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 66^th 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 Mexican competition entry Heli, which grimly (and dimly) depicts corrupt policemen as nihilistic envoys from Dante’s Inferno who crack the necks of puppies, make people roll in their own vomit and, of course, immolate crotches, has set a new record for fastest controversy at the storied event. (If #penisflambé isn’t trending yet on Twitter, it’s only a matter of time.) And as this year’s jury president, the director of E.T. is now obliged to watch every frame. Welcome to France!

Leo DiCaprio at a rain-drenched Cannes premier of The Great Gatsby. (Getty Images)

Cannes is off to a wet and wild start. The soggy opening night extravaganza for Gatsby Le Manifique included Leo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan braving the elements for a black-tie premiere and afterparty that featured the Brian Ferry Orchestra and Florence Welch, not to mention a screw-the-weather fireworks display that lit up the torrential downpour. And this morning’s screening of François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful steamed up the 3,000-seat Grand Théâtre Lumière with the provocative study of a bourgeois 17-year-old Parisienne (lithe newcomer Marine Vacth) who goes from virgin to whore in the span of a year. A nuanced but minor portrait of sexual awakening, budding confidence and emotional immaturity, Mr. Ozon’s lightly erotic and oddly touching ode to youth is alarming, arousing and affecting in equal measure.

More delightfully blunt is the hipper-than-thou kleptomarathon The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s brightly polished ode to 21^st century youth as refracted through TMZ-fueled thieves who invade the homes of tabloid stars. Based on Nancy Jo Sales’ Vanity Fair article “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” about a real-life group of high schoolers who became Hollywood Hills burglars, Bling Ring shows a culture of unchecked narcissism and serial irresponsibility coddled by Facebook posts and Google searches. There’s no there there, critics may wag, which is entirely the point of this glittery cautionary tale of shallow lives in a shallow town longing for the through-the-looking-glass experience of Reality TV fame. Toplining the cast is former Harry Potter icon Emma Watson, who’s clearly angling for the same good-girl-gone-bad career choice that Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens pulled off earlier this year in Spring Breakers. One highlight: Ms. Watson showing off her best pole-dancing moves in the party room of Paris Hilton’s glam-tastic house. (The celebutard heiress even let Ms. Coppola shoot in her actual home, a fabulously gaudy temple of tacky self-aggrandizement.)

Director Sofia Coppola, second from left, with the cast of The Bling Ring. (Getty Images)

Not a bad way to begin Cannes, a paean to excess and flash that has something for everyone, high and low. Especially low: in the film market, held alongside the festival, people can watch a cannibalistic Maori family frolicking through the black comedy Fresh Meat or the last known fertile woman struggling to survive in an underground tunnel system in the sci-fi horror flick Crawl, Bitch, Crawl. And if you’re Troma, the NYC-based granddaddy of schlock peddlers, you’ll hold a self-proclaimed "secret" screening of your latest, Return to Nuke ‘Em High: Volume One – but not without inundating international journalists with a press release first. What’s the point of a secret if no one knows about it?

Ain't no party like a Gatsby party.

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.

"Sometimes a party is just a party," said the Australian director, co-opting the famous Freudian-attributed quote. Mr. Luhrmann had spent the night prior attending the much more oblivious, irony-laced Met Gala.

Whether or not he was including that night's function into his analysis, or merely talking about the bacchanals provided in the 3-D film is something we were left wondering: The director had flitted off to a new subject before we had time to say "We love Moulin Rouge!"

It should be noted that the not all attendees had the same hangups that we did about living in the moment: Lady Gaga showed up late to the screening, and according to at least one attendee, was carrying a six-pack of beer in her posse.

As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo.

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 was). Robert Redford was a perfect Gatsby in the pretty but boring 1974 version by Jack Clayton, but the movie was dead on arrival. The best I’ve seen is still Elliott Nugent’s black-and-white 1949 version, with Alan Ladd at the top of his form as the screen’s most glamorous Gatsby to date, heading a cast that included Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters. Mired in mysterious litigation for six decades, it has never been released on home video, is never shown on any cable or network channel, and cannot be appreciated by the legions of F. Scott Fitzgerald fans who have never seen his work properly adapted to the screen. And so his literary masterwork remains nothing more—an elegant but elusive triumph of words over images, best savored on the written page.

