It was seven P.M., and Dinesh D’Souza—political pundit, writer, documentary-film maker, and onetime wunderkind of the intellectual elite—was dining in his new haunt: the Subway sandwich shop in National City, San Diego, a downtrodden Latino neighborhood about 20 miles from the Mexican border. He ordered his usual: six-inch whole-wheat sub with tuna salad and provolone. The girl making it was one step ahead of him. “He’s one of my randoms,” she said affectionately. Indeed, in his glasses, striped sweater over a polo shirt, and clean sneakers, D’Souza looked as if he were heading for a start-up rollout event instead of a community confinement center a few minutes away, where he is serving an eight-month sentence during nighttime hours.

The rest of his evening would look something like this: He would check in to the confinement center at 7:57 P.M., three minutes before his 8 P.M. curfew. Certain that the Obama administration is waiting for him to slip up, he wouldn’t risk being late, which is why he eats near the facility and not at his home, 20 miles away in La Jolla, where he is free to spend the day (though he may not leave the confines of San Diego County). Upon entering the center’s fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged building, situated across from a pungent recycling dump, he would be given a Breathalyzer test and patted down. He would join about 90 other residents, mostly Latino. After using one of the stalls of his communal bathroom, he would enter the open-plan sleeping quarters and climb onto a top bunk, above a 400-pound guy who, “when he moves, the whole bunk bed shakes.” He would do his best to focus on his book and to block out the conversation. “I’ll be on my bed. I’ll hear four guys discussing the tits on the woman at Los Tacos. It will go on and on and on. I’m just powerless to move.”

D’Souza reports on his new living situation with high energy and a matter-of-fact bemusement punctuated by an eager, slightly dorky laugh—which is odd, given his grim circumstances. Last May, he pleaded guilty to a campaign-finance violation after he was caught getting two straw donors to contribute to the campaign of his old friend Wendy Long, who was running against Kirsten Gillibrand in the U.S. Senate race in New York. At one point, he was facing up to two years in prison, though he ultimately got eight months in a halfway house, plus community service, and a $30,000 fine. Still, it’s no small price to pay given that most people who commit the same crime don’t get caught. So, why is he so animated? According to D’Souza, there’s a conspiracy afoot: he’s a victim of Obama’s anti-colonialist rage.

It makes perfect sense, right? In the past five years, he has turned Obama’s alleged rage into a fortune with three books—The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Obama’s America, and America: Imagine a World Without Her—and companion documentaries for the last two, one of which grossed $33 million, making it the highest-grossing political documentary after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

After the charges came down in January 2014, he cried “selective prosecution,” a serious offense in which the government unfairly targets an individual—in this case, for political retribution. Alas, D’Souza didn’t have evidence that the president, or Attorney General Eric Holder, or anyone else in the Justice Department, was out to get him. When he couldn’t get the case thrown out on that basis, he pleaded guilty and claimed to take responsibility for his actions. The act might have earned him points with the judge, who had the discretion to ignore the sentencing guidelines (from 10 to 16 months of incarceration), but D’Souza seemed to squander the judge’s goodwill by publicly and repeatedly announcing that he was a victim of political persecution. The judge seemed perplexed. Why was D’Souza engaging in self-sabotage? Did he have some kind of psychological affliction? Why, in the first place, did a man who had achieved so much success so carelessly flout the law when there was so little to gain? In short, how could such a smart man be so stupid?

Indeed, D’Souza may be the most maddening, bewildering figure in the punditry world. He is eminently likable in person: courteous, avuncular, chatty, quick to laugh, and willing to lay himself open to ridicule. He’s also a doting father to an intelligent, polite 20-year-old daughter, who utterly reveres him. But in his public life he’s pathologically drawn to pushing the bounds of civil discourse, often with a disinterest in backing up his assertions with facts. While this approach has won him hundreds of thousands of fans of the Joe the Plumber variety, it has eaten away at his respectability in intellectual circles. Few members of the media elite, he complains, have been willing to publicly defend him.

