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.

“What you do,” he continues, politely making way for an elderly shopper as she eases by with her cart, “is you boil it, strain it, then boil it some more. There’s going to be scum. Take the scum off. Then put that into the fridge. Then you come here”—he waves a muscled arm around the stalls at Fairfax Avenue and 3rd Street—“and buy what you’re going to put in the soup: more carrots, some green beans, a little onion, some celery, more squash. You can add a little pasta. Then I add fresh dill right at the end. Because you don’t want to cook dill.”

Anyone who’s watched Burn Notice, which follows a former spy named Michael Westen as he tries to figure out who issued the order (or “burn notice”) that got him expelled from his agency, will see the irony of taking cooking lessons from Donovan. His character, after all, keeps only one thing in his fridge: yogurt.

“You know the whole story about the yogurt?” Donovan asks. Apparently the show’s writers have an ex-intelligence operative on call as a consultant. “They asked him, ‘What do spies eat?’ And he said, ‘Protein in a cup.’ On surveillance you’re sitting in a car for 12 hours. So you pack a cooler. Yogurt has enzymes, cultures, proteins. It’s a perfect little meal.” A beat, then he adds: “I get pretty sick of it.”

*****

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Burn Notice. It’s plugging along just fine without you, with 7 million viewers a week. Equal parts spy-games cool and slapstick funny, it’s been compared to MacGyver (for the homemade gadgetry), The Avengers (for Westen’s chemistry with his ex-lover Fiona, an Irish terrorist played by Gabrielle Anwar), and The Rockford Files (for Westen’s Mutt-and-Jeff relationship with a drunken FBI informant, played by Bruce Campbell). It also recalls the ’60s British series The Prisoner, starring the late, great Patrick McGoohan.

“I rented it for research,” Donovan says of that show. “I wanted to find these kind of fish-out-of-water flawed characters who cannot escape their own circumstances.” Donovan’s Westen, like McGoohan’s Number Six, is consistently confronting his previous employer in search of answers (Number Six is stuck on an island; Westen is trapped in Miami).

“He doesn’t enforce the law, he solves problems,” Donovan says of Westen. “He’s a rogue operative helping the little guy.”

Donovan relates to little guys. Raised in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he grew up on welfare after his mom left his dad, taking Donovan and his two brothers (he’s in the middle) with her. As a kid, he was a cutup. He discovered acting in high school after an English teacher attempted to have him focus by making him memorize Shylock’s “Hath Not a Jew Eyes?” speech.

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!”

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.

Lunch pickup is a job that PAs who work for TV shows typically do for the writers and producers. It is daily torture. It never gets better. It never gets easier. Imagine you are Indiana Jones going deep into some temple to capture the sacred stone and then running out of the temple past the huge rolling boulder and the poisonous spears. When you get back to the office and show the person who ordered the sacred stone what you’ve brought them, they’re, like, “Didn’t I have a side salad with that sacred stone?” That is daily lunch pickup, and I did it for nine months for a sitcom at Sony.

Here’s how it worked: First you’d take down orders, with all their specifications. No onions. Coleslaw instead of fries. Extra fries. You learned to pay attention, checking your roster to make sure you didn’t forget anyone. You’d fax the order in, to the Farm or Kate Mantilini or wherever. Then you’d get in your crappy car (all PAs have midsize crappy cars) and drive to Beverly Hills during the lunch rush. Parking was hell. You needed to park close because you had to get out fast before the food got too cold. You’d hear about it if it was cold. So you’d hit handicapped spaces or pull up to red curbs, putting your flashers on.

You’d go into the restaurant, hoping the food was ready. It never was. When it finally came out, you’d have to check the orders, which was complicated by the fact that because a lot of these places have gone green, you couldn’t see through the cartons. So you’d be dealing with four bags of crappy cardboard containers that some person in the kitchen had scrawled some hieroglyphic code on. You’d take each container out, cross-reference it with your list to make sure not only that everyone’s lunch was in there, but that it was correct. Messing up the order of anybody serious—like the producers—could get you fired.

