Amy Wallace

“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:

Shinan is the social columnist for Canada’s National Post, and author of the novel Boldface [...]

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 [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times, July 9, 2010
Whose Idea Was the Dry-Cleaning Bag Anyway?
By AMY WALLACE
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, [...]

While shopping at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan, the star of USA Network’s hit Burn Notice, opens up about his early struggles as an actor, doing his own stunts, and the right way to make vegetable soup
By Amy Wallace

Los Angeles magazine, July 2010
On this sunny morning at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan isn’t booby-trapping a doorway or [...]

A former Hollywood production assistant  dishes on how the DreamWorks executive takes his meetings on the rocks
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 [...]

Lunch is anything but a break for Hollywood’s production assistants. A former PA tells what it’s like to battle traffic, tickets, and spills

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

This morning I received a wonderful note from a woman who’d just read my More magazine piece about Harold, his purple crayon and me. She said she’d never written to a journalist before, but that the piece, which appeared in December, “struck me deeply… I feel exuberant!”
Harold always makes me feel exuberant. So glad to [...]

My sartorial NYT column is in the International Herald Tribune today.

Share and Enjoy:

Here are a few images of the shirt I designed via www.blank-label.com — complete with my own made-up label, “Live Free or Die.”
The handsome model is related to me. And he likes the shirt, even though his mom made it.

Share and Enjoy:

Originally appeared in the New York Times
By AMY WALLACE
THE idea was never to try to supplant retail, says Fan Bi, the 22-year-old chief executive of Blank Label. Sometimes you need a dress shirt right now, and at those times, Mr. Bi says approvingly, “you can get it right now at Nordstrom.”
But what about those times [...]

She’s neither desperate nor a housewife, and that’s just the way she likes it. Dana Delany sounds off about her single status, why lovemaking gets livelier after 50 and the male star who’s her surprising role model.
Originally appeared in April 2010 More
By Amy Wallace
Photographs spill out of big manila envelopes, making a mess of Dana [...]

In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Thorstein Veblen (who I quote in tomorrow’s New York Times) coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order.
Here are a few pictures of the cool stuff (specifically high-end cell phones) [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times
April 18, 2010
By AMY WALLACE
IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”
As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. [...]

Just got word that “An Epidemic of Fear,” my Wired story on vaccines, will be in “Best American Science Writing 2010,” to be published soon… Very exciting.

Share and Enjoy:

Originally published in the New York Times 3/21/10
By AMY WALLACE
JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.
Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying [...]

Has Dana Delany ever looked better? I don’t think so.
Peggy Sirota took it.
I wrote the accompanying story. It’s in the April issue…

Share and Enjoy:

I just got this from a Wired reader in Australia who read my November cover story and was following the legal action that followed. She gave me permission to reprint it here:
My name is Toni McCaffery. I live in Australia and one year ago my beautiful
baby daughter Dana died from Pertussis on 9 March 2009
(www.danamccaffery.com). [...]

Last December, two days before Christmas, I was served with a $1 million lawsuit that alleged I had libeled a woman who was mentioned in my November 2009 cover story for Wired magazine: “An Epidemic of Fear: One Man’s Battle Against the Anti-Vaccine Movement”.
Today, the lawsuit was dismissed. Read the attached ruling here: Memorandum Opinion

Share [...]

Click on photo below to read about what I saw at the top of Runyon Canyon this morning….

Share and Enjoy:

Noah Baumbach, the writer-director most associated with Brooklyn, explains how he made an (almost) cliché-free movie about L.A.
Los Angeles magazine, March 2010
» The Filmmaker’s Back Story
Noah Baumbach’s first movie was shot in Los Angeles, and you weren’t supposed to know it. The writer-director had wanted to set Kicking and Screaming, his 1995 film about a [...]

Originally published in the New York Times, 2/21/10

By AMY WALLACE
WHEN Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos first hit on the idea that would change their lives, they were thinking big — a little too big, actually.
“It was a mail receptacle/guest house,” Mr. Farentinos jokes, describing an oversize, locking mailbox nicknamed the Elephant Trunk.
His wife agrees. [...]

