Lindsay Lohan acts with props. (YouTube)

You can really feel her frustration in this scene, which is obviously from the movie because Lindsay Lohan would never spend that long trying to find a missing cell phone. (Also, like, who even owns a land line anymore?)

But then you can really feel how scared she is when her boyfriend (porn star James Deen) stalks in and hits her because he knows about her and Ryan. (Ryan who? Ryan Lochte? Probably Ryan Lochte.)

On the plus side, Lindsay Lohan found her cell phone (it was in her boyfriend's drawer, not that weird), and also, acting!

Lindsay Lohan and James Deen in The Canyons. (Facebook)

If there ever was a week for longreads, this would be it. After Elizabeth Wurtzel's 5,500-word essay published in New York about crazy landlords/Not Compromising on Life, The New York Times Magazine proved that it hadn't cornered the market on histrionics. Thus, an 11-page exposé about Lindsay Lohan and The Canyons, the Kickstarter-funded film written by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Paul Schrader, co-starring porn heartthrob James Deen.

As you can imagine, the piece chronicles what a nice time everyone had on the short shoot—which took place over three weeks last July--with a lot of fond, funny anecdotes. Like the time Ms. Lohan took too many sleeping pills, locked herself in a closet, and refused to come out until Paul Schrader took off all his clothes? That one is great. The pitch-perfect tone was immediately reflected in its  blog-snark title, "Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie."

A fine choice, but a little unsubtle. We offer these 10 other titles that would have equally reflected the appeal of such a long, labor-intensive piece of journalism.

1. "Here Is What Happens When You Take All Your Meetings at Chateau Marmont"

2. "'Julia Roberts Is Late!': The Lindsay Lohan Story"

3. "Paul Schrader Takes It All Off"

4. "How Not to Make a Film"

5. "That Time Lindsay Lohan Called Everyone Else Unprofessional"

6. "I’ve got one assistant passed out at my house and the other one in the Palisades saying he wants to hang himself. Life’s great.”

7. "Do you know that iPhone app that makes explosions?”

8. "Grownups Crying"

9. "When Porn Is the Least Interesting Part of Your Film"

10. "American Psycho 3"

James Deen, over-sharer (TMZ)

James Deen may be a porn star, but he's still a babe in the woods when it comes to being a celebrity. After being accosted by a TMZ paparazzo outside Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills last weekend, Mr. Deen--who just finished filming Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader's The Canyons with the "super great" Lindsay Lohan--was more than happy to give the digital tabloid some amazingly doofy soundbites.

(This, despite the fact that his lawyer was present, and Mr. Deen seemed to be aware that he shouldn't be talking about the film.)

Let's look at the transcript, shall we? But a quick word to the wise: Don't be fooled by TMZ's headline ... Mr. Deen never mentioned that Ms. Lohan helped him climax.

TMZ: How did you like working with your co-star, Ms. Lohan?

James Deen: She's awesome. I have no official comment about her because I don't know what my contract ... what's my contract?" (Mr. Deen then turned and introduced his cameraman to his friend.) This is my attorney, so ...

TMZ: Your contract? I think it's called a non-disclosure agreement.

JD: I have some sort of like ...

Lawyer: (Prompting) She's absolutely wonderful ...

JD: No, she was, she was! But I don't have any official, like, things to say about the movie or working with her or anything like that. But working with her was awesome. She's super professional, super great. She's a fantastic actress, and it was really really awesome. I feel like I learned a lot from her. Like in those scenes that we did together, I feel like those were my stronger scenes, because working with a really good actress, or actor or anyone that ... I did a scene with Gus Van Sant, and it was another one that I feel like was very strong just because working with people that are really strong actors and very talented and stuff kind of like bring the best out of you. So it was very helpful to me as an amateur."
(And, scene.)

Someone should tell Mr. Deen what "non-disclosure agreement" means. Also, "professional." Also, "actress."

Perhaps this is just genius viral marketing, as we are now more pumped for this movie than ever. We (NSFW) hope it gets released!

Lindsay Lohan and James Deen (Facebook)

Previously, Mr. Ellis announced on Twitter that Ms. Lohan was attached to the film, but there was some dispute over whether or not she had signed her contract.

