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 the New York Times on 10/11/2009

BY: Amy Wallace

IT’S a miracle. That’s what the humans believe, more often than not, after watching this compact, 40-year-old C.E.O. do his work. He enters a room purposefully, his chest thrust forward and a smile on his face. “How can I help?” is his standard introduction, and the way he says it — calmly, assertively — indicates that your problems are about to be solved.

It’s unbelievable. That’s what the humans say when they see what Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” can do. And the dogs? To a pooch, they appear to be thinking: “Thank God, help has finally arrived.” To prompt a visit from Mr. Millan, these dogs have exhibited seemingly irrational fears (of motorbikes, toasters, linoleum floors) and strange obsessions (biting rocks, ankles, tractor tires).

Their owners, meanwhile, have told poignant, if at times ludicrous, stories. One couple sought out Mr. Millan after their two pit bulls, hell-bent on killing each other, forced them to live apart. Another hadn’t slept in the same bed for months because their Yorkies wouldn’t allow it.

If you have a television, you may know Mr. Millan from “Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan,” whose sixth-season premiere was on Friday on the National Geographic Channel, a cable network piped into about 70 million homes. Nearly 11 million Americans tune in each week. You may have stumbled upon his new glossy magazine, Cesar’s Way, or his four books, the latest of which, “How to Raise the Perfect Dog,” went on sale last week. His first three books, all New York Times best sellers, have cumulatively sold two million copies in the United States and are available in 14 other countries.

Partly because he is based in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the entertainment industry, Mr. Millan has become something of a cultural icon, a Latino man who commands respect wherever he goes. He has helped scores of movie stars and moguls — among them alpha dogs like Oprah Winfrey, the actor Will Smith, the former Disney chief Michael D. Eisner and the director Ridley Scott — become pack leaders in the one place they fail to rule: their homes.

No wonder Mr. Millan’s reputation as a fixer — he says he rehabilitates dogs, but trains people — has been immortalized in pop culture. “What is the ‘Dog Whisperer’?” has been a winning answer on “Jeopardy.” An episode of “South Park” featured the mom of Eric Cartman, the spoiled, foul-mouthed brat, hiring Mr. Millan to discipline him. A New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell quoted scientists and dance experts analyzing how Mr. Millan’s bearing instills confidence. The conclusion: his fluid movement communicates authenticity better than words could.

Not bad for a once-poor native of Culiacán, Mexico, who crossed the border illegally 19 years ago with nothing in his pockets. (He became a United States citizen this year.) When he talks about transformation, in other words, he’s living proof that it’s possible.

With his wife, Ilusion, he runs Cesar Millan Inc., the center of a constellation of businesses that coordinates all things Cesar beyond the show, including speaking engagements; executive leadership seminars; a line of organic dog food, fortified water, shampoos and toys that sells at Petco; and the charitable foundation financed by an undisclosed percentage of the company’s revenue.

His Web site, cesarmillaninc.com, grosses annual sales in the mid-seven figures, according to a company spokesman, chiefly from DVDs, books and merchandise like the Illusion Collar, designed by his wife to help control challenging dogs. Nearly 400,000 visitors are on the site monthly. Then there’s his Dog Psychology Center, a 43-acre mecca he calls a “Disneyland for dogs.” Under construction north of here, near where he and his family live, it will be the first of many such centers nationwide, he says.

According to MPH Entertainment, the production company that is Mr. Millan’s partner in all its many offshoots and co-owns the TV show with the producers who discovered him, he will be a $100 million business in a few years. And he says he’s just getting started.

Bankruptcies Jolt a Ski Haven for the Superrich

Jeff Minton

Originally appeared in the New York Times June 14, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. – Nine days after declaring personal bankruptcy — again — a barefoot Edra Blixseth pads excitedly around Porcupine Creek, her 30,000-square-foot estate here. Guests are coming, probably 125 in all. They’re due any minute. The zipper on her sternum-baring cocktail dress is jammed. Do you think it’s too tight? Can somebody help her?

