Roman Coppola. (Daniel Torok/PatrickMcMullan.com)

“I’m looking for a strong voice and somebody that’s completely original,” actor Michael Pitt told The Observer last Thursday. “Something crazy. Something I haven’t read before." He was referring to the benchmark that vying screenwriters must reach in order to nab a winning spot in the Four Stories screenplay competition, of which he is a judge.

A cocktail hour at the W New York Downtown commenced the competition, which beckons burgeoning scribes to submit work in a global contest sponsored by Intel and the W and curated by director Roman Coppola.

Despite the abundance of circulating champagne glasses, we noticed the cocktail-less Mr. Pitt was out of step with of his Boardwalk Empire character, the typically imbibing Jimmy Darmody.

“I learned a very long time ago that when somebody’s got a tape recorder in their hand you shouldn’t have a drink in yours,” Mr. Pitt told us coyly.

Though we were left with no other option than to speak with a sober Mr. Pitt, who will sit on a panel with Chloe Sevigny, Aubrey Plaza and Mr. Coppola to select the three winning screenplays (the fourth story will be made by Mr. Coppola himself), he wasn’t alone in his taste for a novel script. Just as we retreated to the W’s balcony for a bit of fresh air and a brief hiatus from the crowded room, we spotted Mr. Coppola and queried the director on what he will seek in the script submissions.

“I’m hoping that people do something that’s true to them and unique to them,” he told us. “I’m personally interested in things that are audacious and far out.”

Donning tinted glasses at an evening soiree, we gathered Mr. Coppola was most definitely attracted to a unique aesthetic value. The director, who was staying at the W, divulged to The Observer that he is looking forward to seeing how the screenwriters implement the setting at one of four possible W Hotel locations (Doha, the Maldives, Mexico City or Washington D.C.) and incorporate Intel’s Ultrabook as a prop, two requirements of the contest.

“Obviously, a hotel suggests adventure and romance and travel and things that have a certain unknown quality,” he said. “A computer, less so.”

As we waited for the evasive (and perpetually “on her way”) Alexa Chung and a fittingly elusive David Blaine, Intel’s Johan Jervoe confidently assured us the Ultrabook’s concise design made it a contender to fit inside our small purse, as we were not among the large Birkin-toting cocktail crowd. (Mr. Coppola perhaps wasn’t as sold on the aesthetic worth of a computer.)

The scripts for the ten-minute shorts are due August 30, and after the three winners are announced in September, Mr. Coppola's filmmaking company, The Directors Bureau, will oversee the production. The films will enjoy a debut at red carpet events at select W locations and online distribution.

Jon Abrahams and Mickey Sumner. (Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

“I knew of you,” Jon Abrahams admitted boldly to his Missed Connections costar Mickey Sumner, describing their relationship before making the indie romantic comedy. He turned nonchalantly back to The Observer. “I was stalking her.”

Last night, in a sea of swarming guests and red carpet entrants, The Observer snagged a short cocktail conversation with Ms. Sumner and Mr. Abrahams before they sashayed toward the packed screening at the School of Visual Arts Theater, the first of the week-long GenArt film festival. (Full disclosure: The Observer Media Group is a sponsor of the festival.) Waris Ahluwalia, who plays Pradeep in the film, mingled nearby with other movie patrons as we caught up with Ms. Sumner and Mr. Abrahams.

Though the pair displays palpable chemistry onscreen, we wondered aloud whether it transcended off screen as well.

“It’s awesome!” they said simultaneously.

About the breakneck speed at which the indie film was written (co-writers Martin Snyder and Marnie Hanel banged out the script in six weeks) and filmed (17 days, no re-shoots), the actors were surprisingly gung ho.

“She had one day before she got the part and then started shooting literally one day later,” Mr. Abrahams said. “That can be nerve wracking.”

“He’s a pro,” Ms. Sumner interrupted. Mr. Abrahams echoed similar praises for his costar.

Before they could continue cooing admiration for each other, we interjected to focus on their matching cocktail attire (a purposeful choice, we assumed). Ms. Sumner boasted a mid-length, long-sleeve white Prabal Gurung dress with a soft watercolor design. Though we didn’t see her father Sting on the red carpet (we heard he snuck in), we think her modest attire would have been father-approved. And apparently, it also appealed to costar Mr. Abraham, whose white, button-up shirt served as an understated complement to his leggy costar’s apparel.

“I planned around her,” Mr. Abrahams admitted. “I said, ‘What are you wearing?’ She said mostly white, so I said, ‘Alright, I’ll wear a white shirt.’”

Mr. Snyder, also the film's director, joined our cocktail banter.

