“You see, we’re working with the five senses here to create a fully, well-rounded sensory experience,” he explained as he carried the smoldering concoction over to Laurence Fishburne. He made large circles in the air, enveloping the actor’s formidable head in a cloud of smoke. Then he quickly handed Mr. Fishburne a Cinemartini.

“It’s beautiful,” said Mr. Fishburne, who was flanked by NBC honcho Ben Silverman and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

“Ooooh, I want to try that,” said the mayor. Mr. Silverman smiled and nodded from under a frilly black scarf dotted with white skulls.

Mariah Carey and her husband, Nick Cannon, trotted into the back room, followed by Messrs. Fishburne, Silverman and Villaraigosa, who joined the newlyweds at a large table where British clothier Ozwald Boateng, known for slim $3,000 bespoke suits, was celebrating his birthday. One of the mayor’s bodyguards told me I was not welcome at the round table.

Mr. Silverman, who had on a boot on an ankle he injured skiing, later explained that Mayor Villaraigosa was not there to toast Mr. Boateng. “He’s just very interested in keeping jobs here,” he said. In the patio area, the musician Gavin Rossdale was sitting with his wife, Gwen Stefani. Leaning up against a heat lamp, looking desperately composed, i.e., not drunk or wearing a pink leather miniskirt embroidered with the word “slut” on it, was Kim Stewart, puffing on a cigarette.

“Everyone’s been talking about how there’s a sense of malaise in the air this year,” said a New York–based producer. She had just come from a party, which is normally a very good party. Earlier that week, a billionaire had told her things were looking grim. Earlier that night, a friend had boasted that Lionsgate had bought her script. “I wanted to tell her that Lionsgate was closing,” she moaned. “If I know, everyone must know.”    

“We’re alive and well,” Lionsgate vice president Tracy McKnight told me the following afternoon at the Film Independent Spirit Awards after-party hosted by the IFC channel at the Shutters Hotel.  “I think people are optimistic; I am, at least.” She was standing with Michael Bolton on the cusp of the ballroom. The room, which was festooned in neon confetti and flat screens featuring the letters “IFC” in lava-lamp mode, was beginning to fill up—but who were all these young people lining up to get freshly made mojitos, topped with a swirl of honey? That’s what Fred Willard wanted to know. He was sitting on a bench upstairs, looking out the plain-glass windows at the ashen sky.  

“It’s much too crowded in there,” said Mr. Willard, who gave voice to Shelby Forthright in the movie Wall-E. “I had a mini–hot dog with relish, and that was good, but it’s awfully crowded and we’re going to have go over to another party put on by the wonderful people at Pixar that did Wall-E. There’s an awful lot of people in there; I can’t believe they all won awards and were nominated. I’m going to run down to the water for a quick dip in the ocean and then head out of here.”

Rainn Wilson, of The Office, was feeling optimistic in spite of his brown corduroy suit.  

“One thing that’s great about the movies this year is that they were done on the cheap, with a lot of imagination and art,” he said. He was particularly excited to see Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler getting their due. “And it shows you that Hollywood doesn’t have to be about excess.”

Had he detected any malaise in the air?

“Yes, I think the malaise is really—oh, look, mini-cheeseburgers!” he said, helping himself to a tray of sliders. “I don’t know, man, I just feel like what we do in the entertainment business is so different than what people are going through who were really laid off from actual jobs, like my family that has a plumbing company in Seattle. People are going through really hard times, so anytime people in Hollywood start using the same words about the depression, it’s like, ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

The actor-turned-DJ Danny Masterson was on the turntables. He had just come back from a gig in Dubai, where he said lots of new buildings have stopped construction. But he said he generally plays upbeat stuff anyway—“unless I’m doing like an art opening.”

Larry Gagosian canceled his usual Oscar-timed art opening at his gallery in Beverly Hills. Alex Hitz, a Broadway producer, aspiring film producer and renowned bicoastal party-giver, had canceled his annual party, at his manse overlooking the Hollywood Hills. He normally spends three to four days planning and cooking for the likes of Joan Collins, Valentino and Vidal Sassoon.