You don’t realize just how much misguided damage can be done to a great novel until it is vaporized by a pretentious hack like boneheaded Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Some critics, through the years, have put forth the unpopular theory that Fitzgerald specialized in style over substance, but as any college English major knows, he was famous for pruning away the clutter. With the cinematic meat cleaver that Mr. Luhrmann wields in one bloated misfire after another (I still haven’t recovered from the nausea-inducing Moulin Rouge), style is all there is left, and in The Great Gatsby it looks alarmingly like clutter. Budgeted between 105 and 127 million dollars, depending on which Hollywood trade journal you read, with every inflated expense aimed at your eyeballs in awkward, totally unnecessary and stomach-churning 3-D, this is one of the most maddening examples of wasted money ever dumped on the screen. Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic figure in the excessive Roaring Twenties who came from poverty and devoted his life to becoming a self-made millionaire to win over a superficial girl named Daisy, buying an ostentatious mansion on Long Island across the lake from her rich husband Tom and infiltrating high society with lavish, loud and impossibly overproduced parties masquerading as social events. Racking up his 3-D budget to the credit-card limit, Mr. Luhrmann turns these dinner dances into drunken confetti-drenched orgies. The sumptuous, vulgar Gatsby estate, overflowing with gangsters, movie stars, flappers, wisecracking alcoholics, voluptuous tap dancers, people falling from trapezes, clowns, acrobats and an orchestra in the middle of a swimming pool full of inflatable rubber zebras, looks like a high-school costume party on prom night invaded by Cirque du Soleil.

Is it any wonder, in all the slobber and confusion, that the acting is so bad? With the phoniest set of performances this side of an Ed Wood flick, you might as well be watching Plan 9 From Outer Space. As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo. Worse still, he is no longer the centerpiece of the story, a task that falls into the incapable hands of the incompetent, miscast Tobey Maguire as Jay Gatsby’s friend, neighbor and all-seeing matchmaker and Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway. He might suffice as a callow Spider-Man, but as the film’s narrator, saying campy things like “They were careless, Tom and Daisy ... they smash people and then retreat back into their vast world of money and carelessness ...” Even with these masterful lines from the book, he just sounds like he’s reading from a college yearbook. Mr. Maguire is supposed to be the camera through which the tragedy unfolds, but he is light years away from possessing the range, craftsmanship and experience required to play a Fitzgerald hero. Mr. DiCaprio has the experience, and we know he can act, but he’s not beyond the need for a director’s keen guidance. Without proficient direction, he comes off like he has no stamina to give the role of Gatsby the stature it demands. That kind of direction would imply the kind of wisdom and insight Baz Luhrmann lacks. He’s too busy directing the confetti.

Carey Mulligan is another artist who knows how to pop the cork on bottled emotion, but her Daisy Buchanan is so trite and myopic you wonder what Gatsby ever saw in her in the first place. Only the terrific Australian actor Joel Edgerton has the proper grip on the material as her handsome, shallow, two-timing husband Tom. It’s supposed to be a story about fate and irony, but the jealous garage mechanic Wilson and his sluttish wife Myrtle (so soundly and wrenchingly played by Shelley Winters in the 1949 version), who gets mowed down by Gatsby’s Duesenberg, have been all but relegated to bit players. This dilutes the dramatic impact that builds to the story’s feverish climax, rendering the big finale impotent. This version of The Great Gatsby has the narrative strength of tap water.

Like Orson Welles, Mr. Luhrmann chooses interesting material to shape into movies, but then his colossal ego does ridiculous things to doom it. This catastrophe has actors who roll their eyes and raise their eyebrows in perpetual uncertainty about what kind of literature they are supposed to be interpreting—a trashed-up revision of the original with the narrator now echoing the inner voice of Fitzgerald from an asylum where he is writing a book called ... The Great Gatsby? The jazz and big band swing of the ’20s has been replaced by hip-hop music supervised by Jay-Z and songs by Beyoncé and Fergie with the historical significance of a tuning fork, and there are so many close-ups that it sometimes looks like a movie about ears. I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

rreed@observer.com

THE GREAT GATSBY

Written by Baz Lurhmann and Craig Pearce

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire

Running Time: 145 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

Jay McInerney at Observer's 25th Anniversary party. (PMc)

"Are you sure?" We prodded.