Porcupine Creek is lavish, with a 240-acre private golf course and a pool guarded by bronze lions. Many visitors have seen all that, plus the automated fountain that splashes at the end of her 1,700-foot driveway.

But so far, only Ms. Blixseth’s good friends have wandered around the private space inside: the prayer room, the gym, the beauty parlor, the wet room, the cozy massage alcoves and the private theater adorned with murals; then there’s the 18th-century French furniture, the Italian stained glass, the bedroom suite from the Vatican, the ancient Tibetan Tankas. Until this day, she has never hosted a charity event inside her home. Given the circumstances, though, it’s the best she can do.

“I can’t write a check this year,” she says, referring to her usual gift to a shelter for battered women. Her Gulfstream IV has been grounded. Her jewelry, mostly sold. To help pay the bills, her boyfriend even had to sell his Bentley.

Edra Denise Blixseth, age 55, is tiny, barely 5 foot 3, but she is at the center of a huge financial mess. According to personal bankruptcy papers her lawyer filed in March, she owes $500 million to $1 billion and has assets of barely half that, almost none of them liquid. Earlier this month, the court approved the sale of one of her most prized possessions — the private ski resort in Big Sky, Mont., known as the Yellowstone Club — to the private equity firm of one of its members for $115 million. Just a year ago, that same buyer, CrossHarbor Capital Partners, had been willing to pay $400 million for the club.

The Yellowstone Club, a 13,600-acre playground 20 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, may be the world’s lone members-only ski resort. Its pristine natural beauty and remote location have attracted wealthy skiers who prize their privacy, including Bill Gates of Microsoft; Barry Sternlicht, the hotelier; and Peter Chernin, president of the News Corporation.

In one of the signature, fin de siècle moments of our passing Gilded Age, the Yellowstone Club filed for Chapter 11 protection last November; four months later, Ms. Blixseth followed suit — a club and its doyenne, sucked into a financial downdraft that has wounded even once-untouchable elites.

Marketed with the phrase “Private Powder,” Yellowstone is the anti-Aspen — luxurious, sure, but discreet and child-friendly. Ask members what makes it so special, and more than one offers this simple fact: There, and nowhere else, the family of the world’s richest man can ski without bodyguards. One club member — who, like many Yellowstone members, requested anonymity so as not to be seen as violating the club’s tradition of not blabbing about one another — recalls Mr. Gates’s saying that his family once tried Vail but their need for security “made us look like jerks. Here, we don’t need it.” That’s because the club has long been kept safe by former Secret Service agents, and who can put a price tag on that?

“Once you ski there, you never want to go anywhere else,” says Burt Sugarman, a Beverly Hills businessman who with his wife, the “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart, was among the club’s first members.

Steve Burke, the chief operating officer of Comcast, has a place at Yellowstone. As do Todd Thomson, the former head of Citigroup’s private banking unit; Robert Greenhill, founder of the investment bank Greenhill & Company; Greg LeMond, a Tour de France winner; Annika Sorenstam, the Swedish golf star; Frank McCourt, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers; and about 250 other low-key rich folks.

Membership has its price: a minimum of $250,000 to join, plus the cost of a $5 million to $35 million mountainside home, plus annual dues of about $20,000, according to members.

Originally appeared in Men’s Journal February, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

Just a few months ago, Mickey Rourke was driving around Miami late one night, cruising the streets of his hometown, when his cell phone rang. “Hey, it’s Bruce,” a familiar voice said, but at first Rourke couldn’t place it. “Springsteen,” the voice said. Rourke tears up a little when he remembers.

Rourke, who is 52, has known Springsteen for more than two decades — a span of time that includes at least a few of Rourke’s glory days and all of what he calls “my lost years.” During that period the actor basically told Hollywood to go fuck itself, became a not entirely unsuccessful professional boxer, got the shit beat out of him, and lost all traces of prettiness in his once-pretty face. Long before his recent comeback, he had found a good psycho­therapist in the hopes, he says, of finally becoming — and this is a word he uses a lot — “accountable.”