Immigrant Narrative

Even as a kid, D’Souza demonstrated versions of these two sides—the hopeful immigrant, determined to excel, and the attention-seeking pest. One of his aspirations as a middle-class boy growing up in Mumbai was to memorize the entire English dictionary. Through a Rotary exchange program he ended up, at age 17, in a small town in Arizona. After “crushing the S.A.T.’s,” he landed at Dartmouth. The ways of the Northeast elite were totally alien to him, but he quickly found a group of students that would become his “surrogate family” and unleash his inner frat-boy knucklehead. With support from a charismatic professor, Jeffrey Hart, who was a senior editor at William F. Buckley Jr.’s The National Review, the group founded The Dartmouth Review, with the aim of challenging in the most offensive ways possible what they saw as liberal campus claptrap. Under D’Souza’s editorship, the paper published a “lighthearted interview” with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, accompanied by a staged photo of a black man hanging from a tree; an article about affirmative action entitled “Dis Sho’ Ain’t No Jive, Bro,” written in Ebonics; and the names of members of the Gay Student Alliance. In his memoir, Stress Test, former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who attended Dartmouth at the same time as D’Souza, recalls running into him at a coffee shop and asking him “how it felt to be such a dick.”

D’Souza allows that some of his behavior may have been “sophomoric.” But, as the leader of the young conservative counter-Establishment, he got national attention. “Here I am. I’m 20 years old, 21, and I find myself being written about in The New York Times and Newsweek,” D’Souza recalls. Soon after graduation, he parlayed his young fame into a stint as managing editor of a right-wing quarterly, Policy Review, before landing a job in the Reagan White House as a domestic-policy analyst. Seeing a career in government as a slog, in 1989 he accepted a job offer from the American Enterprise Institute, the pre-eminent conservative think tank.

He could easily have spent the next couple of years churning out dry policy pieces. Indeed, his first few books went nowhere. But in 1991, his Illiberal Education was a smash hit: an exhaustively researched takedown of the political correctness that was sweeping college campuses and that he believed was undermining academic standards and chilling freedom of thought. His editor, Adam Bellow (son of novelist Saul Bellow), had urged D’Souza to aim to engage even liberals, and D’Souza did just that. The book put on the map a conversation that was necessary at the time, and it became a best-seller, getting rave reviews and prominent cover placement in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic. “Illiberal Education was terrific,” recalls Andrew Sullivan, then the editor of The New Republic. “He had a sharp intellect and a gift for provocation, in a good way.”

“Suddenly, I just became a huge mainstream celebrity in the intellectual world,” says D’Souza, who was inundated with speaking invitations. He also became a hot commodity among blonde conservatives. After dating Laura Ingraham and then Ann Coulter, he found the ultimate prize in Dixie Brubaker, a beautiful blonde from a conservative California family, whom he had met while working in the White House; they married in 1992. D’Souza admits, “It was my mission to marry the all-American girl.”

He had the plum job, the perfect wife, and a provocative tack that seemed to work. Emboldened by the success of Illiberal Education, he pushed his argument further, in 1995, with The End of Racism. His being brown himself, he believed, put him in a privileged position to comment on race and would inoculate him against criticism. Among his assertions: slavery in this country was not actually based on race. That if we’re going to discuss America owing blacks reparations for slavery, then what do blacks owe America for the abolition of slavery? He riffed on “widely different personalities” developed during slavery—“the playful Sambo, the sullen ‘field nigger,’ the dependable Mammy, the sly and inscrutable trickster”—that, he claimed, were “still recognizable.” It was another best-seller, but this time the press denounced it as insensitive. Sullivan, who had planned to run an excerpt in The New Republic, declined to publish it. Eventually, recalls Sullivan, “in the office, he was called by his nickname, ‘Distort Denewsa.’ ” Glenn Loury and Bob Woodson, two African-American colleagues at A.E.I., resigned in protest. As Loury wrote, “It violated the canons of civility and commonality.”

