Innholdsfortegnelse for Hollywood 2023 i Vanity Fair

The spectacular actors on the cover of this magazine are only in their 20s and 30s, but it feels inadequate to call them rising stars: They’ve already staked out their rightful places in the firmament. None of them, however, had yet appeared on our annual Hollywood cover. That obviously had to change, as quickly as possible. We are pleased to present, under the banner of the Hollywood Issue 2023, a new power generation—12 leading lights of stage and screen who we know will impress, enrapture, and entertain us for decades to come. Our dynamic dozen have turned in terrific performances over the past few years, running the gamut from prestige television to indie films to box office smashes, and they’re racking up award nominations and industry honors—all that goes without…

Steven Spielberg has quite the track record for launching some of Hollywood’s greats: Drew Barrymore, Christian Bale, Gwyneth Paltrow, last year’s Oscar-winning Ariana DeBose. His latest find, however, was a bit more personal; the director needed someone to play his fictionalized teenage self, Sammy, in his semi-autobiographical movie, The Fabelmans. Enter 20-year-old GABRIEL LABELLE. Amid Oscar buzz for the film and LaBelle’s performance, the newcomer reflects on all kinds of screen life. LABELLE CAUGHT the acting bug during a summer camp production of Footloose at home in West Vancouver, British Columbia. “I’m eight and I’m hanging out with 13-year-old girls who are playing with my giant curly hair. How do I keep doing more of this?” HE AUDITIONED for the part over Zoom from his parents’ dining room. “I had…

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WHEREVER THERE ARE thrones, there are games. In the early 2010s, the leaders of Hollywood’s most powerful talent agency, CAA, began telling senior agents that the kingdom would someday be theirs. The timing certainly checked out. CAA’s trio of cochairmen—Bryan Lourd, Kevin Huvane, and Richard Lovett—had already led the agency through a 15-year period of tremendous growth, and their contracts were set to expire within a half dozen years. But the new generation soon realized that coronation day was further off than they expected. Lovett began reminding staff that 60 was the new 40, according to two sources. “I was like, Fuck no, it’s not,” says one of them, who recalls thinking, Oh, you guys are never going to leave. Lovett, Lourd, and Huvane are now in their 60s. They…

THE BUFFALO WERE GRAZING BY THE HIGHWAY ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE RICHEST COUNTY IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. It was a clear morning in the Tetons, and with binoculars it was possible to see all the way across the valley known, since prehistory, as one of the most secure and comfortable little basins in all of the Mountain West—named, for one of the first white trappers to winter there, Jackson’s Hole. The landscape may have looked like wilderness to the caravanning tourists in $200,000 Sprinter vans and thousands more in athleisure who now flood Teton County year-round. But it is also a kind of hyper-reality of money—tens of thousands of acres and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of conservation easements—in what may be…

Samantha GASMER “L.A. CONFIDENTIAL” P. 130 “The very LA nature of this shoot was special to me,” says Los Angeles native and VF assistant fashion editor Samantha Gasmer. “I loved diving into Martin Schoeller’s Chinatown and Bonnie and Clyde references, so I was thrilled Richard Rushfield and Janice Min were game to go there with the fashion,” she says of the day filled with laughs and Hollywood secrets. Wayne LAWSON “SWANSON SONG” P. 110 “Swanson on Swanson was a memorable, rewarding project for me,” says Wayne Lawson, whose story this month goes inside his work on silent-film star Gloria Swanson’s 1980 memoir that proved pivotal in his career. Two years after its publication, VF brought him on as a senior editor. “That changed the course of my life for the…

“LOOK, THERE WAS a time I thought it was a dirty word,” says Jonathan Majors. “You know what I mean?” He’s talking about stardom. He says the words movie star, then lets them hang in the air like an incantation. “In school, you would never dream of saying something so ambitious.” Majors grew up poor in Texas, where he was raised by his mom, who’s a pastor. As a teenager, he was combative. Anti-authority. Then he discovered the release valve that was acting. This year, the Yale drama school grad’s coiled presence is on display in Creed III and the new Ant-Man and the Wasp movie, and he’ll reign as the archvillain in the next phase of Marvel blockbusters. Majors pours himself into his roles and wants them to be…

PART ONE On November 5, 1980, I attended a book party at the home of S.I. Newhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Random House, the publisher of Swanson on Swanson, the book being celebrated that day, had been purchased earlier in the year by Advance Publications, the giant media company owned by Newhouse and his brother, Donald. I don’t think I knew a single one of the large group of invited guests. The book was the autobiography of Gloria Swanson, who, back in the silent-screen days, had been one of the highest-paid and most popular actors in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille’s biggest star. She was now 81 but looked 60. Not quite five feet tall, consummately stylish, she held court in the art-filled rooms that evening as the fancy crowd…

