| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
A legendary character actor on the viral line reading he gave Michael Mann; Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen; and almost no election content. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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If by some chance you haven’t yet inundated yourself with election-week content to the point of aversion, please enjoy GQ’s election-night dispatches from “New York’s biggest cryptocurrency and art-adjacent edgelord election watch party,” a smoking-ordinance-defying watering hole in Chicago, the fabulous Sunset Strip, a Champagne-less evening at Keith McNally’s Balthazar, and the side of a road in Wisconsin.
Look, it’s been kind of a weird week. Even last weekend feels like a completely different chapter, or maybe a whole different book. Remember when Kamala Harris went on SNL and Donald Trump did that thing with the microphone? Feels like a decade ago, doesn’t it? We were all so young then, like a CGI-de-aged Tom Hanks playing an archetypal baby boomer.
But we need not dwell on topic A, at least for a little while. Somehow, in between compulsively refreshing our timelines, we did manage to publish some culture stories this week. Michael Mann’s The Insider—still somehow an underappreciated Mann despite a typically locked-in ’90s Pacino performance and some peak-of-the-peak-era work by Russell Crowe—turned 25 on Monday, and Jake Kring-Schriefels talked to Crowe and Pacino’s costar Bruce McGill about wiping that smirk off your face. After we got a glimpse of Jeremy Allen White in character as Bruce Springsteen, five Springsteen experts evaluated JAW’s born-to-run fits, and then the actual Bruce showed up to set to bless White’s performance. Yes, Boss!
Meanwhile: Jaharia Knowles talked to fellow GQ contributor Ilana Kaplan about her new book, Nora Ephron at the Movies. Ephron’s films—When Harry Met Sally…, which she wrote, and Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, both of which she wrote and directed—basically defined the modern romantic comedy, a crowd-pleasing and commercially super-successful category of movie now relegated to the twilight of straight-to-streaming Netflix and the Hallmark Channel because Hollywood doesn’t care about rom-coms anymore unless they’re about Deadpool and Wolverine sitting in a tree. Kaplan points to the success of Anyone But You and The Idea of You as proof that there’s still an audience out there for this sort of thing; whether it’s an audience the studios feel like courting is a different question.
Speaking of uh, courtship, and now vanished eras: Groupies: Women of the Sunset Strip From the Pill to Punk, the new season of KCRW’s award-winning podcast docuseries Lost Notes, delves into the wild lives of icons like Lori Mattix, Dee Dee Keel, and Pamela Des Barres, pivotal ’70s LA rock-scene figures traditionally relegated to supporting-character status in stories about the swaggering male rock superstars they hung around with. Mattix notes on the show that she’s been mentioned in 37 different rock biographies that she knows of—but as director Jessica Hopper told GQ contributor Paula Mejía in a Q&A this week, when the women of the Strip show up as voices in traditional rock histories, “the only thing they get asked about is the intimacies of their relationships with these guys, or if they were in love with them. A Led Zeppelin book isn’t going to give us a chapter on Lori that tells us the stuff we want to know.” Groupies puts its subjects at the center of the story for the first time, presenting their experiences (with rock stars and otherwise) in all their complexity. As host and co-creator Dylan Rupert puts it to Mejía, the show is about “justice for the groupies…[as] in understanding how integral they were to the development of rock music, not just as people who are witnessing it. But people that were pushing it along and contributing in ways that are hard to quantify, but still so valuable.” —AP
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