Jordan Gelber and Mia Farrow.

Todd Solondz is the sort of director beloved by fresh-faced film students when they first arrive at school—his films are superficially interesting for their shock value and their disconnect from reality coexisting with an insistence that this is how life really is. Once deep into the syllabus, though, the burgeoning filmmakers learn that these spectacles lack the control or craftsmanship that makes the movie-going experience so exciting. He’s in the sort of rut where fellow student favorite Wes Anderson was uncomfortably wedged before the release of the remarkable Moonrise Kingdom: each film a smeared carbon copy of the one just before, with an emphasis on aesthetics and not much more.

Mr. Solondz’s second film, Happiness, is still his best; it indulges in glum miserablism but still has compelling conflicts and a ’50s-melodrama directorial style that complements its ideas. Subsequent years brought a series of films in which Mr. Solondz intended to shock his audience with graphic sex or events and ideas that are outré for their own sake, as though the lesson he learned from Happiness was that making an audience uncomfortable is the ultimate goal. That’s why it’s a relief that Dark Horse, while bearing surface similarities to past Solondz films, begins on a dramatically different path. Like Happiness, the film begins with an uncomfortable meeting between a beautiful woman and a socially inept, unattractive man. Unlike Happiness, however, the first human interaction in Dark Horse doesn’t lead immediately to crushing unhappiness; the plot unfolds like a heightened version of life.

The socially inept man in question is the film’s protagonist, Abe (played by Jordan Gelber), whose attempts to seduce the lovely Miranda (Selma Blair) are off-putting and bizarre in a manner recognizable to anyone who’s ever reassured a friend going through a long dry spell. Abe calls Miranda late at night, when she’s zonked out on prescription drugs, and takes her attempts to end the call as an invitation to show up to her house with a bouquet of flowers. Their courtship unfolds like a silent comedy, with the ardency of Abe’s affection parried at every turn by Miranda’s pharmaceutical coyness. She’s probably into him—well, maybe; she doesn’t really have the capacity to respond to even the most quotidian of social cues, let alone the mania of Abe’s dating style.

One can’t fault Abe, really, for his inability to interact with people. The first third of the movie elucidates with great sympathy the reasons for his anxieties. Despite being long past the age at which he should have moved out, if his paunch and hairline are to be judged, Abe lives with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) and works for his father. The rage festering inside Abe—at his parents, at his brother, at his loveless and lonely situation—explodes outward in one early instance when he cannot get a refund at a toy store. Leave aside for a moment what a tired cliché the adult action-figure enthusiast may be. The story of a life spent as a "dark horse," hoping for literally anything to change, comes across in a moment; the remainder of the movie would have to be brilliant to be necessary.

But with his screenwriting so able to convey a human story, and his actor so well chosen and so resourceful, Mr. Solondz still cannot resist the impulse to bury his film’s best elements under a thick layer of that old freshman surrealism. Abe’s confidant is but a manifestation of his conscience, or his alter personality, or the self-critical voice in his head: this much is never clear, but she appears constantly to hector him.

Dream sequences in films are very rarely useful; given that cinema is itself malleable enough to contain any experience the director wants to impose upon a character, why must we waste time seeing the character’s imagined experiences? Characters from the film appear like ghosts to torment Abe. The viewer knows with certainty that they are not there, and knows too that any chance of truly understanding Abe through his interactions with others has passed. There is not merely more satisfaction in watching the way Abe moves through the world; there’s unpleasant alienation in having the straightforwardness of Dark Horse snatched away in favor of an arch, overdetermined fantasy that proves only that life is brutal.

The film presents Abe with two variations on the same ending, one apparently real and one imagined. Neither of them provide Abe happiness, though one provides him the chance to think of himself as a doomed romantic idealist. His romance with Miranda is no romance at all, it turns out. This narrative turn is neutral vis-a-vis the film’s quality, but the manner in which it isn’t dealt with—after revealing a dangerous secret, Miranda just fades out of the narrative—is deflating. Shouldn’t Abe have fought for her, or fought with her?

