Joe's View

So far, the 28-year-old Brooklyn actress Jess Weixler has been building a very strong film resume without breaking through in a major Hollywood studio film.

For the past couple of years, she’s been an indie queen in the tradition of Parker Posey, who seemed to dominate the Sundance Film Festival for much of the 1990s.

Weixler’s 2009 Sundance film, “Peter and Vandy,” didn’t get much of a theatrical release, but it is debuting on DVD today and is very much worth renting.

Written and directed by Jay DiPietro, the film gives us a fractured portait of a New York couple’s turbulent love affair — the scenes are shuffled in a manner reminiscent of last year’s indie hit, “(500) Days of Summer.”

DiPietro’s movie isn’t as slick as “Summer,” but it is a very interesting portait of a relationship, viewed from angles we never see in a Hollywood romantic comedy.

“By first seeing their future, we can fully understand what is happening in the past…and vice versa,” DiPietro said in a director’s statement in the press notes.

Weixler is wonderful as Vandy and she is well-matched by Jason Ritter as Peter. She works in a downtown gallery and he is trying to make it as an architect.

“Peter and Vandy” includes many of the hallmarks of a traditional romantic comedy — a “meet cute” scene, a stormy break-up, an unexpected post-break-up meeting — but by shuffling the deck the emotions in each scene are heightened in a way that makes the couple’s joys and sorrows more interesting. We have to work a little harder watching this movie, but the rewards of that closer attention are greater than anything you’d get from “Leap Year” or “When in Rome.”

Weixler has the good looks and charm that are standard equipment for a romantic comedy lead, but the actress’s theater background and her life in New York City have allowed her to connect with the character of Vandy in a deeper way.

With “Peter and Vandy” and another 2009 New York low-budget film, “Alexander the Great,” Weixler has demonstrated that she has the chops to carry a movie. Now, the question is: Will Hollywood make use of this extraordinary young actress?

Last week, YSL sent a racy new video promo/ad film by fashion photographer Bruce Weber into cyberspace (New York magazine labeled it NSFW because of the nudity).

Now comes word that fashion’s long-time envelope-pusher Calvin Klein is launching a profanity-laced, Internet-linked campaign for his new X brand of underwear.

The global and digital campaign features two American actors — Kellan Lutz of “Twilight” (right) and Michael Brooks of “True Blood” — along with Spanish tennis star Fernando Verdasco and Japanese soccer star Hidetoshi Nakata.

The international reach of social networking sites is being embraced by the company through the launch of its first multi-national, racially diverse photo campaign through the Internet.

According to the WWD Website, “a record 19 percent of the ad buy is going toward digital platforms, including Facebook, in 15 markets, and dominant portals and search engines in China (largely Tudou and Baidu) and South Korea (Naver), together having the potential for 66 million impressions. Digital ads will link to Xmarkyourspot.com, a destination for all materials and videos featuring the four models, allowing consumers to see behind the scenes and hear them speak.”

“Teasers for the digital campaign begin later this month, leading to a full reveal on March 1 to coincide with print and outdoor ads, which also have some digitally advanced elements. Ads in GQ will have an augmented reality component allowing consumers with Webcams to view 3-D effects. All in-store visuals will have QR codes that, when scanned with mobile phones, link to videos,” WWD added.

Director John Frankenheimer suffered a major career setback in 1966 when “Seconds” opened to wildly mixed reviews and then bombed at the box-office.

The dark and experimental movie was just a tad ahead of its time — the following year would bring “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate” and a whole new wave of challenging Hollywood films.

“Seconds” is a horror fantasy about the ruthless American pursuit of eternal youth and endless “lifestyle” options.

A burned-out middle-aged Scarsdale businessman (John Randolph) is offered a chance for a second life through a mysterious New York company that guarantees a new face (and body) through plastic surgery and then a relocation into a new home and career.

The catch is that there is no going back — a cadaver is used to provide the cover of an accidental death and estate money is secretly transferred to the new “you.”

So, the overweight and balding businessman Randolph goes into surgery and comes out the much younger and trimmer Rock Hudson, who is relocated to an artist’s colony in Malibu (where he falls for Salome Jens, above).

Hudson gives a very powerful and poignant performance, but his casting probably worked against the picture in 1966. The audience for his light 1960s comedies was appalled by the horror of “Seconds” and the “serious” film audience had no interest in a “Rock Hudson movie.”