In this Sunday’s New York Times, I begin writing a monthly column called Prototype about innovation and creativity. If you want to hear about the thinking behind the first one, about a Compton couple who invented a better mailbox, Sunday Business Editor Tim O’Brien interviewed me for the Weekend Business podcast that just went online.

Share [...]

Three years ago, I asked my friend Kelly to build me a website — an online archive of my work that would make it easy for people to find stories they were curious about. She designed an elegant portal that divided my stories into categories that seemed to correspond to what people might be interested in: Hollywood Players, [...]

She has a billion dollars and she wants to be Governor of California. Her critics say she’ll try to buy the election. Her supporters say that as the former CEO of eBay, she has the business chops to salvage a near-bankrupt state.
Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor [...]

What most people don’t know is that long ago, before Cesar Millan became TV’s beloved canine savant, the Dog Whisperer, his wife had to teach him how to love women.
Originally appeared in Elle February, 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
What, you were expecting peace and quiet,muchachas? Cesar Millan may be known as the Dog Whisperer, but in his [...]

A chaotic childhood left the author believing she had only herself to rely on. But a painful divorce — and an insight from her young son — led her to a new conclusion.
Originally appeared in More Magazine December/January 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
Standing behind her in the supermarket line, I could see the girl was pretty. Slightly [...]

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine January, 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
Sean Carroll’s office at Caltech is a jumble of brainy flotsam. There are books with titles like Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology; five empty champagne bottles, one for each of his students who’s earned a PhD; and a NASA-approved blow-up beach ball of the universe. And on the [...]

An email exchange with Viggo Mortensen on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature.
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine December, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
He has been nominated for an Oscar (for the 2007 mystery Eastern Promises) and was declared a bona fide sex symbol (after his turn in the 2005 crime drama A History of [...]

After Carrying Tabloid Baggage For 18 Years, Paul Reubens Is Back In The Saddle — And In The Playhouse. Ready For A Big Adventure, Boys And Girls?
Originally appeared in Details November, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Paul Reubens is doing one of the things he does best: obsessing. “I am constantly hoping that, like, I’m still relevant at [...]

Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine November, 2009
After she confessed to a young reporter about the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife, Betty Broderick became an icon for women scorned. Twenty years later, that reporter reconnects with the killer who launched her career.
BY: Amy Wallace
She took her gun, entered her ex-husband’s house, tiptoed [...]

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine November, 2009
By Amy Wallace
To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams [...]

Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” built a multimillion-dollar company on his skill with pets and their owners. “God was my lawyer,” he says.
Originally appeared in the New York Times on 10/11/2009
BY: Amy Wallace
IT’S a miracle. That’s what the humans believe, more often than not, after watching this compact, 40-year-old C.E.O. do his work. He enters [...]

Steve Warshak made millions on “natural male enhancement.” Now he’s doing hard time.
Originally appeared in GQ October, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
The ads just ooze intentional cheesiness, none more so than “Enzyte Christmas.”
In the (unlikely) event you’ve never seen it, picture an office holiday party: reindeer sweaters, cubicles festooned with garlands, and antler-headed colleagues engaged in photocopier [...]

Meet Ash, cousin of Sacha, who has quietly been directing not-remotely-funny movies in Hollywood for years – and who told the man behind Brüno to stay away from comedy
Originally appeared in Esquire Magazine July, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Ash Baron Cohen’s father and his uncle — who is Sacha Baron Cohen’s father — were in the shmatte [...]

Saving Grace’s Wild Woman
Originally appeared in More Magazine, July/August 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
As the toughest, lustiest cop on TV, Holly Hunter loves to explode expectations—about women, morality, aging and the need to always be in control.
Holly Hunter is talking about sex, and who wouldn’t want to listen? During her nearly three-decade career, after all, the Academy [...]

