From left to right: Kristi Jacobson, Steve Buscemi, Lori Silverbush and Jeff Bridges (Getty Images)

Last Wednesday night, at around 8 p.m., the Transom spotted celebrity chef Mario Batali ambling through the Museum of Modern Art in his bright orange Crocs. But he wasn’t here to see the Munch exhibition. He was en route to the New York premiere of A Place at the Table, a somber new documentary from directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson, about America’s widespread--and underpublicized--hunger problem.

And while one imagines Mr. Batali doesn’t know much about being hungry, he was here to learn about the topic. And he wasn’t alone. Lots of star power turned out for the screening of the film—which hit theaters across the country last Friday and is also available on iTunes and on demand—including Steve Buscemi, Jon Stewart and Jeff Bridges, who appears in the movie.

Mr. Stewart left before the screening, presented in association with the Cinema Society, but he had already seen the film, which mostly documents the travails of three individuals who deal with food insecurity. In fact, the film's directors had appeared on The Daily Show the previous night. We had seen the interview and noticed that the dialogue had been unusually straight-faced. No jokes were cracked. Why so serious, we wondered?

Mr. Stewart, who will be leaving The Daily Show for 12 weeks to direct his own movie, let out a big laugh. "I try, but sometimes I don't nail it," he told the Transom, going on to talk about the power of the film. "Sometimes you see something and you get so wrapped up."

We asked Ms. Jacobson how she felt she had fared on The Daily Show.

"I was incredibly nervous," she admitted, "but to be honest, once Jon started talking, it got easy. There are times when the subject doesn't lend itself to making a lot of jokes, but we had fun.”

"It was pretty surreal," Ms. Silverbush said of the encounter with Mr. Stewart, "but I came away from it feeling excited and empowered."

And the directors feel that their film will have the ability to empower hungry people around the country. Ms. Silverbush told us that the reality of hunger in the United States--more than 50 million Americans struggle with food insecurity--hit her on a visceral level when, years ago, she realized that a young girl she mentored was going hungry.

It took three years to make A Place at The Table, whose executive producer is Tom Colicchio, the chef and restaurateur who owns a number of elegant eateries throughout the country and happens to be married to Ms. Silverbush.

And the directors say the movie has a precedent: Hunger in America, a CBS documentary from 1968. That film galvanized the nation, they explained; the government took action by creating a food safety net and helped to end hunger, almost entirely, by the end of the 1970s. During the Reagan years, though, reforms were pushed back, the movie argues.

We asked Ms. Silverbush—who, with her co-director, has unleashed a social action campaign in conjunction with the movie's launch—if she thought her film would have the same effect on the country that Hunger in America had on a previous generation.

"I know that it will," she said, without hesitation.

After the screening, guests headed over to Riverpark, a Colicchio outpost on 29th Street, near the East River, where they were treated to a sumptuous, late-night buffet of wagyu beef brisket, Berkshire pork rack, fried chicken, shrimp, lobster, oysters and more.

Clockwise from left: Damian Lewis in Homeland, Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire, Andrew Lincoln in The Walking Dead, Jon Hamm in Mad Men, and Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. (Ed Johnson)

On Sunday night, as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were making history as the first two women to successfully elbow out a male host for the Golden Globes, audiences took in an unprecedented display of girl power. With Lena Dunham winning for Best Actress in a Comedy, Girls taking Best Comedy, and Julianne Moore winning for Game Change, we trumpeted a new era ... one in which women could not only captivate an audience but do so with an unlikable protagonist. (Hannah Horvath is no Tony Soprano, but she can be plenty unappealing at times.)

Many of the night’s other nominees, including the stars of Veep and Nashville, fit into the same category, as did the un-nominated (but still there in spirit) Edie Falco in Nurse Jackie, Laura Linney in The Big C and Laura Dern in the criminally under-watched Enlightened, which premiered its second season this week. This last is perhaps the best example of these hard-to-watch heroines, with Ms. Dern playing the most delusional, self-righteous and self-martyring female antihero ever to traipse through premium cable.