Frankenheimer wanted to have Laurence Olivier play both halves of the role, but Paramount said the Brit wasn’t a big enough star (!) After both Glenn Ford and Kirk Douglas turned the movie down, Frankenheimer heard Hudson was interested, but only if his participation was limited to the “after” scenes.

“Seconds” has slowly gathered a cult following and critics have come to regard it as one of Frankenheimer’s career high points, just under the peerless “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Rinne Groff takes us to the intersection of history and show business in her very powerful new play, “Compulsion,” which is getting its world premiere production at Yale Repertory Theatre.

The show opened to the press Thursday night and will be running through Feb. 28.

Groff tells the little-known story of the wrangling over the dramatization of the diary of Anne Frank after the book became a huge best-seller.

Author Meyer Levin — whose popular books included “Compulsion,” about the 1920s era thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb —played a key role in launching the diary in this country.

Frank’s journal was published in Europe in the late 1940s but there was little interest in the book here until Levin — with the support of Anne’s father Otto — pushed Doubleday.

Levin wanted to write the introduction, but the publisher lined up Eleanor Roosevelt instead in the hopes of broadening the audience beyond a Jewish readership.

Doubleday arranged for Levin to review the book on the cover of The New York Times Book Review — despite the fact that he had a personal interest in the material — and that rave helped the diary become a major U.S. best-seller.

That’s when the trouble started for Levin as his plans to write the play were undercut by Doubleday and Otto Frank — who wanted a bigger name involved and also wanted to lessen the “ethnic” aspects of the story.

In the play Levin is called Sid Silver and he is being given vivid life in New Haven by Mandy Patinkin (left), who captures both the rage and the despair of an artist who is denied the project he believes would be the summation of his career and his life as a proud Jew.

When he was young, Levin ran a marionette theater in Chicago and Groff uses that fact for the daring device of having Anne Frank portrayed as a puppet. Marionettes are also used for re-enactments of scenes from the eventual hit Broadway version of the book.

Director Oskar Eustis does a great job of mixing the hyper-realism of the scenes set in the  New York City literary and Broadway worlds of the 1950s with the surreal elements dealing with history and myth supplied by the marionettes. 

Hannah Cabell (below) contributes excellent work in two roles — as Levin’s French wife and as Miss Mermin, the writer’s ally-turned-nemesis at Doubleday.

Stephen Barker Turner plays all of the other male roles in the show and is especially good in Act Two (above) as an Israeli director who wants to stage Levin’s script a decade after the Broadway production and the subsequent George Stevens film version.

“Compulsion” is a rich mix of history, entertainment world gossip, and a man’s obsession over a work of art that doesn’t really belong to him. It’s a terrific show that that is already set to move to the Berkeley Rep in California and then the Public Theater in Manhattan.

For ticket information, visit www.yalerep.org 

Adriana Trigiani’s just-published novel, “Brava, Valentine” (Harper) is the second book in a trilogy about a hard-working New Yorker named Valentine Roncalli, but I can testify that it works just fine as a stand-alone experience.

Trigiani is one of those best-selling writers I’ve been hearing good things about from friends for a long time, but have just never gotten around to reading.

Fortunately, I had to read “Brava” to prepare for an interview with the writer last week — she’ll be at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison next Thursday — and now I’m dying to get to “Very Valentine” and the rest of Trigiani’s backlist.

One of the blurbs on the new novel calls the writer’s approach “Sex and the City” meets “Moonstruck” — that’s a fairly good description but Trigiani adds many elements of her own devising to tell a story of work and romance and family in contemporary Manhattan (with great side trips to Italy and Argentina).

Valentine is just in the process of taking over the family business when “Brava, Valentine” begins. Her beloved widowed grandmother has found love in her native Italy and has decided to marry and relocate there, leaving the small Greenwich Village shoe factory to her granddaughter.

Valentine wants to expand the business from a high-end custom-made shoe operation into a larger concern that can supply department stores as well as specialty shops.

Our heroine believes she has found love in Italy — at the wonderfully warm and funny wedding that opens the novel — but when she gets back to New York she is not sure what role a sexy older man named Gianluca can play in her life (although he does write fantastic love letters to her).

“I know about women who drop the lives they lead in one place to go and be with a man in another,” Valentine confides to us in an early chapter.

“I’m fascinated by their impulse to choose the possibility of love over the certainty of work. I would never leave my work behind for a man, no matter how scrumptious he might be. I am, however, interested in romance on my own terms, and in my own time. I’m no master craftsman when it comes to love, strictly an apprentice in training.”

