Heather Havrilesky

Did you come up with that image when you were developing it into a show or when you were writing the novel itself?

You know, I never wrote the novel. I wrote a treatment for the novel, which Simon & Schuster bought. So the novel was never written. It was an idea that was probably in my head for five years before I wrote it.

Were your other novels mysteries?

The first one, which is probably the best known, is a book called “Rats Saw God.” It came out in ’96. I wrote it when I was 28, and though it was about an 18-year-old, I really kind of wrote it for an audience of my peers so, given the sex and the drugs and the language, I really didn’t think anyone would buy it as a young adult novel, but Simon & Schuster did and, after that, I was under contract for several more.

You mentioned at the Paley Festival that your original idea for the noir novel involved a male protagonist. When you decided to make the protagonist a girl, did that change the story and if so, how?

At some point in there, I started really thinking about the big picture, like if I’m going to try to tap into any kind of zeitgeist, what is that? I had what I thought was a cool notion about placing teens in a noir universe, but what am I saying, what does that mean? This idea that I was attracted to, and had been thinking about since I taught high school, was this vague notion about teenagers being desensitized and jaded and sexualized so much earlier than I feel like even my generation 15, 20 years before had been. That seemed like a perfect thing to try to shine a spotlight on. [That concept] was interesting to me when the protagonist was a boy, but when I started thinking in terms of a girl who had seen too much and experienced too much at too young of an age, it became even more potent to me. It just seemed that much edgier and more difficult to swallow, in a good way. So, I can’t remember exactly when I shifted, but that was why I shifted.

It’s fun to watch a character who kind of feels like she’s above high school.

The thing that I like about her is that she’s been stripped of all of the teen girl insecurities that weigh so heavily on girls who are 14, 15, 16: how they dress and who they’re seen with. I taught high school journalism for five years and was the yearbook advisor, so I was around so many teenage girls. And I thought, Well, wouldn’t it be interesting if somebody had gotten so far down that she just didn’t give a fuck anymore, that that sort of pressure didn’t mean much to her?

Did you worry about making Veronica believable in the early stages of writing the show?

Yeah, particularly as a private detective. I didn’t want to give her any sort of superpowers, any things that I didn’t believe she could possess. I started with this notion that her dad was out trying to make a living, but he’s got one too many cases, so he tells Veronica, “Just sit right here, and take a picture of whoever comes out of that room.” And that’s how it starts. And because she’s such a pariah at school, she doesn’t have friends, she’s only close to this one person in her life, she just starts hanging out at the detective agency and she just picks things up and picks things up and becomes valuable to her father there. There’s a bit of a buy — you wonder when she’s doing her homework and other things — but I wanted to make it as believable as possible. Most of the back story is there in order to create a world in which you believe this 17-year-old girl hangs out at her dad’s job and learns the real tricks of this trade.

The nice thing about Kristen Bell is that she sells it so well. It’s easy to buy that she’s confident enough to reject high school and pursue these other, absurdly ambitious extracurricular activities.

Yeah, and the show wouldn’t work if you didn’t buy that. As proud as I am of that pilot script, if we hadn’t cast it well, it would’ve flopped. We never would’ve gotten ordered if it hadn’t worked as well as it did with her.

Enrico Colantoni in particular is a really interesting choice, and maybe the strangest, most original dad ever cast on a teen show. How did you decide that he was right for the role?

What I think Rico does is, he gives you a different line reading than you expect. I remember seeing Rico years and years ago on a sitcom called “Hope & Glory,” when it first came out. It wasn’t by any means my favorite sitcom, but — and this was before I was in the business, this was when I was a high school teacher in Texas — watching the show, I remember thinking, Wow, who is that? He’s really good.

There’s really a lot of humor on the show. How conscious of a choice is that?

That was a struggle, because it’s such a weird balance on the show. I think my favorite description on the show was by the Village Voice, who called us the first show to ever try to blend “Heathers” and “Chinatown.” And that’s pretty dead-on. The dialogue on the show is pretty stylized. I adored “Freaks & Geeks,” and that’s a show where the dialogue is not stylized, where those kids sound absolutely like teenagers all the time. They were never allowed to say anything pithier or wordier or more out-there than you’d expect a 16- or 17-year-old to say. We give it a little more freedom in terms of, OK, we’re going to give Veronica the line that, if you had a day to think about it, you would get.

