Take the price of an orchestra seat for the new hit musical Billy Elliot. It’s currently an extortionate $146 for the holiday season. The public subsequently catches a break in the New Year, but the cost of all its orchestra seats will still be a record $126.50 (which increases magically to $136.50 on Saturday nights).

Crisis? What crisis?

I VERY MUCH ENJOYED the fun and wit of Shrek, which has just opened at the Broadway Theatre, and I’d happily recommend it to anybody. But all Shrek’s orchestra seats are $111.50 ($121.50 on weekends). The cheaper seats in the rear mezzanine are $86.50, and even further back, $41.50. (That’s as far back as you can go.)

Shrek—I need hardly remind you—is a family show. There are no reduced tickets of any kind for children.

What on earth are its producers thinking? The last thing they’re thinking about is folk who love the theater but can no longer afford to go. They’re thinking of profit, of course (and more profit). And, like the opportunistic producers of Billy Elliot, they believe they’ll get it.

Would it kill Shrek’s producers—which includes DreamWorks Theatricals—if they at least introduced half-price tickets for kids?

Disney Theatricals is the only producer on Broadway to take a bold initiative. Disney has announced a sale for all its shows—Mary Poppins, Lion King and Little Mermaid. For all performances Jan. 6 to March 13 (traditionally the bleakest months for Broadway business, economic crisis or no), buy one full-price ticket and bring a child free. (The sale ends on Dec. 23 at one minute to midnight.)

It might be said by cynics that the Disney shows aren’t as hot as the newly opened Shrek or Billy Elliot. Maybe so; but who else is giving the beleaguered public a break?

To be sure, discounted Broadway tickets can usually be found by scrambling round the Web or trying your luck at TKTS on the day of a performance. It’s as if a discounted ticket is a secret vice. The importance of the Disney initiative is that it’s the first production company in the recession to openly advertise reduced ticket prices.

What usually happens is the reverse: the scam of ticket prices inflated by stealth.

Let’s imagine you go on a family treat of four—two parents and two children—to Shrek. You sensibly refuse to pay for Premium Tickets at $301.50 each, but you’ve decided to go on the weekend (rather than a school night) and so pay $486 for four orchestra seats. The good news is the ticket price includes a “facility fee” of $1.50 each, which is basically for going to the toilet.

(It’s also known as the “Theater Restoration Fee”: We’re paying the owners to “restore” their own theaters. In 2007, there were over 12 million tickets sold on Broadway. That little $1.50 Restoration Fee made theater owners another $18 million.)

So you’ve forked out $486 for Shrek through Ticketmaster, Broadway’s official ticket outlet. But you now face a further “service charge” and “handling fee.” The service charge is for issuing the four tickets (that’ll be $28); the handling fee is for delivering them (e-mail, $2.50; regular mail, $4).

Congratulations! You now have your tickets for Shrek, and the cost has only gone from $486 to $516.50 because you didn’t have them sent by mail.

But there’s even more good news! Is it that you’ve opted to order takeout pizza and stay home to watch the Shrek video with the kids instead?

No! The good news is that the theater where Shrek is playing isn’t owned by Jujamcyn Theaters. Earlier this season, Jujamcyn began a new, extremely thoughtful initiative that put a higher price tag on aisle seats. They did this because they know that even the best seats at their theaters are so cramped that audience members have been known to cry out in agony from leg cramps. All Broadway seats are like this, but Jujamcyn was the first to charge between $17 and $25, in addition to the full price, for the privilege of sitting on the aisle.

An aisle seat for Chekhov’s The Seagull, for example, could therefore be as ludicrously high as $135. The proud model for Jujamcyn’s aisle gouging is the variable ticket prices on an airline (where you pay extra for every inch). What’s the difference between sitting on a plane and in a theater? One always makes you feel miserable; the other isn’t supposed to.

Now here’s a coincidence: Many seasons ago, I felt so cramped reviewing a revival of The Sound of Music from my aisle seat in a Jujamcyn theater that I publicly challenged Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn, to sit in the same expensive seat and tell me that it isn’t as uncomfortable as sitting at the back of the plane.

He didn’t accept the challenge. Perhaps he didn’t want to sit through his misbegotten production of The Sound of Music.

What’s to be done about all these greedy Broadway producers? Attend to the tale of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, which notoriously introduced the $450 and $375 tickets for suckers, and the $120 ticket for really poor people. It’s closing. The public didn’t buy it.

FINALLY, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Broadway is a highly successful, near-billion-a-year industry. In many ways, it is the city—at least the city I love. I first came from London to live here 28 years ago, and one night I was standing outside a Broadway theater when there was a sudden flurry of activity, and Mayor Koch stepped out of a limo and ran slap into me. “Going to a show, Mr. Mayor?” I asked him.

He took a beat and replied, “I am the show!”

I knew then, if I may say so, that this was my kind of town. But these are extraordinary days, and I fear for the winter ahead and for the future of theater in particular. It’s time for Broadway producers to wake up and do the decent thing: Bring down the prohibitive cost of tickets for the good of all.

jheilpern@observer.com

Shrek is ditching the magic kingdom and coming to Broadway. Although, don't expect Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers to come out of their recording booths to prance around on stage any time soon. Shrek The Musical will premiere in Seattle in August this summer and then transfer to New York (at a theater to be announced) in early November. Spamalot helmer Tim Hatley will direct.

Read on for full press release.

SHREK

THE MUSICAL

Broadway Performances Begin in Early November

ONCE upon a time in a land not so far, far away a new musical began its journey to Broadway.

DreamWorks Theatricals and Neal Street Productions, Ltd. have announced that SHREK THE MUSICAL will play an exclusive world premiere engagement at The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, August 14th to September 21st, prior to opening on Broadway in the Fall of 2008. Preview performances will begin in early November at a theater to be announced.

SHREK THE MUSICAL is an entirely new musical based on the story and characters from William Steig's book Shrek!, as well as the DreamWorks Animation film Shrek, the first chapter of the Shrek movie series.

SHREK THE MUSICAL features a book and lyrics by Pulitzer Prize® winner, David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole), music by Jeanine Tesori (Olivier Award-winner for Caroline, or Change and three-time Tony Award® nominee), and is directed by Jason Moore, who staged the Tony Award®-winning Best Musical, Avenue Q.

