Latest news with #DeerValley
New York Times
3 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
What Does Ultra Wealth Look Like?
When Paul Eskenazi, the location manager for 'Mountainhead,' a new film from the 'Succession' showrunner Jesse Armstrong, set out to find a house to serve as the primary setting for this satire about a group of ultrarich tech bros, he needed a very specific kind of extravagance. In the same way that 'Succession,' which Eskenazi also worked on, reveled in 'quiet luxury,' 'Mountainhead' needed its moneyed protagonists to be living large but without flamboyance. Its characters are too wealthy for mere McMansions, and not any private residence would do. Portraying how the ultrawealthy really live — with all their subtle signals and status cues — has become something of a specialty for Armstrong and Eskenazi. It's about not just private jets and sprawling homes, but the quiet hierarchies within the top 1 percent. There's a pecking order between the 0.01 percent and the 0.001 percent, the kind of distinction that insiders equate to owning a Gulfstream G450 versus a Gulfstream G700. When Eskenazi found a lavish, 21,000-square-foot ski chalet built into a hill of Deer Valley in Utah, he knew it was the right fit — not because it was so large and impressive, though it's certainly both, but because its extravagance had a subtlety that made it almost understated. 'There's a kind of quiet wealthy embedded in that location that doesn't necessarily scream at you. It reveals itself slowly,' Eskenazi said, pointing out that it has a private gondola with direct access to a nearby ski resort. 'It's not flashy, but it's deeply exclusive — the kind of feature that signals a level of access and control money affords without ever needing to show off.' 'Mountainhead' is a tightly wound satirical chamber drama about four rich friends in tech who gather for a weekend of carousing while the world is plunged into chaos. There's Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the founder of a Twitter-like app whose new A.I. creator tools have triggered a tidal wave of online disinformation; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), whose content-moderation software holds the key to resolving global strife; Randall (Steve Carrell), an elder plutocrat with a philosophical bent; and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose meager $500 million net worth has earned him the nickname 'Soups,' for 'soup kitchen.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Class' Is a Poignant Docuseries About Covid and College
'The Class' is a six-episode documentary that follows a group of Bay Area high school seniors and their college adviser during the 2020-21 school year. From its opening moments, you know in your bones that the 'Where are they now?' updates at the end are going to wreck you, and indeed they do. The mini-series, available on the PBS app and website, is a Covid story, a coming-of-age story and a stress test for how much you can watch someone procrastinate before your brain explodes. (I barely made it.) The students are all ambitious, successful, capable — they get good grades, participate in sports, sing in the choir. But then their school closes for a year during the pandemic, and everyone's spark dims. Remote learning is awfully remote, and the idea of going to college on Zoom is not particularly motivating. 'I think when the dust settles, this is going to be really bad,' sighs Cameron Schmidt-Temple, known by his students as Mr. Cam, their devoted adviser who is the heart — and the tear ducts — of the documentary. He relates deeply to his advisees at Deer Valley: He is an alum, who graduated in 2015, and he is applying to graduate programs, so he knows the indignities of the personal essay. He has so many spreadsheets. He texts, he video chats, he gives pep talk after pep talk. But his Google Calendar invites can do only so much against the entropy of despair. While the emotional access here is unimpeachable, 'The Class' can, like its subjects, lose a little focus, and scenes of football and basketball games drag on. We learn very little about the actual academic work the students are doing (or not doing) or how the even more vulnerable and less accomplished students at the school fare.
