Today, the lawsuit was dismissed. Read the attached ruling here: Memorandum Opinion

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.

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. “It was big enough to fit a small family,” Ms. Troyer recalls of their contraption, which the couple invented in 1999 to accept delivery of large packages and to keep the parcels safe and dry, no matter how long homeowners were away.

Back then, they were driven by the belief that as Americans ordered more and more merchandise online, particularly bulky computers, the Elephant Trunk would become a must-have item. It might have happened, too, except that while Mr. Farentinos and Ms. Troyer were still tinkering, the flat screen was born. Before the Elephant Trunk could even be tested and brought to market, its main reason for being — microwave-size computer monitors — became obsolete.

You might wonder why Ms. Troyer, 45, and Mr. Farentinos, 43, can giggle about this. Here’s the answer: From the ashes of their failed experiment arose two smaller products — the Oasis and the Oasis Jr. — that have put their company, Architectural Mailboxes, on the map.

Their smallest locking curbside model is available at Costco.com, Target.com, Lowe’s and about half of Home Depot’s 1,900 stores in the United States. To date, the couple estimates that they’ve sold more than 150,000 of their newfangled, secure letter drops, which cost $97 to $258. They expect to sell 50,000 more this year.

This mom-and-pop success story — the owners qualify because they have two daughters — seemed the perfect way for me to kick off this monthly column about summoning creativity to achieve innovation.

It is often said that there are no new ideas, but Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos turned that cliché inside out. By correctly anticipating how the high-tech future would change the way we shop, they updated one of the most low-tech items around: the repository of snail mail, the trusty mailbox. Along the way, they responded to a growing concern — identity theft — that established mailbox suppliers had failed to address.

“Identity theft was at the top of consumers’ minds. And the mailbox industry was dominated by some large players that just didn’t have an answer for it,” says Rhys Jones, the Home Depot executive who first stocked the Oasis line in 2005 because it met “a need we needed met.”

What was so special about an Oasis? Well, for one thing, thieves couldn’t get their hands past its patented Hopper door — a hinged opening that functions much like those on the Postal Service’s big blue mailboxes. Also, it wasn’t ugly.

“Typically, some of the best innovations come from the small guys,” says Mr. Jones. “They’re more willing to take a risk and they see things that others don’t.” The Oasis was “safe and secure, aesthetically pleasing, do-it-yourself friendly and a great price for the value.”

Oh, and it had something else: a pitchwoman who was unwilling to hear the word no. “Vanessa,” Mr. Jones notes, “is very passionate about her product.”

Ms. Troyer, who handles marketing for the company, first buttonholed Mr. Jones at a trade show. She’d been trying to get into Home Depot for months when he walked by her booth.

“I saw the orange lanyard all the Home Depot people wore, and ran up to him,” she recalls. (This is a signature move for her: she introduced herself to her husband of 20 years in much the same way).

Mr. Jones recalls that when Home Depot first agreed to test the Oasis Jr. in 50 stores, Ms. Troyer helped pick the locations — she had kept her own records of where the product had sold best. “She knew what consumers wanted,” he says, “and where.”

Consider, too, the way she typed the name of Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon.com, into Google and clicked through 58 pages until she found his phone number. She called and, saying that she wanted to send Mr. Bezos a birthday card, also got his address.

This new and improved site — designed, by the way, by Kelly’s brother, Keith — corrects the central flaw of its predecessor. Namely, it posts stories as they appear, letting visitors see my most recent work first. The categories are still there, and you can still search by publication (see list at right). But now, if you check back every once and a while, you’ll be able to catch up with stuff you might have missed because it’ll be right at the top of the pile.

This format gives me a place not just to post stories I’ve written, but also to sound off when I see fit. Anyone who followed the controversy after my November cover story in Wired about vaccines and autism knows that I took to Twitter to write about reader reaction (my tweets were later compiled into blog posts on Wired’s website). Well, starting now, this is the place I’ll air that kind of thing (without a 140-character limit). It is, dare I say it, my first blog. I plan to feed it with increasing frequency in the coming months.

