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th A N N UA L E D I T I O N

THE

I SSUE

E D D I E ! R E N É E ! J. L O !

A N D 2 0 O F 2 0 2 0’ S M O S T L U M I N O U S S TA R S Photographs by E T H A N J A M E S G R E E N

“It’s impossible to watch Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, or Jennifer Lopez without realizing that you’re in the presence of both mastery and ease.

That combination is the result of a journey...”

P. 102

Destination

HOLLYWOOD F E AT U R I N G

Awkwafina L AU R A

Dern

DA N I E L

Kaluuya ANTONIO

Banderas TA I K A

Waititi FLORENCE

Pugh

WILLEM

Dafoe

JENNIFER

Hudson AND MORE!

The

The

GRAND DAME

PARTY’S OVER

LEE GRANT D I S H E S o n S E X, S H A M P O O, a nd A HALF CENTURY of R E S I STA N C E

T H E FA L L of O S C A R S E A S O N ’S M O ST POLARIZING P U B L I C I ST

Plus Mr. Obama G oes to Hollywood

Socialites & Quaaludes

The Secrets of Hollywood’s Wildest ’80s Club

The

The

LAST MEGA-AGENT

RIGHTEOUS SHOWRUNNER

A R I E M A N U E L’S P L A N to O U T S M A RT th e T E C H OV E R LO R D S

BLACK-ISH C R E AT O R K E N YA BA R R I S BU I L D S a N EW H O M E at N ET F L I X

Pedro Almodóvar

Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Mark Harris On How Stars Are Born

DIOR BOUTIQUES 800.929.DIOR (3467)

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Perfection just happens at Dorchester Collection

PHOTOGRAPHED BY INEZ AND VINOODH | VERAWANG.COM

Contents Issue No. 714

140

The Hollywood Issue

81

For our annual Hollywood Portfolio, we asked 23 of the year’s standout actors—legends and newcomers alike—to make a road movie with us. Behold, a Technicolor dreamscape on a desert highway.

Plus: interviews with the stars and an essay by Mark Harris on the bold career paths of iconic fellow travelers Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, and Jennifer Lopez.

Features

P HOTO G R A P H B Y JAC K ROB I N S ON / H U L TON A R C H I V E / G E T T Y I M AG E S

116

122

B Y J OY PR ES S P H OTO G R A P H S B Y AW O L E R I Z K U

The creative force behind the hit ABC series Black-ish, Kenya Barris found his voice—and audience. No wonder Netflix lured him away to tell his story in #blackexcellence.

Eddie Murphy wears a tuxedo by Ralph Lauren, shirt by Budd Shirtmakers, and cuff links by Stephen Russell. Renée Zellweger wears a dress by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello and a necklace by Harry Winston, and, right, a gown by Valentino, sandals by Stuart Weitzman, and a necklace by Harry Winston. Jennifer Lopez wears a blazer and pants by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, shoes by Aquazzura, jewelry by Tiffany & Co., a beret by Eric Javits, and gloves by THOMASINE, and, right, a gown by Valentino and earrings, a necklace, and a ring (right hand) by Harry Winston. Hair products by Oribe (Zellweger) and R+Co and PSxDanielle (Lopez). Makeup by CHANEL (Zellweger) and TOM FORD Beauty and Scott Barnes Beauty (Lopez).

Nail enamel by CHANEL Le Vernis. Hair by Danielle Priano (Lopez) and Jawara (Zellweger). Makeup by Scott Barnes (Lopez) and Fulvia Farolfi (Zellweger). Manicures by Tom Bachik (Lopez) and Alex Jachno (Zellweger). Tailors, Hasmik Kourinian and Tatyana Staraverova. Creative movement director, Stephen Galloway. Set design by Julia Wagner. Produced on location by Portfolio One. Styled by Samira Nasr. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Ethan James Green in Los Angeles. For details, go to VF.com/credits.

On the Cover

H O L LY W O O D

Kenya Barris Levels Up

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Contents Issue No. 714

128 128

136

Nerve Agent

BY RICHARD RUSHFIELD I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y CHRISTINA ZIMPEL

WME agent Ari Emanuel had a bold plan to reimagine his agency and take on the power structure of Hollywood.

A failed IPO may force a rethink.

BY JULIE MILLER

Lee Grant was a rising star in the 1950s when she ran into hurdles— the blacklist, sexism, ageism. The Oscar-winning actress and director shares the truths of a lifetime.

116 “Playing himself, says Barris, was also a way to do ‘something I was really afraid of.’ ” “ K E N YA B A R R I S L E V E L S U P , Ó P . 1 2 2

38

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H O L LY W O O D ’ S O.G. FUTURIST

The 1990 book by George Gilder that inspired superagent Ari Emanuel to embrace the streaming era. [p. 136]

P HOTO G R A P H S: TOP, C O U RT ES Y OF PAU L F ORT U N E; C E N T E R, B Y RON G A L E L L A / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; B OT TO M L E F T , B Y RO N TO M / WA L T D I S N E Y T E L E V I S ION / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; F OR D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

140

“If You’re Not Beautiful, You’re Finished”

CALIBER RM 07-01

RICHARD MILLE BOUTIQUES ASPEN BAL HARBOUR BEVERLY HILLS BOSTON BUENOS AIRES LAS VEGAS MIAMI NEW YORK ST. BARTH TORONTO VANCOUVER www.richardmille.com

TOMFORD.COM

Contents Issue No. 714

Vanities

L A S H A N A LY NC H P HOTO G R A P H E D B Y C H R I ST I N A E B E N E Z E R ; DR E S S B Y ROK S A NDA ; S HOE S B Y M A NOL O B L A H N I K ; E A R R I NG S B Y E R D E M ; B R AC E L E T B Y VA N C L E E F & A R P E L S ; R I NG B Y A M R A PA L I . I L L U ST R AT ION B Y R I S KO . F O R D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

57

Opening Act Lashana Lynch is James Bond’s next star spy My Stuff Inside the life and style of a beloved interior designer Books A new coffee-table book gets inside Fellini’s subconscious; plus binge-worthy novels Culture Mapping out Hollywood’s new clubhouses; a hometowninspired art exhibition; Armani’s foray into fine jewelry Style Rubies and diamonds inspired

by Elizabeth Taylor Trending The red carpet, reimagined Beauty L.A.’s awards season prep includes Joker-approved dentistry and a serene new spa Fairground LACMA and Gucci joined forces for the ninth annual Art+Film Gala

Columns

76

The Obamoguls

BY JOE POMPEO I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y PA R K E R H U B B A R D

As a multiplatform former first couple, the Obamas have books, movies, podcasts, and more in the pipeline.

78 57 “Regret is an imposition from my Catholic childhood that I refuse.”

50 52 54 152

Behind the Issue Contributors Editor’s Letter Proust Questionnaire

P E D R O A L M O D Ó VA R , P . 1 5 2

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ATELIERSWAROVSKI.COM

DESIGNED BY PENÉLOPE CRUZ

®

Editor in Chief Radhika Jones

Deputy Editor Kira Pollack Director of Editorial Operations Caryn Prime Executive Editors Eric Bates, Claire Howorth, Daniel Kile Executive Hollywood Editor Jeff Giles Editor, Creative Development David Friend Director of Special Projects Sara Marks Executive Fashion Director Samira Nasr Market Director Nicole Chapoteau Accessories Director Daisy Shaw-Ellis Entertainment Director Alison Ward Frank Legal Affairs Editor Robert Walsh Research Director David Gendelman Beauty Director Laura Regensdorf Design Director Justin Patrick Long Senior West Coast Editor Britt Hennemuth Production Director Mia Tran Copy Director Michael Casey Associate Editors Mary Alice Miller, Louisa Strauss, Keziah Weir Associate Legal Affairs Editor Simon Brennan Research Editor Mary Flynn Reporter-Researchers Brendan Barr, Michael Sacks Copy Manager Michael Quiñones Editorial Finance Manager Geoff Collins Senior Visuals Editors Tara Johnson, Cate Sturgess Entertainment Editor Caitlin Brody Senior Menswear Editor Miles Pope Special Projects Manager Ari Bergen Copy Production Director Anderson Tepper Special Projects Associate Charlene Oliver Production Manager Susan M. Rasco Assistant to the Editor in Chief Daniela Tijerina Accessories Editor Alexis Kanter Research Manager Taylor Smith Editorial Assistants Arimeta Diop, Danielle Walsh Assistant Fashion Editor Alexandra Delifer Special Correspondents Nick Bilton, Anthony Breznican, Bryan Burrough, William D. Cohan, Amy Fine Collins, Joe Hagan, Maureen Orth, Mark Seal, Gabriel Sherman Writers-at-Large Marie Brenner, James Reginato

vanityfair.com Executive Digital Director Michael Hogan Editor Matthew Lynch Deputy Editor Katey Rich Digital Managing Editor Kelly Butler Senior Visuals Editor Chiara Marinai Projects Editor Alyssa Karas Line Editor Katie Commisso Senior Hollywood Editor Hillary Busis Chief Critic Richard Lawson TV Correspondent Joy Press Senior Feature Writer Julie Miller Senior Staff Writer Joanna Robinson Film Critic K. Austin Collins TV Critic Sonia Saraiya Staff Writers Dan Adler, Laura Bradley, Kenzie Bryant, Yohana Desta Associate Editor Erin Vanderhoof Associate Line Editor Rachel Freeman Executive Producer Traci Oshiro Supervising Video Producer Christopher Klimovski Video Producers Justine Del Gaudio, Ella Ruffel Lead Producer Jarondakie Patrick Visuals Editor Lauren Margit Jones Assistant Line Editor Cynthia Orgel Senior Social Media Manager Daniel Taroy Senior Manager, Analytics Neelum Khan Social Media Manager Sarah Morse Associate Producer Maham Hasan Editorial Assistant Sarah Shoen

The Hive Editor John Homans Senior Editor Claire Landsbaum Senior Media Correspondent Joe Pompeo National Correspondent Emily Jane Fox Politics Correspondent Bess Levin Writer-at-Large T.A. Frank Staff Reporter Abigail Tracy

Communications Vice President and Head of Communications Corey Wilson Associate Director of Communications Rachel Janc Manager of Communications Jackson Chiappinelli Associate Manager of Communications Dane McMillan

Contributors Social Contributor Jeffrey Tousey Production Manager Roberto Rodríguez Special Projects Consultant Matt Ullian Architecture Consultant Basil Walter Senior Designer Ashley Smestad Vélez Summit Contributing Producer Graham Veysey Special Projects Art Director Angela Panichi Associate Editor S.P. Nix Associate Visuals Editor Allison Schaller Art Assistant Justine Goode Visuals Assistant Madison Reid Fashion Assistants Paulo Cesar, Samantha Gasmer, Jessica Neises Contributing Photographers Annie Leibovitz Jonathan Becker, Larry Fink, Ethan James Green, Collier Schorr, Mark Seliger Contributing Artists Hilary Knight, Robert Risko Contributing Editors Kurt Andersen, Suzanna Andrews, Lili Anolik, Carl Bernstein, Peter Biskind, Buzz Bissinger, Derek Blasberg, Christopher Bollen, Patricia Bosworth, Mark Bowden, Douglas Brinkley, Alice Brudenell-Bruce, Michael Callahan, Adam Ciralsky, Rich Cohen, Sloane Crosley, Lisa Eisner, Bruce Feirstein, Ariel Foxman, Alex French, Paul Goldberger, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Michael Joseph Gross, Bruce Handy, David Harris, Mark Harris, Carol Blue Hitchens, A.M. Homes, Uzodinma Iweala, Sebastian Junger, David Kamp, Sam Kashner, Jemima Khan, Wayne Lawson, Fran Lebowitz, Dany Levy, Monica Lewinsky, David Margolick, Bethany McLean, Anne McNally, Nina Munk, Fiona Murray, Katie Nicholl, Evgenia Peretz, Véronique Plazolles, Maximillian Potter, Lisa Robinson, Mark Rozzo, Nancy Jo Sales, Elissa Schappell, Michael Shnayerson, Richard Stengel, Diane von Furstenberg, Elizabeth Saltzman Walker, Benjamin Wallace, Heather Watts, Ned Zeman

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Chief Business Officer Susan D. Plagemann

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H O L LY W O O D

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A place to do nothing.

And absolutely everything.

From the Editors

Behind the Issue

100 gowns.

400 shoes.

2 motorcycles.

1 tractor.

And a cast to die for

50

VAN I T Y

F AI R

Clockwise from top: creative movement director Stephen Galloway and Alfre Woodard; shoes on set; Antonio Banderas; Renée Zellweger; V.F. entertainment director Alison Ward Frank and senior West Coast editor Britt Hennemuth; V.F. executive fashion director Samira Nasr and Taylor Russell; Taika Waititi.

P HOTO G R A P H S B Y M IC H E L L E G RO S KOP F ( WA I T I T I ), K R I STA S C H L U E T E R ( A L L OT H E R S )

Late last October, Vanity Fair seized one cavernous hanger and three studios at Los Angeles’s Milk Studios to celebrate 23 of the year’s most exciting names in film in the magazine’s 26th annual Hollywood cover and portfolio. For his first Hollywood Issue, photographer Ethan James Green and set designer Julia Wagner created a surrealist Route 66—part Technicolor, part Ed Ruscha—for a stylized voyage through some of cinema’s greatest genres. There were tractors, Escalades, cacti, and motorcycles, as well as more than 100 gowns, more than 400 pairs of shoes, and enough carats of fine jewelry to require nearly a dozen armed guards.

“Traditionally the fashion has always been through the lens of glamour and the red carpet, and this year it was really fun to play dress-up and create all of these interesting characters that we meet along the way,” said executive fashion director Samira Nasr. Senior West Coast editor Britt Hennemuth cast the portfolio; producers Tara Johnson and Michael Kramer kept the elaborate production on the road, along with entertainment director Alison Ward Frank. The actors were interviewed about their real-life journeys by Hennemuth, special correspondent Anthony Breznican, and executive Hollywood editor Jeff Giles (page 102). Says Hennemuth, “From movie stars to breakouts, this year’s Find more exclusive videos from our group will stand Hollywood shoot at VF.com. the test of time.”

Contributors

HARRIS

“The Great Entertainers,” p. 102

Joy

PRESS

“Kenya Barris Levels Up,” p. 122

Awol

ERIZKU

“Kenya Barris Levels Up,” p. 122

Richard

RUSHFIELD

“Nerve Agent,” p. 136

Maureen

O’CONNOR

“Regrets Only,” p. 116

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“Interesting second and third acts are what really define stardom,” says the best-selling author of Pictures at a Revolution. “And if you’re as talented as the people on this issue’s cover, it makes sense that the deeper you get into your career, the more subtle and surprising your work will become.”

Harris’s third book, a biography of Mike Nichols, will be published in late 2020. He is covering the Oscar race exclusively for Vanity Fair.

The V.F. television correspondent, who visited director and producer Kenya Barris on the set of his new show, #blackexcellence, says she never would have guessed that it’s also his first major acting role. “Watching Kenya riff on set with his screen wife, Rashida Jones, was a surprisingly playful experience,” she says. “They approach each scene as if it were an experiment, careening off in slightly different directions with each take.”

The Ethiopian American artist knew that his photographs of Kenya Barris “needed to symbolize the wisdom of the exchange” they had when they first met at an artist residency in 2018. “For me, the owl—which we joked on set was a bigger flex than the watch on his other wrist—parallels Kenya’s sharp vision and keen observation.” Erizku’s show, Mystic Parallax, opens this March at the FLAG Art Foundation.

Rushfield, who’s the editor of the entertainment newsletter “The Ankler,” has been an avid industry observer since he was 12 years old. For his piece in this issue about the fallout from blue-chip agency WME’s scuttled IPO and CEO Ari Emanuel’s next move, he spoke with the mega-agent’s former employees and says that he was “struck by the loyalty and affection they feel for him, given his reputation for bombastic behavior.”

O’Connor saw how life has—and has not— changed lately for Peggy Siegal, the publicist who socialized with Jeffrey Epstein. “She’d just had surgery to repair a condition caused by typing on her Blackberry,” the writer says. “Back in the ’90s, Peggy sought medical help for neck pain caused by holding her phone receiver between her ear and shoulder.” O’Connor will next cover Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial for VF.com.

H O L LY W O O D

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P HOTO G R A P H S : F ROM TOP, B Y M A DI S ON R E ID , ROM B OKOB Z A , J E F F V E S PA , N IC OL E L a P OR T E , J O S E P H K U H N

Mark

©J&JCI 2020

Editor’s Letter

Hollywood 2020

I write this at the dawn of the ’20s, less roaring than blustering so far. The year 2020 always sounded so futuristic, and yet here we are, having closed out the Skywalker saga (and with it my childhood), and proved indisputably that Cats does not have nine lives at the box office. War drums beat, bush fires burn, and the great escapism of cinema offers respite and provocation alike. So here is our annual Hollywood Issue, celebrating a terrific year at the movies, and looking ahead to the next season in film.

Every year V.F. travels the festival circuit from Sundance to Cannes, Telluride to Toronto, seeing movies and charting (and creating) buzz, and this time, as the slate of films unfolded, we were struck by the number of legends bestriding the screen like the acting colossuses that they are. Many appeared on our covers over the past 12 months—Laura Dern, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Joaquin Phoenix— and three more came together for this cover, shot by V.F. contributing photographer Ethan James Green.

I won’t wax lyrical about their performances—Mark Harris does that beautifully on page 102—but I will say that paramount on our minds when making that image was the versatility, persistence, and sheer scope of talent represented by Jennifer Lopez, Eddie Murphy, and Renée Zellweger. They are road warriors, not just of this season but of our era, and we’d follow them down any highway.

Our trio kicks off a photographic road trip that I hope you’ll experience both digitally and in the magazine. Online the images create a surreal Route 66 scrolling through American film archetypes; in print they unfold into lush panoramas of our cinematic dreamscape. We feature newcomers and veterans alike, from Beanie Feldstein and Park So-dam to Willem Dafoe and Antonio Banderas.

Behind the scenes in Hollywood, change is afoot, and we’ve got that covered too: from Maureen O’Connor’s account of the precipitous fall of publicist 54

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Margaret Qualley and Radhika Jones backstage at the Hollywood shoot.

Peggy Siegal, starting from the fateful moment last summer (on a yacht, natch) when she learned that her name would be linked with Jeffrey Epstein’s in the damning reports of his crimes; to Joy Press’s revealing profile of Kenya Barris as he prepares for his first Netflix show after leaving broadcast TV. Executive Hollywood editor Jeff Giles and VF.com editor Matt Lynch presided over the issue, which looks fondly back (remember the Fake Club, the ’80s Hollywood hot spot?) and perceptively forward (what’s next for Ari Emanuel and his power agency?).

The movies have never felt more everywhere— they come not only to our multiplexes and art houses but to our home screens and our phones. And in February, V.F. brings our legacy of Hollywood photography to the exhibition space, in a show titled Vanity Fair: Hollywood Calling, mounted in partnership with the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. Iconic images from the magazine’s archives created by the likes of Annie Leibovitz, Collier Schorr, and David LaChapelle—depicting stars from Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Hanks to Michael B. Jordan and Ali Wong—pay homage to our legacy of creating and reflecting contemporary film iconography, capturing star power in glorious Technicolor and glamorous black and white. The show opens February 8, and we’ll see you there.

radhika jone s, Editor in Chief H O L LY W O O D

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P HOTO G R A P H B Y M IC H E L L E G RO S KOP F

The Road to Hollywood

A HIGH-FASHION FAIRY TALE

Photograph / Alina Tsvor

IMMER SIVE TRIPS JUST F OR WOMEN

M E X I C O

WE’RE GOING TO MEXICO a n d yo u c a n c o m e w i t h u s c n t r a v e l e r. c o m / w w t t r i p s t o r e a d m o r e a n d b o o k

H A I R B Y L AU R A I N E B A I L E Y ; M A K E U P B Y M I N S A NDH U ; F OR D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

With a franchise that has been slick for so many years, I wanted to throw a human spin on it— to be someone who’s figuring it out.”

Gown and tie

by Erdem; hair products by Vernon François; makeup by Dior Beauty.

Lashana Lynch, 32,

says of her star spy turn in the new James Bond film c ontinued on page 5 8

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B Y

ST Y L E D

CHRISTINA EBENEZER B Y

OLA EBITI

Vanities Opening Act

60-year-old, $7 billion franchise to land who broke out as Maria Rambeau in Captain Marvel, has shaken and stirred Hollywood’s modern classic, arriving as Nomi, the new 00 agent and rumored heir apparent as Daniel Craig takes his last Aston Martin ride. Here, some insights gleaned from a conversation with a woman undercover.

“Her empathy and —BRIE LARSON

“Lashana moves like a cat.”

—DANIEL CRAIG

sing without acting and you can’t act around Brooklyn—

and emotion.”

she’s from Britain.”

singing with a hairbrush to those.” school and cut her teeth on London stages before American TV titan Shonda Rhimes cast her in the short-lived ABC series Still Star-Crossed in 2017.

“It was color-blind casting at its finest. It doesn’t have to be exact, it just needs to be honest.”

HER 007 TRAINING started early. “When I was only months old, my dad would sit me down under his arm on the couch and make me watch Bond.”

SHE’S HARD-PRESSED to pick a favorite.

“Daniel [Craig] brings the grittiness of London, which I absolutely love, but after Daniel it’s impossible to answer because they all bring something really spicy…. I did like Sean [Connery].”

HER GADGET of choice would be “a time-traveling watch that could make me a fly on the wall anywhere.”

SHE HOPES HER character, Nomi,

brings a new layer of relatability to the world of espionage. “When you’re dealing with a franchise that has been slick for so many years, I wanted to throw a human spin on it—to deal with anxiety and be someone who’s figuring it out, completely on her toes.”

SHE CREDITS Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who was recruited to polish the film’s script, with bringing an evolved female perspective to the Bond girls of the past. “She injected a natural richness into Nomi. Phoebe was able to cater to the women and bring something punchy, unique, and fresh.”

THE BUZZ surrounding a modernized franchise has led some online trolls to be upset that the next 007 might be played by a black woman.

“The good can be bad, and also sad,” Lynch says. “It’s healthy to talk about it because it reminds you, unfortunately, about where the world is right now. But also, of the work that we have to do as people who have a platform to speak.”

UP NEXT she stars in Y, an FX series directed by Melina Matsoukas, based on the comic book series set in a postapocalyptic world ruled by women. “I would say many people in the world right now have dreams of a female-run world. And we actually get to fulfill that dream.”

—brit t hennemuth

Cheers! Paramount’s Hollywood Cocktails book pairs their films with drink recipes. Here, three classics

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Beverly Hills Cop

The ne plus ultra adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s beloved thriller, replete with creamy fashion and ice-cold kills

A buddy comedy with a dash of romance, wrapped in a love letter to Chicago and doused in one of film’s great unsung soundtracks

Peak Eddie Murphy improv, sunny L.A., a gallery assistant peddling artisanal coffee—35 years and two sequels later, Netflix is now planning round four

AMERICANO

FERRARI NAMED DESIRE

ESPRESSO MARTINI

1 oz. Campari 1 oz. sweet vermouth 1 oz. club soda 1 lemon slice

58

VAN I T Y

Pour Campari and sweet vermouth into a rocks glass filled with ice.

Top with club soda and garnish with lemon slice.

F AI R

1 1/2 oz. bourbon 3 /4 oz. mint and lemon verbena syrup 3 /4 oz. lemon juice 4 dashes Angostura bitters 1 mint sprig

Combine bourbon, syrup, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake vigorously. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice, top with bitters, and garnish with mint.

3 parts vodka 1 part Kahlúa 2 parts espresso Handful of espresso beans

Place vodka, Kahlúa, and espresso in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake vigorously, strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with espresso beans.

H O L LY W O O D

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I L L U ST R AT ION S : TOP, B Y L AU R E N TA M A K I ; B OT TOM , B Y J OR DA N A NDR E W CA RT E R . R E C I P E S A DA P T E D F ROM HOL LY WO OD C O C K TA I L S : OVER 95 RE CIPES CE LE BR ATI NG F I LM S F ROM PAR AMOUN T PICTU RES (C IDE R MIL L PRES S)

FAN

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Vanities

My Stuff

MIX MASTER

Interior designer Chiara de Rege, the aesthetic force behind The Wing and Carolina Herrera’s New York flagship, embraces the old and the new

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Listening to: Liz Goldwyn’s The Sex Ed. Desert island books: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and James Salter’s Light Years (2).

