Gerwig signed on to replace Ms. Adams in the lead role. Additionally, our friends over at The Playlist (via Production Weekly's Twitter feed) report that Mr. Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, will make an appearance in the film as well.

Just from looking at the cast roster, our expectations for Greenberg are through the roof. As much as we would have loved to see Mark Ruffalo and Amy Adams (two of our favorites) in a Noah Baumbach film, the melding of these particular actors and talents seems both batshit insane and truly inspired. Between Mr. Baumbach, Mr. Stiller and Ms. Gerwig, there will be three decidedly different styles at work. Greenberg could be a Film Forum-member's wet dream; an amalgam of Mr. Baumbach, Mr. Anderson and Joe Swanberg with a dash of Mr. Stiller's absurdity. We can only hope that Mr. Baumbach hires Harris Savides to once again shoot all of his intense moments of dramatic strife and smart comedy. Our current cinematographer crush was responsible for Margot at the Wedding, a visual feast of dark and natural lighting that belied the actual movie. We imagine he'd be just the right type of guy to bring whatever Greenberg is supposed to be to life.

This past weekend's hilariously over-the-top (or utterly humorless, depending on who you talk to) edition hosted by Paul Rudd closed with a pre-taped sketch called "Clearing the Air" which was directed by Mr. Baumbach. Filmed on location at West Village restaurant Bellavitae, the short film felt more like one of those Albert Brooks helmed ventures from the early days of Saturday Night Live, and not the Andy Samberg viral-ready Digital Shorts that have become so prevalent in recent years. "Air" wasn't ha-ha funny, but it was an exciting departure from the normalcy of the show--such a departure in fact that the audience didn't seem to know quite what to make of it. Meanwhile, on his blog over at NBC.com, Fred Armisen notes that Mr. Baumbach also worked on a short film that aired during the Josh Brolin-hosted episode in late October. Unfortunately, while NBC is very good at putting Saturday Night Live clips online, neither of these happen to be on their website.

For film geeks like us, this kind of news is much more exciting than the prospect of seeing Tim McGraw host (tune in this week for that gem). Yet thus far, NBC hasn't promoted it at all. Come on Lorne, get on that! Since the last skit of the night is usually an obtuse and bizarre time-waster, maybe Saturday Night Live should start exclusively farming out that slot to indie filmmakers. How cool would it be to see Darren Aronofsky produce a short for Saturday Night Live? Or, better idea: have Michel Gondry direct a third installment of Laser Cats. Now that's something we can all get behind.

For the third week in a row, American Gangster (No. 2) and Bee Movie (No. 3) find themselves in the top four. No Country For Old Men (No. 3) maintained a $40,000 per-theater average, even as it expanded into seven theaters. The only film with a better average (and not by much) was Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding (No. 7), which was only showing at two theaters. The film received mixed reviews, but at this point, Mr. Baumbach has a devout following, which will always mean a solid opening weekend. It's questionable whether it will be able to keep up this momentum.

Love in the Time of Cholera (No. 5) struggled to find both a national and local audience. Its $15,000 per theater average will keep it in our top 10 for at least another week, but not for much longer.

Meanwhile, Fred Claus (No. 6) and Lions for Lambs (No. 8) continued to sink, with neither able to maintain an above $10,000 per theater average. (Consider that the waterline, if they're making below it, they're drowning.)

This week's biggest surprise, at least in the city, is the absence of Mr. Magorium's Magical Emporium, the kid-themed fantasy flick starring Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman, from the city's top 10. I guess parents got confused and thought it was the sequel to Rain Man. Watch the trailer to see what I mean ... There's got to be a point when an actor just runs out of characters. Or in the case of Tommy Lee Jones, learns to make the most of out of just one. I would put this one on the Straight-to-Netflix-Queue, but, um, that award is on strike.

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85^th St., 86^th St. East, 84^th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62^nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72^nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3^rd Ave, 64^th and 2^nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62^nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34^th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19^th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, from his own screenplay, turns out to be more ambitious but less clearly focused than was his much acclaimed debut film, The Squid and the Whale (2005), which was loosely based on members of his own family, particularly his mother and father. Seemingly knowing gossip at the time of The Squid and the Whale, among literary acquaintances of the Baumbachs’, insisted that Noah had been much harder on his father character, played brilliantly by Jeff Daniels, than on his mother character, played no less brilliantly by Laura Linney. If the title character in Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman’s Margot Zeller, bears even a slightly reflex resemblance to the writer-director’s own mother, than he can be said to have fully expunged the alleged favoritism he showed his mother in The Squid and the Whale. This is to say that Ms. Kidman’s Margot is one of the most unsympathetically narcissistic protagonists one could imagine in Mr. Baumbach’s family farce-comedy of emotional errors and eternally failing relationships. Only an actress of Ms. Kidman’s stature, talent and proven magnetism could make her mercurial character bearable and watchable for the full 91 minutes of the film, in which she is in almost every scene.

