Ms. Maclaine will be playing the proud American mom to ex-pat Lady Cora (Elizabeth McGovern) on season 3. (This visit will not go over well with Dame Maggie Smith's Lady Grantham, we're sure.)
This news was accompanied by rumors that other stateside cameos might be in the works, so we made several educated guesses as to which American actors could hold their own against the upstairs/downstairs scheming of the McGovern household.

Click through to see our choices, and right in your own candidates in the comments!

(With help Andrew Belonsky.)

Osnes and Jordan.

Hang on to your lids, kids. I actually liked the new Broadway musical version of Bonnie and Clyde. Didn’t love it, mind you. But the show, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is polished, touching and tuneful, a worthy showcase for a few professional performers in leading roles who are vastly entertaining and amount to nothing short of major discoveries. In a dreary Broadway season of nothing but deadly letdowns, including an unspeakable sonic blast from the pitch-impaired and tonally challenged Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin as well as the dreariest second-rate production of Follies in 40 years, at least there’s something to enjoy in addition to Hugh Jackman.

The two most beloved machine-gun toting gangsters in American history have been brought to life with warm, sexy precision by the glorious singing voices of Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan. They can act, too. Forget the mixed reviews comparing them unfavorably with the stars of the 1967 Arthur Penn film. I mean, nobody looks like Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. But could they carry a tune? Ms. Osnes never grows into a movie star translation of hard-luck Bonnie. She’s not cute, vivacious, hard as nails or a model for fashion-trendy costumes. But she has an intrinsically musical instrument that projects beyond the footlights to touch the mezzanine. When she wraps her throat around a creamy ballad like “You Love Who You Love” in an attempt to justify her guilty passion for a hot-blooded bank robber like Clyde Barrow, she has the power to move you to tears. She was a terrific second banana to Sutton Foster in the frisky revival of Anything Goes before she created the role of Bonnie Parker in San Diego, and if the show closes prematurely, I sincerely hope to meet up with her again in a cabaret spotlight in one of New York’s swankier supper clubs. As for the boyishly handsome Mr. Jordan, who dazzled as Tony in the recent West Side Story resuscitation, he can stomp the stage to toothpicks on a rousing number like “Raise a Little Hell” or half-rise naked from a bathtub on a bruising love song with equal aplomb worthy of a closer look (no pun intended). Rising close to their marks and holding her own corner of the stage in every scene is Melissa Van Der Schyff, a knockout belter with a name that regrettably comes close to a fatal detour on the road to stardom; most people have forgotten it already. She plays the sympathetic and pivotal role of Blanche Barrow, the wife of Clyde’s brother Buck and a woman who sacrifices her ideals and self-respect for love, which won Estelle Parsons an Oscar. She stops the show as a kind of operatic Dolly Parton, while the audience begs for more.

Harkening back to the Depression years, director Jeff Calhoun wastes no time getting to the violence. The curtain rises on the movie’s final scene—a bullet-riddled Model T containing the blood-splattered bodies of the country’s most cherished romantic outlaws, gunned down on a Louisiana highway in 1934, rolls out onstage for a good look before the first song. Then the fact-crammed book by Ivan Menchell begins to assemble the reasons why two hormone-busting kids from a dusty, life-wasting butt end of Texas rose from unlucky teenagers to the Most Wanted List in sheriff’s offices throughout the Southwest. Clyde was the tortured son of a sharecropper from Telico, Texas (“That man puts the Hell in Hello!”). Bonnie was an eager, easily manipulated, muffin-headed waitress from Rowena who spent her spare change on movie magazines and helped Clyde break out of jail after he promised to get her to Hollywood. His role model is Al Capone, and she worships Clara Bow. Their story unfolds against a backdrop of wooden slats against which you are educated and fascinated by yellowing newspaper articles, mug shots and arresting Police Gazette daguerreotypes of faces and scenes right out of The Grapes of Wrath—projections bordering on folk art, depicting starving children, breadlines, families in tents and President Roosevelt’s guarantee of a New Deal. Slowly, you begin to understand why Bonnie and Clyde broke the law to ensure a better life they could not afford. By the time they realize they’ve crossed over to the dark side, their love duet, “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” has the resigned element of an adrenalin-pumped future that is anything but rosy. What gives the show its grit, urgency and complexity is the frailty, the flaws and the courage of two tragic lovers—good and evil, brave and foolish—defying the odds to capture the imagination of a nation that wanted to believe a pair of hearts could still beat in the middle of dustbowl economics, prejudice and hopelessness.

Jordan and Osnes.

There are irritating intrusions, including signing autographs after a robbery while the police sirens close in, arguing about whose name should go first in the front-page newspaper stories (Bonnie insists on the same “Bonnie and Clyde” she uses for the title of her long, ballad-shape poem that was published after their deaths, insisting, “Sorry, honey, but nothin’ rhymes with Clyde and Bonnie”). Then there is the score, mediocre at worst, but sometimes a great deal better than that. I’ve never been a fan of Don Black’s corny kindergarten lyrics to James Bond theme songs (“Thunderball,” anyone?) and lugubrious Andrew Lloyd Webber scores, or of composer Frank Wildhorn’s cloying music for boring period pieces (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Jekyll and Hyde, The Civil War), but Mr. Wildhorn does his best, most diversified work here. He has never settled on a uniformly identifiable style, which is O.K., I guess, as long as the style you settle on is not lachrymose musical sludge. This time, his music is surprisingly melodic and versatile. For two rebels with a cause outside the law, trapped victims of the Depression, the romantic, deluded protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde invite an eclectic and restless surge of beats and rhythms and styles, moving through the cycles of doom with reckless fury. The two stars do their darnedest to flesh out both the danger and romance that turned them into folk heroes, and Mr. Wildhorn’s eclectic score gives them room to test their contrasting moods: country, Broadway, blues, and Texas two-step music fit for a county fair, with banjos, rodeo fiddles and, am I wrong, or did I hear a harmonica somewhere in the orchestra pit? Jeff Calhoun sews it together on a Depression canvas broad enough to reflect a whole decade. I’m glad he included actual photos of the real Bonnie and Clyde. She was no Faye Dunaway, and he was plain as a plow mule in a tobacco field.

And so we’ve got ourselves here a down-home musical with guns and whiskey and take-home tunes. You could do worse. Is it great? It’s no My Fair Lady. Will it go down in Broadway history as a milestone? Probably not. But I found it tuneful, lively and highly enjoyable. Just ignore the mixed reviews, and have a rompin’, stompin’ good time.

rreed@observer.com

“That breed is almost extinct,” offered pop culture sage and Vanity Fair columnist George Wayne. “Thank God for Jack, and his sagging scrotum sac, for still holding the fort.”

“Jack” being Nicholson, of course, who last month was famously photographed on a boat off the coast of France, shirtless and pork-bellied, licking his lips before moving in on a foot-long sub. Looking at the photograph of the actor, who turned 70 this year, one realized: Here is the last truly happy man on this overly analyzed, politically correct, downward-dogging, grass-fed, girls-gone-wild planet. His belly said it all: I came, I saw, I conquered.

Burp.

Mr. Nicholson comes at the end of a long and distinguished Hollywood lineage of Geezer Roués: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., David Niven, Rex Harrison, Robert Evans, Darryl Zanuck, Alan Jay Lerner, Jimmy Van Heusen. On this coast you had Bill Paley, Nelson Rockefeller, Huntington Hartford, Taki Theodoracopulos, even The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill. (This was a time, dear young’uns, when male literary lads ran barefoot through the typing pool rather than setting up house in a comfy Brooklyn brownstone.) Mr. Nicholson’s compatriot roués—Warren Beatty, Michael Douglas—have been tamed, to some extent, by much younger wives and the recognition that perhaps it’s better to go gently into that saggy night. If you want to see a Geezer Roué manqué, have a look at deflated Bill Clinton as he plays the Good Boy on his wife’s campaign trail.

Not so long ago, it was not uncommon to encounter silver-haired womanizers, stinking of Bay Rum, wolfishly a-prowl in Manhattan. What distinguishes the roué has always been his impeccable manners—wealth and success, to be sure—and more importantly, the sense of artistry with which he approaches his life’s ambition: to love and be loved by women. It was less about sex and more about sensibility. Especially if that sensibility had great legs and was significantly south of 30.