Although this is the second volume of a trilogy, I never had the feeling of being lost in the middle of a story. The writer’s supporting characters — especially an ex-Paul Taylor dancer named June Lawton who works in the shop and is a quintessential hip New York City senior citizen — are so vivid that we are drawn to them right away.

Trigiani sucks a new reader right in with strong characters and situations that are immediately involving — it’s a bit like the feeling I had when I started watching “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” in their second seasons. The shows hooked me on the spot and then I went back to see what I had missed.

Emmy Rossum has been knocking around in movies for several years — she was the ingenue opposite Gerard Butler in “Phantom of the Opera” and was lost in the ensemble shuffle of “The Day After Tomorrow” — without making a very strong impression one way or the other.

That’s why it is so sad that the Philadelphia-shot indie, “Dare,” fell through the cracks after it debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. Rossum gives a terrific performance as a high school senior who is determined to become an actress.

Alexa is the most committed actress in her class, but is drawing on almost no life experience.

When a successful stage actor friend of her teacher comes to Philly, Alexa gets a wake-up call when the actor tears apart her scene work as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Alan Cumming plays the merciless actor who tells the girl to go out and start taking risks in her own life so that her acting won’t be just an academic exercise.

Alexa decides to see what might happen between her and Johnny (Zach Gilford), the surly fellow student who was pressured into playing Stanley by the teacher.

On the sidelines is Alexa’s best friend, Ben (Ashley Springer), who realizes he is attracted to Johnny as well.

Writer David Brind and director Adam Salky explore this situation with humor and taste (and more than a little eroticism).

Rossum anchors the film with one of the most believable coming-of-age performances in recent movies. She seems to grow up right in front of our eyes. Acting younger than your actual age is very tough and projecting believable “innocence” is even tougher, but Rossum does both things expertly.

The Image Entertainment DVD that is being released Tuesday has above-average extras — including Rossum’s rather amazing screen test and the short film by Brind and Salky that inspired “Dare.” It’s fascinating to watch the way the key scene between Johnny and Ben (below) was played in the short — the unknown Philly actors who did the original film are very good, but Gilford and Springer take the scene to a higher level.

Playbill.com announced some great stage news earlier this week. The epic Sarah Ruhl drama, “Passion Play,” that opened the 2008-2009 Yale Rep season is being produced in New York City in April.

Mark Wing-Davey — who staged the New Haven production — is putting together a new, site-specific version at the Irondale Center inside the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

Previews of the Epic Theatre Ensemble show will be starting April 27 with an official opening set for May 12.

I loved “Passion Play” at Yale Rep but understood why it was not immediately snapped up by a commercial producer in New York — the three-hour piece calls for a large cast and considerable scenic elements.

Yale Rep did the show at the larger University Theatre rather than the Rep stage and it was an awesome production of Ruhl’s trilogy of interconnected plays about the ways in which the Christ story has been dramatized for the last 500 years.

Act One takes us to England in 1575 where the queen has just banned stage tellings of the Passion, and the people in a small northern village are having their livelihoods threated since they are famed for an annual staging of the Bible story.

Act Two moves us to Germany in 1934 and the Oberammergau Passion which draws tourists from all over the world. Ruhl shows us the role the pageant played in reinforcing the anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.

The third play is set in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1969 and 1984 where locals put on a popular Middle American version of the Christ story.

“Passion Play” is about acting and the theater as well as religion and politics.

Ruhl dramatizes the struggle of artists in three different eras in coming to terms with a stage representation of “the greatest story ever told.”

The playwright also examines the provocative and perhaps unintended sexual undertones in the story of the “virgin” birth and a handsome messiah’s relationship with prostitutes and eager male followers.

“Passion Play” never directly addresses the hugely popular Mel Gibson filmed “Passion” a few years ago, but Ruhl does explore the way show biz has benefitted from the sensational violence and near-nudity involved with various Bible tales and the end of Christ.

The cast was quite extraordinary from top to bottom, with several ensemble members returning to work on the play after doing earlier productions in Chicago and Washington, D.C. Polly Noonan played a “village idiot” in the first two acts who is actually much wiser than most of the folks who mock her. In Act Two, the encounter between the “idiot” and a Nazi in the forest becomes one of the most subtle and horrifying dramatizations of the Holocaust that I’ve ever seen in a film or on stage.

Kathleen Chalfant (above and below) delivered a tour de force performance as the queen, Hitler and President Ronald Reagan.

Ruhl’s Reagan has tinges of parody in it, of course, but she also draws us in close to the actor-turned-president in a fantastic and very brief aside in which Reagan confides to us about his love of public performance: “I always liked the light from the camera. The wall of light gave me privacy, made me feel comfortabke. A light would go on and I would relax. All I saw was the light.”

