November 30, 2010 | 5:52 pm

Scarier than Wikileaks: The return of Fran Drescher

Posted by Danielle Berrin

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Prepare to hear the laugh. You know the one.

TV Guide is reporting today that TV Land, an online source for streaming content, has ordered a pilot called “Happily Divorced” based on Fran Drescher’s life:

Using the off-screen experiences of The Nanny star, Happily Divorced follows a woman’s dating struggles after she finds out that her husband is gay. The show looks at how the main character balances her relationship with her boyfriend and ex-husband.

Fran Drescher books daytime “tawk” show

Drescher, 53, wrote the pilot and will produce with her ex-husband, The Nanny executive producer Peter Marc Jacobsen. The couple divorced in 1999 after 21 years of marriage. Jacobsen later revealed he was gay.

Drescher and Jacobsen are also collaborating on her new daytime show, The Fran Drescher Tawk Show, which premiered Friday.

Yep, tawk amongst yourselves.

November 30, 2010 | 9:10 am

Natalie Portman and the religious compulsions driving her ‘Black Swan’ performance

Posted by Danielle Berrin

In a recent roundtable interview, actress Natalie Portman revealed the method behind the melodramatic madness that subsumes “Black Swan.” 

It began with her workout routine.

At the height of her training with New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers, Portman was in toe-shoes five hours a day plus swimming a mile each morning. She was also on a strict diet; for months, she ate only carrots and almonds.

Such is the life of a dancer, she told journalist Amy Longsdorf: “You don’t drink. You don’t go out with friends. You don’t have much food. You are constantly putting your body through extreme pain.”

“I came to understand the self-flagellation of a ballet dancer.”

The rigors of Portman’s physical training clearly helped her descend into the abysmal depths of her character. There is a malevolent desperation to Nina’s madness, as the deprivations of her body mirror her inner-emptiness. Because she lacks both physical and emotional sustenance, she crumbles under the pressure.

You kind of want to grab Nina by the tutu and drag her to the nearest rabbi’s office. A little inner-dimension, please. But on the contrary, Portman said she modeled her character’s nature on examples of religious compulsion, and argued, perhaps rightly, that some religious impulses promote – or even require – obsessive behavior.

“Nina’s bulimic,” Portman said of her character. “And anorexia and bulimia are forms of OCD. Ballet really lends itself to that because there’s such a sense of ritual that goes along with dancing - the wrapping of the shoes everyday and the preparing of new shoes for every performance. It’s almost religious in nature. It’s almost like Jews putting on their Tefillin or Catholics with their Rosary Beads, and then [the dancers] have a godlike character in their director So I think Nina suffers from a sort of religious obsessive compulsion.”

Despite the ritualistic elements in a dancer’s life, or in the Hollywood actress preparing to portray her, Portman’s Nina comes up religiously short. If there’s nothing substantive driving the compulsive ritual, it’s merely ritual for ritual’s sake, or a melodramatic character for Oscar’s sake.

Portman never makes clear the motivation’s driving her character’s ambition. We see Nina unravel on the outside without any clue as to what’s going on on the inside. Why does she surrender herself entirely to the role? What does she think awaits her at the top?

A few years ago, when Paris Hilton was getting carted off to jail, Rabbi David Wolpe gave a sermon about the necessity of spiritual power. Hilton was arrested – not a pleasant thing, but not entirely life altering, obviously – and she completely fell apart. Remember the infamous paparazzi photo of her sobbing and snotty (in both senses) seen through the window of the police car?

“If you don’t cultivate inner-resources,” Wolpe said. “In times of crisis, you crumble.”

Portman’s Nina may have been destined to crumble, but wouldn’t it be nice if we cared?

Read more of Longsdorf’s interview with Portman here:

From the beginning of “Black Swan,” Nina has a loose grip on reality. Locked in a too-close relationship with her mother (Barbara Hershey), she begins to unravel after her company’s artistic director (Vincent Cassel) fires his star ballerina (Winona Ryder) and hands the leading role in “Swan Lake” over to her.

Nina’s problems are intensified when a new dancer named Lily (Mila Kunis) joins the company. The pair instantly begin a pas de deux of love and hate, which pushes Nina even closer to the brink. As one critic noted, the Darren Aronofsky-directed film resembles ” `Mommie Dearest’ meets `Repulsion’ meets `Single White Female.’”