But, D’Souza says, “I didn’t believe that sensitivity had a legitimate place in the debate. Sensitivity was the reason why the debate had the artificiality it did. Everyone has to walk on eggshells…. And I’m like, ‘I’m not going to do that…. I didn’t do any of this to you. So I don’t owe you anything.’ ” He ditched Washington for his wife’s hometown of San Diego and got a job at the Hoover Institution, Stanford’s conservative think tank.

After making wild arguments about race, he would make even wilder arguments about 9/11, in the 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—whose title summed up its thesis. The real reason terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, he wrote, was anger stirred by the left—Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Planned Parenthood, Brokeback Mountain, and The Vagina Monologues. He placed special blame on divorce and adultery, inventions, he wrote, of the left. The logic was as tortuous as it needed to be: the Abu Ghraib scandal, for example, was actually the fault of liberals because the soldiers who enacted the despicable acts, Lynddie England and Charles Graner, were divorced, sex-crazed partiers who were therefore “act[ing] out the fantasies of blue America.” As a remedy to terrorism, he advocated that God-fearing right-wing Americans should join forces with their natural ally, traditional Muslims, including those who agree with Sharia law. Many right-wing critics, including some at the Hoover Institution, hadn’t encountered such creative hypothesizing, and they were nearly unanimous in their appraisal—calling his arguments “dishonest,” “intellectually obtuse,” and “suicidal.”

He recognizes that he may have gone overboard with his thesis. “Look, I may be wrong about it,” he says today. “I am attracted to arguments that have a certain plausible originality to them.” But he ascribes the criticism coming from his Hoover colleagues to jealousy. “There was a simmering resentment against me at Hoover,” he says. “They all sit around and have coffee once a week. I live in San Diego. I’m not at Hoover. And so they have these very chic events, and I literally parachute in. I’m the celebrity over there. And then I parachute out and I’m gone.” Whether it was their resentment over his stardom or simply that they hated the book, the rift was untenable, and he resigned. His intellectual allies were dwindling.

On a Wing and a Prayer

But as that world appeared to be closing on D’Souza, another, larger world was opening to him. D’Souza’s other beat had been Christianity (with such books as What’s So Great About Christianity and Life After Death), and he eventually gained entrée to the mega-church speaking circuit. In venues such as Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, in Orange County, which claims to have more than 20,000 congregants, D’Souza says he was selling 800 books in a day. He’d never encountered the American masses before, but they seemed to love him.

As passionate as these folks were about God, they were as fearful of Barack Obama, who had just taken office. Where did this guy come from? Was he African? Muslim? What was the deal with his name? In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010), D’Souza answered those questions for them. Obama was born in Hawaii, he admitted, and he wasn’t, to anyone’s knowledge, Muslim. But he had a single goal: to avenge the injustices inflicted by colonialism upon his father’s Kenyan homeland, by intentionally weakening America’s economy and power in the world. The book was written in two months, he boasted in the introduction. And with sentences like these, it showed: “The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dream of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s—a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into a stupor, and bounced around on two iron legs … raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated, African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”

The conservative Weekly Standard called the book “lunacy,” but to thousands of Americans—among them Newt Gingrich—D’Souza’s theory sounded about right; the book was an instant best-seller. But D’Souza knew there were millions more out there who needed to hear this message. “The battlefield is much bigger. To reach that battlefield, you have to go beyond books.” Inspired by the success of Fahrenheit 9/11, D’Souza partnered with Gerald Molen, the right-wing co-producer of Schindler’s List, raised $2.5 million from private individuals, and made the 2012 documentary 2016: Obama’s America. It received a 26 percent score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but what did he care? He was a rock star again, this time doing large arenas. He found in his new fans “foot soldiers that are looking for leadership, intellectual leadership, cultural leadership…. Some of them regard me as a hero.”

