By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Details August 2010

Details: When Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps hits theaters, there will be those who—on seeing Gordon Gekko complete a lengthy prison sentence—will ask, “Wait a minute: Greed is bad?” Why do you think so many people misunderstood the message of the original Wall Street? Oliver Stone: I was somewhat amazed by the whole continuing cult thing around Gekko. I mean, I was being facetious. Greed is not good. Greed is an awful thing. In the eighties we entered into a period of perversity which I had never seen before. I thought the world would right itself. And every day it’s just become more absurd.

Details: You once said, “Money was the sex of the eighties.” What is money now? Oliver Stone: Money is still sex, but it’s steroid sex. I mean, a million dollars was a lot of money in ‘87. Now you can’t even open a hedge fund, it seems, unless you’ve got a billion.

Details: Your last Oscar came over 20 years ago for Born on the Fourth of July. Do you feel pressure to win another? Oliver Stone: You can’t fall in love with Oscars. You have to look at it like a high-school presidency or something. You know: You were most popular at that time. When I won, thank God, it wasn’t a madhouse like it’s become. These independent producers started to come up and really campaign viciously. It was so ugly, after I got nominated for Nixon as cowriter in 1996, I never went back. Woody Allen did the smartest thing. And Kubrick. They didn’t give a fuck.

Details: You’ve said that a lot of your critics over the years have confused you with the characters you were depicting. Does that still happen? Oliver Stone: No, less so. I’m not so much of a firebrand. I would spout off when I was a younger man. Get angry. Pissed off. I realized late in life that I could have been like the Coen brothers: Shut up completely and just let the films speak for themselves.

Details: In a review of Platoon, one critic wondered aloud whether you were “using filmmaking as a substitute for drugs.” Have you ever found a suitable substitute for drugs? Oliver Stone: Oh, sure—money, sex, God, Buddha. There’re so many substitutes. Frankly, I don’t smoke grass anymore. I gave it up. I just wanted to see if I could function without it. But it did save my ass in Vietnam. I could have become a very bitter man. I also did a lot of psychedelics that I thought helped me. The worst drug I ever did, and I’ve admitted to it, was cocaine, from ‘79 to ‘81. That I regret, because I do think it hurt my brain cells, and I don’t think I was as creative as I should have been.

Details: Is it true you were in the process of kicking cocaine while writing the coke-drenched Scarface? Oliver Stone: No. I stopped before the writing—cold turkey. My attitude was “Farewell to coke.” I mean, it took so much money off me, I said, “I’m going to get something back.”

Details: At 63, is writing a movie harder or easier?
Oliver Stone: It’s always been a bitch.

By AMY WALLACE

Originally appeared in GQ August 2010

Toward the end of February, in the first-class cabin of a United flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the only man on the planet who has hosted late-night talk shows, appeared on late-night talk shows, and created an iconic TV series that parodied a late-night talk show encountered the man who had just been famously ousted from a late-night talk show.

Garry Shandling was in 1A. Conan O’Brien and his family were three rows back. The two men are close friends, and their unexpected proximity made Shandling happy—so happy, he says, that he asked a flight attendant to deliver O’Brien a present. “Mr. Shandling can’t finish his cookie, and he thought you might want to have the rest,” the woman told O’Brien, presenting the crumb-littered plate. Minutes later, Shandling looked up—way up—to see the six-foot-four-inch redhead planted in front of him, an exaggerated scowl on his face.

“This is the way you treat me, with the broken cookies?” O’Brien asked Shandling, his voice slightly raised to make sure the comedy could be heard over the jet engines. “When I let you get in line with me and my wife and get your ticket ten minutes earlier? This is what you do?”

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” Shandling responded, almost yelling. “I, out of the generosity of my heart, offer you food. And you have the nerve to walk up to my aisle and harass me and heckle me in front of this passenger”—Shandling nodded to the stranger in 1B—”who I don’t know?”

O’Brien turned to Shandling’s stunned neighbor, who will surely be dining out on this story for the rest of his life. “I’m sorry you have to sit next to him,” O’Brien said. “You know, if you call ahead and you find out Garry’s on the plane, they will allow you to switch seats.”