Here's the full release (no pun intended):

LINDSAY LOHAN STARRING IN PAUL SCHRADER THRILLER “THE CANYONS” WRITTEN BY BRET EASTON ELLIS

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (July 14, 2012) Iconic filmmaker Paul Schrader (American Gigolo, Auto-Focus; writer Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) is directing Lindsay Lohan in the forthcoming independent feature “The Canyons” from an original screenplay by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero). Lohan went from wrapping Liz and Dick into rehearsals and then shooting with her fellow cast. James Deen co-stars with actors Nolan Funk, Amanda Brooks and Tenille Houston. Esteemed director Gus Van Sant has also been cast and Brendan Canning (Half Nelson) of influential indyrock collective Broken Social Scene will score the film.

The Canyons is a contemporary L.A. noir about the dangers of sexual obsession and ambition, both personally and professionally, among a group of young people in their 20's and how one chance meeting connected to the past unravels all of their lives, resulting in deceit, paranoia, cruel mind games and ultimately violence.

Leading the independent charge is Braxton Pope (Shrink, The Take), formerly with a deal at Lionsgate, who is producing the feature. The film was brought together using new media methodology, financed partly by the crowdfunding platform kickstarter, where the filmmaking team raised over 150k for their endeavor and partly by Schrader, Ellis and Pope in an effort to retain creative autonomy. They also used the internet casting service letitcast and opened the acting search to professional and amateurs across the globe, as well as Schrader regularly updating his progress via the film’s official facebook page and the twitter accounts of Ellis and Pope. Additionally they also cast a role on social media platform Mobli, a leading social photo and video sharing site.

Said Ellis, "Dealing with the casting of The Canyons was a great, liberating process--for both the production team and for actors in general. We used letitcast and saw some amazing actors that we will definitely keep in mind for future projects. The way the entire cast came together so quickly was a thrill and everyone who landed their roles deserved them. Using social media as a way to help build a film is really like riding the wave into the future."

“Bret Easton Ellis' characters are beautiful people doing bad things in nice rooms,” said Schrader. “Lindsay Lohan and James Deen not only have the acting talent they also have that screen quality that keeps you watching their every move."

“Nothing about this film was orchestrated in a traditional way,” said Pope. “We wanted to actively embrace all the digital and social media tools at our disposal and give the film real cinematic value – ‘The Canyons’ is the result of a forward thinking experiment with a terrific cast.”

Lohan is represented by agent John Burnham of ICM, manager Evan Hainey of Untitled and attorney David Feldman of Bloom, Hergott Diemer Rosenthal LaViolette Feldman Schenkman & Goodman. Schrader is represented by agent Frank Wuliger of the Gersh Agency and manager Johnny Planco. Ellis is represented by attorney Barry Littman at Hansen, Jacobson, Teller, Hoberman, Newman, Warren, Richman, Rush & Kaller.

Besides being more of a PR shill for letitcast than the film itself, the whole press release seems a little strange. It's not every day you see the names of agents listed along with the director, writer, and main star--even weirder that at this point, Mr. Deen is not famous enough to warrant his own agency listing-- but we assume that's so press people like us can update our listings on who in Hollywood is currently risking their rep by backing Lindsay Lohan, whose insurance premium per film must be through the roof.

Linday Lohan and James Deen in 'The Canyons'

Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader's super white-hot project (via Kickstarter) The Canyons has already hit its first casting snag. Despite announcing Lindsay Lohan and approachable porn star James Deen as the movie's stars earlier this week, the car-crashing actress apparently hasn't signed her contract yet.

Which may be an issue, since someone on her team has been coaching the Herbie: Fully Loaded star how to read scripts.

According to a source leak at RadarOnline.com:

“Lindsay and her team are concerned about the nudity that is involved. Lindsay would be required to do full frontal nudity, and the sex scenes are very, very graphic.”

Ms. Lohan will be playing Tara, the girlfriend of "power player and major manipulator" Christian (50 Shades of Grey, much?), who will be portrayed by Mr. Deen. The source went on to tell Radar:

“Yes, Lindsay has posed nude for Playboy, but doing it in a movie is completely different. Lindsay needs to make sure that she is comfortable with it, and that this is something she can handle as an artist.”

