CANNES, France — It’s official: Steven Spielberg just watched a man set someone’s genitals on fire. The Cannes International Film Festival, which kicked off its 66th edition Wednesday night with the rain-drenched international premiere of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, is notorious for art-house auteurs pushing cinema to its extremes. But Amat Escalante’s ham-fisted Read More
Great Giggling Gatsbys! After taking a hit for over-romanticizing the gaudy decadence of the roaring twenties in hist latest film (and subsequent press tour), director Baz Luhrmann spoke to The Observer at Lamb’s Club Tuesday night during The Cinema Society, Brooks Brothers and Town & Country‘s after party for The Great Gatsby. Apparently, we should just all chill out and not think so hard about the implications of reveling in the excesses of high society, despite the film’s moral statement against such extravagance. Read More
Let’s face it. The Great Gatsby never has been—and probably won’t ever be—successfully turned into a great motion picture. Many have tried (four flop movies, not to mention various small-screen attempts, including a truncated but memorable Playhouse 90 with Robert Ryan and Jeanne Crain in the golden days when TV still knew what quality programming Read More
“I don’t know where you got that idea,” Jay McInerney scoffed at The New York Observer at our 25th Anniversary Party last night at the Four Seasons. “I am not writing a book about The Great Gatsby.” We were baffled; we were sure that we had heard that the Bright Lights, Big City author was busy creating a modern adaptation of the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, set in the Hamptons.
“Are you sure?” We prodded. Read More
An Unbroken Series of Successful Gestures
As November ended, Tabber Benedict, a “Gatsbaby” featured in a June, 2012 report in The Observer, pleaded guilty in a Suffolk County court to ten charges related to a drunk-driving incident on July 4, 2011. According to a report in Newsday, Mr. Benedict, a 35-year-old corporate attorney, will lose his law license and will serve time in jail.
Suffolk County D.A. Thomas Spota issued a statement about Mr. Benedict’s plea that called the penalties “completely proportional” to the crime. Read More
The Great Gatsby, the biggest movie of this winter until it was to be the biggest movie of next summer, has screwed its first magazine with its release-date switch. Gatsby is the lead item in Elle‘s September-issue fall preview, with the magazine noting, “Opening day is December 25; our champagne is already on ice.” (Better make sure Read More
The highly-anticipated Great Gatsby re-boot (or whatever!) was to be released this Christmas, but it’s avoiding the Anna Karenina/Django Unchained/Hobbit pile-up with a move to next summer. Totally speculating here: this throws the editorial calendars of several top magazines into chaos. Herewith, our deeply un-educated guesses on the stories and cover lines editors are stuck with: Read More
The Observer has learned that Tabber Benedict, one of the three men featured in this weeks’ cover story on Gatsbabies, has something in common with Jay Gatsby that’s a little less charming than his wardrobe and extravagant lifestyle.
Mr. Benedict, a 35-year-old attorney who runs his own fledgling law practice, is facing charges of aggravated vehicular assault, leaving the scene of the accident, and driving while intoxicated for the 2011 Fourth of July accident in which he is accused of hitting a bicyclist while driving a 2011 GMC Acadia on the Montauk Highway. Read More
An Unbroken Series of Successful Gestures
The girls, so many girls, dressed in pastel-colored wraps that bared shoulders and the swells of their cleavage, clacked their Louboutin heels up a SoHo staircase one muggy May evening.
At the landing, visibly breathless and sweaty, their eyes lit up. They had entered the penthouse loft of Edward Scott Brady, the boyishly handsome world traveler, former classical cello virtuoso and “retired entrepreneur,” who was throwing a “Welcome Back Bash” to honor his return from his seventh trip around the globe. Read More
Last summer’s Midnight in Paris took as its subject a young writer given the tremendous opportunity to meet his literary idols–the writers of the expatriate clique, including Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. It could as easily have been about any young writer or moviegoer as about Owen Wilson’s character, with Read More
