Don't worry, 100 Eleventh Avenue residents, Rasputin has not risen from the dead—that's just Vincent Gallo.

Ladies, gird your loins—indie film star and would-be prostitute Vincent Gallo is moving to New York. (In case you're curious, Mr. Gallo offers his services for $50,000 a night, $1 million for sperm and another half million if you want "natural insemination," according to his website.)

Mr. Gallo, perhaps best known for being fellated by Chloë Sevigny in his 2003 art house film The Brown Bunny, just picked up a one-bedroom condo at 100 Eleventh Avenue, Jean Nouvel's bespeckled blue West Chelsea erection. He snagged the apartment from Diane Zuckerman and Michael Hite, who were apparently desperate to sell, because they parted with the fifth-floor unit for $2 million—a hefty discount from the $2.4 million that they paid the developer for the unit back in 2010, when the city's real estate market was still reeling from the recession.

The former owners did, however, make out a bit better renting the unit before the eventual sale—they got $10,000 a month for the furnished apartment, $200 more than their asking rent, according to Stephen Gutman at Corcoran Sunshine, who along with Elyse Gutman and Judith Harrison represented the sellers.

With an interior like that, we understand the discount.

Mr. Gallo will apparently be moving from Los Angeles, where the director/model/actor/artists/dead-ringer for Rasputin just offloaded one loft and is trying to get rid of another. LA's Arts District Business Improvement District should be breathing a sigh of relief at Mr. Gallo's departure—he once sued the BID for providing "no benefit" despite its thousands of dollars in annual dues. Friends of the High Line, you've been warned!

The two sales in the City of Angels should net Mr. Gallo nearly $4 million, more than enough to cover the purchase price on his new West Chelsea pad. Which is a good thing, because aside from his sex work, we're having trouble figuring out where Mr. Gallo gets his money.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, from his own screenplay (partially in Spanish with English subtitles), conveys a sense of his own life and career convulsing wildly between fulfillment and tragedy, triumph and debacle. Now 70, Mr. Coppola can look back on an existence drenched with family feelings and vague guilt complexes. These he has expanded and wildly overdramatized in an independent low-budget feature shot on location in the most picturesque and art-drenched neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. He has filmed the present-day scenes in highly contrasted black-and-white, influenced by such B&W classicists as Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Robert Bresson. For scenes set in the past or as fantasies, he turned to the vivid color palette of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, represented by extensive footage from The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). The narrative of two brothers in conflict is suggested by Rumble Fish (1983), which Mr. Coppola adapted from one of S. E. Hinton’s series of young adult novels, with Matt Dillon living in the shadow of older brother Mickey Rourke.

In Tetro, Vincent Gallo plays the title character, the older brother of 18-year-old Aiden Ehrenrich’s younger brother, Bennie. The film begins with Bennie as he arrives in Argentina from the U.S. on a cruise ship on which he worked as a waiter. We soon learn that Bennie is in search of his estranged older brother, who had left his family in the U.S. 11 years before, without a word of explanation. When Bennie finally locates Tetro’s house, he is welcomed very warmly by Tetro’s girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdu), but Tetro himself at first refuses to leave his room to greet Bennie. When he finally does, he advises Bennie to return home as soon as possible. Tetro also refuses to answer Bennie’s plaintive queries as to why, in effect, he abandoned his younger brother. Tetro angrily refuses to discuss the subject. And so it goes, on and on, for an inordinate length of time—Bennie beseeching, Tetro turning away.

In the meantime, Miranda tries her best to bring the two brothers together, without any success. Finally, with Miranda’s help, Bennie gains access to Tetro’s hidden hoard of writings and secrets, and sets out to write his own musical play on what he has discovered. Bennie’s writing, in unwilling collaboration with Tetro, attracts the attention of a very influential critic named Alone (Carmen Maura), who awards Bennie and Tetro the Patagonian Festival Prize, at which ceremony all the family secrets come tumbling out. I would be a spoilsport indeed to reveal them.

Klaus Maria Brandauer’s Carlo appears only in the multicolored past as a disreputable parental figure for Tetro and Bennie. Tetro has already been compelled to relive a traumatic car accident, in which he, the driver, survived, and his and Bennie’s mother, sitting next to him, was killed. Mr. Brandauer’s Carlo is a world-renowned orchestra conductor, and bears a superficial resemblance to Mr. Coppola’s own father, Carmine Coppola, the first flute of Alfredo Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra, and a composer for several of Mr. Coppola’s film projects. In interviews, Mr. Coppola has insisted that his father has always been a supportive presence in his life, and that therefore there is no resemblance between his own benign father and Mr. Brandauer’s coldly, cruelly manipulative Carlo. Still, one may be left to wonder from what source Tetro’s and Mr. Coppola’s overpowering rage toward a father figure originated. Of course, Mr. Gallo’s Tetro delivers much of the actor’s own ever-sour expressions of disgust over a world of unexplained grievances. Mr. Gallo’s own films, Buffalo 66 (1998) and The Brown Bunny (2004), the latter having scandalized Cannes with its notorious fellatio sequence with Chloë Sevigny, project enough angst on their own to supplement Mr. Coppola’s.

Still, despite all its longueurs and extreme aggravations, Tetro deserves to be seen as the late work of one of the cinema’s most accomplished masters of mise-en-scène.

Vincent Gallo is also the kind of who guy performs in art-house bands called RIICCEE (What is that—the name of the new ramen dish at Momofuku?)—the kind that shun studio recordings and improvise everything live. Though, of course, that’s not how Gallo would describe his pet project. “Improvisation is not a good word for what we're doing,” claims the band’s bio. “It's more a gesture of composing and performing at the same time, always hoping to avoid musical cliché or jamming.” Gallo plays guitar, bass, and keys, while Nikolas and Simon Haas (twin brothers of actor Lukas Hass) cover drums and keys respectively. Hole co-founder Eric Erlandson used to be a RIICC-ETTE as well, though he dropped out at the end of the band's sold out(!) North American tour last year. We can’t tell you much about the music since the Republican and his two cronies haven’t recorded any, but if you head to the Hiro Ballroom on September 24 you can find out for yourself.

Given the lack of proper tunes, the most remarkable thing about RRICCEE is their merchandise, which—much like the Brown Bunny director himself—is terrifically self-indulgent and shamelessly self-promoting. As the band’s website tells us, “Everything found here is hand-printed, labels are hand-sewn and numbered, all found garments are very unique and hand selected by the band members for use as their exclusive merchandise.” A few are even signed by the band! There’s the $260 pink boots with fur trim and little red hearts on the toe (though those are unfortunately sold-out). There’s a white camisole for $260, and a lady’s purple turtleneck for $100. There’s even a ribbed cotton wife-beater—that’s right, a wife-beater!—for $260.

All of which makes us wonder how much money it would take to shut Mr. Belvedere up and get him to make another Buffalo 66.

An eight-months-pregnant Nicole Richie and her friend, the society disc jockeyess Samantha Ronson, volunteered at a Hollywood soup kitchen yesterday.

Jennifer Aniston recently attended her 20th high school reunion at Rudolf Steiner on the Upper East Side.

Gallerist Larry Gagosian and collector Adam Lindemann are involved in some crack-up over a Jeff Koons which we will ask Gillian Reagan to explain to us later.

Some bloggers don't believe a National Enquirer story claiming that Jake Gyllenhaal has proposed to Reese Witherspoon, but is that because it would mean Ms. Witherspoon was rebounding too fast or because it would put Mr. Gyllenhaal out of reach for The Gays?

Social chronicler David Patrick Columbia finds Thanksgiving to be pretty on the Upper East Side, but still managed to curl up with a copy of Jeanine Basinger's Hollywood book, The Star Machine. Quiet time for D.P.C.

Soft-porn downtown-society artist (photography) Terry Richardson and soft-porn downtown-society filmmaker Vincent Gallo crashed an Upper East Side dinner. But it was only a commercial for Belvedere Vodka. Honestly, it's time to move to Maine.

After already swapping a loft in the glass-clad Richard Meier towers on the western reaches of Perry Street, Mr. Gallo just closed on his second apartment swap in less than a year in the building.

In September, he listed his 1,800-square-foot spread on the seventh floor for $2.75 million. Last week, he unloaded it for $2.4 million, according to his broker, Linda Melnick of Stribling and Associates.

The move comes after the filmmaker and sometime Republican activist purchased the raw-space spread on the seventh floor for around $2.15 million in December, holding it for under a year and flipping it for a $300,000-plus profit (nice going, Vincent!).

"[Vincent] never moved in. He's still undecided about where he wants to actually plant permanent roots," explained his broker, Ms. Melnick.

Douglas Elliman broker Leonard Steinberg represented the buyer and declined to comment. Mr. Gallo was not available for comment by press time.

The buyer of Mr. Gallo's loft, a finance executive, also snapped up the sixth-floor apartment for just north of $2 million, and according to sources familiar with the building, he plans to combine the two spreads into a sprawling duplex, the only mid-floor duplex in the north tower. (Of course, there is the penthouse duplex-that's the spread that belonged to Martha Stewart before the dethroned domestic diva sold it for a little over $6 million).

The Perry Street towers have made frequent appearances in the city's gossip pages, drawing media attention for everything from shoddy finishes to problem-riddled construction. Or, as Mr. Gallo himself once told Vanity Fair: "You won't believe what's going on in these buildings …. It's a microcosm of everything ugly in human beings-beautiful, beautiful architecture desecrated by scandal, greed, conniving and gluttony."