SHREK THE MUSICAL is DreamWorks Animation's first venture in legitimate theater. The production was initiated by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Chief Executive Officer of DreamWorks Animation, and Sam Mendes, who has a long-term relationship with DreamWorks. Mendes, a big fan of the first Shrek film, suggested the idea of creating a musical to DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg around the time the second film was in production. The musical is being produced by DreamWorks Theatricals (Bill Damaschke, President) and Neal Street Productions, Ltd (principals Sam Mendes and Caro Newling).

Other members of the SHREK THE MUSICAL creative team include Tony Award®-winning set and costume designer, Tim Hatley (Monty Python's Spamalot, Private Lives, among others) and three-time Olivier Award-winning lighting designer, Hugh Vanstone, whose Broadway credits include Monty Python's Spamalot, Bombay Dreams, The Blue Room and Art.

The choreography is by newcomer Josh Prince, and Tim Weil (Rent) is serving as music director.

Casting and additional members of the creative team will be announced shortly.

SHREK THE MUSICAL is based on a popular 1990 book by William Steig. The characters of Shrek, Donkey and Fiona, and the other inhabitants of "Far, Far Away," have been featured in three major animated films and a popular television special to date. The first Shrek feature film hit theaters in the summer of 2001, and went on to win the first-ever Academy Award® for Best Animated Feature. The 2004 sequel, Shrek 2, remains the third highest grossing movie of all time and highest grossing animated film of all time. The latest chapter of the Shrek story, Shrek the Third, is the 2nd highest grossing film of 2007. Shrek the Halls, the recent ABC television special, was one of the most watched TV programs of 2007.

Yet after seeing it, about all I can say is that its narrative does not work for me as well as Shrek 's did earlier this year. Some of my colleagues have already noted that Monsters, Inc. might be the victim of bad timing in coming out almost immediately after the Sept. 11 massacre-and it remains to be seen if Harry Potter will seem any less ill-timed. Of course, the tastes of tots and their parents in tandem is a subject I am singularly disinclined to explore. Still, the plot premises of Monsters, Inc. strike me as downright peculiar for a supposed children's entertainment.

First we're told that there's a high-tech corporation with a full assortment of monsters on hand to spring out of bedroom closet doors, frightening small children to the point of their screaming out loud. Next we're informed that these screams provide the power for the monster operation. Here the movie gets surreal, even for an animated cartoon: A supply of closet doors comes down an assembly line; when a monster opens one of these seemingly detached doors, a child's bedroom magically appears in view, with all four walls, a collection of toys and a child in bed-thus violating the three-dimensional consistency of the monster workplace. This conceit is, like the rest of the film, longer on ingenuity than intelligence. The legerdemain is admittedly clever, but it seems too elaborate for my mind, though perhaps not for a child's.

Besides, are parents supposed to be enchanted by the idea of children being induced to scream in fright for some ulterior Matrix -like purpose? How old does a child have to be to stop being frightened by things that go bumpetty-bump in the night? Can the terror be turned away with a night light-or what else are night lights for? Shrek doesn't raise these problems because it works on a fairy-tale allegorical level, whereas Monsters, Inc. functions as a sci-fi futurist fantasy with lots of noisy machinery. And I warn you, the din is often deafening.

A problem arises when the screaming diminishes to the point that the company's energy supply is depleted. It is about this time that we learn the monsters are more afraid of the children than the children are of the monsters. Any threat of con-tamination of monster by child sets off an alarm at the Child Detection Agency, which dispatches huge emergency workers in sealed yellow rubber outfits to decontaminate the premises and personnel. The mere use of the words "contaminate" and "decontaminate" have unavoidably taken on new connotations since the anthrax scare; but, of course, pandering to children in the audience by making monsters terrified of the child surrogates on the screen is a crafty marketing maneuver.

Of the human characters, we come to know a young girl named Boo the best.Unfortunately, she's so lacking in charm that a fatal imbalance results from having suchaccomplished talents doing the monsters' voices as John Goodman (as the chief monster Sulley), Billy Crystal (as his wise-cracking one-eyed sidekick, Mike Wazowski), Steve Buscemi (as Randall Boggs, the reptilian

villain) and James Coburn (as Henry J.Waternoose, the pompous C.E.O. of Monsters, Inc.). How I'd love to see these larger-than-life actors in a live-action update of The Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

But even the voice-over actors must make do with a mere handful of satiric lines until the plot finally degenerates into the kitschy-koo sentimentality of cuddly Sulley's pathetic attachment to Boo. After a coup d'état by Sulley and Mike, in which Henry J. Waternoose is dragged away in chains for threatening the lives of children, the policy of Monsters, Inc. is changed to making children laugh-and thus providing an even greater source of energy for the company. This led me to wonder whether parents would consider it an improvement for their children to laugh instead of scream at night? Whatever happened to a good night's sleep, perchance to dream?

The problem with mixing pale human beings with irresistibly anthropomorphic animals goes back to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and has never really been solved-even in Japan. And though I like The Simpsons up to a point, I must confess that I am more addicted to The West Wing and Law and Order while I wait in vain for grown-up movies to come pouring out of the Hollywood kiddy factories.

For that matter, who the hell is Harry Potter , and when do I get to see this film? Do the distributors know something I don't? I certainly can't guarantee them a good review. But then, back in 1964 no one expected me to call Richard Lester's, Alun Owen's and the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night "the Citizen Kane of juke-box movies."

A Tale of Tourette's

Rob Morrow's Maze , from a screenplay by Bradley White and Mr. Morrow, begins with a double signification in its title, referring both to the name of its protagonist-Lyle Maze (Rob Morrow)-and the quasi-hallucinatory effects of his affliction with Tourette's syndrome. Mr. Morrow hit upon the idea for Maze after seeing a documentary, Twitch and Shout , about people from all walks of life afflicted with the disorder.

Here I must plead complete ignorance, having never seen Twitch and Shout and having no personal experience with any Tourette's sufferers. So I was not prepared for the first shots of Mr. Morrow convulsively twitching and making disturbing knocking noises with his tongue and gums. I kept waiting for an explanation of Maze's bizarre behavior, perhaps a visit to a doctor's office or some clinical discussions. Instead, what I got was a very sensually passionate love story-though one without sex-involving Maze, his best friend Mike (Craig Sheffer) and Mike's girlfriend Callie (Laura Linney). Indeed, Mike and Callie are the only people with whom Maze feels comfortable, even though he's becoming a public figure in the art world for his painting and sculpture.