But in typical Hollywood fashion, just as he was lapping up his newfound glory, the wheels began to come off his private life. Back in 2010, D’Souza had been asked to be president of the King’s College, a small evangelical college in Manhattan. D’Souza wasn’t strictly evangelical—he was raised Catholic—but says he was leaning in that direction. And he had the name recognition King’s was looking for in its quest to raise money. The offer came with a reported seven-figure salary, and he accepted. While he was packing his bags for New York, “I discovered, to my horror, irrefutable evidence that my wife was involved with someone else.” D’Souza says that Dixie had grown bored with his political life and had no interest in repairing their marriage, so he went to New York without her, traumatized. (Dixie says this is “simply untrue…. I signed us up for a marriage-counseling retreat … and attended marriage-counseling sessions.”)

Given his leadership role at a Christian college, he might have handled the situation with as much grace and care as possible. Instead, his old recklessness took hold. In the summer of 2012, before any divorce papers were filed, he began secretly seeing Denise Odie Joseph II, a D’Souza groupie, married and 22 years his junior. She kept a blog called “I, Denise, Lust After … ” on which she called D’Souza “one of our favorite conservative activist philosophers.” He admits, “I was completely blown away.”

It was too dizzying a time to deal with the mundane obligations he’d taken on, like helping to fund-raise for Wendy Long, his old Dartmouth Review compatriot, in her Senate race. The campaign was hopeless, “a joke,” according to D’Souza, and she kept asking him to do tedious tasks, like meeting with groups of wealthy Indian doctors in Westchester to ask for their support. He completely blew it off but was starting to feel guilty.

He’d already reached the legal donation limit by giving $10,000, on behalf of himself and his estranged wife. But there was a lot more needed. So he asked his new lover and her husband to contribute $10,000 and said he’d reimburse them. He asked the same of his young assistant, Tyler Vawser, and Vawser’s wife. Vawser was concerned; according to court documents, D’Souza assured him it was fine. If anyone should ask about it, D’Souza said, Vawser should say that he knew Long and that he supported her candidacy. When Long later asked D’Souza about these unusually large contributions, D’Souza assured her that the individuals had the means. Despite the trail of untruths, D’Souza casts the act as one of generosity of spirit and misguided friendship. “All of my friends supported Wendy Long, but none of them supported her like this. Why? They were too smart to do it…. I felt inwardly that I should do more. I felt an obligation to do more.” Not so obligated, it should be said, that it was worth fund-raising the legal way—like traveling to Westchester to meet with a group of Indian doctors.

D ’Souza felt indestructible, and he was on a roll. Weeks after orchestrating the illegal contributions, he brought Joseph along to a conference in South Carolina. The subject was how to apply a Christian worldview to one’s life, and D’Souza was the keynote speaker. He introduced Joseph as his fiancée to several people, even though both of them were still married to others. Alas, a reporter named Warren Cole Smith from the Christian publication World Magazine discovered that he and Joseph were sharing a room. Six days later, Smith called D’Souza to ask how he could be engaged when he was still married. D’Souza replied that he had filed for divorce “recently.” When Smith checked, it turned out that D’Souza had filed for divorce that very day.

D’Souza maintains that he was the victim of a vendetta: Marvin Olasky, the editor of World Magazine, who had been provost at the King’s College, had fought against D’Souza’s appointment. The reporter, Smith, had been a consultant to the King’s College until D’Souza ended his contract. In addition, says D’Souza, the suggestion that he was committing adultery and lying about it to his employers was disingenuous; he says that he’d already told then King’s College board chairman Andy Mills that his marriage was effectively over before taking the job. Mills, however, disputes D’Souza’s account. “I had no sense that the marriage was over, no sense that he’d separated,” says Mills. “On the contrary, it was, ‘We’re having difficulties, but we’re working on it.’ In fact over the next year, the reports [about their marriage] were quite positive…. So it was a great shock to me when we found out about the ‘separation from his wife’ and this girlfriend. That was completely out of left field.” D’Souza was promptly asked to resign. As for Joseph, “here she is, emblazoned all over the Internet, and people are discussing her breasts…. It put a strain on our relationship,” recalls D’Souza. They broke up soon after. Things were about to get worse.