Vacation spot: My family home in Piemonte, Italy (9).

We donated half of it to the Italian in the other half.

Plane must-haves: Cashmere blanket and eye set, Tata Harper’s Resurfacing Mask, and Shiva Rose’s Glow Face Balm.

HOME

Architectural styles: I know this is a contradiction, but I am drawn to both beaux arts and 1930s.

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And I cannot imagine a world without modern architects such as Le Corbusier, Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe, and Oscar Niemeyer (13).

Furniture: Cristina Celestino’s furniture, tiles, carpet, wallpaper, lighting—she’s a renaissance woman.

Career idol: Madeleine Castaing (6).

Maison C fabrics, adapted from the wallpaper line I cofounded with the artist Costanza Theodoli-Braschi (5).

In bed: I love Olatz pajamas (3) and D. Porthault bedding (1).

Flora: Bodega flowers arranged in vessels from antique stores upstate (7).

Candle: Diptyque

Feu de Bois (11).

Dish set: Wes Gordon’s Carolina Herrera tabletop line with Cabana (12).

Four-legged friend: My 17-year-old Chihuahua, Klaus. He is a grumpy old man but my first baby and love of my life.

ST YLE & WELLNES S

Perpetually worn accessory: My nonna’s wedding band (10) and FoundRae charms.

Go-to shoe: Sneakers from my baby daddy (currently Off-White Nikes), Gucci loafers,

or Le Monde Beryl slippers (4).

Supplements: Wooden Spoon Super Green Protein and anything Dr. Gabrielle Francis at the Herban Alchemist tells me to take! Workout: Walking through Central Park and Ballet Beautiful with Mary Helen Bowers.

D I N I NG

Morning beverage: Bulletproof espresso before I take my daughter to school. Indulgence: Daily croissant (8).

Restaurant: Sushi of Gari on the Upper East or Upper West Side.

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P HOTO G R A P H S B Y J E S S ICA A N TOL A ( 7) ; F ROM F I N E A R T I M AG E S / H E R I TAG E I M AG E S ( 6) , F ROM S L OW I M AG E S ( 9 ), F ROM T E R A S OV _ V L ( 8), F ROM V I E W P ICT U R E S / U N I V E R S A L I M AG E S G RO U P ( 1 3 ), A L L F ROM G E T T Y I M AG E S ; B Y J E H A D NG A ( D E R E G E ) ; F OR D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

T R AV E L & E N T E R TA I N M E N T

Vanities

Books Fellini on the set of La Dolce Vita; a promotional poster; Rizzoli’s new edition of The Book of Dreams, which includes an English translation and essays from collaborators.

SLEEP STUDY P HOTO G R A P H S : C E N T E R A ND B OT TOM , B Y A L L I S ON S C H A L L E R ; TOP L E F T , F ROM U N I T E D A R T I ST S / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; TOP R IG H T , F ROM P HOTOF E ST

A new edition of Federico Fellini’s The Book of Dreams offers a deep look into the director’s subconscious

W

hen Federico Fellini accepted the Palme d’Or for La Dolce Vita in 1960, the director was already

In one dream, Fellini eats spaghetti with the deceased Carl Jung, “a very handsome old man.”

such characters as Ingmar Bergman,

of a starry sky. “We are a mystery among mysteries.”

Cozy Up Fiction fit for bingeing, whether on a long flight or a long weekend at home 1 Amnesty

by Aravind Adiga (Scribner)

In this smart twist on a classic whodunit, Danny, undocumented and working as a house cleaner in Sydney after fleeing Sri Lanka, has information about an unsolved murder. He must decide

whether to stay silent—or come forward and risk deportation.

2 The Mercies

by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Little, Brown)

Spun from real-life events, this lyrical novel

charts the aftermath of a fatal storm in a 17th-century Norwegian fishing village: a town almost exclusively composed of women and girls, and the violent witchburning newcomer hell-bent on their conversion.

3 The Exhibition of Persephone Q

by Jessi Jezewska Stevens (FSG)

When a slightly aimless young woman living in post-9/11 New York is surprised to see herself in the untitled lead image of her former fiancé’s photography exhibit, she sets off on a quest to discover his motives—and, with help from interesting acquaintances, a larger truth.

4 Weather

by Jenny Offill

librarian Lizzie, her classics buff husband, their son, and her brother, a recovering addict. Apocalypse (climate and otherwise) looms over the narrative, and yet it is funny and hopeful too.

5 Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua (Simon & Schuster)

A slick page-turner that dives headfirst into the celluloid world of celebrity and obsession through the rags-toriches story of a star.

—k .w.

(Knopf )

Time flies by in this wry story of a family—

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BEAUTY REST Austin Motel sleep mask, $70. (austinmotelstore.com)

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Culture Rumors are swirling of a members-only bar (don’t call it a club), set to open later this year.

The London

A cheeky oasis for power dining and private stays from the nostalgia experts behind the Sunset Tower Hotel.

Allen and musician Dave Stewart hosts record-label execs and screenwriters poolside.

The female-first workspace where Jay-Z and Beyoncé threw their Halloween party.

the late 1980s (see: Diane Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer), in part because his designs maintain a sleek modernity without tipping toward trendy. Armani’s new foray into fine jewelry— a suite of 78 pieces, including the crisp brooches in onyx and diamond shown here—is fitting, given his penchant for enduring classics. Jewelry, he says, is “destined to last over time.”

Giorgio Armani High Jewelry Collection brooches in white gold, onyx, and diamonds (left) and white gold and diamonds; prices upon request. (armani.com)

Michelin-starred pop-up dining where entrepreneurs and producers can network in sleek corporate settings.

The latest Soho House outpost is a familiar postgame stop for sports fans and concertgoing members.

C H ARAC TE R Sketch “I grew up in Harlem, and my experiences there have informed every part of my personality,” says artist Tschabalala Self, whose new solo exhibition, Out of Body, is on view at ICA Boston through summer. Self’s mixed-media paintings—evocative figures in vivid hues—are influenced not only by her “extremely energetic” home neighborhood, but also by a wide range of inspirations including the work of Horace Pippin, Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body, and Butterfield 8.

SECRET SOCIETY

From no-photo enclaves to women-only workspaces, a new breed of exclusive clubs fuels L.A.’s social landscape, where celebrities and creatives powwow and party. In a town that touts privacy, which will stay famous?

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HENNIE HAWORTH

Sock (2018, left); Bellyphat (2016)

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A RT WOR K B Y T S C H A B A L A L A S E L F / C O U RT E S Y OF P I L A R C OR R I A S GA L L E RY ; F OR D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

Vanities

PROMOTION

Agenda DRINK

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EVENTS

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WAT C H

U.S. Premiere of Romantics Anonymous at The Wallis Adapted from the French-Belgian film Les Émotifs Anonymes, this new musical is a treat for all the senses. Angélique makes beautiful chocolates, carefully infused with all the emotion that seems to overwhelm her in daily life.

Jean-René runs a chocolate factory that is running out of steam. Both seek help from self-help tapes and support groups. Filled with all the joy and pain it takes to survive and love in the modern world, Romantics Anonymous is a tale that will lift any heart.

For tickets, visit: TheWallis.org/Romantics

F O R T H E L AT E S T N E W S , H A P P E N I N G S , P H O T O S , A N D V I D E O S , F O L L O W @ V F A G E N D A

Vanities Style

ELIZABETHAN ERA

E

lizabeth Taylor was a collector: of art (Modigliani, Van Gogh), of husbands (six), and of jewelry. In her 1985 Vanity Fair cover portrait, shot by Helmut Newton, she scintillates in the three-piece ruby and diamond Cartier suite her husband

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A ruby suite draws inspiration from a Hollywood icon

Mike Todd gifted her as they summered on the French Riviera nearly three decades earlier. In 2011, when Taylor’s personal collection sold for a recordbreaking $115.9 million, Cartier bought back the pièce de résistance. Now, it’s put forth a reimagining of all three

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pieces, with a necklace featuring seven cushion-cut rubies, and a ring and earrings sold separately. “You know,” Taylor told Dominick Dunne in her ’85 V.F. interview, “I can’t remember when I wasn’t famous.” With gems like these, we can’t either. —daisy shaw-ellis

HORACIO SALINAS

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B AC K G RO U ND I M AG E © MG M / P HOTOF E ST

Cartier Magnitude High Jewelry transformable necklace in white gold, rubies, diamonds, and onyx; price upon request.

(800-CARTIER)

F E B R U A R Y 8 – J U LY 2 6 Vanity Fair: Hollywood Calling features photographic portraiture and multimedia installations that capture the magic and glamour of the fi lm and television industry’s major players from the last four decades. The exhibition is a look at the Hollywood stars, the parties, and the powerbrokers through the distinctive lens of Vanity Fair — the most widely celebrated journalistic arbiter of Hollywood power and personality.

T H E N E W E X H I B I T I O N AT

2 0 0 0 A V E N U E O F T H E S TA R S , L O S A N G E L E S . C A @ A N N E N B E R G S P A C E A D M I S S I O N A L W AY S F R E E Michael B. Jordan, photographed by Cass Bird, Vanity Fair, November 2018.

Trending

STEP AND REPEAT

P HOTO G R A P H S B Y J O S E P H I N E S C H I E L E , ST Y L E D B Y K R I S J E N S E N ( C H L O É , G IO R G IO A R M A N I , GU C C I ) ; P HOTO G R A P H B Y N E I L S ON B A R N A R D / G E T T Y I M AG E S ( R E D CA R P E T ); F O R D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

Vanities

G E T T I N G K NOT T Y

Chloé bracelet, $580. (chloe.com)

T WO TONE

The red carpet is getting irreverent, taking pages from the mixed-up files of Bowie, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, and Oscar Wilde. Glam, but make it playful

C L A S H HAP PY

GUCCI top, $4,200; pants, $1,200. (gucci.com)

THE MI S SING L INK

Cartier Panthère de Cartier watch, $39,500.

(800-CARTIER)

I N A CI NC H

Giorgio Armani shirt, $1,995; belt, $345. (selected Giorgio Armani boutiques)

DA I SY FR E S H

Louis Vuitton bow tie, $180. (866-VUITTON)

SILV ER STATU S

CHANEL clutch, $2,575.

RUFFLE UP

sandals, $820; belt, $705. (Opening Ceremony stores)

Christian Louboutin shoes, $995. (christianlouboutin.com)

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Beauty

The pool at the Proper Hotel is a worthy place to cool off after an aromatic steam.

Serenity Now Gwyneth Paltrow might be a steadfast supporter, but in Martha Soffer’s world, A-list is for Ayurveda, the Indian system of holistic well-being. This spring, the practitioner’s herbal creams and four-handed massages will take root at the new Surya Spa at the Santa Monica Proper Hotel. In Kelly Wearstler–designed rooms, Soffer will offer a meditative oil treatment called shirodhara and full-body panchakarma detox sessions.

“Your skin just starts to glow,” she says of the red-carpet appeal.

Technicolor Definition

CITY SLICKERS

A town paved in red carpet knows how to go head to toe, from a star-favorite dentist to a new Ayurvedic spa

By Laura Regensdorf

When colorist Alex Brownsell got her start, “bleaching was such a forbidden term,” she recalls of the once-bad rap.

Years later, it’s the name of her beloved salon, Bleach London, slated to bring its painterly approach to Los Angeles this spring. Stocked with its in-house range, the space will have just four chairs and occasionally one Georgia May Jagger (an investor). “She’s like, ‘I want to be the receptionist!’ ” jokes Brownsell.

Jagger swings for pink, but Bleach’s new Green Juice ($9) quenches a thirst for a low-commitment pastel green.

Joaquin Phoenix’s weathered teeth in Joker might be an unusual calling card for a celebrity dentist, but Jon Marashi, D.D.S., has no shortage of fans—Golden Globe nominees Tom Hanks and Renée Zellweger included. For Phoenix, he temporarily removed the actor’s bondings to reveal real-life chips. “Method acting for dentistry?!” quips Marashi.

if it lasts. After Tatcha’s plumping Kissu lip mask ($28), a coat of foundation “helps grab the lipstick,” says makeup artist Daniel Martin (Greta Gerwig is a client). Blue-tone reds—such as Rouge Dior Ultra Liquid Care in Poppy ($38), above—play well across skin tones; a lip liner and brush then lend definition. Blot and powder—but “don’t be precious!”

Fit for a Star

Scents of Place

A marathon awards season calls for crosstraining. Precision Run opens in Los Angeles this spring, bringing calibrated treadmill routines to its oxygen-enriched studios. Over at Rise Movement, Jason Walsh can make you a superhero (Brie Larson) or a pilot (Miles Teller in this summer’s Top Gun: Maverick).

But the after-party moves are born at the Sweat Spot, run by Ryan Heffington (who choreographed Sia’s upcoming film,

creative director Hedi Slimane Eau de Californie ($220): “an utopia in tribute to California.”

Bodha taps a therapeutic

golden resin and floral notes impart a “sense of luminosity and spaciousness,” she says.

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P HOTO G R A P H S B Y J O S E P H I N E S C H I E L E ( B ODH A , C E L I N E , RO U G E DIOR ); R E F E R E NC E P HOTO G R A P H B Y S A M I R H U S S E I N / W I R E I M AG E ( JAG G E R ); F OR D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

Vanities

Animal Magic E H RMAN

N E E D L E P O I N T

K I T S

Grey Cat

Owl

Suzanne Gyseman’s animals are charming, whimsical and fun and they make wonderful needlepoint designs.

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Badger

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Vanities Fairground

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM

At LACMA’s Art + Film Gala, a constellation of stars, many clad in Gucci, which presented the evening, coalesced to honor artist Betye Saar and filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón

The ninth annual gala was a meeting of artistic minds.

Naomi Campbell greeted a starstruck Billie Eilish while Keanu Reeves arrived hand in hand with artist and girlfriend Alexandra Grant. But Sienna Miller stopped the show in a Gucci necklace made of white gold, diamonds, and gemstones, valued at over $500,000.

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1. Anderson .Paak performed 2. Sienna Miller 3. Naomi Campbell and Billie Eilish 4. Leonardo DiCaprio, a gala chair, with Betye Saar

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R E P ORT I NG B Y B R I T T H E N N E M U T H . I L L U ST R AT ION S B Y DA M I E N C U Y P E R S . F OR D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

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“L.A. is kind of a second home,” said Gucci’s Alessandro Michele.

“I love seeing my friends in this energy with the California light.”

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“There has never been a more important time to make sense of our mysterious world,” said Alfonso Cuarón, “and to bring order to the random nature of human existence.”

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5. The dinner scene 6. Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director, admired Salma Hayek 7. Alfonso Cuarón 8. Tyler, the Creator and Zoe Saldana

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The Obamoguls Propelled by still-potent political hope, Barack and Michelle have gone multiplatform

Empire Building

By Joe Pompeo

T

o a player like Donald Trump, deals that sweet had to be fishy: “Look at the Obama Book Deal,” he implored lawmakers this past September, “or the ridiculous Netflix deal.”

It may be particularly galling to Trump that, where it took him the better part of two decades to become a multiplatform media powerhouse, Barack and Michelle Obama have essentially done it in two years. In addition to their political and philanthropic activity, they’re making movies and shows for Netflix, podcasts for Spotify, best sellers for Penguin Random House, mega-events for Live Nation—and making themselves super rich along the way. Their explosion of personal wealth may be head-turning, but the Obamas have managed to do it without sacrificing too much of their ethical cachet.

Their budding media portfolio has a certain recombinant brilliance, fusing familiar elements to create a new cultural prestige—something with the potential to further magnify the Obamas’ already outsize influence. Those quasi-political feelings Barack Obama inspired on the stump are still what they’re selling. As he put it, a touch more earnestly, in a brief YouTube video last summer: “One way of looking at what we’ve both been doing for the last 20 years, maybe most of our careers, was to tell stories.

You want to be in relationships with people, and connect with them, and work together with them.” If getting rich is a by-product, so be it.

The Obamas are putting a new spin on an old playbook. Former first couples have been parlaying their White House credentials into lucrative next 76

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acts for decades, primarily through board seats, best sellers, and the public-speaking circuit. But a confluence of circumstances makes the Obamas’ postpresidential livelihood a sui generis proposition: Barack Obama’s proven gifts as a best-selling author; Michelle Obama’s saintly popularity, which rivals or exceeds her husband’s; the rise of streaming entertainment and social media as mass distribution engines; the intense nostalgia felt by more than half the country for the era in which the Obamas reigned.

Even by the remunerative standards of presidential book writing, the $65 million that Penguin Random House reportedly paid Barack and Michelle Obama was unprecedented, as was the rock-star-level arena tour that Michelle Obama embarked on to promote her book, Becoming. Barack

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Clockwise from top left: The Obama campaign’s emotional uplift has been translated to Spotify podcasts, Penguin books, and Netflix shows.

Obama’s presidential memoir has been coming along more slowly. It’s not lost on the Obama brain trust that publishing it in the middle of the 2020 campaigns could be helpful to the Democratic nominee, but ultimately, “the timing is driven by the writing process, and it will come out when it’s ready,” an Obama confidante told me.

As for their other media endeavors, the Obamas’ multiyear content deal with Netflix is rumored to rival their publishing payday. Their agreement to make podcasts for Spotify isn’t quite as lofty, but it is still said to be in the $10 million to $20 million range, according to sources in the audio

PARKER HUBBARD

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P HOTO G R A P H B Y B I L G I N S A S M A Z / A N A D OL U AG E NC Y / G E T T Y I M AG E S

scene. Additional media projects will presumably follow, all under the banner of Higher Ground Productions, which the Obamas incorporated last year.

The whole thing is an enormous bet on a sort of premium civic storytelling— an intersection of literary sensibilities and leftish, ameliorative politics. The Obamas, who declined to be interviewed, hired two veteran producers, Tonia Davis and Priya Swaminathan, to run the film and television part of the company, which is headquartered in West Hollywood. Dan Fierman, formerly of MTV News, recently came on board as head of audio. Sam Fischer, a veteran Hollywood lawyer and Obama fundraiser, is Higher Ground’s dealmaker. The Obamas chose the name in homage to Stevie Wonder.

Higher Ground is generally steering clear of overtly political content, gravitating instead toward a more earnest oeuvre that preaches the gospel of empowerment: a Frederick Douglass biopic, a documentary about the origins of the disability rights movement, a global food series for preschoolers. The company’s inaugural production, American Factory, about a shuttered GM plant, garnered a fair amount of Oscar buzz. Projects like these are like a plate of broccoli, but the Obamas’ power is such that they can theoretically convince huge numbers of people to devour that broccoli. Sam Dolnick, a New York Times editor who develops film, television, and audio projects, said the goal for adapting the paper’s Overlooked obituary series into a Netflix show with Higher Ground was to reach as many people as possible. “We made a bet that the Obamas’ imprimatur would help significantly,” he told me.

At the same time, Higher Ground has made a point of letting creators know that frivolity isn’t verboten.

Someone who’s taken a meeting with them told me, “They’ve said, ‘Barack and Michelle watch everything. They love things you’d never think they love, and we’re open to that. We could even do a horror movie, or a big comedy.’ But the reality is, when you actually look at a horror movie, people have to die brutal, disgusting deaths. Do you really want your name H O L LY W O O D

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“It’s got the Democratic halo, but there’s this bourgeois element.” on that? And jokes, by their nature, kind of have to offend someone. It’s a hard line to walk.”

As in politics, luck played a major role.

The Obamas arrived on the media scene just as the streaming wars drove up prices for content of all kinds.

Executives from Apple and Amazon were reportedly in pursuit. So was HBO—Richard Plepler put up flares as the Obamas were leaving office, but it was already more or less a given that the first couple were Netflix bound, considering their long-standing close rapport with Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos. In particular, Sarandos and his wife, Nicole Avant, had gotten to know the Obamas during their administration, hosting a fundraiser at their Beverly Hills home that brought in more than $700,000 during the 2012 reelection campaign. “The relationship with Ted was a large piece of this,” said the Obama confidante. Plepler, who left HBO to start his own production company, told me, “They have great taste, access to the best talent, and global distribution. If you have all of those three, it’s not hard to see them succeeding at this. I would bet on them.”

A more cynical assessment is that the Obamas are in the game of big-time wealth accumulation. To be fair, they’re still heavily engaged in political, civic, and philanthropic endeavors: voter registration, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the nonprofit Obama Presidential Center on the South Side of Chicago. But at the end of the day, all indications are that they want to be Al Gore rich, not Jimmy Carter rich. Even some of their fans may question whether that jibes with the core goodness and idealism that has made them so beloved. As another Hollywood source who took a meeting with Higher Ground put it, “It’s got the Democratic halo, but there’s this bourgeois element.”

Those closest to the Obamas reject that notion. “Their paths have always been driven by public service,” says Valerie Jarrett, “and these resources give them an opportunity to have even more of an impact. If they’re a force for good and are able to do well and make money at the same time, I think that’s what we should hope for from all business leaders.”

While neither of them has said much, thus far, about Trump and 2020, the energy and passion of our current political moment is sure to make their upcoming adventures in the media space all the more provocative. In the fall, Barack Obama took some baby steps back toward the political arena, appearing at a handful of fundraisers to galvanize the faithful—possibly a welcome distraction from writer’s block. At one such intimate donor confab in late October, he swung by the NoHo pad of Alexander Soros for a NDRC dinner with Eric Holder and Terry McAuliffe, issuing a salvo about voting rights: “I vowed to myself we wouldn’t be caught sleeping next time.” Obama won’t be sleeping. After the Democratic National Convention this summer, the general election will be in full swing and Obama will be out there campaigning for the chosen candidate. Higher Ground will have more projects in the market, and maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama’s memoir will be on shelves. By then, the Obama media footprint could look almost Trumpian.

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Money Matters

By William D. Cohan

Trading Places The frothy marriage between Hollywood and Wall Street may be too hot not to cool down

O

fficially, Will Smith was on hand to promote his new film Gemini Man, but it’s increasingly hard to tell which is his day job. Smith, the actor and rapper famous for such movies as Hitch, I Am Legend, and Men in Black, was onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, on October 2 in San Francisco, conducting an impromptu Bake-Off between four entrepreneurs to see who would get a cash infusion from Smith’s venture capital fund, Dreamers VC. Of course, since movie stars trying their hand at venture capital is now one of Hollywood’s hottest things, Smith wasn’t the only actor disrupting the Disrupt conference. Joseph GordonLevitt was also there talking about HitRecord, an online start-up dedicated to creative collaboration. Maisie Williams, Arya from Game of Thrones, was discussing Daisie, an app for which she had just raised $2.5 million that, like HitRecord, is dedicated to creative collaboration. Ashton Kutcher, the grand old man of actor investing, was also on hand; Kutcher was one of the judges of Startup Battlefield, a kind of American Idol for tech start-ups.

Smith started Dreamers VC, which has around $100 million to invest, in July 2018 with Keisuke Honda, a Japanese soccer star, using money from Japanese investors looking to get in on early-stage U.S. start-ups. “We just hit it off immediately,” Smith said at the TechCrunch conference about his partnership with Honda. “We felt like there was a beautiful intersection between being able to create businesses but also to stay focused on solving problems of the world.” They had each 78

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been investing on their own but decided to join forces. “Our values were in alignment,” Smith said.

Smith and Honda lead a team of five professionals—including Melissa Danis, the chief of staff who looks like a Hollywood actor, and D.A. Wallach, a Harvard-educated singer/investor who looks like a young Bob Dylan and who also has an investing partnership with Ron Burkle, the Los Angeles supermarket-buyout billionaire. On its website, Dreamers lists 38 investments, including those in Boba Guys—they have retail stores that make and sell boba milk tea; in Elon Musk’s The Boring Company, which is hoping to build urban tunnels to alleviate traffic; and in Just Water, a politically correct packaged-water company.

At TechCrunch, Smith jokingly ratcheted up the pressure on the four entrepreneurs as they were sharing their 45-second elevator pitches. “It’s only an opportunity of a lifetime,” he told them, “and everything rides on this. So just relax into that.” First up I L L U ST R AT IO N

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was AirBie, a start-up that hopes to be the Uber or Airbnb of bicycles. Then there was Bidder, an app that connects Latino construction workers with job opportunities. Smith seemed particularly struck by the appearance of Cody, the Bidder presenter. “You should sell your handsomeness along with your product,” Smith said.