But a moment of silence, please: the bell tolls for the Geezer Roué.

Rarely if ever anymore do you see that nattily clad, well-tanned if slightly creepy gentleman leaned up against the end of the bar. Theories abound as to what confluence of conditions has this once proud beast limping toward extinction.

“The art is dead—so are they, for the most part,” said James Lipton, host of Inside the Actors Studio, one night recently at Elaine’s as he took tiny sips of Calvados. Mr. Lipton bemoaned the fact that there are so few roués—and he’s observed many over the years—left for him to put on the hot seat on his TV show.

“Warren Beatty was a successful roué,” he said. “He lived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I remember when Shirley McLaine was on my show, saying, ‘Have you ever had Warren on your show?’ I said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘He’s got to do this show. Oh, God, the stories he could tell.’ Later, she said to me, ‘I just would love to jump his bones, just to see what all the shouting’s about.’” (Note to the younger reader: Ms. McLaine is Mr. Beatty’s sister; she was clearly joking. However, that’s the kind of hold the roués once held on all femaledom.)

Mr. Lipton sipped some more Calvados. “The amazing thing about a genuine roué,” he said, “is that women know that you’re a roué. Which is to say that infidelity is in the cards. That whatever you’re going to do with them, or to them—or for them—is purely temporary. You’re not going to be there in a few months. Otherwise you’re not a roué. And yet, they succumb to the roués. That’s the great art of roué-ism: Despite the fact that they know you’re a son of a bitch, and it’s all going to end badly for them, nevertheless they take the plunge.”

But the pool in which to plunge is leaking water fast.

“I think the buzz-kill that came in is called the healthy lifestyle,” said New York artist Peter Tunney, who was a budding roué until he walked the aisle this spring at age 45. “There’s a big vibe out there to do everything right. You have to get home on time, you have to get up early, you have to run in the morning. You have to eat green grass for breakfast.”

For 10 years, Mr. Tunney shared an art gallery with photographer and roué Peter Beard.

“Listen, there’s two parts of this,” said Mr. Tunney of roué-ism. “One part is, you love women. That’s just the truth of it. That’s what all these guys have in common, they really love women. And they’re not willing to just settle down. They love their life, they love entertaining with women, they love traveling with women, they love being with them and they love their company and everything else.

“So you have women—and then you’ve got drink. But it’s excess that ends up being the drag. When you’ve got too much excess going on, you really start to become an idiot. And the quality of the people goes down after a while: Who’s there at 7 a.m.?”

Mr. Tunney, who is sober these days, insists that life still has an edge. He still enjoys a large plate of eggs in the morning and he has a brand-new scooter.

“I‘m much happier now and much humbler,” he said. “So paradise lost for me is paradise found.”

But the Vespa-and-eggs technique hasn’t worked out for everyone. The writer and roué Anthony Haden-Guest has moved to London and is no great hurry to return.

“The massive streak of Puritanism in America has reasserted itself, especially amongst liberals,” he said, adding that New York is no long the racy place it was in the 70’s and 80’s. “When I moved to New York there were still a bunch of good writers, often half-drunk, but still very good writers. That doesn’t exist anymore. Where do they go? They probably go and teach at Bard. All the roués I know are reformed or gone back to Europe.” (Like all good roués, Mr. Haden-Guest takes exception to being labeled a roué: “I work extremely hard and have a little fun sometimes.”)

The Actor Studios Mr. Lipton theorized that the young women whom roués would typically prey on have become so sexually liberated and media-savvy that such a plunge today has all the mystery and danger of jumping in a puddle in your rain boots.

“That was part of the allure of the roué; he was something dangerous,” said Mr. Lipton. “He lived in the shadows. And the woman who got involved with the roué knew she was skating on thin ice. There was that excitement.” He noted that women would often get involved with these old devils to boost their visibility.

But in the post-Paris-Hilton-sex-tape era, succumbing to the charms of an older man is not going to raise eyebrows. If a young woman wants to be noticed skating on thin ice today, she simply removes her underwear, clutches her ankles, puts her trust in zoom lenses and glides.

“The wages of sin are pretty damn good,” said Mr. Lipton. “Where does that leave the roués? Somewhere out on the fringes, desperate to attract some attention. It’s not glamorous and sexy. It’s tame compared to these kids running around in their underpants.”

Indeed, some roués have started committing the No. 1 roué sin—boasting. A whiff of desperation accompanies an upcoming article in GQ magazine in which 57-year-old Virgin Atlantic billionaire Richard Branson brags about how he became a member of the mile-high club.

“We got chatting and it went a bit further. And it was every man’s dream, to be honest. I was about 19,” the flaxen-haired honcho is quoted as saying. “What I remember vividly is seeing four handprints on the mirror as we finished, and thinking I’d better wipe them off.”

Mr. Branson—who is married but famously surrounds himself with beautiful young women—surely knows better than to wrap his rascal in what looks an awful lot like a sales pitch.

The roués are mourned not only by the women who succumbed to them; the fact was, a roué was damned good company even if—maybe especially if—both parties remained fully clothed.

Elaine’s habitué Ruda B. Dauphin, the American representative of the Deauville Film Festival, said she had the pleasure of knowing a number of roués in her day. There was the great choreographer Serge Lifar. “Oh, I loved him,” she said. “I wanted to have dinner with him and talk to him and flirt. Who flirts anymore?”

Ms. Dauphin added that greed has unfortunately replaced lust as the deadly sin most in evidence.

“Everybody’s greedy, everybody wants to make money, everyone wants to buy things,” she said. “You wanna buy a yacht, an apartment. How much time have you got to spend seducing women or men? And it’s a pity, because it’s much more provocative to spend time seducing friends, lovers, possibilities, the girl next door, the boy next door. Come on. Come into my web. Be a spider.”

“That Rat Pack sort of style would seem ridiculous today,” said Shawn Levy, author of The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa, a biography of the polo playing, Ferrari-racing Dominican playboy who married five times, including the likes of Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke, and died in a car wreck at age 56. “In that era when old folks had center stage in pop culture, they could sort of set the socials standards, the sartorial standards, the rules of mating,” said Mr. Levy. “But as soon as the kids took over, then any adult that tried to hit on a woman by acting young looked foolish. The only guy who can get away with it today is George Clooney. You have to have a great amount of not-give-a-fuck-ness. You can’t do this if you’re worried about how you look.”

Nor if you’re overly worried about your health: The empowerment of young women—to be as bad as they want to be, to enjoy sex as much as they want to—has perhaps raised the stakes of the game too high for many a geezer heart to bear.

“Roués are now terrified that they’re going to come after a woman and the woman will just scare the daylights out of them,” said advertising executive Jerry Della Femina, at a recent party he hosted at his East Hampton home.

“You have to understand that these days it’s looked down upon to be a sensualist,” said society photographer Patrick McMullan, 51. “And although I started my career so I could have a drink in one hand and a camera in the other, it’s sort of frowned upon to be not serious.”

(Mr. McMullan said he considers himself a roué enabler, because when he takes pictures of young women with older men, “the young girls realize, ‘Well, my picture is being taken, so if I hang out with this guy, maybe I have to put out a little, but I’ll get some attention, too.’”)

“The whole roué dynamic changed when Warren Beatty decided to settle down with one woman and spawn like what, 20 kids,” said Vanity Fair’s Mr. Wayne. “He knocked up that poor woman into oblivion, ruining Annette Bening’s brilliant acting career in the process—which I suppose is the ultimate revenge for the roué.

“There are hardly any leading men in Hollywood today who fit that mold,” he continued. “Brad Pitt has been hen-pecked into creating his own mini United Nations.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Levy was wondering if our sub-sandwich-scarfing Ur-Geezer Roué could still pull it off: “I think if Jack Nicholson walked into an L.A. nightclub, most of the young girls would be scared.”

Mr. Beatty spent more than a decade trying to bring the story of John Reed (1887-1920) to the screen. Born and raised comfortably in Portland, Ore., and educated at Harvard, Reed was gradually radicalized while searching for thrills in Europe and Greenwich Village. He reported on the Paterson strike of 1913 for The Masses, a socialist monthly, and the more mainstream Metropolitan sent him to cover the Mexican Revolution (he wore a new yellow corduroy suit). None of this seemed to interest Mr. Beatty, who begins his story in 1915 with Reed’s first encounter—a frenzied discussion about U.S. involvement in World War I—with Louise Bryant, a married Portland dilettante with journalistic aspirations and burgeoning leftist ideals.