It was a coincidence, these two funnymen being on the Big Island at the same time. Shandling, who had recently completed final reshoots on his first acting role in years—a U.S. senator in Iron Man 2—was enjoying one of his frequent retreats to the Waipio Valley, his favorite place to meditate and ponder the universe. (While he stops short of calling himself a Buddhist, he is a serious student of dharma.) O’Brien, who just weeks before had parted ways with NBC and The Tonight Show, was on what is perhaps best described as a forced vacation. The timing was “synchronistic,” Garry says, recalling that they hung out so much in Hawaii “that Conan’s wife was jealous.”

“We were able to spend some time chatting about, uh, the turtles and anything else that might be going on in our lives,” Shandling says as we stand in the kitchen of the vast Spanish-style home where he lives, alone, in the hills above the West Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood. You can see the distant ocean out the window, past a grassy oasis and Garry’s rock-lined pool. He looks tan and fit, if a little rumpled, in an untucked striped button-down, baggy cargo pants with a tiger emblazoned on one leg, and beige Prada sneakers. When I press, he acknowledges that yes, the topic of O’Brien’s future came up. “Conan’s completely free now,” Garry says with a solemnity more gurulike than you’d expect from someone who got famous making jokes about his hair. “He doesn’t have to fit into someone else’s mold.”

But what Garry really wants to talk about is that hand-me-down cookie. “I’d eaten half, and the other half was in tiny crumbles and pieces,” he says, still delighted. Asked what kind of cookie—oatmeal? chocolate chip?—he adjusts his black baseball cap and takes off: “I asked the same question, and they said, ‘It’s an airplane cookie.’ And I didn’t want to ask what that was exactly. I was frightened.” A beat. “I was in a situation once over water where they said they were having a technical problem with my cookie. I said, ‘Oh, my God, what are you going to do?’ They said, ‘We’re going to have to switch cookies. Give us ten minutes.’”

By Amy Wallace

Originally published in More June 2010

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.”

Minutes later, as if to prove her point, she responds to a question about the watch on her wrist by yanking it off and flinging it onto the cement patio. “That’s the Dior Christal,” she says of the pricey timepiece, made with sapphire crystals, that she’s just tried to kill (Stone says she often does this stunt, which “shocks people but is the reason I am so proudly Dior’s spokeswoman”). She crouches to retrieve her bauble, emerging with a big smile on her makeup-free face. “How about that? It keeps on ticking.”

It’s tempting to say the same about Stone herself. Life has flung her to the hard ground more than once in recent years: She survived a brain hemorrhage in 2001, a bruising divorce in 2004 and, in December, the loss of her 78-year-old father, Joseph, to esophageal cancer. But listen to her tick, tick, tick.

“I’m detached from my celebrity. I don’t need to be ‘it’ anymore,” she says, announcing with what sounds like relief that her days as “a great big movie star” may well be behind her. Not that she isn’t busy. In the spring, she shot a four-episode guest stint on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and headed to Europe to film the sequel to Largo Winch, based on a Belgian comic book series. Still, Stone has a point: Her last movie, Streets of Blood, went straight to DVD. But no matter. When I compliment her poignant portrayal of a hairdresser in Bobby, released in 2006, she pronounces herself happy to be seen no longer as a babe starlet but as “a very fine character actor.” Indeed, Stone reports she is happy with her work, her kids (she has three adopted boys, ages 10, five and four) and her sense of style (“I’m always going to wear leopard; leopard is a neutral for me”). Without sounding too “woo-woo”—a term she invokes when discussing her interest in Eastern -spirituality—she would like you to know she’s been thinking a lot lately about getting older, about womanhood and about lost love. What she’s concluded may surprise you.

“Life and love is like the ocean,” she tells me between bites of a Caesar salad. At 52, she is stunning up close—blue eyed, lithe and radiant in ripped jeans, a white T-shirt sans bra and a linen vest. “Sometimes the tide is in and sometimes the tide is out, and sometimes it’s like the frigging Mojave.” Where’s the tide now? “For me? Mojave! Fortunately, I like the desert. I’m a desert flower.”

