“The maximum intrigue to be found on the August newstand is in GQ’s x-ray of Garry Shandling. Reads like Philip Roth directed by David Chase.” — from @shinangovani
When I looked him up on Twitter, this is what it told me:
I’ve always loved Canada…
I have a lengthy profile of Garry Shandling, the actor and comedian, in GQ this month. It’s not online yet, and won’t be for a while. But please go take a look. He’s a fascinating guy. Oh, and as well as being hilarious, he’s wise. I’m not kidding. If the challenges of work-a-day existence haven’t yet taught you to live in the moment, well, Shandling just might.
LAST month’s Prototype column — about a company that makes reusable dry-cleaning bags — began: “Man or woman, every one of us has experienced the frustration that drove Rick Siegel to become an inventor.”
The day it appeared, with a picture of Mr. Siegel, his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, and their product, the Green Garmento, I heard from another Los Angeles inventor, Jane Wyler. She was plenty frustrated with Mr. Siegel.
It turns out that Ms. Wyler, whose company is called Reuseniks, met Mr. Siegel in 2008 when he and his wife approached her at a trade show. The couple told Ms. Wyler that they were blown away by her reusable dry-cleaning bag, the Clothesnik. After buying two, they asked to meet to discuss investing in her company.
Ultimately, Ms. Wyler opted not to team up with them, but not before Mr. Siegel sent an e-mail message to her and her business partner, Rich Leivenberg, in April 2008, titled “WE LIKE REUSENIKS.” “The reason we want to be so involved in your company,” the message said, was because of how easily the Clothesnik “could be replicated by potential competitors.”
If a more muscular competitor were to emerge, Mr. Siegel continued, it could “undermine your uniqueness and reap the available rewards.” Ask Ms. Wyler today, and she says that Mr. Siegel was absolutely right — and that he has been undermining and reaping ever since. “Can you believe this guy?” she asks. “He stole our idea.”
Au contraire, Mr. Siegel says. Click to continue »
Los Angeles magazine, July 2010
On this sunny morning at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan isn’t booby-trapping a doorway or defusing a bomb. He isn’t shaping cake frosting into blocks of counterfeit C4 authentic looking enough to fool an arms dealer or making an audio bug from a pair of cheap, rewired cell phones. No, the 42-year-old star of the number one show on cable—the wry spy drama Burn Notice—is simply reciting his recipe for vegetable soup. But since he’s already confided that he believes the best part of Burn Notice is that “nine times out of ten what we’re telling you is counterintuitive,” it’s easy to see his veggie brew as a metaphor.
“Take a lot of parsnips and carrots, summer squash—a medley. Then chop everything up, sauté it with a little bit of butter and olive oil, and boil it,” he says as he surveys rows of organic produce. “What most people do is make that their soup. No.”
This last directive he utters with a finality that fans of his USA Network series, whose fourth season premiered in early June, will recognize. Jaunty in a white formfitting T-shirt, gray suit pants, Puma sneakers, and a gray baseball cap, Donovan looks taut, like you could bounce a quarter off almost any part of his body. Not that you’d dare. His navy blue eyes squint slightly now as if to say: Pay attention. There might be a quiz later.
Originally appeared in Los Angeles June 2010
As told to Amy Wallace
At DreamWorks Animation, they have free lunch. So as a PA there, you don’t have to pick up food. But you do have to get Jeffrey Katzenberg’s ice. At the campus in Glendale, there is an office. It is unmarked. And I think it’s guarded by some type of demon. In that office is a refrigerator. The refrigerator makes a specific kind of ice that Jeffrey likes, a cylindrical ice, with a hole in it. This refrigerator, which has its own office, makes ice. For Jeffrey. Only for Jeffrey. Jeffrey’s life is meetings. And the meetings are in different rooms. But this refrigerator office is not near any of them. It is the PA’s job to figure out exactly where Jeffrey is going to sit at each meeting and then to place, to his right, a certain type of glass filled to a very specific level with the special office ice. Next to the glass goes a little bottle of Diet Coke. Here’s the problem: Meetings are often pushed. Jeffrey’s earlier meeting is running long. So all of a sudden the perfect glass of ice has water in it. Now it’s a judgment call: Can I get this glass filled with fresh ice and be back here before the meeting starts? And you’re running down hallways, through buildings, with a glass of ice in your hand, and people see you and laugh and say, “You better hurry up! Jeffrey’s coming!”
As told to Amy Wallace
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine June 2010
When you move to L.A. to work in Hollywood, there’s no clear path. But if you don’t get broken down and don’t give up, you’ll get there. That’s what being a production assistant is all about.
I’ve worked as a PA at DreamWorks and at Sony. Being a PA is very much like a hazing ritual. The goal is to get a reputation as someone who’s really hard-core and unflappable. But, oh, man, do you have every opportunity to be flapped. Especially when it comes to delivering lunch. Click to continue »
Originally appeared in the New York Times 6/13/10
By Amy Wallace
MAN or woman, every one of us has experienced the frustration that drove Rick Siegel to become an inventor. He would be in his clothes closet, running late, wrestling with the plastic bags that encased — and the twist ties that entangled — his dry cleaning. Surely, he thought, those twist ties would drive him mad.
