Peter W. Kaplan

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t know Paul Newman. But I spent a few weeks with him in 1983, when I went down to Florida to watch him direct a father-and-son picture he had also co-written and produced, Harry and Son, with himself, Robby Benson, Wilford Brimley, a young lop-smiled actress named Ellen Barkin and Joanne Woodward. Movie sets, as you might know, are excruciatingly boring places where time moves slowly, really underwater, and the director asks for the same thing over and over until whatever he or she wants revealed shows up.

Paul Newman’s set was a happy set. The weather was good, the actors were kind to each other and every day at 3, three or four giant Hefty bags of popcorn made by the director showed up.  read more »

When I think of Clay Felker, which is often, it’s at the Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria. I had just come to The Observer in 1994 and I was scared and sweating. Clay offered to meet with me once a week and kick around story ideas. I used to bring a stack of napkins. They were, by the end of breakfast, black with scrawl: call David Garth, Milton Glaser, Mrs. Astor; water, Moynihan, women and money, Brooklyn as the new Paris, Columbia vs. N.Y.U., water mains, Murdoch, CBS News, power.

Clay would sit at the Waldorf and dictate. His Felkerian takes on the world, as many have said, added up to a nonfiction novel embodying Clay’s worldview: power was his subject, exuberance was his drive.  read more »

Sopranos Auteur David Chase Left a Majestic Wrap-Up, But His Onion-Ring Existentialism Causes a Panic—Where’s Dr. Melfi? It’s a Media Anxiety Attack!  read more »