What’s the recipe for a myth? There’s no one formula, of course, but it seems as though gods or super-motivated humans are usually involved. Someone keeps rolling a stone up a hill, or makes fire, kisses a frog into a prince, gets swallowed by a whale, procreates, dies, gets reborn. A good myth usually requires a powerful natural or supernatural force.

    The modern myth is trickier, especially in the supernatural department. It can be harder to recognize in the present, but they do exist and reveal themselves with time.

    Earlier this month a filmmaker named Richard Yelland premiered online a documentary titled “12 Miles North — the Nick Gabaldon Story,” a modern myth by any standard, and one that Peter Spacek, an illustrator and The Star’s cartoonist, has helped bring to light in the documentary via his signature scrimshaw work that appears at intervals — art that fits the myth. 

     In this case, the mythological force is the ocean and the hypnotic spell its waves cast upon surfers. Mr. Gabaldon was born in Santa Monica, Calif., in February 1927, the son of Mexican and African-American parents. He graduated from high school in 1945, and by ’51 he had finished a tour with the Navy and was attending Santa Monica College while working in a polio rehabilitation facility. He was strong, handsome, and addicted to surfing.

    The surfing part was unusual for a black man at the time. He had grown up hanging at “the Inkwell,” a beach frequented by blacks that was 12 miles south of Malibu. Because of its perfect wave, “the Bu,” as Malibu was known, was fast becoming the epicenter for surfing in Southern California, and a nursery for many of the sport’s enduring myths.

    California beaches were not segregated per se. But, as the film explains, there was enough racism around for the black community to feel more comfortable taking their kids to the Inkwell.

    Among the pantheon of surf gods whose immortality was secured during the early days at Malibu were Micky Munoz and city lifeguards including Buzzy Trent and Ricky Grigg, who knew Mr. Gabaldon first while guarding the Inkwell, where Mr. Gabaldon bodysurfed, and then, with the encouragement of Trent, as a fellow board rider at Malibu. 

    In the documentary, the old guards explain that because a black man would have found it difficult if not impossible to hitch a ride the 12 miles to Malibu, Mr. Gabaldon paddled the distance, surfed, and then paddled back home. If not superhuman, it was at least an amazing feat of endurance that brought the young man into the fold, the first black man to join the pioneering surf community.

    But then on June 5, 1951, something terrible happened. It was a crystal clear day, the ocean was blue, and Malibu was breaking perfectly and big. His fellow riders described how they watched him take off and ride with graceful style toward the Malibu pier. The waves were winding north to south down the coast and were big enough to continue breaking through the pier’s pilings. 

    On smaller days, a surfer might be tempted to “shoot the pier,” weave his board through the pilings, but not when it was big. Mr. Gabaldon’s friends watched as his wave approached the pier with him still riding. Then he disappeared. A frantic search followed, but he was gone. His body was found floating a few days later. A young surfer died, but a hero was born.

    The documentary and its clear message about overcoming obstacles was sponsored by the Nike company. It includes interviews with athletes who have risen above other types of adversities. Although vivid in the minds of his Malibu comrades, Mr. Gabaldon’s story has not been widely known until now. 

    A little over a year ago, Mr. Spacek, a surfer who grew up in California, began translating his drawing skills into the old whalers’ art of scrimshaw by etching images into the fiberglass of old surfboards instead of whale bone. A collection of his work titled “Scratch” was shown at the Out East gallery in Montauk last fall.

    He was showing his art at the Sacred Craft surfboard-shaping expo in San Diego earlier this year when Jason Cohen, producer of “12 Miles North,” saw his work.

    “Jason saw my scrimshaw and read in my catalog how I scratch into old surfboard fiberglass and drip ink onto the surface to reveal the image. He made the connection between method and story because it was an old story and Mr. Gabaldon had learned to surf at the Inkwell Beach and paddled 12 miles north to surf the better waves at Malibu. It seemed like a good fit to him.”

    “12 Miles North” can be viewed online via Theinertia.com or on Nike surfing’s Facebook page.

    The Pamela Williams gallery on Main Street in Amagansett will close its doors at the end of the month.

    Ms. Williams, who opened the gallery on Feb. 12, 2005, after being a director at Lizan Tops in East Hampton for 10 years, until it closed, was followed by many artists to her new space.

    One of them, Janet Jennings, a painter, said, “It is a great loss on so many levels. Our beautiful little town needs her gallery and her energy, not to mention people, that she brings to it. It is rare to find an art dealer who is encouraging, kind, intelligent, forthright, and totally fun — plus, she loves art.”

    Having a successful gallery can be a difficult proposition at the best of economic times, but the slump of the last few years has made it an impossible one for Ms. Williams. “Working artists and the galleries that represent working artists don’t have big margins,” she said last week.

    Some of the artists she represents have been with her for almost 20 years. “Pam’s more than a gallery owner,” said Charles Waller, a former illustrator who is now a painter and multi-media artist. “She’s pretty much one of my best friends, my big sister. None of her relationships with her artists were business relationships. They were based on friendship.”