Portman is in nearly every scene of the drama and it’s her out-on-a-ledge performance which is earning plenty of Oscar buzz. Asked how she’d feel about a second nomination (following her nod for “Closer”), the actress, 29, says, “it would be a great, great honor.

“The best thing that you can hope for when you make a movie and you put your soul into it, like all of us have done, is that people respond to it well. The fact that audiences have come away moved and excited and entertained and stimulated is extraordinarily flattering.”

If awards were given out for the most harrowing preparation for a performance, Portman would surely pirouette to the podium on Oscar night. A veteran of eight years of dance training (from the ages of 4-12), Portman still needed to work out for nearly 14 months to into tip-top shape.

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November 29, 2010 | 5:23 pm

All she needs is love! Rachel Uchitel, former Tiger Woods mistress heads to ‘Celebrity Rehab’

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Don’t blame Rachel Uchitel for her adulterous affair with Tiger Woods; she couldn’t help herself—she was under the influence. 

Of love, apparently.

“I have an addiction to love,” Uchitel told The Today Show’s Natalie Morales this morning.

Love addiction is the real reason Uchitel tended to Tiger’s lusty needs despite the reality of his marriage, and it’s also why she has chosen to appear on the fourth season of the reality series, “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.”

Uchitel, 35, is the granddaughter of Maurice Uchitel, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who parlayed a successful business in women’s shoulder pads into ownership of the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami and the El Morocco nightclub, Manhattan’s society hotspot in the 1930 and 1950s. According to the New York Times obituary, Granddaddy Uchitel was married to Patricia Pollack, a singer, for 34 years but they divorced in 1979.

Rachel Uchitel was engaged to an investment banker but he was killed in one of the World Trade Towers on 9/11.

According to Dr. Drew Pinsky, the innovative medical mind behind “Celebrity Rehab”, Uchitel’s “compulsiveness” in relationships stems from past trauma.

Not that she has any trouble admitting her problem:

“The issues I have related to relationships are absolutely related to a hole I’m trying to fill in my heart,” she said. “Just like some people use other addictions with alcohol or some other substance—I use relationships.”

Uchitel is also pretty deft at using the spotlight. When word broke a year ago that Tiger Woods, the world’s most accomplished pro-golfer, had been inviting a harem’s worth of mistresses into his bed, Uchitel seized upon her time to shine.

“I’m not a home wrecker, gold digger, tramp, whore ... I’m not those things,” she reportedly told OK Magazine in November 2009. “I have very good qualities. When you’re judged by the nation, it’s really difficult. It’s horrible.”

So horrible, her indiscretion landed her a reported $10 million from Woods in exchange for her silence. But loads of cash couldn’t solve all her problems.

On the Today Show, Uchitel’s celebrity shrink savior, Dr. Drew said that the former nightclub hostess had suffered horrific traumas – including the death of her fiancé in the and the loss of her father to cocaine addiction – which complicated her personal relationships.

When looking for love, she was going for intensity, not intimacy, said Dr. Drew.

“It’s been very tough,” Uchitel told Morales. Though she refused to name it, she insinuated that after the Woods scandal, she retreated from public life.

“I became a recluse for about six months,” she said.

Now, her attempt to turn her infamous past into a more famous future will depend on how she fares on the show. Will audiences find her as compelling as Woods did? Or will they empathize with pill poppers over the lovelorn?

“I think that there are so many women that feel misunderstood,” Uchitel said.

“I really hope people will be able to identify what I’ve been going through and help themselves.”

Watch Rachel Uchitel talk love addiction on The Today Show:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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November 21, 2010 | 9:07 pm

Publicist Ronni Chasen laid to rest at Jewish cemetery

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Power publicist Ronni Chasen, who was brutally gunned down last Monday night, was laid to rest today after an emotion funeral service at the Jewish cemetery Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary in Culver City.

In life, Chasen was surrounded by Hollywood glamour; in death, she takes her place among some of the entertainment industry’s most prominent Jews including, studio mogul Lew Wasserman, producer Aaron Spelling, Milton Berle, Al Jolson and Dinah Shore, who are all buried at Hillside.

