Innholdsfortegnelse for Hollywood 2021 i Vanity Fair

From Costa Rica, the renowned conceptual artists Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari directed 10 photo shoots across four continents, using techniques that allowed us to minimize on-set personnel and maximize COVID-19 protocols. It was a feat born of necessity but suffused with artistic purpose—to demonstrate not just that the show must go on but that there’s joy in its continuance, even in the most surreal and challenging of times. I attended one shoot, which is to say I opened my laptop and logged into two separate production sites: one with a view of the set where Sacha Baron Cohen arrived ready to don his cover-worthy tuxedo; one with a view of the virtual monitor where we captured him dancing with an umbrella (later re-created as a walking stick). It turns…

In a year when philanthropy took on increased importance, Kelly Sawyer Patricof and Norah Weinstein, co-CEOs of the Los Angeles–based nonprofit Baby2Baby, which distributes such essentials as school supplies and diapers to those in need, have doubled their donations. “In 2020, we had a nine-year history with a hundred million items,” says Weinstein. “Fifty million of those were given out since COVID.” The charity is beloved among Hollywood mothers—ambassadors and honorees include Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Adams, Chrissy Teigen, and Jessica Alba—and was the only American nonprofit that Harry and Meghan volunteered with to celebrate their son’s first birthday. The founders are aiming higher. “With the fire, flood, and pandemic relief efforts, we have huge goals,” stresses Patricof. “What about the next billion items?” —B.H. Righteous Muse David Duchovny’s fourth novel,…

THE TV WAS always on in my house. It was like the fireplace. Somehow the glow from the corner of the room would always give comfort even if what was projected out of it was not entirely good news. Frequently the question would be: Why is the television not on? or accusingly, Put on the TV! I suppose in one aspect it was meditative and beneficially numbing after the outside racist world my family and I contended with. Tony Curtis was someone I met on television as a trapeze artist, as Harry Houdini, as a musician, and as a heartthrob. I’m not sure why I was drawn to him, but for some reason through all the gray surroundings of my London existence I took to him, and every time there…

AMANDA SEYFRIED DIDN’T feel the full weight of the word ingenue until Hollywood made clear she wasn’t one anymore. “I hope that role just crumbles,” she says. “The fact that we have to be discovered as young women to fit into a patriarchal society… I was very aware of it all when I had my daughter, because after that, I played a mother every single time until Mank.” The actor has been quarantining in the Catskills with her husband, actor Thomas Sadoski, and is FaceTiming from her car as she waits to pick up her four-year-old from preschool. In September, Seyfried gave birth to her second child, a son. She’s now doing her best to raise children, feed 23 livestock, and promote her moviestealing turn in David Fincher’s Mank, all…

A WOMAN LIES in bed, barely visible in the smudgy darkness. A clicking sound awakens her. “What are you doing? It’s still dark in here,” she mumbles, annoyed. Her roommate becomes dimly visible, hovering over her with her camera. “No, it’s not!” she says. “This light is fantastic!” The first time I watched Claudia Weill’s 1978 feature film Girlfriends a decade or so ago, I felt an immediate spark of connection with its portrait of the artist as an anxious young woman. Susan, its hero, is a radiant, snaggletoothed young photographer played by Melanie Mayron. Her best friend, Anne (Anita Skinner), longs to be a writer. Each woman wants to be an artist; each is convinced the other’s life is more real. Doused in mundane epiphanies—a godmother to Girls, Lady…

IN THE WHOLE FOODS on Montana Avenue, at the top of the lockdown and right after George Floyd’s murder, a Santa Monica lady and I reached for the same avocado at the same time. When I say Santa Monica lady, I mean a white lady. Her child was beautiful, like all the children in the Whole Foods. They were masked. Masked, beautiful, healthy, reverse bandits, as there was nothing they would ever steal. They only wanted to give back. I know this because I read their T-shirts. These were people to whom things mattered. I was also masked. A masked Black person. Sidenote: My mother, 84, lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and goes daily to Marche Madison, which is her nearest grocery store. There are very few…

SPIKE LEE CAN ALWAYS BE COUNTED ON TO BE SUCCINCT. “It was a fucked-up year, 2020,” he says. “Just a fucked-up year in bold letters with exclamation points: FUCKED UP!!!” Our last trip around the sun was a painful one, as political ills both long-standing and recent were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. A now former president and his cronies looted what they could while leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans to die lonely, avoidable deaths. Dangerous conspiracy theories consumed the minds of thousands, if not millions, yanking attention away from very real problems, like police officers carrying out racist violence and domestic terrorism. It was a year of myriad stresses, of horror and loss, of confusion and despair. It wasn’t enough to simply turn to movies and TV for…