After checking the orders, you’d get the lukewarm food back into the bags and head out to your car, which you hoped was still there. Then came the mad dash back to the office. You’d be calling your fellow PAs as you drove, or they’d be calling you to say, “Where are you?” To which you’d say, “Well, I’m picking up lunch!”

There’s something about those bags—they’re too big to fit snugly on your floorboards so they won’t fall over and yet just small enough to slide around in your backseat. Often it would be one hand on the wheel, one hand making sure the precious items in the front seat didn’t tip over. While you were frantically driving, there’d be a lot of slamming on the brakes. Stuff would spill. Sometimes whole dishes spilled onto the floor. The only chance for redemption was calling in and letting everyone know it had spilled, then delivering the rest of the food and going back. Or getting something from the studio restaurant, which nobody ever used. The commissary? I don’t think so!

When you got back to the office, there was the fun of seeing the expressions on people’s faces as they opened their preopened cardboard container and took a nice, hard look at their congealing food. Their faces said total nonsatisfaction. As in, “Well, I guess I can keep this down.” Then, comments: “I think this was supposed to be grilled.” In general, it was, “OK, I’m miserable now because of you. But it’s fine. I’ll get over it. Until tomorrow.”

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 group of friends struggling to get moving after college, at his alma mater, Vassar. He made do with Occidental College but worked to make Eagle Rock evoke an upstate New York vibe. Since then the 40-year-old New Yorker has depicted ’80s Brooklyn (in his 2005 film, The Squid and the Whale, which nabbed him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay) and present-day Long Island (in 2007’s Margot at the Wedding).

In collaboration with his friend Wes Anderson, he has also imagined whimsical worlds (he and Anderson cowrote the scripts for 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and last year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is up for a Best Animated Feature Oscar this month). Now Baumbach has made his first film about Los Angeles. In theaters March 26, Greenberg stars Ben Stiller as a former musician who has returned home to L.A. to recover from a breakdown after living for years in New York. The city on display in Greenberg is less iconic than familiar. It is the L.A. that Baumbach has gotten to know thanks to his wife, the actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who grew up here.

Baumbach and Leigh, who are expecting their first child this month, split their time between New York and L.A. “I would say we live in New York and have a house here. Jennifer would say something else,” he explains. “I think of it as, like, our country house in Los Angeles.”

-Amy Wallace

» Baumbach talks about Greenberg (as told to Amy Wallace)

I don’t know which came first—wanting to set a movie in L.A. or wanting to do a movie about a fortysomething guy who can’t get out of his own way. I had an idea of this character, Roger Greenberg. I wanted to tell a story about a guy who in these very particular ways is trapped in a false sense of himself. Someone who is still hung up on being perceived a certain way and is under the impression that people still care how he’s perceived. And the older he gets, the more this becomes an issue. It makes his life very hard to live.

I had wanted to do something for a while, too, that touches on a trend in a lot of American male novelists’ work: books about men at crisis points in their lives. Sometimes these novelists revisit these men over and over again, like in John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman series. I thought it’d be interesting to do a movie in that vein.

Greenberg grew up in L.A. but has lived in New York for years. He doesn’t drive. He can’t really swim. He can’t do the things that L.A. is ideal for. Even when he goes on a hike, when it’s hot, he wears his down vest. I mean, why would you come to a place where you can’t function? Setting the movie in L.A. enabled me to put the main character in a broader landscape. We shot the movie in wide-screen. Greenberg is so caught up in his own mythology that I liked the sense of putting him in a city that wouldn’t indulge that.

Before I met my wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, I had spent a lot of time in L.A., but I didn’t know the city at all. Through Jennifer I started to feel at home here. I started to see the city in the way she saw the city: as a place she’d grown up in, as a real city. So I just started to see the city differently, and I felt like it’d be great to do something here that approximated my and her experience of the place.