Apparently this Hollywood insider has never seen I Know Who Killed Me.

As even the intermittent online porn viewer might admit, an endless cavalcade of uploads means scenes that are initially titillating can quickly become trite. "It's like with puppy videos," a girlfriend explained. "Now I need a puppy, spooning a panda bear, hugging a sloth." Next to the usual staged moaning and manufactured filth, the couple by the sink offered the same kind of novelty. Mr. Deen, credibly unaware of the cameras, splayed his hands in her hair and whispered something imperceptible. Whatever he said, it was working.

I'm hardly the first XX chromosome to have noticed. In a $13 billion industry driven by the single-minded pursuit of the solitary male orgasm, Mr. Deen has made a name for himself by appealing to the opposite sex. In the past six months, his allure has become something of a pop culture curiosity, a cipher about female desire that isn’t actually that hard to decode. The first real test of his crossover appeal, however, may come via one of his more literary admirers, Bret Easton Ellis, who wants to cast Mr. Deen in his new micro-budget noir movie, The Canyons. The project, which starts shooting in July, will be directed by Paul Schrader, the screenwriter and director behind Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and American Gigolo.

But before I could parse Mr. Deen’s mainstream potential, I had to figure out his name.

"Brown hair, kinda cute, really wants to get the girl off?" I asked my friend. "Oh, I actually know who you're talking about. And he's Jewish!" she squeaked, as though her Bubbe would approve. We were at a Korean restaurant in the East Village. She grabbed my iPhone and pulled up a lengthy profile in Good magazine about Mr. Deen. Before the banchan arrived, I Instapapered the story for the subway ride home. I was 27 when I swapped out erotica for something more visually stimulating. According to Good, many of Mr. Deen’s teenage fans are much, much younger.

After the article wound its way around the web, Slate was left squinting its eyes at “Porn Women Like to Watch,” as though it were a novel concept. Nightline followed up this February with an obligatory finger-wagging segment about Mr. Deen's underage enthusiasts, as though he were a gateway drug to Rick Santorum’s worst nightmare. The Nightline segment in turn prompted sex toy company Doc Johnson to mold a nine-inch, life-sized latex tribute targeted to Mr. Deen’s “very enthusiastic fan base."

Although the latest Nielsen ratings reveal that a third of the visitors to porn sites are female, apparently, it hadn’t occurred to anyone in the San Fernando Valley that girls might want to fantasize about the dude next door too.

At 5' 8" and 26-years-old, Mr. Deen is slight of build, fresh of face, and looks like that cute boy from your high school Spanish class. A little bro-y, maybe. Sophomoric, definitely. But he has a surprisingly witty Gmail handle and a sly sense of humor. He could be your boyfriend, if your boyfriend knew his way around a ball gag and just when to pull your hair.

“He doesn’t look like those mastodons with their bleached hair and their waxed pecs flexing,” Mr. Ellis explained by phone from his Los Angeles apartment. “It’s a more democratized look.”

Mr. Deen taps into a female fantasy that hasn’t seemed to interest porn studios much: a sensitive boy with closed-door swagger—the flip side of a good girl with a dirty mind. Onscreen he seems to exhibit savant-level responsiveness to his partner’s cues, anticipating (correctly, by the sounds of it) when she’d like to be kissed and when she’d like to be slapped.

His facility with the latter has incited a rising heart rate of moral unease, even among some of his co-stars. Mr. Deen, who has recently broken into directing, films about a scene a day—roughly one bondage and S&M scene for every three straight ones. Online, his teenage fans tweet and tumble and make gifs about his devastating eye contact—even as his co-stars lie bound and gagged at his waist. “There are these weird long flashes of tenderness that you don’t really see in straight pornography,” noted Mr. Ellis.

