“And the next year we were moved back to the back room.” “We had great seats in the front room,” she says. She recalls the year she and husband Richard won the best picture Oscar for “Driving Miss Daisy.” “He was enjoying his Holy Roman Emperor status with that, and those people were punished.” “If you asked to be seated with somebody, he made sure not only that you weren’t, but that you ended up in Siberia,” says producer and director Lili Fini Zanuck, who attended her first Lazar Oscar night party 15 years ago and recalls the parties, and Lazar, with great fondness. Those who messed with Lazar-approved arrangements were playing with a sizable ball of fire. The front room was considered ground zero, the primo spot for watching and being watched. Seating was tricky-few relished being stuck in the back room, although mega-celebs sometimes were stuck there anyway. A handful of lucky media types were allowed inside, some told not to roam beyond the bar during dinner. Security types scattered around the restaurant watched crashers and ushered in the biggest stars through the back entrance.Ī few select reporters, photographers and camera crews were stationed on the front porch to catch sound bites. ![]() A gaggle of paparazzi staked out the sidewalk. The party extended beyond Spago’s front door and could be diagrammed in concentric circles: On the outermost arc were fans behind barricades near the restaurant. When Lazar moved his base of operations to Spago in 1985, the hype grew exponentially. I had never met Kathleen Turner, and I felt very comfortable going to up to her and introducing myself.” It was also the kind of party where if you hadn’t met someone, you could. Another year I was seated near (Rolling Stone Publisher) Jann Wenner. “One year I remember I was seated across from Paloma Picasso, and that was thrilling. It was Lazar’s ability to draw in all kinds of fascinating people that Dickinson admires. And suddenly I got the sense of the split between the work and the social tornado-that people in this town who are in the social tornado don’t know the work. I thought in this performance she was just brilliant. “I was at a table with a lot of bigwigs, and I remember Meryl Streep was up for ‘Ironweed,’ but a lot of people at my table hadn’t seen it. When Oprah Winfrey came walking down, you’d think the Messiah had arrived.”Īctress Jacqueline Bissett calls Lazar’s annual fete “an evening of excitement and a bit of fear.” And you could always measure popularity by how loudly people standing outside screamed. “The year Madonna and Michael Jackson came together, they almost seemed like an old married couple. “Something funny would always happen at the party,” she says. It was the same scene every year, but we loved it. ![]() ![]() Then he’d leave and she’d move them all back. Then Irving would come in, look at the boards that she’d been preparing for weeks and move people around. Then Mary would show up with the boards for the seating. So many movie stars, directors, producers, studio chiefs, writers and media types were crammed into one place that even the most jaded Hollywood-ites were impressed with the view.īarbara Lazaroff, restaurant designer and wife of Spago’s Wolfgang Puck, recalls this scenario: “We’d do all the prep work Wolf would be cooking all day.
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