But now, with his latest sale, he seems to have weathered the P.R. maelstrom and made out well, financially. In July 2002, the 42-year-old filmmaker purchased the third-floor spread for a reported $2.03 million before unloading it for around the same price.

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. will greet 2005 with one less Manhattan apartment in his real-estate stable. In September, city records show that Mr. Sulzberger and his wife, the artist and writer Gail Gregg, did some real-estate flippage when they sold a 738-square-foot condo at 104 West 70th Street for $800,000. In August 2002, the couple closed on the property for a reported $615,000. That's a 30 percent profit-not bad!

According to New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis, Mr. Sulzberger was traveling and unavailable for comment about his deft real-estate moves. But perhaps he was inspired to sell after perusing The Times' recently bolstered real-estate coverage, complete with their own celebrity real-estate gossip column! Ms. Gregg was also not available for comment.

The Sulzbergers' Upper West Side spread was reportedly purchased for Ms. Gregg to house her art studio. Ms. Gregg-who, according to her Web site, most recently exhibited at the Gallery at R&F, in Kingston, N.Y.-still lists 104 West 70th Street as her studio address.

Ms. Gregg may also miss one added perk of maintaining a studio space at 104 West 70th Street: the buttery confections on sale at the famed Bakery Soutine, which sits on the building's ground floor.

Back downtown, billionaire scion Robert Soros and his wife Melissa have ankled the West Village. In October, the couple unloaded the four-story townhouse at 288 West Fourth Street for $5 million, city records show. At about the same time Mr. Soros, 41, the oldest of George Soros' five children, was appointed to run the Quantum Endowment Fund, an $8.3 billion investment portfolio.

According to city records, finance executive Ronald Layard-Liesching, a partner and director of research for the risk-management firm Pareto Partners, snapped up the Soros' West Fourth Street townhouse.

After pumping six-figure donations into Democratic coffers during this campaign cycle, Mr. Soros boosted his own personal balance sheet with the sale of the West Village manse: The couple purchased the property, which sits between 11th and Bank streets, for a mere $1.9 million in September 1998, city real-estate records show.

The 20-foot-wide home has a kitchen, a living room with fireplace and a garden on the ground level; the second floor boasts two bedrooms (each with a fireplace) and a bathroom; the master bedroom shares the third floor with a separate east-facing studio apartment; and the fourth floor has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a second kitchen and a sitting room.

Patricia Cliff and Carter Wilcox, both of the Corcoran Group, handled the sale and didn't return calls seeking comment. Mr. Soros was traveling and unavailable for comment.

The Soroses first listed the spread for $5.15 million in June of this year, before unloading it in October.

Recent Transactions in the Real Estate Market

Soho

110 Thompson Street Studio co-op. Asking: $259,000. Selling: $260,000. Maintenance: $540; 47 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: four months.

WHEN ALL THE LIGHTS ARE LOW Meanwhile, another uptown girl bought this 300-square-foot slice of Soho-but she always knew she wanted to be downtown. The twentysomething wine distributor works in the neighborhood and wanted to live among the stylish lanes south of Houston. So, after leaving behind her Upper East Side rental, she closed on this second-floor studio on fashionable Thompson Street. "It was about the location," listing broker Gerry Kendrick of Douglas Elliman said of the first-time buyer's decision to take the Soho plunge. The seller, a book publicist in his 30's, recently married and relocated to a larger spread in the flower district. His former Soho studio has a garden view, hardwood floors and east-facing exposures adding light to the spread. Vincent D'Allesandro of Fenwick-Keats represented the buyer.

Murray Hill

34 East 38th Street One-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom co-op. Asking: $1.2 million. Selling: $1.1 million. Maintenance: $2,561; 65 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: 11 months.

I KNOW A PLACE TO GO This one-bedroom on 38th Street between Park and Madison covers some 2,000 square feet-a rare find in Murray Hill-and yet it languished on the market for the better part of a year. "It was a tough sell," said Ella Sacks of the Corcoran Group, speaking of the unconventional layout: a one-bedroom apartment spread across four floors of a Murray Hill brownstone built in 1865. "One of the challenges in selling this apartment was that it's more like a downtown property." The sellers, a retired couple, relocated as far downtown as you can go-to South America-and listed their midtown perch with its exposed brick walls, eat-in kitchen and three wood-burning fireplaces. Finally, after 11 months on the market, they found a newlywed uptown couple intrigued by the spread's unique configuration. Fellow Corcoran broker Margaret Velard partnered on the deal.

Upper East Side

115 East 86th Street Two-bedroom, two-bathroom co-op. Asking: $995,000. Selling: $1.06 million. Maintenance: $1,212; 50 percent tax-deductible. Time on the market: three weeks.

CONNECTICUT YANKEES Have child No. 1: move to an Upper East Side two-bedroom. Child No. 2: shuttle off to the suburbs. That's what happened with this growing clan when they recently added a fourth member and decided to relocate to the Connecticut wilds in search of more space. "They loved the city, but they couldn't find what they were looking for," said listing broker Jane E. Goldberg of Century 21 William B. May. "In the end, they decided they wanted a backyard." When they listed their 13th-floor spread on Labor Day, they instantly received five all-cash offers. A single travel agent who wanted to hop across the park from her West Side apartment snapped up the place, paying nearly $10,000 over the asking price. The pent-up demand may have been due to the prewar spread's details, which include herringbone floors and a living room with a wood-burning fireplace. How country!

But the hip-hop impresario was speechless for several seconds when The Transom asked him about his own voting record at a press conference on Tuesday morning to introduce Citizen Change, the voter-registration task force that he founded. Asked about the last time he'd voted, Mr. Combs, wearing sunglasses and a dark sports jacket over a "Vote or Die" T-shirt, confessed that he last entered a voting booth and pulled the lever in 2000. Mr. Combs stood at a podium in Kimmel Auditorium at N.Y.U., surrounded by red-white-and-blue balloons in front of an audience that half-expected him to launch his own run for office.

When queried whether he voted in city elections, Mr. Combs said, "No." An awkward silence ensued; the microphone squealed. Could he elaborate on why? "To be honest, I'm just-I was just as disenfranchised as the younger disenfranchised voters," he stammered, before the smooth-talking salesman kicked in. "It's just recently, in 2000, that I started to educate myself and understand the way the system works. So that's what makes this thing so much more relevant, because I'm not talking from the outside. I understand a lot about how young people feel and how minorities feel; we feel that the system doesn't work. But I can't just sit back and complain about it, you know-I can do something about it. So I don't have a long-lasting record history of voting, but I do have a long-lasting record of communicating and motivating and energizing and synergizing young people and, you know, I'm just like them. You know, I didn't believe in the process, so I can explain to young people why they should get motivated with this." The applause was thunderous.

"Now wasn't that a good answer!?" shouted a member of the Citizen Change posse, a group that includes political bulldog James Carville, who showed up in a sport coat, pink shirt and green plaid tie to fulfill his duties as chairman. ("He didn't take no paper because he knows we ain't got no money," Mr. Combs had said earlier. "He was so nice to donate his time.")

One exuberant participant shouted, "We've got bullhorns! And balloons!"

Mr. Combs isn't the only music-industry titan who could be accused of hypocrisy. Christina Aguilera and Outkast's Andre (Andre 3000) Benjamin are featured on giant billboards in Times Square as the faces of Declare Yourself, another campaign "encouraging young people to vote in the upcoming presidential elections." In photos taken by celebrity shutterbug David LaChapelle, Ms. Aguilera and Mr. Benjamin are shown being gagged, with the tagline "Only You Can Silence Yourself."

Up until now, the two have indeed been silent during several recent elections. According to The Transom's recent survey of voting records, neither Ms. Aguilera nor Mr. Benjamin appear to have ever exercised the right to vote. Ms. Aguilera registered as a Democrat in October 2000, but does not appear to have voted since then, according to the Los Angeles County Board of Elections. As for Mr. Benjamin, he registered to vote on Oct. 5, 2000, in Georgia and again as a Democrat in March 2004 in Los Angeles, but does not appear to have ever voted. His registration in Los Angeles is currently inactive. Both have vowed to pull the lever for the upcoming Presidential election.

Ms. Aguilera and Mr. Benjamin are not alone in their failure to vote. Last January, amNew York reported that almost a dozen hip-hop stars affiliated with the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network voter-registration campaign, including Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Eminem, Ja Rule and DMX, had never voted. At the time, HSAN president Benjamin Chavis had vowed that the rappers would vote in November's Presidential election.

-Noelle Hancock and Marcus Baram

Full House

More than a year has come and gone in the meatpacking district: Jersey Girl influx, overpriced pan-Asian slop, neon-lit boutique hotels, a "refurbished" Man-Hole and, of course, Soho House, still closing its doors to Chad Lowe (along with certain more bona fide celebrities). Despite well-documented complaints about a mediocre menu and obnoxious guests, membership renewal rates are at 92 percent and counting at the club. "Everyone is asking me to support their application. They're sidling up to me, hoping I'll extend an invitation to them," one recently renewed member said. "I got a call last week from someone I went to law school with, who wanted to meet me for drinks-at Soho House. I mean, I haven't seen this girl in, like, six years!"

Club aficionados insist that the house doesn't deserve the bad-mouthing, especially compared to other elitist members' clubs like the Brook, the Harmonie or the Century Club, with their extortionate fees. The club's velvet rope is considerably slacker than most, and the $900 annual membership fee-even once it increases to $1,100 (surely to cover the costs of last week's smashed-glassware debacle)-is lower than the annual fee at a mediocre gym on Avenue B.