    Arlene Bujese, who had her own gallery in East Hampton for 20 years and is now the resident curator at the Southampton Cultural Center, said, “It’s a tremendous loss — the kind of spirit she exuded and the enthusiasm for her art and artists is not as abundant as we might wish in a community such as ours.”

    Unlike some galleries specializing in well-known painters whose work commands high prices, Ms. Williams “had the willingness to risk taking on artists who are still building their reputation,” said Ms. Bujese. “Believing in the promise of an artist takes more daring.”

    “What defines a first-rate gallery is someone who knows art, cares about art, and supports the artists in whom they believe. And this defines Pamela Wil­liams,” summed up Ms. Bujese.

    Ms. Williams, who is a painter herself, is known for being fiercely protective of her artists, and the feeling seems to be mutual. “I really enjoyed hanging all her shows,” said Mr. Waller. “She didn’t make me feel like an employee, but a partner. All the artists stop by and hang out with her” — she kept a “secret stash of dog cookies” for their pets, he said — “and when I’ve come to her to talk about my problems, she’s always put her own problems aside.”

    As Mr. Waller faltered a bit, Ms. Williams said, smiling, “It’ll be all right, Charles, you’ll see. I will rise like a phoenix.”

     She added, “I am grateful for the wonderful work artists have done that we showed, for the serious collectors, and for the people who enjoyed what we were doing here. I thought it was a beautiful thing for the community.”

Verdi and Extreme

    Guild Hall’s next simulcast of the Met: Live in HD will feature Verdi’s early opera “Ernani” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Angela Meade sings the title role with Marcello Giordani as her mismatched lover, and Verdians Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Ferruccio Furlanetto. The cost is $22 and $20 for members.

    This week, Guild Hall will also continue to host the East Hampton Library’s Winter Film series with “Unbreakable: The Western States 100” on Sunday at 4 p.m.  The documentary features four undefeated endurance runners as they each run the oldest and most prestigious 100-mile footrace in the world.

Paula Deitz at Madoo

    Paula Deitz will kick off the spring lecture series at Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack with a talk on Sunday at noon.

    Titled “A Garden Writer’s Journey,” it will feature a discussion of her 30-year career writing “intimate portraits of garden spaces and the people who tend them,” according to a press release. Ms. Deitz is the editor of the Hudson Review and has written essays for The New York Times, The Architectural Review, and Gardens Illustrated, among others. She has collected the essays in a book called “Of Gardens,” which she will sign after the talk.

    The cost is $30, $20 for members. Space is limited; reservations can be made through [email protected]. Talks take place in the winter house studio.

Open Rehearsals

    The Watermill Center will present three performances on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. The program will include work by Samita Sinha, Anna Telcs, and the Wet Weather Ensemble.

    Ms. Sinha’s new solo work, “Cipher,” will examine how sound is produced from her body. She will use the “nonsense” sounds of an Indian classical song genre invented in the 13th century that mixes Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit syllables that are said to encode mystical meanings. The piece will be performed with a “band” of four electronic boxes and will last about 45 minutes.

    Ms. Telcs will present “The Dowsing,” her textile sculptures shown in a couture-style salon, as the fall 2012 collection of the fashion house Atelcs. The pieces use quilting techniques drawn from the Mennonite and Amish communities in the Americas and will be worn by models in a runway-style presentation lasting about 30 minutes.

    The Wet Weather Ensemble from Perth, Australia, will perform “Bird Boy,” inspired by a Russian boy who was raised in an aviary by his mother. For this piece, the ensemble has been experimenting with “bird calls, caged environments, mask work, video portraits, and puppetry of household objects,” according to the center.

    The program is free, but reservations are required through eventbrite.com.

Van Booy’s New Play

    Simon Van Booy, a frequent visitor to the South Fork, will premiere his first play, “Hindsight,” in New York City at the Drilling Company Theatre for new plays on West 78th Street.

    The play is set in 1950s Paris, where a young woman and a much older one strike up a conversation on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg. As their conversation continues it becomes apparent that their lives appear seamless, and that one offers the hindsight of the title to the other on a journey of choices, loss, fear, identity, sex, marriage, and forgiveness.

    The play will run for two weeks beginning March 8, with performances Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets cost $18 and are available through smarttix.com.

St. Luke’s Concert

    On Saturday the second concert in the Music at St. Luke’s series in East Hampton will include selections from Haydn, Debussy, and Mozart, along with more contemporary selections by Samuel Barber and two of the performers, Jonathan Katz and William McNally. Mr. Katz and Mr. McNally will be joined by Christopher Schmitt, a graduate of the Julliard School of Music’s bachelor and master’s programs, who is now a doctoral candidate at the school.

