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 Names. He is based in Toronto.

I’ve always loved Canada…

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, with a picture of Mr. Siegel, his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, and their product, the Green Garmento, I heard from another Los Angeles inventor, Jane Wyler. She was plenty frustrated with Mr. Siegel.

It turns out that Ms. Wyler, whose company is called Reuseniks, met Mr. Siegel in 2008 when he and his wife approached her at a trade show. The couple told Ms. Wyler that they were blown away by her reusable dry-cleaning bag, the Clothesnik. After buying two, they asked to meet to discuss investing in her company.

Ultimately, Ms. Wyler opted not to team up with them, but not before Mr. Siegel sent an e-mail message to her and her business partner, Rich Leivenberg, in April 2008, titled “WE LIKE REUSENIKS.” “The reason we want to be so involved in your company,” the message said, was because of how easily the Clothesnik “could be replicated by potential competitors.”

If a more muscular competitor were to emerge, Mr. Siegel continued, it could “undermine your uniqueness and reap the available rewards.” Ask Ms. Wyler today, and she says that Mr. Siegel was absolutely right — and that he has been undermining and reaping ever since. “Can you believe this guy?” she asks. “He stole our idea.”

Au contraire, Mr. Siegel says.

“Her claim is like the furrier telling the guy who makes windbreakers that he stole their coat idea.” The Green Garmento, he notes, is made of polypropylene and retails for $9.99. The Clothesnik is made of organic cotton and goes for $30. Given those differences, he says, “We are not a rival of theirs.”

This messy little disagreement is hardly unusual. Claims to authorship of great products have set off disputes stretching back eons. You’ve heard the saying: There are no new ideas. Especially as the Internet enables the cross-fertilization of information, we like to believe that all of this leads to more innovation — as, in fact, it often does.

Entrepreneurs shine when they respond adroitly and shrewdly to a need in the marketplace. And that, undeniably, is what the owners of the Green Garmento did — which is why they fit so snugly into a column that describes the creative process and how entrepreneurs hit upon winning ideas.

Mr. Siegel says he was under no obligation to mention Ms. Wyler when I asked him, twice, to describe the “Eureka!” moment that led to the Green Garmento concept.

He and his wife do acknowledge that they’d never seen a reusable dry-cleaning bag before they laid eyes on Ms. Wyler’s product, but Mr. Siegel’s “Eureka!” moment “wasn’t in buying a Reusenik,” he wrote by e-mail, “but in recognizing how to morph what existed into something else.”

But that’s not what he told me last month. Last month, he said inspiration visited him while he was standing in his closet, wrestling with twist ties and plastic bags.

Mr. Siegel now says that after he and his wife bought two Clothesniks, they were “intrigued” enough to do some “initial research” that indicated the product would sell better if it were made of polypropylene, which is cheaper. Because Ms. Wyler rejected that suggestion of theirs, Mr. Siegel wrote, she “is not owed anything for our idea.” (The italics are his.)

But Ms. Wyler says she isn’t looking for money from Mr. Siegel and Ms. Nigrosh. She just wants some credit. To be utterly omitted from the narrative — to be treated as if she doesn’t exist — is just too much of an insult, she says.

Herewith, belatedly, the Clothesnik’s genesis: In 1990, two young mothers — Ms. Wyler and a friend, Lynn Williams — invented the company. Both women say they were spurred by environmentalism and the fear of plastic suffocating their children. They made three varieties — the Clothesnik, the Shopnik (for groceries) and the Lunchnik — and enjoyed some success. But the partnership fell apart early, and in 1993, Ms. Wyler shut Reuseniks after becoming pregnant with her third daughter.

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.”

By Amy Wallace

MAN or woman, every one of us has experienced the frustration that drove Rick Siegel to become an inventor. He would be in his clothes closet, running late, wrestling with the plastic bags that encased — and the twist ties that entangled — his dry cleaning. Surely, he thought, those twist ties would drive him mad.

“He’d freak out,” said his wife, Jennie Nigrosh, recalling the typical harried morning. “Scream is a good word.”

Familiar, too, is the guilt that Ms. Nigrosh felt when she tried to intervene. Her husband is 6-foot-4, meaning that if the artist Christo did an installation using the plastic film around just six of Mr. Siegel’s suits, he could easily wrap your garage. Ms. Nigrosh’s father ran a cardboard recycling factory when she was growing up, so a trip to the closet made her stomach clench: Where did all this plastic go?