But complaining is an old sport in this town, and even renewing members love to take a swing ("I've complained and gone, all on the same day," says one cheerfully)-something the club's resident novelist and committee member Tim Geary acknowledges, without glossing over the substance of their complaints. "Given the fact that there have been so many glitches, it's astounding that we're doing so well. Sales have doubled in the last year, hotel occupancy is at 90 percent currently, and there are 1,200 people on the waiting list." There is still plenty to criticize, from the service ("Well," says one renewed member, "the service on the roof tends to be a bit lackadaisical at best") to the food ("patchy") to the clientele ("Let's just say there seems to be a surplus of finance types every now and again"). One member claims to have recently overheard two gentlemen heatedly arguing about the different branches of the Scores strip club. "Every place becomes a victim of its own success," says Mr. Geary. "On some nights you arrive, it's completely heaving and you think to yourself, 'Where did all these people come from?'" Grooming the masses may take time, but Mr. Geary confided that Soho House is taking more immediate measures on another front and has hired a new star chef to start this fall, trained at London's J. Sheekey's.

-Jessica Joffe

Fur Flies

Vincent Gallo isn't making any apologies.

"If you didn't like the movie at Cannes, you won't like the movie now," he said over the phone about his first film in six years, The Brown Bunny, which polarized the Croisette last year. "That said, the boos that came out of Cannes happened before the first frame of the film started. They happened on my opening-credit sequence, which included my name. Did people hate The Brown Bunny? Or did they hate Vincent Gallo? Or the idea of a person writing, directing and starring in a movie where they get blown?"

On Aug. 27, the moviegoing public will finally have the chance to make up its own mind, thanks to the New York–based independent Wellspring, which picked up the film over a year after it premiered at Cannes. In the meantime, Mr. Gallo has cut down the film to a svelte 92 minutes, 26 minutes less than the version shown at Cannes. The film has much-improved sound. Mr. Gallo no longer appears on a tandem bicycle with Chloë Sevigny. An opening sequence involving a motorcycle race has been tightened substantially. Some of the "redundant" road footage has been taken out. And, most importantly, the ending has been changed. (Mr. Gallo claims that the Cannes ending was done simply to appease his Japanese financiers, Kinetique, and did not reflect the original screenplay. In the end, he opted for minimalism, the specifics of which would give away too much of the film.) Everything else-and I mean everything else-has been kept.

"The part in the hotel is slightly shortened, but the actual graphic part of the scene is exactly the same. It's been untouched," said Ryan Werner, the 30-year-old head of theatrical distribution for Wellspring, after much prodding by The Transom over lunch at the Flatiron eatery Bolo. He is referring to the scene that left people humming, in which Ms. Sevigny (playing Daisy Lemon, the girlfriend) fellates Mr. Gallo's character, Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer.

Mr. Werner, along with the company's head of acquisitions, Marie-Therese Guirgis, spearheaded the campaign to have Wellspring swallow the distribution costs of The Brown Bunny. He was part of that other Cannes contingent, those who gave the film a 15-minute standing ovation. "The concept of the movie hasn't changed at all. It's exactly the movie he wanted to make. But he actually had the time to pare it down and focus it toward his goals."

Wellspring, however, has a long road to travel in changing people's perceptions of The Brown Bunny following the absurd amount of negative press surrounding the film's premiere. As part of the marketing campaign, Mr. Gallo will embark on a cross-country road trip-quite like the one his character takes in the film-hosting screenings of the film for the press and select members of the public. And he'll be on hand afterward to conduct a Q&A.

"Part of the reason we want to send him across the country-and why we thought this was a good idea-is because when you work with him and spend some time with him and get to know him, you like him," said Mr. Werner between sips of pea soup. Mr. Gallo will also give a rare New York concert with special guests close to the release date. "We wanted to get him out in front of people."

Considering that Mr. Gallo is often quoted in Page Six bad-mouthing anyone or anything, Wellspring's decision to put him in front of an audience is a clear sign that the firm is not recoiling from the ballyhoo surrounding the film.

"I think one thing to point out is, pretty much we're all in agreement-we and Vincent-on embracing the controversy of the film and not trying to shy away from it," said Liza Burnett, a publicist working on the film from Dan Klores Communications,

That philosophy extends to the promotional materials. In one trailer, edited by Mr. Gallo and already in circulation, a quote from Entertainment Weekly film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum reads, " … no one in America will ever see one frame of this film …. " Moments later, the trailer deems Brown Bunny "the most controversial American film ever made." Moreover, a "wild posting"-half the size of a movie poster-cuts right to the quick-ie: Mr. Gallo stands peering down at the top of Ms. Sevigny's head, which is positioned right in front of his crotch. In the bottom right-hand corner, it reads, "IN COLOR 'X' ADULTS ONLY." (The film is being released unrated. Mr. Gallo, it appears, has a sense of humor.) The other marketing tools, however, are quite artful. An R-rated trailer-also edited by Mr. Gallo-that lasts two minutes employs a split screen, with one side showing a setting sun flooding an empty highway with golden light, while the other side displays Ms. Sevigny participating in some drugged-out sex romp (not with Mr. Gallo). Meanwhile, a mournful Jackson C. Frank song plays in the background.

The ultimate obstacle that Mr. Gallo and Wellspring will have to overcome is audiences conflating Mr. Gallo's onscreen characterization with his offscreen persona.

"I don't want to be Bud Clay. That's a sad, sad character-an unredeemed character," he said, adding, "If you find one girlfriend who's ever said that I've walked around naked for a minute or have any exhibitionism …. I make love with my underwear on."

In the end, Mr. Gallo puts it all into perspective.

"It's clear that I've antagonized people in some way. What that way is, is between them and their priest. Certainly, the film has a certain place. It succeeds in certain ways. And it's definitely original and ambitious. Whether it works, whether it's perfect, whether it's your favorite film, that's personal. But to shrug it off-please!"

-Jake Brooks

The Transom Also Hears …

… The Presidential campaign's next battleground is haute couture. The Kerry daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra, not to be outdone by Jenna and Barbara Bush's debut in Vogue, recently posed for a photo shoot to appear in an upcoming issue of Harper's Bazaar. The brunette Alexandra Kerry's previous fashion moment was the infamous off-shoulder see-through black gown that she wore on the red carpet at the Cannes premiere of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 ….

-M.B.

… The dust keeps flying at Ground Zero. Architect Daniel Libeskind was willing to accept a few hundred thousand dollars for his "political seal of approval" on the design of the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, according to legal papers filed by a top executive at Silverstein Properties, with whom Mr. Libeskind is embroiled in an ugly legal dispute over how much he should be paid for his contributions to the Freedom Tower's design. In court papers filed July 20 that respond to Mr. Libeskind's lawsuit of July 13, Silverstein Properties senior executive Janno Lieber alleges: "During our negotiations, SDL representatives, on various occasions, attempted to justify this extra fee as compensation for Libeskind's willingness to give the Tower his political seal of approval." Mr. Lieber seemed to be suggesting that Mr. Libeskind was willing to trade on the widespread public approval of his master plan-and the popularity he enjoys with the public-in exchange for being paid a premium on his architectural fees. Mr. Libeskind's lawyer, Ed Hayes, said that the very fact that they decided to sue rather than settle out of court is evidence that his client's "seal of approval" was not up for sale. Mr. Libeskind claims he is owed $843,500 for his work; Mr. Silverstein allegedly last offered around $225,000.

-Blair Golson

"I want to thank you guys for inviting me here today. It's a big honor," he told the crowd of pearl- and pinstripe-wearing Young Republicans who had gathered to hear him speak at their monthly meeting on Jan. 15. With his shaggy hair, blue jeans, military-cut overcoat and stubbled face, Mr. Gallo looked about as natural in the ballroom of the Women's National Republican Club on West 51st Street as a Beat poet at a 1950's cocktail party in Cleveland.

And yet he gushed: "In my whole life, no one's ever invited me or included me in any Republican event. As a matter of fact, I used to go to the Rush Limbaugh show with my best friend Johnny Ramone and a couple of other friends, and Rush never … acknowledged us. So I'm thrilled to be here."

Mr. Gallo, 41, is a devout if unlikely member of the G.O.P., an outspoken Republican who rivals only punk rocker Mr. Ramone, Motörhead bassist and hair-meister Lemmy Kilmister, and Factory alum Paul Morrissey for the title of Least Likely Celebrity Conservative. He has been a part of the downtown art scene since the late 1970's-a product of the days of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Studio 54's Steve Rubell (both friends of Mr. Gallo before they died of a drug overdose and AIDS, respectively)-and his most recent film, The Brown Bunny , turns an extended blowjob into a new form of cinema vérité.

He is hardly the poster child for the Moral Majority.

But Mr. Gallo insisted that he's the real deal. "There's a picture of me at 6 years old campaigning for Richard Nixon. I've always been the same. Always. I was against hippies," he told his Young Republican Club hosts. He loves President Bush and loathes "self-serving" lefties, particularly "that commie crawfish, Al Franken," and that "destructive hog," Michael Moore. And he thinks politicians spend too much time pandering to special interests like "the gays, the AARP, handicapped groups." When he gets going on the media's anti-Republican bias, as he did the other night, Mr. Gallo sounds like a regular Bill O'Reilly.

