The $2,500-a-plate dinner and live auction hosted by Rock on Wednesday night was an unusual blend of charity and commercial promotion for the U.N. and made some of its officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, uneasy.

Gucci, which paid the costs, pegged the event to the Friday opening during New York’s Fashion Week of its Manhattan flagship store on Fifth Avenue and put its logo and UNICEF’s behind the walkway where celebrities were photographed.

The United Nations Children’s Fund relies on $1 billion in private sector donations for its $3.5 billion global budget, but the U.N. had never before granted permission to a company to erect a 42,000-square-foot tent on the north lawn of the U.N. for such a lavish event with a commercial tie-in. Gucci gave paying guests its limited edition “Gucci Loves NY” handbag, with a big red heart, costing more than $600 each.

The red-carpet reception drew stars such as Drew Barrymore, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, Amy Adams, Brooke Shields, Salma Hayek, Djimon Hounsou, Dita Von Teese and UNICEF Ambassadors Tea Leoni and Lucy Liu, followed by a cocktail party with the likes of Donald Trump and media mogul Barry Diller.

Celebrities paid $2,500 to $10,000 each to dine on grappa-cured salmon, wild striped bass, tart of goat cheese, foraged mushrooms, truffled mashed potatoes and sticky toffee pudding with creme fraiche. Madonna played videos of Malawi and introduced children from the southern African country. Rihanna, Timbaland and Alicia Keys played music afterward.

Ban, in an unusual move for a U.N. chief who has recently sought the help of celebrities to focus attention on world problems, left New York for Chicago hours before the event got under way even though his appointment there wasn’t until Thursday and his schedule for Wednesday night was open.

Alicia Barcena Ibarra, Ban’s undersecretary-general for administration and management, said her office “should have investigated more fully” before it approved UNICEF’S request to hold the event. Barcena Ibarra said she did not believe it was correct for Gucci to publicize the event in conjunction with the opening of a new store “and I think we have to look into that.”

A 1996 U.N. rule says that “outside entities, including non-governmental organizations, may not hold meetings or events on United Nations premises to conduct their own organizational business or to advance their own purposes or aims.”

Ban nonetheless told reporters Tuesday he was confident there would be no problems.

“I understand that the main purpose of this event will raise funds for a humanitarian purpose, and I am sure that the proceeds will go to the purpose of this event,” he said.

Tom Cruise bid $100,000 for a sports package that included the privilege of hanging out at Yankee Stadium with Alex Rodriguez and a private hour playing soccer with David Beckham, but lost out to a bidder who ponied up $350,000.

“It was an extraordinary evening. The whole evening was quite moving,” Cruise told The Associated Press, accompanied by his wife, Katie Holmes, who agreed. Cruise called the United Nations “an absolute necessity” because of the staff who dedicate their lives to building peace.

A trip to Paris with a tour of a vineyard and lunch with Francois-Henri Pinault and Hayek went for $120,000. The priciest auction item was a $600,000 winning bid to tour with Madonna and take a dance class with her and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Organizers said the proceeds would be collected by the Gucci Foundation, a registered charity, and split among Raising Malawi, an advocacy group that operates under The Kabbalah Centre International, and the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, which supports the United Nations Children’s Fund.

Security was tight and few reporters were allowed inside the dinner.

Though it is a U.N. agency, UNICEF’s operations are overseen by an independent board that doesn’t answer to the secretary-general. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF said Wednesday there is “no formal relationship between Raising Malawi and UNICEF.”

Madonna has tried to help Malawi orphans since she and her husband, Guy Ritchie began raising a Malawian boy they want to adopt. Rights groups questioned her actions since she took him from an orphanage in 2006 at the age of 1. According to UNICEF, HIV/AIDS affects almost 1 million people in Malawi, including 83,000 children, and half of the country’s 1 million orphans have lost one or both parents to AIDS.