Suddenly Mr. Siegel, who was once a Hollywood talent manager, and his wife, a marketing copywriter in the music industry, had an idea: a reusable bag to transport your clothes to and from the dry cleaner. After an initial investment of about $200,000, the Green Garmento was born.

“June 2008, we got our first prototype,” Ms. Nigrosh recalls of the Christmas-morning-like feeling she had when they opened it. Then came disaster.

“It ripped,” Mr. Siegel said, grimacing.

“Gi-normous rippage,” agreed Ms. Nigrosh.

“We went from heaven to ‘Oh, no!’ in five seconds,” said Mr. Siegel.

Two years and several design improvements later, they say they’ve sold about 40,000 Green Garmentos — priced at about $5 wholesale, $9.99 retail — and expect to sell an additional 300,000 more by July 2011. And in March, they got their first outside financing, other than $100,000 that’s come from friends: $350,000 from a small cap investment fund put together by the Progressive Asset Management Group, a brokerage firm that specializes in what it sees as socially responsible investing.

The fund, which Mr. Siegel hopes will eventually raise $900,000 for the company, promises investors a 30 percent annual return on their money until it is repaid — via the first 9 percent of gross revenue.

Just as important, Mr. Siegel and Ms. Nigrosh say, they’ve begun to alter how a very set-in-its-ways industry thinks about doing business. For the Green Garmento to succeed requires not just a customer base, after all, but also a cultural shift within the dry-cleaning world. After all, a reusable bag, unlike disposable plastic, must be kept track of and returned to its owner.

The Green Garmento is not the first reusable cleaner bag. There’s a nylon rival out there, for example, called the Converta Bag that Mr. Siegel says he didn’t know about until they were already committed to their bag. (The Green Garmento is made of polypropylene, a recycled product derived from oil sludge.)

Mr. Siegel, 53, and Ms. Nigrosh, 44, say they’re glad for the competition. They’re trying to do more than make money. They’re trying to change the world.

“Single-use plastic at dry cleaners has gotten a pass,” Mr. Siegel said. “We’re not so much selling our bag as publicizing the concept of the bag.”

According to an analysis of 2005 census figures by the Drycleaning and Laundry Institute, 1.4 billion pieces of clothing and other items are professionally cleaned in the United States each year. If you figure that most cleaners wrap no more than two pieces in a bag, that’s at least 700 million bags a year, or 131 million pounds of plastic gathering dust in the back of our closets. At 5 to 8 cents a bag — plus twist ties and the like — that adds up, which is why even nonenvironmentally minded dry cleaners may be open to making the switch.

That means opportunity, said Mr. Siegel, who says hotels and cruise lines are Green Garmento’s other target customers. “If we can make it the Q-Tip, Kleenex or Xerox of the industry,” he said, “ours will be a $10 million-a-year company.”

Here’s how Jason Lafer introduced the Green Garmento to customers of his Linders French Cleaners in Bernardsville, N.J.: Last November, he informed his 730 pick-up-and-delivery clients that they’d be receiving no more plastic on their clothes. Instead, in a move he called “Greenvenient,” customers received two Green Garmento bags emblazoned with the Linders logo (for which he charged them $7 a bag).

Madoff’s Hollywood Connection

By Amy Wallace

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.

To hear him talk about the economic challenges facing the entertainment industry, you’d think that Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation SKG, would be worried. Still, sitting in a meeting room on the DreamWorks campus, surrounded by plush toys commemorating his company’s biggest hits, Katzenberg speaks in a tone that borders on serenity.

“I tell people, ‘Wherever you are today, this is the new great,’ ” he says, a Kung Fu Panda doll looming over his shoulder. “The sooner you forget what you had, the better off you’ll be.”

Katzenberg’s Zen-like calm is especially surprising, given that just weeks before, he’d learned that he was among the Hollywood victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Both Katzenberg and his DreamWorks co-founder, Steven Spielberg, had millions tied up with Madoff, most of it money they’d set aside for charity and all of it probably gone. As Katzenberg speaks of the belt-tightening that is happening in Hollywood, it’s hard not to wonder about his own belt.

“If you look at where you were last summer, and that’s your measure of how you’re doing, it’s hopeless,” he says. His words could also apply to life after Madoff, I suggest. Katzenberg nods. His loss was humiliating, he admits. “It’s gone. It’s finished,” he says. He refuses to reveal how much “it” is, though public tax filings show his and his wife’s foundation had assets of more than $22 million in 2007. “I’m as lucky and as blessed as I can be,” he says. “Let’s move on.”

