Clearly, the place to have been earlier this month was the TriBeCa Film Center.
There Brian De Palma was holding by-invitation-only auditions for socialites to portray socialites in the film version of Tom Wolfe`s ”The Bonfire of the Vanities.”
The movie will star Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis; this time the search was on for bit players and walk-ons.
The lines they recited were from scenes at a Metropolitan Museum of Art party and a restaurant similar to Mortimer`s, the Upper East Side restaurant frequently referred to as the social set`s ”home away from pied-a-terre.”
”I can`t believe I`m so nervous,” confessed the usually imperturbable Nan Kempner, who was asked to say something like ”If he goes to jail he should write a book; it would be a pity if he didn`t.”
”Was my reading bitchy enough?” she wanted to know. She was assured it was. ”I hope so,” she said. ”That`s about as bitchy as I can get.”
The filming is to be in Los Angeles in early summer, and it`s said that Warner Brothers will foot the bill for the airfare, hotels and expenses.
”I can always use a free trip to California,” Kempner said. ”Who can`t?”
For her audition she wore a basic sweater and skirt, but ”I assume if I get the part, they`ll give me a costume designed by Mr. Anyone Expensive,”
she said.
Anne Slater, famed for her lagoon-blue eyeglass lenses, journeyed downtown with Glenn Bernbaum and William Norwich.
Bernbaum, the owner of Mortimer`s, provided a limousine, white wine and society sandwiches; Norwich, a columnist for The Daily News, provided the biting comments.
He admitted that ”when the publicists rang me up to audition, I thought: `Oh, wow! Hollywood, here I come.` Since then I`ve heard that there are only a handful of parts and billions of contenders.”
His audition lines (more or less): ”Don`t worry about the press. They`re to be disregarded.”
De Palma asked him to read the lines twice.
Norwich wasn`t sure if that was a plus or a minus. In any event, this was not his first brush with possible stardom.
”I`ve done extra work on soap operas,” he said. ”Usually I`m sitting at a far table in restaurant scenes. My greatest opportunity was in an airplane scene. I was sitting right behind a woman supposedly having a nervous breakdown. I`ve always believed that if I had more hair, I could have been a star.”
Bernbaum was asked to be a bit more animated, or as De Palma put it,
”Glenn, excuse me, but the operative word is action.”
Slater had nothing but praise for the director.
”Brian is a dazzling man, patient and easy and all the things a good director should be,” she said. ”Of course, I`ve never met any other film director before.”
Slater`s lines had a familiar ring: ”I wonder if she`d like to chair the museum benefit next year,” and ”I always thought they were such a dull couple.”
Nixon Richman Jr., an actor, read his lines with Jerry Zipkin.
Richman was impressed.
”Jerry`s a good sport,” he said. ”He was having such a good time he told his chauffeur not to wait and sent him off. Jerry should have his own TV show.”
Otto Neubert, a soloist with the New York City Ballet, was asked to read for the role of a Russian dancer who speaks only French.
Neubert is German, but that didn`t seem to bother anyone. He said,
”Encore de champagne, s`il vous plait,” impressively.
Slater was called back a few days later for a second reading. ”They`re probably just being kind,” she said modestly.
”They`ll go back to Hollywood, forget about us and wind up using central casting-society stereotypes like Margaret Dumont or Billie Burke, people Middle America relate to as society.
”I think that if out-of-towners wandered into Mortimer`s and didn`t recognize Jackie, Brooke, Betsy or the usual group, they`d never realize they were looking at top-drawer social types.”
