Even if some critics hailed early flicks like "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon," by the early '80s most seemed to agree with John Simon's acerbic assessment that Bogdanovich's "entire filmmaking prowess is not much more than a mnemonic feat." Whatever; in person, the 62-year-old is thoroughly charming, and lacks the pretense so often ascribed to him by caricaturists. Can a guy who schleps his own water around with him in a tote bag be all bad?

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Attendees of this memorial service for Chatouilleu (whose last name reportedly translates as "French tickler") gained entrance with a donation of five dollars and a gift for the dearly departed. Canned hams, skeleton dolls, bottles of booze and packages of condoms were but some of the presents proffered by clubgoers, most of whom had learned of the event by word-of-mouth. Often the mouth in question belonged to none other than the C.I.A.'s ingenious impresario Carl Crew, a former actor in his late 30s whose credits include the starring role in the low-budget 1993 flick "Jeffrey Dahmer: The Secret Life," wherein he quite literally makes meatloaf out of sedated victims.

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Nazi coffers had been drained dry by the campaign. Hitler had endured significant defections from his movement and threatened suicide. Some Nazis began to wonder if he had the right stuff to be their Führer.

It was at this point that Hitler, falling back on his belief in the occult, called the most renowned clairvoyant in the land to his headquarters at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin for a private session. The man Hitler met with that day is the subject of a recent biography (the first in the English language), "Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant," by Mel Gordon.

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There are other rooms, other assignations and situations. On a wine-colored couch, circa 1960, a topless brunet in mules and sheer dark knickers is involved in various spiderlike contortions. Who is she doing this for and why, one wonders? More puzzling are the chambers where a touch of the surreal is introduced: like the backside of a woman decked out in vintage garters and high heels, severed from its upper half by the folds of a dull gold curtain falling over a vermilion rug. Perhaps the head and arms of this inviting posterior are hidden by the hanging fabric. Or maybe the rest of her has vanished into some parallel Lynchean universe.

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In one particularly sinister, oft-used head shot, a defiant Brady looks like he could give suspected terrorist mastermind Mohammad Atta lessons in ghoulishness. On February 29, 2000, the Sun took up the whole front page with this picture and the bold legend "Brady: Let Me Leave This Cesspit in a Coffin." The story told of the murderer's campaign to starve himself at Ashworth Mental Hospital, near Liverpool, where he's a permanent resident. So far British justice has been unwilling to intervene, and his keepers have been force-feeding him.

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McGruder's 4-year-old strip does garner laughs, but not without an accompanying sting. The point man in the strip is the pint-size Black Panther-in-spirit Huey Freeman, who recently has been as busy as an anarchist at a WTO meeting. Among his many subversive acts, Freeman has called the FBI tip line to report Ronald Reagan as aiding and abetting terrorism, suggested that the terrorists may be making their bucks these days manufacturing flags and has pointed out the parallels between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden during a Thanksgiving meal prayer. About the only thing Huey hasn't done yet is strap on a Kalashnikov and set off for Kandahar. But now that John Walker's bearded mug is on the front page of dailies worldwide, anything's possible.

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But unlike the Big Kahunas of America's fourth estate, Larry doesn't take no for an answer. The Premier Potentate of Porn has filed suit against the DOD to allow Hustler's scribblers to go where the action is, just like Matthew Modine in "Full Metal Jacket."

Flynt's suit may have a snowball's chance in Saudi Arabia, but that doesn't bother him. After all, he's been doing battle for so long over First Amendment issues that conservatives cringe when they hear his name. Recently, the patriotic Sultan of Skin took a break from assailing the government and overseeing his Beverly Hills-headquartered empire of erotica to discuss his suit, the war on terrorism, civil liberties and his current bête noire, Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Why are you suing the federal government, and what do you hope to achieve by it?

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Sometimes I think he should call his column "Diary of a Reluctant Pornographer," because the only thing "mad" -- in the crazy sense of the word -- about Carlos is that he seems so freakin' blasé about watching an amazing brunette in fishnet stockings pee in front of him, or having some peroxide trollop from the Czech Republic maneuver a shiny red dildo in and out of her vagina with her bare feet. I mean, Carlos, don't you know you have it made, man?

"Yeah, yeah," Carlos says, playing it off. "All my guy friends are like, 'Wow you get to shoot that all the time?' But there's a lot of shit that goes along with it. Straight up, I never fuck any of my models. If I was into fucking them, I wouldn't have a book deal at 28. I'd be a hack photographer. OK, the girls are naked, but how're you gonna shoot 15 rolls of film when you're trying to score? There are other things on my mind -- like paying rent. I take my craft very seriously. I don't want it to be Jerry Springer."

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The author of the image, and its gender-bending model, was the French surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier, a suicide at age 76 in the Year of Our Lord 1976. Molinier, a sorcerer of self-portraiture who longed to be a lesbian and who created hundreds of pictures wherein he explored with great sensuality his own transvestism, titled this particular photo "Le Chaman" ("The Shaman"). There's also a variation of this picture in which the same shaman stands before us, but this time with a full erection as well as large breasts. They're a peculiar pair of prints amid the perverse panoply of Molinier's work -- an oeuvre rife with fetish shots of Molinier by himself, in heels and stockings, fucking himself with a dildo or sucking his own cock. His was a sexuality turned on itself, yet still primarily heterosexual. The shaman was the projection of what he wished himself to be.