It was a great night for rude, crude, progressive women. Unfortunately, it was an even better night for Bad Men.

In 2007, when Mad Men won the Globes for both Best Drama and Best Actor, AMC’s new prime-time show featuring gin-swilling 1960s philanderer Don Draper as its protagonist was still considered edgy for a non-premium cable show. Today, networks feature increasingly despicable, morally complex and utterly doomed characters, and the awards tend to follow. In the last several years, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has seen fit to nominate a serial killer (Dexter), a U.S. Marine-turned-Islamic terrorist (Sgt. Nicholas Brody in Homeland), several corrupt politicians (Enoch “Nucky” Thompson from Boardwalk Empire and Boss’s Tom Kane) and the world’s most dangerous high school science teacher (Breaking Bad’s Walter White) in its Best Drama and Best Actor categories.

This year, four of these ne’er-do-wells crowded the Best Actor box, with accolades for Homeland’s Damian Lewis, Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm and Boardwalk’s Steve Buscemi. The only exception to the rule: the disgruntled-but-ultimately righteous Will McAvoy from The Newsroom. God save us when an Aaron Sorkin antihero is the closest we get to a good guy.

The rest are endemic of a new trend in millennial TV protagonists—men who are, if not quite villains, then at least Bad Men. At best, our guy is an immoral misanthrope and a latent misogynist. At worst, he’s a sociopath, one who may or may not be running an international drug cartel. Or a terrorist ring. If you’re lucky, he’s merely a serial killer who kills other killers. And the scary thing is: we relate to them. We empathize. And if they don’t already hate their wives and children, not to worry—we do. How can we not, what with the missus harping about domestic nonsense when there is a meth empire to run or a presidential front-runner to assassinate?

It’s not just awards-season accolades that reflect the shift away from shows about good guys: Homeland, Breaking Bad and Dexter beat their top ratings last season. The Walking Dead surprised even its biggest fans by shattering basic cable numbers with its season-three premiere, which saw an audience of 10.9 million total viewers, the “biggest telecast for any drama series in basic cable history,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

It’s not hard to see what attracts today’s audience to these characters. For the first time in our history, the majority of men will not be able to surpass their fathers in wealth or status. With the recession, record job losses and lack of affordable health care, the Great Emasculation is well underway. Thus our need for men who at least take a stand, for good or ill, men whose nihilism often stems from psychic trauma. Men who, if not kind or ethical, survive and even flourish under dismal conditions. They might not be heroes, but we respect them.

Unlike, say, their horrible wives.

Take, for instance, Jessica Brody, the wife on Homeland played by Morena Baccarin. Not only did she cheat on Sgt. Brody during his eight years in captivity and after he returned, she pestered him for “the truth” throughout season one, only to freak out about his embrace of Islam and finally kick him to the curb. Meanwhile, Brody tried—he really did—to be a good husband and father even as he plotted his terror attack. If only Jessica hadn’t been so nosy, if only his daughter Dana had shown him a little bit more respect, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to run off with a bipolar C.I.A. agent.

Which isn’t to say that the protagonists of these shows ever voice any misogynistic tendencies. They don’t have to. It’s the programs themselves that turn the viewers against long-suffering wives, female colleagues and blameless children. A recent Huffington Post article on the 21 Worst Characters on television included the love interests on The Walking Dead, Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire. These shows, along with Breaking Bad and Homeland, all portray nosy, ineffectual matriarchs who are simultaneously ice-cold bitches, helpless victims and puritanical enforcers. We resent these women for the usual reasons women are often resented: because they are nosy, because they aren’t affectionate enough, because can’t keep their husbands from straying, because they are not always perfect mothers. Of course, they are driven to the brink by their husbands’ actions. But in a world that glorifies amorality, women are the spoilsports. They might be “good” (at least in relation to their husbands), but that makes them worse than bad. It makes them sneaky, shrewish and thoroughly unsympathetic victims.

