Crazy fans and crazier celebs at Tribeca fest

Perhaps the best casting at the Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t on screen but in one of the festival’s last panel discussions, which paired a psychiatrist who has written about “situational narcissism” with Bruce Dern, the actor so expert in playing psychos.

Spaced throughout the Lower Manhattan festival, which ends this weekend, the “Tribeca Talks” sessions featured spies who have inspired movies, comediennes trying to understand why men hog the prime film comedies and filmmakers who have helped bring comic-book superheroes to the big screen. But Thursday evening it was Dern, the shrink and three others on “Fame! I’m Gonna Live Forever!,” so the white-haired, 70-year-old actor confessed right out that he might not be the best person to discuss today’s crazed fans -- for few would have been nuts enough to approach him in his prime.

“I’ve been pretty lucky. The first 35 years of my career I played the nastiest bastards that ever lived,” noted Dern, the man who even killed John Wayne, committing that celluloid sin in 1972’s “The Cowboys.”

Of course, Dern usually got it in the end himself, as bad guys do, though he recalled a “Gunsmoke” episode’s script that was going to let him survive despite the fact that he was part of a gang, with fellow psycho specialist Warren Oates, that kidnapped Miss Kitty, the amiable saloon proprietress. But then the director allowed him to improvise one line, after the heroic Marshal Dillon finally tracks them down, and asks, “What went on in here?”

“So I said ... ‘You don’t wanna know,’ ” Dern recalled. “I wasn’t supposed to die, but he shot me on the spot.”

The topic being today’s celebrity mania, however, he quickly segued into his Robert Redford and Marilyn Monroe stories, to provide some historical perspective.

Dern told of being hissed at the premiere of “The Great Gatsby,” in which his character sets up the murder of Redford’s dashing Gatsby. The crowd not only hissed him, Dern said, but chanted, “We want Bob! We want Bob!”

His Marilyn encounter occurred the very first day he attended a class at the Actors Studio here, in about 1960. Monroe, then Hollywood’s leading sex symbol, sat next to him and asked him to walk her home, Dern said, to the apartment she shared with husband Arthur Miller. When they reached Sutton Place, though, they ran into another woman on the street, older and in a full-length coat, rushing by them to get into a cab. “Bruce! Bruce! ... That was Greta Garbo!” Dern recalled Monroe saying. “And she was sobbing, ‘Bruce, Bruce, that was Greta Garbo -- and she didn’t know who I was.’ ”

His take on the episode? Garbo had to know who Monroe was -- she was just laying a trip on a new era’s starlet.

The Tribeca talk sessions included many such well-honed anecdotes, particularly in panelists’ opening remarks. But there were surprise moments too, and one blurted-out snippet even generated instant celebrity news, that from last weekend’s “Look Who’s Laughing” panel of actresses asked to ponder the distinct male slant of film comedies nowadays. After many quips about how Hollywood most wanted “hotties,” whether funny or not, Debra Messing, at that session’s end, volunteered her “chicken cutlets” tale.

It seems that when she shot the pilot for “Will & Grace,” the wardrobe people handed her these things, “the jelly, the boobs. They’re jelly boobs ....I was like, ‘All right.’ ” But after the show was picked up, she added, “I said, ‘I don’t want to wear these.... I actually like the idea that she’s completely flat-chested and I think there’s comedy to be had.’ ”

So after three episodes without the enhancing cutlets, she said, “I was called to the executive producer’s office and they sat me down. ‘We got a call from the president of NBC.... ‘What happened to her boobs?’ ”

Messing said she replied “ ... ‘em!,” reprising language more associated with another member of the panel, Susie Essman, who became an unlikely breakout character in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as the ranting wife of Larry David’s best friend and agent, whom she’s constantly berating as a fat something-or-other.

In the panel on espionage movies, “Spies Like Them,” ex-CIA spook Robert Baer underscored the worldwide clout of films today with a story about escorting screenwriter Stephen Gaghan around the Middle East while they pondered what story to tell in “Syriana.” He said the president of Syria told them, “I want to help on this movie. I want to get into Hollywood.” Then in Lebanon, they were granted an audience with the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, who explained to the Oscar-winning writer, “I just loved ‘Traffic.’ ”

Thursday night’s panel on fame, held in an auditorium at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, kicked off with the psychiatrist, Dr. Robert B. Millman, explaining his concept of acquired situational narcissism. It’s not the usual narcissism developed early on by “inadequate mothering,” he said, but a consequence of “exaggerated self-importance” that overcomes movie stars or athletes who sense everyone looking at them when they enter a room, until they “stop noticing everyone else.”

Millman then told his “fingernail story,” about a celebrity he didn’t name who was sitting at a table complaining about his discomforting hand until someone else volunteered that he’d recently had heart surgery, at which point the celeb said, “ ‘Oh, that must have been terrible’ -- then went right back to his fingernail.”

Befitting his star status, Dern was seated center stage, the shrink off his right shoulder. But the most intriguing panelist of the night may have been one on the other side, Janice Min, the editor of Us Weekly, who was alternately devastating in her portrayal of celebrity culture today while remaining unapologetic about her magazine’s role as part of the celebrity machine. Focusing on the cover girls who have become famous mostly for being famous, such as Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, she told the audience, “I wouldn’t want to say they’re soulless, but ... ,” then pointed out how none went to college and that their main shared qualities were a “level of stupidity” and the “sheer will” to make their lives a public spectacle.

“You want the gratification that people think you’re pretty,” the magazine editor said. “I really think it’s as simple as that. [But] you can never be fulfilled.”

Dern said that in his case, much as there was an advantage early on to being the crazy man, there now was a good side to becoming “a geezer,” namely that people “give you space.”

Even so, he reported that just that evening a man was waiting outside with a poster from a movie he might want to forget, 1971’s “The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.” Dern said one celebrity friend of his has a policy of treating such fans rudely -- on the theory that “they love that” -- but that he himself chose, in real life, to be the good guy. “Without them,” he said of such fans, “I’m nowhere.”

Moments later, as if on cue, another popped up for all the crowd to see. It was time for questions from the audience and he was first to the microphone. He might have been an aspiring actor himself, trying to show that he too could play the psycho, for he mumbled and tried out a few accents as he explained that he didn’t have a question, “I just wanted to say, ‘You’re an icon.... You’re the consummate artist.’ ” The fellow rambled on some more, and apologized, before announcing that he would be first in line when Dern was gong to sign copies of his new book.

“Hopefully,” the fan said to the famous man, “there won’t be security outside.”

paul.lieberman@latimes.com