But it was Kofi Frimpong, the cofounder of Socionado, which helps small companies beef up their online social media and marketing presence, who really blew Smith away. “I’m in!” Smith announced. “I’m in.” He hopped right up and stood next to the more physically imposing Frimpong. “Let’s rock a selfie,” Smith said, adding that Frimpong could post the picture to his social media accounts and that Dreamers would invest $10,000 in Socionado.

In an interview a month later, Frimpong was still buzzing about the experience. He says it all happened serendipitously. “Trust me,” he says, “if I knew I was presenting onstage H O L LY W O O D

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in front of Will Smith, I would have gotten a haircut.”

By early December, a plan was in place for an investment in excess of the promised $10,000. But there are tangible benefits, besides money, to Smith’s interest in the company.

The picture of them together, posted to LinkedIn by Frimpong, “is approaching about a million views,” he says, plus supercharged traction on Instagram and Twitter.

The symbiosis between show business and Wall Street is at a frothy peak, as actors like Smith, GordonLevitt, and Williams, among others, ramp up their involvement. It’s a favored hobby for entertainers in their downtime, and for Wall Street types anxious to hang out with the glitterati.

Ben Horowitz, the cofounder of Andreesen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, is a big fan of Nas, the rapper, and they have been investing together for years, including in the companies Rap Genius and Bevel.

“He just loves him,” one longtime Hollywood observer says of Horowitz’s relationship with Nas. Venture capital can also be highly lucrative (at the moment). Ed Norton’s private equity investments have seriously amplified his wealth. Thanks in large part to his early investments in Uber, CrowdRise, EDO, and Kensho, an analytics and artificial intelligence company that S&P Global bought for $550 million in 2018, Norton has a net worth estimated at around $80 million.

In many different show business fields, the talent now believes it’s also the brains—and in many cases the talent is right. The latest mind-blowing example of Hollywood colliding with Wall Street is Kylie Jenner, the youngest Kardashian sister, who is all of 22. Back when she was merely 18, Jenner started Kylie Cosmetics to market and sell makeup to her millions of Instagram followers. It was no fluke. In its first 18 months, the company generated $420 million in revenue. In November, Jenner sold 51 percent of Kylie Cosmetics to Coty, the publicly traded cosmetics company, for $600 million, a price that valued the entire company at nearly $1.2 billion. In March 2019, Forbes named her the world’s youngest H O L LY W O O D

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self-made billionaire. “The whole Kardashian thing, they are a machine,” says Chris Silbermann, the managing partner at ICM Partners, the Hollywood talent and literary agency. “That’s just business. They’ve run companies.

They know how to build brands, run brands, leverage their social media platform. That’s the top of the pyramid in terms of how to do this.”

The premier actor-investor has long been Kutcher, who makes occasional appearances on CNBC’s Shark Tank,

“It’s usually a forward-looking indicator that returns are about to pl ummet.”

alongside professional investors such as Barbara Corcoran, Mark Cuban, Kevin O’Leary, and Lori Greiner.

Although Kutcher declined to be interviewed, Cuban, his fellow Shark Tank star, emailed me about Kutcher, the investor: “One of the best. He is a learner. He reads, pays attention to what is happening around him and looks for investments that can deliver and or disrupt. I’m really happy to have worked with him and would do more.”

Kutcher’s been investing in venture capital deals for a decade and he’s good at it. He’s the cofounder, along with Guy Oseary (the manager of Madonna and U2), of A-Grade Investments and a second fund, Sound Ventures. Burkle was the third founding investor in A-Grade. Burkle invested $8 million; Kutcher and Oseary invested $1 million each. (The first three letters of A-Grade correspond to the first three letters of the three founders’ first names.)

Six years later, in 2016, Kutcher was on the cover of Forbes, being celebrated for his canny investments in Uber,

Airbnb, Spotify, Skype, Pinterest, and Warby Parker, among others, and because he and Oseary had managed to turn the initial $30 million in A-Grade into $250 million, or a return of more than eight times the initial investment.

While Kutcher has been playing the game for years, the field is definitely more crowded these days. Could it be the modern-day equivalent of the old Wall Street saw about how, in 1929, Joseph Kennedy Sr.—the father of the future president of the United States as well as the future first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission— realized it was time to sell all his stocks (and preserve his multigenerational fortune) when the guy shining his shoes offered him stock tips?

While Silbermann advises his Hollywood clients to steer clear of private equity investments because it too often takes them away from what should be their primary focus, their acting careers, he does not think the new wave of actors investing in deals is indicative of a market top. He says it doesn’t seem as crazy now as it did during the dot-com bubble. “Nineteen ninety-nine felt, This is fucking crazy, and everybody was going in every deal,” he says.

But Scott Galloway, the iconoclastic professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, thinks this so-called “sector surfing,” where professionals from one industry think they can make a go of it in an unrelated profession, is a sign of a market top. “Sector surfing is a sport,” he says. “It’s not an investment strategy. So Jeff Bezos getting to go to the Academy Awards, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just going to cost him billions of dollars.

“The majority of the people who are successful in private equity are people in private equity,” Galloway continues. “But whenever you have a sector that outperforms other sectors, it immediately draws people from other industries, and everybody likes hanging out with actors. Actors almost always have a free entry pass to any sector they decide is interesting. But it’s usually a forward-looking indicator that returns are about to plummet.”

Added one Wall Street lawyer, bluntly, “I think these guys are going to get their heads handed to them.”

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By Richard Lawson

A

new decade brings new hope—even for Hollywood. It may be pie-in-the-sky, but it’s nice to think that the changing of the calendar could mark an easing of certain tensions within the industry, and maybe the ascension of new trends and talent. Here’s my own little prayer for the near future.

The biggest existential quandary currently facing Hollywood is the streaming wars. It began as a conflict between the theater owners and Netflix, which helped kill the video store and then seemed to turn its hungry gaze toward the multiplex. Both sides dug in their heels but were occasionally dragged into compromise. Netflix now gives a few-week theatrical window to its higher-profile releases, while many once-averse filmmakers have been lured over by the platform’s siren song. But nothing was resolved in the 2010s.

Instead a wary coexistence held—while, it turns out, new streamers were mounting an attack on Reed Hastings’s juggernaut. The battle became not just streamer vs. traditional exhibitors, but streamer vs. streamer, a struggle that will likely last long into the 2020s.

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What I would hope for, as an observer and a consumer, is some kind of détente. Better yet, a constructive treaty for a war that seems to just be gradually reinventing cable television, tearing down the all-in-one-place fantasy of the 2010s and instead atomizing in dozens of different directions, each entity with its own prodigious production company attached. What might bring us toward that armistice is the parties involved doing some self-assessment. Traditional studios are starting to remember how to make non-mega-size films and could reclaim some of the mid-budget territory they ceded to Netflix in the 2010s. On the streaming side, perhaps with the influx of auteurs, there will be more push to give films like The Irishman a true theatrical run. Could enough major filmmakers force a streamer like Netflix’s hand? I hope so. Wouldn’t you like the readily available option to see something like, say, Mudbound director Dee Rees’s next feature, an adaptation of a Joan Didion spy novel starring Anne Hathaway, on a big screen?

Underlying those particular wishes is, really, the hope that the industry arrives at some semi-lasting sense of clarity.

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Uncertainty can breed invention, but it can also lead to timid retrenchment.

The 2020 film landscape is littered with the (now) usual array of I.P. products.

Over the last decade, as Disney’s planet devoured ours, we’ve had to learn how to suss out the interesting stuff from the cloud of mass-market fare. I’m particularly interested in what director Chloé Zhao will do with Eternals, one of Marvel’s big 2020 releases. Zhao was plucked from the docudrama art house and entrusted with taking on what (I’m told, anyway) is one of the Marvel universe’s more out-there brands. My hope is that she finds a way to reimagine what these movies can look and feel like. We’re going to keep getting these things for the foreseeable future, so they may as well evolve with us.

Here’s a related wish: Maybe we can learn to live with our new reality more constructively. Yes, those of us invested and interested should still support smaller, weirder, artier, politically sounder, whatever else–er movies, however we can. And, no, we shouldn’t stop questioning studio conglomerates and resisting the thrall of lockstep fandom. But as the last decade wore on, it grew hard to see the use in rigid disengagement. Some film devotees need to stop seeing every tentpole as some malignant, sticky thing.

That might be asking too much. So here’s a simpler hope: Wouldn’t it be great if Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film version of West Side Story turned out to be really, really good? That would be a nice way to temper us in the new heat of a decade, wouldn’t it? Some of the loveliest music ever written for the American stage given sterling film treatment by the man who invented all of our blockbuster problems. Think of it as his penance, if you’re so inclined.

From left: Gemma Chan, Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Chloé Zhao, Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler, Steven Spielberg, Anne Hathaway, Dee Rees, Willem Dafoe, and Ben Affleck.

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I M AG E S B Y RODI N E C K E N ROT H ( DA F OE ), J E A N - B A P T I ST E L AC ROI X / A F P ( Z H AO ), DAV ID PAU L MOR R I S / B L O OM B E R G ( S P I E L B E R G ), A L B E R TO E . RODR IGU E Z ( H AY E K ) , J E F F S P IC E R ( C H A N ), A L L F ROM G E T T Y I M AG E S ; B Y A WA R E / S H U T T E R STO C K ( A F F L E C K ); © T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY F OX F I L M C OR P OR AT ION / A L L R IG H T S R E S E R V E D ( E L G OR T A ND Z E G L E R ) ; B Y S A M I R H U S S E I N ( J OL I E ), J B L AC ROI X ( H AT H AWAY ), J I M S P E L L M A N ( R E E S ), A L L F ROM W I R E I M AG E

Wish List What if this is the decade that Hollywood does exactly what we want? V.F.’s critic dares to dream

Letter From L.A.

Letter From L.A.

By Anthony Breznican

Power Pack On the set of Ghostbusters: Afterlife with Bill Murray, as he hands the proton pack to a new generation

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and Winston Zeddemore. Also on set were Annie Potts as long-suffering receptionist Janine Melnitz and Sigourney Weaver as Dana Barrett.

(Rick Moranis, who played accountant Louis Tully, has largely withdrawn from performing over the past 20 years and will not return.)

Exactly how the originals will figure into the July 10 release will be left for the film to reveal, along with how

with Aykroyd, died in 2014. “Well, we are a man down. That’s the deal,” Murray said, pursing his lips, looking down. “And that’s the story that we’re telling, that’s the story they’ve written.”

The original Ghostbusters actors— or OGBs, as they were known to the crew—all dropped by the Calgary set of Afterlife over the span of a week to shoot their parts. Each has a meaningful role in the movie, but they

Top: Logan Kim and Mckenna Grace get in on the action. Left: original Ghostbusters Ernie Hudson, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis.

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I M AG E S : TOP, C O U RT E S Y OF S ON Y P ICT U R E S E N T E RTA I N M E N T ; B OT TOM , F ROM C OL U M B I A P ICT U R E S / A R C H I V E P HOTO S / G E T T Y I M AG E S

didn’t even have to use the magic word. It was Bill Murray’s idea for me to try on a proton pack.

In the middle of an interview on a busy soundstage during shooting last September, Murray signaled to one of the prop masters. “You think you can do me a favor?” he said. “Can you get the heavy pack? And put it on Anthony?

Let him wear it for a while. I don’t think he understands exactly what it’s like.”

There was a pause. “Seriously?” asked prop master Ben Eadie, the Ghostbusters’ armorer.

“Yeah,” Murray said. “Seriously.”

Out of respect for spoilers, I can’t tell you what was happening around us or even who else was in the scene. But I can tell you we were in Canada on the set of this summer’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and Murray, just days before celebrating his 69th birthday, was determined to show a visiting journalist that bustin’ doesn’t always make you feel good.

“When you put that gear on, it’s so uncomfortable. It’s so heavy, just to stand there with that weight on your back, tilting your spine,” he said, rolling his eyes at the memory from 36 years ago. “And we wore them for a long time.”

That’s something he especially liked about the new movie, directed and cowritten by Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno). Newcomers are shouldering the movie this time.

Ever since the new project was announced a year ago, fans have wondered if the stars of the earlier films would return, and tidbits of news have been leaking out sideways.

Murray was definitely on the set at one point, as were Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson, reprising their respective roles as Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz,

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Local teacher Mr. Grooberson (Paul Rudd) inspects a map of the town with Callie (Carrie Coon), who inherited her late father’s home.

that anyone can be a Ghostbuster, a unifying idea to counter the backlash unleashed on the 2016 reboot, when some male fans attacked the all-female concept sight unseen, sometimes to the point of harassing the cast on social media. Although that film underperformed at the box office relative to its large budget, 2016’s Ghostbusters established a new branch of fandom among many girls and women, who may be reassured to know they’ll be represented here too, with lead characters who are a tough mom and her science-obsessed young daughter.

Among the challenges the movie faces is worrying signs of weakness in the nostalgia market. The recent big-screen update of the ’70s-era TV series Charlie’s Angels disappointed at the box office, as did The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep and the latest Terminator film, which brought back both Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Reitman never talks about box office prospects. He focuses, like a lot of Ghostbusters fans, on what this meant to his childhood. As the story of Ghostbusters passes to a new

generation of characters, so have the storytelling duties. Reitman is the son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the original two films and returns on Afterlife as a producer. Jason Reitman cowrote the new script with Monster House filmmaker Gil Kenan, who previously worked with Murray on 2008’s City of Ember and is currently directing the 2020 holiday movie A Boy Called Christmas.

“If I think about who I’m making this movie for, it’s my father,” the younger Reitman said. “We all know what it’s like to be told stories by our parents. I’m really honored to get a chance to tell one back to him from the world he brought to life.”

Reitman was maybe the first Ghostbusters obsessive, decorating his childhood bedroom with a calcified chunk of the Stay Puft marshmallow man purloined from the New York set and talking about terror dogs before any of his friends even knew what they were. He wants to do the best he can with something he loves. Something a lot of people love. He’s eager to introduce moviegoers to the new characters, even though he knows many are curious about the older ones. The model scenario is The Force Awakens, which created a new world of Star Wars characters while threading through icons from the original trilogy.

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P HOTO G R A P H B Y K I M B E R LY F R E NC H

mom Callie (The Leftovers’ Carrie Coon) and her two kids, Trevor and Phoebe (Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard and Captain Marvel’s Mckenna Grace), who move into a beaten-down farmhouse in Oklahoma only to discover—as the Ray Parker Jr. theme song long ago prophesied—that there’s something strange in the neighborhood.

Unexplained quakes shake the town.

There’s an old mine nearby that bears the name of Ivo Shandor, who built the Manhattan high-rise in the 1984 film that channeled the forces of evil. Paul Rudd costars as a local teacher who’s been documenting the unexplained phenomena, befriending Callie and her kids and helping make the connection between the current weirdness and the events of three decades before.

The new movie picks up 36 years after the marshmallow-drenched nearapocalypse that’s known in Ghostbusters lore as the “Manhattan crossrip.”

Reitman doesn’t want to explicitly confirm the new characters’ ties to the original story, but fans have noticed the uncanny resemblance between cockatoo-haired Phoebe and a certain stoic scientist whose spectacles she discovers in the home amid some dusty old jumpsuits, one of them bearing the name Spengler.

“Before I ever thought I could make a Ghostbusters film, the image of a 12-year-old girl carrying a proton pack popped into my head and just wouldn’t leave. Eventually, I knew who she was,” Reitman said. “I’m floored by the idea of what it would be like to find a proton pack in your grandparents’ basement. What would that discovery reveal about who you are and what adventures you’re about to go on?”

While Murray is eager to hand off the proton packs, the 1984 Ghostbusters actors are hanging on to their original identities. They all appeared in cameos in the 2016 all-female reboot, but because that film existed in its own cinematic universe they played new characters unrelated to their earlier performances. This will be the first time they’re back as the classic characters since 1989’s Ghostbusters II. There’s something symbolic about sharing the blaster. Thematically, the new story advances the message

Reitman approached us, calling out, “Hold on! Hold on!” He swiped his phone to the stopwatch app, then pressed the Start button. “Timer!” he said, waving it before the crew.

Later, Reitman said he hopes the film will help fans feel the excitement of suiting up themselves: “I wanted to make a movie about finding a proton pack in an old barn and the thrill of

The actor snorted. “It’s that last 30,” he said, shaking his head. “And the dismount.”

I retreated to a nearby bank of video monitors as he went before the cameras to shoot his scene. Between takes, Murray drifted back to check on his new cadet. “You’re not sitting down over there, are you?” he called out. “No leaning!”

“Can you get the heavy pack? ” Murray asked one of the prop masters. “And put it on Anthony? I don’t think he understands exactly what it’s l ike.”

actually putting it on for the first time.

I’ve had friends come to the set and hoist on the packs, and it always turns grown-ups into children.”

Murray just stood by nodding and smiling. “You’ll see what it feels like,” he said.

“The first 30 seconds are okay,” I told him.

In all honesty, I was trying to stand with my back near walls and corners.

Murray is right about the pack getting heavier as time goes on, partly because it extends back so far and gravity exploits the leverage. The width and depth also make it easy to accidentally knock into a script supervisor or sweep a tabletop clear. (The flowers are not still standing!)

After a few more takes, Murray returned to assess my progress. “Your posture is already a little different than it was 20 minutes ago,” he said, looking satisfied.

The work moved quickly, and Reitman wrapped the scene before the hour was even over. Murray left to catch the rest of the Cubs game on TV, but I assured him I’d keep wearing the proton pack for the duration, as promised.

“All right,” he said, looking me up and down.

Then my very own Bill Murray story concluded with the only lie of our conversation.

“If you need any more,” he said, “you’ll know where to find me.”

Director Jason Reitman (seen here with Grace) is directing the latest installment in a franchise launched by his father, Ivan.

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P HOTO G R A P H B Y K I M B E R LY F R E NC H

Murray’s participation in Afterlife was always a looming question mark for fans as well as the filmmakers. He is notoriously enigmatic. Hard to locate, easy to lose. Murray has known Reitman since the Oscar-nominated director was a kid doing cameos on his dad’s movies, and he has fond memories of working with Kenan a decade ago. So he agreed to read the script last spring. Then everyone waited for an answer. “The script is good. It’s got lots of emotion in it. It’s got lots of family in it, with through lines that are really interesting,” Murray told me. “It’s gonna work.”

As much as Murray complained about the weight of the proton packs, he tried his best to sell the upsides of wearing one as the prop crew hoisted the pack over my shoulders and buckled it around my waist. “You can work the lights and stuff,” he said, showing me the controls. “Have some fun. Get your picture taken doing it.”

The production uses lightweight, less detailed packs for stunts and distant shots, but I was saddled with the 30-pound heavy-duty version used for close-ups, which is loaded with batteries and rumble motors to make the blasters shudder and jolt in the hands of the user.

“I think you should wear it for just an hour. Just one hour,” said Murray.

The director noticed what was going on. The cluster of workers parted as

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Handcrafted in Mexico. Imported by the Patrón Spirits Company, Las Vegas, NV. Tequila – 40% alc. by vol.

D E ST I NAT I O N

H O L LY W O O D S TA R R I N G

Murphy R E N É E Zellweger J E N N I F E R Lopez F L O R E N C E Pugh T A I K A Waititi D A N I E L Kaluuya M A R G A R E T Qualley Awkwafina L I L Y - R O S E Depp L A U R A Dern W I L L E M Dafoe J E N N I F E R Hudson A L F R E Woodard R O M A N Griffin Davis N O A H Jupe O A K E S Fegley D A ’ V I N E J O Y Randolph L I L I Reinhart Park S O - D A M T A Y L O R Russell A N T O N I O Banderas A U S T I N Butler B E A N I E Feldstein EDDIE

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EDDIE

RENÉE

Murphy

Zellweger

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME

JUDY

JENNIFER

Lopez

HUSTLERS

Murphy’s tuxedo by Ralph Lauren; shirt by Budd Shirtmakers; cuff links by Stephen Russell. Zellweger’s gown by Valentino; sandals by Stuart Weitzman; necklace

by Harry Winston.

Lopez’s gown by Valentino; earrings, necklace, and ring (right hand) by Harry Winston.

We open on

A H I G H WA Y at sunset.

V. F. asked 23 of the year’s most extraordinary actors— some of them legends, some of them embarking on their first major roles—to make a road movie with us.

They nailed it. Welcome to the 26th annual

H O L LY W O O D I S S U E Photographs by ST Y L E D

B Y

S A M I R A

N A S R

S E T

ETHAN JAMES GREEN

DES IG N

B Y

J U L I A

WAG N E R

FLORENCE

Pugh

LITTLE WOMEN MIDSOMMAR

TA I K A

Waititi JOJO RABBIT

DA N I EL

Kaluuya QUEEN & SLIM

Pugh’s dress by R13; bikini top

by Fendi; shorts by Levi’s; jewelry and belt by Lisa Eisner Jewelry. Waititi’s jacket by Bode; shirt and shorts by Reyn Spooner; boots

by Merrell; socks by American Trench.

Kaluuya’s jacket by TOM FORD.

MARGARET

Qualley

O N C E U P O N A T I M E … I N H O L LY W O O D

Qualley’s ensemble and headpiece by Gillian Gardner for Show-Off Las Vegas; necklace by De Beers Jewellers; tights by FALKE. Awkwafina’s dress and harness by JW Anderson.

Awkwafina THE FAREWELL

L I LY-RO S E

Depp

THE KING

L AU R A

Dern

LITTLE WOMEN MARRIAGE STORY

Depp’s clothing by CHANEL; jewelry

by CHANEL Fine Jewelry. Dern’s coat by Max Mara; dress by Bottega Veneta; earrings by Jennifer Fisher; necklace by Wempe.

( Bottom) ( Top)

ALFRE

ROMAN

Woodard

Griffin Davis

CLEMENCY

JOJO RABBIT

NOA H

Jupe FORD V FERRARI HONEY BOY

OA KES

Fegley THE GOLDFINCH

Woodard’s opera coat

by Richard Quinn.

Griffin Davis’s jacket from Stock Vintage; jeans by H&M; necklace by Miansai; rings by David Yurman (middle finger) and Tiffany & Co. Jupe’s jacket from Stock Vintage; jeans by J Brand; sneakers by Converse. Fegley’s jacket by Schott NYC; T-shirt and jeans by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; necklace by Miansai.

Dafoe’s clothing

by RALPH LAUREN DOUBLE RL; hat from JJ Hat Center.

Hudson’s dress by Versace; sandals

by Giuseppe Zanotti; earrings by Graff.

WILLEM

Dafoe

THE LIGHTHOUSE

JENNIFER

Hudson C AT S

Randolph’s gown by Monique Lhuillier for 11 HonorÊ; sandals

by Sophia Webster; earrings by Chopard; bracelet by David Yurman.

D A’ V I N E J OY

Randolph DOLEMITE IS MY NAME

LILI

Reinhart HUSTLERS

Park

TAY LOR

SO -DA M

Russell

PA R A S I T E

W AV E S

ANTONIO

Banderas PA I N A N D G L O R Y

Reinhart’s dress by GIAMBATTISTA VALLI; boots by Miu Miu. Park’s dress and choker

by GUCCI; boots by R13; briefs by LA Roxx.

Russell’s clothing

by Dries Van Noten; boots by Miu Miu; gloves by Dawnamatrix.

Banderas’s coat by Ermenegildo Zegna; shirt by Givenchy; pants by Hermès.

AUST I N

Butler O N C E U P O N A T I M E … I N H O L LY W O O D

BEANIE

Feldstein BOOKSMART

Butler’s clothing by Alexander McQueen; boots by CELINE

by Hedi Slimane; ring

by David Yurman; scarf by Manner Market.

Feldstein’s blouse and skirt by Rodarte; sandals

by Giuseppe Zanotti; earrings by BULGARI High Jewelry; necklace

by De Beers Jewellers.

None of them did it the easy way, and they’re here to tell you that there is no easy way. Jennifer Lopez, Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, and eight other luminous, multitalented performers get their old-school glamour on and talk candidly about what it takes to build a career in Hollywood—and to survive it

THE GREAT

E N T E R TA I N E R S

BY THE TIME ACTORS ARE READY to give the performance of

a lifetime, they usually understand a great deal about lifetimes.

It’s impossible to watch Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers, Eddie Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name, or Renée Zellweger in Judy without realizing that you’re in the presence of both mastery and ease.

That combination is the result of a journey, sometimes a long one, into an actor’s prime.

Very often, there are bumps along the way—the rises, the disappointments, the comebacks, the odd detours, the triumphs, the mistakes, the loops that can trap you before you realize they’re loops, the odd whims or phone calls or spur-of-themoment decisions that can change your trajectory forever. All entertainers eventually understand the vicissitudes of a career, but few understand it as vividly as the three people on our cover.

