And there at the top of the stairs is Leonardo DiCaprio, waiting to give me a great big kiss while Michael and Vanessa and Sacheen and the orchestra all applaud and beam their approval and --

Oh, uh, excuse me. Apparently about three and a quarter hours into last night's Academy Awards I dozed off and mixed up the grand finale of "Titanic" with what was really on TV at that point: "Oscar's Family Album," another procession of smiling, familiar faces from the past, featuring everyone from Anne Bancroft to Teresa Wright. I wasn't imagining Vanessa Redgrave, but instead of blathering about the Palestinians this time she just beamed benignly at her fellow "R," Luise Rainer.

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And there at the top of the stairs is Leonardo DiCaprio, waiting to give me a great big kiss while Michael and Vanessa and Sacheen and the orchestra all applaud and beam their approval and --

Oh, uh, excuse me. Apparently about three and a quarter hours into last night's Academy Awards I dozed off and mixed up the grand finale of "Titanic" with what was really on TV at that point: "Oscar's Family Album," another procession of smiling, familiar faces from the past, featuring everyone from Anne Bancroft to Teresa Wright. I wasn't imagining Vanessa Redgrave, but instead of blathering about the Palestinians this time she just beamed benignly at her fellow "R," Luise Rainer.

Continue Reading...

And there at the top of the stairs is Leonardo DiCaprio, waiting to give me a great big kiss while Michael and Vanessa and Sacheen and the orchestra all applaud and beam their approval and --

Oh, uh, excuse me. Apparently about three and a quarter hours into last night's Academy Awards I dozed off and mixed up the grand finale of "Titanic" with what was really on TV at that point: "Oscar's Family Album," another procession of smiling, familiar faces from the past, featuring everyone from Anne Bancroft to Teresa Wright. I wasn't imagining Vanessa Redgrave, but instead of blathering about the Palestinians this time she just beamed benignly at her fellow "R," Luise Rainer.

Continue Reading...

And there at the top of the stairs is Leonardo DiCaprio, waiting to give me a great big kiss while Michael and Vanessa and Sacheen and the orchestra all applaud and beam their approval and --

Oh, uh, excuse me. Apparently about three and a quarter hours into last night's Academy Awards I dozed off and mixed up the grand finale of "Titanic" with what was really on TV at that point: "Oscar's Family Album," another procession of smiling, familiar faces from the past, featuring everyone from Anne Bancroft to Teresa Wright. I wasn't imagining Vanessa Redgrave, but instead of blathering about the Palestinians this time she just beamed benignly at her fellow "R," Luise Rainer.

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1. Snarling Micromanagers -- the legendary Pat Kingsley of PMK is queen of the pack here -- who now orchestrate pretty much every aspect of magazine cover stories, and who have managed to make "access" one of the more hideous journalism buzzwords of the '90s.

2. Grumpy Old Machers, like press agentry veterans Lee Solters and Warren Cowan, whose favorite phrases (at least when I've talked to them) are "No!" and "I'm going to call your boss!"

3. Clueless Young Things, easily identified by their favorite phrase, the lilting "... and where can I get a copy of your magazine?"

Then there's Michael Levine. I've never been able to categorize Michael Levine, even though in the '80s he was for a while needled monthly in the old Spy magazine as the quintessential Hollywood flack. In the past couple of years, however, he's managed to make his monthly Los Angeles Media Roundtable dinners a prized invitation among journalists, who are normally dismissive of invitations from press agents. And it's not just the free food either, although of course with the press you should never underestimate the importance of that.

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But after spending some time in Movielineland, I've come to rather admire the magazine for the way it rudely deconstructs the pretenses of entertainment journalism. Joe Queenan, who a couple of years ago collected many of his Movieline pieces into the aptly named book, "If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble," describes the problem with the typical "sucking off" celebrity profile:

"Life isn't like that," he tells me, using as a generic example "the story that ends with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger driving off to spend time with the kids, when they're probably really on their way to shoot pool or something." Journalists, Queenan adds, tend to be quite attached to these neat, omniscient conventions.