When Callie offers to pose for Maze's nude studies after a previous model finds his Tourette's symptoms too distracting and destructive for her (and his) professional concentration, Maze sees Callie bathed in a warm orange glow that is a reflection of Mr. Morrow's visual subjectivity on this project. After Mike has left her alone to pursue an idealistic medical adventure on an eight-month sojourn in Africa, Callie confides to Maze that she's pregnant. Callie has not told Mike of her condition, and she's fed up with being sacrificed for the sake of his humanity-serving-and-saving principles. Callie indicates to Maze that she's willing to start an affair with him, but despite his intense feelings for her, Maze cannot bring himself to betray his best friend.

What happens instead is a long nurturing period in which Callie and Maze are inseparable until Callie brings forth a son. Unselfish to the end, Maze has written to Mike about Callie's impending delivery, and Mike returns, more convinced than ever that he's done the right thing. Callie is confronted with the dilemma of what to do with Mike and what to do with Maze. The nice thing about this movie, in an era of chic open endings, is that Callie finally does make a decision, and we are convinced that it is the right one.

Mr. Morrow, Mr. Sheffer and Ms. Linney expand this intimate chamber drama into something much more by the modulated force and eloquent restraint in the expression of their emotions; left unsaid are the usual alibis of disability. With the simplest means, Mr. Morrow and his colleagues have fashioned a stirring entertainment of charm and humor. Maze is the best kind of independent filmmaking to shame the somnolent mainstream.

Tatou Me

Laurent Firode's Happenstance ( Le Battement d'Ailes du Papillon), from his own screenplay, suggests in its French title that butterflies' wings fluttering over the Atlantic Ocean can cause a tsunami tidal wave in the Pacific. Audrey Tatou, here cast in a pivotal ensemble role, gives a more interesting performance than she did in her overly bossy, fussy title role in Amélie . For one thing, she does a lot more listening in Happenstance as a badgered household-appliance clerk than she did as a know-it-all in Amélie . And Ms. Tatou listens beautifully, with both charm and humor, as she wends her way from setback to setback to stumble finally onto her true love, a young Algerian named Younès (Faudel). As in Serendipity , two characters who are meant for each other are enhanced and enriched by all their reverses until, in the end, they are spiritually prepared for each other.

The Paris of Happenstance is much less the quaint fairy-tale Paris of Amélie . There is a lot more bite and spite and bitterness and crime, all woven together to form the tapestry of individual destiny. People lie all the time to gain an advantage, but are generally found out and humiliated in the process. The "happy" ending can also serve as a grotesque parody of all happy endings. Happenstance is ultimately a celebration of human perversity in the face of life's hidden design.

But in order to apply this giddy image to show business, you first have to turn it inside out: It is Mr. Eisner who has found Shrek squatting on his once-unassailable turf, threatening the remnants of Walt Disney's animation empire.

Ordinarily, the pugilistic Mr. Eisner would have something in his arsenal to fend off any challenger to Disney's summer superiority. But those prospects seem to be dimming. On June 15, Disney released Atlantis: The Lost Empire , a damp, airless cartoon that grossed only $20 million in its opening weekend, making it the poorest summer debut in Disney's recent history. And this past Christmas there was The Emperor's New Groove , a minor addition to the Disney canon, the first animated feature to be green-lighted after Mr. Katzenberg's 1994 departure.

Indeed, it's been a long while since Disney trotted out an honest-to-goodness children's blockbuster. Pixar's Toy Story and A Bug's Life were made out-of-house, in San Francisco. And don't even mention The Tigger Movie .

No, Disney was reborn in the late 1980's with Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and the profit centers called Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King –movies that Mr. Katzenberg micromanaged when he spearheaded the animation division. These movies opened strong and featured compelling stories, inside jokes, double-entendre, direct sentiment and witty animation. They kept kids in theaters all summer with their parents next to them.

Like Shrek .

Suddenly, the allegations made by Jeffrey Katzenberg in his acrimonious 1995 lawsuit against Mr. Eisner–that his magic had elevated Disney to dizzying profit heights–were ringing true. Mr. Katzenberg was not always right (check out The Road to El Dorado ), but there is a feeling that when he left the Magic Kingdom, he took the Leg-of-Tadpole Cookbook with him.

Neither DreamWorks nor Disney executives would comment on the record for this piece. But one high-level Disney executive, who requested anonymity, said, "If DreamWorks makes Shrek a third time–not a second time, but a third time–I'll say, 'Wow, good on ya.' But one film is not a trend."

Disney's early summer has been rough, with tepid critical and consumer response to Pearl Harbor , 4,000 company-wide layoffs and the exit, after just a year and a half, of studio president Peter Schneider.

With Atlantis' gurgling descent came news that Disney would fire 500 in the animation division, the artistic backbone of the Disney brand, and that those who remained would have their salaries cut by 30 to 50 percent. Many longtime artists have quit, and some are openly griping that since Mr. Katzenberg departed, there's been no executive at Disney who's bothered to pay attention to the quality of the stories they've been telling.

"Starting with The Little Mermaid , Jeffrey was at every storyboard meeting, at every session," said Tom Sito, an animator who was the head storyboard artist on Pocahontas , Mr. Katzenberg's last hands-on Disney project. "Jeffrey was a right-in-the-trenches kind of producer and is very much into the story. He doesn't give notes like 'That character's hair is the wrong color.' He says, 'I don't believe he loves her, and without a love story you don't have a movie.'"

That kind of down-and-dirty narrative investment was sorely lacking in Atlantis, which one animator still working at Disney called "technically proficient, but very deficient in terms of storytelling and character."

Another animation artist, who requested anonymity, said that "when Katzenberg left [Disney], the studio went into this major spin about how Jeffrey wasn't the key to the success of the films. But the artists knew better." Disney, he said, wanted to make it sound as if Mr. Eisner, Mr. Schneider and Roy Disney, Walt's nephew and the executive behind Fantasia 2000 , "were all going to do the same thing … but they are just not as intense as Jeffrey is."