“The idea of planning for that sort of thing didn’t seem quite right to me,” Mr. Hitz said over the phone on Monday. He’d been to Barry Diller’s lunch on Saturday. It was lovely as ever, only he was disturbed to see that Mr. Diller, too, served fried chicken. “When I started throwing my party five years ago, I was the only one who served fried chicken,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Hollywood took this fashionable restraint to heart. “Not to be Pollyanna, because nobody loves a good party like I do, but do we need the gardenias floating in the wine glasses?”

Of course, he said, Betsy Bloomingdale’s annual pre–Oscar night dinner on Saturday couldn’t get anymore tasteful. Bob Colacello agreed, noting that this year conversation among the gals—Nancy Reagan, Carolina Herrera, Wendy Stark, Jane Sarkin, Denise Hale—revolved around the awards. Joan Collins was adamantly pro–Benjamin Button; others wondered why Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino had been passed over. But all of Betsy’s orchids were blooming beautifully and the lamb stew was to die for.

Meanwhile, the annual HBO documentary party was about that speed. Guests munched cheese sandwiches. A dessert table in the back featured  jellybeans and cotton candy. Danny Glover was there. Across town at the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge—normally a hotbed of activity following Jeffrey Katzenberg’s “Night Before” party—was already half-empty. Instead, James Caan and Bill Maher looked bored with their dates. Mr. Maher’s girl had a lip ring.

On Oscar night at the Asia de Cuba viewing party at the Mondrian Hotel, a woman in a black skirt announced that she was a yoga teacher and then touched her knee to her nose several times to prove it. There’s soap actress Leven Rambin! “There’s less diamonds everywhere,” she noted. “I miss New York so much, this place is so much more stressful.”

After the awards ceremony was over, a dance floor broke out. The producer Lawrence Bender was having trouble fending off young women. A still-employed investment banker from New York strode up to my table and demanded, “Who made money tonight? Who made money tonight on Slumdog Millionaire? ’Cause I did.” He wore a red snake tie and a black velvet blazer. Someone asked him if he was a magician. 

“The world as we know it is changing,” he said. “And the fucked part about it is, for all you L.A. people, the envelope hasn’t arrived here yet, but that Fed Ex is in the mail and guess what? It ain’t express, it’s gonna be fucking miserable, because in New York City, we’re seeing blood and guts.”

Let’s zip over to the Sunset Tower Hotel for the Vanity Fair party!

“Mr. Short, I want to tell you what a huge fan I am of what you do,” said John Mayer, introducing himself to Martin Short.

“Isn’t it fun to be watching all these famous people,” said Sarah Silverman, along with her sometimes boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel. They were holding court off to the side of a tented area, which gave a fabulous view of the vast twinkling city, like a black sea covered in phosphorescent bugs. “But still get to be apart from it all, in our little comedy corner.”

Nearby, comedians Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Sacha Baron Cohen were giddily chatting.  

“Congratulations!” said a dude who came face-to-face with Sean Penn in his haste to get out the bathroom and back to the party.

“There’s something about economic insecurity that makes everyone nicer,” said Mr. Colacello, who said he’d noticed an unprecedented amount of star-civilian mixing going on. Earlier, he had found himself in a conversation with Meryl Streep, who was eager to share her enthusiasm over Zbigniew Brzezinski’s idea to take back the excessive bonuses and use them to pay off people’s mortgages.

By 1:30 a.m., Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer had retired to an alcove in the Tower bar. Josh Brolin and his wife, Diane Lane, were sprawled on a couch gazing into each other’s eyes.

The VF party did not unleash the usual unbridled debauchery to go galloping out into the night.

At least not at super-agent Patrick Whitesell’s star-studded rager up in Laurel Canyon. 

I asked Jeremy Piven if he thought it was odd that he was probably the most famous person at the party aside from Paris Hilton and Jared Leto.

“So you’re saying that there’s not a lot of high-profile people here,” he said and looked around. “Maybe they’ll show up later.”

“Amazing, loves it,” chirped Ms. Hilton, referring to herself in the third person in a way she finds amusing. Her neck was dripping with diamonds. How come people like her weren’t boning in the bathrooms by now?

“I think everyone’s watching the economy right now, but you know we’re still out to have fun, so it’s all good,” Ms. Hilton said.

At 2:30 a.m., event planner Shawn Sedlacek was on the balcony overlooking the pool and the circus-size party tent below.