“As a rabbi, this is a tough one for me, because of the circumstances of her death,” said Temple of the Arts’ Rabbi David Baron, who conducted the memorial service before a crowd of some 500 people. Among the guests at the service were Sony Pictures Entertainment chair, Amy Pascal, film critic Leonard Maltin, producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, musician T-Bone Burnett, Diane Warren, composer Hans Zimmer, actor Peter Fonda and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Chasen’s friends and colleagues delivered eloquent and humorous eulogies, doing their best to focus on the beauty of her life. But the tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding her death cast a dark pall over an otherwise clear and breezy November morning. Almost a week after her killing, her death remains an unsolved mystery.

Even in the midst of her grief, publicist and friend Kathie Berlin said that she spent the week wondering about Chasen’s final moments: “Was she afraid? Was she alone? Did she know she was dying?”

“We all need this service, this ritual,” said Lili Fini Zanuck, wife of “Alice in Wonderland” producer Richard Zanuck, one of Chasen’s clients. “We need the solace of knowing we’re all hurting.”

Chasen’s tragic end brought the industry to a standstill. Despite its reputation for being fickle and shallow, the Hollywood community is tightly knit and comes together during times of crisis. 

Although Chasen was not religious, she was remembered earlier today as a virtuous and principled woman. Those who eulogized her described her as the kind of person people were proud to know, full of goodness, loyal to a fault, and possessing a wicked sense of humor. 

“Ronni was very proud of her Jewish heritage,” Rabbi David Baron said. “She was Jewish in her heart, in her ethos, in the way she lived and loved and cared for others.”

Chasen’s friend, publicist Vivian Mayer-Siskind said she was “the definition of grace” with “never a hair out of place” and that “she was the funniest human being in life”.

She was also an expert at her job: “She had an eye for talent, and knew a good film from a bad one, but could sell them both,” Mayer-Siskind said.

Chasen’s brother, screenwriter Larry Cohen, recalled their upbringing in New York’s Washington Heights. He said he once asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And Chasen replied, “I want to throw parties!”

The Friday before her death, Chasen threw a soiree for the movie “Black Swan” in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The film’s stars Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassell and Winona Ryder were there, along with director Darren Aronofsky. Chasen had been in her element—working the room, introducing people to each other. She was insistent that her client, producer Mace Neufeld meet Natalie Portman. “Ronni came over to me and said, ‘Go over there and sit next to Natalie Portman!’” Neufeld said by phone last week. “I said, ‘Well I’ve never met her.’ She said, ‘Well introduce yourself! Maybe you’ll do a movie with her.’ So I spent half an hour talking to Natalie.”

Jeff Sanderson, Chasen’s partner at Chasen & Co., the PR firm she created in 1991, said that even in a room full of movie stars, Chasen’s presence was palpable: “When she walked into a room, you knew she was there; you could feel her energy,” he said.

Sanderson said Chasen had just returned from a trip to Paris and told him she wanted to go back—after awards season, of course, and “have some fun.” She was a reputed workaholic, but at her funeral, friends revealed she was ready for a change of pace.

“I want to do something different; I want to meet new people,” Berlin recalled Chasen saying before her death.

Heidi Schaeffer, Chasen’s friend and colleague, had worked with her during the Paris trip and recalled how Chasen had made friends with everybody, from the hotel concierge to gallery owners. She even finagled her way into scoring VIP tickets to the Paris Opera. One night, during dinner with playwright Sir Ronald Harwood at the famous Café Flore, Chasen had said, “I could conduct business all day from this café!”

Now Chasen is buried next to her mother, with whom she was very close, in a cemetery renowned for its high profile inhabitants.

Because of her violent end, Chasen’s friends urged the crowd to tune out all the conspiracy theories making their way through the media.

“There have been lots of fables this week: ‘Did she have a secret life?’” Zanuck said. “Somewhere she must be laughing because she’d have loved to have had a life, let alone a secret one.”

“I beg you, don’t pay attention to the papers or the people on TV who didn’t know Ronni,” Berlin said. “If someone was following her, we ALL would have known – as well as the police and the FBI,” she joked.

Instead, she told the crowd: “Let’s imagine a Hollywood ending: a great white light in which she takes her mother’s hand…I know she’s up there somewhere, changing the seating arrangements.”

“She was the most innocent of us all,” Zanuck said. “She had no enemies.”

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November 19, 2010 | 3:24 pm

Slain publicist Ronni Chasen’s Jewish life

Posted by Danielle Berrin

It was fitting, in that Hollywood way, that the last time Ronni Chasen was seen alive was at a movie premiere. She had been in all her Hollywood glory – stylish and smiling, effortlessly working the room, among friends.