“I’ve been into rough sex pretty much my whole sexual life and so I’m not, like, bad at it,” Mr. Deen told me by phone last month, on his 26th birthday. “I don’t know how to say it without being a hideous prick, but I’m pretty good at having rough sex. It got to the point where a lot of girls who aren’t into that type of sex were afraid to work with me because they thought I was going to slap them in the face or something.  But I only do that if the girl is into it. There’s no reason to choke somebody if they don’t like getting choked. Then you’re basically being an asshole.”

When the two finally met, Mr. Ellis filed that type of misunderstanding under something they had in common. “We chatted amiably about the unearned feminist hysteria we both received at certain points in our careers,” Mr. Ellis happily tweeted out to his 250,000 followers in January.

Mr. Deen has spoken publicly about abandoning certain “porn star punishment” sites for what he called “weird and sort of preachy reasons.” The sites he works for now, like Brazzers.com and Kink.com, make girls sign “limit sheets” that rate their comfort level on “every sort of sexual thing you can imagine,” he said. “Everyone has to sign it, the director, the top, bottom, everybody.

“It’s not like I’m beating women or sending messages that it’s okay,” he added. “Actually the opposite. Why don't we just say it? The submissive is always the dominant party.”

On the blog A Feminist Sub (as in submissive), the twentysomething author analyzed her "crush" on Mr. Deen last June. "His scenes show how sex can be ‘degrading’ without being for-real degrading,” she wrote. “He does a lot of BDSM porn, and plays the dominant role, but is not a prick about it." She also noted his exuberant approach to oral stimulation, which rarely gets as much screen time as when the genders are reversed, pointing to a particularly stirring 20 minute session, during which Mr. Deen was moved to "growl."

There does seem to be something in Mr. Deen’s approachability and eagerness to please that makes conversations about pornography—and how women consume it—suddenly permissible in polite company. Of course, not everyone thinks inspiring girls to talk about porn, often with each other, is a good thing. Just ask Nightline.

To Mr. Ellis, James Deen's success represents the dawn of a new kind of porn star—one who reflects a transitional moment in popular culture. "The dissemination of pornography has been this hugely liberating thing. You don’t go to a movie theater on Vine and sit in the dark by yourself or nervously walk to a newsstand and buy an issue of Hustler,” he pointed out. “James has grown up with it in a way, so he’s got a casual, comfortable relationship with it. Men of my generation don’t."

Nowhere is that comfort level more evident than on Mr. Deen's Twitter feed, which is regularly updated with self-effacing observations on nineties nostalgia, requests that someone bring him a burrito, and goofy musings on porn like, “Dry humping is the new anal” or “I wanna get your brain pregnant.” Mr. Deen also tweets out links to his unbelievably unsafe for work blog, which features extreme close-ups of his partner’s undercarriage and giddy narration of the scene he just filmed: “remy lacroix is one of my favorite new girls. this girl is super hot and really fun to bang and puts things in her butt...”

It’s easy to be sex-positive when no one ever taught you to be negative in the first place.

Mr. Deen, it should be said, is also unwaveringly complimentary of his partners, both on and offline. “There’s been a scene or two where I’ve had to put on a little bit of show,” he admitted, “But 99.9999999999 percent of the time, I’m just into it. I mean it’s pretty rare I’m like, ‘Oh god, what is wrong with this girl, she’s so mean.’"

So his turn-offs don’t include cellulite or silicone, but mean girls? No wonder he’s in the teenage girl pantheon next to Justin Bieber.

"I have a lot of friends who are James’ age, and I get it,” said Mr. Ellis. “I get the humor, the irony, the ‘dumbness’ of—dumbness in quotes—of how they express themselves in their blogs or Twitter. So what if he writes about wanting a burrito? What do you want him to be writing about?" Those who are offended by Mr. Deen’s blog posts, he said, are “having an Empire attitude about it.”

For a few years now, Mr. Ellis has been expounding on his notion that society has crossed over from “Empire” to “post-Empire.” His close reading of Mr. Deen’s appeal situates the porn star firmly in the post-Empire landscape. The rubric, which jumps off from Gore Vidal’s term for postwar American hegemony, basically marks a move away from hierarchical tastemakers toward “exhibitionistic display culture,” as he once put it, describing Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown. The Hills is Empire, Jersey Shore is post. Mr. Ellis recently offered another example by email: “Lana Del Rey? Totally post-Empire. The media reaction against her? Empire.”

