Your Daily Intel Editors Are Characters in ‘Definitely, Maybe’!Last night, we went to the Ziegfeld premiere of the movie Definitely, Maybe. It’s that movie where Ryan Reynolds tells his daughter (Abigail Breslin) about all the women he’s loved over the years. Now, we won’t give away the ending, because that would be sort of like telling you what happens in the final episode of the show How I Met Your Mother. Okay, it would be exactly like that. So, anyway, one of the characters that Reynolds dates in the course of his storytelling is a lovely young writer, played by Rachel Weisz. She’s struggling to make it, and on her second meeting with Reynolds (at a book party for her literary-legend ex-boyfriend), he asks her what she’s been up to lately. And she replies, wait for it
I’m writing these really dumb items for New York Magazine while waiting for my big break to come.
If you were sitting in the Ziegfeld Theater last night, at that very moment you would have heard — from the far reaches of the back of the audience — an audible shriek. That was us.
Definitely, Maybe [Official site]
party lines
Stephen Schwartz Dishes ‘Cluelessly and Recklessly’ About His Opera ProjectWhat is Stephen Schwartz doing in his downtime with the stagehands on strike? Getting an education. The Broadway composer and lyricist told us he’s still working on an opera (commissioned in 2006) to premiere in Santa Barbara in 2009. “It’s like going back to graduate school a little bit,” Schwartz said at the Enchanted premiere at the Ziegfeld last night. Schwartz revealed to us, for the first time, that the opera is called Cluelessly and Recklessly, and it is a psychological thriller. He said he adapted it from the British film Séance on a Wet Afternoon and is getting used to composing for singers who don’t use microphones — for him, the biggest departure from his Broadway work. “Like in Wicked, you know, the orchestra’s just playing away. Or in Enchanted, the orchestra’s just playing away and you turn the mike up and you hear the singers over the orchestra. In the opera you can’t do that. So you have to make sure there’s space for the singers. So that’s a different way of thinking about writing.” This is Schwartz’s first opera. “That’s why it’s so foolish for me to be doing this!” he said. You call it “foolish”; we call it “the only good theater news we’ve heard since the stagehands’ strike began.” —Amy Odell
gossipmonger
Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and Thy OwnNan and Gay Talese are at work on his and her memoirs about their allegedly open marriage. Jon Bon Jovi is not pleased an energy drink named Mijovi is selling well near his New Jersey residence. Ted Koppel dropped the asking price for his Potomac, Maryland, residence from $4.1 million to $2.3 million. Hillary Clinton complained about the traffic in the Hamptons during her fund-raising stint out east. Stand-up comic Phil Stellar entertained an audience at the Ziegfeld after a movie projector broke during a showing of Hairspray. Meryl Streep says she was kicked out of Yale Drama School for not working hard enough. Gwyneth Paltrow uses face cream that contains snake venom.