“People are afraid of actors,” the president continues. “They’re afraid we’re good at lying. I’ll let you in on a little secret. We’re really just EXTRA good at telling the truth.”

I can’t wait to see this play again. I hope Wing-Davey is able to use some of the amazing actors who made the New Haven production so special.

The great film and stage producer David Brown died yesterday at the Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife Helen Gurley Brown.

He was 93 and enjoyed an incredible career that included co-producing some of the biggest hits of all time, including “Jaws” and “The Sting.”

It was Brown and his partner Richard Zanuck who launched Steven Spielberg’s big-screen career with “The Sugarland Express” in 1974. Even though that movie wasn’t a box-office hit, Zanuck and Brown were knocked out by the young Spielberg’s talent and decided to gamble on him by giving the filmmaker “Jaws” which opened the following year.

The producing team stuck by Spielberg when costs went through the roof – mostly due to problems with the mechanical shark – and the studio pushed the duo to bring someone else in. They backed their director, and the rest is Hollywood history.

Brown and his wife more or less created the modern woman’s magazine when she took over the moribund Cosmopolitan in the 1960s and turned it into a huge (and continuing success). David wrote many of the sexy cover teasers that made the magazine irresistible to the young women of the 1970s and 1980s.

I met Brown once when his film “Deep Impact” was about to open in 1998 and found him to be one of the wittiest and most direct movie people I’ve ever met. He laughed when asked about “Myra Breckinridge” (below), the X-rated 1970 disaster that led to him and Zanuck being fired from their production chief jobs at 20th Century Fox.  ”I still like that movie!,” he said, with a wry grin that acknowledged his minority view.

Yesterday, the Esquire Website re-posted a terrific Cal Fussman piece from 2001 in which Brown shared some of his life lessons. Here are a few of the wiser nuggets:

Work yourself to death. It’s the only way to live.

I’ve never loved a dumb woman. The brain, combined with moderate good looks, is an overwhelming aphrodisiac.

Exercise is pushing away from the table.

The screenwriter George Axelrod advised that when you were breaking off a love affair, always do it in a restaurant. He thought that most women would be constrained. I wouldn’t count on that.

It doesn’t comfort me to know that with my passing there will be no pain. I don’t want to leave the party.

Marriage to a woman more successful than you can work, provided you take pride in her achievements and are secure in your own. For years I was known as Helen Gurley Brown’s husband, and, frankly, I loved it.

Good health is beautifully boring.

When you visit the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History and you realize the enormity of the universe and the insignificance of Earth and all who live on it, it’s hard to conceive of a god in our own image.

Never sleep with anyone who has more trouble or less money than you have.

The most unlikely women are the most explosive lovers.

Bad news is rarely exaggerated, and first reports of disaster can always be trusted.

A man’s attitude toward money is indicative of his meanness or generosity of spirit.

If you’re going after mass circulation, you must have mass appeal.

I once took Mae West to a restaurant. Nobody bothered her. When we left, there was a standing ovation. That’s respect. That’s love. It’s overdone now.

Never be the first to arrive at a party or the last to go home, and never, ever be both.

If you’re broke, you’ll live forever. If you’re rich, you’ll die tomorrow. To confound the fates, live it up, but little by little.

Success is a man who has the love and trust of a woman, a job he likes, and an abiding sense of humor. Success is a man whose children love him and have made him proud of them. Success is a man who dies at home in his sleep after a good life.

Eat just enough to fill out facial wrinkles.

What do I love about Helen? Her infinite configurations. Like a cat. No expression, movement, or phrase is ever quite the same. She’s loving and funny and infinitely caring and has a work ethic that is admirable. She has a great laugh. What I love about her is everything. Everything.

Marriage is a lottery. I had been married twice when I met Helen. I had no belief that a marriage would work at that point. I was attracted to Helen sexually. I didn’t know she was a wonderful woman. That’s the luck of it. It’s forty-one years now, nearly forty-two. There isn’t a day when I don’t smile when I think of her. We’re still lovers. My great anxiety is that one of us is going to lose the other at some point, and it’s a thought I can’t bear to dwell on.

The biggest tip I’ve ever given? 100 percent. I always keep my hand over the bill so that Helen can’t see it. She says, “How can I submit this bill on my expense account with this tip!”

I get good tables.

After seventy, if you wake up without pains, you’re dead.

R.I.P.