"Well," he amended. "In the sense that most [stories] are The Great Gatsby, then yes, I'm working on a book that's like The Great Gatsby." Currently involved in several projects--both fiction and non--the author cited Fitzgerald as a major influence on his (and most people's) writing style. He also mentioned that he had once spoken in a PBS documentary about Fitzgerald. Not mentioned was the fact that he has written on the subject several times, or that his novel The Last of the Savages was once compared to Gatsby by The New York Times. (You can see why we'd be confused.)

"Is Brightness Falls also The Great Gatsby?" We joked.

He laughed. "Sure ... no, no. Maybe it is."

And before we could ask if he saw himself as more of a Gatsby or Carraway, he had switched gears. "So, what do you think of that Baz Luhrmann adaptation?" he asked, referring to the summer release of The Great Gatsby movie.

"Oh, every generation has to have its own Gatsby," we replied. "Ours just involves more Kanye West music."

Tabber Benedict (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

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.

Mr. Benedict was driving his black 2011 GMC Acadia on Montauk Highway around 8 a.m. that July 4 when he struck Steve Dorn, age 44. Mr. Dorn, a lifeguard and teacher, was taken to a nearby medical facility in critical condition at the time.

Some of the charges that could send Mr. Benedict to prison for a maximum of ten years include aggravated vehicular assault and leaving the scene of an accident.

Mr. Benedict will be sentenced on Jan. 23, 2013.

The Great Gatsby

We await the coming cover profiles mentioning this long-delayed release with bated breath.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby), Vanity Fair, December 2012

Headline: "YES, LEO'S BACK! Hollywood's Ultimate Bad Boy Goes Back to the Roaring Twenties--and Aims At Oscar"

Editorial Concept: Leo plays with a baby tiger cub, smokes a cigar by a pool, walks through a hedge maze.

Carey Mulligan (Daisy), Vogue, November 2012

Headline: "SECRETS OF EAST EGG: Carey Mulligan as the Woman Who Stole Gatsby's Heart"

Editorial Concept: Done entirely in character, with special attention to the scene with all Gatsby's shirts on the floor.

Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Esquire, November 2012

Headline: "THE TAO OF TOBEY: Hollywood's Hottest Recluse on Fitzgerald, Film, Finding Contentment--and What He's Learned Along the Way"

Editorial Concept: Looking stern on a golf course.

Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), GQ, October 2012

Headline: "TIE ONE ON! The 12 Neckties You Need Now"

Editorial Concept: Mr. Edgerton models a bunch of ties.

Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), Allure, January 2013

Headline: "IT'S ISLA! Mrs. Borat (That's Right!) On Her Big New Role"

Editorial Concept: Best mascaras for your hair color.

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.

Mr. Benedict did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

On July 4th of last year, Southampton lifeguard and teacher Steve Dorn was biking on the Montauk Highway near East Quogue at 8 in the morning when he was hit by a black 2011 GMC Acadia being driven by Mr. Benedict, according to local prosecutors and published reports.

Mr. Benedict then hit another car and drove for two miles before being stopped by two motorists who witnessed the accident and used their vehicles to block him, prosecutors said.

Mr. Dorn, 44, was admitted to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital in critical condition at the time of the accident. He would eventually be released from the hospital.

Mr. Benedict eventually pleaded not guilty to felony charges of aggravated vehicular assault and leaving the scene of an accident. He also pleaded not guilty to charges of DWI, a misdemeanor, and reckless driving, a traffic violation.

He was released on $75,000 bail.

Calls and an email to Robert Clifford, a spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office, were not immediately returned.

Mr. Benedict faces the risk of losing his NY State Bar license if convicted, said Mark Heller, his attorney.

"A reasonable resolution to this case is not a felony disposition, but a misdemeanor disposition," Mr. Heller told The Observer. 

He went on to clarify Mr. Benedict's recent involvement with local charities, including co-hosting the First Annual Post-Walk Celebration to Benefit Breast Cancer Victims.