But when you have a murder in the backdrop, a rape in the backdrop, a missing mother in the backdrop … I was nervous about tone and how well we could blend the comedy and the wordiness with the real sort of drama at its core. It’s a learning process. I ended up cutting a lot of lines out of the pilot that I just felt like were too self-conscious, too much an attempt to go for the joke, so much that it took away from scenes.

It almost seems like there’s more comedy in the show as you become more comfortable with the fact that the tone works. Did you hire comedy writers at all?

None of the writers here have ever worked on a half-hour [i.e., a comedy] before, but that said, when I read scripts, I was looking for funny drama writers. It’s kind of the school that I come out of, having done “Cupid.” I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don’t want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene, I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.

Are you a big fan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”?

I didn’t watch a lot of “Buffy.” I have so many friends who I respect who love “Buffy,” and when I would watch “Buffy,” I always thought, Oh, there’s a well-written show! But I just never got into it and followed the mythology. I would catch an episode here and an episode there. But I knew, certainly, going into this that it would be the show that we would be compared to most, and it was a comparison that I welcomed. “Buffy,” in town, among writers, is a show that writers wanted to be on. It was a show where you got to be smart and fun. A good friend of mine was one of the executive producers, and I actually call her for info on writers all the time.

But no, I’ve probably seen six or seven “Buffys” in my life.

What did you learn from your first job writing on “Dawson’s Creek”?

There are a few things I try to avoid. On “Dawson’s Creek,” those kids were supposed to be outsider kids — you know, wrong-side-of-the-track kids, weirdo kids. And I just felt like there’s no universe out there where Katie Holmes isn’t the prom queen, hottest girl in school. And the same could be true of Kristen Bell unless you really service the story, unless you really explain, unless you make it very clear and keep reinforcing why this person is a pariah, and give that some depth and some weight. So that was one thing I pulled away.

Also, “Dawson’s Creek” was never a happy work environment. Lots of infighting, lots of upheaval at the top, so I’ve really tried to make the shows that I’ve done happy places to come to work.

Something that bothered people about “Dawson’s Creek” but as a writer, I kind of dug: writing those kids as though they were college grad students. It was fun and liberating and made for a true sort of writer’s show. It was a fun year for me, because I got to get out of debt with my first TV job, and I learned a ton.

You wrote for “Snoops” and then left the show. What was the issue there?

You know, I left before the season even started, really. I was supposed to be the show runner, and it was going to be the first show where David Kelley handed over a show to someone else, and he didn’t write all the episodes and make all the decisions, and we just never — he and I didn’t get on the same page about what this detective show was going to be. And you know, in an article that came out at the time, when I left the show, I thought he was really fair about it. He told Entertainment Weekly, “Rob really wanted a sort of a comedy and character-driven show, and I really wanted a plotted, drama-driven show.” Which is sort of accurate — I did think that the show needed to wink. I felt like, you know, you’ve got three sexy women wearing a nipple cam, David, I think we have to play to the comedy a little bit. I had them making quips on the way to a rescue in an early episode, and he said, “Rob, that takes all of the drama out of it.”

I felt like we were going to be closer to “Moonlighting,” and he wanted, I suppose, to be closer to “Rockford Files” or something — which still had a degree of comedy and was certainly a warm show. So that was a creative difference we couldn’t get past. I will say that I’m actually happy that I got my female P.I. show on, because I’ll put mine against his.

Well, that’s the ultimate revenge, I guess.

Yeah, but it makes me feel like a small person to say it out loud.

We’re all small people, I think. You said at the Paley presentation that you read Television Without Pity regularly. Have you ever taken a suggestion from its readers?

I haven’t taken a plot idea, but we certainly react to what they’re responding to. I mean, it does influence what we do here, without a doubt. We try to be really careful with our continuity and with our clues. They catch everything. So part of it is just that voice in the back of the head, when you could have a lazy TV moment, and you realize, “No, no, the fans notice.” So it’s good that they’re there for that. And also, who are they reacting to? Who do they like? Who do they not like? It does make a difference. And certainly if they say something like, “This character’s boring me,” I notice. For me, it’s like, well, we better give him something cool to do.

But it doesn’t always have an effect. They’ve been pretty negative about Deputy Leo, and my belief is they’re down on Deputy Leo because they want Veronica with somebody on the show — they want her with Logan, they want her with Duncan. So they see Leo as delaying their satisfaction. And I think that’s really the resentment, because I find him to be just an amazingly charming, fun great actor and great presence on the show.

Yeah, I love Leo.