While no one should expect a happy ending from a Todd Solondz movie, the film’s initial vigor and commitment to a muscular realism is exciting. However, the manner in which Dark Horse shifts back into the same fantastically unreal dourness is an unhappy ending indeed. While every director has his or her own style, Mr. Solondz’s has worn thin; his halfway realization that there are new ways he might tell stories is not enough to make Dark Horse the film it almost was.

Dark Horse

Running Time 85 minutes

Written and Directed by Todd Solondz

Starring Jordan Gelber, Selma Blair and Christopher Walken

Two out of four stars

Everyone who was anyone attended the fashion show, which included glitter, disco balls, leather bomber jackets, and something that was described by the Associated Press as an "animal-print-meets-tropical-sunset tank dress," which is burning our brains with Miami fever just trying to consider what that might look like.

Here's what you missed from the show, if you weren't lucky enough to snag a seat.

(Photos via Getty)

Robert Benton’s Feast of Love, from a screenplay by Allison Burnett and based on the novel by Charles Baxter, serves admirably as a playful respite from the Iraq-war-driven flood of media violence that threatens to engulf us with a perpetual hangover of hopeless paranoia (and to which I am already beginning to succumb). This is not to say that Mr. Benton, Ms. Burnett and Mr. Baxter have collaborated on a concoction of frothy escapism. Quite the contrary. With the help of an exemplary cast, they have fashioned an exquisite tapestry of interlocking love stories, some of which end happily, some sadly, some farcically and one quite tragically. Throughout all the shifting moods, no single narrative disrupts the smoothly well-paced flow of the film as a coherent whole.

Ms. Burnett’s astute screenplay has some major structural differences from Mr. Baxter’s well-reviewed novel. For some probably financial reason, the action has been transferred from the environs of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a comparable college campus neighborhood in Oregon. The biggest change, however, is the inspired casting of the book’s central character, Charlie Baxter, the author’s alter ego; here he’s played by Morgan Freeman, as retiring philosophy professor Harry Stevenson, thereby becoming the only African-American character in the film’s narrative. (There is one minor African-American in the novel. But he is changed to an immigrant Hungarian-American in the film, which suggests that race is no big issue for this story in either medium.) As a happy consequence of this switch, the Oscar-winning Mr. Freeman anchors the film with his charismatic authority as a raisonneur and as a witness to the separate strands of the story, which in the book are narrated by a half-dozen or so participants in the multiple love feasts. These distractingly shifting viewpoints have been scrapped on the screen for a more neutral vantage point from which each relationship can unfold with relative objectivity.

The story begins on one of Harry’s long sleepless nights, during which he walks the deserted streets and spaces adjoining his off-campus home, which he shares with his now soundly sleeping wife (Jane Alexander). On his restless nocturnal strolls, Harry frequently encounters his next-door neighbor, and friendly fellow insomniac, Bradley Thomas (Greg Kinnear), the maritally jinxed proprietor of the campus coffee shop, and the source of much of the film’s humor in the kind of pompously clueless role he played so effectively in last year’s hilarious Little Miss Sunshine.

One late afternoon after Bradley and Harry have returned to the coffee shop following a game in the girl’s softball league, in which Bradley’s wife, Kathryn (Selma Blair), plays, Harry and Bradley share a table with Kathryn and a personable girl on the opposing team named Janey (Shannon Lucio). As it turns out, Bradley is too engrossed in his conversation with the always-more-observant Harry to notice that Kathryn has fallen in love with the slyly seductive Janey, who has subtly locked her eyes with Kathryn’s. Harry later relates this incredible happening to his wife, who is not surprised by Bradley’s misfortune, citing an old curse she believes had been placed on Bradley’s house after a long-ago murder there. It is not the last time that superstition plays a part in determining the destinies of the various characters.