But flattering as it is to be courted by men half her age, right now she says she’s going solo. “I’ve reached this period in my life when I feel particularly feminine,” she says, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. She is thinking of her father, who with her mother moved in with Stone seven years ago, after he received his diagnosis. “He was a very tough cat,” she says fondly, dabbing her eyes with tissues she’s retrieved from her bag. Watching a parent fight to live, she says, has changed her sense of self—in a good way.

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 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 business together.

Our fathers were working-class Jews who were sent out of London during the blitz to Wales, where they went to school and were the only Jews in a completely non-Jewish environment. They learned quickly that they had to stand up for themselves. They were both creative rebels in many ways. And it probably has rubbed off on the two of us. I think Sash [rhymes with ash] and I are both very intrigued with the idea of mixing reality with perceptions of reality.

Baron Cohen arrived in Hollywood several years before his cousin. His first job was as a stand-in for Lou Ferrigno.

The only thing we had in common was we both have the same size hands. His calf muscle was the size of my head.

Baron Cohen financed his first student film by doing strip-a-grams.

I would have to show up in places in a cop’s outfit.

While in film school, he once convinced Richard Harris to do a cameo, for free, in a student production called The Sex Police. (You can watch the Harris clip on YouTube.)

I went to the Sunset Marquis to sneak into their pool. I was going to be confident, stride toward the pool, and take a few dives. As I walked in, I saw Richard Harris on his balcony. Very regal. That shock of white hair. He looked like King Arthur. So I picked up the house phone — I thought I’d just take a chance — and I asked for his suite. Then I heard this voice — “Who the fuck is this?” I said, “Look, I don’t know anyone in this town.” I asked for five minutes of his time. He said, “Be here at 7:00 A.M. tomorrow for breakfast.” So I was. I said, “I’m shooting a student film, would you consider doing a cameo?” He said, “Write me out a scene.” So I went home and for some reason I thought, I’ll write a scene about the etymology of the word cunt. Either he’s going to throw me out or he’s going to be intrigued. I came back the next day. He said, “Brilliant. Let’s shoot it tomorrow.” He was shooting Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood, and he said, “I told Clint I have food poisoning and can’t come to work today.” When we got back to his hotel that night, he called up Clint. He said, “I didn’t have food poisoning. I was with a young filmmaker, and we were running around on the beach. There were seven people there doing the whole thing, and even I was holding my own light.” He goes, “That was real filmmaking, Clint.”

Baron Cohen released his first feature film, Bang, about a woman who impersonates an LAPD officer, in 1997. Roger Ebert named it one of the year’s best. The director used a single name, Ash.

Was I trying to be cool, like Sting? Actually, I was trying not to be thrown out of the country. Originally, I was here illegally.

Oliver Stone saw the film and subsequently wrote a letter to the INS advocating citizenship for Baron Cohen.

After he saw Bang, Oliver says, “We’ve got to get you legal.” I think he said I reminded him of a young version of himself. The blond hair. The blue eyes. We’re very similar. To a person at the Braille Institute, we’re identical twins.

I’m legally blind without my contact lenses. I try to keep them in while I’m directing, because otherwise people wonder why I’m facing the wall and yelling, “Action!”

He has directed three feature films since 1995. His second, Pups, was sort of a teenage Dog Day Afternoon that starred a pre-O. C. Mischa Barton, wielding a gun. It was the first in a series of movies featuring strong, sexy women. This Girl’s Life, featuring James Woods and Rosario Dawson, was told from a female porn star’s point of view. (Dawson didn’t play the porn star.) He’s currently casting RadioActive, which has been described as a female Scarface.

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 Ballroom, Roger McNamee sits in a blue plastic chair, cradling his Martin acoustic guitar and fretting. The veteran Silicon Valley investor looks around at the members of his new band Moonalice—six seasoned players whom he’d flown in, at his own expense, from around the country—and delivers the bad news.