"In my 43 years of practice, I have never met a more appropriate individual I've been called on to represent than Tabber Benedict," said Mr. Heller. "He is very, very contrite about what happened, he is very remorseful, he's been been remarkably sensitive and compassionate about the individual [Mr. Dorn] who was impacted by this unfortunate occurrence."

Mr. Benedict was among the three "Gatsbabies" featured in Wednesday's New York Observer story, in which the three preening prepsters —noted for their flamboyant attire and their emerging presence in social media and the New York social scene—lured "ladies, lucre and the limelight" in Manhattan.

Mr. Benedict, along with globetrotting "retired entrepreneur" Edward Scott Brady and Pretentious Pocket founder and social gadfly Justin Ross Lee, had all come to evoke (be it intentional or not) the grandiosity and mystery of F. Scott Fitzgerald's titular character from "The Great Gatsby."

[Read Meet the Gatsbabies.]

For Mr. Benedict, who grew up the child of a single mom in Upstate New York and worked his way through a college scholarship and law school, his background seemed as self-made and sedulous as Jay Gatz himself. His foppish, bespoke attire and slicked-back hair gave him an air of a Jazz Age gentleman (while casual gawkers wrote him off as a Scott Disick lookalike). Of course, Jay Gatsby owed his fortune to a bootlegging business while concocting a biography that disguised his modest origins.

Mr. Benedict has been a staple on the charity circuit in recent months, often appearing in Patrick McMullan party pictures, smiling as his left hand remained firmly in his pocket (his left arm is gammy, the result of a car accident he was in as a child).

It is not clear if Mr.Benedict faces any prison time if convicted.

drosen@observer.com 

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.

(Jason Seiler)

Demonstrating a generous spirit, he had posted news of the party to Facebook and Guest of a Guest, luring in hundreds of friends and friends-of-friends, the more the merrier, and plying them with premium booze.

The apartment had all the trappings a wayfaring bachelor requires: the cello, a relic from Mr. Brady’s days playing at the Kennedy Center and Avery Fisher Hall; the African ceremonial masks, collected on his jaunts to the subcontinent; the large antique globe; the red-felt billiards table; the framed photos of Mr. Brady from his journeys.

It was, in the estimation of one female guest, “shit-tastic.”

“He’s, like, famous dude,” said Dmitry Astafev, a Russian entrepreneur who learned about the party through his girlfriend, who had been forwarded a Facebook invite and actually didn’t know Mr. Brady, either.

No matter. Sooner or later, it is safe to say, we will all know Mr. Brady.

“My boyfriend met him in the Hamptons,” said a blond-haired woman in her early 20s.

“I met him at Cyril’s,” claimed another woman.

The place was packed with bros in suit-coats and more babes in slinkier-than-thou dresses, in the appraisal of Justin Ross Lee, than one could shake a stick at.

“Unfortunately for these ladies, I’ve already shaken my stick at most of them,” he added with a wink.

Mr. Lee is an entrepreneur and shameless self-promoter, whose reputation, like Mr. Brady’s, preceded him.The day before, he had been the subject of of a comical New York Times Styles Section profile that depicted him, among other things, tussling with a doorman at The Dream Downtown and bragging about his first-class travels to the Middle East and Europe (“Jew Jetting,” as he proudly refers to it on his Facebook page). Mr. Lee hadn’t made Mr. Brady’s acquaintance either—not yet—though their meeting seemed preordained.

“Unlike me, Edward seems to be very well-liked and a lot less controversial, which means he sleeps better at night than I do,” Mr. Lee quipped.

Then Mr. Lee went over to greet Tabber Benedict, a slick-haired attorney whose khaki suit and classic looks gave him the appearance of an attendee at a convention of Patrick Bateman impersonators. If you squinted, he even resembled a clean shaven Clark Gable, or a more avuncular upgrade of reality TV-rake Scott Disick.

Edward Scott Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

As the two stopped to pose for a Guest of a Guest photographer, people in the crowd discussed the size of Mr. Brady’s loft. “This loft is, like, biggest loft in New York City,” said the impressionable Mr. Astafev.