Walter White is a Bad Men:

But Skylar is kind of worse:

Even worse, they are whores.

For instance, even though both Jessica Brody and Lori Grimes had the moral loophole of thinking their husbands were dead, we can’t help but resent them for carrying on with their husbands’ best friends. Betty Draper and Skyler White are also guilty of the cardinal female sin of infidelity, which is much harder to swallow, somehow, then when their fellows stray. (Poor Walter White has been at least sexually faithful to his wife, only to have her retaliate for his drug dealing by having an affair with her boss.)

Despite the flagrant violence of these shows, the Bad Men still tend to put “family first,” long after they give up every other social convention. And if they lash out occasionally (Draper’s constant bordering-on-abusive-relationships with his paramours, including both his current and former wives) or engage in stalker-level harassment (Walter White breaking into the house of his separated wife and refusing to leave), we sympathize.

In December, a 26-year-old Long Island man named Jared Gurman got into a fight with his girlfriend of three and a half years. They were arguing about The Walking Dead. Mr. Gurman—who described himself on Facebook as “an underappreciated person,” who felt that he should be “making more money at work”—took out a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle and shot his girlfriend in the back. She ended up with fractured ribs and a punctured lung and diaphragm, all for calling Mr. Gurman’s theory about the zombie apocalypse “ridiculous.” Fans of the show might recognize a certain irony: despite a plethora of semi-automatics and reasons to put one to his wife’s head, Rick Grimes never took a shot at his wife.

What a mensch!

From left, T-Bone Burnett, John Turturro, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. (Diane Bondareff/AP Images for Universal Studios Home Entertainment).

White Russians were flowing by the pre-made bottle at last night's Lebowski Fest at the Hammerstein Ballroom on 34th Street.

"I'm not sure why we are even offering a full bar," the bartender told The Observer. As we took our creamy libations from her, an unshaven man donning a bathrobe, jellies and sunglasses pushed by us and ordered three more. “'Scuse me dude.”

On the “red carpet” – actually a number of the rugs depicted in the film, stitched together along the length of the entrance – we had been approached by a pair of middle-aged men in life-size bowling-pin costumes: Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell, co-founders of Lebowski Fest and authors of the book, I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You.

“We played in a really bad band and instead of practicing we would just quote lines from The Big Lebowski,” Mr. Russell said, recalling the inspiration for their first Lebowski-themed bowling party. “We thought ten of our friends would show up and we had like 150 people come out. Next thing you know, twelve hundred people are there.”

This was the first time the cast has reunited since the release of the movie in 1998. The event (minus stars) traditionally features a bowling party, costume contest, and a screening, but for this year’s simultaneous release of the limited-edition Blu-Ray version of The Big Lebowski and Jeff Bridges’ self-titled solo album, Universal partnered with Messrs. Shuffitt and Russell to bring the original cast together for the event.

Tickets for this year’s festival sold out in 48 hours, “quicker than any other event at the Hammerstein,” Mr. Russell announced to the room. “Take that, David Bowie!”

Spying John Goodman break free from the plethora of cameramen at the other end of the carpet, The Observer caught him before he entered the venue. We asked if, like his character, he was armed. “Yeah, I am,” Mr. Goodman said casually, a crazed look in his eye, before he broke into a hearty laugh.

Other actors took on roles not their own: "I'll suck your cock for a thousand dollars" Julianne Moore told us, recalling Tara Reid's line as her favorite from the movie. She was then mauled by a number of reporters eager to know what Maude named the Lebowski lovechild.

As T-Bone Burnett, Jeff Bridges’ music producer and the music archivist for The Big Lebowksi, gloated about Mr. Bridges’ new album, a work he described as “a beautiful, beautiful record,” a procession of emergency vehicles roared down 34th street, temporary deafening us both. “Rick Perry!” Mr. Burnett yelled over the din. “Rick Perry is coming to the screening!”