    Mr. McNally, the organizer of the series, has been a frequent participant in Pianofest. He is pursuing a doctoral degree at the City University of New York Graduate Center in music arts as a recipient of the school’s Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship. He is a teaching fellow at Queens College and also teaches at the New York Music and Arts School. Mr. Katz is a Jacob Javitz Fellow and is also a doctoral candidate at the graduate center.

    Saturday’s concert will begin at 4 p.m. St. Luke’s Episcopal Church is on James Lane. Tickets are $20, free for those 18 and under.

Live at Crossroads

    On Monday, “On the Air at Crossroads,” will treat East End music lovers to the sounds of Klyph Black, Michael Weiskopf, Michael Pour, and Sara Hartman, who will be the spotlighted teenager.

    The performance will be at the Crossroads Music store at 160 Main Street in Amagansett, and will be hosted and recorded for WPPB 88.3 FM by Cynthia Daniels, a Grammy Award-winning sound engineer. Coffee and desserts will be served, with a $5 donation requested for the Springs Food pantry.

    The family-owned and operated music store also offers an open acoustic jam on Sunday afternoons from 1 to 4. Musicians are invited to take guitars; Crossroads provides the space, a bass, a keyboard, and a drums. Crossroads offers year-round instruction for most musical instruments, including voice, sound, mixing, and “just about anything associated with the music business,” according to the store’s Web site, crossroadsmusicstore.com. The store also carries a full line of guitars and musical accessories.

   Leonardo Gala, a pianist, composer, and audio artist, will be the artist in residence for the East End Arts Council at its Riverhead grounds, through May 19. A variety of events are planned throughout his residency, all of which are free and open to the public.

Mr. Gala will share his 30 years of piano instruction, as well as his four decades of knowledge of the exploration of manual and digital composition. He will also share his studies of electronic music derived from travels around the world and work in New York City. Mr. Gala also creates film scores and composes music in various forms and formats for student and industrial films.

   According to Mr. Gala, “Every human being has the innate capacity to express their creativity. Music is the only art form that travels through time.”

   The East End Arts Council’s artist in residence program brings established and emerging artists of all disciplines to the East End to showcase their work and to provide opportunities for the community to learn through exhibits and lectures.

   Feb. 7 marked the bicentennial of Charles Dickens’s birth and the world is celebrating, including here in East Hampton, where the Hamptons International Film Festival will screen David Lean’s “Oliver Twist” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall.

    The event will be hosted by Alec Baldwin, a festival board member, and he will be joined in conversation after the film by Jon Robin Baitz, a playwright whose acclaimed “Other Desert Cities” is now on Broadway. He is also the creator of the television show “Brothers and Sisters.” They will discuss literary adaptations.

    David Lean, who made such epic films as “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago,” made two Dickens adaptations, the first being “Great Expectations” in 1946, followed by “Oliver Twist” in 1948. According to the film festival, this version features “stunningly expressive cinematography by Guy Green” and a “searing performance” by Robert Newton as Bill Sikes.

    For those unfamiliar with the tale, it is about an orphan who runs away from a workhouse and is taken in by a London pickpocket who introduces him to a world where young boys are exploited in the service of the master thief Fagin, played by Alec Guinness.

    “Lean has an affinity for all aspects of what might be required to bring Dickens’s characters to the screen,” Mr. Baldwin said in a release. He chose the film with David Nugent, the director of programming for the festival. According to the newspaper The Guardian, Lean’s adaptation cut much of the dialogue and authorial voice of the book and with it Dickens’s satirical intent. The film’s visual qualities appear to make up for that loss, however.

    Ticket cost $17, $15 for Guild Hall members.

    Also on Saturday, Mr. Baldwin will read from “Oliver Twist” at BookHampton’s East Hampton location at 2 p.m.

    The Long Island Winterfest is in full swing at wineries throughout the East End, and will continue through March 18. Since 2006, talented musicians and music enthusiasts have flooded the venues for six consecutive weekends, bringing welcome business to local restaurants, hotels, and shops during the slowest time of the year. Although most of the events are on the North Fork, there has been participation from Wolffer Estate Vineyard in Sagaponack as well. A full calendar can be found at liwinterfest.com.

    This is the fourth year Winterfest has featured a jazz theme. Claes Brondal, a 37-year-old musician who lives in Sag Harbor, played the festival, nicknamed “Jazz on the Vine,” last year, and couldn’t believe the attendance. “Wineries becoming music ven­­ues, packed for weekends in a row, who knew?” he said last week. “Sometimes you wonder if live music will survive on the East End,” he added, what with competition from such other “noises” as television and computers, and a dearth of good promoters.

    Mr. Brondal will be performing this year on March 4, as drummer and leader of his own All That Jazz! All-Star Super Band. The band was born out of Sag Harbor’s Thursday-night East End jam sessions, found at Bay Burger in season and now at Page Cafe. It performed to a packed house at a benefit for the Bay Street Theatre in November. With Grammy Award-winners in the mix, the group includes Ada Rovatti, Morris Goldberg, Jim Campagnola, Rashid Lanie, and Peter Weiss, who will be joined this year by Lew Soloff, a trumpeter, who was invited by his longtime friend Randy Brecker.