Still, was one loft—whatever its size—big enough for all three men, for their grandiose personalities? The presence of the trio, all in one place, seemed to signal a small if meaningful shift in the city’s cultural history: After a long, dire post-Lehman cold snap, during which ostentatious displays of wealth, social bravado and dandyish fashion gambits were put into deep hibernation, something was stirring. Wall Street was no longer occupied. The impassioned battle cries of the stringy-haired sleeping-bag brigade, fulminating about the ample chasm separating the 99 and 1 percents, had faded. A socially ambitious lad no longer had to hide his Cartier cufflinks or Stubbs & Wootton slippers under a bushel. Suddenly it was okay again to venture into the limelight, okay to aspire to notoriety and social prominence.

Not everyone was ready to put it all out there, of course, but this was the vanguard. Call them the Gatsbabies: three dandyish gentlemen—but straight, mind you, very, very straight—who seemed to come out of nowhere. In this, they were not unlike the former James Gatz himself, on whom they unconsciously styled themselves, the emperor of West Egg, the subject of a million high school book reports and any minute now, a glistening slice of Oscar bait starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Baz Luhrmann.

“They’re products of the zeitgeist right now, and that zeitgeist is one of social media and ability to be your own kind of publicist,” said Rachelle Hruska, the founder of Guest of a Guest, which has helped cultivate the personas of both Mr. Lee and Mr. Brady.

“I think never before have people been able to kind of be their own publicist,” she added. “You can just get a Facebook page and just put basically anything you want on it about yourself all day long, and I think that’s what these three people excel at, is using social media to pump up their brand.”
Photographer Patrick McMullan agreed. “They want to be known, they want to be out there, they want to use their profiles to get more work and more girls,” he said, “and more fun.”
Mr. Brady stood amid the throng, holding a magnum of Cristal in each hand, his long hair slicked-back and his dark tailored suit hugging his athletic form. He greeted his female guests with a kiss on the cheek, often pausing to give a Guest of a Guest photographer a cocksure smirk as the ladies struck poses with him.

Like Gatsby, he seemed a little too good to be true. The open bar and free canapes for his hundreds of guests? The National Geographic-quality photographs? The crowd of beautiful and seemingly available women? Surely there was more to this guy than met the eye—or less. We turned to Mr. Benedict and asked if the scene was real or illusion.

“Being in the industry that you’re in, you of all people should understand,” he said. “Perception becomes reality.”

Tabber Benedict (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

A few days after the party, The Observer received a terse text from Mr. Brady asking us to call him. We had been reaching out to those who RSVP’d for his party, asking how they knew him, and word had come back to him that we were snooping around. In a faltering, nervous tone, he said he was caught off guard by it.

We explained to him that this was just simple reporting. We were doing our due diligence.

“I guess I have to get comfortable with what this media thing is,” he said with a sigh.

We found his response curious, given his highly visible activities. We had seen snaps of him surrounded by a gang of Indian women in their native country, shooting the breeze with the Hmong on the China-Vietnam border, posing casually with a cheetah somewhere in the African Sahara. Downtown Magazine dubbed him “The Most Interesting Man in The World.” His life was like a Tina-era issue of Vanity Fair. Why so shy all of the sudden?

The son of Edward Alden Brady, a former ship captain and Chevron salesman, he was raised in the Larchmont section of Westchester. They shared a name—Mr. Brady goes by “Scott” to help differentiate himself—and a talent for the cello. They also shared a wanderlust: the elder Mr. Brady traveled extensively for work (“He’s been around the world on a boat four times,” the son recalled).

Mr. Brady’s talent for the cello landed him at Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music, where he studied under Norman Fischer, a noted classical music teacher. The brawny Mr. Brady said he also played on the hockey team, eventually bowing out to protect his hands from potential injury.
When Mr. Fischer left Oberlin for a new position at Rice University in Texas, Mr. Brady followed him there and received the Fondren scholarship, earning his degree in in 1995.

At 25, he was awarded the 1998 Panasonic National Young Performers prize. At 27, he became one of the first Americans ever invited to a residency with a Russian orchestra at the Moscow Symphony. There, Mr. Brady endured 15-hour bus rides, eight-hour practices and a measly diet of canned food and scraps while somehow maintaining his sturdy physique (his fellow students, according to a 2000 Times article, nicknamed him Arnold Schwarzenegger).