If you doubt it, let’s jump back 25 years and check in with them. In 1994, Murphy was a superstar who had already had his breakthrough on Saturday Night Live, turned it into blazing success in a dozen movies, most of them hits, and was making Beverly Hills Cop III and getting his first peek into the abyss of diminishing returns. Lopez had taken her first big upward leap—all the way from Fly Girl (for millennials, that means backup dancer) on the Fox sketch-comedy series In Living Color to costar of Hotel Malibu, a CBS summer replacement series that lasted all of six episodes but was, at least, an acting gig. And Zellweger, a recent college graduate, had finally gotten her big break—a role alongside another Texas newcomer, Matthew McConaughey, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, which meant that if her luck held, maybe she wouldn’t have to go back to cocktail waitressing.

As any of them will tell you, it hasn’t been a straight line to 2020.

Lopez became an international music star but also endured the Gigli years; Murphy won an Oscar nomination for Dreamgirls but also got to a point where the prospect of going before the cameras one more time made him so unhappy that he walked away from it, and Zellweger won an Academy Award 102

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By

MARK HARRIS

B Y B R I T T H E N N E M U T H , B R E Z N ICA N & J E F F G I L ES

I N T E R V I E W S

A N T HO N Y

Photographs by S E T

ETHAN JAMES GREEN

ST Y L E D B Y S A M I R A N A S R DES IG N B Y J U L I A WA G N E R

THE TRANSFORMER

RENÉE

Zellweger

Hometown: Katy, Texas Film: Judy Your brother first got you into a school play. He’s always been protective of you, hasn’t he?

Very—but he also helps me keep perspective, like with my first big, public breakup. He picked up all the tabloids, and we were riding in the car home, and his shoulders were shaking, and I thought, Oh gosh, he’s crying, too! And I look over. He’s laughing! He thought it was the best thing in the world—all the things that the tabloids say that you said and did. He started reading them out loud in a ridiculous voice. And we were both laughing till we were crying.

I’ve looked at it that way ever since.

Gown by Valentino; necklace by Harry Winston.

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for Cold Mountain but later reached a point where she felt she could only regain her life by taking five years off from making films. None of them are asking for sympathy, but all of them can explain that being looked at for a living is a complicated and challenging business. So it’s particularly satisfying to see each of them experience a glorious midcareer resurgence that also seems to be an embrace of who they are rather than an attempt to hide or alter it. They’re not playing themselves—as Murphy says, “No actor is who you think that person is”—but they’re using themselves, and doing it more effectively than ever. The hard shell of glamour, and the ambition, drive, sexuality, savvy, and churning emotion just underneath it, are traits that other actors might try to alter, but in Hustlers, Lopez embraces them and then pours them into her character. Murphy roars through Dolemite Is My Name like a man who has rediscovered the joy of playing someone larger than life, and of making people laugh.

And although people have been justifiably wowed by Zellweger’s precise and physically detailed transformation into Judy Garland in Judy, at heart, her performance embodies the tremulousness and compassion and empathy that have always been integral to her most memorable work.

It doesn’t seem coincidental that in 2019, all three actors gave benchmark performances not only playing real people, but playing real people who themselves are performers, who understand the liberation of transforming oneself into someone else and of inhabiting an invented persona, but who also get what hard work it is. They’ve been there. They’ve sweated it. They have more than earned this moment. to be said for coming at acting in a roundabout way, as Lopez, Murphy, and Zellweger all did. Nobody who sees the work done by Little Women’s Florence Pugh, 24, or Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein, 26, or Queen & Slim’s Daniel Kaluuya, 30, would deny that they all seem PERHAPS THERE’S SOMETHING

THE RENAISSANCE MAN

EDDIE

Murphy

Hometown: Brooklyn Film: Dolemite Is My Name What’s a side of you we’ve never seen?

I’ve played everything from an old lady to a donkey and everything in between.

Middle-aged women and old Asian people and an old Jewish guy. I even played a spaceship—it was in that movie Meet Dave. The movie wasn’t shit, but I did play a spaceship. I’ve been the professor, I’ve been the cops and I’ve been a robber, and I’ve been a doctor talking to the animals. To be an actor and to get to play so many different types of things…but when I’m on television, when I’m in a movie, that’s a persona. No actor is who you think that person is.

Tuxedo by Ralph Lauren; shirt by Budd Shirtmakers; cuff links by Stephen Russell.

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born to be doing exactly what they’re doing. But starting out your life wanting to do something else can make the turn to acting a decision that’s enriched by your other passions and experiences—it’s what Jennifer Hudson has been discovering in the 15 years since she broke through on American Idol, and Awkwafina in the last couple of years, as she’s turned from rap and comedy to acting. It’s okay not to grow up hellbent on being a movie star. Maybe it’s even a good thing!

Lopez started as a dancer and singer and says her influences were James Brown, Diana Ross, and “the explosive kind of performance energy of Tina Turner.” Long before she knew the word hyphenate, she was enthralled by “the versatility of singing and dancing and acting, of Barbra Streisand having a recording career and a movie career.” Singing and dancing takes strength, confidence, showmanship, and control over one’s body and posture and breathing—which was good training for her thrillingly assured work as Hustlers’ Ramona. As Lopez puts it, the role was “the first time I got to play a character who was unapologetically out for herself and kind of bad, actually taken over by greed…. She was so many different things. That was really new for me.”

Murphy’s influences have always been comic performers.

Rudy Ray Moore, the man he plays in Dolemite, is one of them.

“I’m part of the same chain as him, and Richard Pryor, and Dick Gregory, and Bill Cosby, and Dave Chappelle, and Chris Rock, and Martin [Lawrence],” he says. “We’re all linked together.”

Murphy sees his place in that time line as a kind of responsibility, one that he has paid forward and backward. “I buried so many people over the years,” he says. “For some strange reason, a lot of people in show business, when they die, don’t have their stuff in order. For Redd Foxx, I had to physically pay for his funeral and his headstone and all that stuff.” For Moore, who died in 2008, Murphy’s performance offers a different kind of tribute—as huge and rich and funny and unafraid to court preposterousness as it is, it’s also an act of real empathy for someone who didn’t get the lucky moment, the fateful audition, the magic phone call, and had to create his own big break.

And for Zellweger, “acting,” she says, only half joking, “was the fork. I didn’t mean this at all. This was a big mistake!” Ask her to name her childhood heroes and she cites “any athlete, especially the gymnasts, oh my gosh, Olga Korbut, and Nadia Comăneci, and then Mary Lou Retton…I did the sport when I was small. I know the degree of difficulty and commitment, the level of focus it requires, and alchemy, how many things have to come together perfectly in a moment in order for it to work.”

Zellweger calls herself “a failed journalist” (“I went to school to write, and here we are!”), and you can see strains of both of those passions in her performance in Judy—the absolute physical precision and the reporter’s desire to understand and convey the reality of another person and her circumstances.

NONE OF THEM, CLEARLY, have ever been afraid to pivot. For

Lopez, her career as a music performer has always been a parallel passion, not something to fall back on but rather another side of herself to turn and return to. But that didn’t make the hard moments or wrong calls easier. More than 15 years later, she still kicks herself for passing on the leading role in the movie Unfaithful. “I should have known that Adrian Lyne was going to kill it, but I didn’t,” she says. “Diane Lane was so perfect for it, and it was obviously meant to be her, but when VA NIT Y

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born just three months apart, are both 50 now, and neither seems remotely afraid of that number. Zellweger says, “I like to challenge myself physically every day with something—I’m a runner, so yeah, if you throw a hill at me, I’ll take it.” And last fall, Lopez called attention to the passage of time by wearing the “jungle dress”—the famous (and famously revealing) Donatella Versace gown that excited so much interest when she wore it to the 2000 Grammys that it resulted in the creation of Google Images. Many performers might avoid then-and-now photos; Lopez loved it. “The second time I wore it and walked out there, it was such an empowering thing,” she says. “Twenty years had gone by, and I think for women, knowing you can put on a dress 20 years later—it resonated. It was like, ‘Yes, you know, life is not over at 20!’”

(Wait a few decades and you might even get to headline a Super Bowl halftime show.) As for Murphy, the effusively proud and sentimental (brace yourselves) grandfather is now planning a stand-up comedy tour, his first in decades. At 58, he considers himself “at the tail end of the middle.” That self-assessment doesn’t seem at all unreasonable when contemporaries like Laura Dern, Antonio Banderas, and Willem Dafoe (52, 59, and 64, respectively) are all reaching pinnacles with work that feels deep and informed by experience and perspective.

What’s especially inspiring is the degree to which these three stars all seem to have developed distance without detachment.

They care about their work passionately, but that’s only because they’ve made passion a precondition for doing the work in the first place. If they don’t feel it, they’re happy to go home, where they’ve got lives they care about at least as much. Murphy, who LOPEZ AND ZELLWEGER,

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lost his older brother Charlie to leukemia three years ago (Dolemite Is My Name is dedicated to him), says nothing is more important than his family and offers some sobering words of caution to anyone who might let an eyes-on-the-prize mentality define them. “The people I knew around my age who had impact in their areas—Michael and Prince and Whitney—they’re gone,” he says. “And without getting into what they did and why they’re not here, what they had in common was that their career, their life as artists, was all-consuming. The center of their whole shit revolved around them as artists, and everything else suffered as a result. Your personal relationships, your finances, substance abuse problems. All that stuff is because show business can’t be the center. That’s the recipe for an early exit.”

Perhaps that’s why when Lopez is asked about goals she still wants to fulfill, she looks in an unexpected direction: “It’s always a career thing that they ask about, and I think, Oh, yeah.

Direct. But if you’re saying bucket list, I would say I would love to live somewhere other than the United States, in a small town in Italy, or on the other side of the world, in Bali. Find another life where it’s a little bit more simple and organic and where I get to ride a bike, and buy bread, and put it in my basket, and then go home and put jelly on it, and just eat and paint, or sit in a rocking chair where there was a beautiful view of an olive tree or an oak tree and I could just smell. I have fantasies like that.”

That may have to wait. It’s easier to imagine Lopez—and her colleagues—diving back into work, not because they have something to prove but because they don’t: They just want to do their own thing, on their own terms. “No one’s going to invite you to do it,” says Zellweger. “You shouldn’t wait. If it’s something that’s your passion, then do it. That really is the truth. No one’s ever going to anoint you and say, ‘No, no, no, you do have the skills to do this, you really do,’ even before you’ve checked off all the things on your list that you think will validate you or substantiate you or your desire to participate. There’s always going to be someone who tells you not to do it. Be around a bunch of people who tell you you can.”

T H E F O R C E O F N AT U R E

JENNIFER

Lopez

Hometown: the Bronx Film: Hustlers Who are the entertainers that you’ve looked to for inspiration?

Growing up, I was really taken by the Barbra Streisands of the world, the Tina Turners. And I would say Diana Ross, I would say James Brown, I would say Janet Jackson. I loved my mom, who introduced me to musicals and movies and fairy tales and the stories of all these different lives. People who are multifaceted or have an explosive energy onstage or on the screen…. I think that’s what I’ve always emulated as a performer.

To hear more from the Hollywood issue portfolio stars, head to VF.com.

Gown by Valentino; earrings, necklace, and ring (right hand) by Harry Winston.

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PAG E S 8 1–115: H A I R B Y DA N I E L L E PR I A NO ( L OP E Z ) A ND JAWA R A ( A L L OT H E R S E XC E P T M U R P H Y ) ; M A K E U P B Y S C OT T B A R N E S ( L OP E Z ); M A K E U P A ND G RO OM I NG B Y F U LV I A F A ROL F I ( A L L OT H E R S E XC E P T M U R P H Y ); M A N IC U R E S B Y TOM B AC H I K ( L OP E Z ) A ND A L E X JAC H NO ( A L L OT H E R WOM E N ); TA I L OR S , H A S M I K KO U R I N I A N A ND TAT YA N A STA R AV E ROVA ; C R E AT I V E MOV E M E N T DI R E CTOR , ST E P H E N GA L L OWAY ; PROD U C E D ON L O CAT ION B Y P ORT F OL IO ON E ; S P E C I A L T H A N K S TO M IC H A E L K R A M E R ; F O R D E TA I L S , G O TO V F.C OM / C R E DI T S

I think about that, I was offered it, and I had the opportunity….

I want to literally, like, shoot my toe off. I do.”

Murphy and Zellweger faced darker periods—moments when the exuberance with which they entered their profession all but vanished. Neither was afraid to do the unthinkable and save themselves by walking away. “About eight years ago,” Murphy recalls, “I said it’s time to take a break and not really be pushing at movies. Getting it right with the director and the writers and having everything work together…that takes a lot of effort, and it’s strenuous. I had gotten to the point where I was just so burned out on the process of making a movie that if I was a little boy, I would have started crying.” After a couple of years of saying, “It’s time to back off and sit on the couch and just be Dad”—he’s got 10 kids, ranging in age from 1 to 30—he felt ready to go back to work. “I just want to do stuff where there’s an emotional hook, and not just because, you know, somebody flashed big dollar signs in front of you,” he says.

At almost exactly the same time, Zellweger was going through her own journey, and doing it far from film sets. “When you repeat yourself in your profession, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for discovery and growth,” she says. “That’s not to say it’s not possible to branch out and be challenged by new things. But [I realized that] there was not time for the things I wanted to experience if I was to keep doing what I had been doing. I just hadn’t found a way to allow for those things that are important and nurturing.” So she stopped; she made no movies for six years, and she tuned out noise from an industry that wondered why she had walked away. She didn’t step back on a set until “I recognized myself again, when I had a life instead of just a profession. When I had friends who I saw on a regular basis.”

THE LEADING MAN

DA N I E L

Kaluuya

Hometown: London Film: Queen & Slim

Has there been a particularly low moment in your career?

It was a year before Sicario. I looked at giving up. I didn’t know how healthy this was for my psychological well-being. Rejection is fine. I thought the reasons were bankrupt— it was racism, essentially. It was like they were saying, “We don’t want black leads.”

I had done the stage. Done Black Mirror. Done a studio film. I thought, Oh, they want me to hate myself! I had to reassess. How do I do this by being myself? I was playing a game that didn’t suit me. When you’re playing a game that doesn’t suit you, you don’t win. Even if you win, you don’t win.

Tuxedo and bow tie by TOM FORD; shirt by Budd Shirtmakers; necklace by Tiffany & Co.; watch by Rolex; dress set by Stephen Russell.

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THE SHOWSTOPPER

JENNIFER

Hudson

Hometown: Chicago Film: Cats

What’s been a perfect moment in your career?

Last night, I had a moment. I said, “Jennifer, do you realize you’re in the film Cats? You’re singing Memory, that iconic song. Do you realize you’re playing Aretha Franklin in a movie in the middle of that? Do you realize you have all these photo shoots?” My friend Walter is my partner…. He was always determined for the world to hear me sing. When we were kids, we would sit in his car and we would use his grandmother’s credit card to buy me clothes to perform in. We had this whole idea of how this industry would work for us one day. And now I’ll be like, “Do you realize we made it? We really made it.”

Dress by Versace; sandals by Giuseppe Zanotti; earrings by Graff.

THE CHAMELEON

WILLEM

Dafoe

Hometown: Appleton, Wisconsin Film: The Lighthouse

What’s been a perfect moment in your career?

The Last Temptation of Christ was a wonderful project. You try not to have favorites, but that experience demanded a lot of me and I work best when a lot is demanded of me. I got a call that Martin Scorsese wanted to talk to me. I was shocked initially. I said, “What role?” And my agent said, “You idiot—Jesus.”

Tuxedo by New & Lingwood; shirt and pocket square by Charvet; shoes by Giorgio Armani; tie by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; socks by Pantherella.

THE PRODIGY

FLORENCE

Pugh

Hometown: Oxfordshire, England Film: Little Women

What’s been a perfect moment in your career?

I would watch so many things as a kid—so many child actors—and I’d go, Oh, shit, I would have loved playing that role! The first actress I ever watched where I thought, Oh my goodness, no one else could have done that was Saoirse in Atonement. I remember thinking, If I get to work with her one day that would be the most magnificent thing—and last year I was on the set of Little Women with her. We have a no-soppy rule in our friendship, because we’re so bro-y with each other. But I wrote it in a card and she sent me a text, like, “You goon!” She’s a magical person and a magical actress.

Clothing by Giorgio Armani; earrings by Ana Khouri; ring by Cartier High Jewelry.

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THE OPEN BOOK

BEANIE

Feldstein

Hometown: Los Angeles Film: Booksmart

Has there been a particularly low moment in your career?

I don’t know if this counts because I was very little, but when I was nine, I had huge nodules on my vocal cords. I was a nine-year-old that loved Stephen Sondheim more than anything else in the world. I lost the ability to speak and sing, and they didn’t know if I would get it back. I was on the floor of my doctor’s office, wailing. That anxiety over my voice—that panic—lives in me every day. I still sort of see myself as that nine-year-old trying to build back something that she lost.

Blouse by Rodarte; brooch (in hair) by Beladora; earrings by Chopard; necklace and ring (ring finger)

by BULGARI High Jewelry; ring by Tiffany & Co.

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EL VIAJERO

ANTONIO

Banderas

Hometown: Málaga, Spain Film: Pain and Glory

What was a decision that changed your life?

It was the day that I decided to leave Málaga and go to Madrid to be a professional.

I hopped into a train called Dos Corazón. I would say I was 19. My mother, she sewed inner pockets in my pants so if somebody assaults me, they wouldn’t find the money.

I remember my friends there in the station—they brought me cigarettes. And I remember the train did a clunk and very slowly I saw my friends going away. I remember thinking, This is the last day of me as I was. When I come back here, I have to be another me— someone who comes not with empty hands, somebody who brings something.

Clothing by Givenchy.

THE QUEEN

L AU R A

Dern

Hometown: Los Angeles Films: Little Women, Marriage Story

What was a decision that changed your life?

I think it was early on—choosing to work for filmmakers and be taught by filmmakers as my education. And that meant taking very little money, taking three scenes in the movie for Peter Bogdanovich versus the lead in a Brat Pack movie. In the ’80s, other people became famous very quickly. But I look back on my career—and I look back on what I learned from my parents, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd—and it was such a sublime moment of saying, “I’m here to learn. I’m here to grow. I’m here to work with auteurs and be of service to the story, whatever part I am.”

Gown by Jason Wu Collection; earrings by Wempe; necklace by CHANEL Fine Jewelry.

THE ORIGINAL

Awkwafina Hometown: Queens Film: The Farewell

You’ve been getting more comfortable with people knowing you by your given name, Nora, rather than by Awkwafina.

When I first started as Awkwafina, there was a more distinct duality, where this is the one that’s performing and this is the one that’s at home having a panic attack.

But as I get older, I think they’re the same person.

Dress by Marc Jacobs; sandals by Roger Vivier.

Pages 82–115: Hair products by R+Co and PSxDanielle (Lopez) and Oribe (all others except Murphy); makeup by CoverGirl (Reinhart), TOM FORD Beauty and Scott Barnes Beauty (Lopez), and CHANEL (all other women); grooming products by Boy de CHANEL (all men except Murphy); nail enamel by CoverGirl (Reinhart) and CHANEL de Vernis (all other women).

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For years, publicist Peggy Siegal was an essential New York party host and omnipresent player in the annual Oscars swirl. Then her past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein came to light. Will she ever live it down?

ON THE SCENE

Peggy Siegal, far right, with, from left, Oliver Stone, Sandy Brant, Ingrid Sischy, Terry Gilliam, and Edward Pressman at a Vanity Fair party at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Cap d’Antibes, 2010.

Regrets Only By

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PAG E 116: P HOTO G R A P H B Y J ON AT H A N B E C K E R . PAG E 117 : P HOTO G R A P H B Y RYA N P F L U G E R / AU GU ST I M AG E . PAG E 119: P HOTO G R A P H B Y R E B E C CA S M E Y N E / T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S / R E D U X

when her life fell apart. She’d flown from London to Italy in early July to attend a dinner Larry Gagosian was hosting at Villa Malaparte, the cliff-top mansion overlooking the Gulf of Salerno where Jean-Luc Godard filmed Contempt. Siegal, a Manhattan-based movie publicist and professional host to the New York establishment, was to stay on a friend’s Feadship until the party. Then she would go to another friend’s home in the South of France to celebrate her 72nd birthday.

Then back home, then to the Hamptons, and then to the Greek island of Patmos. At summer’s end, she would attend film festivals in Telluride and Toronto. For decades, the Peggy Siegal Company has been a linchpin in successful Oscar campaigns. Her exclusive screenings, and the buzz and bonhomie they inspire, are crucial for pushing members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote for films she promotes. When Oscar season is at its height, Siegal has been known to host five events per week.

The day of Siegal’s flight from London to Naples, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor contacted her about disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s social life. Four days prior, federal agents had arrested Epstein on sex-trafficking charges when his private jet landed at Teterboro Airport. For decades, Epstein had cut a shadowy figure in New York and Palm Beach with his mysterious fortune and connections to power players including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and retail billionaire Les Wexner. In November 2018, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown had drop-kicked Epstein back into public consciousness with a reexamination of his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting sex from a minor, and the sweetheart deal Miami prosecutors gave him despite evidence that he’d molested dozens of teenage girls in Palm Beach.

Siegal knew Epstein. He attended a handful of her events, they traded favors, and in 2010 she hosted a dinner in his home to honor Epstein’s then friend Prince Andrew, with whom Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre has said she was forced to have sex. (Andrew denies this.) The prince would later discuss that party in the disastrous BBC interview that preceded his “step back” from official duties in November. Siegal also knew what it meant that Kantor, who with colleague Megan Twohey won a 2018 Pulitzer for reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s alleged

predations, wanted to speak. Now that the FBI had raided Epstein’s seven-story Manhattan town house—and locked safe full of photos—Epstein’s crimes had ignited into a full-blown frenzy that seemed to expose daily a fresh set of prominent figures with links to a wealthy predator. Siegal’s ensuing fall may illustrate the extent of public disgust for the leeway Epstein enjoyed. Or, depending on whom you ask, the moral expectations of post-#MeToo Hollywood—or, the velocity of media judgment; the perils of false friends; sexism; ageism; or how easy it is to dismiss notoriously dismissive people.

After the Times reached out, Siegal consulted a friend who is a lawyer. (She’d only sought his legal guidance once before, when the TSA had revoked her Global Entry privileges for failing to declare clothes purchased in Europe.) “I felt very threatened as to why people were calling me when hundreds of people knew him,” Siegal said when we met in the fall. The lawyer referred Siegal to Matt McKenna, a crisis P.R. specialist who once worked for Clinton. Soon after, Siegal briefly retained Libby Locke, a defamation attorney. McKenna advised Siegal to speak to Kantor for the article. “There was no question that there was going to be reporting about Peggy, and I wanted the first foundational story to be in a paper of record,” McKenna later told me. The article ran on the paper’s front page on Sunday, July 14. An accompanying photo showed Siegal in a fur shrug and gold kitten heels.

“It made me look like a society lady,” Siegal said. The article described her as one of the “social guarantors” who gave Epstein a veneer of respectability. “He said he’d served his time and assured me that he changed his ways,” Siegal told the paper, which also quoted her saying Epstein, in recent years, “was in complete denial.” Siegal considered the article a disaster: “I’m now being positioned on the front page of the New York Times, along with people who really knew him financially, socially, and possibly sexually.”

Hollywood’s trade press came next. Struggling to communicate with her Stateside crisis team, Siegal fell into what she classifies as an emotional spiral. “I’m still in the friggin’ hull of this boat!” Siegal recalled. “I go out for meals, but at the end of the day, I’m back in the hull of the boat.” One week after the Times report, the Hollywood Reporter published an article on Siegal’s “symbiotic relationship with a sex offender.” Anonymous former employees described gifts, favors, and an overheard speakerphone conversation between Siegal and Epstein. “OMFG Jeffrey Epstein,” the Reporter quoted a former employee’s G-chat from July 2010, Epstein’s last month under house arrest in Palm Beach.

“She’s like, ‘You’re not dating anyone, right?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, I am, but you know, she’s very young.’ And she’s like, ‘Stop!’ ” Siegal told me she has no recollection of that conversation and characterizes the sources as disgruntled ex-employees competing for her business. She maintains that she never worked for Epstein—never had a salary, never had a contract—and that the only thing they exchanged were favors.