IN SEPTEMBER 2021, Sotheby’s offered up for auction a cache of 101 Bored Ape NFTs as a lot in a special sale called Ape In! The digital art revolution had seemingly remade the art market in the months prior, and this was the finest collection of non-fungible tokens ever assembled by one of the world’s oldest auction houses, founded in 1744. Scrolling through the catalog of cartoon monkeys in funny hats and jackets, one could see a rare Bored Ape with solid gold fur and holographic eyes, and, rarer yet, an Ape with an unshaven face eating a piece of pizza. For digital art enthusiasts who aspired to membership in the Bored Ape Yacht Club, this was a huge deal. The house was confident that Ape In! could ride the…

“JULIA CHILD WAS not a classical beauty,” Isabella Rossellini says from her converted barn in Bellport, New York, days after filming wrapped for the second season of HBO’s Julia. (Rossellini plays the culinary legend’s coauthor.) “She was very tall and kind of awkward and had a funny voice—but had an enormous sense of wit and this passion for the kitchen.” Rossellini is talking about the French phrase la vie est belle, which she likens to the Latin carpe diem: a call to relish life. If the TV chef embodied that philosophy with gusto, so does another Julia: the Pretty Woman who has fronted Lancôme’s La Vie Est Belle perfume (optimistic, with notes of iris, vanilla, and jasmine) since its debut in 2012. A decade later, the French beauty house is uniting…

ALL THE WORLD’S a stage or film set in this troupe of books. First, two tales of the movies. Michael Schulman’s Oscar Wars, from Harper, examines the history of America’s most watched—and perhaps most divisive—awards show, from the birth of the Academy to the 2017 Moonlight versus La La Land best picture debacle. In Helene Stapinski and Bonnie Siegler’s The American Way, from Simon & Schuster, Siegler looks into a piece of family lore: Her grandfather, who escaped the Holocaust with the help of the future publisher of DC Comics, supposedly captured Marilyn Monroe’s subway grate moment on film. In Permission to Speak, from Crown, Samara Bay—the speech coach who’s helped Ruth Negga, Gal Gadot, and others perfect dialects on film—offers an empowering take on public speaking. Alice Robb presents…

FIRST THERE WAS Tár, then The Fabelmans, then She Said. Empire of Light followed soon after. They were all big fall festival movies, aimed squarely at awards attention—and they all failed to ignite at the box office. Some did well in large cities for a couple of weeks, then faltered in wider release. Others never got off the ground at all, hobbled by weak marketing campaigns and a hard-to-diagnose lack of interest. For years, it has been a locus of worry within the industry: this growing chasm between box office triumphs and the movies deemed, by some anyway, to be the best of the year. This year will see hits like Every-thing Everywhere All at Once, Top Gun: Maverick, and Avatar: The Way of Water jockeying for awards. But long gone…

YOU ARE SURROUNDED by 45-foot-tall white letters, so close you cannot discern what they say. Fourteen hundred feet above the city of dreams, you can see the sweep of the metropolis, from the hills to the sea, and within it the cauldron of struggle and strife that is Los Angeles. But the eyes down below are staring at you, for you are atop the town’s most famous monument, the ultimate symbol of fame, fortune, and the fantasy of moviemaking worldwide. You are standing atop the Hollywood sign. You are not supposed to be here. Normally, you would be chased away, fined, and possibly even arrested. For the sign may be the only monument in the world that keeps visitors out instead of welcoming them in. Getting to the sign is…

SHORTLY AFTER 7 P.M. on January 3, down a cobblestone alley in the splashy Washington, DC, waterfront known as The Wharf, a steady pulse emanated from Union Stage. Inside was a raucous scene: strobing lights, high-top tables covered with empties, the stagnant smell of beer-soaked floors. A backlit white sign near the entrance read “Tonight: Swearing In Concert of Maxwell Alejandro Frost.” Inside, an eclectic crowd—half dressed like they’d just left meetings on Capitol Hill, the other half like ’90s teens—filled the dance floor. “I am too old for this shit,” one attendee near the bar quipped with a laugh as music thumped in the background. Most people there were too old for this shit—and that is, in a sense, what the party was about. Elected when he was 25…

ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, Richard Rushfield’s phone lit up with the type of jaw-dropper that can really get Twitter going on a weekend: Nikki Finke, legendary Hollywood journalist, dead at 68. Finke had largely been off the radar since parting ways with her self-made entertainment news website, Deadline, at the end of 2013. But her death from an unspecified “prolonged illness” was no less monumental. Gone was the mythically fearsome woman who, some two decades earlier, saw an opening in the staid landscape of Hollywood’s trade press and drove an 18-wheeler straight through it, lobbing bombs at anyone in her path. Rushfield had a history of crossing Finke, as the furious messages in his email archives can attest. “Nikki Finke One Step Closer to Dream of Becoming World’s Worst Boss,”…