Rourke has a lot to account for. Once he had been mighty. In the 1980s, Time magazine said he had the potential of a young Jack Nicholson, and New Yorker critic Pauline Kael praised his “edge and magnetism and…sweet, pure smile that surprises you. He seems to be acting to you, and to no one else.” With luck, she said, “Rourke could become a major actor.” Then he self-destructed. There were fistfights and violent marital squabbles (his ex-wife, the model Carré Otis, accused him of assault, then dropped the charges). There was prima donna behavior (he walked off a job because a producer wouldn’t let his beloved pet Chihuahua appear in a scene). There was poverty. And there were many truly awful movies.

Then, in 2007, a really good director named Darren Aronofsky picked Rourke for a great leading role: Randy “the Ram” Robinson, a broken-down pro wrestler at the end of his career. Unbelievably, considering how hard Rourke had worked to dismantle the enormous goodwill the movie industry once had for him, he was getting a second chance — “the last chance,” he tells me. “I’m not getting another pass. This is it.” And to make the most of that chance, a movie called The Wrestler, he reached out to the Boss for help.

“When we got done with the movie, I knew we nailed it. There was magic going on,” Rourke says of the film, for which he transformed his already powerful body, adding 35 extra pounds of muscle. “So I wrote Bruce a letter — a real long fucking truthful letter. And I said, ‘I’m so glad that I didn’t end up like Randy because, unlike me, Randy doesn’t have access to somebody who can help him to change.’ ”

Rourke had poured his heart out, but still, when the phone rang that night in Miami, he was surprised. “Bruce said, ‘Listen, I wrote a little something,’ ” the actor recalls. The song, which shares the film’s title, plays as the credits roll, and its lyrics seem to perfectly capture Rourke’s breathtaking, backbreaking, and literally skin-perforating performance.

“Have you ever seen a one-legged dog making its way down the street?” Springsteen sings. “If you’ve ever seen a one-legged dog, then you’ve seen me.”

I ask Rourke how Springsteen teased out that central theme before the movie was even in the can. Rourke nods, knowing the answer. “He didn’t see the movie,” he says, “but he knows me.”

I first met Rourke on a Sunday morning in September 2002, half a dozen years before anyone would think to put his name and “Academy Award” in the same sentence.

It was early, probably 7 am. That must be said out of fairness to Rourke, given what happened. And he was understandably tired, having spent days at the Toronto International Film Festival promoting a movie he didn’t like much called Spun. He’d only done Spun, he says now, because his new agent told him to, and in those days he was lucky to even have an agent.

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.

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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 Vanity Fair April, 2002

BY: Amy Wallace

There are glitzy Los Angeles restaurants – Mortons, Ago, Mr. Chow – where Hollywood’s top stars and reigning moguls go to be seen. Then there are no-nonsense spots where the same A-list crowd goes to simply eat in peace: the Apple Pan in Westwood, Nate ‘n Al’s Deli in Beverly Hills, O’Brien’s Irish Pub & Restaurant in Santa Monica, and Pink’s in the heart of Hollywood.

Brad Pitt has been known to stand in line at Pink’s, the hot-dog shack that’s been putting wieners in buns for 62 years (and where Orson Welles used to regularly down 10 chili dogs in one sitting).

‘Who’s the guy, Opie? He comes in,’ says Martha Gamble, the owner-manager of the 26-seat Apple Pan, which has served the likes of Jimmy Stewart, Warren Beatty, and, yes, Ron Howard from the same menu for 55 years.

‘My grandfather taught me, ‘Don’t make it too schmaltzy. I don’t want a red carpet out front,’’ says David Mendelson, a vice president of the family-run company that has made Nate ‘n Al’s the place for matzo brei since 1945. Al, David’s grandpa, made discretion one of the restaurant’s signatures, which is why on any given day you cant still see Dick Van Dyke stopping by Larry King’s table to say hi.