Siegal read the article at four in the morning. “I’m going, this can’t be happening,” she recalled. “This is what it’d be like to go

to your own funeral. Or to be a casualty of war. I mean, if I had been in Nazi Germany, it could not have been worse,” she said, invoking ancestors who died in the Holocaust. “I thought, Oh, my God, I’m on the train station. I’m getting on that train and I’m going to the camps. And this is exactly what came to mind.

This is the kind of political, social, horrific nightmare that came to fruition…. Life has come full circle. I’ve finally been attacked for nothing more than being Jewish, or being a woman, or being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Three days later, Variety reported that three studios had distanced themselves from her. FX had worked with Siegal, but Variety reported that it was “highly unlikely” they’d hire her again. Annapurna “dismissed” Siegal from work on Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (Siegal says, technically, she had not yet been hired.) Two events for Netflix’s Ryan Murphy TV show The Politician were already in the works; Siegal’s name was removed from invitations that had not yet been sent. All told, Siegal believes that in less than a week, she lost around 10 jobs.

An executive who had previously retained Siegal told me about calling his peers about her at the time: “Your gut is saying, ‘There’s no way we’re going to associate our movie with her.’

But it’s a gut check.” There’s no reason to risk outraged guests when you could just as easily hire one of Siegal’s competitors.

“An unforced error on an Oscar campaign is stupid,” said the executive.

“I sent, I don’t know, 100 emails to every marketing person, every publicity person, everyone that had done business with me over the past 25, 30 years,” said Siegal, who has landed only one paying job since.

“This was the universal excuse: ‘The corporate lawyers would not allow us to hire you because we are a publicly held company, and we cannot endanger the reputation of our publicly held company with anyone that is associated with Jeffrey Epstein,’ ” she said.

“I finally turned to a lawyer and said, ‘Who are these people?’ ” Siegal continued. “And the lawyer said, Nobody. It’s just an expression.”

she has informally consulted colleagues, including New York power publicists Leslee Dart, Cynthia Swartz, and Susie Arons.

And it’s why she would converse on the record only in the presence of Bert Fields, a 90-year-old showbiz lawyer whose clients have included Tom Cruise and the Beatles. Fields hosted our interviews in his 12th-floor dining room. (In another room, Fields’s wife, the art consultant Barbara Guggenheim, took phone calls.) Siegal remains conflicted about whether participating in this article will save her or destroy her. But she also believes that her account is her best shot at keeping the lights on at the Peggy Siegal Company. “Until you, or I, or anybody else can get the truth out that I have been unjustly accused as a woman, then I have no business,” she said. “I go out seven nights a week. I have an apartment on the Upper East Side. I have no family. My life is my work. It’s always been that way.”

The first time we met, Siegal was brittle. She cycled through what felt like the whole spectrum of human emotions. She ranted, lamented, pounded the table, cracked jokes, grew tearyeyed, reviewed movies, and praised her friends. The second time, she was in better spirits. Her hair was curled and she’d come from a Citymeals on Wheels luncheon honoring Wendi Deng Murdoch. She wore a rib-knit sweater tucked into a voluminous tweed skirt. Her appearance was as youthful as I’d been led to believe. (Siegal has celebrated birthdays by distributing

“This is what it’d be like...

state the obvious: Peggy Siegal would rather not be sitting in her new attorney’s apartment on Central Park South, giving me the blow-by-blow of her ostensible professional death. As a publicist, Siegal knows that image is everything. Revealing that her company is collapsing—she’s laid off eight employees and is down to just one assistant—could be what ends it. That’s why, in the last six months, Siegal says

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ALL THAT GLITTERED

Cate Blanchett and Siegal at a Chanel event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.

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guidebooks to aging—most recently, How to Look Like Me at 70— that feature her favorite plastic surgeon and beauticians. Listings include “the best toe reductions,” “my third set of veneers,” “a new neck,” and “a newer neck.”) “I used to be a powerful woman, but now I just go to lunch with other powerful women,” Siegal announced, displaying the event’s program.

For the record, here is Peggy Siegal’s Jeffrey Epstein story, according to Peggy Siegal: She no longer remembers when she met Epstein. (A statement released in July indicated the year as 2005. Siegal told me she does not recall making that statement.) In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a 16-year-old for sex after an investigation that began with a complaint from a 14-year-old. Siegal says she knew he served time for something in 2008 but can’t remember whether she knew he pleaded guilty to soliciting sex with a minor. “I had no idea about the underage girls,” she said. She knew that his prison sentence was part-time. Epstein served 13 months in Palm Beach County Jail with work releases that allowed him to leave for 12 hours a day. He returned to New York in 2010.

“I’m sure I had said something like, ‘You better change your ways,’ ” Siegal said. “I mean, I knew him, but I didn’t know much about him. Yeah, I spoke to him on the phone. He came to some screenings. I was never privy to his private life. I knew nothing about the girls. Nothing at all.”

In the July statement, released through McKenna, Siegal said she and Epstein were “social friends.” She defined the term for me: “I can call them on the phone. They can call me. I can send him an invitation without being embarrassed because it’s not a cold invitation. I can greet them at the door. I can talk to them after the movie.”

To believe Siegal had no idea about the girls requires some credulity. Before and after Epstein’s guilty plea, Siegal spoke glowingly of him in articles that described his alleged crimes and the ages of his victims. Either she didn’t read those articles, or she didn’t absorb much of the information above and below her name. A 2011 story about Prince Andrew’s 2010 visit to Epstein— during which Siegal played host—appeared on the front page of the New York Post with the headline “PRINCE & PERV.” News coverage at the time of the visit was thorough and straightforward. The prince’s ex-wife, the Duchess of York, clarified that she “abhor[s] pedophilia.”

“It’s so much easier in hindsight, 10 years later, to digest all this information and say, ‘Well, of course they knew that,’ ” Siegal said. “The times have changed so much, in the past five years, that [which] was normal bad behavior between genders is completely out of the realm of possibility today.”

Gossip columnist George Rush, then of the New York Daily News, remembers speaking to Siegal about Epstein while his original criminal charges were pending.

“I don’t know whether that was willful blindness, or she really just didn’t take the time to find out,” Rush said of the accusations against Epstein.

Sitting at Bert Fields’s table, Siegal did her best to explain how Epstein hid in plain sight in her social circle. But to understand how Epstein fits in, Siegal said, I would have to understand the life of a woman who built her career before #MeToo. In subsequent weeks, she devoted herself to self-explanation, sometimes calling and emailing daily. On Thanksgiving, she sent a soul-searching 1,200-word email that used the story of the holiday as a parable for her plight: a legendary dinner party that, in retrospect, masked a much darker reality.

“The men are fine,” she said, referring to Epstein associates such as Gates, Wexner, and Leon Black. “They’re moving on with their billions, and their jets, and their families, and their businesses.

It’s—it’s a little—it’s just odd that a single woman who’s done nothing but kill herself for filmmakers has had to suffer like this. It’s completely unfair.”

“I am a publicist, in the perception business, and I have been a victim of perception,” she said.

...to go to your own funeral.”

OFF THE TABLE

Siegal speaks to Anne Hathaway at a New York City Ballet gala celebrating Valentino, 2012.

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IEGAL GREW UP in a Polish Jewish family in Engle-

wood Cliffs, New Jersey. She landed her first job at 16 as a showroom model for Seventh Avenue dress company Suzy Perette. “All day long, I put the dresses on, and took the dresses off, and twirled around the showroom,” she said. To understand her childhood, Siegal instructed me to watch the 1969 film adaptation of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, starring Ali MacGraw as a Jewish American Princess. Her conversations are peppered with such suggestions, underscoring what the director Barry Levinson described as her “honest enthusiasm” for film. Her father’s family owned a light bulb factory that resembled “a scene from Norma Rae.” Their family in Poland, all of whom died in the Holocaust, had a foundry “exactly like the factory in Schindler’s List.” “She is absolutely, compulsively, and dedicatedly interested in movies and show business,” said actor and producer Bob Balaban, who has known Siegal for 40 years. “And royalty, basically. But really movies.”

Siegal’s mother raised her to believe “you’ll go to college, you’ll work for a year or two, you’ll design a few dresses, and then you’ll get married.” After attending Syracuse University, she moved to New York to pursue a career in fashion, at one point designing her own accessories line. Then she met publicist Bobby Zarem and went to work for him. She hung out at Elaine’s and delivered society news to gossip columnist Aileen Mehle. She

Siegal—and much of Hollywood—adopted his laser focus on appealing to voting members of the Academy. Siegal tailored her events to appeal to members of the Academy, earning more business and sway along the way. “She’s a bulldog. Or, better, a dog with a bone,” said Rain Man producer Mark Johnson. “If you couldn’t make a screening, and you couldn’t make the next one, it became too difficult to keep saying no to her, because she would just put such guilt on you.”

“The fact that she gets under people’s skin is kind of why she’s great to work with,” said a different producer, arguing that publicity favors the bold. Chuckling, the producer described Siegal’s annual tradition of arriving at the Oscars red carpet hours before the ceremony begins so she can greet and photobomb celebrities.

In 2016, she hid on the floor of actor Alicia Vikander’s SUV to sneak into Guy Oseary’s Oscar party—from which she’d been banned two years prior. (“For the sin of being a publicist,” she said.) She later documented the feat in her Oscar diary for Avenue magazine.

Not everyone finds Siegal’s aggression charming. Many describe her as “brusque.” She has been known to berate her staff, others’ staffs, chauffeurs, assistants, and defiant guests.

“She rules with access and fear,” said a professional contact who has experienced both. Her singular focus on A-listers comes at the expense of those she deems unworthy of her attention. “This is one of the reasons why people would think I’m a terrible person,”

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“I keep thinking, What did I do to deserve this?” studied New York society and the overlapping galaxies within it: film, fashion, art, finance. Each swirled alongside the others, interacting and colliding daily to shift the city’s center of gravity one way or the other. After Zarem, she worked for the publicist Lois Smith. Her first two clients were Billie Jean King (“adored me”) and Liza Minnelli (“hated me on sight”). Film became Siegal’s specialty. She worked on E.T. in 1982, moved to Los Angeles to work for Steven Spielberg, then came home to New York to launch a P.R. firm with Smith as her partner. Their first film was The Big Chill, which opened the New York Film Festival in 1983 and earned three Oscar nominations.

Smith left Siegal in the mid ’80s , and Siegal distinguished her business by leaning into events. She specialized in salon-style film screenings that brought together influential people from different social universes. Discussions of Siegal’s power invariably revolve around her list, a database of tens of thousands of potential party guests, categorized by the power tribes to which they belong: media, finance, actors, producers, and, of course, voting members of the Academy. She performed a sort of analog version of social media, encouraging influential people to influence one another. “She’s come up with this thing where she curates events with interesting host committees,” said Balaban.

“For instance, she might have well-known bankers or business journalists host a screening of a movie like Wall Street or The Big Short.” Guests at a 2015 event for Levinson’s Rock the Kasbah included Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mellencamp, Jimmy Buffett, Jann Wenner, and Bill Clinton. As Siegal likes to say, “The mix is the message.”

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said Siegal. She says she knows every name that has appeared in Page Six in the last four months, and Vogue in the last year, but doesn’t always know the names of her employees. “Sometimes I put a little sign by [my] desk of all the girls because I’m going, this one, this one, this one,” she explained. “Probably I would be a better person if I had more small talk with them, and more empathy for them, and cared more about them,” she said. “I don’t have time because my business is so competitive.” She demonstrated what updating her list looks like: “Here, put these guys in the computer,” she would say as an employee typed. “This one’s dead. This one’s hot. This one is so-and-so’s daughter.”

Star seeking yielded high-flying friends. A person who knows Siegal described their phone conversations as glitterati Mad Libs: Hello, I’m in [fabulous location] with my dear friend [ultrarich person] and we’re on our way to [exclusive event]. An abbreviated list of names Siegal dropped in my presence: Barbra Streisand, David Geffen, Gloria Steinem, Andy Warhol, Julian Fellowes, Nora Ephron, Calvin Klein, Sienna Miller, Barry Diller, Eddie Murphy, Barbara Walters, Peter Brant, Mitzi Newhouse, Jerry Bruckheimer, Dolly Sinatra, Queen Elizabeth’s third lady-inwaiting, and several people she seemed to think could make or break my career. Locations included Luxor, London, Cannes, St. Barts, Michael’s, Studio 54, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s apartment building, the owner’s box at MetLife stadium, and the San Vicente bungalows. (Owner Jeffrey Klein “is a great friend of mine.”)

While Siegal was building her mix, Epstein was building his on a parallel track. He too had a reputation as a heat-seeking missile, particularly for scientists and statesmen. By the time he met Siegal, Epstein’s social status was snowballing: He had become friendly with so many socially C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 9 121

His funny and complex show Black-ish enchanted Michelle Obama—and enraged Trump. Now, the showrunner starts his new chapter at Netflix, playing himself on #blackexcellence and helping reinvent television

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JOY PRESS

Coat by Versace; sweater and pants by Louis Vuitton; necklace

by Saint Jewels.

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Kenya

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Kenya Barris has never acted before but was inspired by the example of Larry David.

Barris

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Photographs by ST Y L E D

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Kenya Barris expects the worst.

“I’m always nervous,” he tells me. “I always think I’m going to fail.”

It’s late October in Los Angeles. We’re standing on the set of #blackexcellence, the upcoming Netflix comedy series that Barris not only created but also stars in as…Kenya Barris. He zips his navy-and-orange Nike tracksuit jacket over a thick gold chain and gestures around the set. “This,” he says, “is probably going to fail.”

Possibly he’s joking. Possibly he’s not. Either way, his résumé suggests that he’s wrong. Barris is the man behind the ABC sitcom Black-ish and its spin-offs Grown-ish and Mixedish and cowriter of the surprise smash movie Girls Trip, which sparked Tiffany Haddish’s ascendancy. He has half a dozen major movie screenplays in the works and at least as many television projects. His work is funny and rich enough for Michelle Obama to call Black-ish her favorite show, while Donald Trump rage-tweeted, “How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled ‘Blackish’? Can you imagine the furor of a show, ‘Whiteish’! Racism at highest level?” Clearly, Barris is doing something, and possibly everything, right. After an unexpected break with ABC—about which both sides have been studiously cordial—Barris signed a massive deal with Netflix, which has launched him into the showrunner stratosphere.

Along with Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes, who have also taken up residence at the streaming giant, he’s part of a great migration away from network television and will help the company dominate an increasingly mobbed streaming universe.

Not that any of this makes him any less angsty. Barris stands an imposing six-foot-three but slouches slightly, as if he’s used to bending down to talk to people. He has a neatly trimmed graying beard and tattoos peeking out from under his sleeves.

Bravado and a gentle, almost Eeyore-ish anxiety seem to battle it out beneath his skin. He is a man who would rather brace for calamity and let the universe pleasantly surprise him. Later, he will tell me that his mantra is “We’ll see what happens.”

Barris has never acted professionally before, on top of which he’s making a show about his family (he has six kids) at a time when, off-screen, he is in the midst of a divorce from his wife, Rania Edwards-Barris, M.D. All this might be adding to his sense of precariousness. Barris had initially planned to cast an actor in the #blackexcellence lead but found inspiration in one of his heroes, Larry David, who emerged from behind the scenes of Seinfeld to make a mockery of his own life on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Playing himself, says Barris, was also a way to do “something I was really afraid of.” And so nearly every morning for five months, he made one of the more 124

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surreal commutes in human history, leaving his family’s glass house in Encino and stepping into a nearly exact replica across town at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. The #blackexcellence set duplicates Barris’s real home down to the gray, L-shaped modular sofa that dominates the living room, the Warhol-ish portraits of hip-hop trailblazers by Knowledge Bennett, the sleek turquoise pool, and the piano festooned with whimsical drawings by Hebru Brantley.

“It’s totally bananas!” marvels Rashida Jones, who plays Barris’s fictional-ish wife, Joya, on the show, as well as writing and directing on the series. “It’s like a Black Mirror episode. I feel like I’m going to get a letter that says, ‘Well, you were partaking in a very large psyops experiment!’ The man walked out of his home in the morning, and then back into his home at work. I don’t understand how he is okay…but clearly this is how he’s chosen to process his life.”

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the #blackexcellence hashtag has been used to celebrate everything from high school graduations to job promotions to flashy new suits.

On the 2011 track “Murder to Excellence,” Jay-Z and Kanye West exulted, “Black excellence, opulence, decadence/Tuxes next to the president.” But, of course, the phrase is also loaded with complications in a country like this one. As poet Claudia Rankine once wrote in a New York Times essay about Serena Williams, “There is a belief among some African-Americans that to defeat racism, they have to work harder, be smarter, be better.

Only after they give 150 percent will white Americans recognize black excellence for what it is.” Even then, she notes, they are subject to the white gaze. Black excellence is “not supposed to swagger, to leap and pump its fist,” and the daily pressure of representing blackness in a racist culture can wear a body down.

How to translate a hashtag into an idiosyncratic comedy about the pleasures and pressures of a prosperous African American family? Where Larry David’s character on Curb cluelessly fuses entitlement and perpetual grievance, sees himself as the aggrieved party in all situations, Barris’s doppelgänger is fully aware of his precarious position as a black man in Hollywood. In a scene at a fancy L.A. restaurant, he imagines how the chic folks see his boisterous family, then feels self-conscious as he and an even more successful white TV producer each wait for their cars afterward. The valet hands Kenya the keys to his ostentatious Acura NSX sports car, while the white dude gets into his dirty Prius and gives him a patronizing thumbs-up.

V E R T H E Y E A R S,

That moment at the valet was inspired by a real experience with Jeffrey Katzenberg. Barris didn’t think that the mogul was being condescending, he says, “but in my mind, all I heard was, ‘Hey, look at the black guy spending all his money on a car!’ I wanted to take it and burn it up in the middle of fucking Fairfax.” But it’s a no-win situation. “If I pull up in a shitty car, I’m a black dude in a shitty car.

If I pull up in this car,” he says, gesturing toward his garage, “I’m just a black dude who spent all this money on a car.”

Having driven up Barris’s driveway in my white woman’s Prius (one desperately in need of a car wash), I tell him I feel sheepish.

“That’s the whole point,” he says with a chuckle. “You can do that.”

P HOTO G R A P H S : TOP, B Y RON TOM / WA L T DI S N E Y T E L E V I S ION / G E T T Y I M AG E S ; B OT TOM , C O U RT E S Y OF K E N YA B A R R I S

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in South Central L.A. with “two completely different belief systems”: His mother was a Jehovah’s Witness, his father a black Muslim. He started writing when he was a little kid, creating comic books with his best friend and selling them for a quarter along with a Blow Pop. Although his fellow students initially just wanted the lollipops, they soon got hooked on their stories of Robin Hood–esque criminals. Barris had asthma and spent a lot of time at home losing himself in the set of World Book Encyclopedia that his mother, who sold insurance and later real estate, had saved up to buy.

He had good reason to seek escape.

His younger brother had died of leukemia, and his father was physically abusive. One night after his parents divorced, Barris’s father broke into the house and his mother shot him. Barris was six years old at the time. His father survived, and the family never talked about the incident—until 2016, when he told The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum this story and the magazine’s fact-checker insisted on confirming the details with both parents.

Barris panicked. “I was like, ‘Guys, I’ve never had this conversation with them.’ ” He ended up arguing with his mother about how many times she had pulled the trigger. His mom said twice. Barris remembered six.

Stretching out on the gray velvet couch in his living room, Barris grows vehement. “I was six years old, and this is my version of the story I’m telling!” he remembers explaining to his mom. “I ARRIS GREW UP

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had to have a real talk with my therapist. I was like, ‘But it’s my life too.’ ” These are quandaries he regularly grapples with as a writer of semiautobiographical material. “You take aggregates and archetypes of people you know and make them part of your characters. You try to tell the most honest version of your story.”

I point out that some of what he does now involves processing and reimagining stories about his family, and yet this primal trauma from his childhood never got discussed.

“Never, ever,” he says. “I think if I didn’t have writing and my job, I would probably be in the hospital. Because I have been through a lot of personal trauma growing up, as I think a lot of kids where I grew up did.”

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to two decades toiling in other people’s writers rooms, working on series like Soul Food, The Game, and I Hate My Teenage Daughter. He wrote 18 pilots of his own before he landed one on the air with Blackish. (He did make bank along the way by helping create the reality TV juggernaut America’s Next Top Model with his friend Tyra Banks.) The fact that his show about a thriving black family was watched by many white folks was crucial to him. “People might get upset at me for saying it, but it was incredibly important to ARRIS SPENT CLOSE

FAMILY ENTERTAINMENT

Above: Barris on the set of #blackexcellence with sons Bronx, Kass, and Beau.

Top: shooting a 2016 episode of Black-ish with Miles Brown, Marsai Martin, Tracee Ellis Ross, Anthony Anderson, and Marcus Scribner (in hat).

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me that my show was on ABC after Modern Family,” he says.

“As much as I really, really want my people to watch, I know they’re going to tune in. I also want other people to see us… being unapologetically black.”

A sharp-witted, politically conscious sitcom in the classic mold of Norman Lear (one of Barris’s role models, along with Spike Lee), Black-ish drew laughs from the quandaries of Andre “Dre” Johnson Sr., an advertising executive, and Rainbow Cinnamon Johnson, or “Bow,” an anesthesiologist, trying to raise their black kids in an upper-middle-class white Los Angeles enclave. (“Rainbow” is also the nickname of his real-life wife.)

Now in its sixth season, the series has received 15 Emmy nominations and wrangled with police brutality against African Americans, gun control, postpartum depression, the N-word, and intersectional feminism. That has made it unusually polarizing for network prime time.

At ABC, Barris made compromises, as every broadcast showrunner does. Then, after the 2016 presidential election, ABC announced its desire to speak to Trump voters and put in place a plan that centered on a reboot of Roseanne, which became Black-ish’s lead-in to the prime-time block. The association with Roseanne Barr and the stream of conspiracy theories she emitted via Twitter was bad enough. (The network agreed, ultimately evicting Barr from her own show.) But in 2018, Black-ish became a front in the very culture war it commented on when Barris butted heads with ABC over an episode called “Please, Baby, Please” that wove current events such as NFL players kneeling in protest and the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville into a bedtime story. Rather than allow the episode to air in a defanged state, Barris agreed to pull it. He then asked to be released from his deal with ABC/Disney and landed a reported $100 million overall deal at Netflix.

“Trump had a huge part in me leaving,” says Barris, rubbing his beard pensively. “I have a really twisted personal relationship with him. He tweeted against me. I feel like I’m even getting audited more now!” He laughs, but the smile slides off his face almost instantly. He says that he’s gotten hate mail from racist supporters of the president whom he calls cicadas, droning louder and louder since Trump’s win. “I sometimes think, Can I say that? Is this going to affect my kids?”

When I ask Barris about his conversations with Disney CEO Bob Iger, his tone grows diplomatic. “You’re looking at a situation in which the media world has never seen something like what we’re going through right now…. It’s as close to a George Orwell book as we’ve ever been. And the person who decides a lot of how mergers go through is our president. And so I think the idea of the reach and the influence that [Trump] has unfortunately affects a lot of different things.” I ask if he’s suggesting that Iger chose to placate the president because Disney had a merger with Fox pending. “I don’t really know,” he says. “I think they also felt I was ready to tell different stories. They did not have to let me go, but they did.”

Channing Dungey was ABC’s president at the time; she left the network shortly after Barris did to become an executive at Netflix, where she’s overseeing some of his drama development projects. Reflecting on the ABC conflict, she says now, “This was very much about him telling the story the way he wanted to tell it and that wasn’t going to happen. And so it was a mutual decision to just move on.” The first African American woman to serve as a major broadcast TV chief, 126

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she looks back on Black-ish’s “Juneteenth” episode, about the way America honors the exploits of Christopher Columbus but not the day that American slaves were emancipated in Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, as one of her proudest moments at the network.

After it aired in 2017, Barris says CEO Tim Cook added Juneteenth to the Apple calendar. Barris is now hell-bent on making it a federal holiday.

“Kenya is a very passionate person and he is a very emotional person and he has a big personality, and the combination of those three things can sometimes be a little bit explosive,” says Dungey. “Even in those moments where his passionate exuberance causes him to just be like”—she makes the sound of a bomb detonating—“what’s great about Kenya is that he is a tremendous collaborator. He loves to engage in the discussion and the debate.”