Oh, well good. And so just because the viewers aren’t raving about him, you know, I’m not going to write him out [of the show] just for that, because I think he’s good, I think he makes the show better. I think it’ll make a moment when Veronica does move on that much more satisfying.

Are we going to solve the mystery of Lilly Kane’s murder by the end of this season?

Absolutely. It’s shooting now. Actually, we’re in the last couple days of shooting the second to last episode, in which we will find out what happened the night Veronica was raped. Then in the season finale, we find out who killed Lilly Kane. In these last seven [episodes], I think we’re going to have three or four truly great episodes. And none of them are weak, but I think there are going to be a couple in here that blow people’s minds.

Do you have an idea for the main mystery for the next season?

Yeah! It was a trick to find something that we felt would make Veronica as emotionally invested as she was with Lilly Kane, and to feel like something new and fresh that didn’t feel like Season 1, and we think we’ve got it.

Would you say that the season-long narrative arc is one of the hardest things about doing a show like this?

Yeah. I can’t imagine that any other TV show right now is harder to break than our show. Maybe “24″? But that would be the only one, and I even think ours may be harder, because we have two things going on. Detective shows are harder to break than any other kind of show in the first place. We want to do this in a way that the viewer gets access to the same clues as Veronica over the course of the episode. Unlike a lot of shows, we don’t introduce you to the bad guy at the beginning and tell you whodunit, and in those shows the fun is catching them. In our show you find clue A, clue B, clue C, you meet people who might be a red herring, might be a suspect, might be a witness. You have to lay out the facts and the beats very carefully. We always want Veronica to do something very new and fresh and clever to get to this information, and that’s always a challenge. So just doing the enclosed episode, that’s one challenge that’s hard.

How much of an idea do you have about whether or not the show will be brought back?

Um, I’m really confident — I mean, I’m really confident, I have to say. I think we’re coming back. I would be willing to wager a bunch that we’re coming back. Even if the numbers don’t warrant it, I think UPN is incredibly proud of the show. I think for them, it’s a signal to other television writers, producers, actors, that they can do quality TV on that network.

To all of Salon’s readers: You’re some of the most engaged and outspoken readers on the Web, and my writing has benefited from both your criticism and your encouragement. I genuinely appreciate your support over the years. Please feel free to drop me a line via Twitter, keep up with my latest work through my website, the rabbit blog, and look for my memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” on Dec. 30 from Riverhead Books.

Few writers ever get the chance to enjoy a job that’s as creatively fulfilling as this one, or to write for an audience as smart and as insightful as Salon’s. Although it’s time for me to move on to new challenges, I will look back fondly on my years at Salon and feel grateful for them.

While the old familiar faces of late night don’t do much more than make us chuckle ourselves to sleep at night, one man has been calmly and quietly upping his game: Jimmy Kimmel. Despite his distance from the action, it was Kimmel who took some of the most direct shots at Leno during the late night wars. In addition to imitating Leno on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and then appearing on Leno’s show and insulting him to his face, Kimmel has been more outspoken than Conan himself about Leno’s sneaky strategy to take back “The Tonight Show” (although Bill Carter’s new book, “The War for Late Night,” seems to suggest that Leno wasn’t quite so calculating as Kimmel and others seem to assume). When asked in an interview with GQ this month what he learned from the late night dust-up, Kimmel replied: “The lesson is, it pays to be sneaky. I think that’s the main thing I learned. That, and don’t trust Jay Leno.”

It’s this frank talk that sets Jimmy Kimmel apart from his peers. Throw in the sharpest and funniest opening monologue on late night, an incredible knack for improv, and liberal use of off-kilter gimmicks and skits, and it’s no wonder that Kimmel has risen to the rank of late night king. Whether he’s launching a multitiered attack on Facebook idiocy with his National Unfriend Day, finding creative new ways to insult Matt Damon, or shooting an entire episode during a power outage using only his webcam, Kimmel has always had that combination of swagger and imagination that separates the good talk show hosts from the great ones. Like Johnny Carson and Letterman in his heyday, Kimmel has the bluster and the quick wit to make every moment watching him on the air feel dynamic and exciting.