“They were perfect for it,” Mr. Snyder said of the two stars. “Johnny and I go back. I’ve always been a big fan of his, and Mickey's. It was honestly just a feeling in the pit of my stomach. Having tea with her, I just knew she was the one.” The film is Ms. Sumner's first feature-length film, but she has recently been cast to play Patti Smith in the upcoming movie, CBGB.

We caught up with Marc Lotenberg, CEO of GenArt, who said Mr. Snyder’s film was chosen for more than his movie-making chops.

“In today’s world, it’s not just about being a producer or a director or even an actor,” Mr. Lotenberg told us. “Like, what do you do to take your career to the next level?”

He cited Mr. Snyder's social media savvy and business skills as well as the ability to boost morale around the film. Mr. Lotenberg added that the dexterity of the cast (noting Mr. Abrahams’s DJ skills featured in the film) also enhances the artistic quality.

“You have all different walks of life as a cast, which I think is also important,” he said.

That being said, we queried Mr. Snyder about what he hoped the audience would take from his film

“I wanted to make something that is funny and is love,” he said, “And takes place in New York City.”

FluxBlog, a unique pinprick on the blogosphere upstarted by Matthew Perpetua (who will start his gig as BuzzFeed's first music editor next Monday) that satiates the MP3 appetite of the music niche, celebrated its 10 years “of perfect tunes” at Housing Works Monday evening, inviting speakers like Gawker’s former co-editor Emily Gould and an editor at Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield, to each play a carefully selected single for the relaxed crowd.

“He was like, ‘I’m so excited someone’s going to talk about a song that’s so uncool to admit you like,’” exclaimed Amanda Petrusich, recounting a remark she received from Mr. Sheffield at the start of the evening.

Ms. Petrusich was, like the other speakers summoned to speak at Housing Works, sharing her love for a song she had specially plucked from her mental music list. For many of the speakers, the songs they chose spoke to them on some unique level. Ms. Petrusich, now an author and senior contributing editor at Paste Magazine, chose "NYC" by Interpol to describe her initial 12 months in New York City.

“My relationship with New York was antagonistic, and somewhat destructive and combative and certainly psychically exhausting,” she lamented. “There’s nothing easy about anyone’s first year in New York.”

She took a moment to recount the times she had to divert her gaze from a man “doing digestive business” on the sidewalk and another moment when she had to fight to keep her air conditioner from falling out of the window, before refocusing on the band.

“They’re dark and kind of intensely slash inadvertently dapper and deeply, deeply mysterious with their suits and their haircuts and their nocturnal kind of Lower East Side-y skin,” she said. “I found them both inspirational and terrifying.”

Amy Rose Spiegel, music writer for Rookie, took the stage to play "Nearer than Heaven" by Delays. Unlike the other speakers, who remained seated or positioned in a ready stance by the mic while a segment of their song played, Ms. Spiegel immediately began dancing and nodding her head to the music.

Though her head bobbing seemed to come naturally, she said her music selection didn’t.

“That feeling of walking into a record store and being really overwhelmed by all the possibility of choice,” Ms. Spiegel said, comparing the experience to selecting the night’s single. “You’re thinking, ‘Oh my god, what do I like? Do I like anything? Do I like nothing?”

Though Ms. Spiegel admitted her attachment to the song came after a romantic partner introduced her to it, she also noted that it reminds her of falling in love for the first time, or simply “crushing out” on someone.

Ms. Spiegel’s reasoning for song selection differed slightly from Ms. Gould’s. The former Gawker co-editor chose Martha Wainwright’s cover of "Love is a Stranger," a very different kind of love song.

“It’s a song about romantic obsession, and it’s about this sort of feverish, out-of-control, irrational, uncontrollable variety of love,” Ms. Gould said, also noting the apt title for the album: I Know You’re Married, But I’ve Got Feelings Too.

“[Music] gives you that experience vicariously,” she continued. “It gives me that experience every time I listen to the song.”

Mark Richardson, Pitchfork editor-in-chief, played "How to Rent a Room" by Silver Jews while Sean T. Collins, a music and comic critic and a fervent Nine Inch Nails advocate, played the band’s pre-comeback song, "Leaving Hope."

“In essence, 'Leaving Hope' is the summary statement of the first 13, 14 years of Nine Inch Nails,” Mr. Collins said. “It’s also a farewell song that has never been reprised.”

The music previews culminated with a pick from Mr. Sheffield, who sang along with the Stephen Malkmus recording of "Malediction."

“I wanted to do a song by Stephen Malkmus. I think it is one of the flagship FluxBlog artists. Matthew writes about it him a lot, it’s fair to say,” Mr. Sheffield joked to a nodding Mr. Perpetua. “Matthew is one of the few writers who blows him harder than I do.”

And with that reasonable insight in tow, Mr. Perpetua let Mr. Sheffield finish his speech before cranking a classic tune for the audience to analyze: R. Kelly’s "Ignition (Remix)."