Another complaint is that Disney executives have been distracted. When Disney animation chief Tom Schumacher and Mr. Schneider "got the Tony for The Lion King ," said one animator, "a lot of animators said they'd never be seen in Toon Town again."

There has also been budget-crunching. With Disney's stock on shaky ground, Mr. Eisner and his colleagues have taken measures to stop the bleeding, and they started with animators. In a posting on the Motley Fool Web site on June 22, Dave Pruiksma, a 20-year Disney veteran animator who quit in May, wrote that Disney executives' "contempt for the hard-working artists that actually make the films is palpable." His posting continued: "Rest assured, none of these executives are suffering while Walt Disney's beloved studio crumbles around them. Oh, except perhaps for Mr. Schumacher whom, I am told, recently lost the service of the butler in one of his residences."

Industry sources blamed the shoddiness of the product on a lack of focus, plus cost-cutting. The legend of Mr. Katzenberg's perfectionism and work ethic started with his decree, "If you're not at work on Saturday, don't bother coming in on Sunday"–which led some to call Disney "Mouschwitz" when he was there. His projects were constantly rethought throughout production, frequently at great cost: Aladdin lost two characters and four completed Howard Ashman songs late in production; The Lion King , which started darker, gained the flatulent sidekicks Pumba and Timon. It grossed more than $700 million worldwide.

Some artists feel that frugality rules the current Disney regime. Mr. Pruiksma told The Transom that Mr. Katzenberg had decided late in the game to expand the character of Chip the teacup in Beauty and the Beast, which Mr. Pruiksma animated. But he said of his recent experiences animating the chain-smoking, deadpan Mrs. Packard in Atlantis : "From a character animator's standpoint, there were missed opportunities … the old guys always thought through things. But with Atlantis , it was more about filling the screen with action than developing characters and story. And that's what makes Shrek popular–the writing and the vocal performances."

And on his Motley Fool posting, Mr. Pruiksma wrote of Mr. Schumacher, who has run Disney animation since January 1999, "Hope springs eternal that Schumacher will leave. Feature animation as a whole and in fact the entire animation artistic community is waiting with bated breath for this biggest of problems to leave feature animation permanently and take his corrupt and incompetent regime with him."

Since 1995, "salaries [for animators] have gone up, up, up with a good marketplace," said one high-level Disney executive, who asked not to be identified. "Now those salaries are going to come down. And it's not unexpected that people are going to be unhappy about it."

As for Mr. Katzenberg, who was in Europe at press time, he's got to be as happy as Shrek with a slug sandwich. Some insiders see Shrek as a shrewd acknowledgment that the fairy-tale formula that revived Disney in the 90's can't be recycled anymore. Where Atlantis looks like a politically correct rehash of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , Shrek is a modern fairy tale by way of Entertainment Weekly 's obsession with Hollywood power. Mr. Sito, one of the storyboard artists on Shrek and president of the animators' union, said that Mr. Katzenberg "lives and dies on his ability to engage what the public wants." Mr. Sito also suggested that Shrek 's script can be read as a direct response to charges that The Road to El Dorado wasn't funny. Said one Disney animator, who requested anonymity: "Who can tap into great storytelling and make it relevant to an audience today? Today, it's Jeffrey. Ten years ago, it was Disney."

Of course, Shrek 's success is just the beginning: Many animators interviewed remarked on the good buzz about Lilo & Stitch , a classically animated cartoon that Disney will release in summer 2002. And Disney's CGI arm, Pixar, which created both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 , will release the much-anticipated Monsters Inc. in November. But John Lasseter, the computer Wunderkind behind Pixar, though classically trained by Disney's "nine old men," has, said one insider, "an uneasy alliance" with his parent company and keeps his own digs in San Francisco, far from Mr. Eisner's Southern California stronghold.

For Jean-Louis

The men and women in chef's whites crowded into the immaculate kitchen of Daniel Boulud's eponymous restaurant, and it was hard not to be impressed. It was Sunday, June 24, at approximately 5:20 p.m., and more than 21 chefs and their crews stood and listened to the game plan for the evening's benefit dinner–190 diners, $500 a plate–to help pay the medical expenses of chef Jean-Louis Palladin, who is battling lung cancer.

The line-up: Jean-Georges Vongerichten; Michael Demers, of Mr. Palladin's Las Vegas restaurant; Daniel's chef de cuisine, Alex Lee; Park Avenue Cafe's David Burke; Lespinasse's Christian Delouvrier, and its former chef, Gray Kunz); Gramercy Tavern's Tom Colicchio; Cello's Laurent Tourondel; Le Bernardin's Eric Ripert; Tribeca Grill's Don Pintabona; Montrachet's Harold Moore; chocolatier Jacques Torres; Olives' Todd English; Rocco DiSpirito, the chef at Union Pacific; Ducasse's Alain Ducasse; pastry chef François Payard; Balthazar's Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson; Chez Louis' Matthew Tivy; Ariane Daguin, of D'Artagnan; and Michael Ginor, of Hudson Valley Foie Gras. It was like an All-Star team in aprons, and the chefs did in fact pose together for a photograph during the evening like a baseball team, laughing and crowded together, exuberant in their white home uniforms.

Mr. Boulud explained how the cooks were going to stay out of each other's space and egos, and the restaurateur Drew Nieporent and his wife Ann arrived and began to greet the chefs. "Every time I kiss one of them, I smell a different herb," Mrs. Nieporent said. Mr. Nieporent, carrying a bag of photos of Mr. Palladin with various chefs, waded to the front of the crowd to get the signatures of the participants. "The magnitude of this," Mr. Nieporent said as he scoped out the players. "We have a lot to be thankful for," said Mr. DiSpirito. "The guy invented the rock 'n' roll-chef lifestyle."

Though a place had been set for him at the head table, Mr. Palladin, who was in Washington, was not up to making the event. But his friends were intent on documenting the evening. His lawyer, Ralph Hochberg, roamed the restaurant with a snazzy-looking camera, taking pictures of the participants.