Meanwhile, both Bradley and Harry encourage the budding romance between Bradley’s easygoing employee, Oscar (Toby Hemingway), a former pot addict just beginning to pull himself together, and Chloe (Alexa Davalos), the coffee shop’s newly hired waitress. Soon after, the ever-hapless Bradley talks himself into a second doomed marriage, with Radha Mitchell’s Diana, the sensually scintillating (and hottest) number in the tangled proceedings. At the time of her marriage to Bradley, Diana is still enmeshed in a passionate affair with a married man, David (Billy Burke), for whom she inevitable abandons her husband. Bradley winds up in a hospital emergency room to reattach a severed finger after his pathetic attempt at self-mutilation in grief over Diana’s desertion. Ironically, it is in this same emergency room that Bradley emerges third-time-lucky with a true and lasting love. Harry and his wife are greatly relieved to learn of Bradley’s turn of good fortune, but we have long since been made aware of their own tragic back story, in the recent death of their estranged son from a drug overdose, certainly a contributing factor in Harry’s insomnia.

I must confess at this point, if only for the sake of the ever captious and suspicious, that I have been a close friend of Mr. Benton ever since he and the late David Newman (also a close personal friend) collaborated on the screenplay of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In the ensuing 40-year-period, I have often disclosed my critical conflict of interest in print, but Mr. Benton’s films were too important a part of the movie scene for me to refrain from reviewing them entirely. Hence, I happily joined the chorus of approval when he scored a critical and commercial bull’s-eye with such palpable hits as The Late Show (1977), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Places in the Heart (1984), and Nobody’s Fool (1994), while limiting myself to “constructive criticism” of such near and far misses as Bad Company (1972), Still of the Night (1982), Nadine (1987), Billy Bathgate (1991), Twilight (1998) and The Human Stain (2003). Very often, the sheer unpredictability from the result of casting choices plays a crucial role in the outcome of cinematic ventures in both the critical arena and the commercial marketplace.

I do not know yet if Feast of Love will be a palpable hit or a near miss with the critics and the public. Certainly, the apparent aptness of its casting, particularly with the selection of Mr. Freeman, Mr. Kinnear, Ms. Mitchell and Ms. Alexander, should keep it away from the abyss of opening-week blues. But what do I know? After all, I was just about the only New York reviewer who failed to be bedazzled by either Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) or George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). My excuse for underestimating Jaws has been that I don’t swim, and therefore couldn’t see how a shark could even get at me unless I fell off a ship or a plane, in which case I’d drown long before a shark could get a crack at my flesh. I have no such easy excuse for my resistance to Star Wars, except for my increasing aversion to juvenile science fiction, particularly as I have gotten older.

By the same token, time has only increased my addiction to love and lust in the movies, which makes my enthusiastic endorsement of Feast of Love doubly suspect. Still, I urge my readers to see the film with no pangs of guilt on my part whatsoever.

in front of Remington's, a male strip club in the heart of the antiseptic

downtown here. Director John Waters disembarked, followed by the actors Selma

Blair and Johnny Knoxville, as well as Bob Shaye, the co-president of New Line.

The group was headed to an "impromptu" after-party for Mr. Waters' latest

movie, A Dirty Shame, about a sex-addict messiah and his disciples, which had

premiered to an enthusiastic crowd hours earlier.

According to eyewitnesses (which included marketing execs

from Warner Independent, UA/MGM and HBO), Ms. Blair subsequently offered up

quite the photo op: a rising Hollywood starlet receiving a personal lap dance

from one of Remington's naked, glistening staffers. "I did get asked-really

more than asked-to come up and be the magician's assistant. That

girl-that-gets-picked-up-to-wave-the-wand-around type of thing," Ms. Blair said

the next morning in a courtyard restaurant at the Intercontinental hotel,

looking typically winsome in a floral blouse, but in desperate need of a cup of

coffee. "It was very funny to see my agent at this bar. And of course I'm

dressed like something out of an Adam Ant video-like the goody two-shoes thing.

