WITH BENJAMIN NUGENT
Girl Gone Wild
Never let it be said that Drew Barrymore doesn’t give as good as she gets. Though she’s been quite well behaved since linking up with Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti, Barrymore’s wild-child days are apparently far from over. At a Duplex press junket at the Essex House last week, Harvey Fierstein invited Barrymore, who stars in the film as Ben Stiller’s wife, to check out his “huge titties” in Hairspray. “Your huge titties?” Barrymore shrieked. She then lifted up her shirt and treated him to a display of her huge titties. The film, directed by Danny DeVito, also stars Justin Theroux, Saturday Night Live’s Maya Rudolph, and Eileen Essel. No word if DeVito caught a glimpse of Barrymore’s flash.
Biggs Mistake
Manhattan real- estate mogul Sheldon Solow doesn’t suffer baby-faced actors gladly. At the premiere of Woody Allen’s Anything Else, members of Jason Biggs’s entourage found Solow and his wife sitting in two of BiggsÂ’s reserved seats. “What is wrong with you people?” Solow snapped when asked to move. “Are you crazy? I own this place!” Solow’s mouthpiece, Howard Rubenstein, says Solow was provoked. “Two fellows yelled at him. They threatened to call security and put their hands on him. If they were gentlemen, it would have been an easy discussion.” Meanwhile, Will Ferrell is anticipating more than his first role in Woody Allen’s next movie. The actor’s wife, Butterfield’s auctioneer Viveca Paulin, is four months pregnant with their first child. Ferrell met Allen for the first time at the camera test earlier this month, and it sounds like the actor did his homework: “Armageddon is a great Woody Allen movie,” he deadpans. “And Footloose—I love all the classics.”
Liberal Plot
A yet-to-be-named radio network is being created by wealthy lefties at this very moment. Determined to reclaim the airwaves from Rush, they’ve brought in veterans of Comedy Central’s Daily Show With Jon Stewart, including Lizz Winstead, the show’s co-creator. “I’m the most excited I’ve ever been since I lost my virginity,” she says about returning to New York to work on the project. Winstead was recommended to the network by Al Franken, who is rumored to be up for a job as host. Winstead would say only that Franken’s been consulting with the network.
Tipsy Technique
Perpetual party girl Tara Reid is now an artiste. Her first painting, with Peter Tunney, has just been unveiled in a redecorated room at Capitale. Tunney tells us it all started a few months ago with a boozy lunch at Cipriani (precluding our usual Tara Reid Protocol of asking “Was she drunk when she … ?”). “It was a raucous day, and we took Bellinis over to my gallery,” he says. Reid picked up a brush and started helping Tunney paint the words NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED on a small canvas. “I glued the very brush that touched Tara’s hands on the painting,” he adds.
Bedtime Stories
John Cameron Mitchell, star of the hit rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, has been shopping around a script for a children’s film called Nigh. It’s about a boy who lives in “an America where creativity is squelched” and no one is ever told bedtime stories. “All the studios passed,” Mitchell laments. Might that have anything to do with the fact that Mitchell is currently directing Shortbus, AKA Sex Film Project (“We prefer that people don’t call it porn”), in which the still- unnamed actors do what most actors only pretend to do for the camera? “It’s purely the budget,” says Mitchell, who thinks a kids’ movie wouldn’t be much of a departure from the world of Hedwig, an East German drag queen who underwent a botched sex change. “Hedwig is a fairy tale.”
Towering Ambition
Miramax co-founder Bob Weinstein is buying a $12.75 million apartment in the fabled Beresford on Central Park West. The five-bedroom quadruplex is one of the building’s three private towers. (The others are owned by David and Helen Gurley Brown and John McEnroe.) The pad features terraces on three floors and a “great room” with triple-height ceilings and arched windows. Broker Lorraine Dauber of Stribling & Associates declined to comment.