New York Awards

The 1999 New York Awards

David McCourt
On the Line

Almost all of this decade's entrepreneurs have faced their own Goliaths: Jeff Bezos had Barnes & Noble, and Netscape had Bill Gates. David McCourt of RCN has chosen one of the most formidable giants -- phone companies. And while they're playing technological catch-up, upgrading and repurposing existing lines, McCourt is laying hundreds of miles of state-of-the-art fiber-optic cable and raising the money to pay for it -- a $1.7 billion investment from Microsoft's Paul Allen will keep McCourt's crews busy till 2003. RCN is nothing less than the country's most sophisticated and capacious broadband network to date, offering combined Internet, cable, and phone service for a combined 30 percent less than prevailing rates (though thus far it serves only about 120,000 New Yorkers, most in upper Manhattan). "I want to build a company from scratch around the Internet," he says in his unreconstructed Boston accent, "instead of taking a phone company and turning it into a cable company." Of course, waiting for broadband is about as excruciating as waiting on your 28.8Kbps modem -- but when it happens, you may have David McCourt to thank.
Jod Kaftan

Philip-Lorcadi Corcia
Snapshot of the Artist

Photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia's distinctive style -- moody and film-noirish, with a mysterious quality that comes from being somewhere between reality and fantasy -- is inescapable in fashion magazines today. Which is interesting, because he rarely does fashion shoots. "Good work is complex and perverse," he says. "The world is a lot harder to manipulate and manufacture than the media world lets on." Many other photographers, however, have followed his lead, mixing models and real people in cinematic situations (and wearing, of course, fabulous clothes). Meanwhile, diCorcia, whose photos can be found at Pace\MacGill Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art struggles with his medium and his muses. "My work," he says, "is about trial and error and mistakes."
Maura Egan

Amir Malin
Baby, You're a Witch Man

Before this year's Sundance Film Festival, three-year-old Artisan Entertainment had a shrewd, even enviable, business: Using income from the company's formidable video library -- which includes cash cows like It's a Wonderful Life, Basic Instinct, and Dirty Dancing -- Artisan bought up and distributed art-house fare like Pi and Permanent Midnight. But when Mark Curcio, Bill Block, and Amir Malin -- Artisan's CEO and co-presidents -- went to Park City and caught the midnight screening of The Blair Witch Project, things went through the roof. "We began working on the marketing the day after we signed the deal," says Malin, who oversees the company's acquisitions and distributions out of its TriBeCa headquarters. The campaign was as crafty as their business model -- a carefully created "grassroots" groundswell of Internet-based interest -- and by the end of Blair Witch's eighteen-week theatrical run, it had become the most profitable independent film in history, pulling in over $140 million and landing its creators deals for a sequel and a prequel. With Artisan poised as the next serious challenger to Miramax and New Line, Malin knows all eyes are on him. "Pi was the only successful film to come out of Sundance last year; Blair Witch was the only successful film to come out of it this year -- and we were the only ones who bid on either," says Malin gleefully. "So naturally, everybody'll be watching and wondering, 'What's Artisan gonna do this year?' We're gonna play mind-fuck games!"
Ethan Smith

Natasha Lyonne
Best of Class

In this year's summer giggle-and-sex-fest American Pie, Natasha Lyonne played a high-school senior who got enough of a kick out of her frantic adolescent schoolmates to attend the prom but who'd already figured out that in the end it matters very little whom you lost your virginity to and what you wore to the party. It was a role that perfectly suited this gifted actress -- after all, she's made a name for herself standing out among the popular girls in that ultimate high school, Hollywood. "I don't know that I'm better," she says. "I think it's just that I'm weirder." A native New Yorker, Lyonne made her auspicious debut as Opal on Pee-Wee's Playhouse when she was just 6. More recently, she starred in Slums of Beverly Hills, playing Vivian, a young woman with a surplus of intelligence and maturity grappling with the pressure of growing giant breasts. More recently, after deferring her admission to NYU for a fourth time this fall ("I really do plan to go there -- I want to study philosophy"), Lyonne finished work on But I'm a Cheerleader. Thank God she's anything but.
Ariel Levy

Douglas Atkin
Stock in Trade

Douglas Atkin has nothing personal against the floor brokers of the New York Stock Exchange -- he just thinks his company can do exactly what they do, only much cheaper. The boyish-looking 37-year-old is chief executive of Instinet, the oldest and largest electronic-stock-brokerage firm in the U.S. "The rules of engagement in the securities markets have been designed by and for the middlemen," Atkin says. "My job is to help create a new future for the industry." The industry seems worried. Over the summer, both the NYSE and nasdaq began, somewhat frantically, exploring plans to go public in order to finance their own electronic exchanges -- or possibly make a deal with Instinet. Atkin himself is just watching and waiting, with the confidence of a man who knows he holds the best cards. "We are the largest pool of electronic liquidity by a long shot," he says, "and if you don't do a deal with Instinet, you're opening the possibility that your competition will."
David D. Kirkpatrick