On Kicking and Screaming we were trying to hide L.A. I picked locations, but I didn’t know what any of the neighborhoods were. I still try to figure out where those locations are. While we were shooting Greenberg, the female lead—Florence, played by Greta Gerwig—goes with her friend to the Machine Project gallery in Echo Park. When we were shooting there, next door was a coffee shop where a lot of us would go between setups and hang out. And while I was sitting in the coffee shop I became convinced that it was the coffee shop that was in Kicking and Screaming. I don’t know if it’s true or not because they’d changed a lot of it, and I asked and nobody had been there long enough to know.

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 Violence). He’s starred in three of the biggest-grossing movies of all time (The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, 2002, and 2003). But Viggo Mortensen has always been motivated more by collaboration than celebrity. His new film, The Road, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about survival in a postapocalyptic world of cannibalism and other unimaginable horrors. As “The Man,” Mortensen navigates this devastated landscape with his son (played by 11-year-old newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee). We exchanged e-mails with the actor, poet, publisher (of the L.A.-based Perceval Press), and polyglot (he speaks Danish and Spanish, among other languages) on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature.

Hi Viggo,

The Road is true to McCarthy’s novel in that the nature of the cataclysmic event that has ruined the planet is never explained. As you constructed your character of “The Man,” though, you must have filled in that blank for yourself. Was it a comet, or did humankind bring the end of the world upon itself?

It does not really matter, because the character cannot do anything about it. I think that numerous things happened—fires, floods, drought, earthquakes (which the book and movie refer to) as well as fighting that led to the destruction of the power grids. Once things went wrong, there was no more Internet, phone, TV, radio, so it was not possible to know what really had happened and was continuing to happen all over the place. As when we have had blackouts, big snowstorms, fires, floods like those following Hurricane Katrina, or even as a reaction to events like those of 11 September, 2001, in New York and Washington, D.C., many people tend to isolate. General ignorance and wild, paranoid speculation tend to take over.

You’ve had a lot of physically demanding roles, from sword fighting in the LOTR trilogy to horseback riding in Hidalgo to wrestling naked in Eastern Promises. But The Road seems to be in a class by itself. How much weight did you lose to play a man starving to death?

I am not exactly sure. Enough to be credible as the character. Maybe 30 pounds or so. It was a basic requirement of the story that I not look well fed, so I simply ate less. That was not the hardest part, though. Nor was the hardest part the physical endurance test Kodi and I took part in by working in the cold, wet environments. The hardest part for both of us was the emotional journey, being exposed on the inside.

How did you prepare yourself emotionally to imagine the end of the world?

I’ve always thought that the end of the world, the end of me, of anything, can happen at any time, just as the sun always goes down at some point each day. It is natural, and not something to fear so much as be aware of and, when possible and appropriate, struggle against.

This may sound odd, but The Road had unexpected echoes of WALL-E, last year’s animated movie about an Earth used up and left behind by humans. Though WALL-E was clearly aimed at a different audience, both movies highlight the tenacity of love and the importance of even small gestures of kindness. Did you see WALL-E?

Yes, I did. I get your point. Had not thought of that. Thanks!

Were there any other movies you thought about as you prepared for this role?

For inspiration with regard to my understanding of Kodi’s character and regarding the environment, I looked at some of Tarkovsky’s work—Ivan’s Childhood and Stalker, for example. I also had another look at Sokurov’s Mother and Son and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc for the emotional truth of the performances and cinematography. I listened to certain music, looked at photographs, read certain kinds of poems. I also spoke with people who live in the street in different cities, when they were willing to speak with me.

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 into the darkened bedroom where he slept with his new young wife, and shot them both dead. In just seconds Betty Broderick ended two lives, but her vengeful act would do a lot more than that. Pop culture has long had a familiarity with ladies who kill the men they can’t keep. People have been singing “Frankie and Johnny” since the turn of the 20th century; George Cukor directed his classic film The Women in 1939. Twenty years ago, however, Betty riveted our attention like no other scorned woman. Instantly she became a new kind of antiheroine. Not only has the post-Betty era been richer in female payback, but unwittingly, in ways none of us could have imagined, she has helped change the rules of retribution.