But wait, there’s more: Finally you, too, can be heard. When you get to the end of a story, there’s a place you can add your comments. I hope you will take the time to tell me what you think.

So, welcome to Amy-Wallace.com 2.0. We’re still back-filling the years-old stories and adding new tags, so be patient on the truly archival stuff. But all of 2009’s work is there, plus this year’s stories and a whole lot more besides. Please sign up to follow me on Twitter (see tab at right). And if you like the format of what you see here, I have Keith’s phone number on speed dial and would be happy to share. Enjoy!

Originally appeared in More Magazine February, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Ground zero for Meg Whitman’s campaign for governor of California is a suite of rooms modestly tucked into a colorless cookie-cutter office park—all sprayed stucco walls and fluorescent lights. I’m ushered into a conference room so unadorned there is not even a campaign poster on the walls. Whitman sits at the head of a white meeting table, and as I sit down beside her, two handlers pull up chairs as well. The space offers no clues to Whitman’s personality, and she doesn’t reveal much herself. In her black suit and black-and-white sweater, the former CEO of eBay, now 53, is still the picture of a put-together corporate titan. And her approach is all business. Seeming energized by an earlier discussion of the state budget with her campaign staff, she tosses numbers around with confidence. When I ask where she’ll find the votes to win the race (the primary is in June, the general in November), she breaks down the research in a tone so self-assured that I can almost see a thought bubble forming over her head: Statistics may scare some women, but not me.

Over the months that I reported this article, I often heard the candidate and her staff say that they want people to know “the real Meg Whitman.” Jillian Manus, the chair of Whitman’s women’s coalition (dubbed MEGaWomen), told me, “Everyone knows what she’s done. I want to let people know who she is. To feel her, get her, touch her.” But Whitman is hard to know, much less touch. She’s quiet, understated and more wonky than ebullient after a career spent largely in Silicon Valley tech circles—in all, not the type that seems born to storm the political stage. Unlike Sarah Palin, Whitman doesn’t wink or quip or let go with unscripted rants; unlike George Bush, she doesn’t give people funny nicknames; and unlike Bill Clinton, when she tries to show she feels your pain, she sounds a bit wooden. Forget your pain; she seems at times not even to feel her own.

But with her high-level Republican connections (she counts Mitt Romney and John McCain as friends) and her jaw-dropping personal fortune ($1.2 billion, by a 2009 Los Angeles Times estimate), Whitman is a candidate no one can ignore. Having left her job at eBay in 2008, she is now pursuing politics as a second act and at this moment is in mid-leap—committed to her new calling but, with no experience running for elected office, uncertain of her odds. Her political future boils down to this: Will she persuade voters—especially women—that the talents she parlayed into a billion bucks can guide California through the recession’s perfect storm?

If only every voter Whitman is courting could meet her mother. While the candidate seems all discipline and reserve, Margaret Whitman, 89, does not, and the stories she tells about the young Meg hint at what lies beneath the candidate’s cool. “When she was little, she was extremely determined. Whatever she decided to do, she was going to do,” says Margaret, recalling that swim meets in particular brought out the competitor in her younger daughter. “Meg was a pretty good swimmer. But at meets, I had to be there, because if she wasn’t at least first or second, she’d be screaming with rage. There was no second best for her. She has always loved to win.”

During the summers, while Whitman’s father stayed behind at his financial services job on Long Island, her mother took the three kids—Whitman and her older sister and brother—on cross-continental adventures. They traversed the western U.S. one year and Alaska the next; on that trip, they drove the desolate, partially unpaved Alcan Highway. Whitman was only six, but the image of her mother lashing four spare tires to the roof of the family camper, just in case, stays with her. Whitman recounts how in the 1940s, before having kids, her mom volunteered to be a war mechanic in New Guinea. “She’d never looked under the hood of a car or fixed anything with a wrench,” Whitman says. “But she knew that’s where the critical need was and where she could make the biggest contribution. The learning curve didn’t stall her. In fact, it fueled her.” To Meg Whitman, the parallel is clear: “I am my mother’s daughter.”

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 kitchen on a recent afternoon, there is not a moment of silence. When Millan and his wife, Ilusion, aren’t taking turns bobbling a friend’s baby on their knees or admiring their youngest son’s new braces, they are talking excitedly. Often at the same time.

