Evelyn Nesbit was arguably the twentieth century's first major celebrity. Before her 21st birthday, the model and girl-about-town found herself at the center of a love triangle that ended in 1906 with the Madison Square Garden rooftop murder of her former lover, famed architect Stanford White, at the hands of her millionaire husband Harry K. Thaw, and the ensuing trial and media coverage set a precedent for all future Crimes of the Century. In American Eve, which just hit bookstores, Hofstra professor Paula Uruburu shows how the exploitation of Evelyn's underage beauty in pursuit of fame strikes a prescient note. She spoke to Vulture about Nesbit's rise and fall.

I’ve been struck by how many news stories quote you for historical context about the Miley Cyrus photo flap.
I've become the resident expert on the degradation and lasciviousness of young girls [laughs]. Nothing's really changed in 100 years. I don't want to use the word serendipitous, but as I was writing the book — and it took ten years from start to finish — the parallels between Evelyn and current culture, be it Girls Gone Wild or Mean Girls or Britney and Lindsay, were hard to ignore. Evelyn's celebrity lasted from age 14 to 21, and her entire life was defined by that period.

For more than 40 years, underground animator Ralph Bakshi changed the rules of animation. His 1972 feature debut, Fritz the Cat, was the first animated film to receive an X rating. His fierce polemic against racism, Coonskin, caused Al Sharpton to protest the film's New York premiere. Now he’s the subject of Unfiltered, a new book and ongoing exhibition running at the Animazing Gallery through May 28. Vulture talked with Bakshi about his films and his mass-market protégé Thomas Kinkade.

You mentored Ren and Stimpy's John Kricfalusi. But we can never forgive you for giving Thomas Kinkade his big break.
That son of a bitch! Kinkade was the coolest. If Kinkade wasn't a painter, he'd be one of those cult leaders. Kinkade came into my office with James Gurney when I was looking for background artists [for Fire and Ice]. He's a good painter, and he did a spiel. He made all these deals. How he went out and did what he did is beyond my understanding now. He's very, very talented, and he’s very, very much of a hustler. Those two things are in conflict. Is he talented? Oh yeah. Will he paint anything to make money? Oh yeah. Does he have any sort of moralistic view? No. He doesn't care about anything. He's as cheesy as they come.

Speaking of which, I have a question about American Pop. Was Bob Seger's "Night Moves" intended as an anticlimactic conceit?
“Night Moves” sucks! I was furious! It was all wrong. I had a brilliant song in mind, but they just wanted too much money. I forget what it was. I've blocked it out. If I remember, I'll give you a call.

The strangest thing about Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto IV's New York simulacrum, is that it was all dreamt up in the Edinburgh offices of Rockstar Games' Scottish branch, Rockstar North. Over there, art director Aaron Garbut and his team rebuilt Gotham, pixel by pixel. We spoke to him about cheap GTA knock-offs, scary men in Brighton Beach bathrooms, and how his designers know how much change is in your pockets.

What are some of your favorite, small NYC details?
My personal favorite is our take on the National Club in Brighton Beach. We went there as part of a research trip. Russian karaoke versions of European pop songs, jellied sturgeon under cling film, and lots and lots of vodka. When we left, one of the ex-cops who was looking after us had gotten a little drunk and emotional. He confessed that if shit went down at some point during the week, he'd only be able to save one of our lives, and we should decide amongst ourselves who that should be.

I'm fascinated by the idea of this Scottish design team building another New York.
We're not trying to be accurate. We are creating a caricature, a dream of New York. It's a New York people imagine without necessarily having ever been there, or the one they remember when they leave. Liberty is a grotesque echo of the real New York; it's all the best and worst, exaggerated and distilled into a smaller, denser, dirtier, scarier place.

Picture a woman of a certain age in Bill Blass–type duds with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other, dropping dry-witted rejoinders, and Christine Baranski’s snub-nosed visage will probably come to mind. In plays (Rumors, Regrets Only), movies (The Birdcage), and, of course, Cybill — the nineties sitcom where Baranski played Cybill Shepherd's astringent best friend Maryanne Thorpe — her timing and shading have brought such women to life. Now, in her return to Broadway after a long seventeen years, she brings those deadpan chops to the role of Berthe, a dry-tongued maid in the revival of the early-sixties farce Boeing-Boeing, in which a crew of American bachelors living it up in mod Paris scheme to bed stewardesses from as many countries as they can without getting caught. Through the mayhem, Baranski, who turns 56 today, provides the crankily unimpressed commentary. With ten minutes before a rehearsal, she talked to Tim Murphy about the play, which opens this Sunday at the Longacre.

The play is set in the early-sixties Playboy era, when women were depicted as baubles for men to collect. How did that sit with you?
I saw it in London with Meryl Streep on my second-to-last day of shooting Mamma Mia!. We sat there and laughed, delighted. I call it the "What's New, Pussycat?" school of male chauvinism. It's kind of insouciant and charming and you simply can't get away with that now. Skirt-chasing and chauvinism is no longer comedic, but back then, it kind of was.

Just 24, Andrew Garfield has already broken out in Britain as a hot young stage star — and now he's breaking into film, with roles in Lions for Lambs, The Other Boleyn Girl, and the lead part in the British indie Boy A, currently at Tribeca and opening in New York later this summer. Garfield plays Jack, a young convict who spent most of his adolescence in jail as a result of a childhood crime — and his contained, tense performance more than confirms theater-world rumors of his talent.

Boy A takes on a pretty archetypal story — an ex-con gets out of jail and readjusts to life on the outside. How did you make it feel fresh?
I try to just try to bring as much of myself to it as possible — which I guess is trying to make it as unique as possible. To not to be acting in a film you know.

