The State Supreme Courthouse in lower Manhattan was bathed in light on Tuesday night as movie stars (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, and Dakota Fanning to name just a few), business titans (Ronald Perelman), media mavens (Katie Couric, Charlie Rose, Jared Kushner), designers (Tory Burch, Donna Karan, and Rachel Roy) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked off the 11th year of the Tribeca Film Festival at the uber-swank Vanity Fair party.
We asked these celebrities: What’s the first film you remember seeing that had a major impact on you?
Katie Couric:
“My mom took me to ‘The Birds’ when I was five-years-old. I don’t think she knew how gory it was. And I remember running up and down the aisles screaming. And maybe that explains a lot. A lot.”
Jane Rosenthal (festival co-founder with Robert De Niro):
“‘Mary Poppins.’ She was like the first super hero woman. She could do everything. She was magical. She seemed to do it all. And there’s a little girl named Jane so I really liked that too. I can still sing all the lyrics, but I won’t.”
Bob Balaban:
“‘The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.’ was a really big movie for me. It’s a cult classic now. It was a fantasy. It was MGM in the early ’50s. It was all about a little boy and his piano teacher and he falls asleep and has a dream in which they built a piano where they had however many children – 5,000 fingers playing the piano. It’s pretty beautiful.”
Tory Burch:
“I always loved ‘To Catch a Thief,’ especially for the clothes. It inspired me as a designer. I thought that the style was amazing.”
John Forté:
“I remember cutting class one day to see ‘Conan the Barbarian’. We snuck into the wrong theater and ended up seeing ‘Wall Street.’ My friends fell asleep but I was captivated. I came home and started asking my mom to see the business section of the newspaper so I could learn about commodities trading and about stocks and bonds and what the differences were and what yields were.”
With additional reporting by Jeryl Brunner
