Spanking the Funky: Director-Provocateur David O. Russell Gets Down With the Ghetto Film School

The New York Observer, June 12th, 2007

Director David O. Russell has become known for arousing actors’ ire—George Clooney’s alleged fisticuffs on the Three Kings set; Lily Tomlin’s widely circulated outbursts during the filming of I ❤ Huckabees—but at the Ghetto Film School’s annual spring benefit dinner at Bottino in Chelsea on Monday, June 11, he was the very picture of cool, reminiscing about receiving an honorary degree from Amherst College, his alma mater, in 2002.

“I hung out with the students and partied,” said Mr. Russell, 48, sitting at the bar. “I missed the photo op, which everybody lives for in the alumni magazine, so I got the experience without the status. We were smoking pot. And the college is much more co-educational than when I went there,” he said meaningfully. “And I was just really enjoying it, and there was this girl who kept getting built-up saliva in the corners of her mouth; really disgusting. Now, I’m the kind of guy, I’m going to tell you that. ’Cause I’d wanna know! If it was me, I’d want you to say something, but she was not one of those people, so when I told her she was mortified.”

The high jinks didn’t end there. “The rumor was that [Justice Antonin] Scalia was giving a secret talk on campus—because his daughter was there—to the conservatives,” Mr. Russell said. “So we found out where it was and … we go in and all the conservatives are giving us the special sign, like a wink, like the Ku Klux Klan. I said, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ And he said, ‘Well, could you at least have the courtesy to sit down?’ I said, ‘No, because you didn’t let the election finish.’” You tell ’em!

Just to make Mr. Russell’s party affiliations absolutely clear: He has co-written a film with Al Gore’s daughter Kristin, entitled The Girl with the Nail in Her Head. “It’s about a girl with a four-inch nail in her head who goes to Washington with the dream of getting help to have it removed,” he said. Frank Capra, move over!