    The acknowledged father of the popular weekly jam session, Mr. Brondal has succeeded in attracting many talented musicians to the area. They are backed by his Thursday Night Live Band, which features a bassist, a guitarist, and a drummer, who, he said, can play in any style and at almost any level. “Music of the world” is Mr. Brondal’s description of the progressive music and diverse styles that come under the umbrella of jazz. The variations keep the sessions interesting, he said, with music “from the streets of New Orleans to Lincoln Center.”

    Mr. Brondal said it was important that jazz, with its roots in Southern black America, not be exclusive to an upscale audience. He makes it a point not to charge for band sessions, instead welcoming donations. Word spreads about the special guests, many of whom are well known and show up unexpectedly. The sessions are recorded, “live to tape,” for WPBB 88.3 FM, by George Howard, an independent producer from Rocking Horse Studios.

    Also to be found at this year’s “Jazz on the Vine” is a familiar face from the Monday-night jazz jam session at the Pizza Place in Bridgehampton, Dennis Raffelock, who will be heard on upright bass and vocals on March 10. 

    “You can’t replace live music,” Mr. Brondal said, speaking of the unity between audiences and musicians. He is very grateful for those who come out to listen, he said. “It is like a two-hour vacation.”

   Although art therapy is a well-known professional practice, a Sag Harbor woman who suffered for more than a decade from a panic disorder has discovered that art can be self-healing.

     Linda Edkins Wyatt, a mixed-media artist, paints, does collage, and makes jewelry and decorative boxes, among other artwork. But her art quilts have gained the most attention. “The Eye of Panic,” for example, a mixed-media quilt, was recognized in the magazine Machine Quilting Unlimited and also in a book by Karen Musgrave, “Quilts in the Attic.”

    The severity of Ms. Wyatt’s symptoms, including claustrophobia, terror, and the inability to swallow, was so disruptive that her family moved from New York to the East End about 13 years ago.

    Turning to art as therapy arose during a harsh panic attack, when Ms. Wyatt’s husband, Hugh, and daughter, Amanda, were trying to help by playing soft music and cooling her with ice. Amanda, who was about 10 at the time, asked if her mother wanted to draw and gave her some crayons and paper. By focusing her energy on the paper, the lines, and colors, Ms. Wyatt felt her panic energy was given a way out.

    Two of her quilts, exhibited in a show called Sacred Threads this summer outside Washington, D.C., reflect Ms. Wyatt’s belief that many women have deep internal sadness. In an interview on Saturday, she spoke of “the “loss of loved ones, unfulfilled dreams, unspoken words, and buried emotions.”

    “Broken Chakra Girl” was created based on Ms. Wyatt’s study of Reiki, which, she said, treats the body’s energy centers. The quilt illustrates throat constriction, with an elongated neck wrapped in a ribbon-like bandage, and a broken heart. After consulting with a Reiki master while studying the technique, Ms. Wyatt was told that energy was trapped in her throat, which, she now thinks is the reason she has trouble swallowing.

    In an article in the magazine Cloth, Paper, Scissors, Ms. Wyatt wrote, “Due to the side effects of a medication, I couldn’t sleep, even if I swam laps 30 or 40 minutes a day. My hair started turning green from the chlorine, so I made my hair yellowish green in the portrait. Dark circles under my eyes expressed the exhaustion and sleeplessness. I called it my ‘Panic Portrait.’ ” With the idea that many women hide their feelings and put on a happy face for the world, she embellished it, and made an art quilt called “Picasso Self-Portrait.”

    When she is not quilting, or doing virtual quilting, Ms. Wyatt said she draws and doodles to help release trapped energy. She has learned to express anger with a crayon or the stroke of a brush, she said, or check in introspectively through self-portraits, some of which she calls ugly. “I made the painting look the way I felt,” she said of one of them.

    With education and experience in textile design, and a lifelong love of sewing, Ms. Wyatt’s artwork uses a multitude of styles and materials, including paintings sewn into collages, and family photographs embellished with various substances and colors, such as shells and beach glass. She does collages as covers for journals, then fills the pages with doodles, snippets of poems she finds inspirational, and unusual color combination. She makes jewelry and wore one piece, with stones and home-baked beads rolled with recycled paper, on Saturday.

    Ms. Wyatt also enjoys incorporating her doodles with recycled materials. The inside of a Federal Express cushioned envelope is a favorite. Other items have recently included netting from a bag of oranges, recycled newspaper clippings, and beet juice left over from dinner. She also uses colored or photographic paper for decorative cards, which she trades with other artists or sometimes sells. Her decorative boxes have been sold at museums, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art.