If only it were so easy. The names of Madoff’s other Hollywood victims are still gradually and grudgingly coming to light. Condé Nast Portfolio has learned that Arnon Milchan, the billionaire producer of such films as Fight Club and Pretty Woman, lost at least $18 million in the scam. (Milchan declined to comment.) Actors Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, who are married, have acknowledged that they too were taken.

How did so many smart people get so suckered? By Katzenberg’s own account, he had never met Madoff, never even heard his name. Katzenberg is not a member of the Jewish country clubs in Palm Beach and Minneapolis where Madoff and his agents trolled for investors. He doesn’t move in the social circles of New York’s Upper East Side to which many of the scheme’s patsies belong.

The answer, it turns out, lies closer to home. Katzenberg and Spielberg, like many people on the top rungs of the entertainment business, relied on the services of a personal business manager. Madoff had apparently figured out what industry insiders have known for years: More than agents, more than lawyers, business managers are the financial gatekeepers to Hollywood’s elite.

Since Madoff confessed to spinning a web of deceit that bilked thousands of people, universities, and philanthropic organizations out of an alleged $50 billion, two West Coast business managers have been embroiled in the scam. One is Katzenberg and Spielberg’s adviser Gerald Breslauer, who at 80 years old is widely revered as the dean of his profession. The other is Stanley Chais, 82, who has been helping prominent Angelenos invest their money for decades.

In addition to steering their clients to Madoff, both Breslauer and Chais reportedly have incurred huge personal losses themselves. But in Chais’ case, at least, that shared misfortune hasn’t ­prevented clients from suing. A magician and entertainer named Michael Chaleff was the first to file, accusing Chais, in a $250 million federal action, of “false, misleading, unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent acts and practices.” (Chais would not comment for this story.)

]]> http://www.amy-wallace.com/2010/05/27/kenneth-starr-mini-madoff/feed/ 0 http://www.amy-wallace.com/2010/05/19/stone-gets-heat/ http://www.amy-wallace.com/2010/05/19/stone-gets-heat/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 20:01:34 +0000 amywallace http://www.amy-wallace.com/?p=446 The Huffington Post sums up my Sharon Stone story:

Sharon Stone is on the cover of the June MORE magazine and in the interview the actress, 52, talks about her dating life and the plastic surgery disaster that happened six years ago after her divorce from newspaper editor Phil Bronstein.

On why she got lip injections:
“Nobody loved me. I’m 103. My life would be better if I had better lips.”

On her reaction to the procedure, which made her swear off plastic surgery:
“What the hell?” and “(I looked) like a trout.”

On her divorce:
“It takes a long, long time to come to the point where you can actually say that you got married because you were in love with the person. And it makes me cry… To admit your own lovingness was, for me, a harder step. Not to be embarrassed or ashamed that I could love somebody who didn’t love me. And that can be OK.”

On her current dry spell:
“Life and love is like the ocean. Sometimes the tide is in and sometimes the tide is out, and sometimes it’s like the frigging Mojave. Fortunately, I like the desert. I’m a desert flower.”

On dating younger men:
“I really get pursued by men in their twenties, like, a lot,” she says. “They probably know there’s food in the fridge and that somebody’s there to talk to them and ask themhow their day was.”

Then there’s this, from the NY Daily News:

]]> http://www.amy-wallace.com/2010/05/19/stone-gets-heat/feed/ 1 http://www.amy-wallace.com/2010/05/18/sharon-stone-is-shameless/ http://www.amy-wallace.com/2010/05/18/sharon-stone-is-shameless/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 02:08:59 +0000 amywallace http://www.amy-wallace.com/?p=432 A friend just told me she just received her June  More magazine, whose cover story on Sharon Stone I had the pleasure of writing. The whole piece isn’t online yet, but here’s the lede (and a photo by Brigitte Lacombe):

Sharon Stone is shameless. The actress considers it a skill to have no shame. She thinks everyone should try it, though she cautions that if you’re female, shamelessness can cost you. Her refusal to feel guilty, she says, has gotten her labeled difficult, or worse.

“I’m like a Prohibition-era flapper. I’m like a juke-joint hussy,” Stone says over lunch at an Italian restaurant near Beverly Hills. But better to be called names than to be pressured into not being herself. Feeling ashamed, she says, “is not an organic state of being, so shamelessness is closer to godliness. You have to put shame down.”

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