Paul Brownfield

Paul Brownfield writes for national newspapers and magazines. Based in Brooklyn, N.Y., he is also East Coast contributing editor at Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America West. Brownfield was previously a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.  



    <
    >
The New York Times •

The Last, Best Press Agent

Several women were accusing Joseph R. Biden Jr., about to announce he was running for president, of touching them inappropriately. Sy Presten had a newsy item for the gossip columns. He was sitting on a leather sofa in the living room of his apartment on West 26th Street. His wife, Joanne Binder, was out to lunch with a neighbor. “Years ago, I handled something called ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ It was the first nude musical,” Mr. Presten said. “I’m getting to the item. You got it? The first nude musical.”
The New York Times •

At 101, a Survivor of Hollywood’s Golden Age Throws Down the Gauntlet

Emailing from the Paris hotel where she lives, Dame Olivia de Havilland sounded defiant, and understandably so. The topic at hand was her lawsuit against the FX network and Ryan Murphy Productions over her portrayal by Catherine Zeta-Jones in last year’s docudrama “Feud: Bette and Joan,” about the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Ms. de Havilland’s lawyer in Los Angeles, Suzelle Smith, had arranged an electronic question and answer session ahead of a court date much anticipated by
The New York Times Magazine •

Stand-Up Comedy Without the Stand-Up. Or the Comedy.

The paradox of the podcast explosion among comics is that it’s at once a mini-renaissance for comedy and a retreat by comics further into themselves — a sort of talking cure for a group of people who suffer from something not yet covered, I don’t believe, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a need, when not formally doing comedy, to talk about how and why one does comedy.