William O’Sullivan, who owns O’Briens, prides himself on welcoming his twice-a-week regulars from suburban Diamond Bar (they’re hooked on his $10 Irish Breakfast) just as warmly as he does Russell Crowe or Benicio del Toro.

‘This is not really a celebrity hangout,’ he says. ‘It’s their place to hide and blend in. Nicole was in here just after she broke up with Tom. I get a thrill out of it myself, but the people around them are usually oblivious.’

January 1, 2002

By: Amy Wallace

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED WITH MY BREASTS TODAY. First, I spilled a latte all over them at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. The lid on my cup wasn’t tight, so when I went to take a sip, milk foam poured and then puddled on my sweater. Stooping to wipe up what I presumed would be a mess on the floor, I found that little coffee had gotten past me. For the first time ever, my breasts were too grande for my latte. * Later, I took my breasts out to lunch at the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, where they promptly attracted the attention of, well, everybody. Outside the Broadway Deli, two men approached. They were well dressed, respectable-looking, and as they veered toward me, the one in the black designer suit leaned in, his eyes fixed like spotlights. “We love them,” he announced, smiling wickedly. * I’ve had breasts for years. But now I have the biggest, firmest breasts in sight–a plump, jiggling set that obscure my downward vision and get in the way when I drive. My new breasts are D cup. They weigh 23.2 ounces–about the same as a couple of average grapefruits. They sit high on my chest in a bra that makes the most of my cleavage.

I’ve spent my whole life pretending breasts don’t matter. Part of me still wants to believe it’s true. I can make all the arguments, which basically come down to this: Women should be valued for their selves, not their shelves. Still, I have to admit, at the moment the breasts I’m toting feel like more than mere flesh. They feel like the source of all power.

THE PERFECTLY ROUNDED BREAST IS TO L.A. WHAT BIG hair is to Dallas. More than palm trees or surfboards or stars on Hollywood Boulevard, the breast–especially the surgically augmented breast–has become this city’s icon. That it taps into an American obsession only makes the symbol more potent. Saline or silicone, globelike or teardrop, ta-tas put the la, la in Los Angeles.

Angelyne. Pamela Anderson. Melanie Griffith. These women have the kind of breasts that people associate with Southern California. Six breasts among them, and not one could be found in nature. Angelenos accept this. We joke about it. We exchange tips on how best to spot the fakes. One woman I know says U-shaped cleavage is the tip-off. Another studies breasts at the beach, searching for the telltale melon shape, the way certain implants defy gravity. It’s a sport, and women here play it as much as men do.

Remember the scene in the movie L.A. Story when Steve Martin gropes Sarah Jessica Parker? He blanches, confused. “Your breasts feel weird,” he says. “Oh” she replies, as if she’s heard this before. “That’s because they’re real.”

Then there’s the Seinfeld episode when Kramer explains his expertise on the tactile properties of fake breasts by saying “I lived in L.A. for three months.”

I know a producer of mega-action movies who once told a TV actress that she had the best real breasts he’d ever seen. Can there be another city on earth where someone, in a professional context, would say that out loud? The actress, eager to make the jump from TV to film, used to repeat the producer’s assessment with pride. To be genuine in a city built on illusion is rare, and she hoped it would give her an advantage. The last movie she made went straight to video.

For women who work in Hollywood, the breast is as much about commerce as cosmetics. A memorable first impression is a necessity–one many actresses believe is worth paying $ 4,000 for. “It’s a whole different world in L.A. than in the rest of the country,” says Brian Cox, a Pasadena plastic surgeon who trained here, in the Northeast, and in the South. “In L.A. a lot of people see getting implants as a career move. They see it as a cost of doing business.”