Mr. Beatty plays the part as if Reed was, well, a Warren Beatty character: a little dumbstruck yet determined, used to having things (and women) come his way but striving for the things (and women) that won’t. There’s some bumbling light slapstick as Reed prepares to move on Bryant, and the sociological dogma has the laughable sound of something Cary Grant would spout in Bringing Up Baby. Diane Keaton brings something more than vulnerable beauty and palpable intelligence to Louise Bryant—she brings the ghost of Annie Hall, another free spirit whose charm, insecurities and career ambition both seduced and flummoxed the man in her life.

Bryant follows Reed to New York City, determined to make her mark as an intellectual and a liberated woman. But she feels adrift and unappreciated amidst the Greenwich Village gang—and who wouldn’t when it’s Eugene O’Neill (a remarkably understated Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, in an Oscar-winning role), Max Eastman, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson at the dinner parties? So Reed takes her away to Provincetown, but it’s the same story there, with nicer beaches. This is where Ms. Keaton’s thwarted expressions break your heart: All the men want Bryant to be their muse, and she wants to be a New Woman, taken seriously as she chews over social theories and poses for nude portraits.

They marry, move to Croton-on-Hudson; he travels around the world, covering labor disputes, and wears out his one kidney. If the soothing score that accompanies their home life is any indication, monogamy comes naturally. But the two nonetheless pursue infidelities, seemingly out of some vestigial sense of duty toward progressivism. Along with Bryant’s journalistic struggles—she’d just as soon write about the Armory Show of 1913 as about striking workers—their clumsy free-love experiments are an early sign that the conflicts between ideals and instincts are going to pile up. They go to Russia just in time for the October Revolution, where Reed would gather material for Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that would make his career. There’s a jolt of excitement in seeing the couple at the center of such a kairotic moment, bounding up the steps of the Winter Palace, sitting with Lenin. But even this is subordinate to their romance—Saint Petersburg burns bright with candles, the couple marches huddled together wrapped in coats and ushankas, and “The Internationale” takes on the feel of a Christmas carol. It’s as if the couple’s marriage will flourish as the masses ascend.

The second half of Reds dashes that idea, as Reed and Bryant challenge each other’s priorities and find increasingly scarce triumphs only in bedrooms and at typewriters—stolen moments on the smallest of scales. Reed returns alone to Russia and finds the country’s dream of a socialist utopia turned sour, but doesn’t know when to fold his cards. “If you walk out on it now, what’s your whole life meant?” he asks Emma Goldberg, who would go on to write My Disillusionment in Russia.

Soon the Russian bureaucracy is too much even for Reed. He’s jailed while trying to cross the border, and Bryant sets out to find him. When cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera finally opens up to outdoor vistas, it’s not to convey the breathless, widescreen majesties of Lawrence of Arabia but the damning plains of snow and ice that separate the lovers.

If Mr. Beatty’s reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is—surprisingly—dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles. Reds chronicles personal lives being trampled not only by ideals, but by ideals that will be betrayed. This double tragedy is, by the end, drawn on the faces of Ms. Keaton and Mr. Beatty—most notably when Bryant, visiting the dying Reed in a Russian hospital, looks into the face of a young child and is reminded of the family they never got around to having.

The postscript—unmentioned by the film—is grimmer still. Bryant collapsed at Reed’s funeral (“I heard the first shovel of earth go rolling down and then something snapped in my brain”) and then was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. She died alone in Paris in January 1936, eight months before Stalin instituted the Great Purge and took absolute control of Russia.

Mr. Beatty spent more than a decade trying to bring the story of John Reed (1887-1920) to the screen. Born and raised comfortably in Portland, Ore., and educated at Harvard, Reed was gradually radicalized while searching for thrills in Europe and Greenwich Village. He reported on the Paterson strike of 1913 for The Masses, a socialist monthly, and the more mainstream Metropolitan sent him to cover the Mexican Revolution (he wore a new yellow corduroy suit). None of this seemed to interest Mr. Beatty, who begins his story in 1915 with Reed’s first encounter—a frenzied discussion about U.S. involvement in World War I—with Louise Bryant, a married Portland dilettante with journalistic aspirations and burgeoning leftist ideals.

Mr. Beatty plays the part as if Reed was, well, a Warren Beatty character: a little dumbstruck yet determined, used to having things (and women) come his way but striving for the things (and women) that won’t. There’s some bumbling light slapstick as Reed prepares to move on Bryant, and the sociological dogma has the laughable sound of something Cary Grant would spout in Bringing Up Baby. Diane Keaton brings something more than vulnerable beauty and palpable intelligence to Louise Bryant—she brings the ghost of Annie Hall, another free spirit whose charm, insecurities and career ambition both seduced and flummoxed the man in her life.

Bryant follows Reed to New York City, determined to make her mark as an intellectual and a liberated woman. But she feels adrift and unappreciated amidst the Greenwich Village gang—and who wouldn’t when it’s Eugene O’Neill (a remarkably understated Jack Nicholson), Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton, in an Oscar-winning role), Max Eastman, Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson at the dinner parties? So Reed takes her away to Provincetown, but it’s the same story there, with nicer beaches. This is where Ms. Keaton’s thwarted expressions break your heart: All the men want Bryant to be their muse, and she wants to be a New Woman, taken seriously as she chews over social theories and poses for nude portraits.

They marry, move to Croton-on-Hudson; he travels around the world, covering labor disputes, and wears out his one kidney. If the soothing score that accompanies their home life is any indication, monogamy comes naturally. But the two nonetheless pursue infidelities, seemingly out of some vestigial sense of duty toward progressivism. Along with Bryant’s journalistic struggles—she’d just as soon write about the Armory Show of 1913 as about striking workers—their clumsy free-love experiments are an early sign that the conflicts between ideals and instincts are going to pile up. They go to Russia just in time for the October Revolution, where Reed would gather material for Ten Days That Shook the World, the book that would make his career. There’s a jolt of excitement in seeing the couple at the center of such a kairotic moment, bounding up the steps of the Winter Palace, sitting with Lenin. But even this is subordinate to their romance—Saint Petersburg burns bright with candles, the couple marches huddled together wrapped in coats and ushankas, and “The Internationale” takes on the feel of a Christmas carol. It’s as if the couple’s marriage will flourish as the masses ascend.

The second half of Reds dashes that idea, as Reed and Bryant challenge each other’s priorities and find increasingly scarce triumphs only in bedrooms and at typewriters—stolen moments on the smallest of scales. Reed returns alone to Russia and finds the country’s dream of a socialist utopia turned sour, but doesn’t know when to fold his cards. “If you walk out on it now, what’s your whole life meant?” he asks Emma Goldberg, who would go on to write My Disillusionment in Russia.

Soon the Russian bureaucracy is too much even for Reed. He’s jailed while trying to cross the border, and Bryant sets out to find him. When cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera finally opens up to outdoor vistas, it’s not to convey the breathless, widescreen majesties of Lawrence of Arabia but the damning plains of snow and ice that separate the lovers.

If Mr. Beatty’s reputedly leftist Reds is a voice of dissent, it is—surprisingly—dissent from the idea that personal travails are secondary to collective struggles. Reds chronicles personal lives being trampled not only by ideals, but by ideals that will be betrayed. This double tragedy is, by the end, drawn on the faces of Ms. Keaton and Mr. Beatty—most notably when Bryant, visiting the dying Reed in a Russian hospital, looks into the face of a young child and is reminded of the family they never got around to having.

The postscript—unmentioned by the film—is grimmer still. Bryant collapsed at Reed’s funeral (“I heard the first shovel of earth go rolling down and then something snapped in my brain”) and then was plagued by alcoholism and mental illness. She died alone in Paris in January 1936, eight months before Stalin instituted the Great Purge and took absolute control of Russia.