Originally appeared in The Daily Beast
June 25, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
A recent email exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie’s Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture—and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.

Her golden hair prompted [...]

Checkmate at the Yellowstone Club
Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich

Jeff Minton

Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in [...]

The roster of victims goes way beyond Spielberg and Katzenberg.
How did the scam of the century reach all the way across the country and into the pockets of the showbiz elite? It wasn’t hard at all.
Originally appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio March, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
To hear him talk about the economic challenges facing the entertainment industry, you’d [...]

Sure, he isn’t as pretty as he was, but he is having more sex and attracting attention for his acting, not his antics. And if Rourke doesn’t nab an Oscar this time, so what? He’s going for one next year, too.
Originally appeared in Men’s Journal February, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Just a few months ago, Mickey Rourke [...]

Get Me Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite
Fox hits up Hollywood A-listers to make a sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
Originally appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio February, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Gordon Gekko is an ex-con, fresh out of prison. The year is 2009. The place: New York. In Money Never Sleeps, a script floating around Hollywood, Gekko, the corporate [...]

Originally appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio January, 2008
BY: Amy Wallace
He’s Mark Zuckerberg’s coach, Bill Gates’ editor, Bono’s business partner, and an owner of Forbes. But Roger McNamee—the guitar-strumming soul of one of the quirkiest private equity shops in Silicon Valley—still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

Backstage at a cavernous Denver nightclub called the Cervantes Masterpiece [...]

A battle for control of the Superman franchise pits Time Warner against the original Lois Lane.
Originally appeared in Portfolio, October 2007
BY: Amy Wallace
In May 2002, Richard Parsons, then co-chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, received a scathing letter from the widow of Jerome Siegel, the man who invented Superman.

  “Dear Dick,” wrote Joanne [...]

Originally appeared in Esquire March, 2006
Eats Roadkill, Speaks Danish.
The Appealingly Weird World of Viggo Mortensen
By Amy Wallace
Viggo Mortensen listens to a lot of AM radio. The forty-seven-year-old actor doesn’t enjoy this hobby, exactly. But if the vitriol spewed by conservative talk jocks is what tens of millions of Americans listen to, he figures he ought [...]

What I’ve Learned
Originally published in Esquire,  January 1, 2006
Jerry Lewis: Comedian, 79, Las Vegas
INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace
Hey, Penny! Forty-three years, Penny’s been in my office. She’s something else. She doesn’t let me get away with anything. Penny, bring me an orange soda, honey. You haven’t done a goddamn thing all day.
I will tell you [...]

Hollywood’s king of schlock
Originally appeared in The New Yorker February 2, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
In 1998, a script entitled “Phone Booth” started making the rounds in Hollywood. It had a simple premise: a smarmy New York City publicist picks up a ringing pay phone and learns that a sniper will kill him if he hangs up. [...]

Los Angeles Magazine
February 1, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
Los Angeles is an actor’s town. Some 40,000 actors call L.A. home. But more than their numbers, it is their hunger, their flair, and most of all their ability to face rejection daily and yet still reinvent themselves that fuel this city and make it unlike any other. Whether [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times December 21, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — It was dinnertime when the 80 or so invited guests began arriving. Handing off their Benzes and Boxsters to uniformed valets, many of Hollywood’s most important agents, producers and studio and network executives followed a brick path to Sandy Grushow’s [...]

March 1, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
THE OTHER DAY, KATHY BATES WAS STANDING with a friend on a street corner in Beverly Hills when a stranger offered an appraisal of her hot body.
“This guy said, ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you have really great nipples!’” Bates says, delighted. “I’m over 50. I’m [...]

The Un-agent Agent: He represents top directors. He drives a hard bargain. Mostly, though, Robert Newman just loves to sit in the dark
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine March 1, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
Robert Newman knows every movie theater in Los Angeles — where it is, what kind of seating it has, how many trailers [...]

