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Katharine the Great
Yes, Katharine McPhee can belt out ballads with the best of them, but acting is her first love. In the feature film The House Bunny, she debuts her talents on the big screen. By Joseph Guinto
[dl] Big Screen
 “Oh God, no,” Katharine McPhee says, stretching each word until it’s nearly polysyllabic. The 2006 American Idol runner-up is answering what seems like an inevitable question about her big-screen acting debut in The House Bunny. In the ensemble film, McPhee plays a pregnant student in a pitiable sorority that hires a down-on-her-luck ex–Playboy bunny (Anna Faris of the Scary Movie franchise) to be the housemother. Given McPhee’s own striking good looks -- a simultaneous combination of cute and sultry -- and the fact that Hugh Hefner and his The Girls Next Door lady friends appear in the film, it seems reasonable to wonder if anyone from the Playboy Mansion has ever approached her about taking it all off. “I have never been approached,” she says. “I would never. Ever. Do anything like that.”
Not that she needs to. McPhee is doing just fine getting exposure without getting that kind of exposure, thank you very much. She made the finals of Idol -- but later lost to Taylor Hicks -- by singing mostly wholesome songs by artists such as Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, and even Phil Collins. And her self-titled 2007 debut album offered love-themed dance-pop songs that were fairly safe for “McPhans” of all ages. Because of that, Rolling Stone dubbed McPhee “a little more square than you’d like, but not hopeless.”
Square, huh? Well, she’s definitely not hopeless -- especially when it comes to her acting career. Though her practiced, powerful voice on Idol is well known to the “Kat Pack,” fans might be surprised to learn that McPhee has been acting since well before she introduced herself to Simon Cowell and company. She even studied theater at the Boston Conservatory after finishing high school. She traded theater classes for real work after just three semesters, though, swapping coasts to return to her native Los Angeles, where the harsh realities of Hollywood left her a touch disenchanted.
“There was nothing glamorous about it,” McPhee says. “I was getting some roles and getting rejected for a lot of stuff. It was the actor’s life. But I had the drive. Even though I had rejections, I was constantly telling myself that there was nothing else I could do, nothing else I could be happy doing, except acting.”
Indeed, it was a love of theater, as much as of music, that led her to Idol. “One of my ideas going on Idol,” she says, “was that I’d get better exposure and possibly better representation, which would help my acting. That’s exactly what happened. But that’s not to say it’s not still work just because you have recognition. I still have to go on auditions and still have to work hard and prove myself -- even more so now because a lot of people just see me for what I did on Idol.”
Smartly, McPhee and her handlers are starting out slowly in film rather than rushing headlong into a From Justin to Kelly mess. “We are trying to be patient with it until I get more experience,” she says. “There’s not a feeling that something big has to happen this year or that I have to be a superstar right now. Every time I step onto a set, I’m just glad to be working.”
It’s rational thinking from a surprisingly sensible (square?) 24-year-old. And she continues to take such practical, well-paced steps in all facets of her career. She signed an endorsement deal as the face of Neutrogena’s new skin-care line, is preparing to record her second album (she’s in the process of signing with a new record company after splitting from her previous label), and has an indie film currently in production. Called The Storyteller, it costars American Beauty’s Wes Bentley and features McPhee in a primary role. “Still,” she says, “it’s not a big studio film. That would carry a lot more pressure.”
With all of that going on, plus the fact that her home life is shaping up nicely -- she married her longtime boyfriend, 43-year-old Nick Cokas, earlier this year -- The House Bunny may be the closest McPhee will ever get to the Playboy Mansion. And that’s perfectly fine with her.
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January in Bloom
AMC’s Mad Men, a surprise small-screen hit, has thrust January Jones into the big time. By Allison Winn Scotch
The way Mad Men’s
January Jones sees it, you either haven’t watched (or, perhaps, even
heard of) her hit television show, in which she stars as the repressed
and unhappily married Betty Draper, or you’re obsessed with it. In
2007, critics -- and Mad Men’s
zealous fans -- fell unabashedly into the latter category, and the
series came out of nowhere to win big at last year’s Golden Globe
Awards and Peabody Awards. Now the show, set in 1960s New York, is back
for its second season on AMC. South Dakota–born Jones, 30, tells us
about the appeal of her character, how she fills her downtime, and the
story behind her unusual name.
A
show about advertising in the ’60s on AMC doesn’t exactly seem like a
surefire hit. Did you ever expect this kind of reaction?
I
knew that AMC had not done a series before, but that did not concern
me. It was such an amazing pilot -- very smartly written, really
different. And I love period pieces. I wanted to be a part of it in any
capacity.
Betty Draper is
consumed with creating a picture-perfect life, but all the while, she’s
internally unraveling. How much does that resonate with today’s modern
woman?
