Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Vanity Fair

ERICA CERULO AND Claire Mazur have made a career of being cool-spotters and curators, first with their beloved bygone retail shop Of a Kind, then their “A Thing or Two” newsletter and companion podcast. Their latest venture is 831 Stories, which Cerulo describes as “an entertainment company with books at the foundation.” Think of film distributor A24, with a sensibility that extends beyond movies and into co-branded scented candles and posters, but for romance novels. A nod to late-’90s pager code for “I love you,” with its eight letters, three words, and one meaning, 831 Stories will publish six books by different authors in its first year. First, Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff, in which a politico forms a connection with her childhood boy band crush, and then A.C. Robinson’s…

SINCE JAMES BALDWIN’S death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion’s final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life. The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn’t deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin’s prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer’s centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso. My entry point into…

“AH, SHIT,” SAYS STEVE BALLMER. “We wound up having to go with the metal here, didn’t we?” The multi-billionaire is inspecting every crevice of Intuit Dome, the future home of his beloved Los Angeles Clippers and, in his estimation, a “basketball mecca.” Donning a hard hat and safety vest, Ballmer takes me on a tour he’s given to the likes of Disney boss Bob Iger, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, and hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. “When we’re walking through the building together,” Ballmer says of the iconic rapper, “nobody notices me.” Perhaps, but when I walk through the sprawling project with Ballmer, none of his desires goes unnoticed. Like with Ballmer’s frustration over a metal divider; lead designer Bill Hanway reassures him there will be a transparent glass one, just as requested, when…

PEOPLE ARE SURPRISED WHEN I TELL THEM PETER FALK WAS MY ROOMMATE IN NEW YORK 65 YEARS AGO. They are even more surprised when I say that Falk was not the only one in our circle of friends to attain stardom; so did George Segal, Roy Scheider, and Wayne Rogers. What still surprises me, though, is that those four weren’t necessarily the ones I assumed might become Hollywood giants. Looking back, I realize what a watershed moment in the American theater I was able to witness, surrounded by hugely talented, wildly ambitious, and often tragically flawed individuals. Watching their old films today, I can clearly remember them in their 20s and early 30s, when they were just ordinary people, and we were all young nobodies. In the fall of 1959,…

Hillary BUSIS “THE NATURAL,” P. 120 Senior Hollywood editor Busis, who’s been with VF for eight years, oversees VF.com’s film and TV coverage, cohosts the Still Watching podcast, and wishes she could still watch Freeform’s The Bold Type—one reason she was excited to speak with Meghann Fahy, “whose star has only risen since,” she says. Tom CRAIG “JENNA ORTEGA’S YEAR OF WONDER,” P. 72 “For Jenna Ortega, we wanted to create a space that was drawn from cinema…a playground in which Jenna could perform. And she did not let us down,” says Craig, who hopes his photography reflects his passion for working with interesting people in inspiring situations. Nathan KLEIN “JENNA ORTEGA’S YEAR OF WONDER,” P. 72 “As a stylist and creative director inspired by form, shape, color, and textures,…

TWENTY YEARS AGO Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in an HBO documentary about the dangers of a nuclear plant on the Hudson River. Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister Rory Kennedy, pits the crusading Kennedys, pictured flying in a helicopter over the nuclear facility, against Entergy, the power company. The film argued that the surrounding environment would be made uninhabitable if the plant came under terrorist attack. This was necessarily a high-stakes confrontation. In anticipation, Rory warned her production team they had a potential liability: Her brother, though a prominent and successful environmental lawyer known for suing polluters, could be fast and loose with the facts. “He can say some crazy shit,” she told them, according to a person involved in the film. Kennedy’s interviews had to be…

THERE’S CONFIDENCE, AND then there’s confidence—the kind that helps a Silicon Valley wine mom serenely weather her husband’s flagrant infidelity. Or a lowly fashion assistant charge $500 worth of cocaine to her corporate card. Or a totally green 18-year-old nab a gig as a Broadway understudy after one of her very first auditions. In real life, Meghann Fahy has done just one of these things. (Guess which!) But spend time with her and you’ll see she’s as self-assured as her characters. “Because I never really planned a career in this space, I never really had any idea of what I was hoping it would look like,” she says on a video call from London, where she’s taking a breather with her boyfriend and former White Lotus costar, Leo Woodall. “I…

In another universe, Geraldine Viswanathan got her big break on the Disney Channel. “I think about it all the time,” she says. “I came to LA when I was 18 and had a dodgy manager who was operating out of a Vietnamese restaurant. I got very close to a Disney Channel movie, and it really broke my heart when I couldn’t do it because I didn’t have a visa.” Your loss, Teen Beach Movie 2. Instead, the 29-year-old Australian actor broke out as John Cena’s scene-stealing daughter in 2018’s Blockers. Since then, she’s drawn raves in both mainstream comedies and offbeat indies. She investigated Hugh Jackman’s corrupt superintendent in Bad Education, romanced Margaret Qualley in Drive-Away Dolls, and verbally sparred with Steve Buscemi’s God on Miracle Workers. As we chat…

NOT TOO LONG ago, a non-Jewish lifelong New Yorker who grew up on the Upper East Side was asked by a friend to host a screening of the documentary film Israelism. She immediately said no. It wasn’t that she necessarily disagreed with the message of the film—which bills itself as the story of “young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.” Rather, this would-be screening host feared “being socially exiled by many of her Jewish friends” and “possible career consequences. I want to be brave,” she told me. “I’m disappointed in myself.” As the summer season kicked into gear and much of the Upper East Side migrated to Long Island’s East End, no one wanted to…

ON THE EVE of Wednesday’s cultural domination, “Tim” invited Jenna Ortega to his house for a meeting. I love when this happens in Hollywood conversations: casually, not even pretentiously, legends referred to by first names only, as Ortega does over a clandestine morning coffee. Here is Wednesday on a Sunday at Velvet, a moody cocktail bar at the Corinthia hotel in London. Tim, in this case, is Tim Burton, the mad goth genius behind Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wednesday’s director and executive producer. Even before the biting teen take on The Addams Family exploded into Emmy nominations and TikTok choreo and tween girls’ birthday party themes, the hallowed filmmaker wanted to talk to Ortega, his show’s then 20-year-old star, about a second season. She dutifully compiled…

IN THE DAYS after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, former president Barack Obama set aside time to do what Biden used to do for him as vice president: play devil’s advocate. Over the phone, Obama took on the tough-love advisory role, presenting different scenarios to Biden. Something in the conversation reportedly unsettled the current president, who has resisted calls to exit the race. The attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump only heightened the incredibly tense political environment, and that question. Obama sought to be a sounding board for Biden, not a pundit. At a private White House lunch last summer, he met with Biden to air his views, dropping his signature calm; even then, Obama believed in the very real possibility that Trump could win. But it is…