In fact, it was that shorthand that helped him discover Mr. Deen. His producer Braxton Pope—who also worked with Mr. Ellis and Mr. Schrader on the shark horror flick Bait, dead in the water after five years of development (so Empire)—emailed over a couple articles on Mr. Deen. “’So, what do you think of this guy? Empire or post-Empire?” he asked. Mr. Ellis’s reply? “Totally in the top ten of post-Empire!”

The writer and the performer eventually met for dinner, at Soho House in West Hollywood. “He said he was super nervous,” Mr. Ellis recalled.

“Maybe it’s because I’m an over-analytical Jew and all the issues that go with that,” Mr. Deen confessed. He was also worried about whether he could do the job. Mr. Ellis insisted he could. “We would not be having this conversation if he couldn’t pull it off, if he was simply a leaden actor who was just being hired because of the size of his dick.”

They addressed the question over dinner. “He was worried that he had no acting training,” Mr. Ellis recalled. “I said, ‘That’s not a problem, there are plenty of bad actors who do.’”

Mr. Deen, who is prone to calling his work “quote unquote acting,” still seems unconvinced. Looking at a girl while having sex with her, “doesn’t really feel like acting,” he elaborated. “I’ve been a fan of his since I was a little kid,” he said of Mr. Ellis. Nonetheless, Mr. Deen added, “I don’t know why he wants me in this movie so bad.”

Mr. Ellis, who is self-funding The Canyons (working tagline: “It’s not The Hills”) along with Mr. Pope and Mr. Schrader, will be releasing the movie via iTunes, Netflix, and VOD rather than theaters. The film, he said, will feature explicit sex scenes, but purely in service of character and plot development. He insisted that unlike in the Sasha Grey-Steven Soderbergh project, The Girlfriend Experience, Mr. Deen will not be playing a “a meta version” of himself.

First, though, he’ll need to win over 65-year-old Mr. Schrader, who Mr. Ellis says finds “the busyness” around James Deen “more of a distraction.”

If Mr. Deen gets the gig, don’t expect him to go the way of Sasha Grey, who retired from the porn business last year after breaking into the mainstream. “I got into porn because I want to do porn,” Mr. Deen vowed. If he sticks with that promise, it might be the most post-Empire thing about him.

“Doing the same thing every day is never going to be fun, which is another reason I’m so excited about this,” said Mr. Deen, reminiscing about his early years in the porn industry, when he felt pigeon-holed in one genre. “I would show up to work and it would be, like, ‘Okay, this is gonna be a rough sex scene.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, man, I kinda just want to make out with the girl and have normal sex with her?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, well, you can do that at home.’”

-ntiku@observer.com

According to The Hollywood Reporter, "The man, who works at a posh beach club, angles his way on to a yacht filled with the obnoxious elite, commandeering it into waters filled with the finned man-eaters."

We also like how The Hollywood Reporter calls Mr. Schrader and Mr. Ellis "two of the greatest literary minds of their generations," who will "elevate the genre."

You see them in Beverly Hills, Palm Beach and the concrete canyons of Manhattan. They are called “walkers” because they walk through the gossip columns and society pages on the arms of rich, beautiful, glamorous boldface women who are bored and lonely and always a little bit desperate, escorting them to charity benefits, museums, concert halls and Broadway openings when their husbands are too smart, lucky or otherwise engaged to do it themselves. Walkers are the men in Armani blazers and Hermès ascots who make perfect fourths for bridge, fill important gaps at dinner tables with Baccarat crystal and place cards, and photograph well on red carpets. They are almost always gay, therefore witty and harmless, and look like Truman Capote and Jerome Zipkin. They could absolutely never, under any circumstances, be confused with Woody Harrelson.

And yet, here he is, without his overalls and bare feet, wearing a slickly gelled toupee the color of peach cobbler and a nervously curled smile below his pencil mustache, hopelessly miscast in a load of misguided miasma called The Walker. Clueless about walkers, their manicured world or how to play one, Mr. Harrelson nervously flutters and minces his way through a Truman Capote impersonation he must have learned from studying Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he’s lost from the start, like Willie Nelson playing Louis XIV.