Nonactresses can’t use that excuse. Yet everyone can relate to the insecurities of the flat-chested woman. What man hasn’t worried about measuring up? Women, meanwhile, are so ruthless about their bodies that even the genetically fortunate find time to complain. Gwyneth Paltrow recently told Harper’s Bazaar that she hates her butt. Helpfully, the magazine ran a nude portrait of the actress and said butt, which looked like it should be bronzed and put in a museum.

Originally appeared in Vanity Fair May, 1997

BY: Amy Wallace

TODAY’S SPECIAL: TRUST ME! reads the hand-lettered sign on the wall of Sushi Nozawa. And chef Kazunori Nozawa, one of Los Angeles’ most temperamental restaurateurs, isn’t kidding around.

To occupy one of the nine seats at his counter, a waitress explains to newcomers, is to relinquish control. No ordering, please. You eat what he serves – or you’re out the door.

One hapless entertainment executive refused Nozawa’s tuna on the grounds that dolphins might have perished in the catch. ‘‘Out!’’ yelled the irate chef, who is known to ignore diners’ trendy requests (NO CALIFORNIA ROLL! reads another sign) and to bark instructions (‘‘One bite only!’’) at those whose sushi skills don’t measure up.

‘‘Grumpy doesn’t even begin to describe it,’’ says Robert Ward, a writer and TV producer (Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice), who is such a Nozawa devotee that he immortalized the chef in one of his novels. ‘‘He’s an artist. Asking him to make a California roll is like asking Van Gogh to paint a velvet Elvis.’’

Most nights, customers wait in line to be mistreated at the closet-sized restaurant, right next to a nail salon in a San Fernando Valley mini-mall. Nozawa regulars have spotted Jeffrey Katzenberg, not to mention actors Rebecca De Mornay and James Caan, sampling the albacore and risking the chef’s wrath.

But Nozawa – who once refused to serve singer-songwriter Carole King a second order of uni – doesn’t care who you are, as long as you adhere to his program for sushi Zen.

Originally appeared in Vanity Fair April, 1995

BY: Amy Wallace

Down an alley, next to a sheet-metal factory just off the Santa Monica Freeway, is a place so exclusive that some of Hollywood’s most powerful players are turned away at the door. It’s not a nightclub, but a prep school: the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, a 23-year-old experiment in nontraditional learning that – despite its grungy locale – draws celebrities like moths to a spotlight. 

“We look like an urban-renewal poster child,” admits headmaster Roger Weaver, describing the hodgepodge of renovated factory buildings that house Crossroads’ $12,400-a-year middle and upper schools, grades 6 through 12. Nevertheless, he says, “we have turned down, for basic reasons of admissions standards, some of the biggest names around.”

Dustin Hoffman’s son fared better, as did the children of Goldie Hawn, Maximilian Schell, director Lawrence Kasdan, and Ted Danson. And that’s just for starters. Over the years, Crossroads has taught the progeny of Streep, Streisand, Sheen – even the older children of O.J. Simpson (and, for a time, the son of Simpson’s lawyer Robert Shapiro).

But Crossroads, which also has an elementary school, is known as much for its unusual approach to education as it is for its famous names. Besides being academically rigorous, the school requires its students to participate in community service and the arts. No one graduates without taking kayaking, rock climbing, or two other excursions into the great outdoors.

One day a year, classes are dispensed with to allow students to discuss “global issues” such as racism or nuclear power. Athletic programs include yoga and the martial arts. And to cap it all off, students complete a “Mysteries” class – an exercise in self-expression that culminates in a five-day retreat involving chanting and activities based on Native American sweat-lodge rituals.

“To this day, anytime Crossroads people get together they can say these chants,” says one 26-year-old alumnus. “You did them over and over.”

According to Weaver, it’s all part of the Crossroads ethos: to build self-esteem along with G.P.A.’s. He’s heard the whispers about “fringy, over-the-top” programs, but is unapologetic: “We give kids a lot of permission to be who they are.”

