Movie stars headline New Yorker Festival 2011

The weekend of Sept. 30 will mark the return of the annual New Yorker festival, which is partly a salute to writers and their topics (with Calvin Trillin‘s justly celebrated gastronomic march through  Chinatown, in which I happily participated a couple of years ago, being the legendary belt-loosening highlight) but also will bring in several movie stars. In previous years, I’ve had a great time observing interviews by New Yorker staffers of such film personalities as Judd Apatow, Clint Eastwood, Seth Rogen, Steve Martin and Oliver Stone, and this year’s interviewees will include Oscar-nominated writer and accidental movie star Owen Wilson, Cold Stone creamery fan Aziz Ansari, furry fury Zach Galifianakis (who has been trying to win The New Yorker’s cartoon-caption contest for years without success), my college classmate Paul Giamatti, ageless but occasionally grumpy Steve Martin (again, this time talking about art with the magazine’s art critic Peter Schjeldahl, upon whom Martin bestowed a rather nice shout-out in his typically lovely latest novel, “An Object of Beauty” — no refunds for Philistines expecting arrow-through-head shtick!) and veteran head-exploder David Cronenberg. There will also be a talk about the technology of special effects in a panel called, “Beyond 3-D,” a screening of “Coriolanus” with Brit dreamboats Anthony Lane and Ralph Fiennes and a screening of the (I’m still trying to learn how to type these phrases consecutively without suffering central-nervous-system shutdown) Roland Emmerich Shakespeare drama “Anonymous,” with a discussion featuring Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro. (Hey, where were the factcheckers for “Independence Day”?) Everything is probably extremely sold out (though a just-announced reunion of the cast of “Arrested Development” isn’t, yet, as of this moment) but there are standby seats at each venue to fill up the seats of no-shows. In my experience, there hasn’t usually been a long line of standby hopefuls at these things.