When Netflix bosses Cindy Holland and Ted Sarandos first met with him about a possible deal, Holland recalls that Barris “talked about how for a long time in his career he’d been writing what he thought people wanted to see on television or what he thought audiences might want. After Black-ish and Girls Trip… he really had found his voice.” Barris says he’s not contractually beholden to Netflix for a particular number of projects. “I could do none!” he says impishly, before acknowledging, “I feel like I owe it to Ted and Cindy, because they bailed me out of a really bad situation.”

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fall day, #blackexcellence is filming in the plush white reconstructed interior of a private jet. When I arrive at the soundstage, three boys are perched in front of a bank of television monitors, intently watching three similarly sized actors on the screens. As soon as the take ends, Barris strides over and throws a soft punch at the smallest one’s shoulder. The toddler dissolves into delighted giggles, and it dawns on me that these are Barris’s real sons, Beau, 12, Kass, 9, and Bronx, 3. They’ve got the day off school because fires are engulfing the west side of L.A. and have spent the morning watching their dad pretend to fly to Fiji with his fictional family.

The scene involves a lavish trip that Barris’s character hopes will wow his kids; instead, they are perfectly blasé. The only person actually impressed by this feat of financial excess is Kenya’s assistant. Barris breezes through several improvised takes in which he tells the assistant he’s just like family, then tries to shoo him away from using the fancy toilet in the back of the plane. “Captain has a rule that only immediate family can use it,” Barris says with a shrug. Afterward, while the child actors take a break, Barris’s real son Kass pats him on the shoulder reassuringly. “You said he couldn’t use the bathroom. That was funny, Dad!” In America’s Calvinist-descended capitalist society, wealth and worth are inextricably connected. #blackexcellence takes on N A HEAT-BLASTED

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writing and my job, I would probably be in been through a lot of personal trauma.” the clash of class and race in ways that sometimes make the characters look less than admirable. Jones says that whether or not you like or relate to the fictional Barris brood, she is glad they will be “struggling with their materialism” on TV and helping “to fill in the story that there’s different ways to be black in this country.”

That, of course, was one of Bill Cosby’s motivations for creating The Cosby Show back in the 1980s, though class was rarely remarked upon in the series’s wholesome upper-middle-class milieu. Barris, who was partly inspired to apply to historically black Clark Atlanta University by Cosby Show spin-off A Different World, says he was devastated by the revelations about Cosby. “You have a lot of different heroes,” he says, meaning white people.

“For so many of us, this is the only hero we had. There’s so few of us who get to get these opportunities to do these things.

The weight and cost of them, it’s a lot.”

Later, Barris returns to this theme and tells me that he “cried gutturally”

RARE BIRD

Showrunner and lead actor Barris, photographed at home in Los Angeles.

Suit by Versace; shirt by Dior Men; sneakers by Adidas Originals; watch

by Audemars Piguet; bracelets by Saint Jewels. Throughout: grooming products

by Charlotte Tilbury and Jack Black.

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on his recent visit to Tyler Perry’s massive production complex in Atlanta. His eyes well up even as he says it. “The idea that this guy, on an old plantation that became a Confederate base, has now built a black-owned studio that is bigger than Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Universal combined—a black man who can go get stories made without interference from outside forces…is beyond powerful.”

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at his home induces an unnerving déjà vu when you’ve just seen him on an identical set wearing an identical tracksuit. In real life, his bedroom is flanked by closets that would make Carrie Bradshaw squeal. Three-year-old Bronx’s room is a wonderland of kiddie street style with a black Captain America mural standing guard over his toddler bed, while the older children’s spaces are more muted. Barris is currently sharing custody of his six kids and has a room for each. “They have been incredibly resilient, and they seem to be doing better than I am, which is—not a good sign?” he says, laughing. “But they each decorated their rooms, which I’ve been told it makes them feel like they’re a part of the place.”

I note the challenge of trying to create a show based on his family life when he’s in the middle of a divorce and ask if the parents on #blackexcellence will split too. “I wanted to leave it open,” Barris replies, “that maybe they will C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 8 ALKING TO BARRIS

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Paul Fortune’s 1980s Fake Club is the stuff of legend—stars, drugs, all-night dancing in a bus station—Hollywood, Cinderella-style.

And it was, the designer tells LILI ANOLIK , the real deal

DANCE ALL NIGHT CLUB KIDS

Top row, from left: Linda Kerridge and Paul Fortune; Steve Strange, Perri Lister, and unidentified friend; Fortune (in cowboy hat), Holly Hollington (in white tee), Annie Kelly (in black bathing suit), and unidentified friends; Marsha Hunt and unidentified friend.

Center: Jenny Shimizu (in stripes) and unidentified friends; Fake merch; Pinkietessa and Simon Doonan; Fake news. Bottom: Richard Sharah, Pamela Motown, and Jim Motown; Alan MacDonald (in patterned shirt) and unidentified friends; Sharah, Gerlinde Costiff, and Donald Dunham; Sylvie Temple and Amanda Temple.

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And now, for something really wild: THE FAKE CLUB 1743 Cahuenga Blvd. 462-9858 GRAND OPENING Saturday, March 6.

9:00 P.M.–2:00 A.M. Come as you aren’t.

Except you could only Fake it for real, Fake it and mean it in the early ’80s. That grand opening happened back in ’82.

And yet, because the Fake Club, Hollywood’s most glamorous, beguiling, lowdown, and louche—most secret too—nightspot was a state of mind as much as it was a physical location, the invitation still stands. So you’re on the list, among the chosen, a welcome guest. The Fake Club wants you. As long, of course, as you’re not you when you enter. Club rules.

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Paul Fortune Fearon, then 29, left London for Los Angeles in the summer of 1978: the movies. He wasn’t interested in making them or, heaven forbid, appearing in them. He was very interested, however, in living them. They’d shaped his way of seeing—every image viewed from a camera lens and framed; every person a character, and straight out of central casting; every situation a scenario in disguise, one that either played or didn’t—to say nothing of his sensibility.

Hollywood was the spotlight, burning hot and unbearably radiant, that illuminated his imagination. He wanted to step through the screen as Alice stepped through the looking glass. And in the L.A. of the period, you could do just that.

“The 20th century hadn’t caught up with the city yet,” he says. “It was the ’70s, obviously, but you could find places where it was the ’40s, even the ’30s—the people, the cars, the clothes. And there were these strange little demimondes you could get involved with or not. In the apartment next door was an old dame who was a chorus girl in 42nd Street and who was still in that world. Or you’d go into Vons and in the checkout line was Rita Hayworth, buying cigarettes. Or you’d be in the dry cleaners and there was Ella Fitzgerald.”

The practical reason: London was in the toilet. “There’d been this massive crash. There were strikes and gas lines.

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It was always raining. Then I got to L.A. I could get a great apartment for $250 a month. And no one was here! The city hadn’t happened yet, wasn’t groovy. There was space, freedom, more sunshine than I knew was possible, and almost no history. It was like a big, weird blank canvas, and I could paint myself into the picture.”

Jump-cut—or slow dissolve—to four years later.

He had done…not much, actually. Made cactus lamps out of Plexiglas (Barbra Streisand bought one). Appeared as an extra (a Stetson-cologne-spraying salesman in Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart). Let the good times roll, and keep on rolling.

“All I wanted to do was make rent and explore Hollywood and run around and take drugs and go to parties.” More notably, he’d shucked “Paul Fortune Fearon” like a shapeless winter coat and slipped into the sleeker, gaudier “Paul Fortune.” (Well, how far would Cary Grant have gotten if he’d stuck with Archie Leach? A name-in-lights type name wasn’t just de rigueur for an aspirant, it was sine qua non, the first step to self-invention.)

He’d also acquired a boyfriend, Lloyd Ziff, art director of New West. Says Ziff, “Paul was an artist who hadn’t found his form yet. But he was handsome and charming, and he moved into my Laurel Canyon house.” And he didn’t move out when he and Ziff split, Ziff heading to New York and a job at Condé Nast.

This house was key to Fortune’s development. It was where the man would make his move, the artist find his form. It was also something else. Says Ziff, “A set designer built it and John Wayne used to help. It was a kind of Mexican-Spanish hacienda nestled into the hillside. The master bedroom was built like a ship’s cabin—wood-paneled with a porthole. There were terraces and patios and a two-story living room that had a wall painted to look like rock, but wasn’t. It was this whole mishmash of styles and fantasies, and just wonderful.”

Under Fortune’s auspices, it became a home for wayward (and overgrown) boys and girls, party guests turning into houseguests turning into long-term houseguests. Staying with him in the winter of ’81 was a young British woman, a stylist, named Sharman Forman. “I’d moved in with Paul, but I was still going back and forth to London. That’s when I saw these one-night, two-night clubs popping up. It was the New Romantic era—Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants. Vivienne Westwood was a friend and she was doing her pirate collection, dressing up these groups.”

Fortune’s ear swiveled. Also staying with him was Alan MacDonald. “Alan had been my boyfriend in London. He was one of the beautiful kids who hung out at the Blitz club. There was nowhere to go in L.A. at night. The Whisky and the Roxy were too straight and rock-and-roll. The Masque was punk and punk was stupid and the music was horrible. There was a twinky disco on San Vicente. And that was pretty much it.

Everything was separate—a place for if you were gay, black, in the film industry…. You’d wind up eating knishes at Canter’s because it was the only place open late.”

Side note. The city was, at that moment, as delicately poised as Fortune himself: between its sleepy small-town past and its never-sleeps modern metropolis future; also between the anything-goes ’60s and ’70s—that brief post-pill sexual idyll when the body seemed to exist only for pleasure, biology and puritanism vanquished at last, and drugs were considered consciousness-expanding plus a guaranteed good time— and the chickens-come-home-to-roost ’80s, a decade largely

T H RO U G HO U T : P HOTO G R A P H S C O U R T E S Y OF S I MON D O ON A N ( D O ON A N A S Q U E E N E L I Z A B E T H ) , S H A R M A N F OR M A N ( F A K E N E W S ) , J OH N I NG H A M ( I NG H A M ) , PAU L F O RT U N E ( A L L OT H E R S )

defined by two dire acronyms, A.A. and AIDS. Says Fortune, “We started to think, Why not do a London club here?”

A DJ was found, yet another London exile, John Ingham, a rock critic, the first to interview the Sex Pistols. Then a venue, which Fortune happened upon when his Karmann Ghia broke down and he took it to a Hollywood garage.

“Across the street was the Trailways bus depot, and in the depot was this bar. I needed to use a pay phone, so I walked in.

It was, like, 10 in the morning, and already full of these desperate characters. But it was a good setup—a bar, a dance floor, a second bar. I asked the bartender how much to rent it out for a night. He said, ‘120 bucks.’ ” The club’s geography seemed like a play on the old cliché of starry-eyed, fresh-faced young beauties arriving in Hollywood by bus from non-coastal states to be either immortalized or, more probably, defiled and discarded.

(Says Fortune, “The people who started Fake Club—me, Sharman, John—were all Brits because Brits got L.A. better than the locals did.”) In precisely the same way, the club’s name seemed like a play on the old Oscar Levant line, “Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel.” (Says Fortune, “The idea of the name was, ‘This isn’t really a club. We’re just here a night or two a week. We’re not really club people. We’re doing other things.’ I mean, it was fake. We were just playing.”)

To understand Hollywood is to understand that lies sincerely delivered are a higher kind of truth. The club was an instant smash. “People were desperate for something. We had no competition,” says Fortune modestly. There was a little more to it than that. For one thing, the club knew how to mix it up.

So far as its look went. The décor was ’50s, and not retro ’50s, ’50s ’50s because the décor hadn’t been touched since the ’50s.

So far as its sound went. Says Ingham, “It was the second British Invasion with the New Romantics, and I was playing loads of those bands. But I was also playing Blondie, Bowie, the Talking Heads, a ton of Thriller, and then throwing in older stuff, like James Brown. One day a New York friend called and told me about this weird, great record they were playing at Danceteria, so I jumped on a plane. The song was ‘Planet Rock’ by Afrika Bambaataa. I played a lot of the early New York rap and hip-hop. Fake Club became known for breaking artists in L.A.” So far as its ethos went. Says Fortune, “We had the waitresses in T-shirts I’d designed—‘Some Nights I Fake It.’ ” Except for Pinkietessa. “Pinkie’s look was Mae West if Mae West was an English freak. She’d serve a tray of cocktails in full makeup.”

So far as its people went. There was the coat check girl. “It’s L.A., right?” she says. “There weren’t coats to get checked. So it wouldn’t be worth my while to make $3 or whatever it was I made in tips. Which is why I also sold quaaludes.” Not her only sideline. “Our coat check girl would bring out a rack of clothes,” says Fortune. “If a girl wrecked her outfit on the dance floor or just got bored with it, she could buy a whole new one.” There was the doorman/bookkeeper, Johno du Plessis. Say du Plessis, “I was strict at the door. Didn’t allow bad behavior. Or bad fashion.” Finally there was the bouncer’s bouncer. Says Forman, “One night a Trailways security guard started waving around a gun on the dance floor. He felt he’d been disrespected. We had my boyfriend follow him around, keep an eye out.”

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Above: Pinkietessa (in black), Denise Crosby (harlequin), and Bette Davis Dancers. Right: Simon Doonan as Queen Elizabeth.

So far as its locale went. Says Fortune, “I’d closed up for the night. Right there on the street, a guy was getting stabbed.” Fake Club was a tarnished romance in the way that, say, Casablanca was a tarnished romance, as well as a send-up of the very idea of romance, tarnished or otherwise; a dream of a Hollywood nightclub set in a real Hollywood neighborhood; ironic and poignant simultaneously. “Who wasn’t a Faker?” says Fortune, less modestly, more accurately.

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And the Clash.

The Go-Go’s. Jackson Browne and Daryl Hannah. Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson.

Musicians Marianne Faithfull and Chrissy Hynde. Artists Ed Ruscha and David Hockney. Writers Eve Babitz and Bruce Wagner. Photographer Herb Ritts. Models Janice Dickinson, Kelly LeBrock, Linda Kerridge, though not Britt Ekland. (“She tried to throw her fame about so I didn’t let her in,” says du Plessis. “I never needed to throw my fame about,” Ekland scoffs.) American gigolo Richard Gere, along with Gigolo’s poster creator, Paul Jasmin, and director, Paul Schrader. Anjelica Huston and Beverly D’Angelo (“The girls who liked to dance and get high,” says Fortune). Porn actor Leo Ford. The man who taught Michael Jackson how to moonwalk, Jeffrey Daniel. Pre-Barneys Simon Doonan, sometimes in Queen Elizabeth drag. Kevin Costner, then unknown. Actor EL GIBSON WAS A FAKER.

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PICTURE THIS Large photograph: Eddie Dodson. Top row, from left: Chris Kelman; Maripol and Benedicte Siroux.

Center: Louise de Teliga, Sharman Forman, and Annie Kelly; John Ingham. Bottom: Ian Falconer and John Cameron Mitchell; Marisa Berenson and Paul Jasmin; Fortune, Jeff Judd, and two unidentified dancers; Juliette Hohnen and Madonna.

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Blackie Dammett and his boy, future Red Hot Chili Pepper Anthony Kiedis. (“On a lucky night, [I] got cozy with Susan Sarandon and Kristy McNichol in one of the club’s leatherette booths,” writes Dammett. “Another night, I wandered into the rear lounge and found my underage son leaning against the bar.”)

The Interview crew—Andy Warhol, Joan Quinn, Lisa Love.

Peter Morton, whose new restaurant, Hard Rock Café, Fortune christened by dropping a Cadillac through its roof. MTV had launched six months before, transforming music into something you saw as well as heard, and Fortune, by day, was art-directing videos, such as Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” (Forman did the wardrobe). The reason Boy George, Steve Strange, and Annie Lennox were there too. And Prince (“He DJ’d for us once or twice. Played his own songs,” says Fortune). Also, Ione Skye and Rick Owens, like Kiedis, not yet old enough to drink legally. (“I’d let the kids in the back,” says Fortune.)

And then the clock struck two and the Fake Club turned back into a pumpkin, or rather, a bus depot bar. Says Forman, “You’d be full-throttle dancing and carrying on and the management would switch on the lights and it was done, had to be or the fire marshals would come.” Pas de problème.

Everybody just moved on over to Fortune’s without losing the beat or their buzz.

“My house was absolutely Fake Club after hours. Some crazy person would always show up and define the night.”

Like Mick Jagger. Or Madonna. (Fortune: “I was friends with Maripol [a stylist] and I hung out on the ‘Burning Up’ shoot.

I teased Madonna the whole time.”) And there was the constant stream of visitors. “Rupert Everett, John Sex, John Maybury, Ian Falconer—too many to possibly remember.” And overnight visitors. “The photographer Brad Branson lived with me for a while, and his boyfriend was George Michael, who I’d bump into in the kitchen in his red bikini underwear. George Michael was also the boyfriend of the coat check girl. That was later, though.”

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the spirit of the club perhaps most vividly, however, wasn’t famous, though he was a star. Eddie Dodson. Says Fortune, “Eddie had a great antique store on Melrose, except it was really a cover for the coke business in the back.

He was this charming guy—Southern, a jokester, lots of women around him, and he’d manipulate them with drugs.”

Not just the women, according to Forman. “One night Eddie took a gram of cocaine, threw it in the air. It landed on the dance floor. All the people fell to their knees and began snorting.” Dodson became addicted to his own wares. Louise de Teliga, Dodson’s girlfriend: “We were all doing piles of coke, but I’d left him by the time he got really crazy with the drugs. Then he and Marisa Berenson [model and socialite] dated for a while.” He started experimenting with a different felonious medium. Says Fortune, “Louise was the first to figure out that he was a bank robber. The biggest ever, apparently.”

Dodson robbed a record-setting 64 banks in eight months, six in a single day. “And he didn’t even use a gun. He used a starter’s pistol—talk about faking it!”

Not so tough to do when your life is no longer real to you, is a movie playing in the screening room of your mind, and you’re the lead, a devil-may-care gentleman outlaw. “Once Doddy picked up Marisa in his convertible,” says Jasmin. “He told her he had to run an errand. He robbed a bank, got back in the car,

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took her to lunch. She had no clue.” (Says Berenson: “This story is not at all true about me and Dodson.”) Dodson would go even further with Fortune. “Eddie robbed a bank and I was in the car. We were on our way to an auction, and he said he had to stop for some cash. I might’ve been arrested or shot. The money had a dye pack in it, and it exploded. I couldn’t leave the house for a week.”

On February 10, 1984, the law caught up with Eddie Dodson. Or maybe it was reality. There was a standoff at the Farmer’s Daughter motel on Fairfax. The cops’ guns weren’t starter pistols, and they dragged Dodson off to jail and that was that. The rhapsody of sex, rebellion, fatalism, and the movies was over.

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at around the same time—December ’83. Physical and emotional limits had been reached. Says Fortune, “I was doing more music videos. One morning I got in the car, and I couldn’t get the key in the ignition. I thought, This has to stop.” It was bigger, though, than a change in Fortune personally.

In the two short years of Fake Club’s existence, there’d also been a change in the culture at large. People were strung out.

“The drug scene was dying, or at least going underground.”

And freaked out. “We’d been aware of this mystery disease.

Friends were disappearing. But we hadn’t quite figured it out, so we partied. Then it got serious.”

The irony was, after Fake Club, L.A.’s club scene exploded.

Making the loudest kaboom was Power Tools, founded in 1985 by Fortune’s former roomie Brad Branson and Matt Dike, with Jon Sidel joining later. So why did Power Tools rise to legend and Fake Club fall into obscurity? Did Fake Club come along too soon, before people realized a trend had begun and to perk up, pay attention? Or was it that Fake Club, which catered to a slightly older crowd, the 30-plus Boomers, was getting supplanted by a new generation? (Branson, Sidel, and Dike were all X-ers.) Or was Fake Club so close to a dream that it dissolved in the mind the way a dream dissolves, leaving behind no residue or ripple?

Though Fortune continued to go to clubs, he never again ran one. He’d moved on. An easy transition for him, as it turned out. The directors of those music videos were suddenly rich. They bought houses. They knew Fortune could dress a set, so why not a house? Out of the blue, he had a whole new line of work—interior design—for which he’d become celebrated, his clients including Marc Jacobs and David Fincher. He’d also co-create Les Deux Café, remake the Sunset Tower Hotel, act in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.

Forman moved on as well. “I quickly realized that you couldn’t duplicate Fake Club. It was a mixture of magic and chemicals and people and timing.” Money too. Or lack thereof.

Once word got out that these clubs were bringing in heavy cash, the artists and renegades were done for. Everything became formalized, corporatized. Fortune: “We opened Fake Club for a couple hundred bucks. It would take $20 million to open that same club today. And it wouldn’t be any better. In fact, it would be worse. A certain innocence, a certain esprit was lost.

We had control. We didn’t have to listen to hedge fund guys or whomever. We could do it ourselves. That it wasn’t serious, that it wasn’t professional is why it worked, why it was special.”

If you can’t Fake it, don’t make it.

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FULL EXPOSURE Top row, from left: Brad Branson and Leo Ford; John Maybury and Rupert Everett; Holly Hollington; Lisa Love and Hamish Bowles. Center: Linda Kerridge and unidentified friend; Alicia Bernard (at left), Buck Henry (in blue hat),

and Debi Mazar (in turban); Holly Hollington (with mouth open), Annie Kelly (in black bathing suit), Tim Street-Porter (sticking out tongue), and unidentified friends; Duggie Fields, Simon Doonan, and Kelly. Bottom: Wolfgang Tillmans (at left), Laila Kabulikan (in white tee), Louise de Teliga (in dark dress), Thom Browne (in blue shirt), and unidentified friends; Zoe Cassavetes and Ione Skye; Janice Dickinson, Donna Karr, and Jonathan Karr; Bruce Wagner and Cotty Chubb.

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NERVE

WME’s Ari Emanuel planned to put his agency and the very power structure of Hollywood on the line with an audacious, now-scuttled public offering. With that future on hold and the likes of Netflix and Disney commanding more ground by the day, RICHARD RUSHFIELD takes the mood among the machers I L L U ST R AT IO N

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AGENT GRAND AMBITION

Ari Emanuel hatched a plan to use a talent agency to compete with Hollywood’s tech upstarts.

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The gloom

filling the Goldman Sachs conference room that Thursday was undeniable. This was supposed to be a celebration. After two decades watching the tech world run laps around Hollywood—and ultimately threaten to devour it—Endeavor Inc. and Ari Emanuel, the perpetual ambition machine who has served as its engine for decades, were about to break into the league of titans with that ultimate corporate bar mitzvah, an IPO—the first agency in Hollywood history to go public. The 7,000-employee media conglomerate forged long ago on the back of a boutique talent agency specializing in TV writers was to become a giant outside its own walled-off industry, backed by the public capital of investors large and small. After 24 years of relentless growth, this was the big event. They would acquire the capital not just to make those who had followed Emanuel and his hyperkinetic vision all these years very rich, but that would allow the company to truly compete with the very forces that have reshaped the entertainment industry in the last decade: Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. (In October, WME began representing Condé Nast Entertainment, a division of Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast.)

Four months before, the IPO process had kicked off with customary Emanuel-esque fanfare and bravado, hailing the future of entertainment media. But there were signs for concern. The years leading to the finish line had seen the company’s first extended rough patch. Things arguably started in 2016 with the matter of Donald Trump, whom William Morris Endeavor repped in his previous life as a game show host. It certainly didn’t hurt Lew Wasserman when his former client Ronald Reagan entered the White House, but this was a different kind of calling card entirely. Then, like every company in Hollywood, Endeavor had been forced to take stock of its culpability in the industry’s power structure thanks to the #MeToo era that Trump’s election had helped presage. (They have had to publicly announce investigations into harassment accusations against two agents.) Add to that the matter of WME’s newest investor, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Emanuel hosted on his grand tour of Hollywood in the spring of 2018. (As had Rupert Murdoch and Bob Iger.) The goodwill resulted in a $400 million investment, a check Emanuel felt compelled to return after the Saudibacked murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi six months later.

In March came the Writers Guild dispute which saw TV writers fire their agents en masse over what they saw as agency overreach when it comes to packaging fees. The standoff has dragged on since. It had been a tough stretch on the personal front as well. Both Emanuel and WME partner Patrick

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Whitesell saw marriages end in recent years. The latter’s breakup became international tabloid fodder when word got out that his wife was having an extramarital affair with the Lord of Amazon himself, Jeff Bezos.