Download the evening's musical offerings here.

The playlist:

1. Matthew Perpetua: Scissor Sisters, “Paul McCartney”
2. Emily Gould: Martha Wainwright, “Love Is A Stranger”
3. Heather D’Angelo: Electrelane, “The Valleys”
4. Mark Richardson: Silver Jews, “How to Rent A Room”
5. Amy Rose Spiegel: Delays, “Nearer Than Heaven”
6. Sean T. Collins: Nine Inch Nails, “Leaving Hope”
7. Amanda Petrusich: Interpol, “NYC”
8. Dick Valentine: Mark Mallman, “True Love”
9. Rob Sheffield: Stephen Malkmus, “Malediction”
10. R. Kelly “Ignition (Remix)”

sgrothjan@observer.com

Mr. Andersen reads an excerpt from his book, True Believers.

Wednesday evening, Alison Eighteen played host to 50 guests, hungry for Alison’s cuisine, full wine glasses and the readings from two authors, Kurt Andersen and Meg Wolitzer. It was the first installment of The Pen and The Plate.

The Pen and The Plate is a collaboration by Woodstock Writers Festival and Alison Eighteen, who aimed to create a literary salon series that brings best-selling authors to mingle with fans and read excerpts from their works during a three-course meal.

Martha Frankel, executive director of Woodstock Writers, said the idea to pair books with food came to her after learning that Alison Eighteen was opening a restaurant on 18th Street (after the close of her first restaurant on Dominic Street).

Six white-draped tables seated the guests, with an empty chair placed at each to accommodate the roving authors as they rotated from one table to the next. Feasting and conversation among guests was only broken between courses, when Mr. Andersen and Ms. Wolitzer sauntered to the front of the room to read aloud five-minute excerpts from their published works.

The Observer seated itself at the “popular table,” so deemed by Ms. Frankel. While other guests dined in the company of Bill Keller of The New York Times and Bharati Mukherjee, another well-known writer, with her husband in tow, The Observer dined with a unique guest list. To our right, chatty talk show host Leonard Lopate of the Leonard Lopate Show harangued us before moving on to his next victim, a chef to our left who seemed all too familiar with the talk show host’s biting humor (he was a former guest of the Mr. Lopate's show). Some of the few people spared from Mr. Lopate's witty remarks were writer and TED curator Julianne Wurm and Sarah Chianese, daughter of Dominic Chianese Jr., who plays Corrado Soprano in the HBO series The Sopranos.

Luckily, the timed interludes between courses provided a silent hiatus from Mr. Lopates’s banter and the ability to enjoy Mr. Andersen’s and Ms. Wolitzer’s readings. Mr. Andersen read from his recently published novel, True Believers, which pokes fun at different eras from a 1960s viewpoint.

Ms. Wolitzer, on the other hand, chose to read from several works and as each reading concluded she was met with a wide-eyed audience, begging her to continue her emotive performance of her characters. But the intensity also could’ve also stemmed from the plot of her first reading, which focused on an epidemic that robbed middle-aged women of their libidos.

When Ms. Wolitzer finally made her way to the “popular table” for dessert, the fellow diners offered quick applause before demanding autographs and bombarding her with questions on writing technique.

After dinner, we met up with Ms. Wolitzer to do a little probing of our own, asking how she chose the night’s excerpts.

“I believe that what you remember from books–I’ve heard this line before–is the character more than the story,” Ms. Wolitzer told us.  “It’s true for me when I think about books that I love, so I try to make sure there’s a real sense of character even in a brief scene.”

We chatted with Mr. Andersen just before he slipped back to the mob of guests toting recently purchased books to be signed.

“It’s the ideal version of what people want when they see authors read,” he told us. “And that’s sitting in a big living room with a few other people and getting your book signed.”

From left: composer Ian McDonald, Ted Zurkowski as Edmund, Ryan Tramont as Oswald, Peter Gerety as Gloucester, Amy Grances Quint as Regan, Jeffrey DeMunn as Lear, Erick Gonzalez as Cornwall, John Rothman as Kent, Eric Doss as King of France and Rich Sommer as A Fool. (Lee Wexler/Images for Innovation)

“No actor likes falling on his ass,” actor Ryan Tramont told The Observer. Especially while under the glare of Emmy-nominated Jeffrey DeMunn, who plays the RV-driving Dale on Walking Dead.

Mr. Tramont, who one might recognize from his appearances on Law & Order and 30 Rock, recounted his on-stage blunder (complements of a missing page in the script) after performing in the Frog and Peach Theatre Company’s celebrity reading of King Lear on Monday, staged to benefit the Shakespeare ensembles's future performance of The Taming of the Shrew.

