Contributors

The author of this month’s story on Los Angeles architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, Mitch Glazer already had firsthand familiarity with one of his subjects. The Sierra Nevada house he shares with his wife, actress Kelly Lynch, was designed by Neutra in 1959. Researching the intense and often bizarre partnership between the two modernist masters, which began in 1925 and is chronicled on page 220, Glazer—a screenwriter whose credits include Scrooged and last year’s Great Expectations—thinks he may have discovered material for a future script. “Their relationship was so powerful, it was almost cinematic,” he says. “There could definitely be a movie about them.”

Dominick Dunne is at work on a novel entitled A Solo Act and a coffee-table book called The Way We Lived Then, based on his Hollywood scrapbooks from the late 50s to mid-60s. But he spent much of January and February covering the impeachment trial in the Senate. “Both politics and Washington are entirely new areas for me,” he says. On page 392, the V.F. special correspondent pays tribute to Mike Romanoff, whose restaurant, Romanoff’s, was a legendary meeting place for Hollywood’s A-list, and whom Dunne recalls as “the most likable rogue I ever met.”

During her 14 years at Vanity Fair, features editor Jane Sarkin has produced 170 covers, 14 Halls of Fame, and countless celebrity features and portfolios. “I talk, phone, and produce,” says Sarkin. This special Hollywood issue, like the four previous ones, was the result of thousands of phone calls and hundreds of meetings and lists. Her future plans? “On Monday, March 22, the morning after the Oscars, I begin on the Hollywood issue, year 2000.”

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Although Bruce Handy grew up in California—where owning a car is almost more important than owning a home—he admits he was never much of an auto buff: “I was the pathetic kid driving his parents’ station wagon.” Writing this month’s profile of George Barris, creator of the original Batmobile and custom-car designer to the Hollywood elite, didn’t improve the situation. “I asked Barris if there was anything he could do to my ’89 Honda Accord to make it cooler,” Handy says. Barris couldn’t oblige.

A former editor and writer at Spy, and most recently a senior writer and columnist at Time, Handy is joining V.F. as an editor and writer next month.

When David LaChapelle found out that his Hollywood-portfolio subject, Mike Myers, had shaved his head for his upcoming movie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, he enlisted some Hare Krishna friends to help him shoot Myers as an Eastern demigod. They instructed LaChapelle on the details—gold body paint, robe, mehndi and bindi hand and face markings—and Myers “really went for the whole thing,” says LaChapelle. The photographer’s latest book, Living Large at Hotel LaChapelle, will be published by Callaway Editions this fall.

For contributing editor Kim Masters, the re-emergence of Michael Ovitz in Hollywood—and his war with the talent agency he co-founded—was “a story about brother versus brother, and partnerships that break up violently.” Masters adds that her challenge lay in distinguishing fact from spin. “A lot of agencies would secretly love to kill Ovitz—or do millions of dollars’ worth of business with him. They want to bad-mouth him, but they don’t want you to know that they want that.”

As co-author with Nancy Schoenberger of an Oscar Levant biography and of Hollywood Kryptonite, about the mysterious death of the original TV Superman, George Reeves, Sam Kashner is versed in Hollywood’s dark side. But the inspiration for his article on page 378, chronicling the star-crossed romance between Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr., was musical. “It’s always been a guilty pleasure to listen to Sammy Davis songs like ‘The Candy Man’ and ‘Talk to the Animals,”’ says Kashner, who teaches at the College of William and Mary. His epistolary novel, Sinatraland, is out this month from the Overlook Press.

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After graduating from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, contributing photographer Firooz Zahedi (here with Loretta Young) worked as a diplomat at the Iranian Embassy in Washington—developing skills which translated surprisingly well to his second career. “Washington and Los Angeles are actually very similar,” he says. “Stars need to be handled ... diplomatically.” A sampling of Zahedi’s touch can be found in the Hollywood portfolio. He has also shot the promotional posters for films including Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty.

Sam Staggs can’t say exactly how many times he’s seen All About Eve— “I wish I’d scratched a mark on the wall above the video machine every time I watched it”—but he’s pretty sure that he is now the de facto leading authority on the film. Staggs’s behind-the-scenes look at the backstabbing and bitchery during the making of the film, on page 284, is being turned into a book which St. Martin’s will publish next spring, to coincide with the movie’s 50th anniversary.

Contributing editor Patricia Bosworth describes her investigation into the 1958 stabbing of screen goddess Lana Turner’s mobster boyfriend as one of the hardest she has tackled: “I needed to fit all the pieces of the mystery together.” She remembers reading the press coverage as a teenager in Hollywood, finding it “both sordid and sexy, which of course attracted me.” The author of three books, Bosworth is working on a short biography of Marlon Brando for Viking Penguin.

When Todd S. Purdum moved west in 1997 to be the New York Times Los Angeles-bureau chief (and the husband of V.F. contributing editor Dee Dee Myers), he made a point of going by Jimmy Stewart’s house on Roxbury Drive. “If I was in Beverly Hills, I would just quietly drive past, look at it, and think, Gee, he must be upstairs there, kind of lonely.” An encounter with another Roxbury resident, Rosemary Clooney, led Purdum to evoke, in his story on page 192, the heyday of a street where neighbors included Lucille Ball, Ira Gershwin, and Jack Benny.