A QUARANTINED STAR IS BORN… THE WOMAN LIVED in New York City, had a career in fashion, and was not the sort you’d expect to be alone on a Saturday night. She considered weeknights superior for nightlife, as seasoned New Yorkers often do. Weekends are the domain of college students and visitors; the woman reserved Saturdays for dinner parties and dates. But on March 21, 2020, New York was in COVID-19’s thrall. The governor had announced a statewide stay-at-home order, so the woman stayed in. To entertain herself, she posted a request on Instagram: “celeb stories (first or second hand) you are willing to share.” At the time her account, @deuxmoi, had 45,000 followers—holdovers from a short-lived style blog that the woman had launched, with a friend, six years prior.…

VANITAS VANITATUM After two years trailblazing such runways as Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs, 22-year-old actor, writer, and producer Hunter Schafer landed a starring role on HBO’s Euphoria. Playing 17-year-old trans teen Jules Vaughn, Schafer—who, in 2016, was a plaintiff in the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against North Carolina House Bill 2, which required people to use the restroom associated with the sex they were assigned at birth—brought her own experience to the groundbreaking role. This year Schafer cowrote and coproduced a special episode for Euphoria, emerging as a crucial voice in a new era of storytelling. THE OLDEST OF four siblings, she was raised in North Carolina by her mother and pastor father, and transitioned in high school. SHE SAYS SHE “fell into acting. It was not in…

AUGUSTINUS BADER THE FACE OIL Whenever a makeup artist prepares to put face oil on me, I kindly ask that they not, as every oil makes me break out. Wait—I’m receiving word from my psyche that such confrontation would make me flush the color of liquefied bricks, so instead I say, “Great! Face oil!” and quietly panic. My fellow descendents of potato-and-teacup tribes know the frustration of the skin’s contradictions, but this face oil sinks in like I’m an olive-toned, allergy-less mogul. Augustinus Bader is a German brand that fancy people are obsessed with, thanks to its patented TFC8 technology (a blend of amino acids and vitamins said to support the skin’s natural repair mechanism, obviously). The oils include babassu, hazelnut, karanja, and pomegranate, and just like that, there go…

AFTER A YEAR in which reality grotesquely surpassed our fictions and large portions of the populace thought fiction was reality, it’s not surprising that for many of us, documentary filmmaking seemed more compelling, more urgent, more necessary than the tales concocted in moviemakers’ imaginations. Even the narrative films often mentioned as Oscar contenders blur the line between documentary and fiction: Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland places its star, Frances McDormand, amid the real-life nomads roaming an economically strafed American West. Aaron Sorkin mixes documentary footage of the real 1968 clashes between police and anti-war demonstrators with staged re-creations in The Trial of the Chicago 7, and anyone watching was bound to feel the echoes of the millions of protesters who took to the streets in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. What…

IT’S ENTIRELY LIKELY that December 3, 2020, will go down as the day moviegoing suffered a fatal ice pick from the cold, calculating hand of the streaming revolution. That was the day WarnerMedia, the entertainment division of AT&T and corporate inheritor of Warner Bros.—century-old studio home of Kubrick and Eastwood; Bugs Bunny and Harry Potter; Casablanca and Gone With the Wind—announced it would release its entire 2021 slate straight to the American living room via limited runs on its HBO Max service. (And in whatever theaters would have them too.) From 40,000 feet, it was a sensible, even perfunctory, move. Theaters have been largely shut down by COVID for a year and could be on ice for another. WarnerMedia has a nine-month-old streaming service fighting a near-impossible battle against Netflix…

ZACK SNYDER, THE DIRECTOR OF JUSTICE LEAGUE, HAS NEVER SEEN JUSTICE LEAGUE. His name is in the credits as the filmmaker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to. In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just… it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “Idon’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and…

EVEN BEFORE THE PANDEMIC, HOLLYWOOD WAS ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING AMERICAN INDUSTRIES WHERE BUSINESS IS OFTEN DONE OVER THE PHONE. It’s very 20th century to close multimillion-dollar deals over the phone rather than via text or email or, hell, at Burning Man, but tradition is hard to break. In Los Angeles, if you “give good phone,” as the saying goes, you can get away with a lot. And the so-called Con Queen of Hollywood, who allegedly catfished hundreds of people in town via the phone for at least seven years, was deeply gifted at imitating executives’ patter and bravado. Who is that, you ask? The Hollywood Con Queen, as the trades called her, was known for allegedly rolling calls all day in the guise of prominent women in the…