"I've been on 125 magazine covers worldwide during my career-which is a lot for an unknown person who doesn't have a career-and I've written about 200 articles in all kinds of magazines, and I'd like to let you know that there is media bias in an extreme way against the Republican Party," he said. "I have never been quoted in any article that I've been interviewed for saying anything positive in any way about the Republican Party.

"But you know," he said, "I would like to end my speech today by just saying, in terms of Europe, you know the United States has a great President-a, very, very great President-when the French hate him!"

The Young Republicans went wild, showering Mr. Gallo with applause and sympathy. A cute brunette in a houndstooth dress stood up to say that she felt his pain. When Mr. Gallo left the podium a small group converged on him to hear him expand on the evening's theme: the media's liberal bias.

"You want to know how it's affected my career? Here's one great story," he told his new fans. "It was during the impeachment proceedings against Clinton, and I had gone to present Buffalo '66 at Sundance. I was just rambling on every day, and Paul Schrader [one of the judges] was so offended by my comments at my Q. and A. that he walked into the voting and said, 'Under no circumstance will Vincent Gallo win any prizes tonight.'

"So there I sat, with clearly the hardest ticket at Sundance, and I was the only person who won nothing," he said. "The films that won a lot of prizes were Smoke Signals , because it was the first film by a Native American, and High Art , because it was the first independent film dealing with the complexities of a lesbian relationship. You know, if I had made a film with left-wing concepts- Boys Don't Cry , for example-I may have been nominated for an Oscar that year!"

"I certainly don't remember it that way," said Mr. Schrader, responding to Mr. Gallo's claims of jury bias. "Just because one of five people on a jury doesn't like your film doesn't mean that you're being persecuted for your politics. I didn't even know he was a Republican."

After the event, Mr. Gallo was in high spirits. "Wasn't that a lovely, kind, intelligent group of people?" he said as he swayed under the fluorescent lights of a downtown No. 6 train. "I've always liked square people. When I was a kid, it was always the squarest mothers who were nicest to me. I mean, I was this weird kid, but they always took me in.

"Still," he said with a chuckle, "the Republican Party needs hipsters. If it wants to broaden its base, it needs hipsters."

-Lizzy Ratner

Katha Pollitt, S.W.F.

Many a broken-hearted lover has dreamed of having a national, highly acclaimed publication print a clever, personally penned harangue excoriating an ex in faultless prose. Oh, to imagine our onetime paramour opening up his (or her) favorite periodical on a lazy Sunday at the kitchen table, only to find a wry critique of his (or her) sub-par bedroom behavior in a one-way conversation being read simultaneously by so many other intellectuals worldwide. This would be followed by paragraphs questioning years of "loyalty" and well-crafted sentences detailing the panty preferences of the ex's new lover. Perhaps there'd even be a cute little reference to a certain wooden spoon whose disappearance coincided with a certain someone's moving out with his (or her!) collection of modern art that we never liked anyway, dammit.

Of course, for most of us, the dream ends there. But for Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, it seems that this is where her revenge against her beau of seven years begins. For in her essay "Webstalker" in the Jan. 19 issue of The New Yorker , Ms. Pollitt rails against her ex in this very manner. The five-page essay details how Ms. Pollitt has devoted what seems to be the better part of this millennium "Webstalking" her ex-or, more accurately, plugging his name (and various misspellings of it) into myriad search engines. At the end of the saga, she finds her pot of gold: a photo of her ex-boyfriend's current girlfriend's living room-complete with the ex's ugly paintings-on the Web site of a real-estate company.

This piece is actually something of a sequel: Ms. Pollitt's first tirade against the unnamed ex appeared in July 2002, in a 4,000-plus-word essay called "Learning to Drive," which might have been titled "Learning to Drive at the Age of 52 in Order to Prove to My Asshole Ex That I'm Not a Loser." In that piece, she lamented about his infidelities, talked about his difficult Marxist mother in Vermont and described an argument in which he scolded her for not leafing through The Joy of Sex with more fervor.

In part deux , Ms. Pollitt reveals many more juicy tidbits, including her password ("secret"), her ex's password ("marxist") and the fact that she doesn't know how to download a PDF. But using what Web-searching skills she does have, Ms. Pollitt manages to reveal many uninteresting things about her onetime honey, including the places he's lecturing and the Web sites on which he's posted announcements and musings.

So, while Ms. Pollitt never actually gives the guy's name, plug in a few details and it's not hard to figure out. And really, if you're going to devote so much space to a man, doesn't he at least deserve to have a name?

He is Paul Mattick, born in 1944, a professor of philosophy at Adelphi University and the son of a Pomeranian-born Marxist writer of the same name. What else did we learn that wasn't already printed in The New Yorker ? Not much-Ms. Pollitt covers almost everything Web-able. We found that his name appeared on lots of sites that flaunt the word "dialectic." What else? Mr. Mattick took Ms. Pollitt's author photo on the Random House Web site, is an occasional book reviewer for The Time s and, according to that publication, "was once the lunch chef at the Signet Society in Cambridge, Mass."

Googlism.com, a site that will scan the Internet for phrases that link a name with the word "is," told us that "Paul Mattick is a Marxist" and "is the author of [the book] Social Knowledge and editor of the International Journal of Political Economy ."

The woman for whom Mr. Mattick left Ms. Pollitt is described in "Webstalker" as a professor who is "producing" a book with Mr. Mattick. In "Learning to Drive," Ms. Pollitt describes her as "the young art critic he mocked as silly and second-rate [but] was being groomed as my replacement." Ms. Pollitt also wonders in print if the young critic is more willing than she was to perform impromptu oral sex.

The lucky lady-according to some more of our intrepid Googling-seems to be Katy Siegel, an assistant professor of art history at Hunter College and a contributing editor of Artforum . The book she and Mr. Mattick are "producing" is being published by Thames and Hudson and will be called Art and Money . According to a posting by Mr. Mattick on a site devoted to Karl Marx, the book will deal "with the relations between art and money and the similarities and differences between art and money as cultural phenomena, as exemplified and represented in art works." Mr. Mattick and Ms. Siegel didn't return calls from The Transom, and Ms. Pollitt said she had nothing to add to what she's already written in The New Yorker .

While Ms. Siegel's name doesn't register on Googlism.com, Ms. Pollit's does. According to the site, Ms. Pollitt "is wonderful," Ms. Pollitt "is not voting for Bill Clinton in 1996," and Ms. Pollitt "is large." The words "Katha Pollitt is having a hard time letting go" don't appear, but now that the online version of this paragraph is going down in the Internet's annals, we are filled with hope.

-Anna Jane Grossman

Amy's Eatery

The armies of the night that Amy Sacco has coddled at her nightclubs Lot 61 and Bungalow 8 will soon be fretting about hearing loss, sleep deprivation and liver damage, but it looks like the nightlife diva will be ready to offer her regulars an alternative. The Transom has learned that the flaxen-haired Ms. Sacco is planning to open a 3,500-square-foot restaurant at 461 West 23rd Street, between Ninth and Tenth avenues in Chelsea. City records show that Ms. Sacco purchased a commercial condo at the London Terrace Towers for $1.7 million in November. A copy of the property's deed on file with the City Register states that "the condominium premises are to be used as a restaurant."

Ms. Sacco, 25, declined to comment on the specific plans for the restaurant, but sources close to the deal say that after Ms. Sacco completes renovations to the space-which once was an Italian restaurant called La Traviata-she will open the spot sometime later this year. According to sources familiar with the situation, the restaurant will be Ms. Sacco's first true dining establishment (both Bungalow 8 and Lot 61 have limited menus) and the first property that she owns; Ms. Sacco and her investors currently have commercial leases for Lot 61 and Bungalow 8. Sources say that Ms. Sacco, 35, has yet to select a chef or a designer for the space, but she is close to completing the final details of the business.

While Ms. Sacco has made a name for herself with splashy New York clubs, her decision to open a restaurant is a return to her roots, of sorts. Before becoming the 6-foot-1 matron of New York nightlife, the Chatham, N.J., native got her start in New York restaurants. In 1990, she graduated from the Johnson and Wales restaurant school in Providence, R.I., and her first job in New York was checking coats and hosting at Bouley. She eventually moved on to manage the Lipstick Café and Vong, both co-owned by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. And in 1994 she was engaged to Gilbert Le Coze, then the head chef of Le Bernardin, shortly before he died of a heart attack.

-Gabriel Sherman

Sin by de Sign

If you thought the golden age of zodiac dating died with Harvey Wallbangers and the "dry look," gird yourself for February. That's when astrological authors Starsky and Cox predict that the publication of their book, Sextrology: An Astrology of Sex and the Sexes , will inspire a whole new generation of bar-hoppers in need of annoying pickup lines.

"It's our contention that every sign is compatible with another sign," the statuesque Stella Starsky (Capricorn) told The Transom on a recent evening accompanied by her fellow sextrologist and celestial soulmate, Quinn Cox (Libra). They were nestled in the dining room of their local downtown brasserie Pastis, passionately discussing the merits of planetary matchmaking. "We share the cardinal quality," said Mr. Cox. "It makes us both very ambitious, very forward-moving."

The couple have been doing private readings for friends-many of whom work in the fashion business-for years, but they began moving forward at a faster clip in 1998 when they met Christina Ferreri, then the editor of YM magazine.

