Hollywood Turns Out to Watch Itself Onstage

The Scene: Thursday’s opening night for “Four Dogs and a Bone,” with a cast of Martin Short, Elizabeth Perkins, Brendan Fraser and Parker Posey directed by Lawrence Kasdan. The two-act, film-business spoof was also the inaugural production for the Geffen Playhouse (formerly the Westwood). A reception hosted by Buzz magazine followed the performance.

The Buzz: The show-biz crowd loved the play, but was the dialogue, filled with terms like “negative pickup deal” too inside for the public? Producing director Gil Cates said he blunts criticism by pointing out that “Everybody in Los Angeles is in show business. Everybody from mechanics to waiters. Plus the play deals with universal truths.”

The Guests: The biggest Hollywood turnout for a play in recent history. Among the 498 seated were David Geffen with Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steve Martin, Gabriel Byrne, Geena Davis and Renny Harlin, Keanu Reeves with Amanda de Cadanet, Kurt Russell, Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, Bill Paxton, Shirley MacLaine, Sally Field, Lou Pitt, Frank Marshall, Joel Silver and Terry Semel.

How Geffen and a Playhouse Became Eponymous: $5 million will change hands over 10 years. “I just wanted to support the theater,” said Geffen of his donation to the nonprofit venue run by UCLA. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision.” And you wondered if impulse spending was different for billionaires.

Dress Mode: The haute end of after-work. What a woman called: “Dressed up but not done up.”

Observed: A fantasy-meets-reality aspect pervaded the evening. When a Spielberg joke was told onstage, it was laughed at by Spielberg in the audience. Steve Martin, who’s “Picasso at the Lapin Agile” recently closed at the same theater, compared it to doing his play “with Picasso in the audience.”

Best Analysis of the Play’s Appeal: “The reason savage attacks on the entertainment industry are so well received by people in it,” said Howard Hesseman, “is they’re desperate to prove they have a sense of humor about their own venality.”