He is playing Carter Page III, a rich, sophisticated, well-bred Washington, D.C., playboy with a distinguished family history in the halls of power who knows all the right people in the daylight, but prowls all the wrong gay bars after midnight. Mostly he dishes the dirt in a snobbish Southern drawl, wearing color-coordinated cashmeres and accessories from his neatly arranged cuff-link drawer, with power-wife socialites Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and Mary Beth Hurt. After his nightly rounds, he goes home to the discreetly hidden lover who endures the rants of a drama queen with an understanding that is not always convincing. The wafer-thin plot is nothing you could write home about, but what little there is involves Page’s loyalty to his best friend, Lynn (Kristin Scott Thomas), wife of the U.S. Senate minority leader (Willem Dafoe). Lynn is having a secret affair with a lobbyist, and when her boyfriend is stabbed to death, it’s Page who tells a big lie to give her an alibi and protect her from the media circus that could ruin her husband’s political career, only to find himself a murder suspect as well as the victim of a blackmail plot that leads all the way to the vice president’s office. “In former times,” he lisps, “men who lied would get their testicles tied. Today they get a TV show.” Now it is Page who faces front-page scandal and the potential ruin of his family’s honor. Walkers, it seems, have their own old-fashioned scruples. When the tables turn, they might be surprised to discover who their real friends are.

Writer-director Paul Schrader specializes in tough examinations of ordinary people trapped in the headlights of social pathology. From Hardcore to Auto Focus (not to mention Taxi Driver, which he wrote for Martin Scorsese), many of his films have lasting effects that haunt me still. It is especially disappointing when he stumbles. But The Walker is not a polished or coherent film. It’s more like a work in progress. Casting Woody Harrelson was a tactical error from which the overall concept never recovers. Every time he appears in a new tuxedo, you keep wishing the camera would drop to the floor to see if he’s wearing any shoes. It’s always great to see Lauren Bacall back in the saddle, and Mr. Schrader has given her the best lines. I mean, who can resist a chuckle when that smoky voice rises from a lighthouse mist to observe: “Memory is a most unreliable organ—right up there with the penis”? Nobody polishes a cameo better. Unfortunately, neither the cameos nor the leading characters in The Walker are fully developed. It’s hard to tell just what the point really is. There’s tentativeness and trepidation in every scene, like the way people drive in Los Angeles every time it rains.

Since my freshman year at Stuyvesant High School in 1975, I've been getting my hair cut at Frank's on Spring Street. It's an unassuming barbershop just east of Sixth Avenue, complete with a revolving red, white and blue pole and metal folding chairs out front for the locals to gossip in Italian as they watch the customers come and go. The key figure at Frank's has always been Rocco, a white-haired, elfin man with a perennial glint in his eye. I had always assumed the shop was called Rocco's, until one day I looked on the awning and noticed it wasn't. Frank, a dark-haired, stocky man, was also there, but seemed to play straight man to Rocco's rat-a-tat storytelling.

All New Yorkers get inured to change. Yet each of us finally cracks when some key landmark of our youth is casually overthrown and replaced with something designed to demean that precious memory. For me, it was the Gap that replaced the Saint Marks Cinema. Eventually, however, anger is replaced by resignation, and we promise ourselves never to get so attached to anything in New York again.

But that's easier said than done. And for me, Frank's is a time and a place that I don't want to let go of. When you could see the real Divine live in Woman Behind Bars in the East Village, rather than the Harvey Fierstein imitation at the Neil Simon Theatre. When you could spend the entire night watching Roman Polanski movies at the Elgin Cinema on West 19th Street. When you could dance with a waitress at 3 a.m. in the cavernous Changes bar on Broome Street, before Paul Schrader filmed Fingers there and it closed down.