"Stella immediately said to her: 'You're a Sagittarius.' It really flipped her out." Et voila ! When Ms. Ferreri moved to helm Teen People , she offered Ms. Starsky and Mr. Cox a column in the magazine that ran for five years and, according to the duo, was "revolutionary" because it separated the horoscopes for men and women-24 mini-predictions instead of the standard 12. (In Sextrology , they go one step further, giving gay men and women their own astrological categories.)

"We're not your granola-encrusted, New Age–y, patchouli-wearing astrologers," Mr. Cox told The Transom in between sips of red wine. "We really treat this as an intellectual pursuit." Judging by the six-figure advance they received from HarperCollins, their publisher must see it as a potentially popular one-after all, it is about sex. According to the 500-plus-page book, Leo men, for instance, have a penchant for "cheerleaders," "lite b&d" and "begging." Taurus women, on the other hand, prefer "smooth torsos" and "role-play."

In the name of research-the intellectual kind, of course-The Transom asked the authors for some astrological insight into some of the city's more famous relationships. First up: Sarah Jessica Parker and Mathew Broderick. A quick flick through the book's comprehensive celebrity lists revealed that Ms. Parker is an Aries, as is her beau. "She wears the pants," opined Mr. Cox, adding flatly, "They're friends who fuck."

Next: Drew Barrymore (Pisces) and Fabrizio Moretti (Gemini). According to Sextrology , Aries women are turned on by alcohol and narcotics, while Gemini guys get frisky for the old hour-glass figure ( Hellooo, Ms. Barrymore! ) and white panties.

And our last lucky couple: Uma Thurman (Taurus) and her post-Ethan squeeze, hotelier André Balazs (Aquarius). "In this relationship, Uma gets to be the girl for a change," Ms. Cox opined. As for Mr. Balazs, "Aquarians like to add a little corruption into the mix," offered Mr. Quinn. "Let's just say I imagine he's going to take her places she's never been before."

-Shazia Ahmad

To the Moon, Sheffer!

The American Comic Vision Festival at Symphony Space was kicked off on Jan. 13, at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia theater on Broadway and 95th Street, by a panel of "comic visionaries" hosted by National Public Radio personality Isaiah Sheffer. On the panel were television writer Stephen Colbert, screenwriter Nora Ephron and humorist Roy Blount Jr. Mr. Sheffer was extremely interested in defining the "American Comic Vision." The panelists groaned. So he reconfigured the question: "Well, what's the future of America's 'Comic Vision'?"

"Uh, it's future is in space," said Mr. Colbert.

The conversation meandered from there-there was a brief chat about self-deprecating "Jewish" humor and a screening of a Mel Brooks short film-until the heart of America's Comic Vision was found: American politics. When Mr. Sheffer mentioned a comment that Ms. Ephron had made backstage before the panel-about the dowdy and not-very-First-Lady-like shoes worn by Judith Steinberg Dean in the unflattering front-page New York Times portrait of her that day-Ms. Ephron seemed rankled. "I didn't want that said publicly," she said. "I feel bad … I'm a Dean person."

Mr. Sheffer shrugged it off. "Don't worry," he told her. "We're an elite group of Upper West Siders. Most of the world doesn't care what we do or say."

-A.J.G.

This, according to hard-core festival mavens, is as it should be. You go to Cannes or Berlin or Toronto, they remind you, to see innovative visions of the world you will never see again, not the standard Hollywood fare coming soon to a shopping mall nearby. I'll buy that, but doesn't anybody have any fun anymore? Toronto's idea of an antidote to persistent Sturm und Drang was the deadly Mambo Italiano , a popular Montreal stage play hoisted onto the screen, possibly by a derrick. Flooded with shrieking Italian clichés, it drones on with tongue-in-cheek titters about a cop and a travel agent, two gay sons of old-country immigrants, who can't tell their parents they are lovers. "Is your son gravely ill?" asks the priest. "No," says the sobbing mother in the confessional, "he's gravely gay." With ugly furniture, ugly clothes, ugly hairdos and ugly wall paint (they all live in houses the color of fruit cocktail), these Italian stereotypes would put you to sleep in or out of the closet. Their noise and hand-waving are punctuated by hyperventilation, sitcom one-liners and lasagna. No tragedy is so hopeless it cannot be cured by a fresh batch of cannelloni. The butch cop bails, and the deserted travel agent who refuses to move back home to Mamma solves his dilemma by writing a lousy TV show about his experiences. My Big Fat Gay Italian Wedding ? Not very much to applaud here, except the producers' clever merchandising techniques. Thanks, guys, for the pound of fettucine and the can of Contadina tomato sauce you sent me. I liked them better than everything else in Mambo Italiano put together.

More unveilings which have since moved on to mass consumption: Ridley Scott's Matchstick Men is a highly enjoyable caper comedy about a scam artist (Nicolas Cage, whose neurotic charm is shown to much better advantage here than in last year's abysmal, overrated Adaptation ) whose life is turned into an upside-down cake when a teenage daughter he's never met (the terrific Alison Lohman, who electrified audiences as Michelle Pfeiffer's abandoned daughter in the underrated White Oleander ) shows up to invade his space and talk her way into a partnership in crime. The fact that Mr. Cage falls for fatherhood despite the fact that he has ignored his kid for 14 years, and despite the potential danger to a profession that could be embarrassing as well as compromised, comes as a shock to his affable, long-suffering partner, a fellow con artist (versatile, charismatic chameleon and rising superstar Sam Rockwell) who already has his hands full trying to collect on all the tax-free swindles and worthless products the pair have sold in exchange for bogus prizes that don't exist. For a 14-year-old with larceny on her mind, Ms. Lohman is also a bit too sexy for her own good, which may lead viewers to suspicions I was too busy being entertained to entertain, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the trajectory of the witty script by Nicholas and Ted Griffin builds with consummate ease and more plot twists than a pretzel, thanks to Ridley Scott's humorous action style-a refreshing change of pace from the director of Alien, Blade Runner , and Gladiator . This is a film that never lags in the number of shameless surprises it pulls off with panache. The first three-fourths of Matchstick Men seems to be a domestic drama about two flim-flam supremos and the girl who moves in on their hearts, with Mr. Cage delivering a colorful, bouncy performance as a chain-smoking, obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic overwhelmed by so many ticks and neuroses that a leaf in his swimming pool or a cracker crumb on his carpet can lead to panic and cardiac arrest. Then the film shifts gears again when the ultimate con backfires and all three of the "matchstick men" get mixed up in a murder which may or may not be what it seems-like the characters themselves. For a tough cookie who usually figures out everything in advance (when everyone was on the edge of their seats in The Sixth Sense , I was yawning), this film's climax and postscript were so shocking I was knocked right out my socks.

Better still was Lost in Translation , Sofia Coppola's careful, focused study of two lonely Americans with too much time on their hands in a Tokyo hotel. Bill Murray is superb as a faded film personality who may be over the hill in Hollywood's changing youth market but still has fans in Japan, where his old movies dominate every digital Sony on the Ginza. Getting paid big bucks for a Japanese whiskey commercial, he wanders around with a face like raw limburger, a tall man among midgets, bemused by the culture clash, confused by the production crew that says L's instead of R's. Bored but unwilling to return home to a career and a marriage that are both on the skids, he runs into a bimbo plugging her new movie with Keanu Reeves, orders a prostitute who begs him to "Lip my sockings," and gets subjected to a humiliating talk show with the "Johnny Carson of Japan." Understandably, he becomes infatuated with another bored (and much younger) hotel guest, a neglected wife whose photographer husband is in Tokyo shooting a rock band (the enchanting Scarlett Johansson). With restraint, sweetness and a May-December camaraderie that is totally believable, this mismatched couple gets to know each other against a backdrop of the most splendid guided tour of Japan since Sayonara . Exploring the strangeness of the country, from its odd video parlors and exotic after-hours social clubs to its breathtaking tea houses and scenic postcard views of Mt. Fuji, two people touch each other in time and place and spirit, in ways that are understated and touching. The film is superbly lensed by Sofia Coppola, who has many of her father's directorial flourishes, but an intimacy with actors he often eschews. I used to scratch my head over Bill Murray's appeal, but the sallow, pock-marked complexion, the sad moo-cow eyes and the poker-faced blankness that make him the perfect pessimistic victim in comedies that are out of sync with the rest of the world are growing on me. He can stare motionless at the bizarre dimensions of an impossible miniature toilet in a Japanese men's room and make me laugh. Many things in the cultural tangle between East and West are indeed Lost in Translation , but not Bill Murray's subtle, wrinkled brand of rancid humor. His heavy-lidded Robert Mitchum eyes seem to be asking questions even when they are closed. We've got all sorts of unconventional contemporary movie heroes. Why not a querulous one?

But light pleasures were few. Signifying a return to the unique visions and unconventional styles of the 70's, Toronto featured a plethora of U.S. films dealing with massive social confusion and the search for personal freedom in the sadness and injustice of marginalized American society. Movies about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that say: "We don't care if you don't like us-we don't like you, either!" Movies that take on the church, the government and the military-industrial complex, defining new standards of virtue, sexuality, heroism and gender identity. In Gus Van Sant's Elephant , non-professional teenagers re-enact the carnage of the Columbine high-school massacre. In 11:14 , horrible events on a night in American suburbia are told from different points of view as Hilary Swank helps rob a convenience store to pay for a girlfriend's abortion, Rachael Leigh Cook is in the middle of an orgasm in a cemetery when a headstone falls off a statue and cracks her partner's head wide open, Patrick Swayze as her overweight father throws the head off a bridge and smashes the windshield out of Henry Thomas' S.U.V., causing a boy in a passing car to lose his penis while hanging out of the window in the confusion. In Pieces of April , the prolific actress Patricia Clarkson plays the terminally ill matriarch of a dysfunctional New Jersey family trying to make a Thanksgiving dinner with their estranged goth daughter on the Lower East Side. (Big comedy scene: Cancer-riddled Mom stops to vomit in a filthy highway gas station and loses her wig in the toilet.) In the disgusting Wonderland , Val Kilmer plays the heroin-addicted porn star John Holmes (a.k.a. Johnny Wadd), who was suspected of a group of savage murders in his twilight years between X-rated stardom and death from AIDS. Since he was never convicted, what's the point?

