Wonderful, in-depth article on film director Nancy Meyers, whose new film, It’s Complicated (starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin), opens this week.
NANCY MEYERS may be a singular figure in Hollywood — may, in fact, be the most powerful female writer-director-producer currently working (not that there’s much competition) — but that doesn’t appear to give the 60-year-old blonde a whole lot of social clout. On a Monday evening in late October, for instance, it didn’t stop the owner of Vincenti, a small, much-in-demand Italian eatery in Brentwood, from asking Meyers whether she would mind switching tables come 8 p.m. True, ours was a prime corner booth, and the owner, a fierce-looking woman with coal-black hair who would fit nicely into a Fellini film, assured Meyers that she was only being asked this favor because the person who requested the table was an investor in the restaurant. (He turned out to be Howard Weitzman, a lawyer whose clients have included O. J. Simpson and Michael Jackson.) But it still gave me pause. You know, the whole sexual-politics thing rearing its timeworn, fractious head: a powerful man trumps any woman. (“When you describe how influential I am in Hollywood,” Meyers ruefully observed to me, “say we were thrown out of our booth.”) As we got up to move at the appointed hour, John Burnham, an agent and executive vice president at International Creative Management and an old friend of hers who happened to be sitting at the table next to ours, expressed outrage on our behalf, offering to confront the owner personally. But Meyers just shrugged and laughed, stopping on our way to a table in deep steerage to trade hellos with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer. – From NY Times