Ms. Morris, 39, makes vast paintings of geometric abstractions. The Towne installation is an expanded variation of her Los Angeles series of paintings, works using colors and geometries associated with a city’s vocabulary and palette. She studied semiotics at Brown and is still enthused about interpreting the world through systems of symbols. Sitting on a marble slab in the Lever Plaza, wearing a navy dress with green rectangles, she explained that she is interested in conspiracies, a city’s grand schematic plans and the workings of the corporation. Not character—not fictional businessman Noah Cross’ desire in Chinatown to have a child by the child of his child. Rather “the closed-off water systems …. ”

There was a man on the plaza eating a sandwich, two women with ponytails, and a woman smoking and studying her cell phone—all oblivious to the convoluted hexagonal plotting on the overhang above.

Why did Ms. Morris choose the sea-green, stainless-steel-framed, early-1950’s Lever House—the former headquarters of the soap company, the “perfect tabletop model of postwar American idealism,” wrote Eric P. Nash in Manhattan Skyscrapers—to interpret Mr. Towne (a name, she mused, “that is like a code, a word that has a double meaning”)? “I remember having martinis in the Four Seasons,” she said. “It must have been before Sept. 11, and I was telling friends how I really wanted to do something at the Seagram Building. I love that building. It’s almost too perfect. The only thing you can do there is take down the Picasso tapestry and put something in its place. Lever House is complicated. The public plaza was problematic—probably because the space seems nonfunctional. You can’t pass through the city block. It’s always critiqued as being sort of dark. I was attracted to that; it’s unresolved, in the sense that it seems to have a public function yet it’s sort of thwarted.

“It also has a Jacques Tati element,” she continued, referring to the French film director. “Points of false entry. You don’t quite understand what’s going on with the architecture. It seemed like a perfect spot to intervene. Then I started to realize Towne as a chrysalis form, a portal…”

The revelation began in Warren Beatty’s library, she said, during the making of her Los Angeles film (Ms. Morris also makes short “quasi-documentaries” of cities), sometime after Mr. Beatty told her, “Tell me what’s so great about you, and then tell me what’s so great about me.”

Ms. Morris strode through the white 20-foot entrance tube to the Lever House Restaurant, with the Japanese plaster walls and the white Corian bar top, where she ordered a Ketel vodka and cranberry juice. “I was trying to convince Beatty to be an image in the film,” she said. “He said, ‘Conversations about a possible collaboration sometimes take years.’ I was pushing to have a decision in 24 hours, and he was saying these things take years …. ”

Mr. Beatty—“on hiatus,” his publicist said, and unavailable to comment on Ms. Morris—must have a real sense of longevity.

“He also has a sense that non-action is more interesting than action,” Ms. Morris said. “What’s not in the frame is more interesting. It was interesting for me to accept that people involved in the film, people who were circulating in and around my mind, were not necessarily in the work. The refusal to be an image is an intriguing refusal.” Then Bob Towne called, she remembered. “Beatty proceeded to have a real detailed conversation with him,” Ms. Morris said. “You know how someone involves you in a conversation, talking to him while talking to me, present but not present? Beatty was almost making me complicit in it. The conversation moved in a Bob Towne way, moving in a sideways direction. Certain parts of that conversation sounded very cryptic, coded. It seemed they wanted me to understand the code.”

Didn’t Mr. Towne write Chinatown in some basement?

“I don’t think he’s in a basement now,” Ms. Morris said.

He didn’t say what room he was in, but over the phone from L.A., the 72-year-old writer and legendary last-minute script consultant (Bonnie and Clyde, The Parallax View), said he’s currently working on a screenplay about a “rather eccentric World War II American soldier who became a soldier in the Philippines—one of the few men who refused to surrender after Bataan and Corregidor fell to the Japanese, and he attempted successfully to organize a resistance.”

And how did Mr. Towne feel about being evoked on the overhang of one of New York’s most famous buildings? “It’s better to be on the ceiling than on the floor,” he said.

The Towne installation is always perceived in long shot; there are never any close-ups, no matter where one stands. That goes for the Lever House building itself, which still looks as if it’s an architect’s drawing or model. The real people in the plazas look like tiny artificial figures placed there to show the scale of the big space.

Ms. Morris’ life, by contrast, is rather outsized. She is married to a successful artist, Turner Prize nominee Liam Gillick, who also leans toward the geometric-architectural-conceptual; they have a 4-year-old son, Orson. The family appears to always have a bird’s-eye, godlike view, whether it’s in their apartment in another glassy tall building, near the United Nations, in which Truman Capote and Johnny Carson also once lived; or in Ms. Morris’ studio in Chelsea overlooking the Hudson, where three assistants work on her seven-foot-square and nine-and-a-half-foot-square paintings; or in their apartment on the top of the Barbican apartments in London; or on a plane flying over the Atlantic.

Ms. Morris was raised in Rhode Island, in “just a brick house with a lot of antiques,” she said. Her parents are “in medicine,” and they met through her aunt, who was “a flapper.” After Brown, young Sarah was accepted to the Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study program after submitting a one-issue magazine that she had produced as an undergraduate. She worked as an assistant for Jeff Koons, had her first solo show in New York by 1991, and then, one day, walked into a dinner party of 30 people and met Mr. Gillick, who opened the door.

She now shows regularly at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York and White Cube in London; has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2006) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2005); and is talking to the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, who are building the stadium for the 2008 Olympics, about a possible film there. How Leni Riefenstahl!

If Ms. Morris has a point of view, it might be described as hypnotic surveillance—sort of like the filmmakers Ernie Gehr and Chantal Akerman—but without the feelings of isolation or deep longing. In fact, it is more from the point of the view of the corporation. “Many of the people aren’t aware they’re in film functioning as a conduit in the city,” she said. “I wanted to use citizens as part of the work.”

Ms. Morris didn’t consult Mr. Towne about the use of his name, though they talked on the phone—“It was an interesting conversation,” she said—after he was contacted about photo permission for publicity materials. “The Public Art Fund said that the etiquette is that you should ask,” she said. “Well, half the art in the world wouldn’t be accomplished using etiquette.”

Her installation cuts through the building—“as if you took a knife and chopped off the bottom,” she said, “continuing from the lobby out on to the plaza.”

“The cutting-through is what intrigued me,” said Aby Rosen, the German-born, silver-haired developer and owner of Lever House, also a principal in RFR Holding L.L.C., which sponsored the installation. His other holdings include the Seagram Building, the Gramercy Park Hotel (with Ian Schrager) and some 35 other properties, mostly in New York. His personal art collection includes 80 Warhols. He makes Chinatown’s Noah Cross look like a pauper. Asked about a recent remark in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (“We go for the money”), he said: “Look, I have desire for great design and architecture. You have to put out X amount of money to make more buildings, art …. ”

Public art in the democratic 1960’s—the days of giant bright red and yellow giant steel abstractions in parks and plazas—was seen partly as a way to bring art to the world without a ticket price, but it is also very much the artist’s footprint on a landscape: Giant’s Leap or the kettles of Stonehenge. Today, it’s about the corporate sponsor’s largesse. Everybody ends up with big affect, and producing it is no small matter. Ms. Morris estimated the cost of Robert Towne at well over six figures, which included assistants, professional sign painters and electricians. “We increased the wattage,” she said.

The recessed lighting did seem brighter than usual.

SOURCES: WARREN BEATTY TO BLOG!

The Observer has learned that Warren Beatty, the 68-year-old actor and director, will likely join a lineup of liberal all-stars who will "group blog" on a Web site to be launched next month by columnist Arianna Huffington.

"I probably will," Mr. Beatty said, on the phone from his production office in Los Angeles.

The "Huffington Report," as Ms. Huffington has dubbed it, will also feature such boldface bloggers as Senator Jon Corzine, David Geffen, Viacom co-chief Tom Freston, Barry Diller, Tina Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow. If the name seems to echo that of the Drudge Report-the mega-site operated by the rightward-tilting unofficial editorial director of America's news cycle, Matt Drudge-well, it's supposed to. And Mr. Beatty approved of that.

"I applaud the effort to tell the side of the story that Arianna Huffington seems to be engaged in," he said. Mr. Beatty was all too aware, he said, of the power Mr. Drudge has to steer the American media.

"I would say he does a very industrious job of finding the things that he feels could be exploited to further the political agenda of the far right," said Mr. Beatty.