That’s no small feat, of course, but it’s what real late night heroism demands. Kimmel tackles pop culture with more sharp wit and weirdo flair than any of the other late night hosts, whether he’s addressing the new Spider-Man musical (“I’ve been working on a superhero show myself, it’s called ‘Aquaman on Ice.’ Aquaman on skates, trying desperately to speak to his friends who are trapped under the layer of ice. That’s a musical!”), rumors that Snoop Dogg will play at Prince William’s bachelor party (“I’m excited for His Highness, and by His Highness, I mean both of them”), airline security pat-downs (“We freak out if a TSA agent touches us on the outside of our pants, but Black Friday, we will hump each other’s heads to get at Walmart to save 8 bucks on a PSP”), or even the plans to have Lindsay Lohan appear on “Dancing With the Stars” (“I would love to see her vomit on Len Goodman”).

When he’s interviewing guests, Kimmel is arguably better on his feet and more ready with unexpected quips than any other host. On a recent episode when Ben Affleck waxed sympathetic about hard economic times in America, Kimmel soon hinted that no one wants to hear a megastar fake emotion for the little people.

Affleck: I don’t think there’s anybody in the United States that hasn’t been affected (by the recession) in some way or another.

Kimmel: Oprah hasn’t been affected at all.

On another recent episode, Kimmel took an otherwise bland interview with Kate Bosworth and livened it up. (And let’s face it, the real test of good late-night hosting lies in finding some way to spice up interviews with dull, self-involved young actors and actresses. In addition to Kimmel, only Letterman and Craig Ferguson manage it with any regularity.)

Bosworth: (on her Korean co-star) He literally is the Brad Pitt of Korea. It’s pretty wild.

Kimmel: Really? ‘Cause I was told I was the Brad Pitt of Korea. That’s disappointing. I feel like I was lied to. (pause) He’s the Brad Pitt of Korea. And so does that mean he adopts a whole bunch of white kids, or how does that work?

He even managed to save an interview with Paris Hilton from the bowels of hell:

Hilton: (on her current boyfriend) Right now, I’m just so happy. He’s my best friend.

Kimmel: Wait a minute, now. I saw a television show in which you picked a best friend and he wasn’t it. Are you telling me that was not your real BFF?

Later, when Hilton called her new perfume “my tenth fragrance,” Kimmel countered, “That seems like too many fragrances to me.”

This is where the fans of Jimmy Fallon, who have been rallying lately to crown their contagiously giddy leader the supreme ruler of late night, really must admit defeat. While Fallon’s antics try our patience in all the right ways (Zach Galifianakis’ recent appearance, followed by a skit the very finest flavor of stupid, marked a recent high point), Fallon is a pretty bland interviewer, sometimes resembling Chris Farley’s guffawing yes-man talk show host of “SNL” legend. Nonetheless, Fallon is undoubtedly in the groove lately, with such sure-footed oddball gimmicks and quirky enthusiasm that it makes you wonder if “The Chris Farley Show” itself wouldn’t have morphed into something deliciously strange, if given enough time. And let’s face it, anyone who makes Helen Mirren play beer pong deserves at least an honorable mention, if not an Emmy.

While he might be the best Neil Young impersonator on late night (or anywhere else), Fallon has none of the subtle snideness that made Carson, Letterman and now Kimmel masters of the craft. Sure, the kind folks down at the local elementary school’s bake sale might find such a tone distasteful, but the rest of us, who’ve been marinating in a toxic mix of “The Love Boat,” People magazine and celebreality shows for years now, need a healthy dollop of scorn to make the celebrity promotional appearance go down a little more smoothly.

Fans of Craig Ferguson will point out that he shares the requisite doubting tone in his interviews, and also scores very high for sheer courage of conviction. And it’s true that to watch half a second of Ferguson’s show is to love him, from his googly-eyed knowing looks to his perverse but genius rambling asides. His self-effacing charms make his perhaps the most unpredictable and unruly of the late night shows. However enchantingly strange Ferguson’s monologues and interviews may be, they just don’t stack up to Kimmel’s.

And like Letterman, Kimmel carries the torch of bemoaning his network overlords, lamenting the dumb stuff ABC makes him promote. The imbedded advertising — Bud Light signs on the stage, Old Navy promotions at the start of the show, constant appearances by “Dancing With the Stars” contestants — isn’t all that easy to ignore, but Kimmel makes the best of it. He’s taken to calling himself “the three-headed dog the stars must pass on their way to no-dancing hell,” and after that show’s big finale, he told his audience, “I tell you something, I had a good morning. I woke up this morning, and for about three minutes, couldn’t remember who won “Dancing With the Stars” this year. It felt great, it really did.”

