Search results

The clash of cultures on the Japanese prefecture, where locals interact with thousands of U.S. service members: “Eve had started dating Americans at age nineteen, when she was a student at Okinawa Christian Junior College. She and her friends hung around clubs, parks, and beaches and practiced speaking English with American guys. The men struck […]

Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s unlikely collaboration with Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, who was arrested and asked to provide evidence at Nuremberg against war criminals: “In subsequent interviews he continued the story: ‘I had this warrant for her in my pocket. It was like burning a hole in my pocket … Finally I took the thing […]

The director on what’s wrong with Hollywood today, why you should never use his name in a pitch, and why he’s retiring from movies to focus on painting: “The worst development in filmmaking—particularly in the last five years—is how badly directors are treated. It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide […]

The origins of one of Hollywood’s earliest femme fatales: “Theodosia Goodman grew up in Cincinnati, the child of middle-class Jewish immigrants. Her father was a tailor; her mother kept house. She went to high school, she went to two years of college. She was a middling actress with middling looks, age 30, stuck in the […]

Scovell, a former writer for Spy magazine, joins a group of up-and-coming writers to work on a Fox late-night show called The Wilton North Report: “In October 1987, I was offered a job on a new, late-night variety talk show and, without thinking twice, I relocated from New York City to Hollywood, where the sunshine […]

He’s most closely connected to New York, but his writing about California helped define what makes it special: “It started by accident. Wolfe was working for the New York Herald Tribune, which, along with eight other local papers, shut down for 114 days during the 1962–63 newspaper strike. He had recently written about a custom […]

A look back at how filmmakers handled the Vietnam War, and how they worked with the military—or ignored their recommendations—to get them made: “In coming to the Pentagon with his plans in May, 1975, Coppola told Public Affairs officials that his initial script would need considerable work, especially the end, which he considered ‘surrealistic.’ While […]

A look behind-the-scenes at the alleged 2004 search by the Church of Scientology for the next Mrs. Tom Cruise: “Nazanin Boniadi, 25, who had not yet become the human-rights activist for Amnesty International and the actor she is today, was summoned in October 2004 to meet an important church official at the Celebrity Centre International, […]

A trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, joining a UN mission to investigate the massacres there: “In the last few months, I’ve spent time in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I used an embarrassing fuck-up by one of the world’s most publicly accountable organizations as a bargaining tool to get a story. A […]

A writer of made-for-TV movies reflects on his middling successes and near-misses from a career of steady but not spectacular work in Hollywood: “On occasion during my 30-year screenwriting career, the amount on these checks has been life-changing, enough money to buy a car or temporarily pay off our credit cards. But I don’t really […]