     Ms. Wyatt participates in a fabric postcard exchange group, using the mail. She finds it exciting to check the mailbox to see what art may be awaiting her, she said. A series of her 4-inch-by-6-inch postcards titled “Pseudo Self-portraits,” have been chosen for publication.

    Ms. Wyatt said the healing process has helped her to be more in tune with her body and aware of stress triggers. Once recognized, she stops what she is doing and does some deep breathing. Finding time to do a little of what she calls scribbling every day calms her and keeps the panic from erupting. She thinks that women, especially, need to let out what they suppress and worry about. With the pressures to be sexy, pretty, and accomplished, they often take care of themselves last, she said.

    Due to the competitive nature of the art world, Ms. Wyatt said she had pulled back from shows. She also has trouble parting with her work. “It’s the doing,” she said, “even if what you make is terrible and ugly, it is still healing to do something every day.”

On Sunday night, when the last of the envelopes are opened at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, one of East Hampton’s own could be making her way to the stage.

    Rachael Horovitz, who lives in Springs, is nominated for best picture as a producer of “Moneyball” along with Brad Pitt and Michael De Luca, but the film is primarily her baby. She optioned the Michael Lewis book, struggled with convincing distributors that the nonfiction work could have a cinematic narrative, brought together the screenwriters, the stars, and the director for the film, not once but twice when Steven Soderbergh’s vision was a bit too far out of the mainstream for Sony Pictures. (The film ended up with Bennett Miller as the director at the suggestion of Mr. Pitt’s friend Catherine Keener, who had worked with him on the movie “Capote.”)

    Considering the book came out in 2002, it has been a long struggle, but one that has ultimately paid off, not just in the realization of her own goals for the project, but also the enthusiastic and warm reception the film has received and its many award nominations, including her first for an Oscar.

    “Moneyball” has received recognition not only from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, the British Academy Film Awards or BAFTA, and the Producers Guild. It has won awards from several city and regional critics groups, including the New York Film Critics Circle, which named Brad Pitt for best actor and Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian for best screenplay. The film won an American Film Institute Movie of the Year award as well.

    On Sunday it is up for Academy Awards in six categories, including best picture, best actor, best supporting actor for Jonah Hill, adapted screenplay, editing, and sound mixing.

    “It’s really exciting,” she said earlier this month while packing for the BAFTA awards, which were held in London on Feb. 12. “The first weekend that ‘Moneyball’ was on the marquee in East Hampton, I danced a jig.”

    It was the only theater where she “wanted to slip in the back to see the audience’s reaction.” And so she did a couple of days after the movie opened, and reveled as a man in the back complained that someone was blocking his view. “It was a meaningful hometown experience. There was a lot of work I did to push this movie into being that I did in the little corner of the hallway in my house that I call my office.”

    Although she has worked on such well-received films as “About Schmidt,” “Rushmore,” “Next Stop Wonderland,” and “State and Main” when she was an executive at Fine Line Features, “Moneyball,” along with the HBO film version of “Grey Gardens,” were her first projects through her own independent production company, Specialty Films. She had always envisioned speaking to Albert Maysles about making a narrative film from the documentary, but as a studio executive, “I didn’t work at a company that would make a movie like that. It was the first phone call I made after I quit being a movie executive and ‘Moneyball’ was the first material I optioned.” She was stunned to discover that not only were the rights to “Grey Gardens” available, but they were free.

   “Grey Gardens” was filmed in Toronto, which was a disappointment after working on the pre-production of the film in Springs. “It was only money. That year Canada had an incredible tax incentive the studios couldn’t ignore.” But the weather held, the exterior of Grey Gardens at the time was perfectly rendered by the production designer and distressed just as authentically as time passed in the film, and it all worked out. “I joked that I was going to ship the 1930s facade back to Springs and tack it onto my house.”

    Ms. Horovitz did not grow up thinking she would make films. She was introduced to films, and to the South Fork, through lifelong friends and family. It would be difficult now for her to imagine her life without either.

    Her father is Israel Horovitz, the author of “Line,” New York City’s longest running play, and a long list of other award-winning productions as well as a number of screenplays. Her mother, Doris Keefe, a painter, died when Ms. Horovitz was in her early 20s. “Both my parents were from Boston and we went to the North Shore” of Massachusetts in the summer. “The early juxtaposition of Ipswich farmland and the beach would come back to her on her first trip to Springs with her godmother, Priscilla Morgan, to stay with her good friends Willem de Kooning and his daughter, Lisa de Kooning.

    She continued to visit for several years and then bought a place with her husband, Michael Jackson, a television producer and former head of Channel Four and BBC in Britain, and their twin sons, Eli and Joe. While she spends some of her time working while she is here, she might just as easily be found swimming in the bay or ocean or gathering fresh produce for dinner from the farm stands in summer.