As the clock neared 6 p.m., the chefs dispersed to their stations. The American chefs were responsible for the cocktail reception: Mr. Burke set out lollipops made of smoked salmon, velvety foie gras, goat cheese with a nutty shell. Mr. Pintabona served up briny Malpeque oysters topped with caviar, nestled on a bed of cucumber sorbet. In homage to Mr. Palladin's love of organ meats, Mr. Tivy offered grilled duck hearts filled with a tiny dollop of foie gras.

By 7 p.m., when dinner was scheduled to begin in Daniel's main dining room, the restaurant was a cross-section of the culinary culture, heavy on New York: chef Jacques Pepin; Café des Artistes owners George and Jenifer Lang; Mr. Vongerichten's partner, Phil Suarez, and his wife Lucy; Osteria del Circo co-owner Mauro Maccioni; Windows on the World president David Emil; Daniel Johnnes, the wine director at Montrachet; Ibrahim Fahmy, the general manager of the Essex House hotel, who put up Mr. Palladin when the chef was in town for treatment; wine importer Anthony DiDio; San Domenico owner Tony May; Gourmet editor in chief Ruth Reichl; New York magazine food writer Gael Greene; and Jean-Marie Amat, chef at the Saint-James Relais & Châteaux, outside of Bordeaux, who came bearing three bottles of Chateau Petrus '90.

Mr. Kunz told The Transom about the first James Beard dinner in Las Vegas, where Mr. Palladin's Napa restaurant is based. Participating chefs were asked to donate a spoon or an article of clothing to be displayed on a bulletin board. "Jean-Louis gave his underwear," Mr. Kunz said with a laugh. "They're still up there."

Before dinner, Mr. Boulud stood. "My life changed a little bit because of Jean-Louis; of course, my career also," the chef said, explaining that Mr. Palladin had helped him land a job at the Polo, at New York's Westbury Hotel. Then Mr. Boulud introduced Mr. Palladin's statuesque daughter Verveine, who shyly told the audience that her father was "doing O.K. right now. And he's very sorry he couldn't be here, but he loves you all and he thanks you so much for being here."

Mr. Boulud wished the crowd " Bon appetit " – but before the first course could arrive, he was back at the microphone with a boyish smile on his face. "In the life story of Jean-Louis, there is always one young woman," he said, and the crowd erupted in an appreciative laugh for Mr. Palladin's girlfriend, Tanya Bogdanovic. Mr. Boulud thanked her for taking such good care of Mr. Palladin, including making numerous trips "back and forth from restaurants … to bring meals to Jean-Louis."

The four-course meal, prepared by the French contingent, followed. Each course featured two different dishes delivered in alternating order to the tables, which meant that in order to sample all of the entrées, one had to rely on the generosity of the person sitting next to him or her. For the fish course, Mr. Ripert sent out a plate of steamed halibut on a bed of sweet-pea puree, along with sugar-snap peas with oregano and black truffle sauce. It looked like a piece of minimalist art and contrasted with the more textured-looking dish of spice-crusted striped bass in sweet-and-sour broth that Mr. Vongerichten prepared for the same course.

In between courses, GQ food writer Alan Richman and Bloomberg culinary correspondent Peter Elliot conducted a live auction. The bottles of Château Petrus went for $3,000. And bidding for a package that featured dinner for six guests at all five of Mr. Nieporent's restaurants intensified when Mr. Boulud's publicist, Georgette Farkas, noted that the package came with the private-reservations number for Nobu. The package went for $3,900.

The crowd became quite spirited, and when it became hard to hear Messrs. Elliot and Richman, Ms. Bogdanovic suddenly took the microphone.

"We're here for my boyfriend, her daughter and many of you that are here, his friends," she said, her voice a little tremulous. "And we'd like to raise some money, and I know that most of you here would like to beat what we did in Washington."

(A few weeks earlier, $250,000 had been raised at a similar event in the old Jean-Louis space at the Watergate.)

One of the last auction items produced some of the most heated bidding. It was a fall pig roast for 80 prepared by Mr. Boulud, who assured the crowd that for the final months of the 250-pound beast's life it would be raised on "apples, chestnuts and buttermilk" at Four Story Hill Farm in Pennsylvania. Foodie Roger Yassen wanted the pig. So did Mr. Nieporent, even though people kidded him that in his current dieting state–he's lost 70 pounds in a matter of weeks–he couldn't eat it. "Listen, I'm kosher and I want the pig!" Mr. Nieporent yelled. And he got it, with a bid of $12,000.

Finally, Mr. Elliot put up an item akin to a baseball signed by the '61 Yankees: one of Mr. Boulud's chef's jackets, signed by all of the participating chefs. San Domenico's Mr. May paid $2,500 for it, with the stipulation that Mr. Palladin also sign it. The final figures were not in at press time, but the auction raised $101,195, the dinner brought in more than $84,500, and another $8,500 was donated by people who couldn't attend.

Then there was a commotion at the entrance to the main dining room.

There, staring intensely at the crowd, stood the chefs themselves. As Mr. Boulud called their names, they threaded their way through the tables and the applause, pausing in front of Mr. Palladin's daughter and his girlfriend to receive kisses of thanks.

George Lang, the Café des Artistes owner who has seen a thing or two in his life, watched. "How much they work for five minutes of glory," he said quietly. But his face made it clear that the glory had nothing to do with it.

–Frank DiGiacomo

Vicky Jenson, from a screenplay by Ted Elliott, Terry Russio, Joe Stillman and

Roger S. H. Schulman, based on the book by William Steig), and Pearl Harbor (directed by Michael Bay,

from a screenplay by Randall Wallace). Shrek

has had nothing but good reviews; Pearl

Harbor almost nothing but bad. After seeing Shrek with an appreciative audience, I decided its good notices

were fully justified, and I dreaded what promised to be the three-hour ordeal

of Pearl Harbor . But Pearl Harbor was not nearly so hard to

take as I had anticipated. I even got a bit teary-eyed over its full-bodied

romanticism and anachronistic nobility, which reminded me of a period I had

experienced firsthand, though admittedly at the hyper-susceptible age of 13.

My more justifiably enthusiastic response to Shrek , however, had to overcome my

habitual resistance to animation as an alternative to live-action

cinematography. Still, I am willing to concede that animated films are more

"artistic" than live-action films in that there is more human control in the

former than there is in the latter. This is to say that Kate Beckinsale was not

created by the filmmakers who utilized her talent. There is an irreducible core

of reality to her feisty beauty.