When the picture begins, Margot happens to be on the way to the wedding of her sister Pauline (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), though we learn later the two sisters had stopped talking to each other after Margot willfully broke up Pauline’s first marriage by something imprudent she said, as was her habit. Margot is a writer, you see, and writers in Mr. Baumbach’s world, and in the real world too, I imagine, are notorious for spilling the beans at the expense of their families and friends.

One of the biggest problems with Mr. Baumbach’s second film is that he seems to have made it up as he went along, throwing in two or three new characters here, and two or three laborious metaphors there. I must confess that I had trouble following all the proliferating subplots, and keeping all the relationships straight in my mind. For example, the budding non-relation between Margot’s teenage son, Claude (Zane Pais), and Pauline’s teenage daughter, Ingrid (Flora Cross), from her first marriage. They seem to have a thing for each other, but their hairdos’ are so messily alike that at times I had trouble telling them apart. There is much dressing and undressing in close quarters for all the main characters, and a casual, almost bohemian intimacy in their behavior.

One of the more interesting eccentrics in this carnival of eccentricity is Jack Black’s Malcolm, Pauline’s prospective second husband. Some people at the screening I attended couldn’t figure out why he had been written into the plot as such a hopeless loser, without a job or serious prospects, and self-consciously, albeit often charmingly and amusingly, self-deflating. Again, as with Ms. Kidman and Ms. Leigh, Mr. Black has reached such a high level in my estimation that he can do almost no wrong.

Then there is the main setting, an island off the New England coast, a comparatively underdeveloped offshoot of more posh and populous islands like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. It seems a strangely desolate location for a wedding. Still, there seems to be enough of a downtown somewhere on the island to accommodate a well-attended book signing and interview session between the mini-celebrity author Margot and her writing partner and lover, Dick Koosman (Ciarán Hinds). The interview ends disastrously, of course, in one of Margot’s many spasms of self-recognition and self-loathing. Mr. Hinds, a distinctively charismatic presence, is another overqualified member of the cast. After a brief conversation with his daughter Maisy (Halley Feiffer), who, while babysitting for Pauline, became physically involved with the hapless Malcolm, the outraged father chases the would-be husband all the way to the beach. Dick catches up with the grotesquely clumsy Malcolm, and soundly thrashes him. It all seemed to come out of the blue, which leads me to accept the rumor that Ms. Feiffer’s Maisy had much of her part end up on the cutting room floor.

Much of the action swirls around a red oak tree on which Margot climbs to settle a doubt raised about her active childhood propensities. She gets way up on the tree, looks down triumphantly at the rest of the wedding party and then discovers to her horror, as they walk away, that she is too scared to come down. When the local fire department has to rescue her, it marks another burst of bravado ending in humiliation. The tree itself is dying, and because it infringes on a nasty neighbor’s property and is killing the plants and flowers in his garden, it has to be sawed down. Malcolm undertakes the task with his usual lack of organization and manages to have the tree fall where it can do the most damage to the already doomed wedding. It is in the midst of all this chaos and carnage that the very tentative trucelike reconciliation of Margot and Pauline is smashed to smithereens. It is about this time also that Margot’s estranged husband, John Turturro’s Jim, flits in and out of the movie from his home in Vermont after experiencing a briefly sensual reunion with Margot that leaves them both more bewildered than before. Yet by the end of the film, Margot and her son, Claude, are sitting together on a bus to her husband Jim’s home, much as they started off sitting together on a train to Pauline’s wedding. Only this time their roles are reversed, with Margot, so poised and confident in the beginning, having become so hysterically frazzled by the end that Claude, so restlessly unsettled in the beginning, virtually assumes the role of parental stability.