It was after midnight, a short while later, when the power publicist was driving down the dark winding streets where Sunset Boulevard meets Beverly Hills when shots rang out into the night. Chasen crashed her black Mercedes into a lamppost and was found slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding to death. She had been shot multiple times and died an hour later.

Her violent and mysterious death sent shockwaves throughout the entertainment community. How could this happen? Why did this happen? Who wanted her dead? It was the end of a life, but the beginning of a Hollywood murder mystery that has turned up no leads. No suspects. No motives. 

It has, however, turned up a reward: The organizers of the Palm Springs International Film Festival, whom Chasen worked with, are offering $100,000 for anything that leads to the apprehension of her killer.

At her funeral last Sunday, friends couldn’t help but allude to the bizarre circumstances of her death: “There have been lots of fables this week,” said Lili Fini Zanuck, wife of Alice in Wonderland producer Richard Zanuck, one of Chasen’s clients.  “Did she have a secret life?”

Those in the entertainment industry who knew Ronni Chasen, a ubiquitous presence at all the parties, awards shows, and chic restaurants in town, remember a vivacious tour-de-force who drew little distinction between her professional and private lives.

In Chasen’s world, work was life and clients were family; she was Jewish by birth, but her religion was Hollywood.

“She had a place in this community and in the solar system of Hollywood,” said Tom Tapp, a former editor at Variety. “It’s kind of like one of the planets is missing.”

A fixture of the industry circuit for three decades, Chasen was considered a trailblazer and a relentless workaholic. “I really didn’t know Ronni when she wasn’t working,” said Invictus producer Mace Neufeld, a friend and client of Chasen’s for 35 years. “When she wasn’t working she was working.”

Over the course of her career, Chasen tirelessly pounded the pavement, helping win Oscars for her A-list clients, including the late Natalie Wood, producers Richard Zanuck (“Jaws”, “Planet of the Apes”) and Irwin Winkler (“Rocky”, “Raging Bull”) and a slate of composers including Hans Zimmer, who spoke at her funeral.

“She was one of a kind,” Neufeld said.

In an industry known for big egos and flimsy loyalties, Chasen was considered a class act. She wasn’t religious, but she was deeply principled, known as an elegant, caring woman. “She was totally professional. She didn’t bad mouth people. Her clients and her business were her life,” Neufeld said.

Indeed, Chasen celebrated everything from birthdays to holidays with her clients. Lynne Segall, publisher of Nikki Finke’s entertainment news Website Deadline.com said Chasen attended Irwin Winkler’s Passover seder and Yom Kippur break-fast each year. Neufeld remembers a time 11 years ago when he and Chasen attended the Venice Film Festival during the high holidays; Chasen was restless, scouring the streets of Venice, Italy until she found a synagogue.

Chasen also had a brother, Larry Cohen, a well-known B-movie writer/director with whom she was close. They grew up in the Washington Heights and Riverdale sections of New York, where their father was a real estate broker and their mother, a homemaker.

But the centerpiece of Chasen’s Jewish life was at Temple of the Arts on Wilshire Boulevard, where she was a member and attended High Holiday services, according to Rabbi David Baron who performed her funeral service at the Jewish cemetery Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary.

“As a rabbi, this is a tough one for me, because of the circumstances of her death,” Baron said to a crowd of some 500 people. Chasen’s funeral drew the Hollywood elite, including Sony Pictures Entertainment chair, Amy Pascal, film critic Leonard Maltin, producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, musician T-Bone Burnett, the songwriter Diane Warren, the actor Peter Fonda and the astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Funeral eulogies portrayed Chasen as the kind of person people were proud to know, full of goodness, loyal to a fault, and wickedly funny. She was the kind of Jew whose virtuousness made up her religious practice.

“Ronni was very proud of her Jewish heritage,” Baron said during her funeral service. “She was Jewish in her heart, in her ethos, in the way she lived and loved and cared for others.”

Chasen, who was a beauty in her youth, began her career as an actress. She appeared on a smalltime soap opera but quickly defected to the world of PR where her star shone even brighter. She ascended the ranks at the firm Rogers & Cowan where the late legendary publicist Warren Cowan, took her under his wing. For a time she ran publicity at MGM until finally setting up her own shop, Chasen & Co. in 1991.