The Greasy Spoons that Made L.A. Great
Originally appeared in Vanity Fair April, 2002
BY: Amy Wallace
There are glitzy Los Angeles restaurants – Mortons, Ago, Mr. Chow – where Hollywood’s top stars and reigning moguls go to be seen. Then there are no-nonsense spots where the same A-list crowd goes to simply eat in peace: the Apple [...]

Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2002
INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace
Jodie Foster sums it up: she’s focused, she’s critical, she’s downright mathematical. After so many movies, she knows how things work and why they don’t.

THERE’S A MOMENT IN DIRECTOR David Fincher’s upcoming thriller, Panic Room, that shows why Jodie Foster got the lead role. Playing a [...]

Los Angeles Magazine
January 1, 2002
By: Amy Wallace
LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY BREASTS TODAY. First, I spilled a latte all over them at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. The lid on my cup wasn’t tight, so when I went to take a sip, milk foam poured and then puddled on my sweater. [...]

Los Angeles Magazine
December 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
Bitter sweet dreamers: in their comedies Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and now The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson and his friends Owen and Luke Wilson skirt irony in favor of sincerity. They are the perfect funnymen for an unfunny world.

YOU HAVE TO SEEK OUT VAHRAM. IF you need to know about [...]

He knows the movie business as well as anyone, and when he talks, studio chiefs listen. He’s Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart, and he lives in curious coexistence with the industry he covers
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine September 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.
“I really take [...]

Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
ALEC GUINNESS USED to say that he built his characters from the shoes up. Laurence Olivier began with the nose often reshaping it with putty. Al Pacino insisted on the elegant camel-hair coat he wore in The Godfather, Part II. Externals matter, he explained.
BUT WHAT OF THE [...]

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKED AT EVERY TURN; BEN AFFLECK MAY SEEM TO HAVE A SCATTERSHOT CAREER, ACTING IN BOTH INDIE AND BLOCKBUSTER FILMS. BUT IN HIS AFFABLE WAY, HE CLEARLY KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS.
March 7th, 1999
BY: Amy Wallace
Ben Affleck likes money as much as the next guy, but for a friend, he’ll still work cheap.
Consider the small [...]

Uni Bomber
Originally appeared in Vanity Fair May, 1997
BY: Amy Wallace
TODAY’S SPECIAL: TRUST ME! reads the hand-lettered sign on the wall of Sushi Nozawa. And chef Kazunori Nozawa, one of Los Angeles’ most temperamental restaurateurs, isn’t kidding around.
To occupy one of the nine seats at his counter, a waitress explains to newcomers, is to relinquish control. [...]

Karma and culture draw Hollywood to the free-spirited Crossroads School
Originally appeared in Vanity Fair April, 1995
BY: Amy Wallace
Down an alley, next to a sheet-metal factory just off the Santa Monica Freeway, is a place so exclusive that some of Hollywood’s most powerful players are turned away at the door. It’s not a nightclub, but [...]

Originally appeared in Vanity Fair October, 1994
BY: Amy Wallace
Nestled into a steep Santa Monica hillside, 189 concrete steps are giving new meaning to the term ‘social climbing.’ At dawn, at dusk, even in the middle of the night, the fit and would-be fit battle for parking spots near the top of the well-worn stairs, which [...]

Three years ago, I asked my friend Kelly to build me a website — an online archive of my work that would make it easy for people to find stories they were curious about. She designed an elegant portal that divided my stories into categories that seemed to correspond to what people might be interested in: Hollywood Players, [...]

Click on photo below to read about what I saw at the top of Runyon Canyon this morning….

Last December, two days before Christmas, I was served with a $1 million lawsuit that alleged I had libeled a woman who was mentioned in my November 2009 cover story for Wired magazine: “An Epidemic of Fear: One Man’s Battle Against the Anti-Vaccine Movement”.
Today, the lawsuit was dismissed. Read the attached ruling here: Memorandum Opinion

I just got this from a Wired reader in Australia who read my November cover story and was following the legal action that followed. She gave me permission to reprint it here:
My name is Toni McCaffery. I live in Australia and one year ago my beautiful
baby daughter Dana died from Pertussis on 9 March 2009
(www.danamccaffery.com). [...]