For his part, Mr. Drudge was deeply skeptical of a Web site operated by Hollywood liberals. And he rebuffed Mr. Beatty's characterization of his site as slanted toward Republicans.

"I still refuse to be put into the category of feeding completely Republican talking points," Mr. Drudge said. "That's ridiculous. If they're accusing me of doing Republican, we can assume all Warren Beatty is going to do is be putting out Democratic talking points.

"I look forward to the Warren Beatty News Network," Mr. Drudge cracked, before asking: "So they really are serious about this, aren't they?"

The Hollywooders appear to be. The partisan left has slowly been constructing outlets to counterbalance the partisan right's perceived influence in radio and television (Air America; former Vice President Al Gore's TV channel). Ms. Huffington, Mr. Beatty and Co., however, are aiming not at the margins but at the center of the media scrum: the news cycle itself, now being deftly nudged, goosed and spun by Mr. Drudge-daily, hourly, instantly.

"As the day follows the night, Drudge will inspire its opposite," Mr. Beatty said.

Arianna and Clyde aren't the only ones gunning for Mr. Drudge. On April 6, New York–based Gawker Media plans to launch Sploid.com, a British-style tabloid site meant to compile breaking news in a similar style to the Drudge Report. Gawker's publisher, Nick Denton, described its politics as "anarcho-capitalist," pitted only against "all the lazy incumbents who thrive on hypocrisy."

A screenshot of Sploid, provided by Mr. Denton, showed a fairly literal interpretation of a U.K. tabloid sheet, complete with corpulent fonts and bludgeoning (yet merry!) headlines in a style seemingly ripped from Rupert Murdoch's publishing playbook.

"We want to occupy the space between the whiny left and the ranting right," said Mr. Denton, who said he considered Mr. Drudge a brilliant news editor whose site was likely unstoppable for the foreseeable future.

However, his own project-which will be edited by ex-Gawker editor Choire Sicha on the East Coast and a blogger named Ken Lane on the West Coast-would avoid what he saw as Mr. Drudge's weaknesses, he said.

"It's not a wonder that newspaper front pages have their agenda set by him," Mr. Denton said, but "he has some blind spots. Occasionally, there's a story that takes on the Bush administration that's a good story. Occasionally there's a funny, interesting, scandalous story that he won't touch because it offends his audience. And he won't take on the churches."

He described Mr. Drudge's recent lead story featuring the Pope lying in state above the word "Peace" as the "same reverential coverage of every newspaper across the planet."

Mr. Drudge took issue with the criticism. "Oh, he would put 'Hell'?" he asked. "I mean, c'mon, this is small-time. How do I take seriously 'Sploid,' 'Gawker,' 'Wonkette'? How do you begin to take this seriously? It's like 'Supercalifragalisticexpialadocious: This is just in!' … Too cute by half."

In June, Mr. Drudge celebrates 10 years on the Web, having long since become the first draft of daily journalism in America. His site provides a pungent, sneering feed of the conservative, populist media mindset, whether serving as a launching pad for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or mulling the weekend box office for Sin City and its alignment with the Pope's death.

Mr. Drudge has stayed on top by being essential-a "utility," he said-and always being there for his readers, day and night. He operates from anywhere he chooses, most recently from his new "newsroom," a brand-new 2005 Mustang GT that he outfitted with a broadband connection. (He engaged in a recent instant-messenger conversation discussing his would-be challengers while sitting in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant in his hometown of Miami.)

Until now, his dominance has never really been challenged by other independent operators. Other Web efforts have mainly focused on a single area of interest, be it Hollywood or Washington, instead of trying to be one all-encompassing clearinghouse. But here come Ms. Huffington and Mr. Denton with a new format to realign the factual firmament with a breaking-news zag for Mr. Drudge's zig-hoping, ultimately, to become the news media's leading sensibility.

Mr. Drudge said he doubted the market for news links would support more players.

"I don't think that need is there," he said. "I think I fill that need."

Mr. Drudge observed that Ms. Huffington had "tons of charm and humor," but he questioned whether she and her powerful Hollywood friends had the stamina or wherewithal to keep up with him.

"This isn't a dinner party, darling," he said. " This is the beast! This is the Internet beast, which is all-consuming, as anyone knows who works in this business."

It's little wonder that Mr. Drudge accuses his adversaries of hanging out at parties. He said he once met Mr. Beatty at a book party in Los Angeles co-hosted by Susan Estrich celebrating a publication by lawyer Burt Fields.

"When he met me, he said it was the biggest thing since meeting John Wayne," recalled Mr. Drudge, who called Mr. Beatty an "extreme charmer. Extreme."

He added that Mr. Beatty's wife, actress Annette Bening, glowered at him and asked, "'How's Sidney Blumenthal?' with her Being Julia look." (She was referring to the former Clinton White house aide who once sued Mr. Drudge for defamation.)

Mr. Drudge was dismissive of competitors, including the contingent he liked to call "Drudge Babies."

"The road is littered with Wonkettes who have come and gone," he laughed. "They lose interest and/or they can't make it work. Or burn out."

But Mr. Drudge was still pugnacious. Just name a popular Web site-then count the seconds it takes for Mr. Drudge to dismiss it.

"I don't read Romenesko," he said, referring to the media-news site run by the Poynter Institute. "It's redundant to me. Every once in a while, someone will give him a memo that's hot. Other than that, it's redundant."

What about the Note, the ABC News political Web site run by Mr. Halperin?

"Oh, please!" said Mr. Drudge. "That Mark Halperin-it's like picking lint out of your navel. And really old, nasty lint."

Gawker?

"I mean, they have sightings of me in New York City when I'm halfway around the world," he spat. "I feel if they can't get that right about me, I don't know what to do."

Mr. Drudge gleefully sent The Observer a number of links to traffic charts generated by Alexa, a service of Amazon.com, which measured the visitors to his Web site versus traffic to other Web sites like Wonkette and Gawker. They showed a giant blue spike for Mr. Drudge, with Mr. Denton's blogs barely registering in comparison.

"Drudge is very good," said Mr. Denton. "It will probably take us 10 years to catch up with his level of traffic. We'll have 1,000th of the traffic, at least to begin with."

Mr. Drudge was especially proud of a comparison to The New York Times. According to the charts, the Drudge Report surpassed The Times online during the period in which Terri Schiavo and the Pope dominated the news cycle. He said The Times had been slow to pick up on "the populist wave" of dramas like the Schaivo case.

Mr. Drudge said he didn't read other blogs, but he admitted to enjoying Rosie O'Donnell's blog entries-dubbed by Ms. O'Donnell as "the unedited rantings of a fat 43 year old menopausal ex-talk show host."

"She's the new Maureen Dowd now," he said. "Oh, Rosie's on fire. She's the must-read. We read Dowd second. It's true!"

(In an e-mail, Ms. Dowd said she didn't read the Drudge Report. "I'm afraid I'll see something about myself," she wrote. "If he's got something good, I know I'll hear about it around the coffee machine.")

Ms. Dowd may be an exception to the rule. Mr. Drudge's influence on the rest of media runs on self-fulfilling prophecy: Reporters provide him with the good stuff-leaked memos, not-yet-published Times articles, breaking-news links-for a crack at the enormous audience that the good stuff draws to his site.

But to some, the rest of the press has been playing into Mr. Drudge's hands. His former political friend David Brock, who runs the Web site Media Matters for America, compiled a 33-page dossier on Mr. Drudge, bullet-pointing his many alleged distortions and misreports.

"We try to function not as a Drudge, but as an anti-Drudge," he said via e-mail, "which leaves plenty of room for a progressive knock-off of Drudge."

Mr. Brock said he saw a place for Ms. Huffington's project.

"I think it's long overdue," he said. "I've always felt that progressives have information and another entity could be fed. I think it could be very successful."

Mr. Denton was more cautious about the idea of a liberal response to Mr. Drudge. "Unfortunately, a liberal tabloid is a contradiction in terms," he said. "I don't think it's workable."

If Ms. Huffington and her crew hoped to counteract Mr. Drudge's impact, their first move seemed aggressive enough: According to a Washington Times item, they were in the process of hiring Andrew Breitbart, the longtime West Coast contributor to Mr. Drudge's site, to run the Huffington Report.