“She was a straight shooter and she never took no for an answer,” said producer Zvi Howard Rosenman, who met Chasen in 1976, when few women were in positions of power in the industry. “In the 70s, it was like, ‘Ohmigod she’s so aggressive.’ But her aggression was never edgy or ugly; it was always in the service of her clients.”

Her clients thought she was fearless, smart and insightful: “She wasn’t just interested in getting your name in the paper,” Neufeld said. “She was concerned about the content of what was said about you and the image that you wanted to project. She was very smart about that.”

Journalists found her aggressive, relentless and incredibly effective: “She wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power no matter who it was. She was dogged in her commitment to her clients.” Tapp said. “As an editor of Variety, I spent many hours on the phone with Ronni when she would pitch things that I thought were impossible for a story. But she just kept at it, and I’d say, a lot of the time she convinced me. She was someone who could do the impossible in Hollywood.”

Until the impossible happened to her.

“I think it was a random act or an attempted robbery,” Neufeld said.

The mystery of her murder has prompted conspiracy theories and rumors of a dark shadow side to her life. Was there a mafia connection? A secret spurned lover?

After all, Chasen had a reputation as an “old-school broad,” always impeccably dressed, with perfectly coiffed golden-blonde hair, expensive shoes and a magnetic personality. “She was the type of woman who’d be at a cocktail party and Clint Eastwood would walk up and say hello to her,” Tapp said.

She was a very private person, but friends say she had a string of low-profile romances with high-profile men. “She was like a Howard Hawkes broad,” Rosenman said. “She could drink and swear with the men and flirt like a woman. She was alluring like Lauren Bacall—she had that quality.”

Chasen married and divorced when she was in her 20s but never had children. She came from a generation of women who made huge sacrifices to get to the top, so that the women who followed her wouldn’t have to.

“She was an iconic figure—she was an original,” said publicist Michael Levine, the founder of Levine Communications Office, a premier PR firm. “Her clients had almost familial relationships with her. She had a very good reputation; she was well respected, well known, feisty and tenacious.”

But for all the time spent in the spotlight, at the end of the day, Chasen drove home alone. And no one knows what possible darkness might have lurked beneath her shiny surface.

“There was nothing dark about her,” Rosenman said. “She wore white; she had blonde hair!”

“I beg you, don’t pay attention to the papers or the people on TV who didn’t know Ronni,” publicist Kathie Berlin said at her funeral. “If someone was following her, we ALL would have known – as well as the police and the FBI,” she joked.

But Chasen’s death was so stunning, it left the Hollywood community grasping for answers.

Even Berlin, who struck a defiant tone at the funeral, admitted that in the midst of her grief, she wondered about Chasen’s final moments: “Was she afraid? Was she alone? Did she know she was dying?”

“She had so many people that loved her completely,” Deadline.com’s Segall said of her late friend of more than 20 years. “This was such a senseless, random, violent way for someone to go.”

“We all need this ritual,” Zanuck said at the memorial. “We need the solace of God because we’re all hurting.”

The violence of Chasen’s tragic end has left its scar, but it has also emboldened her loved ones to seek justice: “We will find the person who did this,” Berlin said. “And they will never again see the light of day.”

In life, Chasen was surrounded by Hollywood glamour; in death, she takes her place among some of the entertainment industry’s most prominent Jews including, studio mogul Lew Wasserman, producer Aaron Spelling, Milton Berle, Al Jolson and Dinah Shore, who are all buried at Hillside.

But it remains uncertain if Chasen’s story will have a Hollywood ending.

“I can tell you that for Hollywood this is not merely a murder—this is a 9/11 moment,” Chasen’s colleague Michael Levine said. He, like most of Chasen’s inner circle, is dismissive of any suspicious murder plot.

“Life is short and life is unpredictable, and this is extremely unsettling. So we seek explanation, we seek order, when sometimes, there isn’t.”

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November 19, 2010 | 9:38 am

Israeli film ‘Precious Life’ makes 2011 Oscar shortlist

Posted by Danielle Berrin

The Israeli documentary ‘Precious Life’ about the unlikely bonds that develop when a Palestinian family seeks medical treatment in Israel has made the Oscar short list.

The film, directed by Israeli television journalist Shlomi Eldar focuses on a Palestinian family from Gaza who receive treatment for their infant son in an Israeli hospital. Aided by a devoted Israeli doctor and the anonymous Israeli philanthropist who foots the bill, an observant Muslim family fights for the life of their son alongside their Jewish neighbors. Tensions eventually arise when, in the midst of treatment, the Gaza war breaks out and the child’s mother says she would gladly sacrifice her son “for the sake of Jerusalem”.