Just got word that “An Epidemic of Fear,” my Wired story on vaccines, will be in “Best American Science Writing 2010,” to be published soon… Very exciting.

My sartorial NYT column is in the International Herald Tribune today.

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 [...]

After Carrying Tabloid Baggage For 18 Years, Paul Reubens Is Back In The Saddle — And In The Playhouse. Ready For A Big Adventure, Boys And Girls?
Originally appeared in Details November, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Paul Reubens is doing one of the things he does best: obsessing. “I am constantly hoping that, like, I’m still relevant at [...]

What most people don’t know is that long ago, before Cesar Millan became TV’s beloved canine savant, the Dog Whisperer, his wife had to teach him how to love women.
Originally appeared in Elle February, 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
What, you were expecting peace and quiet,muchachas? Cesar Millan may be known as the Dog Whisperer, but in his [...]

What I’ve Learned
Originally published in Esquire,  January 1, 2006
Jerry Lewis: Comedian, 79, Las Vegas
INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace
Hey, Penny! Forty-three years, Penny’s been in my office. She’s something else. She doesn’t let me get away with anything. Penny, bring me an orange soda, honey. You haven’t done a goddamn thing all day.
I will tell you [...]

Originally appeared in Esquire March, 2006
Eats Roadkill, Speaks Danish.
The Appealingly Weird World of Viggo Mortensen
By Amy Wallace
Viggo Mortensen listens to a lot of AM radio. The forty-seven-year-old actor doesn’t enjoy this hobby, exactly. But if the vitriol spewed by conservative talk jocks is what tens of millions of Americans listen to, he figures he ought [...]

Meet Ash, cousin of Sacha, who has quietly been directing not-remotely-funny movies in Hollywood for years – and who told the man behind Brüno to stay away from comedy
Originally appeared in Esquire Magazine July, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Ash Baron Cohen’s father and his uncle — who is Sacha Baron Cohen’s father — were in the shmatte [...]

Steve Warshak made millions on “natural male enhancement.” Now he’s doing hard time.
Originally appeared in GQ October, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
The ads just ooze intentional cheesiness, none more so than “Enzyte Christmas.”
In the (unlikely) event you’ve never seen it, picture an office holiday party: reindeer sweaters, cubicles festooned with garlands, and antler-headed colleagues engaged in photocopier [...]

Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
ALEC GUINNESS USED to say that he built his characters from the shoes up. Laurence Olivier began with the nose often reshaping it with putty. Al Pacino insisted on the elegant camel-hair coat he wore in The Godfather, Part II. Externals matter, he explained.
BUT WHAT OF THE [...]

He knows the movie business as well as anyone, and when he talks, studio chiefs listen. He’s Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart, and he lives in curious coexistence with the industry he covers
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine September 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.
“I really take [...]

Los Angeles Magazine
December 1, 2001
BY: Amy Wallace
Bitter sweet dreamers: in their comedies Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and now The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson and his friends Owen and Luke Wilson skirt irony in favor of sincerity. They are the perfect funnymen for an unfunny world.

YOU HAVE TO SEEK OUT VAHRAM. IF you need to know about [...]

Los Angeles Magazine
January 1, 2002
By: Amy Wallace
LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY BREASTS TODAY. First, I spilled a latte all over them at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. The lid on my cup wasn’t tight, so when I went to take a sip, milk foam poured and then puddled on my sweater. [...]

Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2002
INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace
Jodie Foster sums it up: she’s focused, she’s critical, she’s downright mathematical. After so many movies, she knows how things work and why they don’t.

THERE’S A MOMENT IN DIRECTOR David Fincher’s upcoming thriller, Panic Room, that shows why Jodie Foster got the lead role. Playing a [...]