I looked a bit peculiar, but very chic, I think, with a nice big cock waving in

my face."

If the action at Toronto is any indication, American

independent film is entering a sexed-up phase, joining European fare like

Anatomy of Hell, starring an oft-nude Amira Cesar, and Michael Winterbottom's

Nine Songs, which shows real sex and little else. Kinsey, about the iconic sex

doctor Alfred Kinsey, was a big hit at the festival here, thanks in part to one

passionate kiss between Liam Neeson (as Kinsey) and Peter Sarsgaard; and in

Oliver Stone's Alexander (as in: the

Great), Colin Farrell flip-flops so much he puts John Kerry to shame. Let's not

forget that Mr. Farrell also plays for both teams in A Home at the End of the

World.

"I've had three interviews this morning-I think I've said

'vagina' in every one of them," said Toronto festival director Noah Cowan with

a hoarse laugh. "I think you're seeing a greater attention to sex, and to how

we address sex in cinema. And that moves with the times. The times right now

are: 'Let's talk about gay stuff. Let's talk about bisexual stuff. Let's talk

about sexual stuff.' And it's O.K. for stars to participate in those worlds

now."

It's a brave new world for actresses and actors alike: Chloë

Sevigny can go down on Vincent Gallo and still have six projects in the works;

Neve Campbell plays a bisexual temptress who masturbates in the shower in James

Toback's When Will I Be Loved, accepting money for sex from a character played

by Dominic Chianese (Dominic Chianese!). Roget Ebert considers Ms. Campbell an

Oscar front-runner-and before you laugh, remember that he made the same

prediction for Charlize Theron in Monster.

"I think the exploration of bisexuality is something that's

very popular at the moment," Ms. Campbell said, sitting in a comfy love seat in

a room at the Intercontinental. "I don't know if there are many actresses my

age in Hollywood who haven't done a [bisexual] scene. It is somewhat trendy at

the moment."

That's an understatement-and it's not just women who are

having the fun. Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, about homosexual cowboys and

starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, is scheduled for release in October

2005 by Focus Features. John Cameron Mitchell is in pre-production on Short

Bus, another film featuring explicit nookie of all types.

Mr. Waters ventured that in the acting world, sexuality is

the new mentally handicapped. "The same way that an actress would first vomit

in a movie or play retarded people-that shows they were serious about their

craft, and they've all been shot on a toilet-now that's the next thing," he

said in an interview, also at the Intercontinental. "The final thing is to have

real sex."

As with actual encounters, if the audience is not turned on

by an actress' or actor's performance, it is forgotten the next morning (see

Elizabeth Berkley and Maria Schneider). As Ms. Sevigny romped through Fashion

Week in New York, it already seemed like her foray into Mr. Gallo's lascivious

den was slipping into pop-culture amnesia. (A rep for the once-Oscar-nominated

actress was traveling and unavailable for comment.) It can be dangerous to play

against type. Sharon Stone flashing her crotch in Basic Instinct made her a

star, but receiving explicit oral sex in In the Cut did little for America's

sweetheart, Meg Ryan.

Ms. Campbell, however, had high hopes for how her onscreen

rolls in the hay might help her with future roles. "I've wanted to play against

my looks," she said, "which I have nothing to do with, because I wanted it to

be about talent as opposed to …. " Then she paused for a moment. "I was a

dancer my entire life-so for me, it was about developing myself into

something."

In When Will I Be Loved, Ms. Campbell has a Sapphic

encounter with a girlfriend, doggy-style sex with her boyfriend, and accepts

money to sleep with Dominic Chianese (Dominic Chianese!). In the opening scene

of the movie, the actress is shown using the detachable shower head to

masturbate in the shower-no Party of Five necessary. "I like the fact that the scene is in the film,"

insisted Ms. Campbell, who also played bisexual in 1998's Wild Things. She

trotted out the old girl-power argument: "People like to put women on this

innocent pedestal and like to believe that they're not explorative in some

ways. And it's not true."