“I’ve earned a reputation for many things: pushing the envelope, for being a provocateur, for never taking no for an answer. For endlessly reinventing myself, for being a cult member, a kidnapper. For being ambitious, outrageous and irreverent. And for never settling for second best,” Madonna told the dinner.

“But I don’t just want you to write me a check. I’m more interested in your heart. I want to take you on that journey with me tonight. I want you to feel as inspired as I do right now,” she said. “Yes, I want to raise Malawi. But if I can do that — if we can do that — then the sky’s the limit.”

Cinematical: Your previous film, The Great Raid was a effects-heavy period piece set during World War II; was part of the appeal of doing You Kill Me being able to do something more modern-day and not smaller in scope but less arduous on a production level?

Dahl: I think it was fun to do an independent film; but I think a lot of it is just kind of an amazing opportunity happened; Ben Kingsley and Carol Baum sent me a script and it was actually good. The challenge was – my first reaction when I read it was “Wow, this is a great script; no one will make it. It’ll cost too much.” It was like doing the limbo. I said, ‘This is 11 million; maybe you could do it for seven. …” And I think we finally settled on four.

Leoni: Three-point-four, I think we had at one point. …

Dahl: Yeah; how do you do that? And that was what was great about getting Ben as a producer and Téa as a producer, and Ben saying that he liked this movie too; once you have your lead cast and a director committed to making the film – and recognizing that this is quirky, this is dark, that it doesn’t have to reach 3,000 screens on it’s opening weekend – it just has to be true to itself, somehow. And if we think it’s interesting – and I think that’s one of the more satisfying things, is that I think that Ben, Téa and I signed on, saying “We have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into, but let’s see what can happen.” Because there’s really no safety net. If something screwed up, if a scene was bad – there’s absolutely no safety net, so you have to kind of get there and make something happen that day, and there’s something kind of exciting about that.

Leoni: I don’t think there really – it was exciting; we never experienced – to be fair, and myopic in my opinion, we never had those scenes that went ‘kerplunk’ or we wished we could have gone back and re-shot. I think you come into it with such a readiness that you have to make it work; you have to find it or it’s going to get out of the film. And every scene was important; we dropped very little, we didn’t cut that much.

Dahl: I’ll give you one example; we were doing that scene in the parking lot, where (Kingsley) crashes a minivan into a dumpster. Well, there was supposed to be another scene after that, during the day, where basically Ben Kingsley sleeps in a parking lot the entire night, and the next morning it’s filled with Volvos and BMW’s, and he’s laying in the only available parking spot. And this woman in a BMW honks her horn to wake him up – thinking he’s some kind of homeless guy – and he kinda stands up and then she parks. It’s kind of a funny scene –

Leoni: – but we didn’t have the money for all those Volvos and BMW’s –

Dahl: — and what happened was we were getting ready to film the scene and we were on the praries of Winnipeg and you can just see a storm coming; 20 minutes later, it was just pouring rain. “Well, we’re not shooting that scene;” in fact, we’re scrambling back to the studios to shoot everything else for that scene on green screen, all the interiors. And Ben? That was one of the few nights where he was a little testy. He had been there all day just to smash into a trash can. So then I had go to him and say “Ben, how do you feel about laying in the parking lot and getting rained on?” So then Renaldo, our Assistant Director, was laying in the parking lot, getting rained on, to show where (Kingsley) would go. So we brought Ben out. “Right there? I’ll do it.”

Leoni: But we talked about it; I remember thinking that this was a quirky, different picture. And you know what that does? If you start with that attitude, you get to fly under everybody’s radar. And the artistic integrity of this film, I would say for me, there are very few other films I’ve worked on that have been so pristine. And yet what we came away with, after we’ve flown under the radar and made it and locked it and closed it – then you get to present what’s actually a very relatable, adorable, very funny romantic comedy, and we never would have breathed a word of that when we set out to make it.

Cinematical: Moving away from Mr. Kingsley and Ms. Leoni, you had the chance, in this film, to work with actors Dennis Farina, Bill Pullman and Phillip Baker Hall – do you have to give a lot of direction to those actors, or do you just hire them so they can tuck their scenes under their arm and walk away with them?