The Un-agent Agent: He represents top directors. He drives a hard bargain. Mostly, though, Robert Newman just loves to sit in the dark
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine March 1, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
Robert Newman knows every movie theater in Los Angeles — where it is, what kind of seating it has, how many trailers [...]

March 1, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
THE OTHER DAY, KATHY BATES WAS STANDING with a friend on a street corner in Beverly Hills when a stranger offered an appraisal of her hot body.
“This guy said, ‘I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you have really great nipples!’” Bates says, delighted. “I’m over 50. I’m [...]

Los Angeles Magazine
February 1, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
Los Angeles is an actor’s town. Some 40,000 actors call L.A. home. But more than their numbers, it is their hunger, their flair, and most of all their ability to face rejection daily and yet still reinvent themselves that fuel this city and make it unlike any other. Whether [...]

Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine November, 2009
After she confessed to a young reporter about the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife, Betty Broderick became an icon for women scorned. Twenty years later, that reporter reconnects with the killer who launched her career.
BY: Amy Wallace
She took her gun, entered her ex-husband’s house, tiptoed [...]

An email exchange with Viggo Mortensen on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature.
Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine December, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
He has been nominated for an Oscar (for the 2007 mystery Eastern Promises) and was declared a bona fide sex symbol (after his turn in the 2005 crime drama A History of [...]

Noah Baumbach, the writer-director most associated with Brooklyn, explains how he made an (almost) cliché-free movie about L.A.
Los Angeles magazine, March 2010
» The Filmmaker’s Back Story
Noah Baumbach’s first movie was shot in Los Angeles, and you weren’t supposed to know it. The writer-director had wanted to set Kicking and Screaming, his 1995 film about a [...]

Lunch is anything but a break for Hollywood’s production assistants. A former PA tells what it’s like to battle traffic, tickets, and spills

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 [...]

A former Hollywood production assistant  dishes on how the DreamWorks executive takes his meetings on the rocks
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 [...]

While shopping at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan, the star of USA Network’s hit Burn Notice, opens up about his early struggles as an actor, doing his own stunts, and the right way to make vegetable soup
By Amy Wallace

Los Angeles magazine, July 2010
On this sunny morning at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan isn’t booby-trapping a doorway or [...]

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKED AT EVERY TURN; BEN AFFLECK MAY SEEM TO HAVE A SCATTERSHOT CAREER, ACTING IN BOTH INDIE AND BLOCKBUSTER FILMS. BUT IN HIS AFFABLE WAY, HE CLEARLY KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS.
March 7th, 1999
BY: Amy Wallace
Ben Affleck likes money as much as the next guy, but for a friend, he’ll still work cheap.
Consider the small [...]

Sure, he isn’t as pretty as he was, but he is having more sex and attracting attention for his acting, not his antics. And if Rourke doesn’t nab an Oscar this time, so what? He’s going for one next year, too.
Originally appeared in Men’s Journal February, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Just a few months ago, Mickey Rourke [...]

Saving Grace’s Wild Woman
Originally appeared in More Magazine, July/August 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
As the toughest, lustiest cop on TV, Holly Hunter loves to explode expectations—about women, morality, aging and the need to always be in control.
Holly Hunter is talking about sex, and who wouldn’t want to listen? During her nearly three-decade career, after all, the Academy [...]

A chaotic childhood left the author believing she had only herself to rely on. But a painful divorce — and an insight from her young son — led her to a new conclusion.
Originally appeared in More Magazine December/January 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
Standing behind her in the supermarket line, I could see the girl was pretty. Slightly [...]

She has a billion dollars and she wants to be Governor of California. Her critics say she’ll try to buy the election. Her supporters say that as the former CEO of eBay, she has the business chops to salvage a near-bankrupt state.
Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor [...]

