Innholdsfortegnelse for 10/2-10/15/17 i New York Magazine

1 “Could we be on the cusp of an IVF baby-boom?” Stephen S. Hall asked in his cover story on the reproductive potential of “abnormal” embryos (“A New Last Chance,” September 18–October 1 ). A few readers pointed out that the feature was groundbreaking in the field: @Alison-Rosen tweeted, “In the very specific and not-all-that-openly-talked-about IVF world this is fucking huge.” But Eric For-man, medical and IVF laboratory director at Columbia University Medical Center, responded, “Few experiences are as devastating to a couple struggling with infertility as finally achieving a positive pregnancy test only to have their dreams crushed by miscarriage. There is incontrovertible evidence that chromosomal abnormality is the leading cause of age-related infertility, failed IVF, and miscarriage. Our ability to safely biopsy and test the genetic status of…

ONE OF THE TRUEST THINGS IN LIFE is that where there are nerds, there is a cappella. Thus, as Silicon Valley has taken over as the nerd capital of the world, the hills outside of San Francisco have come alive with the sound of unaccompanied vocal harmonies. “There’s like a real Silicon Valley tech-company a cappella scene,” says Deke Sharon, the genre’s current éminence grise, known for arranging the music for the Pitch Perfect movies. Come December, he will reprise his role as the master of ceremonies at the fifth annual “Techapella,” at which vocal groups comprising employees of the area’s largest technology companies will put aside their devices and their dreams of conquering the world in order to perform renditions of popular music onstage at Redwood City’s Fox Theatre…

Most of the dishes at Ann Redding and Matt Danzer’s brand-new fast-casual spot, Uncle Boons Sister, take their cues from traditional Thai street food. Not so the fried-chicken larb. That one was inspired by KFC—a food-court KFC, no less, inside a Bangkok mall. “We were eating at all these great spots with my family, and they know where to go—all the little hole-in-the-wall places,” says Redding. “And then I saw the KFC fried-chicken larb.” When the photo of the Frankendish caught Redding’s eye, she was smitten, but the purist members of the food crawl forbade her from trying the thing, and it remained stuck in her head like a catchy pop tune. “I really wanted to have it,” she says. “So we decided to make our own rendition.” On the…

FOR A SIMPLE pasta sauce, the combination of tomato, cream, and vodka is one of the great culinary mysteries of our time. Its murky origin and fundamental chemistry have been scrutinized but not resolved by culinary historians, food nerds, and fans of Italian-American cooking everywhere. Things we know: Vodka sauce has been around since at least the ’70s. It’s commonplace in New York but virtually nonexistent in Italy, where it might have originated but never caught on. And vodka sauce is enjoying some degree of hipster celebrity with today’s reclamation of all things retro at restaurants like Carbone, where the signature pasta just happens to be “spicy rigatoni vodka.” The pink potage is a mainstay of the city’s enduring red-sauce joints, but you can also find it at fast-casual-pasta newcomers…

JUDGING A SCREENPLAY from a finished film,” an apocalyptically disheartened screenwriter once told me, “is like arriving at a murder scene and instantly deciding that the victim had it coming.” It’s a pretty good line, although the writer will no doubt notice that I’ve mangled it a bit for my own purposes. Imagine his frustration at getting rewritten for the worse by someone who has the final say, multiply that by a thousand, and you can guess how most screenwriters feel when they see a critic airily surmise that a director “did what he could with a weak script” or watch themselves get blasted for clumsy dialogue they didn’t write, a choppy structure that replaced their graceful one, or a good character turned into an inexplicable one by the vagaries…

Director Sean Baker and screenwriter Chris Bergoch, who collaborated on Tangerine and their latest, The Florida Project, use interviews with real people to build “scriptments”—and also make sure they nail the local slang. CHRIS BERGOCH: We would write the treatment, then go down [to Florida] and research, talk to a few people, then add to the treatment. And then slowly the treatment becomes a scriptment—through actually writing in dialogue. SEAN BAKER: We always wanted Floridians to feel properly represented and to like the film. BERGOCH: Sean’s gonna laugh, but I was raised on Star Wars and Indiana Jones. In Star Wars, we are hearing Luke and Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru talk about moisture vaporators and all these technical terms—like the audience would know what they’re talking about. And it’s…

ON THE DAY that I visit Liz Hannah’s leafy Hancock Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, there’s a fuchsia truck blocking her street. What looks like a hipster ice-cream vendor turns out to be something called the Headshot Truck, a mobile photography studio where aspiring actors can get their head shots taken. It’s possibly the most Hollywood thing on four wheels—and a garish reminder that, inside many of these houses, showbiz dreamers still await the day when their big break will arrive. For Hannah, that break came a year ago, in the form of a phone call a few weeks before the presidential election. Hannah, who’s 31, had written a screenplay on spec called The Post, about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and executive editor Ben Bradlee and their 1971 decision…