“He’d freak out,” said his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, recalling the typical harried morning. “Scream is a good word.”
Familiar, too, is the guilt that Ms. Nigrosh felt when she tried to intervene. Her husband is 6-foot-4, meaning that if the artist Christo did an installation using the plastic film around just six of Mr. Siegel’s suits, he could easily wrap your garage. Ms. Nigrosh’s father ran a cardboard recycling factory when she was growing up, so a trip to the closet made her stomach clench: Where did all this plastic go?
Suddenly Mr. Siegel, who was once a Hollywood talent manager, and his wife, a marketing copywriter in the music industry, had an idea: a reusable bag to transport your clothes to and from the dry cleaner. After an initial investment of about $200,000, the Green Garmento was born. Click to continue »
Today’s criminal complaint against Kenneth Starr, the financial adviser to many a Hollywood A-lister, made me dig out a story I wrote last year about business managers who serve the entertainment industry. It ran in the March 2009 issue of Portfolio (the now-defunct business magazine where I was a senior writer). The complaint, as outlined by the Daily Beast, mentions several anonymous clients who were allegedly defrauded by him and his firm. The Beast says those clients include actress Uma Thurman and agent Jim Wiatt. Sound familiar?
To hear him talk about the economic challenges facing the entertainment industry, you’d think that Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, would be worried. Still, sitting in a meeting room on the DreamWorks campus, surrounded by plush toys commemorating his company’s biggest hits, Katzenberg speaks in a tone that borders on serenity.
“I tell people, ‘Wherever you are today, this is the new great,’ ” he says, a Kung Fu Panda doll looming over his shoulder. “The sooner you forget what you had, the better off you’ll be.”
Katzenberg’s Zen-like calm is especially surprising, given that just weeks before, he’d learned that he was among the Hollywood victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Both Katzenberg and his DreamWorks co-founder, Steven Spielberg, had millions tied up with Madoff, most of it money they’d set aside for charity and all of it probably gone. As Katzenberg speaks of the belt-tightening that is happening in Hollywood, it’s hard not to wonder about his own belt.
“If you look at where you were last summer, and that’s your measure of how you’re doing, it’s hopeless,” he says. His words could also apply to life after Madoff, I suggest. Katzenberg nods. His loss was humiliating, he admits. “It’s gone. It’s finished,” he says. He refuses to reveal how much “it” is, though public tax filings show his and his wife’s foundation had assets of more than $22 million in 2007. “I’m as lucky and as blessed as I can be,” he says. “Let’s move on.”
If only it were so easy. The names of Madoff’s other Hollywood victims are still gradually and grudgingly coming to light. Condé Nast Portfolio has learned that Arnon Milchan, the billionaire producer of such films as Fight Club and Pretty Woman, lost at least $18 million in the scam. (Milchan declined to comment.) Actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who are married, have acknowledged that they too were taken. Click to continue »
The Huffington Post sums up my Sharon Stone story:
Sharon Stone is on the cover of the June MORE magazine and in the interview the actress, 52, talks about her dating life and the plastic surgery disaster that happened six years ago after her divorce from newspaper editor Phil Bronstein.
On why she got lip injections:
“Nobody loved me. I’m 103. My life would be better if I had better lips.”
On her reaction to the procedure, which made her swear off plastic surgery:
“What the hell?” and “(I looked) like a trout.”
On her divorce:
“It takes a long, long time to come to the point where you can actually say that you got married because you were in love with the person. And it makes me cry… To admit your own lovingness was, for me, a harder step. Not to be embarrassed or ashamed that I could love somebody who didn’t love me. And that can be OK.”
On her current dry spell:
“Life and love is like the ocean. Sometimes the tide is in and sometimes the tide is out, and sometimes it’s like the frigging Mojave. Fortunately, I like the desert. I’m a desert flower.”
On dating younger men:
“I really get pursued by men in their twenties, like, a lot,” she says. “They probably know there’s food in the fridge and that somebody’s there to talk to them and ask themhow their day was.”
Then there’s this, from the NY Daily News:
A friend just told me she just received her June More magazine, whose cover story on Sharon Stone I had the pleasure of writing. The whole piece isn’t online yet, but here’s the lede (and a photo by Brigitte Lacombe):
Sharon Stone is shameless. The actress considers it a skill to have no shame. She thinks everyone should try it, though she cautions that if you’re female, shamelessness can cost you. Her refusal to feel guilty, she says, has gotten her labeled difficult, or worse.
“I’m like a Prohibition-era flapper. I’m like a juke-joint hussy,” Stone says over lunch at an Italian restaurant near Beverly Hills. But better to be called names than to be pressured into not being herself. Feeling ashamed, she says, “is not an organic state of being, so shamelessness is closer to godliness. You have to put shame down.”