“Nobody’s out there,” says McNamee, 51. On the other side of a flimsy, decal-covered door, the warm-up act, Storytyme, rocks out to a nearly empty room. McNamee frowns slightly and tucks wisps of his graying shoulder-length hair behind both ears. “The promoter said they would bring 50 to 100 people with them,” he says. “They appear to have brought between four and six.”

His bandmates nod solemnly. It’s not the first time they’ve outnumbered their audience. When someone mentions that Storytyme’s members are a trio of brothers in their twenties, Moonalice’s bass player, Jack Casady (who, in 1965, when he was in his twenties, joined the psychedelic-rock band Jefferson Airplane), sets down the World War II novel he’s reading. “That explains why there’s no one here,” he says, chuckling grimly. “Only one set of parents.”

McNamee shuts his eyes and keeps them shut. He made his name in a world far away from this grunge pit, whose floorboards stink of beer and where a chipped disco ball twirls slowly overhead. This Ivy League-educated, self-described geek has compiled a remarkable investment record that has given him near-wizard status on Sand Hill Road, the Bay Area tech industry’s main artery for capital. Known as a savvy strategist with a gift for anticipating technological change, McNamee has spent the past two decades guiding several top-performing funds—first at T. Rowe Price, the giant mutual fund manager, and then at two private equity shops he co-founded. Now he’s leading his third firm, Elevation Partners, whose profile—thanks to the involvement of U2 lead singer Bono—is even higher than the amount in its $1.9 billion war chest.

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 Siegel. “Have you been aware that your representatives have gone too far?”

In the mid-1930s, when she was in her late teens, Siegel had been the sketch model for Lois Lane. Now she was accusing Parsons’ company of trying to fleece her and her daughter of their share of Superman revenues. She called AOL Time Warner “greedy” and alleged a “heartless attempt” to rewrite history. “Just like the Gestapo, your company wants to strip us naked of our legal rights…. Is that the reputation you want?”

In the five years since Parsons received that three-page screed, Siegel’s outrage has found a more formal outlet: two lawsuits, both championed by a controversial Malibu litigator named Marc Toberoff. The 52-year-old attorney has made a career of taking on big entertainment companies on behalf of creators and their heirs. He has been especially successful against what is now Time Warner.

His most publicized victory came in 2005, when he persuaded a judge to enjoin Warner Bros. from releasing the movie The Dukes of Hazzard because it was based in part on an earlier film, Moonrunners. Six weeks before the Dukes premiere, the studio settled with the Moonrunners producers for $17.5 million.

In the pending cases, Toberoff is taking a different tack, asserting that the Siegel family has terminated the grants to the Superman and Superboy copyrights that Jerry Siegel had bestowed in 1938 and 1948, respectively. The Siegels have exercised a clause in U.S. copyright law that gives creators or their heirs a five-year window to reclaim rights to their works 56 years after the copyright was issued. Toberoff says this entitles the Siegels to half of all Superman-related profits earned since the copyright termination took effect in 1999—a sum he estimates tops $50 million—as well as any future profits. He also asserts that Time Warner has infringed the Siegels’ Superboy copyright with its Smallville TV series and thus owes unspecified damages.

Time Warner’s lawyers dispute these claims, saying, among other things, that the Siegel heirs have reneged on a settlement hammered out before Toberoff entered the picture. The attorneys also question whether the termination papers were filed correctly and say that, even if they were, the Siegel family has vastly overstated how much it is owed.

At stake is not just money but, potentially, the very future of the franchise. If the Siegel heirs prevail in winning back their copyrights, the result could be a similar challenge by the heirs of Superman’s co-creator, artist Joe Shuster. And if that challenge were successful, then Time Warner—which is currently developing a follow-up to last year’s film Superman Returns—could eventually find itself out of the Superman business altogether. How big is that business? Only Time Warner knows for sure (and it isn’t saying), but counting the Superman- and Superboy-related movies, TV shows, DVDs, books, comics, and merchandise, the conservative estimate is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Toberoff says it’s $1 billion.