But Kimmel should wake up feeling great every morning. After all, who would’ve thought that this guy would be the big winner of the late night debacle of 2010? When you flip from Conan to Leno to Letterman, or stay up for Carson Daly or Fallon or Ferguson, even though you might appreciate Ferguson’s bizarro self-deprecating digressions or Fallon’s raw enthusiasm, Kimmel is the only host who will make you laugh out loud more than a few times per episode. He’s got the sharpest monologue, the most interesting digressions and skits, and the best interviewing skills. Now that the dust has cleared, “The Tonight Show” doesn’t look like a prize worth squabbling over, because, with or without the Cheesecake Factory backdrop, Jimmy Kimmel is the new Johnny Carson.

“OK, have a great weekend!” I replied.

Old people are a little checked out, it’s true. But we’re amiably comatose. This friendly state of autopilot is the only way we’ve found to manage our dashed dreams, our growing contempt for the culture, our creeping disappointments, our fibromyalgia. We grind our teeth at night and have vivid dreams about screwing cheerleaders. We resent the unflattering shape of matchstick jeans and daydream about gigantic claw-foot bathtubs we can’t afford. Our elbows hurt and our hair always looks bad and we secretly think all electropop sounds like Kraftwerk.

Recognizing the defeat in each other’s eyes, we smile warmly and say things like, “Of course! We’d love to,” and “Fantastic! I can’t wait!” because we recognize that everyone is flawed and just barely able to accept their own mediocrity or tolerate the frustrations of advancing age. The least we can do is be nice about it.

Youngish (under 35) skeptics will tell you that the men of “Men of a Certain Age” (premieres Dec. 6 on TNT) don’t talk like men at all, they talk like post-menopausal book club members. This show isn’t made for those youngish people, though. It’s made for the oldish (over 35) among us, who recognize the self-doubting, second-guessing, pot-bellied guys on their TV screen as a painfully palpable embodiments of the humiliations and tiny little ego victories of middle age.

The charms of “Men of a Certain Age,” like the charms of growing old, are lost on the common whippersnapper. While youngish people tend to reevaluate and reappraise their oldest friendships constantly, questioning whether this or that old friend is up to speed with just how advanced and mature and evolved the new “me” is, old people recognize that they haven’t actually advanced or matured or evolved much over the years. Thus do they humbly turn to each other, all rumpled feathers and matted fur, and sigh deeply. Less important than how far you’ve come, to old friends, is how far you haven’t come — and also, where you were before you got old. The fundamental importance of old friendships, plus that peculiar flavor of shared, comfy nastiness that bounces around between old friends — these make up the soft center of “Men of a Certain Age.” We grow old, we fail, we reproach the gods and grimace in pain, and then we meet to eat pie and complain at the same diner each week.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, don’t give up on your dream, Terry!’” Terry (Scott Bakula) tells lifelong friends Joe (Ray Romano) and Owen (Andre Braugher) of his acting career. “What would’ve been so bad if I had, huh? We’re at this place in our lives, we’ve come all this way, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You’ve got something — families, careers …”

“Families suck,” Joe replies. This harshness, which of course we don’t expect and don’t believe entirely (even from a divorced guy with an anxious teen son and a moody teen daughter), is what balances out the vulnerability of “Men of a Certain Age.” As hand-holdy as the talk can get, these guys are still just guys.

And if you think their confessional, supportive tone with each other comes out of left field, tell that to the wood fence contractor who volunteered to me last week that he’d been “journaling a lot” about his dad’s death, or the plumber who, apropos of nothing, discussed the struggles of raising teenagers. Middle-aged strangers tell each other emotional stuff out of the blue, and middle-aged friends tell each other everything. (The only exception may be certain varieties of hipster intellectual, who could literally chat about Sufjan Stevens’ latest album on their deathbeds instead of confessing the hopes, fears and regrets of their final hours.)