Sex made a big comeback, and it was amazing how graphic it was. Meg Ryan, Ewan McGregor, Mark Ruffalo, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts all turned up naked onscreen. But nothing emerged from the New Age moral abyss in quite the same way as The Brown Bunny , a catatonic self-indulgence by the hugely talentless actor Vincent Gallo that was, in May, already formally labeled "the worst movie in the history of the festival" by critic Roger Ebert. (He must have forgotten the year Isabelle Adjani had sex with an octopus in a freak show called Possession .) Anyway, The Brown Bunny was heralded in Toronto as "audacious", "innovative" and "quintessentially American," but quickly became more accurately described as "The Epic Fellatio Movie." It opens on about 10 minutes of repetitive shots of a motorcycle race, followed by an unshaven, glassy-eyed, greasy-haired bum who drives around the country in the rain with his motorbike strapped to his truck, silently observing America through his windshield wipers. He is played, more or less, by Mr. Gallo, the director-writer of small abilities and actor of none. He picks up a gas-station attendant named Violet and deserts her in the dust. Then he picks up Lilly and leaves her in the dust. (All of the wilted women are named after flowers, which constitutes the film's only irony and prompts a lot of derisive audience laughter.) He drives some more. The camera closes in on the hundreds of hair follicles in his earlobes. He stops at a pet store and talks about the life expectancy and eating habits of bunnies. He drives some more in the rain. He stops at a motel, takes a shower, takes a nap. Several more encounters with girls. By this time, hordes of laughing people are walking out, making rude remarks. They all miss his arrival home. His girlfriend Daisy is not there. He goes to another seedy motel. Daisy shows up, hooked on crack. She is played by Chloë Sevigny, who ends the film with the Epic Fellatio Finale, filmed in detailed close-up in real time. He moans. He screeches. Is it acting, or what? Two and a half minutes later, it's over. He calls her a whore and starts driving down the road again. It starts to rain. The End. All I could think of was, "Could this happen to Barbara Stanwyck if she was alive today?" At the press conference, Mr. Gallo was asked if the film had an American release date. "Are you kidding?" he answered. He also said he used to live with Ms. Sevigny when she was 14 years old, but her Epic Fellatio technique had improved since then. Ms. Sevigny giggled and said she didn't like it when they were together but she likes it better now. I mean, you learn the damnedest things in Toronto.

Mr. Gallo clanked his fork against his untouched plate of grilled octopus. "It's not a good thing to do," he said. "It's better to stay in your own delusion. It's better not have a mirror in your house and to invent your own idea of your silhouette and not confront things in basic ways. Because you can develop confidence in your own instincts, in your own opinions and your own points of view."

Mr. Gallo, 41, had found this out the hard way. A little over a week earlier, he had ventured to the Cannes Film Festival and walked straight into a media maelstrom. Mr. Gallo's second film, The Brown Bunny , which he produced, wrote, directed, shot, starred in, edited and, according to him, has yet to finish, had been one of only three American entries accepted into the festival competition. The filmmaker said he never intended his film to go to Cannes, but submitted what he called a "temporary print" after his backers pleaded with him that it would be good for business.

Not that the film was lacking a profile. Even before Mr. Gallo had set foot in the south of France, The Brown Bunny had become a topic of much discussion once word leaked that the film culminated in a scene in which Mr. Gallo's co-star Chloë Sevigny, whom he once briefly dated, gives him a very real-looking blowjob. But by the time Mr. Gallo and Ms. Sevigny traversed the red carpet at the Grand Theatre Lumiere-capacity 3,200-for the film's official May 21 premiere, the advance word on The Brown Bunny had grown much uglier. The first press screening of the film, which had occurred the previous evening-Mr. Gallo was not there-"was remarkable for the unrestrained hostility of the audience," wrote New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who noted among the reactions to the film that "every time" Mr. Gallo's "name appeared in the end credits (which was often), they whistled some more, and gave voice to that French form of abuse that sounds like a cross between the lowing of a cow and the hooting of an owl."

According to another press account, Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert began singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" during a scene in which Mr. Gallo and Ms. Sevigny ride a bicycle built for two while she cups his crotch. Mr. Ebert himself wrote that, after the screening, he told a TV crew outside the theater: "The worst film in the history of the festival," adding: "I have not seen every film in the history of the festival, yet I feel my judgment will stand."

The negative reaction had little, if anything, to do with The Brown Bunny 's fabled sex scene. Mr. Ebert wrote in one of his dispatches from Cannes: "The film consists of an unendurable 90 minutes of uneventful banality." In another, he wrote that if "Gallo had thrown away all of the rest of the movie and made the Sevigny scene into a short film, he would have had something."

But Seiichi Tsukada, an executive at Kinetique, the Japanese company that provided the financing for The Brown Bunny , told The Observer that "I was at Cannes. I felt injustice. The bashing in Cannes is not for Brown Bunny . I think they're bashing Vincent. I don't know why."

Mr. Gallo seemed to have an idea. "They booed me because I'm willing to be unpopular," he said at Petrossian. "They booed me because this year I was the guy at Cannes to boo.

"I don't know, I have it in me," Vincent Gallo said. "People don't like when you work without unions, agents, press people …. People don't like when you do things yourself. They don't like the confidence in myself to do all those things. They don't like what they find as bravado or something. They don't like it."

He smiled. Mr. Gallo looked relaxed, not like a man who'd just had three years of work dismissed. The episode in Cannes clearly caused him some pain, but it had also returned him to a position that was comfortable to him: the underdog.

Mr. Gallo hails from Buffalo, N.Y., where he once said, "I had a very violent and abandoned and complex relationship with my mother and father." But he achieved a kind of cult fame in downtown Manhattan in the 80's. He was a member of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat's band, Gray, and his paintings showed and sold in major galleries. More recently, he has pursued his musical interests again by releasing two CD's, When , in 2001, and Recordings of Music for Film , last year, on the Warp Records label. He is also an avowed Republican.

Mr. Gallo's first film , Buffalo '66 , which was released in 1998, had transformed him from an actor with a quirky résumé- Palookaville , Arizona Dream -into a filmmaker with a genuine vision. And now the media had knocked him back a few pegs. Maybe it was because, as Mr. Gallo contended, that he had succeeded without webbing himself into the legion of handlers, negotiators and mouthpieces that enable most filmmakers' success; or maybe it was because, as Mr. Ebert insisted, The Brown Bunny really stank; but whatever it was, Mr. Gallo knows the role: how to be an effective David when a Goliath rumbles into his path.

When the mayor of Cannes asked Mr. Gallo to leave his handprints on the Croisette-an honor given to a select few guests every year-London's The Guardian reported that the filmmaker first motioned to his crotch and said, "Are you sure you don't want an imprint of this?", then ended up "marking the clay with the back of his fist and a long middle finger pointing straight up."

Body Naked, Mind Open

In an effort to describe his experience at Cannes, Mr. Gallo recalled once watching movies with former Paramount studios chief Robert Evans.

"He brilliantly watches a movie and understands what makes it work or not work. He thinks in that way." Cannes was not that way, Mr. Gallo said. "These are not the heads of Paramount à la 1970. These are freaks from Long Island or wherever they're from, working at Focus Films or who knows … and, uh, looking for the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding .

"Who knows?" he said. "I know that Antonioni's Eclipse , which is one of the best films that I've ever seen in my life, was spit on at Cannes."

Cannes, Mr. Gallo said, "is the most like that of any place in the world. And that's exactly what happened to me. I don't ever want to be involved in anything where there's British journalists ever again anyway."

Mr. Gallo said that while there was some booing and "ironic applause" during the official screening-occurring at one point when he said a "mistake" by the company that processed the print turned what was supposed to be a 21-second slow fade into a jarring blackout-he also noted that no one reported that The Brown Bunny got a "15-minute standing ovation at the end of the film. Longer than Gus' film"-that would be Gus Van Sant's Elephant , which won the Palme d'Or-and longer than any other that I saw there. And there was 75 percent at least of the audience left for that long standing ovation."

Mr. Gallo also disputed a line in one of Mr. Ebert's dispatches that Ms. Sevigny "reportedly cried during the screening."

"I was with Chloë every minute," Mr. Gallo said. "And I never saw her cry." Ms. Sevigny's publicist, Amanda Horton, concurred and also pointed out that The Brown Bunny received a standing ovation that she put at 10 minutes.

"I was there," she wrote in an e-mail, "unlike many journalists who are confusing the public by writing about a press screening, and leading readers to believe that there were derisive comments and walk-outs at the actual premiere."

There were other, more positive reactions, too. According to a Google.com translation of France's Le Monde , the paper's film critic wrote that though The Brown Bunny was not "a masterpiece," it was a "beautiful film, dense, courageous, singular, inventing its own form."