On November 28, 1989, just after Thanksgiving, I drove to the Las Colinas Detention Facility in Santee, near San Diego, to talk to Elisabeth “Betty” Broderick for the first time. It had been three weeks since she’d murdered Dan and Linda Kolkena Broderick. I had a hundred questions, but they boiled down to two: Why had an affluent 42-year-old woman with four children and a home in La Jolla overlooking the Pacific Ocean thrown it all away just to get even with the father of her kids? Had he really done her so wrong? I had no reason to think she would see me. Then, all at once, there she was. Betty was tall, statuesque, if a little plump, with her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore jailhouse garb—a gray sweatshirt and navy sweatpants. As she took her seat in a hard plastic chair on the other side of a glass partition, her blue eyes flashed with intelligence. Smiling wanly, she picked up a phone receiver connected to one I held to my ear and began to talk.

That interview with Betty was my first big scoop as a journalist. Eight weeks before, I had started a new job at the Los Angeles Times. I was 27 years old, green, and determined to prove myself. Suddenly I was a lead reporter on a story the whole country was talking about. Overnight Betty had become not only infamous but  culturally significant: the focus of a debate over whether divorced women inevitably were treated unfairly. Betty’s suspicions that her husband had cheated, combined with her claim that she had been a victim of emotional abuse—assault by lawyering—resonated with many women. People,Ladies’ Home Journal, the syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen—everyone had an opinion about what had made her snap. Eventually Court TV would cover her trials (there were two; the first resulted in a hung jury), Oprah Winfrey would interview her in prison, and her case would inspire two top-rated TV movies, three books, a documentary, even a skit on Saturday Night Live.

When she took her seat across from me at Las Colinas, Betty seemed tired but self-assured. For the next half hour she recited a catalog of complaints about her ex-husband’s slights and infidelities. She had supported Dan while he completed Cornell University Medical School, then Harvard Law. She had raised their two sons and two daughters almost single-handedly, with little help and less money. Then, when he had finally achieved everything they’d scrimped and worked for—he was a thriving medical malpractice attorney—he threw her over for Linda, his receptionist. Since then, she said, he had tormented her in and out of court. If I could understand every moment of her marriage and its undoing, she said, I would agree that Dan was to blame, not her.

She didn’t acknowledge the murders. It was immediately clear, however, that one conversation would not be enough. After our jailhouse meeting, Betty started calling me collect and sending frequent letters, always on yellow legal paper and always in pencil.

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 character actors or A-listers, newcomers or old-timers, the finest performers — like Patricia Clarkson and Benicio Del Toro — help us see ourselves in ways we never imagined.

Inside: How to survive a terrible audition, how to get Del Toro drunk, and how to turn Clarkson on.

PATRICIA CLARKSON

PATRICIA CLARKSON is telling what turns her on. “Talent is a very potent aphrodisiac,” she says. “When someone is incredibly gifted. I find them incredibly sexy.” The actress takes her time with the word, lingering on the s, letting it build to a hiss, then finishing with a rush of breath. Pier throaty voice, like her laugh, can sometimes be sharp, clipped, Imagine Katharine Hepburn, but born and raised in New Orleans. There are also times, like this afternoon, when her voice — as slow, sweet, and sticky as molasses — can fill a room.

She’s talking about the party scene in Y Tu Mama Tambien, when the three main characters dance and drink together on the beach. She loves this scene, she says, because of its sexual energy. “There’s nothing coy, nothing premeditated, nothing arch. There’s no negligee in the scene. No teddy. It’s about sex,” she says, and this time the word pops like a bottle rocket. “It’s not about tits and ass. There’s no tease. It’s messy It’s a little nasty. And it’s on the edge, though it’s not about doing something taboo just for the sake of being taboo. That drives me crazy you know?”

