The Screengrab

Charles  H. Joffe, a talent agent, business manager, and producer best known to casual filmgoers as the producer of a number of Woody Allen's best films, has died in his home town of Los Angeles at the age of 78. 

Felled by a persistent lung ailment, Joffe had been ill for some time, but since the 1950s, he had been a powerhouse wheeler and dealer in Hollywood and New York.  His Rollins Joffee talent agency, founded with partner Jack Rollins,  was the first to book Lenny Bruce, and later handled the careers of some of the biggest names in comedy, including David Letterman, Dick Cavett, Robin Williams, Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Robert Klein, and the team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May.  He had a reputation as a tough, old-school, cigar-chewing negotiator whose gift for big-money contracts often saw his clients turning over huge profits within a short time of signing with him.  

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We happened to be reading a biography of Led Zeppelin just before seeing the footage of Shia LeBeouf's recent appearance on the David Letterman show, where he talked about his getting arrested on his twenty-first birthday for making serial nocturnal appearances at a Walgreens while "pretty wasted." And that may have had something to do with our first reaction, which was sort of along the lines of, they sure don't make bad boys the way they used to. We like LaBeouf, we wish him well, and we wouldn't want him doing anything that might force Harrison Ford to put the lad over his knee. But still, you only turn twenty-one once, and a lot of people turn twenty-one before they have access to fame, riches, and admiring young women whose appreciation for your natural delighfulness is thrown into even greater relief by all those riches and fame you're storing in the glove compartment. We're not saying that you ought to get arrested to commemorate the event. But if you do get arrested, the circumstances should in no way involve a late-night shopping trip in quest of Clearasil.

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There comes a time when all of us have to put our skateboarding, glue-sniffing, bum-fighting, Meryl Streep-pushing, smoking-in-bed-and-burning-down-the-house days behind us, and if the New York Times is to be believed, that time has come for Harmony Korine. Perhaps the only man on earth who counts Werner Herzog and magician David Blaine among his close friends, Korine no longer wanders the mean streets of New York asking strangers to punch him in the face. He’s now married and living in Nashville, and as Dennis Lim reports, “this onetime fixture of the downtown party circuit did not seem nostalgic for the old days.”

The old days were interesting, though – some would say more interesting than the movies he made then.

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A business story by Brooks Barnes in The New York Times examines how the writers' strike is affecting social interaction "in the giant high school cafeteria that is Hollywood." As Barnes points out, "Only a rarefied circle of writers, of course, has the ability to truly mingle with Hollywood’s corporate royalty. The vast majority of writers are average folks who manage a middle-class existence or are unemployed in their chosen profession at any given moment. The union says the average income for a member is $60,000. But the union also counts as members dozens of creators of hit television shows, who can take home upwards of $5 million a year, and writers who command fees of $1 million for a screenplay or more." These are the ones who frequent the same restaurants, hotels, and luxury resorts as the bloated capitalist overdogs who run the studios, and who are finding themselves huddled in whispers about the greedy moneybags at the adjoining table at the Four Seasons, not the first place where you might expect to hear voices raised in a rousing, impromptu chorus of "Joe Hill." The strike does seem to be bringing inch-stained wretches of different tax brackets together: when David Letterman, having worked out a deal with the WGA to use his own writing staff (paid by his production company, not CBS), returned to the air last night, the ten "striking writers" who marched onstage to read the Top Ten list included Nora Ephron, the celebrity journalist turned Hollywood player (Sleepless in Seattle, the screenplay of When Harry Met Sally). In the meantime, writers and executives who were once nominally friendly and ducking past each other at grocery stores and their kids' school assemblies and being seated "selectively" at Campanile, whose manager, Jay Perrin, told the paper, “I don’t think a fistfight would break out. It is more like people cracking jokes about each other with more bite than normal.” The strike also crosses family lines; Barnes cites examples of striking writers who happen to be married to network executives, leading us to wonder if maybe Nora Ephron is taking notes for a future wacky romantic comedy while she's down there in the trenches. That might be reason enough to hope the strike will never end.