And though Merideth Finn, director of acquisitions and producer for Fine Line in New York, said the film was not right for her company, she found The Brown Bunny a "really interesting film" that came from "a good place."

"More than anything else, it was interesting because it was one of more obvious examples of narcissistic disorder that I've ever seen," Ms. Finn said. "And I don't mean that sarcastically. It was one of the great examples of narcissism as art."

Mr. Gallo took issue with a piece in the trade magazine Screen International that reported the filmmaker had "apologised" to "financiers and audiences for his film The Brown Bunny , which had a disastrous reception at Cannes."

"I accept what the critics say," Screen International quoted him. "If no one wants to see it, they're right-it's a disaster of a film and it was a waste of time. I apologise to the financiers of the film but I assure you it was never my intention to make a pretentious film, a self-indulgent film, a useless film, an unengaging film."

The publication also reported that Mr. Gallo said that the official premiere "was 'the worst feeling I ever had in my life.'"

According to Screen International editor in chief Colin Brown: "All these quotes that were reported in Screen International were tape-recorded. There's not even question of these being taken out of context. The only thing that Gallo could argue was that he didn't know that he was necessarily talking to Screen International ," because it took place during a roundtable session that Mr. Gallo took part in the day after the official premiere.

This is what Mr. Gallo told The Observer he actually said: "Going to see a movie that I directed, photographed, acted in and controlled 100 percent with 3,500 morons is the worst feeling that I've ever had in my life."

A Curse on Ebert's Prostate!

Having been back in the States for only a few days, Mr. Gallo has already begun to set the record straight-in his own inimitable way. He called Mr. Ebert a "fat pig" in the June 2 edition of the New York Post 's Page Six column and said that he had put a curse on the movie reviewer's "colon."

Mr. Gallo told us that with the help of Scorpio Rising filmmaker Kenneth Anger, he had put a curse on Mr. Ebert's prostate. "I mean, he was at the [closing] ceremony-where I'm not a participant, because clearly I'm not the kind of person who will ever win anything-and every other word out of his fat face was 'Vincent Gallo' or ' The Brown Bunny .' Does he think, because he's married to an African-American, that somehow that makes him compassionate or understanding? I mean, he has the physique of a slave trader."

Mr. Ebert told The Observer that he was mystified that Mr. Gallo had singled him out. "It's just the rantings of a very sad and confused person who should dial down a little bit and look at the film," Mr. Ebert said. "If he thinks he made a good film, then I feel sorry for him. Buffalo '66 was a good film, and this is not progress."

Mr. Ebert, who pointed out that he'd recently lost 30 pounds, then looked up his reviews of Mr. Gallo's acting performances and said he'd never given him a bad review until The Brown Bunny . "I look forward to giving him another review," Mr. Ebert said. "He's a good actor, and as a director he's batting .500 right now. Lots of directors don't do that well."

In the next few days, Mr. Ebert may help Mr. Gallo's film even more, though probably not intentionally. The day after Mr. Gallo strafed the film critic on Page Six, the same column reported that Mr. Ebert was "crafting a reply" to Mr. Gallo that he would air on the nationally syndicated TV show that he co-hosts with film critic Richard Roeper- a response that is sure to draw even more attention to The Brown Bunny .

Mr. Ebert also e-mailed me a copy of a piece he wrote for the Sun-Times , which was scheduled to run on June 4. In it, he wrote: "I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than 'The Brown Bunny.'"

Like Ryman

Asked to describe his movie, Mr. Gallo called it a minimalistic piece in the tradition of the artist Robert Ryman, the artist who works almost exclusively with white paint.

"It's not an art film," Mr. Gallo said. "It has a very precise methodical narrative, but it has a very unconventional narrative. And it's a real road film, meaning that the geography is more authentic than any other film that's pretended to be a road film. What I mean by that is that you get to really experience traveling by car in a way that's, let's say, more extreme than what has been conventionally done. If you sit back for 50 minutes and you accept that you're going on this journey for half of the movie, the film is quite beautiful.

"And it's quite easy to watch. If you're there as a press journalist who's seen 2000 movies and are trying to figure out the plot in eight seconds," Mr. Gallo said, but he didn't finish the thought.

This is how Mr. Ebert interpreted it: "Imagine long shots through a windshield as it collects bugs splats," Mr. Ebert wrote. "Imagine not one but two scenes in which he stops for gas...Imagine a film so unendurably boring that at one point, when he gets out of his van to change his shirt, there is applause."

Mr. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer, who is traveling cross-country in a van. During the trip he meets women who have names of flowers, Rose, Lily, Violet. "He interacts with these girls in very bold, outrageous ways by bringing them in to either extreme intimacy or making outrageous proposals or requests to them," Mr. Gallo said. "And then immediately abandons them and continues on his trip."

Through flashbacks, Mr. Gallo said the viewer learns that Bud is in a "real relationship" with Daisy, played by Ms. Sevigny. The brown bunny of the title is her pet.

The film ends not only with the oral sex scene but with a twist that Mr. Gallo did not want to give away, but he said: "The scene that involves the sex is part of such a complex narrative at that point-there are so many levels of drama and pain and story and history and present going on-that the last thing you would remember from that scene is the graphic images of sex that you see briefly."

"It is not a pornographic scene," Mr. Gallo said. "It's a highly complex scene of intimacy."

Mr. Gallo wouldn't how much his film cost. "But let's say this," he said. "Let's say that most of the money that was spent on the movie was spent to do very technical things that are very modern, like intermediary digital processing, uncompressed editing, film composition techniques. None of the money was spent to make my life easier, to make the production easier for me."

"I didn't work within the protocol of cinema. There's no call sheet, no craft service. I did the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the wardrobe, everything," he said. He said his crew never exceeded "three people. Ever."

When he and Ms. Sevigny shot-and reshot-their big climactic scene, "no one's in the room-no soundman, no one. Everything's on remote. I set up the whole shot. It's all done by myself. Literally by myself."

And yet Mr. Gallo said he ended up being dissatisfied with the work of some of his crew, and wound up having to re-shoot a lot of the footage by himself, and digitally "recompositioned every frame of the film after it was shot.

"So, in fact, not only did I work with the smallest crew in history," Vincent Gallo said, laughing. "I did the movie in spite of them."

Canned Cannes

Mr. Gallo said he was editing his movie when the Cannes organizers "got wind that I was making a radical movie and desperately wanted to see it." He said that Cannes president Thierry Fremaux came to his home in Los Angeles, "where I refused to let them see it."

But soon Mr. Gallo's Japanese backers "called me up on the phone from Japan and said" here Mr. Gallo imitated a timid and mannered Japanese voice, "'Ah, Vincent, It would be so good to go to Cannes. And they listed the reasons why it would be good for them if the movie went to Cannes.'"

"I told them that to show a movie that was unfinished was destructive to the film, I told them that to put a film that was so radical in a market environment would be bad for the film," he said. Mr. Gallo said his backers disagreed and continued to pepper him with phone calls. But, he added, "They had done nothing but support me since Buffalo '66 ." Mr. Gallo said that he warned his backers that they were making a mistake. "But if they wanted to do it, they would have to live with that mistake."

Mr. Gallo's film went to Cannes, and he said: "The reaction of course from Roger Ebert and his cronies is very similar to my Aunt Vera when she took me to see the Ryman exhibition in Buffalo, N.Y., and said, 'What? Anybody can do these paintings."

Kinetique's Mr. Tsukada declined to comment.

It's Archival

"I'll tell you what it took what it took from me with no support. I lost 30 percent of my hair," Mr. Gallo said. "I gained 10 percent of my hair into the color gray. I lost my house. I lost my girlfriend. My relationship broke up as soon as I finished the screenplay. Just the idea that I would make the film I had to sacrifice my relationship. I destroyed my body. I can't sleep anymore because I've hurt my back so many times with the equipment. Lifting all the equipment myself on the film. Sustaining the same injury on my back. I haven't had a good night's sleep in three years. I've sacrificed a social life, I've sacrificed my relationship with my best friend, my former best friend Johnny Ramone. I haven't been able to spend time with my dog, who's the love of my life. I've lost money. I haven't taken any other jobs. I've spent my own money. I've lived in hysteria. I had a nervous breakdown making the movie. There was a moment where my brain left my body for three weeks where I was babbling. That's how stressful it was."

When I asked Mr. Gallo if he thought the negative reception had hurt his backers' chance of finding an American distributor, he replied: "I think it might have."

"I don't know if extreme support would have made a difference. But certainly extreme lack of support from the press certainly didn't make any one of the mainstream buyers second-guess themselves. The worst thing that happened was, the French distribution company Wild Bunch that had bought the European sales rights to the film tried to back out of the contract after all the negative response to the movie. Not after they saw the movie-after the negative response to the movie. Which again is more reflection on the lack of integrity in French businessman."

Mr. Tsukada declined to comment, but did say that Kinetique had gotten offers from independent distributors to release The Brown Bunny in the U.S.

Mr. Gallo had finished his octopus and was now opening up small squares of dark chocolate that had been placed on the table.

"The film is archival," he said. "The minute that I finish the print of the film, it will never go away, and Roger Ebert will be dead of prostate cancer-if my curse works-within 16 months, and my film will live far past the biopsies that are removed from his anus."