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They especially want original, classic Spanish-style architecture from the '20s and '30s. Juliette Lewis replaced the French Normandy roof on her Hollywood house with red tile because it was more in keeping with the building's Spanish architecture. Kevin Costner bought a 9,000-square-foot Spanish hacienda on the Westside last year for around $3 million. Penny Negron, a top Fred Sands realtor on the Westside, says a day doesn't go by without a call from someone looking for a vintage Spanish house.

Major players want l-o-n-g gated private driveways that take half a city block to reach the front door and that say to strangers, "Keep Out!" A cable TV show called "Driveways of the Rich and Famous" once spotlighted Barbra Streisand's interesting gated driveway, which is bordered by a fence topped with shards of broken Michelob bottles.

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How could this be? I'd always been perfectly friendly and charming to him!

OK, well, there was that time I'd been inspired to write an entire magazine article about masculine obliviousness, called "What Girls Don't Tell Men," after hearing this man rudely complain in front of his wife that the delights of young female flesh were forever lost to him because he was no longer single.

"The hard thing about being married," he'd said in his signature whine, "is that when I walk down the Venice boardwalk these days the 18-year-old Twinkies look right through me."

To which I'd blurted out, "actually, those 18-year-old Twinkies don't look through you because you're married; they look through you because you're 42 years old."

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I liked its lead, though: "Luckless celebrity biographer Frank Sanello can't get a break ..." And I'll tell you, I've always liked Frank. When he sees me searching the locker coin return slots for forgotten quarters at the Academy library of motion picture history, he rarely says a word. He's a good kick-boxer and has offered to teach me handy shortcuts to killing someone with just one kick. In his spare time he teaches tae kwon do to AIDS patients fearful of gay-bashers. He constantly buys presents for neighborhood children and tries to find homes for abandoned pets (he has three dogs and three cats).

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I was holding forth about this last week at lunch with Hollywood man-about-town Ben Stein, who's also a freelance writer -- as well as an actor, lawyer, economist and host of the new Comedy Central game show "Win Ben Stein's Money." I used to try out for shows like this in the futile hope of making some easy, extra cash. No longer!

"There must be a word for this phenomenon," I mused grandly, "where you actually make more money by turning down work."

"There is," Ben said. "The word is 'temporary.'"

OK, OK, I get the point. But still, I don't see why people have to knee-jerk into poor-pitiful-you mode as soon as the subject of my occupation comes up.

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OK, thanks for the slap -- I needed that. The departure of the infamously wishy-washy SC3, as he's known in Times inter-office e-mail, came a month after take-no-prisoners Times Mirror CEO Mark Willes assumed even more control of Hollywood's hometown paper of record by also becoming publisher. Richard Schlosberg III, who had been publisher, resigned Sept. 12 after months of butting heads with Willes, the hardheaded former cereal company executive who arrived at Times Mirror just over two years ago.

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But what's the real story behind the stereotype? Alec Mapa was a working character actor who at one point had the starring role in "M. Butterfly" on Broadway. He hit a streak of truly bad luck, spent six months in the purgatory of the California Pizza Kitchen in Encino, Calif., and only began crawling his way back up from the bottom when he was so down and out that he no longer cared. He sometimes introduced himself to customers with a cheery, "Hi, I'm Alec ... and I'll be touching your food."

Unsurprisingly, he was often close to becoming the waiter-who's-really-unemployed. "The thing is," he told me, "I was a fun waiter. But I was really sloppy. I was always on the verge of being fired. I had the dreaded managerial conference: 'Alec, you're a little slow on the cash register ...'"

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"Yes, it was accurate," Busch told me over breakfast a couple of weeks ago, when she was in the middle of weighing half-a-dozen job offers. "But there was no call placed to him. I felt it was really wrong of the paper. After the Marcus thing, I started interviewing. I felt like the paper's level of integrity was reflecting on my work."

Apparently what had happened was this: Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart, who has sources at the top of the Hollywood power structure from his two decades at Paramount and MGM, knew Marcus was about to be fired, but had promised not to let on. So he told the reporter on the story -- not Busch, as it happens -- to refrain from calling Marcus. This is just the sort of thing that makes Peter Bart (who did not return my call for comment) one of the most hated men in Hollywood.

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"No," I said.