For years Clarkson was relegated to roles as the wife, the mother, and the girlfriend in films like The Untouchables and Jumanji. The worst thing about this, she says, is that “when you’re playing just these archetypal roles, you’re often not shot from the waist down.” Clarkson believes in the body — its gestures, its frailties, its power to convey.

“I’m a very physical actress. But only with High Art did people get to see me as a physical presence,” she says, referring to her breakthrough performance as Ally Sheedy’s manipulative German girlfriend in the 1998 indie. “Close-ups have their power, but” — here the molasses starts flowing again — “I lo-o-o-ve a big long shot. Set the camera up in the next house over and shoot me.”

Clarkson, who is 44 and known to her friends as Patti, appeared in three films that were released last year (not to mention her regular stint as Aunt Sarah on HBO’s Six Feet Under). In All the Real Girls, she was a professional clown. In Pieces of April, she was a woman in the terminal stages of cancer who reluctantly reconnects with her errant daughter. In The Station Agent, she was a recluse who, while grieving over the death of her son and the end of her marriage, befriends two other lonelyhearts, both of them younger men. “I got to be the chick in that one,” she says. In the coming year, she has four more movies: a horror film (The Woods), an experimental thriller directed by Lars yon Trier (Dogville), a contemporary drama about a Hollywood love triangle (The Dying Gaul), and a movie about Olympic hockey (Miracle). Yes, she acknowledges, she plays wives in two of the four, but wives who are “alive, sparkly, real, detailed.”

Today, though, the actress is thinking about other people’s movies. Asked to choose five favorite scenes, she admits she’s had trouble. There are six videocassettes on the table in front of her and about a dozen more performances she admires — George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight, Peter Sellers in The Party, Morgan Freeman in Street Smart — that she’d also like to mention. Sitting in the conference room of the Santa Monica apartment building that is her temporary home, the longtime Manhattan resident twists her red-blond hair into a rope with one hand. “That Stephen King movie, Misery, with Kathy Bates. I could have picked her, too.”

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 overweight. I was never the Twiggy type. I just laughed hysterically before I could think to say, ‘Gee, would you like to take us out for a drink?’”

At this, Bates throws back her head and lets out one hell of a laugh — warm and rolling. Ever since she stepped naked into a hot tub with Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, Bates has gained something she’s never had before as a film actress: sex appeal.

In director Alexander Payne’s bleakly funny portrait of a repressed retiree who drives across the Midwest after the sudden death of his wife, Bates plays Roberta, a vivacious hippie who wears caftans, licks chicken juice off her fingers, and thinks nothing of getting naked with a man she hardly knows. The actress argues, however, that the movie is about more than one nude scene.

“No one would ever in their right mind expect to see a woman like myself do a nude scene, let alone with Jack Nicholson, and I appreciate that,” she says.

It’s dusk, and Bates, 54, is sitting barefoot on a gold sofa in the sunroom of her Hancock Park house. “But why is that so rare? It’s as if reality has become absurd and make-believe Hollywood is the norm.”

She looks a bit tired — she’s been at work all day, looping dialogue for a character she’s playing on the upcoming season of HBO’s Six Feet Under. She throws a comforter over her lap and lets her Yorkshire terriers, Griffin and Stella, settle in. After a career of being warned that her lack of glamour was a limitation — “When I was in my twenties, I remember people telling me, ‘You’re not really going to come into your own until your forties or fifties because you are a character actor’” — it’s great to be treated like cheesecake. But all the fuss over a single act of disrobing makes her a little sad, too. If it’s true that more Americans look like Bates than like Kate Hudson, then why doesn’t Hollywood acknowledge that?

The story has been told and retold about Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, which playwright Terrence McNally wrote with Bates in mind. She made it a hit off-Broadway in 1987, but when it came time to make the movie, Michelle Pfeiffer was given the part. Bates is over it — “You know what? Glamorous people don’t want to be limited by their glamorous looks any more than people who look sort of plain want to be limited by theirs.” But too often in movies, women are portrayed as either mad or beautiful, and by and large, Bates has occupied the mad end of the spectrum.