She added: "I've gotten to a place where I'm not concerning

myself with what the industry thinks or what the audiences think, because

there's really no controlling that anyway. At the beginning of people's

careers, we tend to really obsess over what the right next step is. And that

gets really old and frustrating."

Ms. Blair has a similar take. In A Dirty Shame, due for

release on Sept. 24, she plays a sex-addicted stripper with augmented assets:

two breasts that each could double for the atomic bomb dropped in Dr.

Strangelove.

"Girls have it in them, too, to really goof around," she

said, looking and sounding much more chipper after getting her coffee. "I

really don't care if my child sees Tracy Ullman pick up a bottle with her

cooter. I don't think that will scar them-I just don't. I think it's silly.

It's funny. And maybe inspirational."

She scoffed at the notion that her career might be affected

negatively by playing an overtly sexual role. "I don't believe in career-making

or -breaking performances," Ms. Blair said. "I don't really care what people

think of me in that process. I care more what people think of me on a more

personal level."

first television appearance on the Charlie Rose show on Jan. 23, he talked a

lot about his father. His dad, he said was one of the top three influences in

his life. The other two were show business visionaries, MCA founder Lew

Wasserman, and late Warner Bros. chairman Steve Ross, so that said a lot.

Mr. Ovitz's father was a wholesale liquor salesman who, as he

told Mr. Rose "covered the chain store accounts." Ordinarily, it wouldn't be

worth noting were it not for the seemingly penitential tone of Mr. Ovitz's

appearance, which has entertainment executives on both coasts talking.

No one has referred to Mr. Ovitz as the most powerful man in

Hollywood for some time now. Though his management group, AMG, which represents

Cameron Diaz, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio continues to thrive, Mr.

Ovitz's attempts to branch out into television production and to catch the

broadband wireless network wave have fizzled. But though he didn't dwell too

much on the present state of his affairs-except to say that he was doing fine

financially-Mr. Ovitz did tiptoe through the lowlights and regrets of his

career in an effort to adjust his image from superman to human. "I must say

that in my early years, I was incredibly aggressive," he told Mr. Rose. "I was

working as hard as I could to build a business, to try to dominate a business.

And I probably irritated a lot of people."

There it was. Hardly an epiphany, but the timing was right. In

the wake of our national agony, Mr. Ovitz, and, yes, Tina Brown before him-two

people driven to put their fingers to the wind-had to figure that this city,

this nation were in a conciliatory mood. Stand up. Embrace your failure. Submit

to its purifying properties. You will be forgiven-and, if you're lucky-reborn.

There was something vaguely Bill W. about Mr. Ovitz's

performance, as if he was taking part in some 12-step program that required him

to apologize to the people he'd hurt in his life.

"Having trained myself for 30

years as an aggressive, insensitive agent," Mr. Ovitz said that he was now

"pushing like crazy to change."

Mr. Ovitz didn't exactly bare his heart or beg for forgiveness

and he spent a lot of time defending his actions, but he did imply that he and

Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, who fell out after Mr. Ovitz's

disastrous stint as Disney's number two, were trying to patch things up.

But he left little doubt that

the situation between him and his former friend and C.A.A. partner, Ron Meyer,

who currently runs Universal's movie studio, was hopeless. Likening the end of

their friendship to "a divorce" and "a huge hole in my life," Mr. Ovitz

admitted, in the end, "I think that he was just one of the people that I was

insensitive to."

It was fascinating to watch

Mr. Ovitz, gap-toothed and visibly nervous, do his television act of

contrition, but, ultimately, there aren't too many of Mr. Ovitz's colleagues

who are buying it. And this is, perhaps, where the influence of Mr. Ovitz's

father comes in.

Mr. Ovitz's attempts to atone for his sins failed because he sold

his apology wholesale when he should have taken it door to door. He should have

appointed himself the Fuller Brush Man of remorse, and expressed himself

privately and personally, not over the distant medium of television.