As hard as it is for the viewer to navigate the raging currents of the narrative, with all its structural flaws leading to too many abrupt entrances and exits, Mr. Baumbach deserves a great deal of credit for the pungency and humor of much of the dialogue. Mr. Baumbach claims in the production notes that the inspiration for his stormy saga of warring siblings sprang from a single, enigmatic image that came to the writer-director almost like a dream: that of a mother and a son sitting on a train. Oddly, Margot at the Wedding leaves the viewers with the impression of an illogically remembered dream.

Best known for his clean-shaven, uptight leading roles in Whit Stillman’s trilogy of films about young urban angst among the privileged class (Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco) as well as Noah Baumbach’s pre-Squid and the Whale work (Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy), the goateed, relaxed Mr. Eigeman hasn’t spent much time with kids. He only played a dad once on screen, in a small film called Clipping Adam, and isn’t terribly eager to again. (On being offered such parts: “‘Oh, really … the dad?’ I don’t want to play the dad. The dull dad. Or, like, the really mean dad?”) But he has written and directed his first feature film, Turn the River, which will premiere Friday at the Hamptons Film Festival. And making a movie feels, he imagines, about the same as having a baby.

“The affection you have for [the film] has to be the same as the affection you have for one of your kids,” Mr. Eigeman hypothesized, his gray-blue eyes serious, gray-white glinting in his beard. He was certainly dressed for Dad-dom, in loose light blue jeans and a neat white Oxford cloth shirt with a pen in the pocket. “You don’t want to see it manhandled. You don’t want anybody to say anything nasty about it, not even behind your back. When you’re in a film, you have that, but I think to a lesser degree. Here I have very little cover.”

Turn the River is gooey stuff for a guy who’s made his career playing the smartest asshole in the room. It’s the story of a pool-hustling woman named Kailey (played by Mr. Eigeman’s good friend Famke Janssen, the Dutch former model and Jean Grey from the X-Men franchise, whom he met on the set of indie flick The Treatment), who’s trying to win enough money on the table to make a life for herself and her estranged son, Gulley. (Incidentally, Gulley is also the name of the Eigemans’ beloved white German Shepherd, who himself was named after the main character in Mr. Eigeman’s favorite book, The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary. And no, he won’t be naming his actual son Gulley.) In Turn the River, Gulley lives with his dad and stepmother in Manhattan, but sneaks off in secret to meet his mother; the two exchange letters like clandestine lovers via an old friend of Kailey’s.

Perhaps you were expecting that fourth Whit Stillman movie that Whit Stillman hasn’t gotten around to making? Or a Kicking and Screaming for our midlife crises instead of our postgrad rut? Mr. Eigeman’s onscreen persona is so ingrained in the minds of a certain generation (the one currently dominating Brooklyn and East Village streets with banded left hands and baby strollers) that it was hard not to assume that all these years—from his debut as WASP-y Nick Smith in Metropolitan to his turn on Gilmore Girls as a witty, neurotic insurance executive named Digger—we were seeing Chris Eigeman there on the screen, not a character he was hired to portray. He was the crush of choice for every girl who ever, even for a second, dreamed of being Parker Posey.

Sitting in his neatly manicured backyard, Mr. Eigeman is as erudite and quick with a joke as any fan would expect. When this reporter arrived, he was reading The New York Press, wide-eyed over that story about New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon and her questionable interview methods. He dropped references to bands like the National and Arcade Fire as naturally as any 25-year old. He’s hip to the World Wide Web.

But Turn the River reveals a side of Mr. Eigeman that only those close to him know. “Chris is the kind of person who cries really easily, so I wasn’t surprised at all by the sensitivity of Turn the River,” said Mr. Baumbach via phone from the Mill Valley Film Festival in California (lordy, what’s next—a fest on the Moon?), adding that even a political newspaper story can turn his pal misty. Mr. Baumbach, who has remained close to Mr. Eigeman since casting him in Kicking and Screaming more than 10 years ago, shared some of the equipment he used for his upcoming film Margot at the Wedding with Mr. Eigeman, whose movie was made for less than a million dollars and shot around New York City in just 21 days.

Some elements of Turn the River, which takes its name from two poker terms, are straight-up autobiographical—the split-up parents, the gambling and game playing. “My mom and dad got divorced, so it was one of those things where Sundays I’d go to dad’s apartment, and this was, say 1970-whatever, and it had a pool table on the top floor in a very traditional kind of divorced-dad apartment building,” said Mr. Eigeman, who grew up in Denver, Colorado, attending the Putney boarding school in Vermont. “It was just the sort of thing where we could play pool together and we could talk about the Broncos. And that was pretty much it.”