“[Mr. DeMunn] is staring at me and I’m like, ‘You’re looking at me for the cue. I’m screwing this up, oh my god,’” he divulged, giving us a peek at an actor’s inner monologue. (For the record, the audience didn't even notice, and Mr. DeMunn, who read the part of King Lear, told us he didn’t have any problem with Mr. Tramont's lost script page.)

Despite the slipup, the audience was enraptured by the emotive reading by Mr. DeMunn and other actors, which included BeBe Neuwirth, Darrell Hammond, Rich Sommer of Mad Men, Peter Gerety and Eric Doss.

Another focal point of the night was the plush venue, The Player’s Club, where Frog and Peach has hosted several of its performances.

Lynnea Benson, director of the performance, said the venue came to them through the suggestion of Mr. DeMunn, a member of The Player’s Club.

“The architecture, the location–heroes of mine are hanging on the walls,” Ms. Benson gushed, shifting her gaze throughout the room as if to emphasize the history-rich detailing. Upstairs from the club entrance, pictures overtook the burgundy walls. A vintage black-and-white rendering of Kim Cattrall fixing her makeup hung next to photos of Kevin Spacey, Tom Hardy and Sinead Cusack–all of them taken while the actors were backstage prepping for live performances.

The top floor houses the former bedroom of Edwin Booth (brother of President Lincoln’s assassin), and in fact the building was a donation from Mr. Booth.

Ms. Benson, who said she first became intrigued with Shakespeare at the age of nine, said she enjoys directing Shakespearean plays and readings because they’re appropriate for her New York audience.

“We starting turning Shakespeare on its ear,” she told us. “Make it very immediate, not fancy, not prim and proper, but down in the trenches–very ballsy and American.”

sgrothjan@observer.com

Isaac Mizrahi and Derek Blasberg at W New York Downtown.

Last night, a group a fashion moguls, designers, models and perfectly dressed men and women, made their way to the W New York Downtown hotel to view the first film screening in in the Grand Classics series "New York in Film."

The evening commenced with a cocktail hour, rife with fashion editors and a lingering music crowd. It was a fitting precursor to the film screening of Sweet Charity–a personal pick by Isaac Mizrahi, a New York fashion icon who knows all about sexy.

“There’s a difference between when you put air quotes around something, and it’s actual meaning, you know what I mean? So it’s like 'sexy' is not as good as sexy, and this is a really sexy movie,” Mr. Mizrahi told The Observer, sincerely.

As if almost on cue, a 20-something woman donning a black dress and crimson pout fluttered up to Mr. Mizrahi, obviously inviting some sort of approval for her carefully pieced-together ensemble.

And Mr. Mizrahi didn’t look too bad himself–not that we expected anything less. A classic black button-down with a mandarin collar gave a very classy vibe and a nod to the 1960’s styling of Sweet Charity.

Lavish hors d’oeurves circulated through the W Downtown’s fifth-floor lounge at the same rate drinks were poured. We expected a strictly early 20’s crowd given the loud, techno-y music played by the DJ, Eiko. Not the case. The younger crowd meshed seamlessly with a more mature circle of hotel guests and those already familiar with nightlife in the financial district.

And with an overabundance of sky-high heels and perfectly manicured blowouts laying siege to the plush seating, we could easily spot what the allure was.

Mr. Mizrahi shifted his attention away from the young woman and back to us.

The film, he said, reflects New York at a time when it was less glamorous and the famous were less dependent on stylists–New York fashion in its rawest form.

Katrina Plavos helped to launch Grand Classics to highlight films that inspire fashion icons and directors in New York City. Ms. Plavos said the program was introduced after 9/11 to bring “spirit and joy back to New York.”

Her only stipulation for Mr. Mizrahi’s film choice was that it had to take place in New York. Sweet Charity highlights the life of a dance hall hostess, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine, who finds love (or lust) with all the wrong men.

“It really is about a bygone New York. It is about this ideal that I grew up loving about New York; this incredible presence of contrast,” Mr. Mizrahi told us, talking as though he’s experienced a close kinship with the area.

“And also, the clothes. Oh, the clothes,” he gushed. “You think you’ve seen a trench coat, you think you’ve seen a trench coat with an edge and then you see Sweet Charity.”

Guests eventually migrated away from the cocktail lounge, drinks still in hand, to view the screening from W’s 31st floor, which boasted a 360-degree view of the city skyline and the Hudson River, offering a peek at both the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building.

After Derek Blasburg, fashion writer and editor, introduced Mr. Mizrahi to the room, guests noshed on a 1960s-themed candy bar of spiced popcorn, M&Ms and Charleston Chews among other treats.

Just before the film began, Mr. Mizrahi left guests with one final sentiment of Sweet Charity.

“It’s gritty and rough and there are maybe bad parts of it,” he said. “But it’s mostly amazing.”