It’s a Latino thing, Cesar explains: “Everything is so loud.” Ilusion agrees: “I’m naturally a loud person. It can be a bit overpowering. I’m just sharing my feelings, you know?” Her husband, looking trim in a V-neck sage-colored T-shirt and faded jeans, continues, “I feel like I’m regulating the volume of my wife’s intensity. Like—”

“That’s so true,” interjects Ilusion, vibrant in a hot pink sleeveless turtleneck and pants ironed to a sharp crease. “He’s like, ‘Honey, okay, we understand. But there are neighbors!’ ”

Yes, that’s right: When the Dog Whisperer talks to the woman he says domesticated him—call her the Man Whisperer— he’s lucky to get a word in edgewise. “When we’re in a restaurant,” the D.W. says, “and she gets into that, you know, stage, I have to say, ‘I’m right here. Look! I can totally hear you.’ ”

The M.W. nods, smiling. “We’re both very animated,” she says.

“Let me tell the story,” the D.W. says in the same calm, assertive tone that he uses with the unruly dogs on his weekly hit TV show (now in its sixth season on the National Geographic Channel). And at first, the correction seems to take.

“I’m sorry, baby,” the M.W. responds, her voice warm like she means it. A beat later, though, that’s out the window. The M.W. has something she just has to say.

So it goes, for more than two hours: Cesar, 40, and Ilusion, 34, jabbing and parrying, cross-talking, even bickering. What other couples might see as exhausting, however, the Millans, perched side by side on tall stools, treat as a blessing—because there was a time they had trouble communicating at all. Today, more than 10 million viewers a week hear the D.W. repeat, mantralike, that he rehabilitates dogs and trains people. What few know is that before he became the Dog Whisperer, his wife rehabilitated him.

“She gave leadership to the relationship,” the D.W. says, recalling the dark day 15 years ago when Ilusion—fed up with her husband’s harsh indifference—moved out with their infant son.

“He was having a hard time loving me, because of his past, because he just wasn’t a people person,” Ilusion says, leaning forward so her knees almost touch her husband’s. “He was afraid to love anybody.”

“I didn’t do it with humans, that’s all,” Cesar says, matter-of-factly. “I was there in my heart, but my heart was blocked.”

When Cesar was growing up on a farm in Culiacán, Mexico, his affinity for canines earned him the nickname El Perrero, or “the dog man.” It also got him teased. He was that weird kid who related better to animals than to his own species. Plus, he was dirt-poor. So from early on, he believed that people could hurt you, but dogs—never! Determined to become the world’s best dog trainer, Cesar crossed the border illegally at age 21. Arriving in Los Angeles, he washed limousines while trying to build a clientele.

From the moment a 17-year-old Ilusion saw Cesar in a crowded ice rink, she says, “I knew this was the guy for me.” Cesar, then 23 and living in a one-room apartment with six dogs, wasn’t so sure. When a friend told him he could go to jail (and surely be deported) for dating an underage girl, he broke off their fledgling romance. He was blunt, Ilusion says. “I came to the door and pressed the bell, and he said, ‘I can’t see you anymore.’ It killed me.”

But it didn’t deter her. There was something about Cesar’s focus, his drive, that made her feel safe. The day she turned 18, she showed up at his door again, and soon they were inseparable. When, a few months later, she discovered she was pregnant, Cesar immediately proposed. Before their wedding, which he paid for, he washed the limousine they’d ride in himself.

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 built, her dark hair cut in a bob, she evoked an Asian Audrey Hepburn. Then I saw the scar. Perfectly straight, it bisected her upper arm about six inches below the shoulder of her sleeveless blouse. More than anything else, it was the color that hit me: Against her suntanned skin, the gash was bright purple.

Tough break, I thought, as the cashier scanned her saltines, her soy milk and her fifth of Jack Daniel’s. (I live in Hollywood; this is what passes for groceries among wannabe actresses.)

