None other than Michael Musto helps the Village Voice this week shake off its 50th anniversary malaise. And to hear him tell it, all he had to do was answer the phone!

Bennett Miller rang—you know, the talent from Mamaroneck who directed Capote, about the mixture of compassion and manipulation behind the making of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. "Am I the next Capote?" was naturally my first question. "You are," Miller obliged as I prepared to be stroked. "You're going to charm and disarm me and then betray me. You will laugh your way through my defenses and peel back the layers and find the chink in my armor and thrust your sword and reach your arm through my ribs and pull out my heart, throw it on the ground, puncture it with the heel of your pumps that I know you're wearing right now, and then put your cigarette out in it. In that way you are the new Capote." Goshers, I was hoping more for, "Yes, you're a truly brilliant writer for the new age," but hey, I'll take it. ...

(M)ore lip-smackingly, was Capote casting around for an indiscriminate love match with his not unattractive criminal subject Perry Edward Smith? No way, said Miller, who'd consulted biographer Gerald Clarke about this. "In Cold Blood meant more to him than anything else. He wasn't about to risk it all for a blowjob!" (So I'm not the new Capote.)

But that is not all! For the low, low price of free, you get Elaine Kaufman's trenchant commentary about Tab Hunter, Hope Davis expounding on the moral implications of The Weather Man's "cameltoe montage" and a Madonna entendre left over from her recent Roxy appearance. Let this prince be a lesson, gang--genius never sleeps.