Mr. Breitbart, who once worked as a researcher for Ms. Huffington before he worked for Mr. Drudge, declined to discuss his current status with Ms. Huffington, but said he was still presently working with Mr. Drudge. On Tuesday, April 5, he was set to appear on Dennis Miller's CNBC show as an affiliate of Mr. Drudge's. But he could be contractually annexed by Ms. Huffington.

"I think actually hiring Drudge's guy is a smart move," observed Mr. Denton. "I don't know how much he did, but he knows the ropes."

Mr. Drudge said Mr. Breitbart's influence was a moot point, because "I'm the final edit. I have control on the Web site. I always have the final edit. My name is on the page."

Developing …

-Additional reporting by

Gabriel Sherman

When last we met on the Harvey Weinstein–Martin Scorsese field of battle, it was about two years ago; the producer and the director were in their own street fight, and it had gone beyond the "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" stage. It wasn't. But like a screwball comedy in which a couple falls in love, splits and remarries, they're back together.

But this time, the plot has a bunch of knots that the drunkest story conference in old Hollywood couldn't have come up with: Mr. Weinstein is on the verge of dissolution with the film company he built, Miramax, with a $115 million gamble he's co-producing with a phalanx of partners, including Warner Brothers and Initial Entertainment Group. Mr. Scorsese is back in Mr. Weinstein's embrace. Everybody's reputation is on the line. The picture is two hours and 48 minutes long, about a manic-depressive, obsessive-compulsive billionaire whose glamorous Lindbergh- and Valentino-like reputation was hidden by his mad-hatter old age-and who nobody under 45 can remember. The chairman of Disney, which owns Miramax, can't stand Mr. Weinstein and would like to see him boil in oil; Mr. Weinstein, likewise. There is no longer a T.W.A. or a Pan Am Airways.

It's a gamble Hughes would have loved. You could even sell tickets to it. The notorious entrepreneur, film director and test pilot's story-beginning with the making of his own crazy movie gamble, Hell's Angels, to the flight of the world's biggest aircraft and his ensuing loves' insanity-will begin its campaign to win your heart Dec. 17, courtesy of Warner Brothers and Miramax.

Harvey Weinstein is not Howard Hughes. He has no mustache. But he can relate. For the last six months, the co-chairman of Miramax Films has been engaged in a very public imbroglio over the future of the mini-studio he and his brother Bob founded almost 25 years ago. He has gone to the mattresses with the only man more disliked in Hollywood than himself, Michael Eisner-the surprisingly tall, monomaniacal titan of Disney, recently playing himself in a Delaware courtroom .

But the street-fight gusto of Mr. Weinstein's Fahrenheit 9/11 stand in May, when Disney refused to distribute the controversial documentary, has dissolved into a roiling story that he will be leaving Miramax by early next year, that he is already dismantling his crack staff-thus making The Aviator the de facto last stand, the last big-budget hurrah in the Weinstein era of Miramax.

"This is the first of many swan songs for Harvey," said one longtime film publicist. "We all should expect an infestation of swans."

And on Dec. 17, the Oscar race with Mr. Weinstein, Mr. Scorsese and Mr. DiCaprio as protagonists, plus: Clint Eastwood's female boxing picture, Million Dollar Baby, and James L. Brooks' Adam Sandler movie, Spanglish. Five days later, Joel Schumacher's $60 million version of The Phantom of the Opera. Alexander Payne's Sideways, which has generated the most attention up to this point, and Bill Condon's Kinsey will be in wide release. Mike Nichols' Closer shows up, with Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman and Jude Law, and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic will already have had a small head start.

Hollywood awaits it all, but The Aviator jacked up the stakes Nov. 24, when Variety hit the Internet with Todd McCarthy's review: "An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama," Mr. McCarthy wrote to every agent, producer and Academy voter in town. " The Aviator flies like one of Howard Hughes' record-setting speed airplanes …. Martin Scorsese's most pleasurable narrative feature in many a year is both extravagant and disciplined, grandly conceived and packed with minutiae. Although he was not exactly born for the role, Leonard DiCaprio is in terrific movie-star mode."

Socko!

Suddenly, the morning line was set in Hollywood. This wasn't Gangs of New York, a bloody film they had been dragged into kicking and screaming. This was a retelling of one of their own, the most mythologized and remythologized man in Hollywood history, the hero of The Carpetbaggers and Melvin and Howard!

The Aviator is a two-hour-and-48-minute pedigree production-culled from Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Weinstein's thoroughbred stable-that speaks to every branch in the Academy and explains the man who owned R.K.O. and produced the first Scarface. It was directed by America's Greatest Director Who Never Won an Oscar, a topic Mr. McCarthy spoke to: "If Gangs of New York felt heavy and never found its rhythm, The Aviator runs like a dream on all cylinders with scarcely a sputter or a cough."

And although the company has high hopes for Marc Forster's J.M. Barrie biography, Finding Neverland, bringing home the gold for Mr. Scorsese after his four nominations would satisfy Mr. Weinstein in a kind of special way.

Asked if this was his swan song, Mr. Weinstein purred-and growled. "No," he said, adding that negotiations between him and Mr. Eisner continue to be amicable.

"But that sounds good, doesn't it?"

Mr. Weinstein wants this picture to work. Both he and Mr. Eisner have had their share of difficulties lately. Mr. Eisner has had to endure the trial brought by Disney shareholders regarding the $100 million or so severance package received by former CAA boss Michael Ovitz when he was fired from the No. 2 spot at Disney in 1996. And even though Mr. Weinstein's Miramax is on course to match last year's domestic box-office total with fewer films, Miramax's internal disintegration has provided ample fodder for tabloids, trades and blogs, which are waiting for his departure from Disney. There were layoffs, defections-the most recent was chief operation officer Rick Sands, who went to DreamWorks-expired contracts and leaks of internal memos regarding vacation days. The company has been whittled down to Mr. Weinstein's inner circle, a tight group of upper-echelon executives he has cultivated over the years.

A big Oscar night would do wonders to erase a year that Mr. Weinstein would love to forget, and it would have him leaving on top on an evening that Hollywood formerly resented his ownership of, as Miramax won barrels of Oscars for prestige pictures starting with The English Patient's Best Picture in 1996.

But Mr. Weinstein cautioned the Hollywood community not to expect a massive Weinsteinian onslaught this year.

He has, he said, changed.

"Overaggressive marketing and over-pushing-and I'm not saying that I haven't been guilty of that in the past-I'd rather not have it," he said. "Our plan is definitely low-key for me and Marty. If it happens"-he meant winning an Academy Award-"it happens. And if it doesn't happen, both of us are proud of the movie."

Mr. Weinstein did, however lament that the Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater would not match Mr. Hughes' for Hell's Angels, which was attended by 500,000 Los Angeles residents and visitors: "I think in the post-9/11 era the idea of one of us going to the State Department and saying, 'Listen, we've got this very fun movie about airplanes. Can we just have like 100 airplanes fly over New York City, fly over Los Angeles?' Even us who have unlimited chutzpah can't ask for that."

Miramax, which up until this point has put most of its marketing mettle behind Marc Forster's Finding Neverland-especially pushing Johnny Depp's portrayal of the Peter Pan creator-finds itself now gearing up its Aviator campaign. And Mr. Weinstein's message has trickled down.

"We're planning a full, strong campaign on The Aviator," said Cynthia Schwartz, Miramax's veteran Oscar maven. Ms. Schwartz was on her way to the airport to catch a flight to L.A. for tomorrow night's premiere. "It's going to focus very much on the performances-in particular on Leo's performance."

Still, who can forget Mr. Scorsese's pained expression when he lost to Roman Polanski with The Pianist. It was an indelible Oscar moment, one terribly crystallized when Chicago- incidentally released by Miramax as well-a glitzy, old-fashioned musical, beat Gangs for Best Picture. Sitting in an aisle seat off the center row of the Kodak Theatre, Mr. Scorsese looked crestfallen, matched by Mr. Weinstein and actor Daniel Day-Lewis. It was supposed to be Mr. Scorsese's night. He had finally ushered his 20-year pet project to the screen, but the nominations it received proved to be a Pyrrhic victory-by time the Oscars came around, the Gangs of New York marketing had sputtered. The Gangs campaign had focused heavily on Mr. Scorsese. This year, however, the campaign will not.