The next year he returned to New York and started Musika, a private-music tutoring service that targeted wealthy areas in Westchester County and New Jersey. Musika grew from 15 teachers to 800 nationwide, becoming profitable enough for Mr. Brady to retire at the age of 33. He would not comment on Musika’s annual profits. “I can do pretty much whatever I want at this point,” he said. “I can travel, I’m able to lead the life I want to have.”

On Musika’s website, his biography elaborates on his “World Most Interesting Man” pedigree, noting that he is a member of Mensa, “an organization of people with high-level IQs.” (A spokeswoman for Mensa confirmed that an Edward Brady from New York was a member in 2003–2004, but said that his membership had since lapsed).

After his retirement, Mr. Brady set out to travel the world. His travel itinerary reads like a list of locations for a Bond film: playing polo in Abu Dhabi, surfing in Bocas del Toro, Panama; traveling across Madagascar in an ox-led transport.

The photos of his travels are sweeping and sensational in composition and tone, which has led some to believe that he hired a photographer to document his adventures.

“Everyone’s so curious about who’s taking the photographs,” he told us with a laugh. “I have a tripod, I have a Canon 5d Mark II, and there is a device called the Giga T Pro.” The device, he explained, acts as a remote release that can be activated from a quarter of a mile away. He uses it to capture himself in tender, social moments, like speaking with the female members of the Maasai tribe, which he then posts to his Facebook page.

“That’s why I identify with Scott,” said Mr. Lee, while seated in his Murray Heights office. “There’s no accidental postings. He’s methodical and I’m methodical.”

Perhaps, although that’s not the first term one might apply to Mr. Lee, who likes to say there are three things he never pays for: “parking, publicity and pussy.” His borscht-belt schtick and enormous bravado has brought him infamy (if Page Six still counts), sponsorships, and more publicity for Pretentious Pocket, his line of pocket squares, than might seem reasonable.
The day after his Times profile went online, he claimed he did three months worth of business in one day.

Justin Ross Lee (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

“I mean, I had them working through the Sabbath,” Mr. Lee said, nodding toward a quiet and severe-looking intern who was typing on a MacBook air. “I said, ‘No shul without drool.’”
He admitted that he played up his feud with the doorman at The Dream Downtown to provide some material for Bob Morris, the Times reporter who was following him around for the evening.
“I never would have gone to The Dream Downtown,” he said. “I was going there because I had a New York Times reporter behind me. I set him up and he’s stupid enough to walk right into the lion’s den.” [UPDATE: After this story was published, Mr. Lee wrote to say that he "misspoke and was referring to the stupid doorman," not to Mr. Morris. "Bob is a brilliant writer and journalist whom I respect."]

Such behavior is all part of the schtick. So is the peacockish attire—stylish and garish, in equal measure—guaranteed to draw glances. The Gatsbabies are not particularly concerned with how others see them, as long as they’re being seen.

“People look at me and they’re like, ‘That spoiled prick,’” said Mr. Benedict, a 35-year-old attorney who recently launched his own practice, Benedict Advisors LLC. He didn’t seem too concerned about that. Although there is one oft-made comparison he can’t abide.

“Don’t tell him he looks like Scott Disick. He hates that,” said one female friend. We brought up his resemblance to Clark Gable, and the woman paused. “I don’t know what Clark Gable looks like,” she said flatly.

Mr. Benedict says he has earned his pinstripe C. Oliver Custom Suits. At Mr. Brady’s party, he recalled a hardscrabble childhood in upstate New York, working lousy jobs at grocery stores and McDonald’s throughout high school while being raised by a single mom.

“I literally was using foodstamps,” he said. “Justin never did that. He wore nice Brooks Brothers clothes that his parents bought him, you know what I mean?”

He won a scholarship to Colgate while working in the school library, then went to Columbia Law School and put in time at White & Case and The ACE Group before eventually launching his own firm.

Mr. Benedict was at one time engaged to a woman he met through taxi driving matchmaker Ahmed Ibrahim (their pairing was featured in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article). He said he adopted the name “Thomas Pink,” a pseudonym he uses primarily on Facebook, in the interest of personal safety—to protect him from his now ex-fiancée.