Eldar, a prominent Israeli news anchor and producer Ehud Bleiberg were in Los Angeles earlier this month to screen the film at the Museum of Tolerance. TheWrap.com’s Sharon Waxman moderated a discussion with the filmmakers and the Palestinian family from Gaza who were skyped in to join the conversation.

But don’t get too excited because although an incredibly moving and important film, ‘Precious Life’ is not getting the kind of Oscar buzz other docs are getting. 

Anne Thompson writes on Indiewire.com that the frontrunners are “Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Oscar nominee Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo and Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman.”

Which is still good news for Jews. “Client 9” is about former New York attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who of course, is Jewish, though we’re not particularly thrilled that the film highlights his relationship with for-hire shiksas. Also good for Jews is Davis Guggenheim’s education-themed documentary “Waiting For Superman”. Guggenheim was a longtime client of former William Morris agent David Lonner, a super Jew, and went on one of Lonner’s industry-exclusive trips to Israel in 2008. Also, Amir Bar-Lev’s “The Tillman Story” about a government cover-up of football star Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan is a serious contender, no doubt due to its provocative content and the backing of awards-magnet producer Harvey Weinstein.

The announcement also brings focus on the snubs, which includes the critically acclaimed Joan Rivers doc, “A Piece of Work” about the iconic and eccentric Jewish comedian.

Also left off the list is the Holocaust film “A Film Unfinished.”

Here are the 15 contenders, courtesy of The New York Times’ MichaeI Cieply:

“Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer,” Alex Gibney, director (ES Productions LLC)

“Enemies of the People,” Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, directors (Old Street Films)

“Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Banksy, director (Paranoid Pictures)

“Gasland,” Josh Fox, director (Gasland Productions, LLC)

“Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould,” Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont, directors (White Pine Pictures)

“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson, director (Representational Pictures)

“The Lottery,” Madeleine Sackler, director (Great Curve Films)

“Precious Life,” Shlomi Eldar, director (Origami Productions)

“Quest for Honor,” Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, director (Smothers Bruni Productions)

“Restrepo,” Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, directors (Outpost Films)

“This Way of Life,” Thomas Burstyn, director (Cloud South Films)

“The Tillman Story,” Amir Bar-Lev, director (Passion Pictures/Axis Films)

“Waiting for ‘Superman,’” Davis Guggenheim, director (Electric Kinney Films)

“Waste Land,” Lucy Walker, director (Almega Projects)

“William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, directors (Disturbing the Universe LLC)

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November 16, 2010 | 3:22 pm

Veteran Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen shot and killed [UPDATED]

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Hollywood is collectively grieving the loss of longtime publicist Ronni Chasen, 64, who was shot and killed last night on her way home from the premiere of “Burlesque.” Chasen had attended the film’s afterparty at The W Hotel in Hollywood and was likely on her way home to Westwood when she crashed her car into a pole near Sunset Boulevard and Whittier in Beverly Hills. A neighborhood witness found her after midnight bleeding profusely, apparently from five gunshot wounds to the chest. The slaying has come as a shock to the Hollywood community and the details surrounding her death are scant.

In reports on entertainment Websites, Chasen was referred to as a “constant figure on the Academy Awards circuit” and over the course of a career that began in 1972, represented Hollywood luminaries including the late actress Natalie Wood, the actor Michael Douglas, the composer Hans Zimmer, and film producer Richard Zanuck, according to the L.A. Times. Chasen spent several decades working at the prestigious PR firm Rogers & Cowan before striking out on her own to establish Chasen & Company Publicity in 1991.

Chasen was Jewish, and according to a report in The Daily Beast, attended Passover seder at her client, Rocky producer Irwin Winkler’s home:

Winkler, who was with Chasen for three decades, said over the phone on Tuesday, “She was at our Seder on Passover. She was always a part of our family. When we had a family occasion, Ronnie was a part of it. When one of my kids got married, she was at the wedding. That’s been going on for some 30 years.”

Though Chasen was married and divorced in her 20s, she did not have a family of her own. At the time of her death, she was single and without children. She is survived by her brother, Larry Cohen, a successful genre writer and director. Her deepest longings, according to The Daily Beast, were for community and friendship.