Who else could have played an obsessive fan who whacks a sledgehammer into James Caan’s ankles in Misery? No one in American movies can match Bates for her portrayals of women on the verge — think of Dolores Claiborne, the addled mother she plays in the movie of the same name, or Libby Holden, the disillusioned political strategist in Primary Colors. Even when she embodies someone legendary, as she did with the Unsinkable Molly Brown in Titanic, you know you are in the presence of a character who has had nothing handed to her on a platter.

In recent years the actress has pursued directing — her credits include the cable movie Dash and Lilly and episodes of Oz and Six Feet Under — though, she is quick to insist, “I’m no David Lean.” The hot tub scene in About Schmidt only came to after much discussion between Bates and Payne, who also cowrote the script. In the screenplay Roberta’s nakedness is described in graphic terms. Bates says it mentions the character’s hysterectomy scar being visible. The actress felt strongly that the scene should be less about what Roberta looked like naked and more about how comfortable she was getting naked.

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 it shows. Six of those theaters are on his speed dial. The numbers link him not to a recording but to a person who can tell him how big the screens are, which shows are most crowded. He loves crowds. He has never understood private screening rooms. He won’t watch a movie with just ten people if he can help it. He tries to see everything, preferably on opening weekend. If he hates a movie and walks out, at least he got a feeling for the audience, what the vibe was. “You walk in,” he says. “You have a point of view. The trailers go on. Okay. Done. Count me in.”

Most people think agents like Newman are soulless hucksters, chameleons, shape-shifters, Sammy Glicks. Insincerity of the “love ya, baby” variety is commonplace in Hollywood, and agents — conduits who connect actors, directors, and writers to movie studios and television networks — are usually masters of the art. For them, phoniness can be a skill, a way of manipulating whomever they’re addressing.

No wonder agent jokes never go out of style. There are jokes about aggressiveness (What’s the difference between a pit bull and an agent? Jewelry) and about disloyalty (What’s the difference between a bantam rooster and an agent? A rooster clucks defiance. An agent fucks da clients). There are jokes that cast agents as unctuous (Two agents meet at a dinner where Sophia Loren is receiving an award. First agent: “Why Sophia Loren? She’s so over.” Second agent: “She’s my client.” First agent, without missing a beat: “Let me finish”). The most biting jokes skewer agents for ignoring their clients (A screenwriter comes home to find a pile of smoldering rubble where his house used to be. “Your agent came to your house,” a policeman tells him, “slaughtered your family, burned your home to the ground, and then danced on the rubble in hobnailed boots.” The screenwriter looks dazed. Then his face brightens: “My agent came to my house?”).

Newman, who is 44, is head of International Creative Management’s motion picture literary department, which means he leads a 25-agent team that shepherds the careers of about 250 directors and screenwriters in exchange for 10 percent of their earnings. Newman’s list includes actors Lucy Liu and Jet Li and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Hodge. But he is best known for representing directors, many of whom are widely considered the Industry’s most vibrant and original. Among them: Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids), Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge), Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia), Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors),Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie), Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), Wayne Wang (Smoke), Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides), Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter), Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End), Alex Proyas (The Crow), Iain Softley (The Wings of the Dove), and Todd Solondz (Happiness).

“If Robert Newman opened a movie studio with just his clients, it’d be a kick-ass studio,” says Mike De Luca, the production chief of DreamWorks SKG. Still, neither his clientele nor his job title fully conveys the singular place Newman occupies in the Hollywood firmament. It’s not that Newman is more intimidating than other agents. The guys at Endeavor Agency, for example, who give out Louisville sluggers as agency Christmas gifts, cultivate a tougher image than the wiry Newman could ever hope to pull off. It’s not that he’s the next hot young player at Creative Artists Agency or William Morris or United Talent. Last year, when Details magazine listed 12 “Special Agents” 35 and younger who “have made the town forget Mike Ovitz,” Newman was too old to be included. What sets Newman apart is this: Of the hundreds of agent jokes, not one applies to him.