"Well, you're going to." I was pondering the Zen koan quality of this exchange when I looked up to see a tanned and ascotted Tony Curtis magisterially approaching our table. As he cocked an eyebrow in my direction, I could practically see the thought bubble forming over his head: "Who is this? Nobody!" Which of course only added to the experience.

Match me, Sidney -- I was having a Tony Curtis moment! I'd hoped for a Tony Curtis moment ever since reading something Bruce Jay Friedman wrote years ago about the fabulousness of life in Hollywood -- that Tony Curtis was the kind of person who, when he tells a story about a man dropping a veal chop on the floor, actually drops a veal chop on the floor. Oh, to be in the vicinity when that chop hits the ground!

Restaurants like Spago serve a kind of "Twilight Zone" function in Hollywood. They are, besides safe zones for celebrities, portals for commoners to a different dimension -- that of the rich and famous, or at least of the hip and happening. When this occurs often enough a restaurant becomes that ineffable thing known as a Hollywood hangout.

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"Sometimes when I look at him," she explained, "not when he's smiling, but just when he's going like this" (here Perri affected a blank, zombielike expression), "I think, Does he have a wife? And children?"

Ah, I thought. The birth of a fan. The nascent discovery that a celebrity can be a blank screen for reels of projected fantasies. Perri was so impressed when I told her I'd actually interviewed Brendan Fraser that her jaw dropped and stayed that way for several moments. "What did you think," she finally gasped, "when you interviewed him?"

Well ... "I thought he was very nice," I said, which was true. But what I'd actually spent more time thinking was, "Oh, God, another one. Another shy, quiet, sweet young actor. And now I'm going to have to spend tons of time tracking down people he knows to say interesting things about him, because he doesn't have much to say for himself."

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Those cost-cutting measures quickly raised Times Mirror stock -- then at a low $24 a share -- by 50 percent. (The price is now around $54, a figure not reached since before the 1987 stock market tumble.) Nevertheless, July 21, 1995, remains the big Black Friday on Spring Street. Sept. 12, 1997, was something of a Black Friday II, but so far for only one person: publisher Richard Schlosberg III, who will retire early in October.

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Parade, of course, is that venerable national supplement for papers too provincial or cash-strapped to have their own Sunday magazines. As a child I used to pore over Walter Scott's Personality Parade during the short time my mother subscribed to the Orange County, Calif., Register; she was selling Oriental rugs out of the garage and needed to check that her ad appeared each week. But for years this was just a pleasant (if rather stupefying) memory, along with the Register's wonderfully downmarket comics featuring the Jackson Twins and Dondi.

Oddly, Times readers now have two Sunday supplements, at least for a while. Although Spring Streetologists expected Parade to be the death knell of the failing Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Times editors actually have put renewed effort behind it, and last Sunday the new, ad-fat, redesigned version -- now hokily subtitled "The Best of Socal" -- made its debut. Well, with the falling cost of newsprint and a booming economy, why not?

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I hesitate to contradict Batman, but all those noises coming from George Clooney et al. about how the paparazzi drove Diana to her death strike me as ridiculous. The excessive speed of the car, the unseatbelted passengers and the concrete posts seem the deciding factors here. The pursuing photographers and drunk chauffeur probably contributed to the accident, of course -- but then I'd say so did the example set by stars like Clooney in his Batmobile.

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Yes, the long-awaited (well, I've been waiting) "G.I. Jane," which like almost every Demi Moore vehicle is less a movie than a signal for another media feeding frenzy, finally opens today. Some have already jumped the gun for the next round of Demiotics. Just three days ago Demi made an appearance in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page: "In a world where what we are offered for entertainment includes the actress Demi Moore gyrating on a bar counter with Madonna's gay brother ..." Perhaps this only meant that the Journal is now keeping close tabs on National Enquirer covers. I saw it as a Sign.

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Which isn't to say that they don't have talent -- just that the great piles of money forked over for constantly catering to the mass market tends to ... well, not exactly encourage it. And the market is mass, despite the standard "I never watch TV" comment TV writers hear all the time at cocktail parties. "Oh, I know, no one does," a sitcom writer I know once deadpanned after being informed of this for the umpteenth time. "I don't know why they pay us."

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