“When I think of Hollywood going into the Hollywood Hills, I think of, ‘I am a golden god jumping into this pool right now.’ No one’s jumping in the pool,” he said. “It’s only two and a half hours into the party and we’re already serving the good-night breakfast.”

smorgan@observer.com

“A lot of people are really, really down in the dumps about what January looks like,” said Jay Lauf, the publisher of the recently revamped Atlantic.

Layoffs, hiring freezes and canceled Christmas parties have cast a general chill over the magazine world. But with budget season finally wrapped up, it looked like the industry could finally take a much-needed breather right before the New Year.

Then suddenly more bad news emerged from the business side: bleaker-than-usual ad-page numbers for January. 

“I think they’re dramatically, dramatically off,” said one Condé Nast insider. “The issues are much thinner than I expected.”

January is a historically anemic month for magazines ad pages. (Who wants to buy an ad after everyone is finished with their Christmas shopping?) But the gauntness of January 2009 is drawing extra scrutiny, since this is the first round of books that closed post-crash, at some point in mid- or late-October, a full month after Lehman Brothers went down on Sept. 15.

Now some are wondering if this could be a harbinger of even grimmer times ahead. “Rightly or wrongly, people are looking at this as a sign of a really, really, really tough year,” Mr. Lauf said.

Word started spreading at magazine palaces like 4 Times Square and Hearst Tower as soon as ad-sales staffers returned from Thanksgiving break: their waistlines expanded; their bottom lines, not so much.

Early copies of Bon Appetit, Condé Nast’s B food magazine (after Gourmet), especially raised eyebrows. A source who got a peek at the January issue told Off the Record that it’s only 108 pages altogether—practically a leaflet—and its table of contents page appears on the magazine’s second page, a discomfortingly early placement at the front of the book. The space inside its back cover is an advertisement for a Bon Appetit cooking volume: a house ad rather than the traditional big outside corporate purchase.

“It’s barely perfect-bound,” said our source, referring to the glued spine that is the modern standard for monthly glossies of a certain length.

Wired is also expected to have a very rough month after getting hit hard due to a slump with consumer electronic ads. A more modest loss is projected for the Tina Fey cover of Vanity Fair, which will fall back about 7 percent this January, down to 43.48 pages from 46.75 last year.

Over at Hearst, meanwhile, spokeswoman Alexandra Carlin conceded that Harper’s Bazaar is off by one or two pages. “But January is traditionally a lighter month for magazines,” she reminded Off the Record.

“January issues will never be a litmus test,” said one optimistic publisher who nonetheless requested anonymity, given the skittish climate. “All it takes is four or five advertisers for most magazines to go in either direction”—good or bad.

“The year always ends with kind of a whimper,” the publisher continued. “You can’t derive great importance from it.”

Mr. Lauf also refused to think bad thoughts—out loud, at least.

“It’s about not letting a negative prognosis become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “I don’t think we should read too, too much into it.”

But Mr. Lauf is in a better position than most. Ever since The Atlantic cut back its publishing schedule to 10 issues per year from 12, it’s free from the burden of having to sell a stand-alone January issue. He got to squish the ugly month in with February!

Mr. Lauf said that The Atlantic’s ad-page count might remain flat for their first 2009 issue, but there are still a few more weeks till close.

Which makes one wonder: Could coming out with 10 issues a year be a economic new model for the monthly? (And then what would you call it instead of “monthly”?) Portfolio announced its plans to do that back in October.

Then again, it’s not a guaranteed formula for profit. Men’s Vogue ran unsuccessfully at 10 times a year, and now its production schedule has been reduced to a barely-there twice per year. And as ad buyers become more selective, it makes one wonder how many magazines in the same category one parent company can sustain. (Witness the sad crumbling of O at Home, House and Garden, etc. Could food and fashion be next?)

“It’s like, ‘Oh my God, if we start in this hole, how can we dig out of this,’” Mr. Lauf said.

jkoblin@observer.com

First up, Vanity Fair, which enlisted The Times' Maureen Dowd to profile Ms. Fey, whom the magazine's cover trumpets as "A New American Sweetheart!" (Punctuation theirs.) The magazine's Web site also features one of those behind-the-scenes videos of Ms. Fey's photo shoot that all magazines' Web Editors are convinced Internet users love. (In an example of too-weird-to -ignore/too-geeky-to -explicate life imitating art, a very Maureen Dowd-like character played by Christine Lahti once wrote a profile of the protagonists' of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show, like Ms. Fey's 30 Rock, set behind the scenes of a sketch comedy show very much like Ms. Dowd's launchpad, Saturday Night Live.)

