Gossip Central

The New York Public Library’s Literary Lions Gala by the Book

A bookish night at the New York Public Library, the Literary Lions gala celebrates writers. Charlie Rose attended, and was ensconced in conversation as pigs in blankets were passed. Jean Doumanian confessed to hating long cocktail hours, but the gabfest went on for a while. Writers do have stories. Julie Taymor is finishing her film on Gloria Steinem, and Gay Talese, ever the dapper gadabout, said he went out to screenings and book events galore, even stepping out to a pub to watch television, if nothing else was on his social calendar.

Me Too, Megyn Kelly, and Bombshell

The women in the Roger Ailes story are fierce, ambitious blonds, at least those in the forefront of the movie Bombshell, a truthful account of the demise of the Fox News CEO: Truthful, because, at a recent screening of Bombshell, many close to the story of how Gretchen Carlson refused to compromise in her lawsuit against Ailes cheered at the recognition of the scandal depicted just the way they remembered it.

The Cave: What Will Happen to Syria?

The stakes could not be higher in Feras Fayyad’s relentless documentary The Cave. Set in an underground hospital on the outskirts of Damascus, the sounds of classical music juxtaposed with the thunder of bombs give you the yin and yang of experience in Syria under siege, the forces of life competing with those of death. With Dr. Amani Ballour in charge, a young woman with nerves of steel who must face evil as well as the distrust of men in a culture where a mother who cannot feed her children fears the societal norms that prevent her from taking a job more than imminent death, “the cave” becomes a last refuge of humanity. Speaking about his focus on women in this culture, the director becomes tearful thinking about his mother. This week at the movie’s premiere at the Walter Reade theater, he sat between his producers, Sigrid Dyekjaer and Kirstine Barfod from a Copenhagen based production company, and spoke about the horrors faced in his country, worsened in the last week with the American pull out of troops: he admitted for the first time that his mother was a Kurd.

Downton Abbey: The Movie Gets a Royal Premiere

Just as Lord and Lady Grantham are thinking of downsizing,
the King and Queen decide to visit, setting off the lavish fairy tale
that is Downton Abbey: The Movie. The smartly dressed crowd at Alice
Tully Hall cheered as John Lunn’s symphonic music swelled, a rich
reminder of what was left behind when the last PBS season ended in
Julian Fellowes’ extravagant entertainment, and what now, in the form
of a feature-length film, ushers in two hours of sheer pleasure.

Rob Reiner, Visiting the Hamptons, Reads Mr. T at Celebrity Autobiography

Photo: Roger Friedman

Rob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in Tiger Woods: The Making of a Champion. Or Reiner as Arnold Schwartzenegger’s dialogues with himself, emboldening the workings of an already outsized ego, or Joe Namath’s obsession with his hair, in Alan Zweibel’s voice. When performed onstage for an audience by first class actors, the results are laugh out loud good. That is the engine that fuels Celebrity Autobiography, a hit every year on and off Broadway, and at Guild Hall. The brainchild of playwright/actor Eugene Pack, who, upon reading Vanna Speaks, producer Merv Griffith’s miraculously talented letter turner on Wheel of Fortune, discovered that describing in detail what it is that Vanna White brings to the game, is its own game. And so he had Lewis Black reading White.

The Return of Showtime’s The Affair: Preview at Gurney’s

Photo: Nina Salpeter

Showtime’s The Affair returns to Montauk for its final season, to a preview decktop screening at Gurney’s. With the drizzle and ocean breezes, fans felt right at home with the first episode: Helen (the remarkable Maura Tierney) ministers to both the death of Vic (Omar Metwally) and the birth of his son, Ed. Noah (a quizzical Dominic West) lends a helping hand. And in mini segments Noah discusses the film of his roman-a-clef, Descent, with its star; Joanie Lockheart (Anna Paquin), at a moment in the future, deals with family and missing her mother and father. The question is, do we miss them too?

Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo: Purist’s Connect 4 Brother Act

If you ask me what is the funniest show I have seen all summer, it is Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo at Purist Magazine’s Connect 4 Ideas Festival. The CNN commentators, brothers in arms, told how they got to where they are, even as Cuomo was wrapping up a week of scandal involving an Italian-American putdown turned violent. Without recounting the experience, let us just say, the media star did not shirk the subject, hit it straight on, as he and Lemon went through their bona fides through the lens of loved ones shown onstage behind them in photographs, from the bittersweet loss of Lemon’s sister Lisa to Cuomo’s dad Mario. This deft taming of the elephant in the room at Guild Hall took place in the company of family and friends, and in something unusual in the media, with the support of another kind of bond through CNN.

Elvis in Vegas: The King Graces a Surreal City in the Sixties

In Sagaponack, the house Richard Zoglin shared with his late wife Charla Krupp sits nestled on wooded grounds: immaculate, swimming pool, antique adorned, just the way she, a style editor for Glamour and In Style Magazine, left it. By contrast, the subject of Zoglin’s new book, Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show, which tells “The King’s” story in transforming Las Vegas entertainment, is as much about the place itself in all its tawdry madness: a culmination of Zoglin’s work in his last two books, Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the ‘70’s Changed America, and Hope: Entertainer of the Century, taken together, his books form a trilogy in the history of American entertainment, well researched and themselves well, highly entertaining.

Mike Wallace is Here: Remembering a Real Journalist

Many who grew up watching 60 Minutes regularly will find Avi Belkin’s documentary, Mike Wallace is Here, a trip down memory lane. And still, this fresh look at a premiere television show, and career we thought we knew, offers many surprises. Wallace worked his charm and good looks on commercials, and other odd acting jobs. When he first came on board for this great show, known for superb reporting, his colleagues thought he would not be rigorous enough. He proved them wrong. And at a recent special screening at the Whitby Hotel, with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft attending, as well as a stellar group of documentarians, Barbara Kopple, Karen Goodman, Katherina Otto-Bernstein, the consensus was, here was a serious journalist, and an impressive, entertaining look at an esteemed part of American culture by an Israeli filmmaker.

Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix, and More: Allen Ginsberg Never Gets Old

Just before his death in 1997, Allen Ginsberg wrote to President Bill Clinton advising him that just in case he was going to name an American poet laureate, this would be a good time to honor him. As we know, that never happened. But look around: Allen, over 20 years after his death, is everywhere. In Martin Scorsese’s documentary of Bob Dylan’s tour, Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix, the poet is named “The Oracle at Delphi,” giving him some classic, other-worldly stature. Seated Buddha-style he lends a religious benediction to a rock and roll tour that features Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Sam Shepard, Anne Waldman, Ronnie Blakely, and others. Dylan’s great music is of course the star, but Allen exercises his chops. A highlight of the tour that starts in 1975 is a visit to fellow poet Jack Kerouac’s grave, near his birth home in Lowell, Massachusetts. Only recently dead since 1969, Kerouac may have enjoyed Ginsberg and Dylan cavorting and reciting from “Mexico City Blues” and otherwise paying homage to the dead beat.