The number of men and women in show business that Mr. Ovitz has

angered-as important and self-reverential as they are-is not enough to register

with Nielsen. So when Mr. Ovitz went on a national-albeit boutique-television

program to catalog his faint regrets, it was apparent that something strategic

was afoot here.

"It was like watching Nixon," said one entertainment industry

executive who knows Mr. Ovitz. "Sweaty lip and all."

And some of those suspicions were confirmed when, on Jan. 24,

former Columbia Pictures chief Mark Canton was announced as the new chairman of

Artists Production Group, the movie-producing sister company of A.M.G.-even if

the deal feels a little like Moe Howard hiring Larry Fine.

Watching Mr. Ovitz recount

his good friend and client, Michael ( E/R )

Crichton's advice that ``The only way to really learn something is to have

failed" felt a little like watching yesterday's news-because it was! Ms. Brown

had just spent the previous week, in the wake of Talk magazine's demise, dispensing similar pearls of S&M

wisdom.

Still, it's hard to dismiss Mr. Ovitz's intentions as entirely

calculating. He did tell Mr. Rose that he had lost his father a year ago. Even

for a Hollywood ninja, that is a life-altering event, and Mr. Ovitz said that

the experience had made him look "at my life through his eyes and what he

brought to his family and what his legacy was, which was really my brother and

myself."

As for his own legacy, the man who co-founded the formidable

Creative Artists Agency said it is "not going to be about having been the most

powerful man in Hollywood for 10 years because, frankly, that was fun but it

wasn't particularly relevant to me socially or...charitably. The legacy for me

is going to be my three kids, the UCLA Medical Center," to which Mr. Ovitz had

pledged $25 million, "and hopefully, having built a couple of companies from

scratch and-and leaving them in good hands."

There were other moments that seemed genuine, too. When Mr. Rose

asked Mr. Ovitz: "How are you different today than you were at the height of

the power of CAA"? Mr. Ovitz said he'd just had the same conversation with his

21-year-old son.

"I tried to explain to him errors that I made in my career and

things that I thought that I did were good. And on the error side, a lot of it

had to do with immaturity and with insensitivity and with an agenda of wanting

to get out of what I called "the valley.''

"San Fernando Valley," Mr. Rose said.

"Yeah. I grew up in the

valley, and I just wanted to make something of myself. And I had a lot of

ideas, and I wanted to do things.…And in order to do that, I pushed really

hard."

That sounded real. Unfortunately, Mr. Ovitz's comment that he and

his family "play Ozzie and Harriet" on the weekends did not. And why is it that

entertainment moguls always profess their human frailty when they're on the

skids?

There was also something hinky about Mr. Ovitz's attempts to

bring to light his philanthropic side, perhaps because it's the one thing that

the natural-born killers of the corporate world try to dredge up when they're

trying to look human.

Mr. Rose did his part to shill on that front-after all, Mr. Ovitz

had chosen to wear the stubble shirt on his program. In his wiry Southern

gentleman's voice, he told his television audience that Mr. Ovitz's "friends

want you to know that there is another side that is not seen and not told, a

family man who's a superb art collector and generous in charity."

Then Mr. Rose asked: "What is it you want to say? What's...wrong,

you think, with the image that many people have [of you]?

"One of the reasons I called you is that I was having dinner with

a friend of mine who I had helped," Mr. Ovitz said. I'm involved at the UCLA

Medical Center in raising money to build a new hospital. And she had called-I

hadn't talked to her in some time-and asked if I could help a friend of hers

who was in very serious trouble."

Mr. Ovitz lent his assistance, and he said, his friend had told

him: "You know, you are so opposite of what I read about.'' That, Mr. Ovitz

said, was what had led him to appear on Mr. Rose's show.

"I mean , all of us are

probably three people. We're probably the person that we think we are, and

we're probably the person that you or somebody else perceives us to be, and…

frankly, we're probably somewhere in the middle. And I think that it's

important that there be a balance with respect to how individuals are-you know,

are looked at," Mr. Ovitz.