But the utter lack of hipness of “Men of a Certain Age,” the total lack of concern for what’s deemed cool and what isn’t, the complete disregard for matching the breakneck pace, the action, the swooning romances, the spitty outbursts, the shiny thrills of other TV shows, is exactly what makes this drama so lovable. Where other dramas would pack in more zaniness and intrigue in every available second of airtime, “Men of a Certain Age” rolls out the familiar, the ordinary, and locates poetic folds and sweet pockets of emotion therein: Joe’s employees are two pure-intentioned teenagers who are genuinely confused by his old-guy ways, and one slow-moving old Spanish-speaking guy, Carlos, who sleeps on the job but Joe still can’t stand to fire him (he lays him off then hires him back at the end of the first season). Owen works at a car dealership owned by his dad, a thoroughly mundane job that Owen dislikes most of the time, but also occasionally excels at. When he breaks away to work for another dealership at the start of the second season, his father is angry, but his respect and investment in his son finally start to emerge out of the fog of his constant hectoring. Even Terry, with his acting career, has encounters with the film industry that will strike anyone who’s actually worked production as hauntingly authentic, less focused as they are on stars and perks and glamour than on a steady flow of deeply humiliating interactions with the most unsavory sorts of egomaniacs imaginable. The big promises and untrustworthy allegiances Terry forms with one director (who refers to him, tellingly, as “T-bag”), only to have the rug pulled out from under him on a whim, echo some essential Hollywood experience that’s rarely portrayed with quite as much clarity and empathy.

But the big impact of this drama comes in its quietest moments: Joe and his son, Albert (Braedon Lemasters), are driving home from the movie theater after Albert has had an anxiety attack and insists that they leave. Suddenly, Albert wants to know if Joe is embarrassed by him. “Embarrassed? No, man. Never,” Joe says, his eyes starting to well up a little. “You’re my hero. I mean that. You’re doing great, man. I’m proud of you.” It’s simple dialogue, nothing fancy, nothing too clever or provocative, but that’s what gets you in the throat sometimes.

Like the oldish and crumpled and vaguely resentful among us, “Men of a Certain Age” casts aside sophistication and witty banter for the comfort of what’s real — even when what’s real is disappointments, missed connections and inadequate attempts to reassure. In accepting our frailty, we locate our souls.

You’re doing great, “Men of a Certain Age.” We’re proud of you.

Oh, and have a great weekend! 

The answer to that question, of course, is zero. Or as Lebowitz herself puts it when speaking to a roomful of young people, “There are too many books, the books are terrible, and it’s because you have been taught to have self-esteem.” This is Lebowitz’s distinct talent: making elitist contempt sound charming.

Toni Morrison, a friend of Lebowitz’s, puts it a little differently. “You seem to me almost always right,” she tells Lebowitz. “But never fair.”

“That’s why,” Lebowitz responds. “I’m always right because I’m never fair.”

Most of us secretly wish that we could be as right and as unfair as she is. But the world has changed a lot since “Metropolitan Life” was first published in 1974. Being unfair isn’t nearly as acceptable as it used to be. Today, people demand prose that is polite, respectful, nonjudgmental, and that never employs terms, phrases, suggestions or hints that could offend any segment of the population. People demand prose that isn’t prose, in other words.

Contrast that with almost any assertion made by Lebowitz in “Metropolitan Life” or “Social Studies”: Jews make good stand-up comedians. Sports are “dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.” Communism is unpleasant because “I do not work well with others and I do not wish to learn to do so.” Children “tend to be sticky” and “respond inadequately to sardonic humor and veiled threats.”

“Public Speaking” (premieres 10 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22, on HBO) is also packed with Lebowitz’s clever observations, the most gratifying of which may be her reflections on the ways our culture has changed since her books were first published. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists. That audience died in five minutes,” she says, referring to the AIDS epidemic. These days, Lebowitz says, “everything has to be broader, more blatant, more on the nose.” The problem? “Too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society.”

Lebowitz’s real strength, though, lies in explaining the different social classes to each other, either in her books or in Scorsese’s film. In “Social Studies” she includes a “Glossary of Words Used By Poorer People” including meatloaf (“A gloriously rough kind of pate”) and overworked (“an overwhelming feeling of fatigue, exhaustion, weariness. Similar to jet lag”), and outlines the trivializing effects of the international jet-setter (“What, after all, is London to a man who thinks of the whole Middle East as just another bad neighborhood and the coast of South Africa as simply the beach?”).

In “Public Speaking,” it’s clear that, although Lebowitz might mingle with elites, her underlying affections lie with the common man — as unsuitable as she might find his pants or his penchant for installing wall-to-wall carpeting in bathrooms. When the topic of how New York City has changed over the past two decades arises, Lebowitz says, “When a place is too expensive, only people with lots of money can live there. That’s the problem. You can like people with money, hate people with money. But you cannot say that an entire city with people with lots of money is fascinating. It isn’t.”

Even if her writers block continues for another three decades, Lebowitz herself remains undeniably fascinating. Scorsese’s documentary offers us a long overdue taste of her unique, queasily accurate perspectives on our culture — always right, never fair and never disappointing.