Has Dana Delany ever looked better? I don’t think so.
Peggy Sirota took it.
I wrote the accompanying story. It’s in the April issue…

She’s neither desperate nor a housewife, and that’s just the way she likes it. Dana Delany sounds off about her single status, why lovemaking gets livelier after 50 and the male star who’s her surprising role model.
Originally appeared in April 2010 More
By Amy Wallace
Photographs spill out of big manila envelopes, making a mess of Dana [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times December 21, 2003
BY: Amy Wallace
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — It was dinnertime when the 80 or so invited guests began arriving. Handing off their Benzes and Boxsters to uniformed valets, many of Hollywood’s most important agents, producers and studio and network executives followed a brick path to Sandy Grushow’s [...]

Checkmate at the Yellowstone Club
Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich

Jeff Minton

Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in [...]

Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” built a multimillion-dollar company on his skill with pets and their owners. “God was my lawyer,” he says.
Originally appeared in the New York Times on 10/11/2009
BY: Amy Wallace
IT’S a miracle. That’s what the humans believe, more often than not, after watching this compact, 40-year-old C.E.O. do his work. He enters [...]

Originally published in the New York Times, 2/21/10

By AMY WALLACE
WHEN Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos first hit on the idea that would change their lives, they were thinking big — a little too big, actually.
“It was a mail receptacle/guest house,” Mr. Farentinos jokes, describing an oversize, locking mailbox nicknamed the Elephant Trunk.
His wife agrees. [...]

Originally published in the New York Times 3/21/10
By AMY WALLACE
JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.
Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times
April 18, 2010
By AMY WALLACE
IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”
As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times
By AMY WALLACE
THE idea was never to try to supplant retail, says Fan Bi, the 22-year-old chief executive of Blank Label. Sometimes you need a dress shirt right now, and at those times, Mr. Bi says approvingly, “you can get it right now at Nordstrom.”
But what about those times [...]

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. [...]

Originally appeared in the New York Times, July 9, 2010
Whose Idea Was the Dry-Cleaning Bag Anyway?
By AMY WALLACE
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, [...]

A battle for control of the Superman franchise pits Time Warner against the original Lois Lane.
Originally appeared in Portfolio, October 2007
BY: Amy Wallace
In May 2002, Richard Parsons, then co-chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner, received a scathing letter from the widow of Jerome Siegel, the man who invented Superman.

  “Dear Dick,” wrote Joanne [...]

Originally appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio January, 2008
BY: Amy Wallace
He’s Mark Zuckerberg’s coach, Bill Gates’ editor, Bono’s business partner, and an owner of Forbes. But Roger McNamee—the guitar-strumming soul of one of the quirkiest private equity shops in Silicon Valley—still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.

Backstage at a cavernous Denver nightclub called the Cervantes Masterpiece [...]

Get Me Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite
Fox hits up Hollywood A-listers to make a sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street.
Originally appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio February, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
Gordon Gekko is an ex-con, fresh out of prison. The year is 2009. The place: New York. In Money Never Sleeps, a script floating around Hollywood, Gekko, the corporate [...]

The roster of victims goes way beyond Spielberg and Katzenberg.
How did the scam of the century reach all the way across the country and into the pockets of the showbiz elite? It wasn’t hard at all.
Originally appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio March, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
To hear him talk about the economic challenges facing the entertainment industry, you’d [...]

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 [...]

Originally appeared in The Daily Beast
June 25, 2009
BY: Amy Wallace
A recent email exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie’s Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture—and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.

Her golden hair prompted [...]

Hollywood’s king of schlock
Originally appeared in The New Yorker February 2, 2004
BY: Amy Wallace
In 1998, a script entitled “Phone Booth” started making the rounds in Hollywood. It had a simple premise: a smarmy New York City publicist picks up a ringing pay phone and learns that a sniper will kill him if he hangs up. [...]

In this Sunday’s New York Times, I begin writing a monthly column called Prototype about innovation and creativity. If you want to hear about the thinking behind the first one, about a Compton couple who invented a better mailbox, Sunday Business Editor Tim O’Brien interviewed me for the Weekend Business podcast that just went online.