Market forces weren’t exactly in WME’s favor either. In the weeks ahead of its planned IPO, high-flying tech launches built by charismatic founders had floundered or wrecked beneath sudden Wall Street skepticism. WeWork’s smashup, still unfolding as the Endeavor gang gathered in the Goldman offices, was so spectacular and tragicomic that it sucked the appetite for newfangled business models right out of the market. Then, on the eve of Endeavor’s pricing, Peloton hit the skids. The cultish home-workout brand downgraded its offering and prepared to open even below that new low.

And yet on this day, all such matters—macro and micro— were back of mind as WME and its bankers set to crunching the numbers to arrive at a stock valuation. And then crunch them again. And again.

Emanuel and the team worked the figures with the Goldman advisers, searching for a scenario, any scenario, that would produce an inside straight. Nothing seemed to work, and slowly the room began to realize that going public would mean setting a price far below what they had come for, and probably getting even less than that. For the many agents and executives of William Morris Endeavor who had followed Emanuel through the wilderness, working at reduced pay in exchange for equity, it was the jackpot deferred. And for many observers both in and outside the company, it was the unthinkable: The unstoppable Ari Emanuel had met an immovable object.

Word quickly got out, and from one end of town to the other, the schadenfreude flowed. After decades of watching Emanuel grow, grow, grow—dangerously! recklessly! so many had warned—finally, the comeuppance. WME president Ari Greenburg was en route to the New York Stock Exchange for the traditional bell ringing and had to be called back. Someone forgot to cancel the In-N-Out truck that had been ordered for the next day’s soirée at the company’s headquarters. The would-be centerpiece of the celebration became a glum consolation. No zillions this year, but here’s a cheeseburger. In the days to come, stories ricocheted across L.A. of real estate agents who suddenly found their weekends free as WME agents canceled their appointments to search for that perfect upgrade in the hills. By December, the New York Post was reporting that a number of agents at the company were feeling burned and eyeing the exits.

“The first rule of agenting is don’t count your chickens,” said one observer. “A lot of people had calculated the price tags on a lot of chickens.”

Such sentiment shouldn’t come as a surprise in a town that’s never been rich in sympathy for one’s rivals. But speaking to other agents and industry players in the months since WME’s failure to launch has yielded much more than just the usual told-ya-sos and grave dancing. As of this writing, the entire entertainment industry is marching toward a cliff commonly called the streaming wars. After years of ignoring the disruptive potential of on-demand video and actively licensing their product to their usurpers, the button-downed mandarins of today’s Hollywood have finally taken note. Everyone is spending at levels never seen before to try to capture a piece of the new market, which may, in the course of things, displace not just traditional cable money but the entire movie business.

Does any of this add up? What lies on the other side of the cliff? No one knows, but it will certainly bring ruin and disaster for at least some of them. Is each little Hollywood fiefdom meant to sit patiently and wait to be swallowed? Since the ’80s, but really even back to the days of radio, agencies have supplemented their 10 percent commissions with packaging fees— an arrangement through which an agency bundles clients into one project and forgoes its usual commission for a share of the eventual revenue. The upside became so lucrative in recent years that it essentially paid for A-list agenting: offices, suits, cars, travel. The arrival of the streaming giants caused the packaging well to dry up. The streamers by and large pay huge prices for shows and their rights, which means no back end or ownership. For the agencies, that meant falling back on a business of working just for commissions. Endeavor’s push to grow and diversify can be seen as a need to have a product that’s more durable and independent of the goodwill of clients (whose own career life spans are getting shorter).

Love it or hate it, WME’s moon shot had come to represent (and may yet still) a different kind of Hollywood future—one grounded in a romanticized version of its past as home to outsize egos and galactic ambitions. Emanuel’s fate presented a veritable whiteboard upon which so many in town could mark up their own existential anxieties. So have we reached the natural limits of how far a brash, swashbuckling showbiz mogul can go on energy and imagination? Or is a force of nature like Ari-dom not to be that easily derailed? ne can’t overstate just how big a splash Ari Emanuel (who declined to speak for this article) has made in Hollywood for so long now. From his very earliest days out of the training program at Creative Artists Agency and then as a young upstart agent with a 1,000-words-a-minute elocution at the midtier firm InterTalent, legends of Emanuel’s ambition have been a constant. By his mid-20s, Emanuel had become a devotee of the futurist George Gilder, whose 1990 book Life After Television anticipated the streaming era. Still barely more than a trainee, Emanuel brought the writer predicting a postnetwork world to speak at the agency, which was then living at the height of traditional network deals. It wasn’t all techno-futurism and media theory. A hard-charging, frattish culture took shape around the young InterTalent group. Trash talking at the weekly office basketball games was so fearsome that even hardened Hollywood players wilted before the put-downs.

“There was one game where my agent’s assistant was fouling me hard—hard!—and calling me a useless moron,” recalls one occasional player.

And when in 1995, Emanuel and three other agents broke off on their own to form the Endeavor talent agency, the legend only grew.

“There was the hazing,” one early Endeavor employee recalls. “It was this group of guys who were all interconnected.

They had the boarding school connections, a lot of Harvard.

And you felt that when you went there. It was frat type guys running their company like a frat.”

The antics would later be embarrassingly revealed in 2002 when agent Sandra Epstein sued the firm, alleging a culture of sex on desks, casual pot smoking, and one instance of an assistant being ordered to book prostitutes for his boss. The suit was settled out of court.

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The stories of Emanuel’s volcanic temper became a subgenre of their own: tales of him berating employees or rivals, lobbing projectiles across the office, or, as one observer remembers fairly recently, beating to death his laptop in his building’s garage. There are his health regimens. At six feet one and a lean 165 pounds, Emanuel practices a strict vegan diet with intermittent fasts. He works at a treadmill desk. In the mid-aughts, Entourage and Jeremy Piven introduced an exaggerated idea of Emanuel to the broader public consciousness. But not even a premium cable parody builds a legend like success.

In 1995, Endeavor came into being as a nearly micro boutique with a specialty in TV writers at a time when the agency world was defined by the overwhelming shadow of Mike Ovitz and Ron Meyer’s CAA, unchallenged champion of the 10-percent world. Emanuel and his hard-driving partners grew their little boutique to the point where, in the important (soon to be all-important) world of TV series creation, they challenged and even surpassed CAA in deals.

In 2009, the feisty start-up did the impossible and merged with—effectively swallowed up—the stalwart of Hollywood stalwarts, the William Morris Agency; still a formidable company, particularly in the music business, where Endeavor was weak. In the absorption, Emanuel and William Morris Endeavor became the first true rival CAA had seen, eventually joining it along with UTA, ICM, and Paradigm in the five-part hegemony that has presided since. The rivalry with CAA also created another comparison, between Emanuel and the great dealmaker of the previous generation, Ovitz.

“The first rule of agenting is DON’T COUNT YOUR CHICKENS. A lot of people had calculated the price tags on a lot of chickens.”

In his 2018 memoir, Ovitz himself called Emanuel and Whitesell his “real heirs.” One can take this as a swipe at his own former protégés or as an attempt to aggrandize himself by association with Emanuel’s building of the sort of multipronged media company he was never able to turn CAA into. But the comparisons to Ovitz, a slash-and-burn business practitioner, have their limits. Emanuel, despite the yelling and laptop beating, engenders a remarkable loyalty from those around him. Former assistants gush, which is almost unheard of in Hollywood. Even outsiders who are extremely skeptical of his imperial designs can’t help but lavish praise. “Ari is the hardestworking man in this business. There is no one more dedicated to his company,” says one source I spoke with for this piece, having finished tearing down the greater Endeavor vision. s WME grew, Emanuel hatched a plan to use a talent agency, of all things, to combat the tech interlopers awakening to Hollywood’s potential. It’s a plan that demonstrates Emanuel’s singular place in Hollywood circa 2020. For more than a century, the film business has been a sanctuary for moderately unhinged C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 1 4 8

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PUSHING BACK

Lee Grant, seen here in a 1970 TV movie, turned to directing to have a voice.

“IF YOU’RE NOT BEAUTIFUL, YOU’RE FINISHED” The Hollywood blacklist, sex on sets, ageism, sexism, the charms of Warren Beatty: The elegant, indomitable, Oscarwinning actor and director Lee Grant speaks the truths of a lifetime

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ing documentarian, Lee Grant is a lovely host—quick-witted, warm, and fiercely candid about the obstacles that life and Hollywood continue to throw into the path of women. Grant— who is now in her early 90s—made a sensational film debut opposite Kirk Douglas in 1951’s Detective Story, winning best actress at Cannes, as well as being nominated for an Academy Award. Then the blacklist struck. While giving a eulogy, Grant had suggested that an actor friend’s death had been hastened by the trauma of being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee. She was largely sidelined between the ages of 24 and 36. Compounding her difficulties was an unhappy relationship with her first husband, blacklisted screenwriter Arnold Manoff, which Grant chronicles in her memoir, I Said Yes to Everything.

When Grant returned to the screen in the mid 1960s, the ageism of the industry was debilitating. Still, she won the 1966 supporting actress Emmy for Peyton Place, the 1976 supporting actress Oscar for Shampoo, and earned two additional Academy Award nominations for The Landlord and Voyage of the Damned. In the 1980s, Grant pivoted to filmmaking, presciently shining a light on social issues like income inequality and poverty in America, most notably in her Oscar-winning 1986 documentary Down and Out in America.

During my three-hour visit to her home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Grant gave me a tour of the artwork and personal photographs papering her walls, referred me to her Pilates instructor, and offered me sincere relationship advice.

After settling into a comfortable corner of her bedroom, she talked passionately about a range of subjects. They included the horrors leveled at women in the industry; her memories from the sex-crazed set of Shampoo; and her happy second marriage, to producer and painter Joseph Feury.

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PAG E S 14 0–4 1: I M AG E F ROM A B C P HOTO A R C H I V E S / WA L T DI S N E Y T E L E V I S ION / G E T T Y I M AG E S . PAG E S 14 4 –4 5: I M AG E F ROM T H E E V E R E T T C OL L E CT ION

ON TOP OF BEING AN OSCAR-WINNING actor and a trailblaz-

J.M.: In your memoir, you described a pivotal moment with your then husband that encapsulates so many themes about not just being a woman but being a woman in Hollywood: You were offered an acting job and your husband told you he would leave you if you took it. You were in your mid-30s. You’d been blacklisted and hadn’t worked steadily in years.

And you took the job.

L.G.: My first marriage was [with] somebody who had no need for me at all. He had two boys he didn’t want to give to the boys’ mother because he’d have to pay alimony, so he [wanted me to basically be] an au pair who would be there, cook dinner and take care of the boys so he could make a living. That’s exactly what I became until he said, “If you leave, we’re finished.”

Thank God his feelings toward me were so evident that, at last, my pride wouldn’t let me go back there to take care of the children.

I had no control over my life.

I had a daughter who was about four at the time, and I knew that if I didn’t work, I’d lose her.

My whole focus at that time was to keep Dinah. If I didn’t have her, I had nothing. I had no other means of making a living. The only thing I could do was act, and I had to look 29 for this part.

You went to what, for the time, were great lengths to make sure you did look 29—you got a face-lift.

Did you hear of other actresses doing the same thing?

No, but I was sick. It was neurosis….

I was so panicked after being blacklisted from 24 to 36. I mean, think about that age.

It’s your prime age as an actress.

It’s the only age. At 36, you’re a character actress. I didn’t even enter Hollywood until 36, and I spent the next 12 years trying to hide my age every way I could— on my passport, on my driver’s license, in publicity. I really was panicked they would find out how old I was and not hire me. You get a little nuts.

This was in the 1950s. Were you scared that something might go wrong during the face-lift procedure?

No. It was, “Please, save my life.”

As women we’re taught that so much of our worth is appearancerelated. When you’re an actress, that pressure must be exponentially worse.

That’s all that exists in Hollywood for women. If you’re not beautiful, you’re finished. You can be cute. You can be pert. But you have to be young. It’s not like with the English, where there is a different kind of measurement.

In England, you can be a 90-year-old woman, respected as an actor, and work.

You mentioned that at age 36, you’re considered a character actress….

I’ve never, ever, ever wanted to be the lead in movies. Never.

agent was gay. He couldn’t care less about me. He was crazy about Joey.

[Grant married Feury in 1973.]

Anjelica Huston spoke recently about the climate in Hollywood during the 1970s, and the parties that people like Jack Nicholson threw.

That was our group. Brenda Vaccaro and Michael Douglas were together. The parties at their house were amazing—everyone you ever wanted to meet in your life.

It was every week. The door opened and somebody from Paris would come in. Somebody from England. Some great comic. Every director. Everybody was kind of beautifully stoned. It was like an

In the middle of this party, she was writing her lists of what to get for the kitchen or something like that.

I just saw him move right out of my life. Of course, she didn’t pay any attention to him, which was so much more attractive to him.

In Shampoo, you won an Oscar for playing the mother of Carrie Fisher’s character. What do you remember about her, and more generally, about being on set?

Her character played tennis, so she was in white shorts—her legs and arms were as white as her shorts were. She just was so exquisite with that little face, and her big, dark eyes. She had a mystery to her. The scene where Warren was in the

“I was so panicked after being blacklisted...

I spent the next 12 years trying to hide my age on my passport, my driver’s license, in publicity....”

Because the lead part is always attached to box office. No matter how interesting you are, if the money doesn’t come in at the box office, you don’t get your next movie. Take Faye Dunaway. She did Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky—[whom] I worship.

Somebody comes along, only once a lifetime, and is able to rip the falseness off of what the industry was. But she was remarkable and got the Oscar for Network. Two pictures later, my agent, who was also her agent, was sitting in the dailies watching a film she was working on.

He overheard [someone] saying, “Look at that fat pig.”

There has been a deluge of horrifying Hollywood stories in light of #MeToo. Did you have any of those kinds of encounters?

No. What do you attribute that to?

Those years I was acting, the directors that were coming out—the Norman Jewisons, the Hal Ashbys—they were bringing a new kind of film. It wasn’t an atmosphere where old guys came on to you. My H O L LY W O O D

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open house in a golden time. It had love affairs to it but no breakups.

What do you mean by that?

I mean there was a lot of flirting, but nobody broke up—except Brenda and Michael. Brenda comes here for dinner all the time, by the way. Michael and Catherine [Zeta-Jones] were just here two days ago, having dinner.

I have to show you the robe she gave me. [She runs to the closet and returns with a pink robe.] This is a [Casa] Zeta-Jones.

What about your flirtations back during this period?

I remember Warren [Beatty] calling me one time after [Shampoo] was over. He said, “What are you doing tonight? You want to go down to Brenda and Michael’s, and meet there?” I said, “Sure.” I thought to myself, The film is over. He’s such a cute, sexy guy. I drove to Brenda’s house. I was sitting on the couch talking to Warren when I saw his eyes wander over to a table in the middle of the house. I turned my head, and there was Dolly Parton. I saw myself being slowly dropped. She was so gorgeous.

bedroom with Carrie—the day before we did it, he took me aside, and he said, “You don’t know what’s going on in the bedroom between those two characters.”

[Beatty wrote the script with Robert Towne.] I said, “You’re telling me what to think?” “No, but this is something you have….” He couldn’t stop, and he wouldn’t stop.

I was so upset that night—that this was going to be my life for this movie, that he was going to tell me what to do and what to think—that I came in the next day, and I quit. I went up to him and I said, “I’m off the movie. You can’t tell me what to think.” Of course, he came over and said, “I’m sorry.

It will never happen again.”

What happened with that scene with Carrie was that I had come in with my hair in rollers for his character to take out. [My character] was so hot—so on fire with need for sex—that I didn’t give a fuck who he fucked in that room. I just wanted him to get upstairs and do me. That’s almost the way I [myself] felt through all of that film. The set was so hot that the hairdressers were having 143

hot dreams. It was like, whoa.

I called a gay friend of mine who I’d always found so cute and so attractive, and said, “Come down from San Francisco, wherever you are, and make love to me.” He said, “You’re scaring me.”

You mentioned being game to meet up with Warren after filming.

Were there any other costars you were drawn to in that way?

No. Joey was 12 years younger than me. He was a producer on commercials and was going to be traveling around the country for jobs. I knew that there was going to be some cute little girl along the way that he would, you know, spend an afternoon with, or try and pack it in with, or go to the bathroom in the airplane with. If somebody came along that I could not resist, I wouldn’t have stopped myself…. I like to flirt. It’s part of living. If he was serious about somebody, it would kill me. This is what I wrote for us when we got married….

[She gets up and returns with her and Joey’s framed marriage vows, which read: Q: Will you please continue to be my dearest friend—to be there when I am afraid or lonely or unwanted—as you always have been. To help me grow—even when growing separates us—and will you continue to acknowledge my freedom and solitary rights as I must acknowledge and respect your freedom and your solitary rights. A: I will try.]

Are there any parts you wish you could be playing now?

I have big problems remembering names. [During an intense meeting with House Un-American Activities Committee lawyers, Grant inadvertently mentioned two women; the terror that she had jeopardized their careers was so deep that recalling names continues to be a struggle.] That has spread to lines. I had a trauma when I did a Neil Simon play with Peter Falk. In the second act, I forgot my lines. It was on the Wednesday matinee of the week that we were closing. It had been running for a year. Every actor has had a 144

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moment onstage where the lines go and a costar is [usually] able to say something like, “Are you talking about eggs?” But Peter didn’t know how to save me. Peter turned to the audience and pointed at me with his thumb. All of a sudden, I was just exposed in front of these thousand people. The curtain had to come down. I tried two plays after that. I didn’t forget my lines, but I was not the great investigative actress I wanted and needed to be. I was scared. When you’re scared, you’re finished.

How incredible that you were able to pivot to filmmaking.

It took me out of actors’ hell.

When I say “actors,” I mean every actor—the men, the women. You go up onstage and expose yourself.

“He was good; he was bad.”

“She’s getting old.” Being behind the camera and choosing what you want to explore, it freed me. You’re never free of how you look. You’re never free. I’m always…look at this stuff, you know?

[She gestures to products piled high on her desk.] Makeup piled on makeup, all age-related.

There’s about to be a retrospective of your films in Manhattan.

How does that feel?

It gratifies me so much. I’ve made great documentaries, really great documentaries and important ones. They were my war against the people who were blacklisting—to be able to speak with my own voice. Not acting, because, with acting, you’re saying other people’s words.

At what point did you decide you wanted to make films?

I had just come back from doing Voyage of the Damned and I got a call from AFI [American Film Institute] saying they were doing the first women’s directing workshop. I had an idea to do the play The Stronger by August Strindberg. Nothing has been that magical for me—to create a life out of four pages. When I was at the Los Angeles Film Festival for a presentation [of The Stronger], I was sitting next to Barbara Kopple.

Her film came up—Harlan County,

FLIP SIDE

Grant in 1975’s Shampoo, for which she won the best supporting actress Academy Award.

OBJECTOR

USA—about coal miners who were striking. I hadn’t seen that kind of documentary ever, and it was a life changer. I was comparing this jewel of mine to this great insight into people’s lives. I had so much to say that I couldn’t say because I was afraid I wouldn’t work again if I said it. That’s when I decided that was what I wanted to do.

Your husband has grown with you.

He produced your documentaries, including Down and Out in America, which won the best documentary Oscar.

I was playing Mrs. Mussolini in Yugoslavia when Joey called and said that the documentary we wanted to do [was a go].

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I remember saying, “Well, that’s such an important subject… if I can’t come back in time, let them do it [with another director].

It’s so important that.…” He said, “Are you fucking kidding me? Are you kidding me?”

In your memoir, you wrote that the blacklist taught you how to fight the bad guys. What other bad guys have you had to fight?

Well, as you and I know, we’re in a period that is rewriting and refilming exactly what I went through in the ’50s. Don’t forget that Trump said, “Where is my Roy Cohn?”—the guy who [helped create] the blacklist and was this shadow figure to Joe McCarthy.

To be a part of this, at this time in my life, and after Obama.…

After Obama won the election, my friend Virginia wrote me a postcard about what it was like on the street where she lived when Obama won…people coming out and looking around and asking, “Is this real? Is this a dream?” That’s how I feel about the Trump thing.

It’s difficult to know how to respond when so much is being threatened.

I wrote a letter to the Times [criticizing the response to Al Franken], and then I thought about the #MeToo thing and there was a time when Rose McGowan attacked Meryl

I M AG ES: F ROM L E F T, F ROM M IC H A E L O C H S A R C H I V ES/G E T T Y I M AG ES , C O U RT ES Y OF A F I , F R O M S H U T T E R S TO C K , © C O L U M B I A P I C T U R E S C O R P O R AT I O N – R U B E E K E R F I L M S / A L A M Y, COURTESY OF LE E GR A NT, B Y ROB I N PL ATZ ER/ONL IN E USA/T WI N IMAGES/GE T T Y I M AGES

From left: In 1971, a few years after being removed from the blacklist; at the 1974 Directing Workshop for Women—she’s gone on to direct socially conscious documentaries; with Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night.

A LIFE IN PICTURES

From left: With Warren Beatty in Shampoo; a self-portrait; with husband Joseph Feury at the New York premiere of Dr. T and the Women, 2000.

Streep [because she worked with Harvey Weinstein for years].

The idea of women attacking women—that’s not #MeToo. The women friends I have—we worked together, we shared together, we mourned the loss of so many lives together. You don’t attack each other. I got scared.

I sent the letter to Dinah, my daughter, to look at before trying to publish it. She said, “Don’t send it. At this time in your life, you don’t need to be attacked by the people you fought for.” ... I don’t know how to use Twitter. I don’t have that part of my brain. I can’t type. It left me feeling that I don’t have any weapons, and that I have no way of reaching out and saying, “Look at what you’re doing. How could you do this? [Especially] at this time.”

Having carried yourself with such strength and grace throughout such challenging periods, what advice would you give to women coming of age now?

This is a very scary world that my grandchildren are going into.

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How do you protect your kids?

I don’t know. I live in a castle that is so beautiful to me. [She gestures to her apartment.] It has all my friends’ pictures in it. All of my friends come to the kitchen.

That’s the world I want to live in. I’m frightened of that world out there. There are Trumps all over the world now. There are devastating political abusers in every country, who are taking all the money, and are leaving the people with nothing. There are rebellions all through South America. There are fires from California to Brazil. There are people begging for work. There is a man taking our troops away from Syria, so that the few allies that we have there are about to be killed. We’re living in a world that is so ugly and so unequal, that to step out of this apartment is to face a kind of reality that I never thought would be there when I was a child. It was a wonderful world. I [grew up] under Roosevelt. They were kind.

They were elegant. They weren’t gangsters. These are gangsters.

Female actors are still scrutinized for their looks, obviously—and not just by producers but by critics and even the public on social media. What do you think when someone like Renée Zellweger is criticized by complete strangers about her appearance?

I hate that. That’s so petty. These are the things that worry me about the press—they don’t see what she’s gone through. They don’t see the thing that that person said about Faye Dunaway.

“Big, fat pig.” They don’t see the skinning that women get in Hollywood for a wrinkle or a bag under the eye. They’re fucked. Renée Zellweger is a very charming actress. Lovely actress. Very unique. Did you see her in Judy?

Yes—and, of course, she plays Judy Garland when she’d been ravaged by the demands of Hollywood and was running on fumes.

That’s our lives, honey.

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Kenya Barris

divorce, maybe they won’t. I wanted to make it as fluid as a real relationship and a real family is.”

Jones, a veteran of unorthodox comedies like Parks & Recreation and Angie Tribeca, says that playing Joya has been “fun and chaotic and really different than anything I’ve ever worked on,” at least in part because Barris’s emotional entanglement in the series keeps things off-kilter. During one scene I watched them shoot, Barris accidentally called Jones’s character Bow instead of Joya, Bow (or Rainbow) being his real wife’s nickname, as well as that of the character on CON TIN U ED F ROM PAGE 1 27

Ari Emanuel

geniuses to pursue their dreams on an epic scale. Very few of the type still roam free, certainly not at the helm of heavily capitalized companies.

In the Entourage version of Emanuel’s life, the character ends up taking over a studio and becoming, effectively, king of Hollywood. In the real-life script of Hollywood circa 2020, those studio-chief slots, when they do come open, seem invariably to go to buttoned-down (and previously unknown) corporate types.

The man who stands as the unquestioned leader of traditional Hollywood right now, Robert Iger, perhaps the most successful executive in showbiz history, is the anti– mad genius, a king of common sense. Hollywood has slowly ceded its claim as global grand visionary capital to Silicon Valley and watched while a succession of wunderkinds has created the modern world’s miracles from the realms of tech, not entertainment.