    She likes it that while many people in the film business come here to relax, she doesn’t have to see them, which is why she has chosen not to live in Los Angeles either. Nonetheless, she didn’t mind coming upon Paul McCartney one late afternoon singing along with his extended family of children and grandchildren in an East Hampton beach parking lot. “I was so moved that he could be anywhere in the world and that’s where he was that evening. It was a lovely moment,” she said, but she respected his privacy and kept her distance.

    After she graduated from college, she took a circuitous path to her destiny. She first worked at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. “My plan was to live in Paris and the South of France and do something creative. I came home when I ran out of money.” One of her first stateside jobs was working for the administration of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch under Henry Stern, who was the parks commissioner.

    She eventually found her way to the film business through a group of friends who worked for the producer Dino De Laurentiis in New York. They “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I went over to Dino’s company and, after my first Cannes [Film Festival], I was hooked.” Still, she kept a hand in city government by helping found the Cinema School in the Bronx, the first public high school specializing in a film curriculum.

    She has another 12 projects in various stages of development, with an enviable eye for significant, yet often atypical, storytelling. Included are a biography of the British writer Bruce Chatwin, who died in 1989, an adaptation of Isabel Gillies’s memoir “Happens Every Day” with Amy Adams, and a recently optioned piece by Adam Gopnick about his friendship with the art historian and curator Kirk Varnedoe called “Last of the Metrozoids.” She is also working on an adaptation of Bill Buford’s book “Heat” about working in the kitchen at Mario Battali’s restaurant Babbo and Wil Haygood’s book “Sweet Thunder” about Sugar Ray Robinson.

    After the validation of her tenacity with “Moneyball,” she is back in the netherworld of attempting to ensure that her visions for these films are fulfilled. “In a sense you don’t really know that your vision is going to be realized when you’re a producer.” Much of what happens gets turned over to other people. “You’ll see some of the dailies, and what worked on the page and in conversations doesn’t always work live.” With “Moneyball,” she said, “I felt secure watching the very first dailies and was also pretty confident when Bennett Miller came on board that that would be a defining moment.”

    Still, she has an affection for the way Steven Soderbergh saw the film as well. “His way into the story was different, not to use flashbacks of the young Billy as a player, but instead he was going to use real footage, documentary style,” to cut to some of his Mets teammates such as Darryl Strawberry and the scouts on scene in the 1980s when Billy Beane was a player. “That documentary footage was incredibly interesting, that version is still in my brain.”

    The production team decided that for this film, it was important to get it right and be entertaining. “It was kind of a tenet of the team that we not stray from the verisimilitude of that worldview. We didn’t have to be 100 percent accurate. The exact thing said or the exact meeting in an exact place was not as essential as the understanding of the world itself.” That meant communicating the dark and dank world of major league baseball’s front offices, particularly that of Oakland.

    The Oscar nominations are exciting, she said, but it would have been okay if they hadn’t received them either. “We were thrilled when we found out about them. When you work for so many years on a movie that you care about so much, what counts is that you think it’s good. So this is a home run for me.”

John Iversen, a jeweler and goldsmith, balks at being called an artist, but it’s impossible to look at the cuff-like bracelets, necklaces, earrings, and brooches he has made over the last 30 years and not see them as wearable sculptures. Apparently the curators of the Drawing Room agree, as they are showing his elegantly wrought jewelry and works on paper in the same gallery that has shown the artists Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Harms, and Costantino Nivola, among others.

    “John is deeply involved in the fresh use of his materials and is keenly sensitive to their tactile appeal,” Emily Goldstein, an owner of the Drawing Room, wrote in an e-mail. He “considers the ‘feel’ that his forms will have on the body of the wearer. . . . The brooches and bracelets all have a movement that is truly magical.”

    His designs start out on paper, he said recently at his studio on Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton. “The drawings are part inspiration, part guide. . . . A lot of drawings are made with jewelry in mind, but not every sketch becomes a piece of jewelry.” Sculpture, which he also does, comes from a totally different place, he said. “Does it make you feel like you want to pick it up?”

    That, aside from any consideration of aesthetics or craftsmanship, is a strength of his work: Whether it is a Pebble River bracelet, or his berry cluster Double Jacks earrings made of pink and gray akoya pearls, pink coral, two black diamond beads, and 18-karat gold, or a cuff bracelet made of 14-karat red gold, 18-karat yellow gold, 14-karat green gold, and 14-karat white gold, the hand reaches for it.

    “Working in three dimensions is a different experience. . . . With the drawing it remains abstract. Working in three dimensions you get to a point that you can’t imagine when you’re drawing . . . it’s still a fantasy. You’re never quite sure it will really work, so seeing the final piece is always a thrill because you made it work.” He added that he usually makes a point of finishing a piece even if he hates it. “You can get too much of it and it’s like a constant bickering.”