Later, following a cast Q&A marked by the more intoxicated members of the audience yelling lines from the movie before the cast even had a chance to speak (Steve Buscemi shouted “Shut the fuck up!” more than once), The Observer picked our way over to Jeff Dowd, the original "Dude" and the Coen brothers' inspiration for the movie.

What message did Mr. Dowd have for aspiring Dudes?

"Are you fucking ready for this?" he asked, posing for a picture with a couple who had been to Lebowski Fest more times than they could count.

"Get as close as you possibly can to one woman," he began, while shaking hands and posing for a few more pictures. "Intimacy is everything."

He meant what he said, putting his arm around us, and pulling us in uncomfortably close. He hiked his leg up on the chair in front of us and gazed out over the crowd. “The Dude is the holy fool, like the King’s jester. He is the one guy who can tell the truth without getting his head cut-off,” he paused, looked us straight in the eye, and said: “We need to use that power to create the future.”

Perry.

The riots in London seem finally to have subsided, but strange things are afoot stateside this week, so much so that we’re starting to wonder if Mercury, which went retrograde Aug. 3, is currently doing to the entire planet what it once did so publicly to Jeremy Piven. (Also, when does the statute of limitations on that joke run out?)

It all started last weekend, even before the city was deluged with cloudbursts of biblical proportions, when Texas governor Rick Perry threw his 10-gallon hat into the G.O.P. ring just as votes were being counted in the Iowa Straw Poll—an event that sounds like it involves blue ribbons for accurate jelly bean counting but that is actually a significant temperature-taking exercise for 2012 Republican voters. On Saturday night, the poll handed a slim but decisive victory to Michelle Bachmann, the woman Tina Brown recently dubbed “The Queen of Rage” on the cover of Newsweek (alongside a wide-eyed photo that would give Steve Buscemi nightmares), and on Sunday, milquetoasty Minnesota governor and “Obamneycare” coiner Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race. Meanwhile, everyone pretty much ignored Ron Paul.

In other public slights, Steve Jobs earned an enemy in Marty Markowitz when the ailing tech mogul failed to respond to the borough president’s whimsical iPad video pleading for an Apple store in Brooklyn. Mr. Markowitz announced that Mr. Jobs and his company won’t “reach the big-time” until they land in the city’s most Safran-Foer-rich district, but seeing as Apple survived last week’s stock market free-fall with barely a dent, we think Marty needs to fuggedaboudit (at this point he’d have better luck buying a black market baby, and even then there’s no guarantee they’d get a spot at the new Grace Church high school). George Soros is being sued by his ex-girlfriend Adriana Ferreyr after reportedly making her eat dinner at the kids’ table. And Arianna Huffington may finally be hitting a paywall after solicitations for free HuffPo graphic design submissions from readers prompted widespread outrage.

More evidence of universal chaos: Lady Gaga will design the seasonal window displays at Barneys (flank steak will make a perfect coat for Santa!), someone paid $70,000 for a tour of Facebook’s headquarters—an honor we suspect any U.P.S. delivery man bearing Mark Zuckerberg’s new Adidas sandals from Zappos gets for free—and a “flash mob” looted a Maryland 7-11 without even throwing in any hastily conceived choreography for good measure. In addition, New Yorkers despondent over the crashing economy flocked to city landmarks to take their own lives (two suicide attempts—one at Rockefeller Center and one on a Statue of Liberty-bound ferry—were, happily, thwarted by first responders), an unidentified body was discovered floating in Niagara Falls, and on Thursday in Tulsa, Okla., a man climbed a 300-foot tower and, while showing no signs of jumping, he has refused to come down for five days (he did, however, order a cappuccino).

