Gossip Should Have No Friends

[October 8th, 2008]

QUE SERA CERA: George-Michael Bluth, a.k.a. Michael Cera, was spotted last Friday night at Northwest Portland’s most happening crêperie, Le Happy. Scoop has heard on wweek.com that the star of the much-missed cult TV show Freaks and Geeks Arrested Development—as well as Superbad, Juno and this weekend’s third-highest-grossing movie, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist—is looking to make a movie in a town with “a lot of rain.”

PASTRAMI PROLIFERATION: As first reported on wweek.com, the gents behind phenomenal downtown delicatessen Kenny & Zuke’s are said to be on the verge of opening a second location at Northwest 24th Avenue and Thurman Street. Co-owner Nick Zukin declined to comment other than to confirm that he is looking for a second location, but we’ve heard from two sources that the meat mavens have submitted a proposal to bust out the bialys in the building that last housed Springbox Gallery.

WORKING GIRLS: Now that Portland director Todd Haynes has finished with Bob Dylan, it looks like he’ll tackle Joan Crawford. Haynes tells WW exclusively he’s in talks to helm a television adaptation of the James M. Cain novel Mildred Pierce. “I read the book recently,” Haynes said in an interview last week, “and it’s so different from the Joan Crawford film.” That would be the 1945 two-hankie weeper that won Crawford her only Oscar. Haynes said he doesn’t know who he’ll cast in his update, which he’s writing with Old Joy scribe Jonathan Raymond. But he plans to keep the book’s 1930s setting. “It seems so fitting,” Haynes said, “because it’s really about the Depression-era economy. It feels particularly prescient right now.”

GOT BARACK? Portland-based film director Gus Van Sant has returned from the battleground state of Ohio. That’s where the director of Drugstore Cowboy and Elephant, among others, recently shot a spot for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Although Van Sant, who is just about to release his own highly political film, Milk (about slain civil rights activist Harvey Milk), didn’t meet Barack in the Buckeye State he couldn’t help but be impressed by the fervor surrounding the election: “It was overwhelming.”

ON THE QT: Kendall Clawson, executive director of the Q Center—a meeting place for Portland’s GLBT community—reached her goal Oct. 1 of raising $200,000 in just 90 days for a new building fund matched by a local benefactor—without ever meeting him. “I knew who he was,” Clawson said, “but it was strange that I still have yet to meet him.”