The point is that Shrek ,

possibly the most accomplished and articulate animated film ever made, lacks

something that one experiences with even a very ordinary-and, at best, only

marginally meritorious-war movie like Pearl

Harbor : a feeling of kinship with images of life in real time on the

screen. I am perhaps indulging a humanist bias on my part that is totally at

odds with the tastes of today's more gadgety and cyberspatially driven young

people, who make up the target market audience for this new movie millennium.

Nonetheless-and here is the ironic twist in my acceptance of Pearl Harbor -the parts I liked most are

the parts before and after the digital destruction of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese carrier planes.

For me, the only use of spectacle here, as in Titanic , is for the enhancement and

redemption of the major characters. Mr. Bay and Mr. Wallace borrow proudly and

shamelessly from many old movies, not the least of which are Gone With the Wind (1939) and Children of Paradise (1945). They

achieve only faint echoes of the originals, of course, but there is more than a

suggestion of Scarlett with the wounded in Atlanta, and of Garance offering

herself to the misguidedly noble Baptiste in Paris, in Ms. Beckinsale's Nurse

Evelyn Johnson. In one instance, Evelyn is overwhelmed by the carnage in Pearl

Harbor; in another, she is disappointed by the misplaced scruples of Ben

Affleck's Rafe McCawley.

Mr. Affleck has taken a lot of heat for not being a big

enough star to carry a love story in a special-effects superproduction, but he

is as good as most-if not all-of the $20 million superstars. Indeed, I have

seen him be good in so many underrated melodramas that I can't dump on him

here. In the end, Pearl Harbor is not

so much about World War II as it is about movies about World War II. And what's

wrong with that? We certainly don't need to revive our hatred of "the Japs" at

this late date. A few years after the war, Nat Holman, then basketball coach at

City College, visited Japan to give some basketball clinics, and he was

astonished to discover that these polite and civilized people were the same

ones who had bombed Pearl Harbor. This is something Pearl Harbor doesn't pick up on: the sheer disbelief in the United

States that a despised race of people would have the technical and strategic

know-how to destroy the mighty American fleet, and then sink two British

battleships that had sailed confidently to relieve Singapore. This

condescension to Japan lasted into the 50's, when American cineastes were

amazed to discover, in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon

and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu , the

spearheads of a vibrant Japanese film industry going back to the silent era.

Still, what Pearl

Harbor cannot be forgiven is its $135 million price tag-as if with all that

money a filmmaker should be able to purchase Shavian dialogue and Chekhovian

pathos. This is hardly the first time critics wound up reviewing the money

rather than the movie. I was in Cannes in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was unveiled, and all

that the American and British critics on the scene wanted to talk about was its

fiscal extravagance in the face of its anemic commercial prospects. Twenty-two

years later, the uncut Apocalypse Now

was hailed as the best film at Cannes, and no one seemed to care about how much

it had cost.

Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles were buried in Hollywood

under the tombstone of needless extravagance, and even Michael Cimino was

treated more roughly than he deserved for Heaven's

Gate (1980), a film that stays in the mind despite its undeniable

bottom-line follies. And let's not talk about Max Ophüls and Lola Montès (1955)-after Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Jean

Renoir's The Rules of the Game

(1939), my favorite box-office disaster.

Pearl Harbor is

not in this class of creative extravagance, and as I have suggested, its

celebrated bang-bang scenes are closer to animation than to live-action

cinematography. As for the widely panned kiss-kiss scenes, I cannot recommend

them to my readers, because that would arouse expectations that could not be

fulfilled. The best way to see the movie is as I did: expecting nothing and

being pleasantly surprised, and strangely moved, by Mr. Bay's audacity in

filming his lovers in end-of-the-world close-ups, however briefly. This is a

choice I applaud, despite the risks it runs with reviewers.

There is less to say about Shrek that has not already been said many times over. The film has

been heralded as the antithesis of everything Disney stands for, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Pearl Harbor . Still, as much as I like

and admire Shrek , I am not prepared

to give up Dumbo (1941), Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), and especially Thumper, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and

all the inspired Goofy sports cartoons. And, of course, there is Tex Avery, and Mr. Magoo, Bugs Bunny and the Road

Runner-and let's not forget The Simpsons

and South Park . Have I implied that I

don't like animation? Let's say I've kept looking at it out of the corner of my

eye-or, better still, let's never say never. Or, even more embarrassingly,

let's say that we never entirely grow up.

I'm not sure I can adequately describe the advances in

animation represented by Shrek , which

may be another reason why I shy away from posing as an authority on the

subject. I know what I like on the narrative level. The backgrounds look

interestingly detailed, and the donkey in particular has his anatomy and its

movements imaginatively integrated with his smart-ass personality. What Shrek is saying to both its adult and

child audience is mainly that ugly creatures can find happiness together if

they find and appreciate each other's inner beauty, or some such sentimental

and politically correct nonsense. Since most of us look more like the Ogre in Shrek than what most people would

consider an adequate prince in shining armor, it's a fairly popular message to

send. Of course, looks don't matter in the game of love-as long as that assumption

is not tested too often on the screen.

What gives Shrek

its special artistic distinction is its witty and knowingly sassy dialogue,

delivered by vocally charismatic performers whose voices remind us of their

stellar screen personae in live-action movies. As we were leaving the theater,

my companion and I wondered aloud why Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy didn't have

marvelous Shrek -like lines in their

recent live-action bonanzas. Here was Shrek ,

a cartoon directed largely at children, with more adult dialogue than either

the Austin Powers or Nutty Professor idiocies in which Mr.

Myers and Mr. Murphy were enmeshed, respectively, for the benefit of their

bankbooks. We had almost forgotten how subversively funny both could be. And

the same complaint can be made for the corny, vulgar vehicles in which a comic

genius like Robin Williams has found himself trapped in recent years. Perhaps

he needs a Shrek -like regeneration to

regain his comic and satiric edge.

