Michael Schulman

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Michael Schulman

Nigel Smith, an Australian architect, first went to Fire Island Pines in 2004, when he was twenty-eight and newly out of the closet. “It was heaven,” he said, not long ago. He spent days in a Speedo and met people at “tea,” the roving party where gaggles of gay men dance, drink, and flirt. He started visiting every summer.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Richard Brody |Michael Schulman |Sheldon Pearce |Helen Shaw

In the nineteen-seventies, U.C.L.A.’s Ethno-Communications program, founded to increase minority enrollment, attracted a critical mass of young Black filmmakers. They quickly began to make a widely varied range of independent films that were unified by their bold and intimate attention to Black lives and history, and by distinctive cinematic forms to match; the group eventually gained the nickname the L.A. Rebellion.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Michael Schulman

Seth Rogen’s first exposure to Hollywood executives was at the age of seventeen, when he was starring on “Freaks and Geeks.” His mentor, Judd Apatow, had invited him to listen in on a notes call with the network. “Judd was, like, ‘These people are going to sound crazy, but just know that they could be fired at any second, and they’re operating from a place of sheer panic,’ ” Rogen recalled the other day. Over the years, he got to know this strange L.A. species.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Michael Schulman

The actress Leslie Bibb cuts a figure like the aerodynamic swoosh of a Brancusi, or a gazelle. She is five feet nine, with a blinding smile and blond hair styled in a knifelike bob—glamazon features that pair oddly with her singsongy voice. You might cast her as a cheerleader (which she played on the WB show “Popular”), or a flight attendant (the horror flick “Flight 7500”), or a country-club belle (“Palm Royale”). But Bibb, who is fifty, doesn’t like to be pigeonholed.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Michael Schulman

Candy Clark came to Hollywood at the dawn of the seventies, a spunky twentysomething who’d fled her conservative Texas home town and taken up modelling in New York. Though she was indifferent to acting, she nabbed a part, as a boxer’s girlfriend, in the John Huston film “Fat City,” plus a movie-star beau—her co-star, Jeff Bridges. She settled into Bridges’s Malibu home but kept a bungalow off Fountain Avenue, close to auditions.