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MacGowan's gargantuan exploits in the realms of substance abuse have been well documented by admirers and detractors alike. Apparently, he was fired from the Pogues, the legendary, London-based Anglo-Irish rock group he co-founded in the early '80s, after his band mates decided in 1991 that they could no longer abide his missing tour dates because he was incapacitated by drink. In doing so, the Pogues signed their own death warrant. MacGowan, the apotheosis of the inebriated Celtic rebel, was the one the crowds wanted.

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Shooting up, playing with guns and sex: This is what the teens in Clark's low-life American almanacs were shown doing -- all of it long before the likes of Nan Goldin and Gus Van Sant exploited such grimy gutter pearls for art's sake. But Clark was not off to the side with a camera. He was living the life. After "Tulsa," the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a grant toward his next project, the even more explicit "Teenage Lust," but that had to wait while Clark did a stretch in Oklahoma's McAlester Penitentiary for a 1976 parole violation.

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"The Anniversary Party," which Leigh wrote, produced and directed with Scottish man-child Alan Cumming, flows before us with great economy of movement -- as if the two have performed this dance countless times before. They play a successful Hollywood husband and wife on the occasion of their sixth wedding anniversary. The party's on, and their pals are all invited. But Sally (Leigh) and Joe (Cumming) have just reunited after a painful separation, and their soiree's pregnant with a bellyful of disaster.

The film, cast with Leigh and Cumming's friends and shot in a glass house (metaphor alert) in the Hollywood Hills, is trenchant, sexy and tragic all at the same time -- a movie for grown-ups. Recently, Leigh discussed "The Anniversary Party" over a glass of iced tea.

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"The Holy Grail" was Monty Python's first narrative feature film, 1971's "And Now for Something Completely Different" being essentially a rehash of skits from the sextet's British TV show. And after more than a quarter-century, "The Holy Grail" is still the best spoof of medieval times since Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court."

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Indeed, in one of the Prague maestro's favorite hand-tinted, sepia prints, titled "The Burden," Saudek stands nearly naked with his back to the camera while his former wife, Maria, sits atop his shoulders -- her creamy, gargantuan derrière apparently having swallowed Saudek from the neck up. Looking at that woman's divine posterior, bathed as it is in blue, one fantasizes about drowning in the folds of her massive sex.

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Still, the star of "The Ice Storm," "Sleepy Hollow" and numerous indie hits like "Buffalo '66" and "The Opposite of Sex" has plenty on her platter, even without a gig as Frodo's love muffin. With several movies in production, including the film adaptation of Elizabeth Wurtzel's bestselling memoir, "Prozac Nation," it's easy to forget that Ricci just hit 21. She may have the C.V. of a seasoned Hollywood actor and her own production company, Blaspheme Films, to boot. But she doesn't appear to have aged much since Disney's '97 remake of "That Darn Cat."

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The elder sisters of these apparitions don't fare much better. Their creator, best known to art mavens and ordinary Angelenos by her childlike signature (becca), posts them in some of the rougher parts of East L.A. and downtown, as well as the seediest bits of Hollywood and the glitziest stretches of the Sunset Strip. A seamstress in pearls works her sewing machine in the infamous Belmont Tunnel graffiti pit, a spray-paint-covered area known to every gangbanger in the city. A Donna Reed mother figure guards a boarded-up doorway with a bowl full of greenery. A sultry lady of the evening sits amid the graffiti tags, her green dress hiked to reveal scarred shins.

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Snoop Dogg is that cat to the nth degree. The braided and goateed favorite son of Long Beach, Calif., popularly known as "tha L-B-C," has dominated the rap music dojo from his days bangin' with Dr. Dre on the 1992 bomb "The Chronic" to his own chart toppers like "Doggystyle" and "No Limit Top Dogg" and his latest ghetto classic, "Tha Last Meal." He was birthed on Oct. 20, 1971, under the dog star of G-dom. And long before he was helping to define, along with Dre, Ice Cube and others, that style popularly known as "West Coast" or "gangsta" rap, little Calvin Broadus was nicknamed "Snoop" by his parents, who thought he looked like Charlie Brown's hipper-than-thou beagle.

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After meeting Neve Campbell, I can vouch for the fact that she's nothing like the conniving, patchouli-oiled high-school rebel she plays in John McNaughton's swamp-noir blockbuster. On the contrary, Campbell seems quite the good-girl Canadian import -- the freshly scrubbed ingenue who's an idol to the Gen Y crowd for her six-year stint as orphan Julia Salinger on the soft-soap Fox series "Party of Five." Still, there's a razor blade or two beneath those auburn eyes. Not only did she have edge enough to kick some psycho ass in the "Scream" trilogy, but she can convince me on-screen that she reads Céline and smokes dope, all with the dearly departed Mark Sandman of Morphine crooning in the background.

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Boorman's playful dip into the tropical fleshpots is greatly assisted by a cast led by Pierce Brosnan as MI6 operative Andy Osnard, a scheming, avaricious scalawag hornier than Brosnan's Bond and lacking 007's redemptive patriotism. British intelligence assigns Osnard to the Panamanian backwater as punishment for his sins. Once there, he enlists expatriate ex-con Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a tailor to Panama's political elite, in an effort to destabilize the country and enrich themselves in the process. Along the way, Brosnan's whiskey-swilling Osnard attempts to screw every female in the land, including Harry's wife, Louisa, played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

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German journalists were outraged by the film when it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year. They decried Ed Harris' cold, brutal portrayal of Maj. König, a German sniper on the hunt for his famed Russian counterpart, Vassili Zaitsev, played by Jude Law. Even some non-German reviewers boarded the bandwagon, criticizing the use of British actors such as Law, Joseph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz to depict Russian soldiers with British accents.

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