Originally published in the New York Times, 2/21/10

By AMY WALLACE
WHEN Vanessa Troyer and Chris Farentinos first hit on the idea that would change their lives, they were thinking big — a little too big, actually.
“It was a mail receptacle/guest house,” Mr. Farentinos jokes, describing an oversize, locking mailbox nicknamed the Elephant Trunk.
His wife agrees. [...]

Last December, two days before Christmas, I was served with a $1 million lawsuit that alleged I had libeled a woman who was mentioned in my November 2009 cover story for Wired magazine: “An Epidemic of Fear: One Man’s Battle Against the Anti-Vaccine Movement”.
Today, the lawsuit was dismissed. Read the attached ruling here: Memorandum Opinion

I just got this from a Wired reader in Australia who read my November cover story and was following the legal action that followed. She gave me permission to reprint it here:
My name is Toni McCaffery. I live in Australia and one year ago my beautiful
baby daughter Dana died from Pertussis on 9 March 2009
(www.danamccaffery.com). [...]

Has Dana Delany ever looked better? I don’t think so.
Peggy Sirota took it.
I wrote the accompanying story. It’s in the April issue…

In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Thorstein Veblen (who I quote in tomorrow’s New York Times) coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order.
Here are a few pictures of the cool stuff (specifically high-end cell phones) [...]

Here are a few images of the shirt I designed via www.blank-label.com — complete with my own made-up label, “Live Free or Die.”
The handsome model is related to me. And he likes the shirt, even though his mom made it.

My sartorial NYT column is in the International Herald Tribune today.

This morning I received a wonderful note from a woman who’d just read my More magazine piece about Harold, his purple crayon and me. She said she’d never written to a journalist before, but that the piece, which appeared in December, “struck me deeply… I feel exuberant!”
Harold always makes me feel exuberant. So glad to [...]

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 [...]

While shopping at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan, the star of USA Network’s hit Burn Notice, opens up about his early struggles as an actor, doing his own stunts, and the right way to make vegetable soup
By Amy Wallace

Los Angeles magazine, July 2010
On this sunny morning at the Farmers Market, Jeffrey Donovan isn’t booby-trapping a doorway or [...]

“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:

Shinan is the social columnist for Canada’s National Post, and author of the novel Boldface [...]

Originally appeared in Vanity Fair October, 1994
BY: Amy Wallace
Nestled into a steep Santa Monica hillside, 189 concrete steps are giving new meaning to the term ‘social climbing.’ At dawn, at dusk, even in the middle of the night, the fit and would-be fit battle for parking spots near the top of the well-worn stairs, which [...]

Karma and culture draw Hollywood to the free-spirited Crossroads School
Originally appeared in Vanity Fair April, 1995
BY: Amy Wallace
Down an alley, next to a sheet-metal factory just off the Santa Monica Freeway, is a place so exclusive that some of Hollywood’s most powerful players are turned away at the door. It’s not a nightclub, but [...]

Uni Bomber
Originally appeared in Vanity Fair May, 1997
BY: Amy Wallace
TODAY’S SPECIAL: TRUST ME! reads the hand-lettered sign on the wall of Sushi Nozawa. And chef Kazunori Nozawa, one of Los Angeles’ most temperamental restaurateurs, isn’t kidding around.
To occupy one of the nine seats at his counter, a waitress explains to newcomers, is to relinquish control. [...]

The Greasy Spoons that Made L.A. Great
Originally appeared in Vanity Fair April, 2002
BY: Amy Wallace
There are glitzy Los Angeles restaurants – Mortons, Ago, Mr. Chow – where Hollywood’s top stars and reigning moguls go to be seen. Then there are no-nonsense spots where the same A-list crowd goes to simply eat in peace: the Apple [...]

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine November, 2009
By Amy Wallace
To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams [...]

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine January, 2010
BY: Amy Wallace
Sean Carroll’s office at Caltech is a jumble of brainy flotsam. There are books with titles like Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology; five empty champagne bottles, one for each of his students who’s earned a PhD; and a NASA-approved blow-up beach ball of the universe. And on the [...]