Peter W. Kaplan, the fourth and longest-serving editor of The New York Observer, announced to his editorial staff today that he is resigning from the newspaper effective June 1, 2009.
“I wanted to take care of my family,” he said in an interview. “My family has been—it sounds like a baseball thing, doesn’t it?—relegated to Read More
Vampires don’t really live forever—it just feels like they do. Lately, you can’t turn on the TV, go to a bookstore, see a movie, or go to (if you’re really prepared to argue that these books aren’t just for kids, you might want to take a cold, hard look at yourself in the mirror at Read More
It’s 2 a.m. and you awake with a jerk, alone in your fully lit apartment and still on the couch. On TV, the credits of some movie you’ve already seen a billion times are scrolling by. It feels like rock bottom. And we know, because we’re just like you: single.
Need a movie to keep Read More
Monday: Lost
Long before the Dharma Initiative, Widmore Industries and The Oceanic Six, there was the first season of Lost. It was a simpler time, when Michael Emerson was just that guy from a few episodes of Law & Order and not a passive-aggressive criminal mastermind with a couple of Emmy nominations … but Read More
The lethal combination of Will Smith in the tentpole apocalypse-drama I Am Legend (No. 1), the nasty weather enveloping the Northeast, and nothing good happening on TV (which translates to nothing good saved for weekend DVR watching) created one of the healthiest weekends for Hollywood in some time. In Manhattan, who didn’t go to the Read More
Maybe there’s not one word that can explain a man’s life, but 156 pages of them will cost ya about $100,000. At least, that’s what Orson Welles’ personal working script of Citizen Kane went for last night at a Sotheby’s auction. An anonymous phone bidder nabbed the final revised draft (before the final shooting script Read More
Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax, from a screenplay by William Wheeler, is based in part on Clifford Irving’s own confessional account (also entitled The Hoax) of his real-life 70’s scam at the expense of his credulous publisher, McGraw-Hill. Mr. Wheeler has added some fictional embroidery to Irving’s fraudulent maneuvers, which were intended to convince the world Read More
When people have asked me to name the greatest film of all time—in my humble opinion, of course—my instant answer has been unvarying for the past 30 years or so: Max Ophüls’ Madame de … (1953). It was released in the United States under the somewhat misleading title, The Earrings of Madame de …. I Read More
Orson Welles is the one that got away, the director with the greatest gifts and the strangest career, a man whose run of programmed bad luck eventually engulfed a bevy of biographers.
Books about Welles generally fall into three categories:
It was all his fault (Charles Higham).
None of it was his fault (Joseph McBride, Read More
My interest in Marc Salem’s Mind Games on Broadway should come as no surprise to those who know me. I’ve been intrigued by mind-reading and its allied arts since I was a child and knew no better.
For example, I share something in common with Orson Welles and Muhammad Ali. I’m a sucker for Read More