What do you mean by that?
I try to avoid acting at all costs, all those obvious tricks and traps you can fall into.
It's just so easy to do a performance that's been seen before. My main concern was: Why the hell does this girl fall for him? We had to bring in some more lightness, some more joy and funniness between them. I think it's wicked. I'm really chuffed, actually. I wasn't sure if it was gonna be any good or not.

Seasoned dancer Desmond Richardson’s intimidatingly statuesque form isn't all he has going for him — a former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, he regularly guests with the world's premier companies and soloists (when he's not busy co-directing the groundbreaking New York modern ballet troupe Complexions Contemporary Ballet with visionary choreographer Dwight Rhoden). Tomorrow, Complexions performs the world premiere of a new production of Stravinsky's Pulcinella with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Richardson spoke to Vulture about his unique relationship with Rhoden, and the persistently pasty face of contemporary ballet.

You’ve said that you started Complexions to bring some diversity and modernity to the ballet world. Have you seen a difference here in the city?
It still totally needs to diversify. And, unfortunately, in my opinion, it's a little stale in all the companies at the moment. I would just prefer to see the dancers really doing a mélange of things, instead of one particular style. We can't stay in the forties and the twenties and the... 1400s. We're just not there! Why not investigate different ways of movement? That's what dance is: it's an investigative art form. Otherwise, audiences are just coming to see dancers do phenomenal lines that they really don't connect to.

As we're sure you're aware, this week sees the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, the highly anticipated latest iteration of the popular violence-based, sandbox-style video game series. This time, the action is set in Liberty City, a living, breathing replica of New York. Dan Houser, Vice President of Rockstar Games and co-writer of GTA IV, spoke to Vulture about building a nuttier, dirtier Gotham.

So the gaming industry has changed a lot since the last GTA ...
Yeah, fuck all this stuff about casual gaming. I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We're hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies. We always said: We’re not going release a large number of games. They’re going to have the production values of movies. They're gonna be about themes that interest us whatever the medium, instead of the weird, special video game–only themes that too many people make — orcs and elves, or monsters, or space. We felt you could make a good game and have it be about something we could actually relate to. Or aspire to.

When Brazilian director José Padilha’s Elite Squad premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, the critics’ knives were out in full force. (“A recruitment film for fascist thugs,” shrieked the normally-restrained Variety.) Then it went on to win the fest’s coveted Golden Bear. Now Tribeca gets its shot at Elite Squad, which tells the story of two friends from Rio’s hopelessly corrupt police force who join a highly-disciplined, ideologically pure commando force devoted to violently rooting out drug dealers from the slums. And its director (no fascist demagogue, as best as we can tell) is happy to handle another round of controversy. Vulture sat down with Padilha, who is in town to present his film and — take that, critics! — serve on the Tribeca documentary jury.

Did you anticipate the kind of controversy your film would provoke?
Yes. People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy. For example, when you say to people who do drugs: "You're financing a heavily armed drug dealer. Don't act as if you have nothing to with the problem of violence in Brazil, because you do." That confronts them in a way they're not used to. So if you're that guy who likes to do a joint now and then and has to review this film for a newspaper, how are you supposed to take this? Either you look back and deal with your hypocrisy, or you dismiss it.

One of the most shattering documentaries at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Kassim the Dream brings viewers into the world of Ugandan-born boxer Kassim Ouma, the 29-year-old former International Boxing Federation light-middleweight champion, and his struggle with his deadly past. Abducted from school at the age of 6 and forced to become a child soldier, Ouma fought in the National Resistance Army during Uganda’s harrowing “bush war” in the eighties, engaging in brutal acts that still haunt him to this day. Later, he discovered boxing and fled for the U.S. to try his hand at going pro. Since then, under the tutelage of his manager Tom Moran (whom he affectionately calls “Uncle Tom”), Ouma has become not only a renowned athlete but also an outspoken advocate for African issues. We spoke to him during a visit to New York for the Tribeca premiere of Kassim the Dream.

You say at the end of the film that you’re still trying to become the normal boy you once were. Do you think you’ll ever get there?
I’m still looking. I will always be looking. Put yourself in my shoes. You’re a child and you’ve been abducted. You don’t know nobody — don’t know who loves you and who doesn’t. They tell you to do horrible things, and you have to do them. They order you to kill your best friend — and if you don’t do it, they’ll kill you. What would you do? You kill him, to survive. So, I can never forget it. Every day, I think about it. I’m trying, but I don’t know if I’ll ever overcome it.

After nearly a decade of self-imposed silence, Bristol, England’s Portishead return with a new album, appropriately titled Third. Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley’s noir electronica, along with Beth Gibbons’s plaintive vocals, have always garnered the band critical accolades, while — for better or worse — designating them the torchbearers of that quintessentially nineties music genre, trip-hop. The weekend of their only U.S. appearance, at California’s Coachella music festival, Barrow and Utley spoke with Vulture about what the press gets wrong, why Gibbons still isn’t talking, and ending up on the same stage as fucking Limp Bizkit.

Why did you guys choose to play Coachella?
Adrian Utley: Well, they’ve been ringing us now for six years to do it. We never seemed relevant before because we were in the studio making an album, so the idea of going out to play old material at a festival, while in the middle of writing new stuff, would have felt really shit. But now it feels right.

But why is that the only U.S. date?
A.U.: There’s nothing mysterious or sinister about it. We just don’t want to keep touring forever. The more touring you do, the more it informs your music, but it can also kind of thrash the fuck out of you so you don’t really want to see anybody else in the band ever again.