As the first suit moves toward a January trial, Time Warner has retained three law firms to keep the Man of Steel in the fold. Overkill? Not considering how much the company stands to lose—and the fact that it has lost to Toberoff before.

Reviled by some as the Hollywood equivalent of an ambulance chaser, Toberoff specializes in helping aging writers and artists (or their heirs) reassert their claims to decades-old properties. Then, in exchange for an ownership stake in the recovered rights, Toberoff tries to get new projects produced that are based on those properties, sometimes at the very same media company with which he just did battle.

<<>>

Now more than ever, risk-averse Hollywood loves remakes, which are seen as easier to market. That trend has created opportunities for Toberoff, who, despite what one executive has called “pushy and aggressive” tactics, has a knack for attaching himself to projects that studios want to make. For example, back in the mid-1990s, it occurred to Toberoff that the 1978 TV series Fantasy Island could be the basis for a feature film. He tracked down Gene Levitt, the series’ creator, and convinced him that it would be worth his while to dig his original contract out of the basement. Toberoff then proved that Levitt (who died in 1999) owned the show’s movie rights. Sony Pictures is now developing the series into a film to star Eddie Murphy. If it is made, Toberoff will collect a producing fee. (He won’t say how much.)

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. The story, which takes place entirely in and around a booth on Fifty-third Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, was seductively “high-concept,” meaning that you could explain it in a sentence or less. Such scripts are relatively easy to sell to moviegoers, which is why Tom Cruise’s production company flirted with buying it, and why Twentieth Century Fox paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to take it off the table. Steven Spielberg briefly considered directing it, as did Mel Gibson, who also planned to star. Michael Bay, the king of blow-it-up cinema, was in line for the director’s job, and then the Hughes brothers were. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robin Williams were interested in starring, but the studio wanted to go younger, so Will Smith came aboard. After he dropped out, Jim Carrey stepped in, with Joel Schumacher as director. Then Carrey took a pass.

All this was difficult for the screenwriter, Larry Cohen, to watch. So as A-list actors and directors came and went, offering suggestions for rewrites, Cohen-who is more of a B-movie man-dealt with his frustration by doing something that has soothed him since he was a teen-ager. He wrote another script.

In 1999, as “Phone Booth” continued to linger in development, Cohen sold his new script, “Cellular,” for nine hundred thousand dollars. “Cellular” is “Phone Booth” turned inside out. It’s the story of a man who answers his cell phone and hears a woman say that a kidnapper will kill her if he hangs up. “Phone Booth” is a guy on a phone stuck in one place trying to save himself; “Cellular” is a guy on a phone running all over the place trying to save someone else. As far as Cohen was concerned, the two scripts were completely different. Fox executives disagreed.

“I was furious at Larry,” Elizabeth Gabler, the president of Fox 2000, says. She called Cohen after reading the script for “Cellular,” which was eventually sold to Dean Devlin, the producer and co-screenwriter of “Godzilla.” Devlin had a development deal at Sony Pictures. “I said, ‘What were you thinking? It’s exactly the same idea.’ ”

Even Cohen’s mother heard the echo. “She said to him, ‘Larry, enough with the telephones,’ ” Cohen’s sister, Ronni Chasen, a well-known Hollywood publicist, says. Gabler, meanwhile, alerted Fox’s lawyers, who threatened to sue. They exacted a promise from the producers of “Cellular” that “Phone Booth” could be released first, and it was, last year. Today, Cohen still doesn’t see why everyone got so worked up.

“So I’m in my phone phase-so what?” he says. “I want to do a phone trilogy, so that the people who write about movies and review them will think, Oh, that’s a Larry Cohen script,” he explains. “Now if anyone sees a telephone in a movie, they’ll know it’s mine.”

Hollywood is a place where wunderkinder are so prized that even twenty-eight-year-olds try to pass for younger, and people with any history-a writing credit from a hit TV show like “M*A*S*H,” a birth date before 1980, or even a slight familiarity with “Father of the Bride” (the one that didn’t star Steve Martin)-usually take pains to hide it. When you work in the entertainment industry, Botox isn’t just about vanity; it’s about parity.