Two days after his appearance, Mr. Ovitz's remarks about his

charitable acts was met with a headline in

The New York Post : "Pay Up, Mike Ovitz." The story's writer Nikki Finke,

who has written for this newspaper, reported that Mr. Ovitz, who had promised

the $25 million in April 2000, had made payments toward the pledge but had yet

to deliver the full amount.

That same day, UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale issued a

statement in response to the Post's article. Mr. Ovitz's "generosity is not

only a gift to UCLA; it is a gift to mankind," the statement read. "The gift,

like most major gifts, is to be paid over a period of years, and I have every

confidence that Michael will live up to his commitment." Mr. Ovitz's spokesman

Mike Burns did not respond to the Observer's request to interview Mr. Ovitz,

but he did tell UCLA's Daily Bruin

newspaper that Mr. Ovitz's pledge is not supposed to be fulfilled until 2007.

Mr. Ovitz had gone on television and expressed some regrets. His

comments had ridden out on the signals and particles of electronic media that

his friends and rivals control and monitor on a daily basis and the immediately

the response had come back.

The message was in code, but it was unmistakable: You are not yet

forgiven.

 Liza, With a G.O.P.

Liza Minnelli has recorded a lot of enthusiastic numbers in her

day, but her latest happens to be a political endorsement for Republican State

Assemblyman John Ravitz.

Mr. Ravitz, who's running in the Feb. 12 special election for

State Senator Roy Goodman's seat, was in attendance when Ms. Minnelli laid down

the spot at a Manhattan recording studio on Jan. 20. According to the

candidate, this was the entertainer's first political advertisement.

The Transom obtained a copy of the 60-second spot, which opens

with a few piano bars of what Mr. Ravitz described as a creative "mix of

['One,' from] A Chorus Line , and 'New

York, New York'." Neither tune could be used because of copyright restrictions.

Ms. Minnelli pops up seconds

later. "Hi, this is Liza Minnelli!" she says in a peppy tone that must have

sent the V.U. meters to the moon.

For whatever reasons, Ms.

Minnelli has adopted an extremely sibilant style of enunciation lately, and

when she announces in the ad that she'll be voting for Mr. Ravitz for "State

Senate in the special election," she sounds as if Lucifer got waylaid at the

Lucille Lortel Theater on his way to the Garden of Eden.

"Now as a longtime resident

of the East Side"-Ms. Minnelli owns a co-op apartment in the Imperial House on

East 69th Street, in the district where Mr. Ravitz has served for 10

years-"I've seen our city come together after the tragic events of last year."

Ms. Minnelli memorably responded to the tragic events of Sept. 11

by refusing to fly to Los Angeles for a benefit concert. At the time, she told

the New York Post 's Cindy Adams that

her "Washington contacts" had advised against flying and sagely remarked, "I

should risk my life for one fucking song?"

But for Mr. Ravitz, Ms. Minnelli had softened her tone, if not

her pitch. "We need to stay together to preserve the things that make New York

so special, like the arts," Ms. Minnelli says, with slight slur, explaining

that Mr. Ravitz understands "how important the arts are to our city and our

souls."

"They create jobs and are the"-here Ms. Minnelli builds to a 42nd Street crescendo-"very heart- beat of New York!"

After reiterating that Mr. Ravitz "understands how [the arts]

enrich our daily lives," Ms. Minnelli inexplicably follows with the

announcement that "he's 100 percent pro-choice and favors strong gun-control

laws."

Then, sounding a bit like Kathy Bates in Misery , Ms. Minnelli yelps: "And guess who loves him?"

The deafening answer?

"Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg!"

So, Ms. Minnelli concludes, "start spreading the news!"

Mr. Ravitz said that the final line was Ms. Minnelli's personal

flourish, "because it's from 'New York, New York,' which she is so proud of."