“Girls would post on my [Facebook] wall funny things, and she would take it the wrong way,” he recalled.

There was also the enterprising stalker who broke into his Upper East Side apartment as he was attending a charity event. “She called and said, ‘I’m inside your apartment, Tabber. It’s really nice! My friend Tyrone is here, who has brought me some party favors,’” he said.

Nonetheless, he noted that getting his face out there as much as possible—attending the Seeds of Africa charity event, co-hosting the First Annual Post-Walk Celebration to Benefit Breast Cancer Victims—helps to shore up business.

“You don’t meet people in your bathroom, or like on your sofa, watching Game of Thrones,” he said. “I meet people out, and that’s how I meet my clients.”

Mr. Benedict and Mr. Brady (photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

We were at 286 Spring Street for the launch party of TheCityStreet.com, an “exclusive” global directory of bankers founded by former investment banker Vana Koutsomitis. Mr. Benedict did not know Ms. Koutsomitis, but as the party lagged, he pulled her aside and offered to call a photographer from Patrick McMullan’s agency. Within 30 minutes, the photographer arrived, Ms. Koutsomitis happily posed with friends and colleagues, and the vibe picked up considerably.

“He sort of looks like Scott Disick,” Ms. Koutsomitis whispered to us.

The night was a success for Mr. Benedict. He had walked in virtually a stranger, and had left with a few business cards of prospective clients. However, as he has learned, the more public the face, the less understanding the girlfriend.

“The last time I checked, I want my lawyer to be as discreet and dorky and smart as possible, not some philandering playboy,” said Elizabeth Stockton Howard, his blue-blooded, Princeton-educated paramour.

When asked what it’s like dating an internet personality, she replied, “It’s awful! I think about breaking up with him everyday because of that!”

Edward Scott Brady does not have a girlfriend to take issue with his activities. But he blanches at the idea that he is aggressively self-promotional.

“I never think I am actively necessarily promoting myself,” he said, sipping from a beer at the rooftop bar at the James Hotel. “I am just doing what I want to do, and traveling, and that is what I am becoming, and what people see me as. Why am I am traveling around the world? Because I want to do it. I’m not thinking about packaging.”

“Edward Scott doesn’t have the same media focus that Justin does, obviously,” said Mr. Benedict. “That’s Justin’s life. I would of course argue that I have a different focus than Justin, too. My focus is on more of the high-end charity events, because that’s what I care about. Justin does a lot more club parties.”

Differences aside, all three of them owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Fitzgerald’s indelible playboy.
“That was one of my nicknames,” Mr. Brady admitted. “‘Gatsby, what are you doing tonight?’ Especially in the Hamptons.”

“We tickle people’s curiosity,” Mr. Lee said. He’s found that, as it was for Gatsby, a certain air of mystery can be useful. “The first question I get is ‘What do you really do?’” he said. “And that’s how I know I’ve garnished their attention, and that’s how I know it’s a three-pointer.”
drosen@observer.com

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 the current great interest in Jazz Age characters.

Aside from the slew of instantly recognizable literary figures that helped make Midnight in Paris Woody Allen's biggest hit ever (each speaking in the arch style of his or her own writing, to knowing chuckles from the audience), last night saw the debut of HBO's prestigey Hemingway and Gellhorn, about the romance between Ernest (Clive Owen) and Martha (Nicole Kidman) when both were war correspondents. (A second Hemingway biopic is in the works, starring Anthony Hopkins rather than the dashing youngish Mr. Owen.)

The year's buzziest new trailer, too, was not for a superhero flick but The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann's visually lush Fitzgerald adaptation due out this winter. The immediate response--to the casting, the mise-en-scene, the music--proved just how many people feel a proprietary sense towards the source material. And why shouldn't they? Hemingway and Fitzgerald are two of the first "adult" writers one reads--and the two American writers, aside from Harper Lee, that just about everyone reads in school. Returning to their legend, the mutual sense of end-times doomed romance in both writers' work and life, makes sense, as it's about the only American myth just about every moviegoer has heard of. Compared to Gatsby, Iron Man's an unknown.