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the season’s coolest

cocktails

Billionaires Dressing BadlySilicon Valley’s Style Crisis

The Music Industry’s Greatest Hitmaker Tells All

of vice anD men how bad are your

guiLty pLeasures?

details.com

GeT rIpped. fAsT.steps to the perfect body6

hollywood mavericks sTArrInG

LeonArdo dIcAprIo And THe InnovATors, rIsk-TAkers & bIG THInkers wHo Are cHAnGInG THe fAce of enTerTAInMenT.

s p e c i a l i s s u e

THe details HoLIdAy

GIfT GuIde

THe rIGHTsTuff

1 3 1d e t a i l s d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 2 | j a n u a r y 2 0 1 3

Rumors of Hollywood’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. However, everything is upside down: The top-heavy old-guard studio

dinosaurs bear the whiff of desperation, while the real power is bubbling up from below in the form of an inspired and mobilized creative class that’s more

reliant on big ideas than big budgets. No one is who they seem: Writers are becoming directors, directors are becoming moguls, actors are becoming all of the above instead of lying around praying for a spin-off. And nothing is static:

Partnerships want to be companies, companies want to be cultural movements, cultural movements want to fundamentally change the way we define

entertainment. All this constructive chaos is being fueled by the fevered, risk-taking innovators who see tumult and transition as the time to pounce, to kick

up dust rather than wait for it to settle. These bold thinkers have no time for sky-is-falling prognostication and no need for affirmation. They’re too busy

working, building the future—because they know they have one.

BY JESSE ASHLOCK, ALEX BHATTACHARJ I , STAYTON BONNER, KR ISTEN DOLD, GREG EMMANUEL, STEVE KANDELL, LAURENCE LOWE, SHE ILA MONAGHAN, AND JON ROTH

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG INGL ISHSTYLING BY EUGENE TONG AND SARAH SCHUSSHEIM

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1 3 2 d e t a i l s d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 2 | j a n u a r y 2 0 1 3

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can almost hear them: “Leo, baby, why don’t find yourself a nice action fran-chise and settle down?”

That’s the thing about the Tao of Leo: He’s managed to cast a long shadow over Hollywood for two full decades without ever bowing to convention—no big-budget franchises, no rom-coms, not even a true action movie. “I don’t know why I choose certain films,” he says. “I just gravitate toward them and I don’t question that.”

Perhaps the boldest move in DiCaprio’s 20-year career is playing antebellum plantation owner Calvin Candie in Django Unchained. DiCaprio was drawn to him from the moment he read Tarantino’s script. He calls Calvin “one of, if not the most, despi-cable, indulgent, radical characters I’ve ever read in my life.” Naturally, DiCaprio signed on right away, and he promptly presented Tarantino with a gift: an antiquarian book on phrenology, the racist pseudo-science used to rationalize slavery. From there, DiCaprio and Tarantino made some striking modifications. “Writer-directors tend to be very precious about their material and their words,” he says, “but Quentin’s whole pro-cess is getting input from the actors and adding levels to their charac-ters.” Perhaps no character evolved as much as Calvin, the master of Candyland plantation. “A lot of the talks we had specifically about phre-nology really took him to a completely different level.”

Adding philosophical underpinnings to Calvin’s racism helped unlock the character, informing his affection for his surrogate father, a house slave played by Samuel L. Jackson, and his leering need to possess—as chat-tel—Django’s wife, played by Kerry Washington. Tarantino drew on phre-nology to fashion an epic, incendiary monologue on racial superiority. The moment DiCaprio finished delivering the speech, the entire cast gave him a spontaneous standing ovation.

“He creates shades and layers and probes and just goes deeper than anybody else ever desires to,” says Stacey Sher, one of the film’s produc-ers. “The last day, when everyone was saying goodbye to him, Leo was like, ‘Yeah, I’m sure happy not to be that guy anymore—it feels good.’ You knew he just felt lighter.”

Yet for the newly liberated Leonardo DiCaprio, there was never any hesita-tion about letting it all hang out—in Django, in what he calls Scorsese’s “really wild, nuts movie,” and in a musi-cally charged makeover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “sacred” American novel.

“Of course it’s all risky,” he says, as a production assistant calls into the office to tell him he’s needed for the next scene. “I mean, that’s the excite-ment of doing it, you know?”

the leading man

MEET THE EMANCIPATED

LEONARDO DICAPRIO,

A SINGLE-NAME SUPERSTAR

WHO’S BROKEN FREE OF THE

SHACKLES THAT CONSTRAIN

OTHER A-LISTERS:

DON’T ACCEPT A SUPPORTING

ROLE? (TOO LATE.) NEVER

MESS WITH A BELOVED

CLASSIC? (WHOOPS.) UNDER NO

CIRCUMSTANCES PLAY A BAD

GUY? (DOES A VIRULENTLY

RACIST SLAVE OWNER COUNT?)

“I apologize if my voice is out—I’ve been screaming all day,” Leonardo DiCaprio says from the Long Island set of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Taking a respite in his produc-tion office, he sounds sleepy, scratchy, and, quite frankly on this late-October afternoon, a little spent.

Gone are the days of the biennial, or at best annual, Leo movie. After assiduously turning selectivity into an art form, long exercising the power of saying no, he is tasting the free-wheeling joy—and pain—of saying yes: DiCaprio has three big films hitting theaters within the next year, and he’s producing three to boot. He’s coming off a year straight of wrangling, meetings, and a whole lot of acting. “This has been an exceptional situation,” DiCaprio says. “Filming three movies back to back to back, I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”

Curiously, he gravitated toward a timely theme in all of them. “In a weird way,” he says, “I realize these movies are about three different periods in American history, but all have a central character trying to hold on to the priv-ileged life they’ve been given, by any means necessary.” He says this either unaware or unconcerned that it could apply to a 38-year-old movie star who is taking risks like never before.

For the first time since appearing in Woody Allen’s Celebrity in 1998, he’s playing a supporting role—a villain, no less—in Quentin Tarantino’s Spaghetti Western–cum–revisionist slave narrative Django Unchained; he’s rein-terpreting the most iconic character in modern American literature in Baz Luhrmann’s high-octane 3-D adapta-tion of The Great Gatsby; and then he’s reportedly going the full monty in a group-sex scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, the no-holds-barred look at the finance world he’d been trying to get made as a producer for years. With so much conduct unbecoming a leading man, it’s a wonder Damon, Cruise, et al., haven’t staged an intervention. You

BY ALEX BHATTACHARJ I PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SEL IGER

1 3 3d e t a i l s d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 2 | j a n u a r y 2 0 1 3

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Suit and tie by Burberry London. Shirt

by Burberry Brit.

Leonardo dicaprio, 38 Credit check: Actor, Django Unchained, The Great Gatsby; actor-producer, The Wolf of Wall StreetCatch Him if You Can: “My whole thing has been to develop material outside the studio system for myself, and this expanded to funding material I won’t necessarily star in. I don’t need to wear the producer hat while making movies, but I love to have that collaboration.”