ROBERT NEWMAN’S HANDSHAKE SWOOPS TOWARD YOU, HIS thumb rigidly perpendicular to his fingers, and it culminates in a single tug, firm but brief, as if he’s ringing a bell. The effect is assertive and a bit playful. “Newman here!” he says by way of greeting. His good-bye is simply “Later!”

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 newly divorced woman with a young daughter, Foster has just rented a huge Manhattan brownstone that has one unique feature: a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of a break-in. You know from the movie’s title that something or someone will soon cause Foster and her daughter to take refuge there. Once they do, a breathless, freaked-out Foster looks straight into the camera, and you can see it, there in her alert blue eyes: a formidable intelligence that will save the day.

It’s the same intelligence Foster applies to her own life. Few people have seen the filmmaking enterprise from as many angles as she has. An actor since the age of four, she has appeared in more than 30 films and has won two Academy Awards (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs). The 39-year-old has worked with many of America’s most celebrated directors, has directed two of her own movies — Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays — and has produced the latter and several others. Weeks before the March release of Panic Room, Foster agreed to sit down and talk about what she calls the “mathematics” and social dynamics of film production — a topic that fascinates her so much, it turns out, that she once considered writing a book about it.

Foster arrives exactly on time at the Four Seasons’ Gardens restaurant. She is alone, sans handlers. Fine boned and startlingly pretty, she is a master at blending in. Dressed in jeans and loafers, she wears nerdy tortoiseshell glasses and no makeup. She admits to being exhausted: Her second son, Kit, was born September 29, and she hasn’t had ten free minutes since — a point that is driven home later when she suddenly grabs the right armpit of her brown suede shirt with alarm. “Oh, man, how great is this? Look what I found,” she says, laughing as she reveals a bulky plastic security tag she is noticing for the first time.

Foster has stuck with the same editor, composer, costume designer, and first assistant director in both films she’s directed, and she has strong views about the collaborative nature of filmmaking. “Can you tell this is my obsession?” she asks at one point. “I could talk about this forever.” Now, as she attempts to simplify her life to make more time for acting and directing (she closed her 12-year-old production company, Egg Pictures, on January 1), Foster talks about the importance of ceding control, the appeal of opinionated people, and the realization that, over time, she has become less of a pain in the ass.

FOSTER: I’ve made a lot of movies with first-time directors and a lot of movies with directors who have made scores of films. You absolutely never know who’s going to be great and who isn’t. Some directors don’t do a great interview, and you’re like, “Whoa, this guy doesn’t have much to say.” And he comes on and brings so much to the process and is so observant. Then you’ll get a first-time director who seems like he’s got it down. And by the first week, everybody’s ready to kill him. He procrastinates. He doesn’t come up with anything. He’s one of those cocktail party directors who talks about it well but has nothing to deliver once you start shooting.

What I’ve learned also is that what’s wrong in your shrink’s office is what’s wrong on the set. Nine times out often, the thing that makes a film suffer is the thing that the director really needs to deal with psychologically. It’s usually issues of authority — not only how you handle other people’s authority but how you are as a leader. How you feel about yourself and how you project that onto other people or just the environment you set into play.

So now when I start a film with David Fincher or Robert Zemeckis or Andy Tennant, that first week I’m basically just sitting them on the couch. I’m doing the whole Freud thing on them so that I can figure out where their weak areas are and how to serve them. I really believe that the actor’s job is to serve the director. Even if he’s a schmuck, and even if by week one you realize he doesn’t know what he wants or you don’t respect what he’s going for or you don’t like his style, you still have to serve him. So you have to swallow any dissident thought. Not just because it will hurt the movie but because once a lead actor or anybody in a high position dissents, the rest of the crew no longer respects the director, and it’s down the toilet. He’ll never be able to take control.