And the kids take advantage of it. During a recent lunch period, the lack of dress code was apparent in the tie-dyed T-shirts, overalls, and fatigues. One pink-haired 12-year-old wore a pair of gossamer wings, “because I’m different,” she explained.

Out in the alley, where kids gathered around a gourmet-lunch truck that serves empanadas and meatless burgers (there is no school cafeteria), one student observed that, for all its downscale fashion, Crossroads is no stranger to conspicuous consumption.

“You can tell the teachers’ cars from the kids’,” he said. “The teachers have beat-up Volvos. The kids have Beemer convertibles.” At other schools, pranksters may put thumbtacks on chairs. At Crossroads, they steal one another’s vanity plates.

You don’t have to be rich and famous to go to Crossroads. The school prides itself on its diversity – roughly a quarter of the students are minorities – and this year’s financial-aid budget is $1.7 million. But the support of wealthy families is essential to its survival, which has at times proved troublesome in this tight-fisted town.

Dr. Jake Jacobusse, a former director of the upper school, explains, “So much of the money in L.A. is new money, there’s no tradition for philanthropy.”

Big names bring other complications as well. Like how do you tell somebody with a shelf full of Oscars that he or she needs to spend more time parenting? “The big-star types are not used to people telling them they’re blowing it,” says Weaver. “But sometimes, that’s what they need to hear.”

The school, lauded as exemplary by the U.S. Department of Education, is not without critics. One parent says that for all its creative programming Crossroads’ so-called student-centered focus fails to teach important lessons.

“The kids lose out on the experience of having to deal with things that don’t always suit them,” worries this mother. “Everyone’s bending over backwards to please them.”

But the school must be doing something right. Its orchestra is nationally recognized and its choir world-class. Nearly 100 percent of the students go to college, many to the Ivy League. And the waiting list for admission is legendary, no matter who you are.

BY: Amy Wallace

Nestled into a steep Santa Monica hillside, 189 concrete steps are giving new meaning to the term ‘social climbing.’ At dawn, at dusk, even in the middle of the night, the fit and would-be fit battle for parking spots near the top of the well-worn stairs, which offer panoramic views of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Leaving their bottled waters curbside, they move down the narrow zigzag and climb back up again, over and over until delirium sets in.

Desire for a tight derriere lures most people to the tree-lined stairway, where there’s more than one way to escalate. Arms swing or are clasped tightly behind the back. Legs kick forward or out to the side. Some people climb backward. So-called commandos, who do as many as 50 sets (that’s 18,900 stairs) a day, are easy to spot: they run the steps, usually several at a time.

But many who put on spandex and sweatbands to visit this neighborhood of million-dollar homes seek more than mere sinew. They want to be seen.

‘It’s a chic place to break a sweat,’ says Eric Moore, a real-estate broker who avoids the crowds by climbing during the wee hours. Habitues are still chuckling over the novice who used to do a few laps every morning and then jump into his Mercedes and make phone calls, as if on display. Some here have much more than exercise on their mind.

‘The pickup scene is everywhere – and her is no exception,’ says Daniel Paul, a production assistant at Paramount who claims that on his first visit to the steps he was approached by ‘a bunch of older Swedish women.’

Gloria Charles, a screenwriter, adds, ‘After 10 sets, nobody looks good. You’ve got to catch them coming out of their car.’ A regular for four years, Charles is an expert on proper form, both athletic and social. When passing, give a polite warning (she recommends ‘On your left!’). And never, ever wear perfume – it has a way of overpowering the fresh salt air.

Local homeowners, however, feel their neighborhood is overpowered by the climbers. The steps are a nuisance, they say, bringing traffic jams, noise, and loitering.

‘All the traffic – it’s a definite negative,’ says one real-estate agent who is trying to sell a house near the top of the steps. But even she hesitates to condemn the climbers – after all, she’s one of them.

‘Got to keep the butt up,’ she says.