At some point in 2013, after conducting what the government called a routine review of Long’s campaign filings, the F.B.I. reported to the Justice Department a couple of red flags—two contributions totaling $10,000 each from individuals not known to Long, in a sea of smaller contributions. In January 2014, after investigators questioned Joseph and Vawser, neither of whom were prosecuted, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, charged D’Souza with two counts: violating federal campaign-finance laws and causing a false statement to be made to the Federal Election Commission. The two charges could bring up to seven years’ jail time. D’Souza hired Benjamin Brafman, whose clients have included Michael Jackson and Dominique Strauss-Kahn. For four months D’Souza refused to plead guilty. Instead, Brafman sought to have the charges thrown out on the grounds that D’Souza was the victim of selective prosecution. According to the motion, D’Souza was being targeted because he was “a sharp critic of the Obama presidency who has incurred the president’s wrath.”

To back up this claim, Brafman cited several similar straw-donor cases that were settled by fines, not criminal prosecution. The cases that resulted in jail time, he argued, involved either larger sums of money or larger schemes of corruption. The prosecution countered that D’Souza’s case had distinguishing characteristics that made it egregious enough: he had involved a person in his employ, Vawser, whom he encouraged to lie, and he had repeatedly lied to Long. In the end, U.S. District Court judge Richard M. Berman determined that D’Souza’s claim of selective prosecution was “all hat and no cattle.” The case would not be dismissed.

Jolly Good Felon

On May 20, 2014, the day the trial was to begin, D’Souza pleaded guilty to the illegal campaign contribution charge (taking the second charge off the table) and professed to take responsibility for his actions. The next few months would be critical, as the judge would be deliberating on the appropriate sentence. The moment called for humility. D’Souza enlisted 27 people—colleagues, friends, and family members in India—to write to the judge on his behalf. While they got busy attesting to his remorse, he began publicly conveying just the opposite. Brafman begged his client to keep his mouth shut, but D’Souza couldn’t resist. He was finishing up his second documentary, America: Imagine a World Without Her, which was to be released imminently, and had to insert one last scene: Dinesh himself in handcuffs, rubbing his eyes, accompanied by a treacly voice-over: “I’m not above the law. No one is. But we don’t want to live in a society where Lady Justice has one eye open and winks at her friends, and casts the evil eye at her adversaries. When will it stop?” He repeated a similar line in interviews with Megyn Kelly on Fox and elsewhere. On September 3, as his sentencing day approached, he wrote to the judge that he was “ashamed and contrite.” Two days later, he posted on Twitter: “The Obama campaign to shut me up: is it working?” Although Brafman has come to “grudgingly respect” D’Souza’s decision to speak out, he admits that “Dinesh was trying to do everything possible to alienate the government and the court while I was working my ass off trying to develop arguments to support a very lenient sentence.”

Judge Berman could only wonder. “I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it,” he told him on September 23, the day of the sentencing hearing. “The defense says it has accepted the court’s rulings in this case, yet Mr. D’Souza … continues to deflect and minimize the significance of the crime and of his behavior.” D’Souza’s public pronouncements, he went on, were “totally thoughtless and not self-reflective and not self aware…. I’m totally confident that Lady Justice is doing her job and that she’s not taking off her blindfold to target Dinesh D’Souza.” D’Souza’s trail of bluster had finally caught up with him in court. The judge sentenced him to five years’ probation, a full day of community service each week for those five years, eight months in a confinement center, and therapeutic counseling. A week later, D’Souza reportedly had a request. Could he delay the sentence? Because he really wanted to, among other things, promote his new movie. The judge wrote, “Respectfully denied.”