The radio ad was suggested by a mutual friend of Mr. Ravitz and

Ms. Minnelli, whom Mr. Ravitz declined to name. The friend encouraged Mr.

Ravitz-who's focusing much of his campaign on "protecting cultural and art

institutions"-to call the performer, who "knew [his] record through newsletters

and things," Mr. Ravitz said. Soon after, Ms. Minnelli contacted the mutual

friend and asked what she could do to help the campaign.

Ms. Minnelli, who is in London presumably planning her March

wedding to music producer David Gest, which will feature Michael Jackson as best,

man and Liz Taylor as maid of honor, could not be reached for comment.

- Rebecca Traister

Blair Ditch Project

What do you have to do to get booted off MTV's Total Request Live ? All actress Selma

Blair did was take a role in a Todd Solondz movie.

On Tuesday, Jan. 22, Ms. Blair was in town to promote her role in

Mr. Solondz's new film, Storytelling .

Despite Mr. Solondz's predilection for skeevy subjects-1995's Welcome to the Dollhouse dealt frankly

with seventh-grade rape fantasies, and 1998's Happiness had an unsettling subplot about a pedophile-MTV had

booked Ms. Blair for an appearance to promote the new film to TRL 's core under-18 audience.

Storytelling contains a

scene in which Ms. Blair's character, a college student named Vi, has sex with

her black professor. The scene is explicit enough that Mr. Solondz avoided an

NC-17 rating by obscuring part of the steamy image with a digitally produced

red box.

But the show's producers didn't screen the movie until the night

before Ms. Blair's appearance-and that's when they decided to disinvite her

from Tuesday's show, which is cablecast live.

Ms. Blair's publicist, Troy Nankin, said that he received a call

on Tuesday morning "saying that upon review of the tape sent to them of Storytelling, they would be unable to

honor their commitment to have Selma appear on TRL in support of that film."

A spokeswoman for MTV released a statement which emphasized that

the network "has had Selma Blair on MTV numerous times to talk about her

various projects which resonate with our audience."

The statement went on to explain that "We didn't get a screener

of Storytelling until late, and once

we had the opportunity to watch it, we decided that the film's content was not

appropriate for the TRL audience."

"The TRL audience" is

not exactly a bunch of delicate blossoms. In July, the Backstreet Boys chose TRL as the forum in which to disclose

that band member A.J. MacLean was in treatment for alcohol addiction. And in

August, the cast of the R-rated American

Pie 2 (which included Mr. Daly's ex-fiancée, Tara Reid) appeared to promote

their film. American Pie 2 included a

scene in which Jason Biggs' character glues his hand to his penis, which is

arguably more disturbing than Selma Blair and her professor going at it behind

a red box.

Both MTV and Mr. Nankin

confirmed that Ms. Blair will make her next TRL

appearance in March, when she'll be promoting The Sweetest Thing, co-starring Cameron Diaz, Parker Posey and

Jason Bateman.

Jason Bateman? Now that's skeevy.

- Rebecca Traister

Party Out of Bounds

No one dances on Ron Porges'

bar-not even Fred Schneider. Things got a little too frisky-for Florida-at the

closing-night after-party for the Sarasota Film Festival at Ovo Cafe on Jan.

26. R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe and B-52's singer Fred Schneider were in

attendance when the café's D.J. cued up the latter group's "Love Shack" and Mr.

Schneider jumped on the bar to sing along. The crowd loved it, but Mr. Porges,

who owns Ovo, did not. "We got pretty nice bars, with high-gloss finish," he

told The Transom. "To have someone dancing on it, I don't care who it is-it's

not cool."

Mr. Porges said he didn't remember what happened next, but one

Ovo employee told The Transom that the owner pulled Mr. Schneider off the bar

and admonished him about proper saloon etiquette.

The D.J. tempted fate again when he played R.E.M.'s "It's the End

of the World as We Know It", but Michael Stipe stayed put on the floor.

"He wasn't really dancing," said the employee. "But you can't

really dance to their music, can you?"

-Blair Golson