I think it was a different
time when marriage was definitely an institution and you didn’t get
divorced. One of my favorite things about Betty is that she has been
educated. She has traveled the world. You see her gradually come to
terms with the fact that [being a housewife] is not going to make her
happy. And now, she’s finding that very difficult to remedy and is
imploding, which isn’t too different than being in a relationship in
2008. I relate to those things. I think everyone does. What I would not
relate to is not minding that this is going on.
Offscreen, you’ve created a jewelry line. How did that come about?
I’ve
always really enjoyed doing beadwork. I mentioned it in an article a
couple of years ago, and my business partner’s mother saw it [and told
him about it], and he approached me. I was like, “Right. This guy wants
to give me money to design a line. Sure -- sure!” After he tried a
couple of times to get hold of me, I was like, “What do I have to
lose?” So I took a meeting with him, and he wanted me to design a line.
We’re doing special orders now, and the jewelry will be in stores soon.
Tell us about your name; you are not named after the month, correct?
I was named after a character in the book Once Is Not Enough
by Jacqueline Susann. My mom and dad saw the TV version of it, and my
dad especially liked how January went with Jones. My sisters are all
JJs as well.
Has Mad Men opened up a lot of doors for you?
Yes,
in certain ways. But I’m still the same in how I approach things. I’d
rather do small roles that I’ve never done before than a leading role
in a romantic comedy.
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Glass Half Full
Oenophiles will drink up Bottle Shock, a tender ode to California wine. By Jessica Jones
For
those of us who really like movies and really like wine, it would seem
obvious that a movie about wine would be our idea of perfection. But
we’ve been burned before (darn you, A Walk in the Clouds), and we’ve learned that merely putting vin on the screen does not a great wine movie make.
Thank goodness for Bottle Shock,
a delightful independent film that charmed its way through this year’s
Sundance Film Festival and is set for release this month . Based on a
true story, the film centers on a frustrated 1970s Napa Valley
winemaker (Bill Pullman) and his son (Chris Pine), whose Chardonnay
upsets its French competitors in a tasting contest organized by a
skeptical European wine-shop owner (Alan Rickman). Turns out, the
Judgment of Paris, as it came to be known, would help eradicate the
second-tier stereotype of California wines and put Napa Valley on the
map.
Since we know that wine plus cinema does not necessarily
equal a hit, what elements did director Randall Miller use to ensure
this crowd-pleaser would leave a good taste in moviegoers’ mouths? We
found out.
SIDEWAYS + UNDERDOG STORY - OVERDRAMATIC SLOW CLAP + CULTURE-SHOCKED TOURIST x SUNDANCE BUZZ = BOTTLE SHOCK
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[dl] Books
 Ranting and Raving
One fed-up New York City waiter serves more than just the specials in his entertaining behind-the-scenes memoir. By Kristin Baird Rattini
When Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential
hit bookshelves in 2000, the chef’s revelations about the culinary
underbelly of the restaurant business shocked and titillated the
reading public. The author of the new memoir Waiter Rant (Ecco, $25) seeks to do much of the same, billing his book as “the front-of-the-house version” of Bourdain’s best seller.
Subtitled Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter,
the book is a New York server’s tell-all. Well, more like a tell-most.
That’s because the author -- identified only as the Waiter -- hides
behind an apron of anonymity, as he has for the past four years on his
award-winning blog, WaiterRant.net. Both on the blog and in the book,
the Waiter dishes candidly on the outrageous behavior of staffers and
customers at the undisclosed upscale restaurant where he works.
Yet, as a 20/20 type of exposé, Waiter Rant
falls flat. Many of its “reveals” -- dirty bathrooms are a sign of a
dirty kitchen; servers spy on each other for the manager -- are nothing
but warmed-up leftovers, some straight from Bourdain’s book. Instead, Waiter Rant
succeeds as an entertaining literary sitcom on restaurant life. By the
book’s end, readers will have come to know the Waiter’s motley crew of
coworkers: There’s Beth, attractive and wise beyond her 23 years;
Louis, so lazy he faked a heart attack to get out of work; and Fluvio,
the paranoid control freak of an owner. The audience will also have
come to know the Waiter, who gives much of his true self in the memoir,
if not his real name. A 40-year-old former seminary student, he loves
to wax philosophical, explaining how waiting tables is like gambling
and how patrons’ jockeying for the best table is all about competition
for resources. But he also freely admits he can be an arrogant bully to
his coworkers and a mercenary to his rudest patrons, gleefully steering
them toward the most expensive items on the menu and robbing them blind.
Even
if readers don’t fully sympathize with the Waiter, they will with the
plight of the average restaurant server. One of the book’s best
passages is a breathless stream-of-consciousness account of juggling 20
customers at five tables that are seated simultaneously on a summertime
Saturday night when the heat index is 102 degrees, the air conditioner
is on the fritz, the line is out the door, and the computer system is
down. It leaves no doubt that servers usually deserve not only 15
percent but an occasional pound of flesh too. In his debut novel, the
Waiter extracts it with panache.
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SUMMER READING LIST
Put
down that cheesy romance novel; there’s heartier fare out there that
you won’t be embarrassed to be seen reading on the beach. Check out
these four takes on summer from some of literature’s heavyweights. --
K.B.R.
Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, $15)
No
matter what his subject is, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Halberstam entwines social commentary, investigative reporting, and
engaging storytelling into masterful narratives. The foreground of this
literary portrait is a nail-biting midcentury pennant race between the
New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. But the background is that of
a postwar America looking to baseball for a sense of comfort and
familiarity amid the uncertainty of changing times.
The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $15)
Hemingway
is in his element here, returning to his beloved Spain to chronicle the
rivalry between two top matadors during one brutal summer of
bullfights. The celebrated author reveals much about his personal
struggles with mortality in his gripping descriptions of the
bullfighters’ “regular appointment with death.” Hemingway’s own
appointment came just one year later, making this his last major work.
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, $15)
Kingsolver
tackles the birds and the bees in both the literal and figurative
senses in this intricate lyrical novel. Her three interlaced stories of
neighbors in southern Appalachia serve as moralist tales reflecting on
our connections with one another and with the fragile planet we all
share.
The Summer before the Dark by Doris Lessing (Vintage, $10)
According
to the Nobel Prize committee, which awarded Lessing with a 2007 prize
for literature, the British author brings “skepticism, fire, and
visionary power” to her explorations of the female experience. This
novel follows a middle-aged British housewife whose summer travels
through Europe turn into a journey of self-discovery as she finds
romance and madness along the way.
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[dl] Music
 A Brand-New Man
Randy
Newman has never been the most prolific singer-songwriter in the biz.
But at long last, he’s starting to get personal on a new studio album. By Bob Mehr
For
Randy Newman, it’s always been about quality, not quantity. Over the
course of a career that’s spanned five decades, he’s released
relatively few albums compared with his singer-songwriter
contemporaries. “And I’ve always beat myself up a little about not
having produced more,” says 64-year-old Newman. “So much time has gone
by, and I’ve only done a handful of records. I mean, Elton John made
three albums while I was sitting by the pool.”
While Newman
hasn’t exactly been idle -- he’s occupied himself with a career as an
Academy Award–winning composer for films -- it has been nearly 10 years
since he recorded his last proper studio album, Bad Love. But his new effort, Harps and Angels
(Nonesuch, $19), shows little in the way of rust: Newman has turned out
a sparkling batch of songs that shows off his trenchant wit, his gift
for evocative musical arrangements, and his distinctive nasal rasp.
The
album, out this month, continues Newman’s subtle shift away from
signature character studies and toward increasingly personal
narratives. “More and more, the characters in the songs are me or
little variations of me,” he says. “It’s not all the truth; there are
still a few lies in there. But you can put yourself in a box if
everything you write is completely in character.”
In addition to
producing seven new songs, Newman revisits a trio of numbers from his
catalog, including 2007’s wry political commentary “A Few Words in
Defense of Our Country” and the wistful ballad “Feels Like Home,” a
song originally written for Bonnie Raitt and about which Newman says,
“It’s borderline whether I can actually sing it.”
Despite his
admitted vocal limitations, one could argue that no one sings Newman
quite like Newman. “I like my voice, actually. It can’t do everything,
but neither can a lot of people who think they can. [Opera-pop singer]
Josh Groban’s got a nice voice in a traditional way, but there are
things he can’t do, and he proves it occasionally,” Newman says,
chuckling.
After he finishes scoring Pixar’s Toy Story 3 and Disney’s The Princess and the Frog,
he hopes to return to writing more solo material. But even if another
decade passes between albums, he’s more than satisfied with Harps and Angels.
“I’ve
been saying to people that I think it’s the best record I’ve made.
Then, it dawned on me that I hadn’t heard some of the stuff I’d done in
years,” Newman says. “So I went back and listened to a bunch of it, and
I still think this is the best record I’ve made. It’s shameful I didn’t
do more, but maybe they wouldn’t have been as good if I’d done twice as
many.”
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HEAR, HEAR
These new albums are hitting music shelves -- or online catalogs -- this month. By Sam Machkovech
Long before Bright Eyes front man Conor Oberst
shared protest-song stages with Bruce Springsteen and R.E.M., he was
just a teen making acoustic cassette demos under his own name. Oberst’s
new self-titled album sees a return to his simpler origins, as the
songs on it have far fewer of the indie orchestral swells and overt
political statements his band is known for. But there’s still plenty of
the Dylan-esque country-folk tunes, melancholic lyrics, and warbling
vocals that have made Bright Eyes a college-radio sensation.
Pop-rocker Juliana Hatfield
has never shied away from making a lot of noise as a solo artist. Even
at 40, Hatfield is still pulling off the half-angry, half-nervous
contrast that made her a star in early ’90s MTV hits like “My Sister.”
But on her tenth studio album, How to Walk Away,
she doesn’t just slash her cooing voice with grinding guitars; she
takes confident detours into calmer waters that are complete with lush
production, twinkling guitars, and tasteful soft-pop melodies.
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