Maybe it was the tabloids staring vacantly from the rack, but my mind jumped to the cause of the girl’s wound—a late-night car crash, perhaps, or a sledding accident involving a barbed wire fence. In my head, I saw the girl in the ER, bravely biting her lip as a handsome surgeon mended her bicep. I imagined the argument she’d had with herself: Dare I, or dare I not, go sleeveless ever again? I admired her for answering yes, purple scar be damned.

Then she turned to swipe her debit card. This is the moment in the daydream where you hear the screech of a phonograph needle yanked across vinyl or the screen goes black. Because suddenly I saw that the thick purple line wasn’t a scar at all. It was a tattoo—a tattoo of a little bald-headed boy in footie pajamas drawing a fat, straight line with a huge purple crayon. It was a tattoo of a boy I recognized, a boy whose name I had known almost all my life. Harold.

In that moment, I thought: Maybe there is a God.

There is a photograph of me, age two and a half, lying on my stomach on a quilted pink bedspread. I am wearing a white nightgown and resting on my elbows, a book propped open in front of me. I have raised my head to look at the photographer, and although I am not smiling, I am very happy. I know this for two reasons. One, I’m kicking my feet in the air. Two, judging by the picture of a hot-air balloon clearly visible on the page I’m reading, I’m two thirds of the way through my first favorite book: Harold and the Purple Crayon, written and illustrated by Crockett Johnson.

Originally published in 1955, seven years before my birth, the book contains just 64 pages, many of them with only a few words. But the story’s impact on me—on how I see the world—could not be bigger.

I was raised not to believe in God. I’ve never turned to any religious text for solace, for guidance, or to make sense of my life. But at the age of 47, I still seek out Harold.

He’s easy to find. Open the book, and he’s on every page. Plunked down in an all-white landscape with only his wits and his crayon, he is nothing if not resourceful. “There wasn’t any moon, and Harold needed a moon for a walk in the moonlight,” the book says. So he draws a crescent in the sky. When he needs direction, he lays out a purple path so he won’t get lost. By his own hand, Harold always saves himself.

For me, Harold’s story has been a parable about making your own way in the world. Harold’s teachings are simple. His hand is steady. You could call him my guru. But that’s not quite right.

I guess you could say I worship in the church of the purple crayon.

“And he set off on his walk, taking his big purple crayon with him.”

When I was four years old, my mother put me in a borrowed yellow Karmann Ghia with a man I’d never met and pointed the car west.

We had been living in New Jersey for only a few weeks when my mom decided on this course of action. She believed my father, a young philosophy professor who was just starting at Princeton, had cheated on her. But that wasn’t all. At the local supermarket, she saw other faculty wives trudging from aisle to aisle, screaming children in tow. Suddenly, she knew she didn’t want to be one of them. How much her moment of clarity had to do with the fact that she’d met someone else—a graduate student back in California—I guess I’ll never know.

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 physicist’s computer screen is a graph of the narrative progression of the time-bending movie Memento. “Memento does this combination of flashbacks and reverse chronology,” he says excitedly. “The later scenes are played in reverse chronology, the earlier scenes are played in ordinary chronology, and they meet up.”

In January, Carroll will release his own pop take on the complexities of time with his much-anticipated debut book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Armchair Einsteins will geek out on his audacious thesis. He argues that our perception of time is informed by entropy — the level of disorder in a system — and that the movement from low to high entropy as the universe expands establishes the direction in which time flows. Furthermore, he posits that our cosmos may be a relatively young member of a large family and that in some of our sibling universes time runs in the opposite direction. Some others, he argues, don’t experience time at all; once a universe cools off and reaches maximum entropy, there is no past or present.

Abstract enough for you? That’s where Carroll’s common touch comes in. His writing is accessible and peppered with cultural references — quotes from Dumb and Dumber and Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance. But don’t be fooled by his mass-market approach: Carroll isn’t afraid to wade into topics that have befuddled even name-brand physicists. Though we may deal daily with time’s quotidian realities — deadlines and bus schedules and aging — most of us have trouble thinking about how it might exist outside our own experience of it. “We’re so used to the arrow of time that it’s hard to conceptualize time without the arrow,” he writes. “We are led, unprotesting, to temporal chauvinism.”