Cameron Diaz as the spunky Princess Fiona and John Lithgow

as the grotesquely diminutive Lord Farquaad round out the cast of iconoclasts

trampling on the flowers of chivalry as well as the blessed creatures from

Disney's Magic Kingdom. For once, all the "inside jokes" work, so that takeoffs

on televised blind-date shows and the magic mirror in Snow White , and a lovesick, fire-spouting dragon who encapsulates

all the anthropomorphic excesses of the Disney oeuvre , do not slow down the narrative flow to a trickle.

I was happy in the end for Shrek because he was both

discriminating enough to accept his limitations and courageous enough to

realize that he didn't need a beauty to complete or transform him. I am

reminded of Marlene Dietrich's (or was it Greta Garbo's?) complaint after a

screening of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and

the Beast (1946), with its conventional ending of the Beast transformed

into a prince. "Give me back my Beast!" she cried. Still, Shrek goes even further by imagining the blissful union of two

Beasts, figuratively speaking, and that makes for an original fable, indeed.

There was Pearl Harbor: too violent, maybe, for the repeat viewings of that crucial audience, teenage girls; also, its high cost and appeal to the Japanese, the largest foreign market, are iffy.

There was Shrek: "A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to Jeffrey Katzenberg," Mr. Dixon said, "and I said to him, 'Jeffrey, how do you think Shrek is going to open?' And he said, 'I don't have a clue.'"

There was A Knight's Tale. "I saw the picture three weeks before it opened, and I walked out of the theater and said, 'This one is really odd-it could work.'"

And there was Moulin Rouge: "This one's going to be over the top!" he said. He happened to be walking up 54th Street, in sight of the marquee at the Ziegfeld Theater, where the hyped period musical was to open, in limited distribution, the next day (in deference to Pearl Harbor, its studio, 20th Century Fox, had pulled its punches and decided to wait until June 1 to open widely). His eyes lit up. Moulin Rouge, he said, like A Knight's Tale, "was one of those oddballs that just might work."

Or not, as the Memorial Day receipts showed. Pearl Harbor did $75.1 million, short of the $100 million many had projected for it; Shrek, at $54.2 million, managed to beat its opening weekend, and has grossed more than $110 million to date; The Mummy Returns, weeks out of the box, did a respectable $19.1 million; and A Knight's Tale, sinking quickly, did $9.3 million.

All of which goes to show that predicting film hits-particularly in the pressurized atmosphere surrounding Memorial Day weekend-may very well be the ultimate fool's game.

Yet Mr. Dixon makes his living reading the tarot cards on the movies. The head of UBS Warburg's Media Equity Research Group, Mr. Dixon recommends stocks based on the financial prospects of films and the companies that make them. Also among his responsibilities: network and cable television, software and publishing concerns-a total of 160 companies constituting $1.2 trillion in market capitalization, which are monitored by 35 analysts under his supervision.

Along with Jessica Reif-Cohen at Merrill Lynch and the independent David Londoner, Mr. Dixon is one of a handful of oft-quoted Wall Street media analysts who wield market-moving influence, whose favor is curried by media executives-and whose opinions on the film industry are especially in demand in the weeks around Memorial Day, one of two sweeps-like periods (the other being the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas) that make or break studios for the year.

It's a high-stakes version of Pick the Oscars-with a lot more to consider than whether an actress had the performance of her career or whether the special effects were transporting. Mr. Dixon not only has to find the hits; he has to find the ones that are going to affect a studio's and its parent company's bottom line and maybe put its stock on the move.

There's no formula. "When a studio is making a movie," said Mr. Dixon, "they are basically committing dollars today for a product which will be sold in a very short window two years from now. Anybody who tells you that they have a clue as to how a movie that they're putting $50 million in the next week is going to open in Memorial Day 2003 is lying." He let out a quick laugh-snort, as he often does, to emphasize his point.

In other words, he said, speaking of Shrek: "As an analyst, I don't know any better than Jeffrey Katzenberg how his movie's going to do."

But once it's out, he can issue the recommendation: buy or sell.

Mr. Dixon has been recommending AOL Time Warner for the long term. Its subsidiary company, Warner Brothers, has one potential blockbuster this summer-Steven Spielberg's A.I.-but at Christmas it will release the Harry Potter film, while AOL Time Warner's New Line Cinema will release the first of its Lord of the Ring trilogy. Short-term, he likes Universal because of one word: Mummy. He's not so hot on Sony, which he says "continues to not have the breakout exposure" it needs, or on Disney, which he thinks lacks direction (and Pearl Harbor, despite its boffo weekend, is fraught with overseas perils and has to recoup enormously to cover its high costs).

But he knows he could be wrong. In 1998, he recommended Disney, partly based on his expectations for the animated feature Mulan, which he thought was perfectly positioned to clean up. It didn't, and Disney stock that year was down 10 percent, partly because it lacked a blockbuster.

Two years later, after seeing How the Grinch Stole Christmas in pre-release, he cooled on Universal Pictures. But it turned out to be the highest-grossing film of the year.

Which just goes to show there's a lot more to this game than being a film critic. Still, Mr. Dixon is highly regarded among the handful of analysts who cover his turf. Other media analysts told The Observer that Mr. Dixon is among the most well- regarded when it comes to the film industry-although one, comparing him to Merrill's Jessica Reif-Cohen, said, "There's a big difference in quality between Dixon and Jessica. It's like comparing Yale to the University of Alaska."

More important, though, is his standing with institutional investors themselves, the people buying his research: He's been on Institutional Investor's list of top analysts 8 of the last 12 years.

Grab a Tentpole

Mr. Dixon, 53, was sitting in the UBS office, discussing how he does what he does. He was wearing a tie with floating Mickey Mouse body parts, but he discounted its signifigance. Gruff but affable, he keeps steering the conversation to sweeping discourses on the film industry. He saw it all coming, he said, punctuating his points with that laugh-snort, sometimes even underscoring them with an excited "Okay?"

His influence has been enormous, if he does say so himself.

"I was one of the first analysts to talk about the fact that the entertainment industry was a real business," he asserted. "That it was not just made up of a lot of guys in gold chains, hanging out in Hollywood lots, and that entertainment was the No. 1 source of U.S. export dollars."

Later: "I was one of the first analysts to talk about how it was inevitable that the industry would consolidate to become truly global."

And after that: "I was one of the first analysts to take a look and say, 'Wow, I can develop the Walt Disney Company's entire business model with Lotus on my laptop.'"