Nicole Laporte writes:

Awards season was when Chasen came to fullest life, and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Robin Swicord fondly remembered being with Chasen last year, when Chasen threw an intimate party at a small jazz club for the indie drama Crazy Heart. It was an unusually communal evening, one in which Hollywood’s typical paranoid reserve seemed to dissipate, and Swicord said that Chasen was moved by the spirit of the room.

“She said, ‘There was such a feeling of community in the room and I wish it were that way all the time. And there was a place we could go together and have a nice time and we wouldn’t be competing with each other,’” Swicord recalled. “That was the woman that I really knew. Underneath the job she had to do, there was this person that really longed for community.”

According to the latest reports, the police have no suspects and are seeking the public’s help in apprehending Chasen’s killer.

The L.A. Times has the following witness account:

Nahid Shekarchian, a 33-year resident of the neighborhood who lives just south of the house where Chasen’s car crashed, said sometime after midnight she heard gunshots—“boom-boom-boom”—and opened the curtain of her upstairs bedroom. She told her daughter-in-law to call 911 and went outside to see what had happened.

Shekarchian said the woman in the car was bleeding profusely from her nose and had blood on her chest. The window on the passenger side of the front seat had been shattered. Another neighbor walked to the car window and asked: “Can I help you?” Shekarchian said the driver “was breathing very heavily” and did not respond.

Shekarchian said the police told her that whoever shot Chasen might have been walking rather than in another vehicle. But Shekarchian said she saw no one in the vicinity.

TheWrap.com reports on police theories:

People close to Chasen said police were working on a few theories, primarily that someone might have encountered her outside the W Hotel—situated in a down-at-the-heels part of Hollywood—and gotten in her car. They’re also considering a road-rage incident, though Chasen’s friends consider that antithetical to her personality.

 

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November 12, 2010 | 12:53 pm

Not even the Mila Kunis-Natalie Portman sex scene can save ‘Black Swan’

Posted by Danielle Berrin

It never ceases to amaze me what passes for Oscar-material these days. Admittedly, I gave up hope that an Oscar meant anything of significance when Julia Roberts won for Erin Brockovich; it was a great Julia Roberts performance, yes, but the performance of a great actress? Not so much. Roberts is one of those actors who is immensely compelling to watch, not because she transcends herself and becomes a character, but because Julia Roberts—the movie star—is intensely compelling on screen. She is charismatic, but rarely a character, and this is something that afflicts many movie stars, when an actor’s celebrity becomes so big, they can no longer convince an audience they are anything but their celebrity persona. 

But I digress.

Black Swan deserves Oscar buzz because it is the work of Darren Aronofsky, who manages to push past the prettiness and delicacy of ballet to expose the psychotic inner-life of a ballerina. He succeeds here in turning highbrow into high drama, making the erudite echelons of dance culture accessible to folks who either don’t like, or know anything about, the world of toe shoes and classical music. But style cannot replace substance, and ultimately, Aronofsky’s indelible cinematic style is the only thing Black Swan has going for it—that, and a lubricious sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman.

Depth, the film sorely lacks, but sex it has in spades. And it’s a predatory, violent sex, which doesn’t seem to stop Portman from enjoying it. But even the sex is a hard sell: Portman seems to climax at first touch, so between the lesbian lust-fest and a masturbatory scene in which she tries to please her director by pleasing herself, I began to wonder what pills she was taking. The most erotic scene in the film actually takes place when Portman and her director, Thomas, played by Vincent Cassel, dance together: “Now I’ve seduced you,” he reprimands. “It should be the other way around.” Which is exactly how the audience feels; they want and wait to be seduced, but unlike with Portman, the climax never comes.

Black Swan ultimately fails because it descends into high melodrama without a single sympathetic character. Portman’s Nina becomes so one-dimensionally deranged it becomes impossible to feel for her, and for this we can only blame the script. The same goes for Winona Ryder’s character, Beth, who is there to warn of every ballerina’s inevitable decline but without any insight into her personal struggle. She is like a stick figure or scarecrow, portending some horrible evil without being frightening. Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey is another shallow figure, her balletic past alluded to but never explained, yet we’re to believe it was powerful enough to transform her, afflicting her with nightmare stage-mom syndrome as she tries to fulfill her own broken dreams through her daughter.

In the end, which is foreshadowed in the beginning—and in the trailer, and in the title—I cared less about Nina’s fate than the the fact that in meeting it, she sullied her feathery white swan costume.

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