With all signs pointing to an astrological system gone horribly awry, maybe it’s a good thing that New York police spent last weekend practicing riot drills on Randall’s Island. Like the state lotto constantly reminds us, hey—you never know.

Boardwalk Empire, set during the dawn of Prohibition, has a pretty spiffy pedigree even for HBO: Martin Scorsese--who directed the pilot episode--is an executive producer. It was created by Terence Winter, the Sopranos writer who--after David Chase--was responsible for writing the most episodes (another Sopranos alum, Tim Van Patten, is on board as executive producer and director). Even Mark Wahlberg is involved! It would be easy to buckle under the weight of collective award-show wins and expectations, and even understandable, really, if an early backlash were to occur. Except for just one thing: It's really, really good.

Based on Nelson Johnson's Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, the show is unabashedly ambitious, large in scope and lavish in set. It looks incredibly expensive (reportedly the pilot alone cost close to $20 million). But its debut episode faces the same conundrum that any epic, complicated show faces: An awful lot of information and characters, along with some pesky history, have to be introduced in the first 60 minutes. (Try not to be alarmed during your first viewing--or hit Wikipedia--when names like Al Capone, Arnold Rothstein and Lucky Luciano come up. All will become a lot clearer and easier paced in episodes two and three).

At the center of it all is half-politician/half-gangster, treasurer of Atlantic City, Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, played by Steve Buscemi, who in the span of a couple of hours is able to enthrall a roomful of women with his praise of the recently passed Prohibition law and tales of a hardscrabble youth ("First rule of politics, kiddo," he tells his protégé after exiting the town hall, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story"), before gathering with fellow city power players with the promise that Atlantic City will remain "wet as a mermaid's twat."

After a decade of big, blustering James Gandolfini as our go-to pop-culture reference for a Jersey boss, it's a nice change to have Mr. Buscemi, with his pale, vulpine face and goggly eyes, morph into top dog. He's fantastic: in one scene vacillating effortlessly between a cold, occasionally violent leader and a deeply sympathetic man. (Just watch those eyes when he pauses on the boardwalk to look at the rather disgusting Incubator Baby. Could babies be to Nucky what ducks were to Tony Soprano?). His protégé, Jimmy (Michael Pitt), a former Princeton student, has arrived back from the war a changed man: No longer content to be simply a lackey, Jimmy's ambition is the catalyst to the plot machinations that get this series going. Mr. Pitt was simply made for the fashions of the 1920s, with his big DiCaprio-y cherub face and creepily empty eyes (it's hard to forget his earlier roles in Murder by Numbers and Funny Games). Their relationship is fraught and confusingly paternal--one can assume all that will get untangled eventually--including the part that encompasses Gretchen Mol (remember her?) as a mysterious showgirl. Kelly MacDonald (The Girl in the Café) plays Margaret Schroeder, an Irish immigrant with firsthand knowledge of the evils of liquor who manages to catch the eye of both Nucky and the tightly wound Agent Nelson Van Alden (the always great Michael Shannon), who seems to be pursuing Prohibition offenders with a zealot's determination.

As the series continues, more familiar faces will crop up and become important, including Dabney Coleman and The Wire's Michael Kenneth Williams. And, of course, there's that $5 million set. For the modern New Jerseyite (or Jersey Shore watcher), it's hard to imagine "AC" being a place of such glamour, but this art-directed Atlantic City is a wondrous thing to behold, from its clean boardwalks to glittering Prohibition parties. It makes one wish for a time machine. As for the plot, best to let it unfold naturally, but let's just say it's clear that there's plenty of tangled corruption, relationship intrigue and crime to chew over--and just how does Al Capone end up ruling Chicago, anyway? Around the third episode, the series settles down and hits its sweet spot, with that Sopranos-like mix of stomach-turning violence, surprising poignancy and the occasionally hilarious scene (just wait for the Yiddish dentist). So it turns out that we can't fight the hype; and dear viewer, we don't even want to.

svilkomerson@observer.com

Since actor Steve Buscemi had come all the way to City Hall to endorse Bill de Blasio for public advocate, I figured I’d ask him who he was supporting for mayor.