"We're not focusing specifically on Marty as much as we're focusing on the overall movie," said Ms. Schwartz. "It's not that we're not focusing on Marty or ignoring Marty, obviously. But I think that the movie speaks for itself so beautifully that we're focusing beyond Marty."

With The Aviator, the waning empire that was Miramax is content to let the picture glide into Oscar night, letting Mr. Scorsese's career speak for itself. And the studio will do the same for the film: The movie looks like a $115 million, which it reportedly cost. The Hughes saga took place in a glorified period in moviemaking, cherished by the silver-haired Academy.

And Mr. Hughes, loved or hated, is being resuscitated as the emblem of that period: Hollywood's noble gambler, who bucked the studios. The very first indie-he gambled with money, with women, with his life.

He virtually created the big-budget action picture with Hell's Angels, the most expensive directorial debut in history. He flew around the world in four days, which would be like Mr. Weinstein climbing into a space shuttle and going around in four hours. His romantic escapades are the stuff of legend-Hepburn, Gardner, Harlow, Terry Moore, Jean Peters, Bette Davis. Wow! The relationships with Hepburn (stunningly played by Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) are the only sentimental moments in the picture.

It is clear that Mr. Weinstein would hate to see Mr. Scorsese go out the same way Stanley Kubrick did, without the little gold man. And given Eisner-Weinstein war, this could very well be a fitting farewell to Miramax, the company that Hollywood loved to hate but, as it is with all movie renegades, can learn to love once it's croaked. It may be the final marketing spin necessary to make them champs once again. By taking on Mr. Eisner, Mr. Weinstein is an underdog once more-a position he hasn't been in since Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Private Ryan in 1999.

"If they stay, great," said Tom Bernard, co-head of Sony Pictures Classics. "If they don't, they're going to get a billion dollars to start a new company. So I don't know if this is the last hurrah."

There is one thing that's certain, though: Wherever Mr. Weinstein ends up, he plans on sticking to what's worked. "I don't want to be limited by anything," he said, adding that he was proud of the big movies and, he said, "I'm proud of the small ones. I think you have to grow with your filmmakers, and you have to keep an eye on the bottom line. I think all of that's important. We've had such success."

Contact!

Late-Life Crisis

Rotten movies directed by music-video hacks I've never heard

of starring people I never want to see again are such a daily ritual in this

business that I rarely expect anything better. But when mature stars I admire

and rely on for sanity, symmetry and vision turn out incomprehensible gibberish

like the catastrophic Town & Country ,

all hopes are dashed. This labored, charmless mess has been gathering dust on

an editing-room shelf for three years, for reasons that become painfully

obvious in a matter of minutes. Directed by Peter Chelsom, from an unfinished

script by Buck Henry and Michael Laughlin-all of whom appear to have been miles

from the 1998 location shooting, where the original $44 million budget was

being wasted (expenditures are rumored to have doubled faster than the Dow

Jones)-it's supposed to be a sex farce about adultery that sums up the American

experience in bed. Sigh. The humorless and numbingly pointless result lacks all

rationale, except the wrecking of as many careers as possible.

In the careening farrago of broad sex jokes and disconnected

plot lines that form the disjointed trajectory of Town & Country , four witty, smart, rich, successful, sexy

people become semi-paralyzed by too much technology and information as they

bounce back and forth from Park Avenue and the Hamptons to Mississippi and the

ski slopes of Sun Valley. The first third of the movie is about affluence and

infidelity. Returning from their 25th wedding anniversary in Paris, Porter

Stoddard (Warren Beatty) and his addled wife (Diane Keaton) find their daughter

is living with someone who can't speak English, their son is shacking up with a

freak with a stud through her tongue and their housekeeper has taken up with a

creep the size of a Sumo wrestler, who has just arrived from a jungle tribe in

a country that doesn't seem to have yet been discovered-all under the couple's

own roof.

Mr. Beatty plays a sort of upscale Dagwood Bumstead (he even

has the same occupation-architect!) to Ms. Keaton's career-obsessed Blondie.

When they're not struggling to understand the 21st-century noise and anarchy at

their dining table, they're piling into their ugly S.U.V. and heading for the

Hamptons, where their quaint country cottage is overrun with Japanese fabric

designers. Meanwhile, their best friend (Goldie Hawn) discovers her own husband

(Garry Shandling, never believable for a moment as an antiques dealer) is

having an affair with a mysterious redhead who turns out to be a transvestite.

Poor Dagwood can't even have a quiet bowl of Rice Krispies in the middle of the

night without the sounds of sex emanating from every room. It's only a matter

of time before he gets himself a bang of his own, with both his best friend

(the adorable Goldie) and a pregnant cellist (Natassja Kinski). Who can blame

him? He should have left home years ago.

The movie shifts gears, and the middle section turns into a

Looney Tunes cartoon for no purpose except to drive the budget into the

stratosphere. While the wives go ballistic and head for the divorce court, all

of the characters disappear from the movie except Mr. Beatty's and Mr.

Shandling's, who head for Idaho. Struggling to survive the snow and cope with

the sexual innuendo that results from sharing the same bed, Mr. Shandling's

character hooks up with a hardware saleswoman (Jenna Elfman), and the

I'm-already-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown architect played by Mr. Beatty

falls into the horny clutches of a spoiled rich bitch (Andie MacDowell, whose

comic technique is clueless) and her insane parents. But in the most

embarrassing cameos in this trash wallow, Charlton Heston demolishes his

integrity as a right-wing gun lobbyist by chasing everyone with a 12-gauge

shotgun, while the dignified Marian Seldes crashes into the furniture and

breaks everything in sight screaming filthy obscenities that cannot be quoted

in print. It's no wonder Mr. Beatty hides in a polar-bear costume.

The third section of the

movie is a soap opera staged during a New York awards dinner, in which all of

the women turn up in the same ladies' room, unaware that they are all sleeping

with the same men. Ms. Keaton spills red wine on her white pantsuit, and the

repulsive Mr. Shandling announces in front of everyone you read about in Suzy's

column that he's gay! None of this makes one bit of sense, and the unresolved

ending seems to have been made up on the spot in time for the release date. The

only thing that makes this debacle watchable is the desperation of a highly

paid group of middle-aged talents trying to turn a boiled egg into a soufflé.

They're adrift without a compass, and they know it.

When in doubt, Ms. Hawn shows as much of her skin as the

shopping-mall trade will allow and proves she doesn't live in those Hollywood

gyms for nothing. Ms. Keaton falls back on an arsenal of engaging

mannerisms-stutters and assorted defense mechanisms that make her look like

she's appearing in an altogether different film. They fare better than the men.

Where Mr. Shandling's reputation as a laugh-maker came from is anybody's guess,

and it's a matter of historic cinematic record that Mr. Beatty's forte has

never been comedy. But in fairness, I must admit he has some amusing moments. Nervous,

irritable and scratchy as an infant with diaper rash, he's still looser than he

was in the calamitous Bulworth . As a

man wrestling with guilt, confusion and apoplexy to see if he still has a

testosterone level after the age of 60, he's a poster boy for Viagra. Maybe he

should only tackle comedy when he's not directing himself at the same time. The

fatally miscast Mr. Heston and Ms. Seldes, who are definitely old enough to

know better, are as funny as gunshot wounds. My reaction to them all is one of

profound humiliation. But what the hell-they've survived worse assaults.

They'll survive Town and Country .

Overheard on the way out: One critic says, "It's about

mid-life crisis," and the second critic, scratching his head, says, "For the

characters, or the actors?" Anyone for bringing back canasta?

More Suffering From

Dogma 95

Nobody survives The

King Is Alive . This pretentious bilge is by Danish director Kristian

Levring, one of the four wackos who founded Dogma 95, a laughable manifesto

dedicated to "stripping the superficials of modern filmmaking and getting back

to the essence of story making." This deranged notion is responsible for the

brain-dead works of Lars von Trier, including Björk in last year's Dancer in the Dark , the worst movie I've

ever seen-until The King Is Alive .

The Danes wouldn't know how to tell a story or strip filmmaking of

superficiality if eight tons of raw film stock fell on their heads in the

middle of a strawberry-rash festival.