At Frank's, part of my fond memories involve the feeling that I was invisible to Rocco and his crew, who seemed to exist in a parallel Italian universe. Except once: I had a friend at college who was having an affair with a wealthy, elderly Italian count who spoke no English. She told me that whenever the count would manage to penetrate her, he would proudly exclaim: " Che cazzo !" During one haircut, Rocco noticed a flash of recognition cross my face when he used the term cazzo as he told an apparently ribald tale. He launched into a long story in Italian. I laughed along, feigning understanding. It was a moment of intimacy with Rocco that was not repeated, but that I will always treasure.

Over the years, there have been changes, to be sure. John (Lafave Santo on his barber's license) joined in the late 80's. Then, more dramatically, Irina, a Russian émigré (who was actually a better barber than the rest) came on board when Frank retired and moved back to Italy in 1993. The essential feel of the place stayed the same, however.

Then, one Sunday about three years ago, I biked down to get my hair cut and saw Rocco sitting outside of a trendy hair salon called Anonymous, around the corner from Frank's on Sullivan. When I got to Frank's, I asked Irina what had happened.

"It's very sad," she said, clearly upset. "I don't want to talk about it." All I could get out of Irina was that the store had been sold and that there had been an angry disagreement between Rocco and the new owners. The salon around the corner had taken Rocco in and was allowing him to perform his $10 haircuts alongside their $50 "treatments."

This posed a dilemma. Having my hair cut by Rocco at a fancy salon just didn't seem the same. But Frank's without Rocco-particularly with a banished Rocco plying his trade around the corner-just felt wrong. I hoped it would all be resolved by the time I had to get my next haircut.

But when I came back, Frank's was closed. A makeshift sign suggested unconvincingly that it might reopen. I went around the corner to Anonymous and found no Rocco, only $50 haircuts, although the hairdresser there said she thought Rocco still came in sometimes. After that, I tried to avoid the area entirely.

Then, one day during the summer of 2001, I found myself on Spring Street and couldn't help going to see what had become of my little barbershop. As I approached, I could see that it was no longer called Frank's, but the Hair Box. The interior had been redone, including tacky new oversized tile on the back wall purporting to show hairstyles through the ages. Even the barber chairs had been moved from one side of the shop (where they charmingly blocked the door) to the other.

Just as I was about to walk away in disgust, I saw Rocco emerge from the back of the cramped shop. I went in immediately to get a haircut and ask Rocco what had happened. Unfortunately, I still couldn't make heads or tails out of what Rocco was saying. I could see from their barber licenses on the wall that John and Irina were back as well. So I ignored the new décor and fell back into my familiar pattern, coming for a trim and a shave every few months.

Still, I was curious about what had really happened. Irina had intimated that the owner of Anonymous had bought the place, so I went over there to ask. What I heard was an unusual New York story: It has a happy ending, and the landlord is one of the good guys.

Pat Winters has owned Anonymous for 16 years. It turns out that the reason they called the barbershop Frank's is that it really was Frank's. When he retired, Frank gave the lease to his brother-in-law, and Rocco became his employee. This went along fine, until Rocco and Frank's family had some kind of disagreement. Pat didn't know what it was about when she took Rocco in, and all I could make out from what Rocco said was: "They threw me out."

Business suffered from Rocco's absence, and then the rent on the lease went up.Frank'sfamily stopped paying rent, and the marshals came to shut the place down. The landlord, who was aware that the location had been a barbershop for most of the century-dating 60 years beforeFrank'seven opened in 1971-approached Pat to see if she would take over the lease. Pat offered it to Rocco, who complained that he was too old to take on the responsibility, but agreed to work there if Pat took it on. The landlord, Martin Herzog, agreed to a reasonable eight-year lease with only 1 percent annual rent increases.

The place re-opened in May 2001. Pat has heard a lot of complaints about the new décor, but she has no apologies: "It was a disgusting place: filthy, cockroach-ridden-even though it was 'charming,'" she pointed out.

As for Rocco, according to Pat, he just turned 73 and is working as hard as ever, arriving every morning at 8 a.m. sharp.

"Some days, he won't eat. He worries the customers won't wait. I tell him: 'Rocco, they'll wait.'"

Pat says she's actually making a little money on the place, but that isn't why she did it.

"It wasn't right," she explained. "Frank should have left it to Rocco. Now Rocco is the boss."