Ms. Dowd's story was dutifully picked up by The Daily News, The New York Post (whose Page Six also had an item about Ms. Fey today), and The Associated Press, and TMZ. (Apparently a lot of people have been wondering why Ms. Fey has a scar on her face.)

Also out today, The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin's take on Ms. Fey's show, about which she writes:

Ms. Franklin also manages to get a quick shot in at Ms. Fey's former 'Weekend Update' co-anchor Jimmy Fallon, whom she calls "a comic nonentity" who "will inexplicably take over the plum Conan O’Brien spot on NBC when O’Brien prematurely takes over the 'Tonight Show' from Jay Leno next year."

Any minute now, we expect The Daily Beast's Tina Brown to call for Ms. Fey to host Meet the Press or become a part of President-elect Obama's cabinet.

It's hard finding just one thing to quote from the long, admiring review, which takes into account a man with a long, admirable life, but here's one little nugget.

Per Mr. Carter:

If you're interested in seeing some of the roles Mr. Plimpton did have time for, Blake Wilson, writing for The Times' Paper Cuts Blog, presents The George Plimpton Film Festival.

Mr. Carter also manages to get meta while talking about the founding of The Paris Review, which sounds suspiciously like his own start-up a generation later, but now feels like a misdirected telegram from a lost world:

According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year." He goes on to quote Times executive editor Bill Keller as saying:

As for that internecine warfare, Mr. Mnookin quotes photographer Ashley Gilbertson saying that in the early days of the war, "It was Iraqi and American politics by day and New York Times politics at night."

One example (among many) Mr. Mnookin recounts is the conflict between John Burns and James Glanz, which:

Just last week, The Times sent out a memo announcing that Mr. Glanz was appointed to the paper's Investigations desk.

In June, The Observer spoke to several reporters from The Times and other news organizations about life during wartime. (And in 2007, Politico's Michael Calderone, then of The Observer, wrote about Messrs. Burns and Glanz.)

Also, this week in The Times' Play Magazine, Dexter Filkins talks about how watching and listening to football got him through his Iraq experience, which Mr. Mnookin describes in Vanity Fair as a "collection of close calls [that] sounds like a horror-film montage."

In a landscape where there are no available media jobs, and there's virtually no mobility in the market, Mr. Bowden appears to have written his ticket. He told The Observer that after six years on contract at The Atlantic, it was a decision that largely came down to money.

"I talked to the [Atlantic] editors and told them I wanted to accept these other lucrative opportunities when they present themselves," said Mr. Bowden.

Earlier this year, he wrote an e-mail to Mr. Carter and Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy (who until 2006 was managing editor at The Atlantic), telling them he was interested in doing something.

The three gathered at Mr. Carter's Bank Street brownstone to discuss the details: Mr. Bowden's contract will be for two stories a year, and according to a source with knowledge of the deal, the contract is worth a low six-digit sum.

Mr. Pitt offers this bit of press criticism in citing Mr. Roth for the list:

In October 2006, Mr. Pitt wrote Esquire's cover story about the drug war, green building, and the ultimate diaper-rash cream.

OK, fine, keep moving.

But to several commenters—you know, those scourges of civilization—on VF.com, the cartoon was a little too similar to one by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's David Horsey that ran a week earlier. In it, the McCain's appear on the cover of The National Review, he's drooling in a wheelchair (mumbling to himself, "Bomb, bomb, bomb—bomb, bomb Iran"), she's pouring prescription pills into her hand. On the wall is a painting of Dick Cheney; in the fireplace, the Constitution.

As predictable accusations of plagiarism were hurled around the comment area, Media Mob contacted both artists. Mr. Bower said he hadn't seen Mr. Horsey's cartoon when he did his for Vanity Fair. He agreed with the assessment that both were the product of parallel-drawing.

