Hasta La Ideas

Designer Isaac Mizrahi, a known consumer of chocolate, has been announced as one of the two hosts of the Bravo network’s Project Runway replacement, The Fashion Show. He’ll be placed alongside actress Kelly Rowland before a group of struggling designers who undergo challenges, get voted on, someone gets sent home, etc. From the description, it sounds like it’s essentially the same thing as Project Runway but with one exception: The Fashion Show will have a studio audience (two differences if you count different hosts, we guess). Meanwhile, Project Runway was busy shooting the sixth season of the show during Fashion Week in New York last week, putting together its final episode, but without a network behind them yet and still trying to figure out who will win the legal battle between their two current owners, the Weinstein Company and NBC Universal. This also created a bit of trouble for the show, as the push back on the shooting schedule while all of this wrangling has been going on, forced the producers to put each contestant’s work on the runway, so as not to give away who were finalists:

“I’m a little bit sad for our designers, that they don’t get that recognition today,” [Heidi Klum] said. The introductions of the finalists were taped in advance.

In addition, all 16 contestants were expected to be backstage, making it more difficult for models or makeup artists to spot the finalists. Unlike in past years, reporters were prohibited from going into the area.

“I feel really bad” for the contestants, one audience member said as the lights were dimmed. “What a bummer,” a woman seated in the first row added.

Wait. Why does Klum just feel “a little bit sad” and some random viewer feels “really bad”? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Is it a German-to-English thing or is Heidi Klum a horrible, horrible person? We like being judgmental so we’re going to go with the latter.

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Unable to find the appropriate parka, we sat out this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where two documentaries on our 2009 must-see list were among the award winners. Ondi Timoner‘s We Live in Public, chronicling a decade in the life of Internet voyeur/pioneer/artist Josh Harris, was the festival’s big documentary winner, taking home the grand jury prize. Meanwhile, the hotly anticipated film that captures the making of Vogue‘s September 2007 issue (weighing nearly five pounds, it sold more than 13 million copies) won for excellence in cinematography for a U.S. documentary.

So how did The September Issue come about? Two words: Anna Wintour. “I like to joke that I was able to convince her to do this film by making her think that it was her idea,” says director R.J. Cutler (The War Room, Thin) in the film’s production notes. “But the truth is that focusing on the September issue as a structure was indeed her suggestion. She said it was something she always thought would make a great subject for a film.” Among Cutler’s greatest challenges was making the well-oiled machine of Vogue play on film. “We were filming a group of people who had been working together for years, in some cases decades,” says Cutler. “They worked together with a fluidity that was almost deceptive. They communicated with nods and glances, not with grand pronouncements. When we started filming there, we were stymied.”

Click “continued…” for a video in which Cutler discusses The September Issue and how he managed to get a skeptical Grace Coddington to stop asking him and his crew to go away. You’ll also get a sneek peek at a few clips.

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