Given the stakes-that studios are increasingly cost-and-profit centers for large multimedia corporations-Wall Street and the studios themselves want to know what Mr. Dixon thinks. So he studies each studio's financial history, its strategies, its strengths and weaknesses and its balance sheets, down to the last dollar. He builds and runs detailed models, reads the most obscure trade publications, consults with everyone from Mr. Katzenberg at DreamWorks SKG to Ron Meyer at Universal, and finally says what he thinks the stock is worth. (And in a splurge of self-promotion, on Monday mornings he sends out a fax to 1,400 Wall Street and Hollywood recipients, comparing the weekend's box-office receipts to those of the previous year and making predictions for the coming week. He's the only big-name media analyst who does this.)

Besides the lucre in this-Mr. Dixon would not say how much he earns, but his counterparts are said to make anywhere from $2 million to $5 million a year-he gets to indulge in his first love, movies. Mr. Dixon, who is married and lives in Manhattan, was born in Switzerland, raised in Montreal and moved to Connecticut as a teenager. He studied English at the University of Pennsylvania, then spent the first 18 years of his work life as a producer and director-beginning as a freelance assistant on the Martin Scorsese–edited 1970 film Woodstock-making short films for everyone from Chevrolet to the New York Shakespeare Festival, directing the "Bloodhound Gang" segments on the PBS children's program 3-2-1 Contact, and finally ending up as a film editor for commercials (including the "Thanks, I needed that!" campaign for Mennen Skin Bracer Aftershave).

A lot of what he learned back in his pre-analyst days now gets factored into his recommendations, he said. For instance, Mr. Dixon recalled seeing The Cable Guy a few years ago. The film was expected to be a summer smash for Columbia Pictures, and another notch on the belt for Jim Carrey. But Mr. Dixon knew within minutes that, in the annals of bad-moviedom, it was going to end right up there with Ishtar.

"The lighting was terrible!" he declared. "You can't have that many shadows in a comedy. Nobody wants to see that."

In 1987, Mr. Dixon decided to go back to school. He enrolled at New York University's Stern School of Business, and when he emerged two years later, at the age of 38, he went directly to work for Kidder Peabody as a media analyst. Mr. Dixon made a name for himself there-in part working with NBC, which was owned, as was Kidder Peabody, by General Electric-and in 1991 moved to PaineWebber, which was bought by UBS Warburg last year.

Mr. Dixon said that he tracks films-and their studios-according to three categories: tentpoles, generics and oddballs. Out of the 20 or so films each studio releases every year, most have at best two or three tentpoles-the potential moneymakers that cost anywhere from $75 million to $150 million to produce and are put out during those crucial Christmas and early-summer periods.

This summer's tentpoles include Pearl Harbor (Disney), Tomb Raider (Paramount), A.I. (Warner Bros. and DreamWorks) and Planet of the Apes (Fox).

With tentpoles, Mr. Dixon explains, it's a winner-take-all scenario. If a big-budget film opens strongly-a $30 million opening weekend or more, and a healthy second weekend with a drop-off of less than 40 percent-the studios will keep it alive in theaters through ongoing promotion. That's when Mr. Dixon grabs his calculator to assess the effect on the studio.

Shrek, for example, which opened on May 18 and grossed $42 million in its first weekend, is typical of tentpoles, he said: "If a picture has a $50 million opening weekend, and makes $30 million its second weekend, then I can extrapolate that it will generate $85 [million] to $90 million overall in the U.S. theatrical release. Given what we've seen at this studio, the $90 million will translate to $45 million in domestic film rental, or D.F.R., and will generate a total of four times that in all its distribution platforms. So I'm looking at a picture that will generate $180 million over its life, which includes domestic and international theatrical release, video and DVD, cable and television, and licensing."

"At the end of the day, the real value of a movie to a company is the ability to re-release that movie, as Warner Bros. does regularly with Casablanca [his all-time favorite film], and generate incremental cash flows," Mr. Dixon continued. "Disney is going to make more money off the re-release of Snow White on DVD than it will off of Pearl Harbor."

And as for the highly vaunted opening-weekend receipts: "For a picture to take on the characteristics of an E.T. or a Titanic, it's all about the repeat business. You have to get the kids to say, 'I want to go back and see it again.'"

Tentpoles cost the most and provide the highest visibility, but studios also rely on what Mr. Dixon calls generics: less expensive films with a specific audience that are expected to bring in $40 million to $50 million in domestic box-office receipts, and $80 million to $100 million over their lives. Examples are Clint Eastwood or Adam Sandler movies, which bank on actors with dependable followings, and modish fare such as American Pie (the mode being teens, sex and scatological humor).

Then there are the oddballs: relatively inexpensive films that usually disappear unnoticed, but occasionally find a market and take off. "It's the oddballs that can make a studio," Mr. Dixon said, citing two famous examples: Sex, Lies and Videotape, which put Miramax, its U.S. distributor, on the map, and The Blair Witch Project, which made Artisan. "The oddballs I find most interesting," Mr. Dixon said-which explains his hopes for Moulin Rouge and A Knight's Tale.

Hits and Misses

In the end, though, it's hard to tell how a film will do. Occasionally, he said, "you'll see a picture that's just abysmal and you know it's going to fail"-like the Geena Davis pirate picture Cutthroat Island (1995), which he called "one of the great turkeys of all time."

But usually, Mr. Dixon admits, you just don't know. "If I were to offer you a $30 million stake in a film," he asked, "which involved animation and live action, had either Steven Spielberg or George Lucas producing it, and either Universal or Disney [to] release it, would you take it?"

Of course, he's told.

"Great," he said. "You just put $30 million into Howard the Duck. And if you turned to me and said, 'No, I don't want to do it'-well, you just missed Roger Rabbit. There's no difference in the elements."

All of these concerns make Mr. Dixon's life harder, and discussing Pearl Harbor puts him in a critical mood. He loves movies, but in the day when even subway clerks can recite a film's opening-weekend gross, something is wrong.

"People now go to see movies based on how much money it grossed last weekend," he laments. "What I'd like to see happen is a return to those happy days in the 40's, when people went to movies based on stories and how wonderful they may or may not have been."

That's the movie fan in him talking-not the businessman.