Mr. Horsey responded to Media Mob at greater length:

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His driver's car was totaled, but Salon paid for a replacement. "No one has ever been killed because of me," he says. "And I'm very, very proud of that. There have been repercussions because of my stories but I can look you in the eye and say no one has been seriously hurt because of me."

One of the more serious challenges for journalists in Iraq is finding locals who can help them get around, act as translators or liaisons, and, when necessary, ensure that they survive such incidents.

Bobby Ghosh, Time's most recent Baghdad bureau chief, had his own terrifying experience as he was leaving the Green Zone with his bureau manager, an older local Iraqi who has adopted the affectation of carrying a walking stick wherever he goes to evoke deference as an elder. Mr. Ghosh and his manager were attacked by a group of teenagers who began hitting Mr. Ghosh with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. The manager, in turn, began whacking the attackers with his walking stick.

"I was in shock," Mr. Ghosh remembers. "I looked at him and thought, 'Why is he doing that? Provoking these people.' He knew what he was doing. By playing this sort of cantankerous old man, he knew what sort of response he'd get. And sure enough, these kids, they began to say, 'Oh, grandpa, don't worry. We won't hurt him.'

"It was all I could to stop from peeing in my pants, frankly. I was just completely terrified."

Mr. Ghosh, like so many journalists who've covered Iraq, relies heavily on his Iraqi staff, none of whom previously worked in journalism (one was a chicken farmer, another worked in the military), but, he says, "they've instinctively become journalists."

"We don't as a rule use our Iraqi staffers as reporters unless we absolutely have to. But when we do, they do a terrific job."

With journalists as potential kidnap targets and danger all around, who would want a job working for a Western bureau? "They need to have a certain appetite for danger," according to Mr. Ghosh. "There's no way to varnish that."

"These guys have saved our lives so many times."

It's not always heroic, according to Patrick Graham, who covered the war for Harper's and others. "There were a lot of journalists who were being led around by their nose by just really corrupt drivers. There was a kind of driver mafia," he says.

Phillip Robertson would agree. "Not all of these guys are trustworthy," he says. "You're kind of getting, on one level, desperate Iraqis. In a war of occupation, working for Westerners is not really looked upon well. So, what kind of people do you get who are willing to do that? People who really want the money. They're motivated by money. Not all of them, but some of them and it's a real problem."

"When you go out in the field and you're bringing somebody with you. ... He has a couple of choices: He can try to keep his job with a Western news agency a secret, which lasts I don't know how long. Not very long. How long is that secret gonna stay? Or he can be known to the armed groups and trade information to them."

Mr. Robertson cites the Vietnam-era example of the Associated Press, which was infiltrated by a Communist double agent, Pham Xuan An. "Western news agencies have problems with their stringers and their employes and it's not publicly talked about--it probably shouldn't be. They make mistakes. They didn't go to Columbia J-school. They don't know. AP gets burned by bogus information all the time. It's the worst thing that can happen to a news organization."

"I don't have that many people there that I really trust," he says. "It might just be my style of working with people: I burn them out."

Others have a different approach. William Langewiesche, who covered the war for The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, considers his contacts in Baghdad friends. He says the relationships with his drivers, translators, and security was non-hierarchical in every way: "I trusted them as they trusted me."

One of them is "almost like a brother" to Mr. Langewiesche.

"We'd talk a lot about what we're looking at, what's going on. He was strongly tied in with the Sunni thing, so he was able to tell me many things that I did write about. As time went on, I trusted his judgment. When he was telling me something was happening, I knew enough to listen very carefully to it.

"He would tell me something and six months later or one year later, it would make the news."

The Iraqis also serve the valuable function of being keepers of the memory, especially in bureaus where reporters are cycling in and out and can miss changes that might mean the difference between life and death. "They're the ones who've been through the whole thing," says Time's Bobby Ghosh.

The New Yorker's George Packer sees them as serving a valuable function in the future as well. "I will be very eager to see the books that come from Iraqis in the years to come," he says. "I think there will be some. They will be different. Some of them I think will be able to do it. They'll have the literary ability to do it."

"It's not easy," he says. "It's a lot harder, not necessarily in terms of risk, but in what the writing job requires. A lot harder than filing a day story or something. They will be the voices that will come closest and we haven't really heard much from them yet. But we will. And I really look forward to that."