Dahl: Well, a lot of it is letting them be who they are, and what everybody likes about them. I’ll give you an example: One of the first scenes we shot with Dennis, he walks into the Polish deli and he’s got to intimidate Roman (Phillip Baker Hall’s character). And he sees him and he walks over and bites – it wasn’t scripted that he’s going to bite the cannoli. So he walks over in rehearsal, and he just picks up (Hall’s) cannoli and eats it. And I think it’s hilarious. And I’m thinking “Is that too much?” And I think, “No, we have to hate this guy by the end of the movie, and it’s Dennis Farina – he’s pretty hard to hate, so … yeah, that’s kind of the tone of the movie.” And I had that experience with every other actor – the first scene that they did, they were so kind of dead-on in terms of the tone that it sort of made itself. The first scene Téa did was the scene where she almost gets shot at the back door when she goes to the house in Buffalo. And just … the delivery, the timing, the fact she’s sitting there with these cold feet – it was just sort of so right. Phillip Baker Hall, one of the first scenes we did with him – it was shooting him in a chair. And it was a really long day, and I’ve got this seasoned veteran, and it’s a sixteen-hour day, and it’s four in the morning and we’re shooting squibs off in a neighborhood and I’m thinking “Are they going to shut us down?” He was so game. Bill Pullman, he shows up in Winnipeg with this weird haircut and glasses and says “What do you think?” When he walked on the set, the AD the whole time was like “I know we’ve got a great cast, but the guy I really want to meet is Bill Pullman; I just think he’s terrific.” And Bill comes walking into the room and is standing next to (AD) Renaldo (Nacionales) didn’t recognize him.

Leoni: Bill looked like a crazy man. It was almost like “Uhhhhh .. Security?” he had that. And every now and then, he’d look at you and give you that mouth – that weird mouth.

Dahl: So a lot of that is that these are great actors and just … letting them be themselves.

Source: http://www.cinematical.com

Also, Tea will be on The Early Show on CBS next Monday morning, June 25.

You can see Leoni featured on the main page here:

www.movingpicturesmagazine.com

The video is part of a series of questions she answered from the festival that you can find here:

www.movingpicturesmagazine.com/videoaudio/mpminterviews/TeaLeoni

• Monday, June 18: Late Night w/ Conan O’Brien on NBC
• Tuesday, June 19: The Sauce on Fuse
• Friday, June 22: Live w/ Regis and Kelly on ABC

Have fun!

Tea Leoni and David Duchovny will give the bigscreen treatment to the story of Reader’s Digest founders DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace.

Through their And Then Prods. shingle, Leoni and Duchovny have optioned “American Dreamers,” a book by former Digest editor Peter Canning.

While Leoni and Duchovny will produce, they likely won’t appear in the film.

“This is what happened to their American dream, when it got filtered through the right wing,” Leoni told Daily Variety. Canning, a 25-year vet of the mag who rose to managing editor, writes that the magazine’s idealistic goals got compromised as it grew into a juggernaut after WWII. It became a pulpit for a conservative agenda, and the founders allowed it to be used as a tool by the CIA and the FBI. The founders also lost themselves when they became rich and passive as people pawed for money and control of their empire. “They were manipulated by a system that was so much bigger than they were. The wealthier they got, the more vulnerable they became,” Leoni said.

The author will be a consultant on the project.

He had difficulty getting his book published, and by the time it was released, hundreds of volatile pages were excised. They will be exploited in film. Leoni said a writer will be hired shortly.

As producers, Leoni and Duchovny recently set up the Universal comedy “Miss Captivity”; the Beacon Communications comedy “Mount Pleasant”; the Showtime pilot formerly known as “Californication,” starring Duchovny, written by Tom Kapinos and directed by Stephen Hopkins; and “Yogaman,” a comedy series written for Showtime by Duchovny, Scott Burns and Bart Freundlich.

Source: Variety