The new film “Detachment” star, Oscar winner Adrien Brody, is also its producer. Why?
“It’s a small independent film,” he said. “Although I’m treated well as an actor, I try to be useful. I like the idea of having my own legitimate voice.
“There are many ways to do financing. With our small budget, you can pre-sell for foreign sales. A valued actor automatically is valued in a dollar amount. Resources came in place with my participation.
“In this I play a sick teacher who surmounts hardships in a dysfunctional school. A lost soul with a troubled past avoiding emotional connections, he bonds with no one. Amid apathetic students and a burned out administration, he connects with a runaway teen.”
This runaway, a beautiful young actress Sami Gayle, who was wearing braces, told me: “I play a teenage prostitute. Adrien picks me up off the street. He helped me with the part. He made me comfortable in the role. Prostitutes aren’t self-conscious, and I was self-conscious with the intimacy.
“He was my mentor and showed me this must just be you and me going into the scene. Just two people talking to one another. Not two actors playing a role.”
Said Adrien: “Sami’s very open, fearless and has emotional intelligence. So you encourage. Give acting secrets. I told her, ‘Make these lines your own. Talk to me. You are talking just to me not to an actor. Say the line, and we’ll have a banter.’ She did and we incorporated her pauses. It worked perfectly.”
Playing a counselor having a bad day was Lucy Liu. Busier than Newt Gingrich, Lucy plays a police officer on TNT’s “Southland,” has three movies coming — a Russell Crowe job, a thing titled “The Trouble With Bliss,” and something else, and just shot CBS pilot “Elementary,” where she’s Watson to a modern Sherlock. Plus she’s off to Europe for some video, and her sculptures are in assorted galleries.
Lucy Liu, in designer leather dress, borrowed Lorraine Schwartz diamond ring, and big false lashes, sighed: “All I really want to do is put on jeans, get on a plane and sleep.”
COURTNEY Love buying lots of furniture. Shopping and schlepping with Pier 1 Imports salesgirls following her around the floor . . . From a law enforcement family, drawing on his own Irish experience, Ed Burns’ brother Brian writes Tom Selleck’s series “Blue Bloods”. . . New Christmas item will be the Jewish Mother Doll. Pull the string, and it says, “Again you pulled the string?”. . . David Arquette on fatherhood: “I kept every Playboy for 16 years. Courteney [Cox] made me throw them out because now I had to be a grown-up.”
JEFF Koons working on an equilibrium project. “A tank filled 50/50 with pure distilled water and a 50 percent submerged basketball. With the ball totally eclipsed, equal forces create total equilibrium. Using sodium, a density gradient, the ball hovers there. So far it only hovers six minutes.” Look, I don’t understand it either but, then, I don’t make artistic balloon dogs that sell for millions.
GRACE Coddington, Vogue’s tall, red-haired fashionista force, is doing a Random House memoir. Life in her teens in Britain was awaiting arrival of a months-old copy of Vogue. Now in the front row as its creative director, she’s doing a close-up.
She says: “I’m 70. I was a model. I’ve been in fashion 55 years. With Vogue 20 years. I’m not telling secret stories. Not writing ugly bad things to get back at anyone. This book’s not gossipy. It’s more a record. I’ve kept a diary since I was a tiny kid trying to find my way, and going through all my written records reminds me of shoots and jogs my memory.
“The book is out in November. My lone regret? Throwing out my old clothes. Not keeping those beautiful Saint Laurent outfits.”
TWO things that may not come up in conversation: 1) Kirsten Dunst reportedly can’t sleep without a brown security blanket she’s had since birth. Given by her mother, she takes it wherever she goes . . . 2) Said of Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival producing partner: “How she looks so calm and beautiful, I don’t know. She’s handling a husband, two teenage kids and a movie star.”
PRESIDENT Obama has signed into law Sen. Schumer’s bill to award the Congressional Gold Medal, our highest civilian award, to WWII’s first-ever African-American Marines. By President Roosevelt’s 1941 order, 19,168 received training in North Carolina’s Camp Montford Point. Like historic Tuskegee Airmen, Montford Point Marines endured prejudice and risked their lives to serve their country. One such? David Dinkins. Our former mayor enlisted in high school. Rejected because of color, the July 1945 day he turned 18 Dinkins registered for the draft. The Montford Point Marines Congressional Gold Medal will be displayed at the Smithsonian.
FROM the other end of a cellphone: “A good guy’s like coffee. Best rich, warm and can keep you up all night.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.