    Mr. Iversen may have begun these ruminations in Hamburg, where he was born in the early 1950s. He and his family moved to Dusseldorf where, as a lad of 15, he enrolled at the College for Metal Industries. As a child, he said, he always liked making things. In Dusseldorf he learned to saw and file. He then had the good fortune at age 17 to pursue a jewelry making internship with an uncle, Karl H. Stittgen, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

    Mr. Stittgen, who had moved there as a watchmaker in 1952, at that point was a self-taught jeweler who at first translated what he saw in nature into jewelry. Mr. Iversen spent four years there, where, he said, “The awareness of nature came . . . mainly from living in Vancouver and all the Asian influences there. Coming from small-town Germany without any diversity, it hit me like some sort of shock — speechless.”

    The goal of his technique of nature casting, similar to lost wax casting, is not to recreate a hydrangea blossom or gingko leaf, however, but to produce his concept of that leaf or blossom as a jewel. In this way, the piece is imbued with the feeling of its maker, another distinction of Mr. Iversen’s work. “Jewelry in a way is an emotion. The instinct to wear something, put something on your body, is a deep-rooted feeling. It’s very human and one of the things that sets us apart from other animals.”

    After his stint in Canada, Mr. Iversen returned to Germany, where he spent three semesters at the Staatliche Zeichen Academy’s College for Jewelry Design and Manufacturing. In 1978 he moved to New York City, but felt unprepared to take the city by storm quite yet. “You start getting jobs but you don’t want to do that for the rest of your life,” he said, perhaps referring to his job cleaning castings in Midtown.

    At age 24 or 25, “you find yourself there thinking, what am I going to do now? Well, you say, this is what I’ve got.” The exigencies of making a living superseded his ambition to make jewelry, especially given his modesty about his own level of talent.

    “I learned jewelry making,” he said, “but part of me wasn’t that good at it. I had a little bit of an artistic bent . . . I didn’t really pursue art as a career and I didn’t really pursue jewelry as a career. It was more a twist of fate.”

    “Fine artists have always made jewelry,” he went on, “also, a few jewelers became artists. It’s all a continuum. Some of the earliest pieces found were pieces of jewelry. The Venus of Willendorf, for instance, was probably an amulet.”

    His fortunes began to change once he quit the job of making wedding rings and took the chance of going out on his own, eventually having his work accepted by Artwear, an international SoHo jewelry gallery that was considered a hub of innovation and inspiration. Not long after that his work was featured on the cover of Vogue and in Harper’s Bazaar and, the rest, as they say, is history. Toward the end of the 1990s, Mr. Iversen moved with his wife and son to the East End.

    Boxwood, oak, gingko, and maple leaves, pebbles, seeds, water, and petals — hydrangea and eucalyptus mainly — appear again and again in his pieces. He has also worked with enamel.

    He uses hardly any gemstones. “It’s basically metalwork — combination. He also uses semiprecious stones, both matte and shiny, especially in his berry cluster series: amber, lapis, tourmaline, coral, jade, lemon chrysoprase, pink coral, and labradorite.

    He and his assistants make everything in his studio, except for stone setting, gold plating, and metal casting. Molds are made in New York and what comes out is sent back for him to finish, which often involves manipulating the surface of the metal by grinding, filing, engraving, or oxidation.

    Some bracelets look either like a jigsaw puzzle, chain mail, or metal that has been shattered and reassembled. He uses a tiny jewelry saw to cut the gold, silver, brass, and nickel.

    The edges of each piece are different, jagged in different ways. After years of working on the engineering and design, Mr. Iversen developed small hinges made of gold affixed to the back of the bracelet that keep the pieces together. These give him great satisfaction, like knowing a secret. Thanks to the flexibility given the piece by these hinges, a bracelet made by Mr. Iversen often feels like a Slinky on the arm, he once remarked to Ms. Goldstein. What makes the pieces so persuasive, he said, is that “they live in your hand. They’re not so static.”

     Mr. Stittgen, Mr. Iversen’s uncle, abides by the Japanese tenet in his jewelry and now his ceramics of “the beauty of imperfection,” an idea that doubtless had an impact on his nephew while he was in Canada.

    “The whole idea of a perfect piece doesn’t really work,” he said. “You’re always sort of moving on; you realize in hindsight that a piece was really a good one or one that you were trying to aim for,” which is why he sometimes puts it away. “Internally you can mature and then you understand and can forgive yourself when you look at it again. The zeitgeist is be in the here and now, but that has become a cliché. Time does its own work by itself. It’s an important part of art.”

    Here’s how it went: Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was at a posh Bastille Day brunch at an oceanfront East Hampton home. A young woman, newly arrived on the East End, trying to make conversation over the smoked salmon tray, offered: “Oh, I’m from Indianapolis, too.” Whereupon Vonnegut, of the rumpled face and sweet, bovine eyes, said: “My mother committed suicide. She should have done it a lot earlier.”

“And So It Goes”

Charles J. Shields

Henry Holt, $30

    If anything, what Charles J. Shields proves in his well-researched, well-reasoned biography is that Kurt Vonnegut’s life was a non sequitur. Nothing flowed logically.