Later on, he found a worthy competitor in his now-wife, Linda, 42, against whom he’s been shooting pool since they met at Kenyon College. (Yes, except for a brief breakup followed by “a very long letter-writing campaign on both of our parts that I don’t think could happen today in the land of e-mail” they have been together that long. And to think, most of his characters could barely even date!) The two would play eight ball in halls near Gambier, Ohio, and later, once they moved to New York in the late 1980’s, at Julian’s, on 14th street, and Chelsea Billiards. The Eigemans have a pool table now in their upstate farmhouse, near Hudson. (It wouldn’t fit in their parlor floor brownstone apartment.)

“We’d play these first-to-200-wins—whoever wins 200 games could ask for whatever they wanted,” Mr. Eigeman said. “And she won the first one and I won the second and asked for a night at the Algonquin, and that’s where I asked her to marry me.” (Heart palpitations!) The actor-director has his wedding anniversary inscribed on the inside of his wedding band. “I was told to do this—it’s a very good idea,” he said sagely. Their 14th anniversary was earlier this month.

Before New York, the Eigemans did a brief stint in England. “I was going to be in an acting school in London and then I promptly got thrown out of an acting school in London,” he said. “Well, it wasn’t that I got thrown out as much as I was not invited back, which is the same thing, just more polite.”

Back on this side of the pond, Linda interned at CNN (she still works there, as a senior producer) while Mr. Eigeman parked cars at the River Cafe. (They’ve been in Brooklyn pretty much ever since; his neighbors include actor Gabriel Byrne and the novelist Arthur Phillips, with whom he frequently lunches.) Back then, he’d occasionally gamble away his night’s earnings—“I could lose a couple hundred dollars a night, and that was all I made the night before,” he said. “So it was like a zero-sum game. I lost everything.” Needless to say, Mr. Eigeman doesn’t gamble any more.

He is most frequently recognized for having played Max in Kicking and Screaming. His favorite “fan” story involves a fellow restaurant patron visiting his table and putting down a scrap of paper that read “Broken Glass,” an homage to a scene in Mr. Baumbach’s film when Max sees a pile of broken glass on the floor and puts a piece of paper over it saying “Broken Glass” instead of cleaning it up. “I was like, ‘That’s fantastic.’ It’s a huge compliment, it’s also very clever, it’s everything you want,” he said.

But nearly every role Mr. Eigeman has played has echoed his very first as Nick Smith in Metropolitan, which went on to earn an Oscar nomination for Mr. Stillman for best original screenplay.

“EVERYBODY SHOULD BE SO LUCKY that that would be their first film,” said Mr. Eigeman, who got the part after answering an ad in Backstage magazine. “Because it in a way was so extreme, it was really like acting, you were really swinging for the fences all the time. I’m not sure if I would have the balls to do that now. The bravery of ignorance is spectacular. But also you had to think like, this was 1990-whatever, one or two or something. Film was really happily sexual, dark. Sex, Lies and Videotape. Even Eating Raoul. … I was like, C’mon, this [Metropolitan] is crazy! And you know, it gives you brain freeze because you’re like, ‘I am going to do a 14-page monologue about collars and cummerbunds.’”

Speaking by phone from his home in Paris, Mr. Stillman said that Mr. Eigeman was “impressive right from the start.” He cast him as the lead in his next two films, despite the fact that by the time they made The Last Days of Disco in 1998, they were “under a lot of pressure not to work together again. People were worried about typecasting, and that he would be too associated with my films.” Disco’s producers wanted a star in the role of Des, the sleazy nightclub manager who breaks up with girls by telling them he might be gay. Mr. Stillman insisted, however, on Mr. Eigeman. “Chris was just so much better than anyone else,” he said.

Mr. Stillman suggested that possibly “the roles he’s played in my films do him a disservice, a bit.” But Mr. Eigeman begged to differ. In fact, he seemed downright content with his whole freaking life. “I’ve been really, really, really lucky because I’ve worked with some incredible directors and I did some films that people can look back on and think, ‘Oh that was a good film and that was of the time,’” he said.

And unlike his characters, he’s not afraid to grow up. Well, maybe.

“Even though I am in my mid-40’s I live like I am in my mid-20’s,” Mr. Eigeman said. “Like, if you turn the sound off, I don’t think there would be any real difference from my mid-20’s to my mid-40’s, and that’s all about to change.”