And Mr. Gallo said this: "If you see the film and you know my paintings and you know my music and you know my other movies and you understand me aesthetically in any way possible, this is the most clear, cool example of everything that I've been working toward my whole life. Both visually, sound-wise, color-wise and in my concept of how a narration works. How relationships work. How pain in a relationship works. How difficult it is to love and be loved.

"It's a classic example of all my experiences, all my intuitions, all my concepts and all my aesthetic sensibilities than anything that I've ever done in my life," he said. "And it's 50 times more mature of a film and more realized in my sensibility than Buffalo '66. That doesn't necessarily make it as easy to like to a mainstream audience. But if I die today"-he let out a laugh-"I promise, the film that will have impact on the Darren Aronofskys of the future, the Paul Andersons of the future, the Wes Andersons of the future."

"Passive aggression could destroy me," he said. "I'm an easy target on a personal level. In a creative way, in relationship to principles that I seek or admire I'm non-reactionary. I don't wait around for people to like me. I like people who don't like me. But in my work, I'm so narrow-minded. I'm the horse with the blinders on. And sometimes that has worked well for me. And sometimes that hasn't. Sometimes that's helped me to move forward in my work, in a big way. I will never be discouraged or encouraged by a guy with a thumb that points up or down. And I won't be discouraged by a rude audience at a film festival or an impatient audience at a film festival.

"But I won't be encouraged by that either."

The baby-faced Mr. Murdoch nodded his goodbye, took the arm of his blonde trophy wife, Sarah, and headed toward the exit. It was almost 11 p.m. and one more connection had been made between two members of the city's elite. Sure, dozens of such offers are made and reneged upon every day in this city, but what made this one stick out-what made the entire evening stick out-were the circumstances of that encounter and the ones that were occurring throughout the room.

It had taken awhile, but finally, a new power structure had begun to show itself. Young Mr. Murdoch and young Mr. Rudin were among the 212 dinner guests invited to kick off the Tribeca Film Festival's sophomore year. The evening's hosts were comparative dowagers: actor and festival co-founder Robert De Niro and Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter, whose magazine is a sponsor of the movie klatsch. Given Mr. De Niro's garden-trowel goatee-grown for a movie about the Inquisition-and Mr. Carter's bell-curve hairstyle, the two men looked like they'd stepped out of a Dutch Masters cigar ad from the 60's, but the crowd their operatives had invited felt a lot fresher.

The freshman and sophomore classes of power brokers were on the rise, and it really felt that after a long and tough winter of anxiety and tension, it was springtime among the New York oligarchs, and the generational flip had finally convincingly taken place, so that the young power scions didn't look like Junior League debutantes at the Armory, but looked like what they were: the prematurely middle-aged, finally, somewhat belatedly taking the reigns of power for which they had long practiced. It was May 1, and they were finally being given a chance to take the social Vista Cruiser out for a drive on their own. And here they were at a convergence party, at which culture, society, media and money all merged, and they were behind the wheel.

Indeed, it was the second blow-out that Condé Nast-the media company that seems to be singlehandedly preserving glamour in this city-had co-produced that week, and it was by far the more sap-risen and breezier one. On Monday, April 28, the Newhouses had underwritten, with Gucci, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Benefit. But the two events were quite different. One guest at the Costume Institute noted that the event is haunted by too many ghosts of the past-the ghost of Diana Vreeland, the wraiths of Old Society-and so the party often feels like trying to perform CPR on one of the Met's mummies. But the Tribeca Film Festival-only two years old-is unfettered by history and such old-world notions.

And perhaps that is why TV gossip Claudia Cohen-whose reigns at Page Six and the Daily News covered the ebb and flow of this city's power grid-gushed that the Tribeca Festival opening night party was "becoming the quintessential New York party."

Perhaps it also had something to do with the intoxicating breeze blowing through Foley Square that evening. Certainly it had something to do with the "end" of the war in Iraq, but on May 1-the same day that President Bush had clambered out of a fighter jet looking like Bill Pullman in Independence Day -it felt as if the last crusty vestiges of New York's elite epidermis were giving way to pink new skin, and the city seemed to be coming to life again. You could almost sniff the scent of ambition coming back after a very long nap. Ten years ago, the Rudin-Murdoch encounter would have involved Lew-or Jack-Rudin and Rupert Murdoch, but inside the courthouse the next generation of the city's power structure seemed to be soloing: New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; public relations scion Steven Rubenstein, who bears more than a passing resemblance to his father, Howard Rubenstein; public-education czarina Caroline Kennedy; and Steven Newhouse, of those Newhouses, mingled with those who, while not backed by a dynasty, had emerged, through Mayoral appointment and/or a combination of skillful navigation, hard work and-always-a dash of hype, as the city's new social stalwarts: Tribeca Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal and her banker husband, Craig Hatkoff; New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly; Mr. Carter; comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his wife, Jessica; girl crooner Norah Jones; Her Effulgency, Angelina Jolie; Lady Lynn de Rothschild; MTV Networks chairman Tom Freston; Clear Channel radio chief John Sykes; and, of course, Miramax's press-mocking co-chairman Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob. Sony USA chairman Sir Howard Stringer-whom Jay Kriegel, the Ghost of CBS Past and lobbyist of the Olympics future, addressed as "Your Lordship"-was also in attendance. As was Mr. De Niro, who only seems capable of expressing his love for the city in terms of crinkle-eyed grunts and civically stirring actions, not words.

They weren't so much new to the social scene as newly vested-dedicated to righting a city roiled by terrorism, economic woes and a complicated war.

The wise men and women were there too, the Gallant Geezeocracy-former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, author Dominick Dunne, art critic Robert Hughes, movie producer David Brown, his wife Helen Gurley Brown, Howard Rubenstein, and-to remind us that the world had changed big time-Mrs. Tommy Franks, in pink.

But on this night, the elders did not cast long shadows. Nor did the events of the world. And so it was possible to walk up those magnificent staggered steps of Guy Lowell's courthouse, stand in the fresh breeze and think that, this year, spring might mean something in New York.

There was the handsome Mrs. Franks being introduced to Mr. Dunne and telling him, "I know who you are"- an indication that the general's wife no longer spit shines the general's shoes. There was Elvis Costello and Diana Krall talking shop with David Bowie. There was MTV's Mr. Freston relishing the thought that his newly single Cuban-escapade comrade, CBS Network chief Les Moonves was in town for a spell.

And there was actress Chloë Sevigny, in a short black dress and black heels, matter-of-factly discussing her adventurous upcoming role in Vincent Gallo's new film, The Brown Bunny.

At the Vanity Fair Oscar party, Mr. Gallo-who has long identified himself as a Republican-had told us that his film, which he directed and stars in, was going to be the most sexually explicit American film ever made. Mr. Gallo didn't explain why, but a recent item in Page Six reported that the film, which will screen at Cannes, features an explicit oral sex scene.

And so when we spotted Ms. Sevigny talking to restaurateur Brian McNally, we asked her if Mr. Gallo's claim was true.

"Probably," she said with a smile. "I haven't seen the movie yet. But, she added: "The sex is not gratuitous."

Was the sex simulated or actual, we asked her.

"Ea-sy," Mr. McNally told me.

But Ms. Sevigny didn't even flinch. "I did the deed," she said. "We dated a long time ago," she explained, referring to her and Mr. Gallo. "So been there, done that."

That's the kind of the change the world could use more of.

And that kind of relaxed, high-spirited frankness seemed to dominate the evening. One Vanity Fair source said that hip-hop impresario, Roc-A-Fella Records founder Damon Dash, who dressed down for the evening, approached Mrs. Franks and asked her about a pin she was wearing that was a jewel-encrusted-the source said diamonds-replica of one of her husband's military medals. Seems Mr. Dash wanted to know where he could get one. (When we attempted to inquire about the veracity of the story, Mr. Dash's assistant hung up on us.)

After the chilled zucchini and avocado bisque and oven baked halibut with fennel and fresh tomato marmalade and the plates of homemade marshmallows were consumed-Town chef Jeffrey Zakarian cooked-Mr. De Niro got up and made a speech that very few people could hear because of the lousy acoustics. The speech lasted about 30 seconds and ended with Mr. De Niro, who was sitting next to Whoopi Goldberg, saying something like, "And that's it."

Then Mr. Carter got up and likened Mr. De Niro's appearance to Mitch Miller. Pumping his arms up and down like some kind of German oom-pa-pa singer, Mr. Carter suggested that Mr. De Niro lead the crowd in a singalong. Mr. De Niro stood up. There seemed to be a little bit of Bickle in his eyes-repent, Graydon Carter, or the rack for you!-but he sounded like Meet the Parents ' Jack Byrnes when he spoke. "Not likely!" Mr. De Niro said.

Not long after that, Mr. De Niro crept out some side entrance giving attorney Allen Grubman a playful whack in the arm as he passed by. In the middle of the room, Mr. Stringer stood looking up at a stern-looking man in a powdered wig who looked down sternly from the rotunda mural. "Blackstone" read the painted label nearest his head. "Look, Pete Peterson is looking down over us," Mr. Stringer said, referring to the chairman of the private investment banking firm, The Blackstone Group, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

As the clock passed 11, the crowd began to follow Mr. Murdoch's lead and head for the exits. It was Thursday, after all, a work night. On the sidewalk, MTV's Mr. Freston stood looking up at the red-lit court house, its stairs lined in perfect rows of votive candles. "This building didn't look this good when I came here to get divorced," Mr. Freston said as he took in the sight. "I guess I finally had a good time here."