“I was not happy that the mayor wanted to run for a third term. So, I do like Thompson a lot. And we’ll see what happens.”

It's 2 a.m. and you awake with a jerk, alone in your fully lit apartment and still on the couch. On TV, the credits of some movie you've already seen a billion times are scrolling by. It feels like rock bottom. And we know, because we're just like you: single.

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Fargo [starting @ 1:35 a.m. on IFC]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: Is it possible that a musical score can make a movie? In the case of Fargo, the answer is perhaps. The Coen brothers 1996 classic is easily their most assured and taut work—clocking in at a bare-boned 90 minutes, the film doesn’t waste an iota of extra energy—but, for us, what makes it so memorable is Carter Burwell’s haunting and bombastic score. The dissonant strings, regal horns and even the lilting glockenspiel perfectly complement the Coen Brothers’ stark and wintry imagery and make even the most mundane snowflake feel heightened and alive. 

Of course, the movie it gets showcased in isn’t half-bad either. As filmmakers, too often the Coen brothers are fond of staying above the fray. They create a bunch of flawed and unbecoming characters—cowards, killers, weaklings and liars—and then take them to task for being flawed and unbecoming. To reference their Oscar winner, No Country for Old Men: The Coen’s are like Anton Chigurh, when we’d rather see them try to be a little more like Llewellyn Moss. Thanks to Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson, though, Fargo is loaded with real-life human emotions. Despite featuring a rouges gallery of contemptible characters, Marge stands like a beacon of hope—we want her to succeed and feel good when she does—and, as a result, Fargo might be the Coen’s most humane work. And, yes, we are talking about the movie wherein Steve Buscemi gets chopped up in a wood chipper.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: A great thing about Fargo is how it tweaks normal genre conventions. Take the two kidnappers played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare. At first, they come off like any other post–Pulp Fiction Tarantino-tinged set of mismatched criminal partners: They’re funny and goofy, like Laurel and Hardy with guns and greasy hair. But that feeling of glee disappears once they get pulled over by a highway patrolman. So we’ll make it until 2:07 a.m., 32 minutes into the film, when the Coen brothers flash their trademark violence and all the joking turns brutally real. We’ll say it: This is the best scene they’ve ever done.

Would "Crazy Joe" Gallo look good in fleece?

The Daily Transom couldn't help but wonder on Monday night, June 1, during a reading of author Tom Folsom's new book about the legendary gangster, titled The Mad Ones, inside the new J. Crew Men’s Shop in Soho.

What, was Spark's Steak House all booked up?

"Well, there is a mob of people here," noted former Fox News blogger Roger Friedman, who was chatting with the actor Matthew Modine inside the shop at 484 Broadway.

The place was truly packed. By 7:30 p.m., you couldn’t walk around the small store, as waiters handed out champagne, wine, and vodka drinks, along with some hors o'doeuvres--watch out for the chinos!

The event was sponsored by the nonprofit Accompanied Literary Society, whose founder, Brooke Gehan, explained the curious location thusly: "As they are the first major fashion retail chain to support books and even sell old typewriters and other literary ephemera, this partnership with J. Crew fit our organization perfectly."

The actor Mr. Modine, who read aloud a chapter from Mr. Folsom's book, told the Daily Transom: “I think people always like stories about the mob because it’s kind of our nature. We live in a society where we aspire to civilization and humanity and goodness, but just scratch the surface each of us, and we are all looking for the opportunity to steal a pack of gum from the grocery store line.”

Cinema Society founder Andrew Saffir had yet to read Mr. Folsom's book. "I was about to go buy one," he said. "But I hear there's one in the gift bag. So I'll save myself $24.95!"

Why are New Yorkers so fascinated by the mob?

