Gossip Central

Julia Garner in The Assistant: He’s Not That Into You

Remember when the big news was the rampant sexual predation in our culture? Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, men who preyed on women seem like proverbial spuds compared to the current threat on all our systems. The movie The Assistant, about Jane, an aspiring film producer in her entry level job at a movie studio goes through her routine, making coffee, copies, reservations, and observes some unsavory activity between a new hire and the much older unnamed, unseen boss. When she attempts to report her employer’s impropriety, the film takes on a timely edge, and made many who saw it at early screenings think of Harvey Weinstein in the Miramax years and beyond, just as the movie mogul was then the big news of the day, convicted after 87 women accused him of sexual misdeeds. Now, The Assistant is available on DVD, AppleTV, and Amazon Prime Video, and, while it has lost that hot topic punch as far as #MeToo, it gains in being emblematic of a bygone world in severe disrepair. If we ever go back to the office, it’s got to be better than this.

A Star-Studded Tribute for Stephen Sondheim at 90: He’s “Still Here”

To fete beloved Stephen Sondheim at 90 in song for two and a half hours, an A-list of Broadway stars zoomed in. Sure, you don’t get the wow production, the pageantry, the costumes and sets of a live musical, but what you do get is that up close emotion that the internet allows, as if you were seated a foot away from say Meryl Streep’s face as she carouses with Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald for a drunken rendition of “Ladies Who Lunch.” This is what the split screen was meant to do, just as Beanie Feldstein and Ben Platt’s duet from Into the Woods and Annaleigh Ashford and Jake Gyllenhaal from Sunday in the Park with George keeps them in the same frame, even as they, and we are, well, apart and elsewhere.

Mystery in Montauk: The Untoward End of Peter Beard’s Wild Ride

The story of Peter Beard has a grim end: some 19 days after he disappeared, after search parties including helicopters had given up their trawling the rocky coast, the erstwhile adventurer has just turned up. Some thought he went into the sea, lunch meat for sharks, if there are such fish at these shores, but no: maybe he’d gone into some secret corner of the woods, and like beat poetry catalyst Neal Cassady, another legend, died of exposure. No body, no news. But now all that may change.

The Times retold an anecdote about Beard, that while working in the city, when he was told his house had gone up in flames, he just continued his work. What the Times failed to say, and what might merely be Montauk rumor, was that the house had been burnt down by workers, locals disgruntled that they had not been paid. Legends abound about such adventurers: some saw the house lifted off the nearest cliff by Sikorsky helicopter, moved to the most remote point, a piece of property jutting farther into the sea than the lighthouse. Montauk residents gathered outside the church in the early ‘80’s, when Beard married Cheryl Tiegs.

Remembering Hal Willner: Music Impresario and Literary Man

Back in the early 1980’s, Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs grinned across the screen on Saturday Night Live, having just been introduced as the greatest living writer in America by supermodel Lauren Hutton. Usually writers don’t read from their work on television, but behind the scenes, Hal Willner made it happen. Willner, beloved music producer is best known for his work with musicians, but he was always literary, and he loved the Beat writers, and made recordings with Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Robert Wilson, who had collaborated with Burroughs and Tom Waits on The Black Rider. When his longtime friend Lou Reed died, he produced the memorial event for him at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Now it is Hal we will have to mourn: he died on April 7 at age 64.

Here is a glimpse of Hal Willner at work on one of his productions:

Remembering Bucky Pizzarelli at the Café Carlyle

Among the many joys of New York night life, and jazz performances in particular was hearing Bucky Pizzarelli on guitar alongside his son John’s quartet at the Café Carlyle. This week the elder Pizzarelli (94) succumbed to the coronavirus. Through the years, John was a regular at the Carlyle, and seven years ago, his father was still out there performing and trading one-liners with his son. Here is my review from April 10, 2013, entitled “John Pizzarelli Quartet (Plus One) at the Café Carlyle:”

This entertaining show may be billed as a jazz quartet, but as aficionados know, John Pizzarelli has a secret weapon: his dad. As he tells you, Bucky Pizzarelli, now 87 and seated beside him, has a long and distinguished career on guitar performing with Vaughn Monroe and other big bands of that era, but with his son John—and another son, Martin on bass—(that must be the family rebellion), the show at the Carlyle features smooth standards sprinkled with patter, as if son John, front man on guitar who also sings, needs to tell Bucky just where to come in.

Jesse Eisenberg in Resistance: Remembering Marcel Marceau as Holocaust Hero

One of the last great New York nights was the opening of The Girl from North Country on Broadway, nearly a month ago. Among the guests crowding into the Belasco was Jesse Eisenberg. By coincidence I had just that afternoon seen his latest film Resistance, and still recovering from the power of this Holocaust survival drama based on the true story of the world’s most famous mime, Marcel Marceau, I stopped him to applaud his performance as a rescuer of orphans during that brutal time. “Oh, was it okay?” he asked, having not yet seen it. “It meant a lot for me. My family came from Lublin.”

Because the movie is set in the South of France in Strasbourg, the chief Nazi villain is Klaus Barbie, known for outrageous cruelty, that is, the torture of his captives for pleasure. Dubbed “the Butcher of Lyons,” the movie’s merciless Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer), a handsome Aryan, descends upon a corps of homosexual Nazis on a night out. But that is just a taste of this true-life character, whose outsized violence escalates to barbaric heights in yet another scene, all the more horrible left to the imagination as Barbie describes what he will do to a captured young Resistance fighter. The memory of the terrified woman strapped into a doctor’s chair, her sister forced to watch, leaves a profound chill. It’s a moment of thrilling movie-making from writer/director Jonathan Jakubovicz.