COLIN FARRELL loves to tell the story of how he wasn’t Yorgos Lanthimos’s first choice to star in The Lobster—2015’s great, odd cinematic treat, set in a dystopian future in which single people are turned into animals (or hunted for sport) if they can’t couple up, and the start of a string of collaborations between the two. He’s telling it right now, sitting across the table from Lanthimos in a hotel lobby in Toronto. Another actor had been cast but had to drop out, “and I capitalized!” Farrell says in that lyrical Irish brogue of his, cackling with delight. Later on, I ask Lanthimos why he wanted to work with Farrell, and Farrell jumps in again—lest anyone give him any credit: “Because he lost his actor! They were threatening to…

As a black female executive in Silicon Valley, you’re something of a pioneer. How do you think you’re going to impact the culture of Uber? One way is just being here. I think we should all leave our fingerprints where we are. For me, it’s like there’s nothing that can remain the same or the way it was once you’ve touched it. It, like, physically changes. There is a narrative that’s being told about you and what you’re doing. What’s that? Well, that Uber is fucked and you’re going to save it. I see it very differently. I just feel that I’m part of the reflection of what already exists. I don’t consider myself a unicorn here. Really? Look around. That’s part of the challenge. We spend so much time…

Even in future-obsessed, Pollyannaish Silicon Valley, you can see some dark clouds on the horizon, which is one reason it’s boom times for the bomb-shelter business. If you don’t want to live alone in an underground bunker, though, you better be able to write a good application essay. WITH ROCKET MAN and the Dotard lobbing threats over the Pacific, prepping for hellfire has become that rarest of American phenomena in 2017: a unifying activity. “During Obama, you had people worried about civil unrest,” says Gary Lynch over the phone from Texas, where he manages Rising S Bunkers, which will install a steel shelter beneath your backyard—starting price: $39,500. “Now people are worried that Trump won’t back down if someone pushes him into a war.” But for those wanting membership in…

What gallery do you work for? Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin—it’s my father’s gallery. I never really wanted to go down that nepotistic path of taking over the gallery—which I still don’t think I want to do. But for now, I really enjoy working there and traveling to places like New York. You don’t have a German accent. My mother’s from here, and my father’s German. They met in New York when my dad was working at the MoMA. At the time, my mother couldn’t stand New York, and they were debating whether to move up to Westchester, where her parents lived, or get out of the city and move to Berlin. I’m happy they didn’t choose Westchester! LIGHTNING ROUND Age: 24. Neighborhood: Mitte, Berlin. Roommates:…

FOR THE Solo Houses project, in which French developer Christian Bourdais gave 15 architecture firms free rein to design holiday homes in the Matarraña region of Spain, Tokyo-based Takei Nabeshima Architects proposed an inverted concrete pyramid, rising out of the ground. It has three separate floors and a pool and looks like a Bond villain’s mountain lair, but the flipped form is practical: The house acts like a tree, providing ample shade in the hot Mediterranean climate. To principal architect Makoto Takei, the house—construction will likely begin next year—is “a building somewhere between nature and architecture.”…

A FEW YEARS AGO, the screenwriter John August—who wrote Go, Charlie’s Angels, Big Fish, and many other films and is the co-host of the highly influential Script notes podcast for screenwriters—stumbled into a tidy metaphor for the state of movie screen writing today. He was struggling to find a film idea to pitch to Disney. August, who has since co-written a Will Smith–starring version of Aladdin, understood, as he says, what “Disney would actually make: princess movies, adaptations of live-action cartoons, Star Wars, and Marvel; there’s not a lot else.” Then he remembered it also made films based on theme-park attractions (Pirates of the Caribbean, Tomorrow land, Haunted Mansion, Mission to Mars, and The Country Bears), so he developed a pitch based on his favorite ride, Tower of Terror. The…

TWENTY YEARS AGO , a major studio apocryphally commissioned a study to determine which kind of movies made the most money, with the understanding that it would concentrate on that type exclusively. It turned out there was an answer: sequels. You see the problem here. You can’t simply add a 2 or II or Chapter 2 to a title. First, you have to make Part One. This dilemma was acutely illustrated this year with The Mummy: a textbook case of what happens when a studio’s drive to build franchises, tentpoles, and universes rearranges a screenplay’s DNA and, with the addition of a major star’s demon semen, produces a mutant more horrifying than anything onscreen. Some background: The Mummy is the first product of something that Universal Pictures has labeled the…

Just a few of the enticements American cities have offered to lure the tech behemoth’s second headquarters. From: TUSCON, AZ  A 21-foot cactus sent as a gift: “It’s a hardy plant. It can grow up to 40 feet. And that’s Tucson.” FRISCO, TX A promise to build an entire city around Amazon: “We’ve got a lot of available land.” DETROIT, MI  A partnership with a Canadian city, to circumvent border issues: “It might be an international, sort of two-country effort. That’s something nobody can compete with.” GARY, IN  A valentine-like ad in the New York Times: “Why Not Northwest Indiana?” Indeed.…