This is part of what makes Larry Cohen a puzzling figure: he has been in the business for nearly half a century. Forty-eight years ago, when he was seventeen, he sold his first script, to NBC’s “Kraft Television Theatre.” Today, he is sixty-five and a grandfather. Not that he looks it: he has a full head of hair that he tints a sandy blond, and his five-foot-ten-and-a-half-inch frame is lean. Twice a week, he and his personal trainer climb the steep trails that crisscross the Santa Monica Mountains above Beverly Hills, where he lives, often while listening to tapes of Abbott and Costello’s classic radio show.

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 front door. Mr. Grushow is the president of 20th Century Fox Television, and his clout was reflected in the 8,000-square-foot Tudor house he shares with his wife, Barbara, and their two children. A pianist played standards on a baby grand in the foyer. An army of waiters in taupe Nehru jackets offered hors d’oeuvres on glistening platters.

“Mini-Reuben sandwich? Knish?” a waiter asked the guest of honor, Rabbi Steven Z. Leder. Rabbi Leder opted for a corned beef and Swiss about the size of a postage stamp, then climbed a few steps up the Grushows’ elegant staircase and quieted the crowd. “I thought we might begin tonight by taking an opportunity to turn to your left or right, to meet your neighbor,” he said. “Then, I would appreciate it if you would just share your net worth with them.”

The room shook with nervous laughter. No one complied.

Rabbi Leder is the senior rabbi of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, arguably Los Angeles’s most prestigious synagogue. The evening was a chance for him to unveil his new book, “More Money Than God: Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul,” for some of the wealthiest members of his congregation: those who make the deals, call the shots and create the programming that ends up on America’s movie and television screens. While he didn’t mean to offend, he knew that the book’s central premise — that raging materialism and the relentless pursuit of money lead to moral bankruptcy — might strike some in his audience like a stick in the eye.

“The thought has occurred to me: Am I biting the hand that feeds the temple?” he said a few weeks before the book party. Not that “More Money Than God” is particularly incendiary. Close readers will find a few juicy tales (without names) about some in his flock, like the young woman who inherited tens of millions of dollars from her grandfather but feels as if her husband is a mooch, or the Oscar-winning movie director who died alone, with nothing but a tattered snapshot of his parents to soothe him. Overall, however, the book’s messages are hardly fire and brimstone: don’t be a workaholic; give generously to charity; teach your children that materialism, like racism, is not okay.

Nevertheless, in Hollywood, where who’s up, who’s down and where one stands in the pecking order are constant obsessions, Mr. Leder’s chosen topic is a thorny one. Money here is much more than a passport to comfort. For people whose success depends on something as amorphous as being able to predict the national mood 18 months into the future, the size of one’s paycheck (or profit participation, or back-end) is a crucial signifier. Perhaps more than any place on earth, money here, like corner tables in hot restaurants or middle seats at movie premieres, is a way to assert your rank. And the fickle nature of the business can make even the very affluent feel insecure in a way that makes no amount of money ever seem enough.

“This is a town where the next big script could be written by the person who’s handing you the cup of coffee at Starbucks,” said Stuart Krasnow, a temple member and an executive producer of reality programming at NBC. “Things change so rapidly. Success can go away rapidly.”

Which makes the rabbi’s supporters a bit worried for him. By focusing on money, said Erwin Stoff, a partner in the management-production company 3 Arts Entertainment, whose clients include Keanu Reeves and Matthew Broderick, Rabbi Leder had entered “a risky area.”

Leonard Goldberg, the TV and movie producer (among his many credits: “Charlie’s Angels” — the series, the film and the sequel), agreed. “This book will force people to look at themselves, and there may be some who don’t appreciate that suggestion,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We’re not building bridges here, or saving lives. We’re just making movies. And when you’re making so much money for what secretly you think may be the very little that you do, it can be very unsettling. The only benchmark some people have is what their peers are making. As somebody once said: ‘It’s not about the money. It’s about how much.’ “