You Don't Say.

"There's no form of journalism that's more depressing or demeaning than the celebrity profile," says Esquire Editor in Chief David Granger, "which is why we go to such extremes to make them interesting." In 2001, Tom Junod wrote a parodic profile of Michael Stipe that was literally -- and deliberately -- half-true. Lately, the magazine has taken the postmodern, how-meta-can-we-get approach, having the celebrities annotate their own profiles (Jon Stewart) or interview their interviewers (Halle Berry).

And sometimes, they take the classical form to its most florid extreme. It was Junod who called Angelina Jolie the best woman in the world last month in a profile that exemplifies post-Talesian prose at its most ambitious. Determinedly un-starstruck, and deeply serious, the story is a disquisition on fame, civic virtue and the actress's tiger tattoo. As much as a portrait of Jolie, it's a portrait of a writer swinging for the fences in trying to make that tattoo mean something.

Sherrill tried that, too. But, she says, "no matter how much you want to tell yourself that you're creating art or literature when you're writing about Clint Eastwood or Peter O'Toole, you're fooling yourself that you're making some kind of contribution to the culture. What you're really doing is getting people to go out and buy a ticket to a movie."

You may walk in feeling like Joan Didion, but you walk out Jiminy Glick.

Forging a New Narrative

Can we do better? With fame and reality converging in the green flash of Gawker Stalker and "American Idol" (Stars! They're just like us! Us! We're just like stars!), with the celebrity profile a hackneyed shadow of what "Sinatra" hath wrought, with the bloggers and the blotters and the couches, can a new form be invented?

It might be worth remembering that, to write the greatest celebrity interview in journalistic history, Talese never interviewed Sinatra. Indeed the writer, reached at his home in Manhattan, still bristles at being credited -- or blamed -- with creating the modern celebrity profile. "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," he is eager to remind those who would imitate it, was not a product of access to the star, or 45 minutes in his trailer. Instead, Talese went to Los Angeles, he followed Sinatra, he watched, he talked to the singer's friends and family and he took notes for several weeks. "It's the art of hanging around," says Talese, now 75. "You don't use tape recorders, you don't work the phones, you hang out ."

"I wonder if I could publish 'Frank Sinatra' today," Talese says, adding that Sinatra wasn't even at the height of his stardom when the piece was written, and the story was published without a promotional peg. "I don't think I could. The magazine writer today has to be writing on a topic. It has to be tied in."

The tyranny of the tie-in has never been more vise-like, as media companies consolidate and cross-promote with promiscuous abandon. Who can expect anything like intimacy, or even spontaneity at its most structured, when stars are herded through press junkets like soldiers on the Bataan Death March? Stuck in a hotel room while the same TV crew photographs a steady stream of broadcasters doing four-minute interviews, it's no wonder the talent can develop a 1,000-yard stare. "The worst day I ever did was for the movie 'Escape From L.A.,'" recalls Buscemi. "I did, like, 70 in one day. I literally just got tired of talking and tired of thinking."

But sometimes, something real breaks through the artifice, even on TV. When John Travolta danced with Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show earlier this year, his sinuous hips expressed more than he could ever say. And there's nothing like the Old Medium of radio to capture a side of a celebrities that exists outside their fetishized images, as Terry Gross and the NPR show "Fresh Air" consistently prove.

And new forms are percolating: A few years ago filmmaker Jamie Stuart began attending press junkets for movies and created unusually smart, poetic and funny film essays that skillfully convey the hothouse world of film marketing in just a few impressionistic strokes. One of the best is "An Amy Adams Picture," a collaboration with the actress in which he gave her the camera during the press junket for the film "Junebug." It's a tantalizing hint of what could be a New Journalism of New Media.

"What I'm doing is the art film, and everybody else is watching TMZ," says Stuart, referring to the gossip Web site. "There are tons of interesting things that can be done with new media, in terms of interviews and promoting people. It really ultimately comes down to the talent of the filmmaker." (Stuart's work can be seen on his own Web site, http://www.mutinycompany.com.)

Choire Sicha, managing editor of www.gawker.com, says the celebrity profile is in desperate need of reinvention. "There's so much candid video, TMZ is camped out behind nightclubs every night, there are sometimes three or four sightings of one person on Gawker Stalker in a day -- all that can be assembled into something meaningful. It hasn't been, yet. But at some point definitely there has to be some sort of collage-microscopic-profile art created out of this."

The Talese of the iPhone is out there, with the technological chops and philosophical insight to create something brand new, something observant and witty, compassionate and detached, ruthless but deeply humanist. Surely, the world is ready for a new celebrity narrative, one that explodes old forms, reveals the subject at hand, and conveys something essential about ourselves.

Surely someday, Lindsay Lohan will have a cold.