    Take, for example, his name: Born in 1922, he was the third child. The oldest, Bernard, a scientific genius, didn’t get the appellation “Jr.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the least favored of the children, was once told point-blank: “You were an accident.”

    Vonnegut’s parents were among the richest in the Hoosier capital city. When the Depression hit, the family lost most of its money. But they went right on spending despite the fact that they were unable to sell their fancy house. His father was an architect and responsible for a truly remarkable engineering feat: He moved an entire office building, the Indiana Bell Building, with all the workers doing their job in it. The edifice was winched up and moved 52 feet forward from its foundation and then swung around. Even the elevators continued to operate during the incredible maneuvers. But despite a triumph that brought observers from all over the globe, Vonnegut Sr. couldn’t prosper as an architect or engineer.

“Kurt Vonnegut:

Novels & Stories,

1963-1973”

Edited by Sidney Offit

Library of America, $35

    Big brother Bernard insisted Vonnegut Jr. study science at Cornell, where he loved writing for the student paper. But in science classes things really weren’t going well. It was World War II. Vonnegut decided to enlist. By then his parents had finally moved to a smaller Indianapolis house, which his mother roamed, Lady MacBeth-like, all night long. He got a military pass to come home. But it was too late: On Mother’s Day when he was 21 the family found Edith dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. She had not left a note. He had not gotten to see her that weekend.

    As a P.O.W. Vonnegut’s experiences were devastating. And then came the bombing of Dresden. Coming up out of the bowels of the earth where he was imprisoned, he was forced to search shards of buildings for days to find and stack rotting corpses. He was barely alive himself. Some of his starving fellow soldiers were shot when they found and pocketed bits of food. The images, the horrors, were indelible. Masterfully Mr. Shields uses a Dostoyevsky phrase that Jane, Vonnegut’s first wife, provided him: “One sacred memory from childhood is perhaps the best education.”

    Upon Vonnegut’s return from war, Bernard, a puppet master, finagled a job for his brother with his own employer, G.E. Vonnegut, newly wedded, was thrilled with the job as a flack for a scientific concern. But soon he earned the dismay of his employers because he was too busy writing his own stories. Some of which were published. Many not. He quit his cushy job anyway. Editors such as Knox Burger nurtured him enormously.

    “Harrison Bergeron” (get it?), originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, appeared in “Welcome to the Monkey House” in 1968. The story centers on a constitutional stipulation that each American is completely equal — no one is weaker, slower, uglier, or less intelligent than anyone else. The story takes place in the year 2081. There’s even a Handicapper General and a swat team of agents. The problem is a beautiful, graceful ballerina. She has to wear a mask as well as weights around her ankles, which is figuratively what Vonnegut had to do his entire life.

    Vonnegut once provided a list of rules for aspiring writers that were, of course, contradictory — and these rules carry both the sweetness occasionally manifested in him as well as his orneriness. Here are a few: Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on that they could finish the story themselves should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

    Mr. Shields is the author of “Mockingbird,” a biography of Harper Lee, who is a very different type of writer and whose personality, although feisty, can’t be more different from Vonnegut’s. It is clear that Vonnegut’s widow, the photographer Jill Krementz, did not cooperate with this biographer. That she is depicted as a harridan is putting it mildly. And perhaps as a result the photograph albums included in the book are not particularly interesting or revelatory. Indeed, Vonnegut is barely recognizable in most of the photos. Another nitpick: Mr. Shields misspells the name of the town of Southampton — surprising given the fact that much of Vonnegut’s later story takes place in Sagaponack.

    The Shields biography could perhaps have benefited from a more intense examination of Vonnegut’s novels and short stories. However, the recently issued Library of America omnibus contains many of Vonnegut’s finest works in a handsome collection, and it’s perhaps best for readers to return to the original. In Vonnegut’s case there’s a great deal of prescience. In “Breakfast of Champions,” also titled by Vonnegut as “Goodbye Blue Monday,” his famed Kilgore Trout (the author’s alter ego) makes an appearance. The book, which takes place in Midland City (hmm, wonder how the Indiana author thought that one up), involves “two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.”

    In “Cat’s Cradle,” Vonnegut’s fourth novel, a satire of the arms race, Felix Hoenikker is the fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb.

    Then there’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” and Billy Pilgrim, the alien from Tralfamadore, who witnesses the bombing of Dresden. The book’s succinct subtitle? “The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, a Fourth-Generation German-American Now Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This Is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.”

    Is there any wonder why this author who was made to feel apart from the heartland, apart from his parental home, his marital homes, his children, from everything, would not be alien-obsessed? Mr. Shields points out that Vonnegut often felt dismissed as just a sci-fi writer by the literary establishment. But of course “Slaughterhouse-Five” was named the 18th greatest novel in English of the 20th century by the Modern Library. That’s how it went.

—

    Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007.

    Laura Wells is an editor and writer who lives in Sag Harbor.