The Ecocapsule, an 88-square-foot pod-on-wheels that runs on solar and wind energy, is for those looking to drive completely off the grid. Originally conceived by Slovakian firm Nice & Wise Architects for a 2009 New York design competition, the project was later featured on the website Inhabitat, and popular demand pushed the Ecocapsule into development. Now, after securing investment from financial backers, it’s ready for preorder ($94,000 at ecocapsule.sk) and will be available for delivery to the U.S. by the end of the year. (A mass-produced, cheaper version will be available in 2018.) Solar cells and a wind turbine provide power, while the Ecocapsule’s shell is thermally insulated and the domed roof allows rain and dew to be collected, then filtered for drinking water. Inside, there’s a kitchenette, a waste-separating…

THE GREAT SANDWICH WAIT is finally over on Clinton Street, where Dewey Dufresne—father of Wylie—has opened the sandwich shop he first teased us with six years ago at a Feast of San Gennaro pop-up. The BYGGYBEEF, a pomegranate-braised flavor bomb with pickled vegetables, American cheese, and a special sauce of sorts, is the main attraction. Dufresne’s return to this stretch of the Lower East Side is noteworthy not only for sandwich aficionados but also for local culinary historians, who will remember that he was an original partner at 71 Clinton Fresh Food, the restaurant that launched both his son’s career and Clinton Street as a serious foodie destination. From 1999 through wd~50’s closing in 2014, the pioneering, iconoclastic, and welcoming Dufresnian spirit distinguished the tree-lined corridor, and with the opening…

“TO MAKE A GOOD FILM,” said Alfred Hitchcock, “you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” Yet while it’s easy to find (and argue over) lists of the greatest films ever, it’s difficult to find a list of the greatest screenwriters. We decided to remedy that—by polling more than 40 of today’s top screenwriters on which of their predecessors (and contemporaries) they consider to be the best. What is the essence of the screenwriter’s art? Plot? Dialogue? Character? All that and more? We left that judgment to those who know best—the writers. Here are their selections (ranked in order of popularity, with ties broken by us) and a representative testimonial for each. THE JURY  Scott Alexander Ed Wood, Man on the Moon Judd Apatow Knocked Up, The…

1. Don’t Pander “Hollywood people who don’t know this market have a stock strategy: Set a location in Asia and write a role for a Chinese star. But look at The Great Wall: They chased the Chinese audience and wound up with a film that didn’t appeal to either American or Chinese audiences.” 2. Do Go Big “What works in China is what works internationally, writ large: big, blockbuster, visually driven entertainment. The Fast & Furious movies are enormously successful there. They don’t want a talky comedy. They want to see Vin Diesel driving off the Burj Khalifa.” 3. Don’t Try to Mix Styles “The foundations of Chinese storytelling are totally different than Western ones. There’s an element of what we might see as broadness—so if you try to impose…

THIS MONTH, items from the estates of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, ranging from furniture to clothing to knickknacks, are being put up for auction—including their collections of shooting scripts. Below, a page from Fisher’s script for The Empire Strikes Back, complete with her handwritten annotations (“What does that mean”). If you’re interested, the opening bid for the script is set at $30,000.…

> Casablanca “Please consider alt ending we discussed—i.e., Ilsa gets off plane at last second, runs across tarmac to Rick, etc. My assistant sent you a YouTube clip from the end of The Bodyguard for reference.” > Rashomon “While we like the ambition of the structure, we’re worried it could get a little gimmicky. Consider a more linear approach?” > Citizen Kane “We get that the sled thing is obviously a placeholder, but we should try to nail this down in the next draft.” > Taxi Driver “There’s a general concern that Travis’s character is a bit of a downer in places. In this next pass, let’s look to amp up his humorous side (à la ‘organizized’— funny, let’s have more of this!!).” > Chinatown “I’m afraid we’re all a…

THEATER 1. See Too Heavy for Your Pocket The costs of resistance. Roundabout Theatre, through November 19. Playwright Jiréh Breon Holder and director Margot Bordelon present a story of the clash between the personal and the political during the civil-rights movement. Holder, who is Tennessee-born, sets his play in 1961 Nashville, where his 20-year-old hero has just given up the transformative opportunity of a college scholarship to join the Freedom Riders. SARA HOLDREN ART 2. See Mel Kendrick: Woodblock Drawings That’s art, not just process. David Nolan Gallery, 527 W. 29th St., through October 28. It’s a hard truth that most of the artists who emerged from the late-1970s process-art scene never really evolved. A wonderful exception is Mel Kendrick, 68, who is still all process, all the time, but…