In this abomination, 11

bus passengers, stranded in the African desert with nothing to eat but tinned

sardines, stage a production of King Lear

while they are starving to death. Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is terminally drawn

to this kind of septic waste, gets raped and poisoned and dies bleeding and

vomiting on a mud floor. Before this horror concludes, everyone joins her, and

not a moment too soon. The tedium is as fatal as the rusty sardine cans, so I

spent most of the time reading the production notes, which are so dry they must

have been translated from Danish. It's astounding what you learn from those

jolly chaps: " The King Is Alive is

not a filmed version of the Shakespeare play and, in fact, the choice of the

play was essentially irrelevant. However, King

Lear is undoubtedly an exceptional family drama." There is more, but I'm

feeling benevolent enough to spare you. Boring, diabolically unwatchable and

dead on arrival, this candidate for everybody's list of Worst Films of All Time

was shot in a deserted mining town called Kolmanskop, Namibia. It looks it.

About One Night : Just Forget It!

One hour of One Night

at McCool's is too much. One night is unthinkable. Liv Tyler has more

cleavage than competence in the role of Jewel, a trashy bimbo who will stop at

nothing, including murder, for a house with wall-to-wall carpeting. Matt Dillon

plays a hunky, doofus bartender at a sleazy saloon called McCool's. One night

when he's closing up, he rescues her from a staged setup which he believes to

be a near-rape in the alley and, oblivious to bad acting, takes her home for a

soothing nightcap of tap water in a dirty jelly glass. Anyone who saw Kathleen

Turner in Body Heat can spot trouble

in a red dress, and sure enough, after a round of rough sex with the bartender,

her rapist and partner in crime shows up to rob the place. But, fueled by

dreams of redecorating Mr. Dillon's rundown shack with venetian blinds, she

kills the scuzzy intruder and her horny host pleads guilty to protect her.

She moves in and

immediately charges a new mattress to his credit card. After what seems like

hours of predictable ho-hum time-wasting exposition, she turns him into a

burglar to acquire more household appliances, breaks up the marriage of his

yuppie lawyer cousin (Paul Reiser), transforming him into a kinky sex slave,

and reduces the cop investigating the case (John Goodman) to the status of a

justice-obstructing stalker. Between the double-entendre jokes about phallic

hot dogs and the running gag of a wino priest, the corpses of Jewel's victims

pile up, punctuated by a ceaseless stream of noisy, intrusive pop-rock songs by

Caleb, Jungle Brothers and Johnny Cash, and there's a massive shoot-out while

the Village People scream "YMCA." In a far cry from Traffic , Michael Douglas, of all people, shows up as a hit man with

a 20-pound pompadour, a hideous paisley nylon shirt, a gruesome gold neck chain

and a passion for bingo. Hired to knock off Jewel, he falls for her, too.

With four wasted morons now competing for her sexual favors

in a state of slobbering lust, the hopelessly incompetent, baby-talking Ms.

Tyler points her bosoms toward new horizons. The hired killer may be old enough

to be her Daddy, but he also owns a DVD player. Reba McEntire is wasted as the

lawyer's perpetually appalled shrink. They should all fire their agents. This

nasty, sniggering, mean-spirited farce, with sex and violence galore, was

produced by Michael Douglas (a sorry thing to contemplate) and marks the

unwelcome directorial debut of Harald Zwart, another dismal convert to feature

films from commercials and music videos. It could only happen in Hollywood.

Mr. Brooks has been capturing people in unflattering poses for years. In a piece for Terry Teachout's collection, Beyond the Boom , he swept his basilisk eye around the dinner table at the banquet of a Washington think tank. He noted "an activist of some sort who comes to all these dinners and talks of nothing but her efforts to empower the people who are not invited." Next to her, the man "with his shirttail hanging through his fly is a senator, of course." Now, disconcertingly, he has written about me.

This was not his intention, but what else am I to make of his descriptions of bourgeois bohemian living rooms that are stuffed with the loot of a dozen souks? Too late to schlep everything in mine back to Rajasthan and replace it with pieces from Ethan Allen or even Moss. How one likes to observe, how one resents being observed. Or what about Mr. Brooks' insight that bourgeois bohemians decorate with the icons of faiths that none of their guests practice? I ask the dancing Shiva or the metal plates of body parts to which the Greek Orthodox used to pray for cures. Mr. Brooks is describing an oppositional class, weaned on the worldview of popular entertainment and music, with its rebel poses. But rebels bred by the arts, it turns out, express their rebellion chiefly in aesthetic, or moral, terms. It is a rebellion of the wardrobe and the bedroom, not the factory (except in the sense that, in the new technology, there are fewer factories). Bourgeois bohemians work as hard as Poor Richard in the Almanac, but they don't want religion, society or custom telling them how to behave-except on those occasions when they all spontaneously do the same thing, like furnish their bookshelves with Buddha heads.

Michael Lind (not of the Weekly Standard ) took a crack at the same people a few years back, calling them the "overclass," suggesting their Island of Laputa indifference to the concerns and the toiling of average folk. David Frum maybe steals the march on both men, for the point of How We Got Here is that we're all here together, responding to similar tropisms.

Two symbols of the new ruling class strike me. (Don't worry, we shall leave the Clintons out of this; there will be time enough to consider the boner king before he rides off to Chappaqua, or the Cohiba Presidential Library or Bring-Your-Spouse-to-Work Day at the U.S. Senate.) One symbol is negative, the surrender of a symbol. Family circumstances have caused me to dispose of sets of sterling flatware, some the residue of antepenultimate generations. Who eats this way anymore, I wondered? They lay, the Prince Eugene a bit jumbled with the State House, in flannel bags with grosgrain drawstrings. Some were lined up, like drill bits, in albums whose covers were now stiff and cracked. They all struck me as faintly ugly and remarkably heavy; if manners at the table took a sudden plunge, the handles could be used a weapons. They were weapons-against boorishness, slovenliness, being off the farm or the boat. Maybe that's where the owners had come from, but they were preparing themselves for occasions on which the distance they had traversed would be demonstrated. It used to be a sneer of the English upper classes that Americans, Jews and other climbers had bought their own silver. You bought sterling, as Henry V put it, to gentle your condition. Do people buy it now? Tiffany's is still in business and brides register. Why then did I feel I was holding things of the past?

The other symbol came to me at the Oscars. That was a while ago, but sometimes symbols have long fuses. I was in Los Angeles to film celebrity comings and goings at the Vanity Fair Oscar party at Morton's, for a PBS documentary on George Washington. As I stood outside in my tux in the chilly L.A. night, I watched the ceremony on banks of monitors. Peak moment: the presentation of the Irving Thalberg career achievement award to Warren Beatty and the introduction delivered by Jack Nicholson.

What made the moment a peak is that Mr. Beatty was beautiful once, Mr. Nicholson was exciting, and now they are gray eminences. Mr. Nicholson is the line of transmission from Marlon Brando to every edgy young edge; Mr. Beatty thought about running for president. (And when you look at Alan Keyes making his second try, who can criticize him?) There they had been in their youth, and there they were on Oscar night-lords of the rebellious upper class.

Peak of the peak was Mr. Nicholson. It has been argued that the toast scene in Five Easy Pieces was cruel and self-indulgent, and encouraged cruelty and self-indulgence in others. But there were many other scenes, in many movies. Don't call the honor roll, you know them all. Now Mr. Nicholson is stout. He's stout and he doesn't care. He also has an ugly mustache, about which he doesn't care, because no one will say anything to him about it, because he's Jack Nicholson. If I wore that mustache, or a string of dead rats around my neck, or an air-freshener cookie from a urinal behind my ear, people would say something to me, but they don't say it to Jack Nicholson. He was stout and mustached and tuxed, and if Warren Beatty had wanted to reshoot Reds , and if he had done a scene with cops breaking up a demonstration in Union Square, and if he had cut it with shots from a banquet of plutocrats at the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and if he wanted a big plutocrat to be saying something like, "America has never been more prosperous," while he cut to a cop nightsticking Emma Goldman, he would not have to change an article of Mr. Nicholson's clothing, or an inflection of his voice. He was stout and mustached and tuxed and happy, because he was a rebel, and he's still a rebel, and now he's in paradise.