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Black-ish played by Tracee Ellis-Ross. This hall of mirrors he’s built is tricky to navigate.

“I do get the sense that Kenya is working out a lot of his marriage stuff in this show,” says Jones. She was particularly struck by a scene in which Kenya lashes out at Joya, a lawyer who has become a stay-at-home mom, mocking her for being obsessed with her social media persona and all the trappings that come with money. “My character is trying to find her identity, to figure out how she fits into this weird world that is so different from the life that they thought they were creating together.”

As for Barris himself, even just the sheer scale of his work life seems to be therapeutic.

He has those movie screenwriting projects in his back pocket: The Witches and Coming to America 2 are scheduled to be released this year, with Uptown Saturday Night and Last Dragon in the works. Barris is also developing a stage musical about Juneteenth with Pharrell Williams for the Public Theater. At Netflix, under his Khalabo Ink Society banner, he’s executive-producing projects like the new sketch comedy show Astronomy Club, as well

as Kid Cudi’s forthcoming animated music series, Entergalactic. He’s hoping his Netflix slate can also include stories about slavery and the conversation about reparations. Sitting in his living room, staring at a glimmering painting called Infinite Blackness made of diamond flakes and ebony lacquer, he muses, “I could easily make that my life’s mission.”

In addition to all this, of course, there’s the fact that Barris is not just a creator now, but an actor as well. On the set, he seems surprisingly charismatic and agile. Hale Rothstein, an executive producer on #blackexcellence who’s been working with Barris since The Game, admits that he’d been nervous about the decision to have him star. The second day on set, however, they were chatting about basketball while waiting for shooting to begin. “The director yelled ‘action’ and Kenya just completely switched on,” says Rothstein. “All of a sudden he was saying the words and I thought, Oh wow, he’s really an actor. This was the right choice.”

Barris, of course, retains his right to be anxious and skeptical to the end. “The moment I think, It’s going to be great,” he says with a shrug, “shit falls apart.”

DVD business and in a few years had half the town working for them.

When this all began to unfold, the agencies were still rich in the era of home media revenues and giant packaging fees from broadcasters, an arrangement that allowed them to own a percentage of the show in place of commissions and share in the resulting revenues. The streaming era might as well have been a seven-mile-wide comet.

Recalls one agent, “The change of the last decade has been relentless and terrifying.

In 2013, Netflix had one show on the air and they were the only streaming service.” Then HBO aired True Detective and, the agent says, “the walls came tumbling down between movies and TV.” Sensing a tectonic shift, WME saw an opportunity to go where no agency had gone before. The notion was to build on the hub of an agency what Emanuel has called a “21st-century media company”—a galaxy of entertainment and cultural businesses and servicing arms (media rights, legal support, etc.) that help grow those businesses, through which clients could build out and own the products of their talents in a variety of fields.

Seeing a future in which two to five companies control and wholly own all of traditional entertainment, the Ari plan was to turn Endeavor into a counterweight to the streamers and studios, giving clients outside avenues to control their destinies. On came a slew of acquisitions that on their faces seemed to have little to do with the business of a Hollywood talent agency but might provide such opportunities down

the line: the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Miss Universe Competition, Frieze Art Fairs, Fashion Week, Professional Bull Riders.

To Endeavor supporters, it was a recognition that the real competition for Disney, Netflix, or Apple won’t be other streaming services but the stars themselves, who, by creating industries around themselves and building international followings, become more valuable than just the next job they book. Think Dwayne Johnson or Rihanna.

There were reasons no agency had gone there before. To start with: There are laws.

The state of California in particular has traditionally, but not lately, enforced very strict rules against agencies creating conflicts of interest by controlling the means of production as they were. But the political representatives who oversee these matters had started to let things slide. With the amount of money Hollywood contributes to politicians in the state, Emanuel seems to have sensed they weren’t about to start getting tough again any time soon. But there were also unwritten rules. The moves put WME in contact with the third rail in agenting: It started producing its own movies and TV shows, via Endeavor Content, which had a hand in La La Land and Killing Eve, among many other projects.

To detractors, this furious growth was megalomaniac Emanuel empire-building for its own sake. “Nothing is enough for them,” says one observer. “Ari’s on a mission to make himself a captain of industry, as opposed to leaving well enough alone at a time when you can make a fortune as an H O L LY W O O D

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agent.” Skeptics claim the Endeavor empire has ceased to serve the agency’s clients and become its own beast, demanding to be fed at the clients’ expense: forcing agents to funnel clients to in-house projects from the many corporate arms rather than pursuing better deals elsewhere. “At the head of the agency meeting it’s the same group of guys who own 100 percent of the voting stock needing to support all the branches of their company,” says one observer.

“I don’t know what they are selling,” one veteran says.

Endeavor says that if it ceases to operate in its clients’ best interest, they can walk anytime.

Wall Street has never shown much interest in Hollywood talent agencies—and maybe with good reason. An agency is always one bad lunch with a movie star away from a wrecking ball through the balance sheet. As one veteran put it, “It’s a business where your merchandise walks out the door every night.” The audacity of Emanuel, many see, has been to tie around the agency such a collection of other stuff that the agency itself and the fluctuations of individual stars becomes less critical. (And indeed, in the current Endeavor, even without the IPO, the entire WME agency accounts for only about 30 percent of the company’s cash flow.) To the naysayers, it’s scale for the sake of dazzling investors in hope of luring Wall Street cash, and a dangerous distraction for

Peggy Siegal

socially desirable people that onlookers assumed he too was socially desirable.

“Bill Gates sort of normalized it,” said New York publicist R. Couri Hay, who says he considered, but decided against, taking Epstein on as a client. “Because you figure, Bill Gates can meet him [and] be his friend for two or three years. So why can’t you?”

“He was a very minor aspect of the mix,” Siegal said of Epstein. “He was one of thousands that came through. And in the billionaire level, hundreds of. He was nothing really special, except he was another wiseguy billionaire.” She paused. “Or said he was a billionaire.” Court records document Epstein’s assets at $550 million.

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the core business. To true believers, it’s the hedge against the very scary future Hollywood is mindlessly barreling toward.

Amid all the dislocation and insanity, some around town wish that someone out there were trying something different, something crazy even. (And let’s not get totally ahead of ourselves. There’s still plenty of schadenfreude too. The TV writers gladly took credit for having a hand in WME’s launchpad sputter. Expert opinions vary as to how much is deserved.) But the heavily corporatized entities currently running the place have displayed little appetite—even in the face of looming disaster—for the craziness and big visions that have built Hollywood. Which brings us back to that IPO deferred. As Emanuel has told confidants, these giant streaming Goliaths are fated to attack each other for the same market while a whole new world of completely different entertainment experiences arises— Snapchat, live events, what have you. Which was the road Endeavor started down; one in which “talent agency” is no longer the core definition and one in which Emanuel positioned himself to become a hybrid mogul– studio boss unlike anyone else in town. With the IPO nixed, those plans may have to wait.

From within the agency, sources paint a more determined future. While the disappointment is certainly palpable and still raw with anyone you speak to, people familiar with the company’s finances are unequivocal. Cash flow, they say, is ample

to sustain the business and service the debt.

Its Moody’s rating remains top-drawer, and investment money is still available to fund further growth. In November, Endeavor made yet another acquisition, the Harry Walker Agency, a firm specializing in speakers’ engagements, and announced a program to buy back shares from its employees—compensating those who missed their chance for the big score. Further, they point to the fact that the company was able to pay back the Saudis and cut ties. (Uber, another of this year’s IPO class, seems unable to take the same leap, earning itself eternal blowback.) So is this the end of Emanuel’s worlddevouring ambitions? Has reality bitten hard enough that he’ll settle down, focus on tending to the agency, and play nice?

As one industry veteran, an Endeavor skeptic, admits: “I don’t think a new IPO makes any sense at all but maybe it’s still doable. If you’re a great salesman, you can sell anything.”

People who have talked to Emanuel recently report a man disappointed but unbowed, and looking at how this experience could make him and the company stronger. He recently told one colleague, “There is no such thing as failure. You learn from every experience.

I’m not looking at how big my stack of cash is.

I’m looking to grow something about where the world is going. People put it in economic terms, but success is about what you learn.”

And in Hollywood, there is always, always another act.

By 2007, as the Palm Beach investigation was playing out, Epstein’s profile was expanding. For a New York magazine article that year, journalist Philip Weiss met with Epstein in the office of Manhattan P.R. heavyweight Howard Rubenstein, who has represented Rupert Murdoch, Leona Helmsley, and Mount Sinai Hospital. (A spokesperson for Rubenstein’s firm says that after Epstein’s conviction, the firm dropped him and stopped returning his calls.) Titled “The Fantasist,” the article described the criminal accusations against Epstein, which included using a vibrator on a 14-year-old girl. Siegal is the first Epstein friend quoted in the article, in a paragraph that noted that girl’s age. Two months later, Epstein surfaced at another Siegal event. He returned to Florida to plead guilty later that year.

“No matter what it said in the paper, [that] was irrelevant to the fact that he wasn’t in the jail,” Siegal says in defense of her overall proximity to Epstein. “So how serious would you think that was?” The New York story provides a window into how Epstein’s social circle might have understood his crimes at the time. The article presented a theory that Epstein viewed and passed off his lechery as a version of the libidinous lifestyles that made

men like Bob Guccione and Hugh Hefner famous a generation earlier.

Weiss ultimately paints an entirely monstrous vision of Epstein, but his early pitch to his subject was: “It’s the Icarus story, someone who flies too close to the sun,” as if sexual contact with minors was a symptom of overambition. (Epstein’s instantly infamous response: “Did Icarus like massages?”) I asked a different journalist, who ran in Siegal’s social circle at the time, whether the ages of Epstein’s alleged victims were common knowledge. “I think it was generally known,” the journalist said. “But it was like, ‘Oh, wow, you got away with it. Wow. Good for you.’ ” “There was a whole group of guys that were bad boys, that had very bad reputations,” Siegal told me. “They used to be called playboys. And my relationship with them was not about their social lives. I had a business to run. If they had legitimate social clout, and could make a difference and pass along a good word about these films, they were included in these events. I didn’t have time to get involved with the social lives of these guys.” More than one Siegal friend made a similar, if backhanded, argument: Peggy was too self-interested to enable Epstein.

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Peggy Siegal “You know about the golden rule?” Siegal asked me during a discussion of men who abuse their power.

Do unto others?

“No. Those who have the gold, rule.”

When Epstein returned to New York in August 2010, reporters noted his presence at a Siegal screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. The guest list included Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Rudy Giuliani, and the late shopping mall magnate Alfred Taubman. The scene prompted one observer to joke to the Wall Street Journal about the “beautifully done meeting of the prosecutor and the felon.” (To be fair, they could have been talking about Taubman, who served time for violating price-fixing laws.) Epstein’s presence at Siegal events, or seemingly on her arm, periodically drew attention. The Hollywood Reporter dated its last such sighting to 2016. Siegal told the paper that Epstein had sometimes been a last-minute guest-list addition, in which case his name wouldn’t have appeared on the studio-approved list.

During Epstein’s second month back in New York, Siegal attended a post–Yom Kippur break-fast at Epstein’s home. The Daily Beast’s Alexandra Wolfe reported that “a group of 120 friends brought their children over.” Siegal said she recalled only that the event was a “serious religious gathering.”

Then there was the dinner for Prince Andrew. On the day of the party, in December 2010, Siegal said Epstein called to request her help. “And I’m like—” she fell into a hushed tone, “Prince Andrew? Yeah, I could do that.

When is it?’ ” Tonight, said Epstein.

“I thought it was strange,” Siegal said, “that someone who actually had a prince in his house as a houseguest—couldn’t figure out a few people to invite for dinner? I thought that was odd. On the other hand, I had my own selfish reasons because I wanted to tell Andrew about The King’s Speech.” She was promoting the film, which later won best picture.

Its distributor was the Weinstein Company.

Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding was coming up, so Siegal called three journalists: Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, and Charlie Rose. She also invited Chelsea Handler, Woody Allen, and Soon-Yi Previn. “I said, there’s this guy, Jeffrey Epstein.

He has a huge house. It’s really beautiful, it’s one of the largest houses in New York, and he’s a financier.” And he was hosting a dinner for Prince Andrew. In the July Times article, Handler said, “It was just one of those strange nights.” Stephanopoulos described his attendance as a mistake.

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I’d watched the third season of The Crown, which she recently binged. “Peter Morgan is a genius,” she said.

The New York Post published its “PRINCE & PERV” cover two months after the duke’s visit, prompting the Duchess of York to issue her statement abhorring pedophilia and to apologize for accepting money from Epstein.

Around that time, Epstein hired another publicist, Los Angeles crisis manager Michael Sitrick, who has represented R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, and Theranos. Sitrick said that, knowing what he knows now, he would not accept Epstein as a client. He emphasized that his work for Epstein was “not a reputation restoration assignment.” He only fielded press requests, he said: “I never met him.”

Nobody has accused Siegal of enabling Epstein’s criminal behavior. Siegal says the dinner party was a favor. Rather, she is accused of enabling Epstein’s rarefied social life, which he in turn presented to his victims to manipulate them. “More than being just a movie screenings guru, she’s an important social connector,” a New Yorker who has known and observed Siegal for years told me. “And if you’re kind of gross and second-tier, or if your politics are out of step with the dominant allegedly progressive ethos of New York, she can do a lot to ameliorate and ease the way.” Especially, this person theorized, “if you’ve got a private plane or a beachfront property.” (Siegal says she was never on Epstein’s jet or visited his homes in Palm Beach and the Virgin Islands.)

I ran down a list of rumors and questions about Siegal’s relationship with Epstein. Did she see him with girls who appeared to be underage?

No, but: “It’s very hard to tell their ages. You don’t walk into a room and say, ‘Oh, right, how old are you?’ ” Did she accept Epstein’s financial assistance when she traveled, as she confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter in July?

“That’s a mistake,” said Siegal. “I thought I did, and I went back to the accountant. I never did.”

How could she confuse that?

“In my world, people send presents. In my world, people invite you to their homes in the South of France. They invite you on boats.

Sometimes they invite you on planes.”

Did Epstein help her during a legal issue with her brother over her inheritance?

“Yes, he gave me help.” She would not specify its nature.

Did she hire a young woman as an intern in 2018 on Epstein’s recommendation? I provided the woman’s name.

“Everybody’s friend has a daughter who wants to be an intern. I don’t even know their names.”

Some Epstein accusers have described performing jobs that might have resembled those of a household staff. Did Siegal notice that?

“You’re not supposed to notice the staff.”

At a recent press conference, a woman who alleged she was 15 when Epstein raped her said: “It was clear from the time I spent with Epstein that something was very wrong with his lifestyle, and it didn’t take a victim to see that. We were not hidden.”

They didn’t have to be. To socially ambitious guests whose attention, care, and compassion went in only one direction—up—they would have been invisible. “I didn’t have chains,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre said in her BBC interview “These powerful people were my chains.”

Siegal contemplated whether her admitted inattentiveness is a personal failure: “Part of this, this—I don’t know whether guilt is the right word—but remorse, just this nauseous feeling, is that I didn’t see it. How did I miss it? I mean, I’m extremely articulate. I am extremely perceptive. I’m in the perception business, and it was right in front of me and I didn’t see it. And it’s very hard to believe that.

But it’s the truth.”

Epstein hanged himself in his prison cell on August 10. (Siegal does not believe Epstein committed suicide. “Where has the FBI hidden Ghislaine Maxwell?” Siegal asked, throwing up her hands. “I have been destroyed, and Ghislaine Maxwell is probably on some island, sunbathing!”) Less than a month later, at the film festivals in Telluride and Toronto, Siegal received no invitations to screenings or parties. Before a Jojo Rabbit showing in Toronto, she said “a dear friend” asked her to avoid the theater, lest her presence damage the reputation of a comedic movie about Hitler. Two months later, Siegal was uninvited from HBO’s premiere of the Ralph Lauren documentary Very Ralph at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“These are dear friends of mine, treating me like I have leprosy,” said Siegal.

To stay busy, Siegal hosted events pro bono for friends. She organized a fundraiser for a South African theater troupe that British director Stephen Daldry supports. She hosted a dinner for her dermatologist, Macrene Alexiades. At the Hamptons International Film Festival in October, she purchased 40 tickets to a screening of the Netflix film The Two Popes, invited a crowd that included seven voting members of the Academy, and hosted a dinner party at the East Hampton home of billionaire philanthropist Katharine Rayner afterward. If a studio hired Siegal to organize such an event, the bill would be between $20,000 and $25,000, she said: “I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.”

Why did Siegal fall so hard, so fast? All of her detractors—and many of her boosters— brought up her churlishness. “I don’t think that Jeffrey really undid her,” said the longtime observer. “I think she mistreated people for so long, for so many years, so publicly, so H O L LY W O O D

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flagrantly, that the minute there was…this little thing that nonetheless revealed something bigger about her, everybody pounced.”

Two people noted that those who work with her sometimes feel leveraged. “She gets the confidence of a fancy director who’s being nominated for an Academy Award, then she gets the director to call the studio and say, ‘You have to hire Peggy Siegal.’ And they hire Peggy. And they’re annoyed,” said a producer who believes Epstein provides a convenient excuse for them to avoid her.

Some, including Siegal, point to sexism.

Matt McKenna said Siegal’s gender made her a media target: “That it was a woman who helped Jeffrey Epstein come back? I think that narrative was too seductive for the trades.”

Several people I spoke to argued that Siegal would not seem so “brusque” if she were a man and invoked seemingly unsinkable male Epstein associates such as Wexner and Black.

But has gender protected those men, or has their status and wealth? Some men have lost prestigious posts: Joi Ito, director of the MIT media lab, resigned after his role soliciting donations from Epstein came to light. MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman stepped down amid controversy over leaked emails discussing a different scientist’s Epsteinrelated sexual assault allegation. Prince Andrew may have been forced into early retirement. “I think we wonder, are we somehow not giving her the pass that we would give to men?” said the observer who thought the scandal revealed Siegal’s larger issues.

“But it’s like, no! She’s a person who had no issue kind of orchestrating the social reinvention of David Koch and Jeffrey Epstein,” this person said, referring to Siegal’s relationship with the late billionaire activist. “That’s a specific person. And sometimes ruthless ambition is loathsome.” There are publicists who rehabilitate criminal reputations for a living, a different publicist noted. But Siegal’s job is to bring people places. “She cultivates an audience. You want to feel good about that person.” When the mix is the message, there isn’t room for any error in judgment.

Hollywood isn’t a town known for its vast reserves of loyalty. “For her business to be threatened because she invited Jeffrey Epstein to parties is just such bullshit!” a

producer who is fond of Siegal told me. “It’s morally reprehensible to take Peggy down because of what Jeffrey Epstein did. Every fiber in my body says that’s wrong.”

He paused.

“Unless, by the way, have you uncovered more?”

Meanwhile, the film industry is changing.

Intimidating bosses with big personalities aren’t tolerated as they once were. As theatrical releases lose their power, so do adjacent traditions such as screenings. And the Academy is changing too: Under pressure to increase diversity, the group has added thousands of new members in the last few years.

Siegal’s power base, as she readily admits, is old white Jewish men—their votes still matter, but less than before. “She is one of the direct causes of #OscarsSoWhite,” said an ex-employee.

Can Siegal make a comeback? Several people I spoke to pointed out that only a few months have passed since her P.R. crisis; maybe she’ll have better luck next year. “I have been told to go away,” Siegal said. “ ‘Go away for a year so everybody forgets.’ Well, I’d like to know where I should go.”

A fellow publicist observed that Siegal may be her own worst enemy: Is she having a publicity crisis or publicizing a personal crisis?

“She came up to me at a party and said, ‘You know I can’t get any work,’ this whole kind of pity thing,” said a person in Siegal’s social orbit. “Woe is me. Feel sorry for me. And you know what? I almost did.” But, “there are a lot of much nicer people that this happened to, that deserve our sympathy and support.”

Siegal can talk for hours about being treated unfairly. During our interviews, she went out of the way to name three ex-employees she believes spoke to the press and are poaching her clients, including one she believes stole her list. Ironically, Bobby Zarem has long held that Siegal stole his list. He’s 83, working on his memoir in Savannah, Georgia, and still mad. (“I did not steal his list,” said Siegal.)

In December, Siegal attended the world premiere of Cats, her first major studio premiere since her fall. It took work. She lobbied NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer by email before securing the invitation.

Before the movie, she stopped by a cocktail party in the Manhattan home of Greece’s

exiled crown prince—across the street from Epstein’s town house. She observed that the lights were still on.

Why not retire? I asked Siegal. Be a fulltime lady who lunches? She glanced at Fields, who is 18 years her elder and still goes to the office. “If I would be happy with that, I would have married a dentist 50 years ago and moved to Scarsdale like Marjorie Morningstar,” she said, referring to the 1958 film in which Natalie Wood, in the title role, plays a Jewish American actor deciding between career and marriage. Defying her mother’s vision for her, Siegal never married.

At the end of our first sit-down, Siegal asked me to turn my recorder back on. The sun had set during our two-and-a-half-hour interview, prompting Barbara Guggenheim to joke that we looked like we were having a séance. To get that first job as a showroom model, Siegal said, she’d been forced to stand in a bra and slip in front of the store’s owner, who came too close, looked at her lasciviously, and touched her shoulder. “I was 16, and that was the first time I experienced fear of a man who I didn’t know,” she said.

When she was 24, Siegal said, she would walk to the factory that manufactured her jewelry line. “The truck drivers always used to whistle. And I always used to say hi to them because I wanted to just be so cool.”

One summer day, she said, one of the whistlers followed her. When she got into the factory building elevator, he jumped in, trapped her, held a knife to her ribs, and demanded to see her breasts. He pinned her to the wall.

She screamed. He repeated his demand, and she kept screaming as he held the car on an empty floor. Eventually, he ran off, she said.

She broke down and cried. “To this day, I will not stand in an elevator with a single guy,” she said. “I never went in a subway again. I took taxicabs everyplace. I never walked home alone after an event or a movie.” She was teary and shaking as she told me this.

At our next sit-down, Siegal was more composed as she discussed Epstein’s victims. “The idea of these women, what he did to these women, is so incomprehensible to me,” she said. “To be a part of this, and to be accused of being part of this, it’s so humiliating.”

“I keep thinking, What did I do to deserve this?” she said. “And then I say, ‘Nothing.’ ”

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Proust Questionnaire

The director of Pain and Glory talks samba and social justice

Pedro Almodóvar

hat is your idea of perfect happiness? A sudden summer breeze on a hot afternoon. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Federico García Lorca. Which living person do you most admire? Dr. Pedro Cavadas, a pioneer in face transplants and a specialist in the transplant of severed members. This surgeon from Valencia devotes his summer breaks to travel to Africa and tend to children who have been castrated in tribal conflicts. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Sincerity in its most brutal version. It isn’t always necessary. On what occasion do you lie? The few times I go to a movie premiere, or to a theater opening, in the artists’ dressing rooms. Which living person do you most despise? I don’t despise, I prefer to hate. And I hate Trump. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? In Spanish: “No doy crédito” (“I cannot believe my eyes”). In English I usually abuse “actually….”

What is your greatest regret? If I make a mistake, I try to apologize. But regret is an imposition from my Catholic childhood that I refuse. When and where were you happiest? The first time I went into a samba school in Rio de Janeiro. The whole neighborhood was rehearsing in plain clothes the numbers they’d perform during the Carnaval.

Which talent would you most like to have? To be a great novelist. What is your current state of mind? I miss my youth. If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? You have to accept family the way it is. What is your most treasured possession? Memories. Materially speaking, 18 of the 21 films I have directed.

W

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? All

miseries are unfair and unbearable, but migrants running away from war and slavery only to find First World doors closed seems intolerable to me. The other side of this problem is people condemned to unalleviated poverty in the First World, which seems horrible to me too. Where would you like to live? For the time being, in Madrid, where I feel most comfortable and organized. What is your favorite occupation? To rewrite, when I have the story for a script clear and defined. What is your most 152

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marked characteristic? I never give up. What is the quality you most like in a man? Originality and lack of preju­ dices. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

The capacity to fight. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Don Quixote. Who are your heroes in real life? The

ONG Open Arms, whose members risk their lives and freedom to save migrants from drowning in the Medit­ erranean Sea. What are your favorite names? Antonio, Carmen, Soledad, Eurídice, and Fe (Faith). How would you like to die? Like John Huston, after shooting The Dead.

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