Celebrity Film Set Gossip with High‑Profile Names

Back on the set I tell Oliver that Graydon is willing to be in the film with lines. Oliver finds that intriguing. Oliver shoots the piano recital scene over and over again from different angles all afternoon. Financial wizard Don Marron saunters on the set to visit and Oliver spontaneously puts him in a scene chatting with Josh. Carrie Mulligan hangs out watching boyfriend Shia work. At sundown Julia Koch has to race from reel to real life and explain to her husband where she has been all day. (He loves it.) Chuck Pfieffer plants a "Page Six" item and the next day socialites begin calling me to get into the film. Thursday, November 5, Shun Lee Restaurant, West 65th Street Oliver shoots a crowded tight interior scene with Michael, Carrie and Shia, who are having an intimate Chinese dinner. Spontaneously, Oliver decides this is the perfect scene for Graydon Carter. After a flurry of calls, Graydon arrives on set, and playing himself, sashays by the table. Gekko jumps up to say hello and Graydon brushes him off with a few dismissive lines. Monday, November 9, 25 Broadway One hundred swells show up at the former Canard Shipping building, a massive Italianate hall, at the crack of dawn for the Alzheimer’s Ball, a grand charity event. Susan Hess and I are chauffeured downtown with our Vera Wang gowns and report to the VIP extra holding area where we join Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia in a bespoke dinner jacket, journalist Christopher Mason, songstress Yanna Avis, photographer Kelly Klein, art dealer Larry Gagosian's girl friend Shala Monroque in see-through Rodarte, beauty executive Olivia Chantecaille, producer Lawrence Robins, author Jackie Weld Drake, Vogue film critic Joan Juliet Buck, fashion consultant Jill Fairchild, CNN’s Felicia Taylor and Italian newsman Mario Calvo-Platero. Ellen Mirojnick and her costume department have assembled racks of the most expensive elaborate designer gowns and work at break neck speed styling while we wildly strip to our undies in a makeshift dressing area. Ellen pours me into a black tulle Marchesa with a enormous wired silver bow. Twenty hairdressers and make-up artists systematically work on 250 extras. A mile of tables are alternately filled with steaming coffee, fattening breakfast foods, hair sprays, mirrors, shoes and jewelry. It’s a madhouse of excitement. We are led to the part of the set used for the cocktail reception and placed around Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen stand-ins. Charlie has been flown in from LA for half a day's work to reprise his original character. He is now the highest paid television actor commanding two million dollars an episode of “Two and a Half Men.” Oliver arrives on the set greeting, examining, tweaking the shot and always pulling the prettiest girls closest to the camera. Michael and Charlie arrive from their trailers and run their lines as socials drift into their sight lines challenging their concentration on pages of dialogue. Oliver yells, "Action" as the extras aggressively jockey for face time. Charlie is not having an easy day and they do take after take. My corporate husband Chuck Pfieffer has gotten his real girlfriend Lisa Crosby in the film and my marriage has become a threesome. Sensing our concern of not making it onto the silver screen Oliver tells his first assistant director to seat a dinner table with Susan Hess, Jill Fairchild, Prince Dimitri, Chuck Pfieffer, Grace Meigher and Mario Calvo-Platero. He directs us to chat with each other turning left and right as the camera closely pans past our faces. Elsewhere on the set are John Buffalo Mailer, as Shia's character's best friend, Austin Pendleton, 94-year-old Eli Wallach and Natalie Morales. Also in this film are: the magnificent Frank Langella, as Shia’s boss, who throws himself in front of a train early in the film, Susan Sarandon as Shia’s real-estate broker mother, Sylvia Miles, who reprises her hilarious cameo as another real-estate HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021244