"I'm a Sopranos fiend, first of all," Mr. Saffir said. "That's part of the thing that drew me here. A bad guy is always appealing, espeically a guy with a heart. There's sort of a heroism about a well-written bad guy, which is what Tony Soprano was. And I don't know much about Crazy Joe. Is that his name? But I'm completely fascinated. He also seems like he was a gangster that went against the grain which is kind of cool too!"

Actor Steve Buscemi, who appeared in 18 episodes of the Sopranos himself, was also on hand to read a few passages from the book.

"I think Tom paints a really great picture of what New York was like in the '60s," Mr. Buscemi said. "I like how he blended all of the counterculture stuff that was going on, with the under world."

The Daily Transom wondered why the fictional Mr. Pink always seems to end up playing criminals?

"It’s interesting because I’ve played a lot of different roles, and I’d say most of the roles I’ve played have not been gangsters and criminals, but it seems that the criminal roles are the ones that people seem to know," he said. "I enjoy playing a wide variety of characters."

He paused for a quick second and added, "It’s always kind of fun to play a bad guy."

The author Mr. Folsom, sporting a gray suit and black-framed glasses, seemed pleased with the evening's turnout. He gave props to the event's sponsors and the book's publisher, Weinstein Books--not to mention the curious host, J Crew. "They’ve all really been behind the project so it’s an exciting time that we get everyone together and celebrate The Mad Ones in a style that I think Crazy Joey Gallo would have appreciated."

Everyone seemed to be trying to get Mr. Folsom’s attention, but he was too busy talking about the book.

"I think there is no other story that really gets to the heart of what’s happening than Joey Gallo," the none-too-modest Mr. Folsom said. "This is literary in the wake of The Godfather. You know, three weeks before he gets killed, The Godfather is out, so it’s a phenomenon. Everybody who is anyone wanted to meet a real life gangster, and here’s Joey Gallo hitting the scene. What more could you want with a gangster? He looked the part. They call it gangster chic. He dressed like the Reservoir Dogs--black suit, white shirt, skinny black tie. You know, he had the whole look down. And the big shades of course."

Publisher Harvey Weinstein didn’t show up until towards the end of the event. He said he was also planning to turn The Mad Ones into a movie.

"This is a great New York story," Mr. Weinstein said. "The mafia meets the literary society meets the beat culture. I mean, it’s just got it all. Very few stories do. This one does. I think it sells because certain mobsters are fantasy figures. They start doing right, and doing things for the right reasons, and then the dream gets corrupted. And I think America likes their outlaws. But they like their outlaws to get punished in the end."

It seems like the problem with Mr. Scorsese over the last few years is that he has forgotten how to just say no. Including Falcon's Tale, he's currently attached to direct or in talks to direct six different movies and a documentary about George Harrison. And we didn't even include the modern day version of The Great Gatsby he's putting together for Vincent Chase to star in on Entourage (which, p.s., sounds like a great idea.) Don't get us wrong, we love that Mr. Scorsese wants to work--too few great directors actually seem to make movies anymore. But perhaps some more focus would benefit Mr. Scorsese's current schedule. After all, by the time the completed Shutter Island gets released next October, it'll be three full years since The Departed came out. At that rate, we should be seeing Falcon's Tale by 2024.

In other Martin Scorsese news, word is that Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald are in talks to play roles in his upcoming HBO series Boardwalk Empire. Already on our radar as the next "best show on television", Boardwalk is based on the book by Nelson Johnson and tells the story of Atlantic City's rise during the 1920s. Mr. Buscemi will play a liquor distributor at the onset of Prohibition, while the lovely Ms. Macdonald will star as an Irish immigrant with a nasty husband. Mr. Scorsese is certain to direct the pilot of the series from a script by Terence Winter (The Sopranos), but after that, how much involvement he'll have is unclear. Considering all the feature film projects he has lined up, we hope HBO doesn't keep a seat warm for him.