In October, D’Souza entered the confinement center, joining the kind of people he had publicly referred to as “parasitic.” Luckily, none seemed to be familiar with his work. Those first days had their Orange Is the New Black moments. The first night, he slept “with one eye open.” While he was lying there, his 400-pound bunkmate struck up a conversation: “He goes, ‘Hey, man, what are you in for?’ I go, ‘Campaign-finance violation.’ He goes, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I go, ‘Well, my friend was running for the Senate, and I gave her too much money. I raised money for her in the wrong way.’ So he goes, ‘Shit! Can you raise money for me?’ I go, ‘No.’ Then there was the mandatory rape class, which was about ‘establishing that all of us have a right not to be raped.’ Very reassuring.”

But D’Souza also shows flashes of self-reflection. Looking back on the recent events in his life, he says, “Part of what you learn about life is that a wrecking ball can come out of nowhere, and it isn’t just going to take out your left toe. It can hit you right in the middle and take you down.” His personal experience has made him re-assess some of his public stances. His community service, teaching English to Mexican immigrants, some of whom are undocumented, has softened his stance on immigration. He once had a credo that “the quality of the immigrant is directly proportional to the distance traveled to get here…. But I now see that the adults in my class are incredibly industrious, determined, and hardworking, and no less strenuous in their pursuit of the American Dream than any other immigrant group.” Likewise, his own divorce has “sobered and humbled me and made me a lot more tentative about things I was sure about.” It seems he’s no longer convinced that the country’s acceptance of divorce led to the destruction of the World Trade Center. And he is as productive as ever. His future plans include starting a PAC, to pay for getting his America documentary shown on hundreds of campuses, and writing a new book with a companion film about the “secret history” of the left. He is also trying his hand at Christian-themed feature films and, to that end, is busy writing screenplays for a thriller and a family film.

Still, old addictions are hard to break. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he tweeted, “An interesting parallel: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character. I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama.” You’d think he’d made his point already. But in his view, it was working—since his sentencing, he says he has raised $10 million toward his new film—so why stop? “This whole episode,” he says, “far from denting my career, has actually brought me to the attention of a wider audience.”

She didn’t exactly set the stage on fire, but she was still, it seemed, the highlight of everyone’s day. In June, in Manhattan, 35-year-old Chelsea Clinton, vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation, looking understated-chic in a silk blouse, held court at the United Nations about the global problem of fathers’ being disengaged from their children. She used no notes and moved her gaze back and forth across a room full of rapt nonprofit leaders and policymakers as she shared her passion for numbers and data. “We often say at the foundation that data helps measure progress, but it also helps drive progress. And that’s why I think this report [State of the World’s Fathers] is so tremendously important.” She rattled off facts about the benefits of engaged fathers and introduced the audience to “Abenomics,” a recent Japanese theory for stimulating economic growth. In what has become customary in her public addresses, she brought the issue around to the personal, mentioning her then eight-month-old daughter, Charlotte, and her husband, 37-year-old hedge-fund manager Marc Mezvinsky: “I’m so grateful for his dedication, his support, his love, and the investments that he makes in our daughter every single day.”

The U.N. speech was no big deal for Chelsea, mind you. In the past few months she has accompanied her father and 20 wealthy foundation donors to Africa, capped off by a Clinton Global Initiative conference in Marrakech; visited Haiti; and hit the TV talk shows to tout the foundation’s “No Ceilings” project, an online report that gathered more than “a million data points” about the state of girls and women in the world. With Jimmy Kimmel she demonstrated not only her impressive grasp of the issue but also her new breezy rapport with friendly interviewers.

In addition, she spoke at a June tribute to the late fashion great Oscar de la Renta, referring to him “as my friend and as the man I would have chosen for my grandfather had God granted me such a gift.” In 2014 she received Glamour’s Woman of the Year award. During an interview with her following the ceremony, a beaming Katie Couric concluded that Chelsea was also, “I think it’s safe to say, probably a Mom of the Year.”

Gone is the Chelsea who tried to blend in as just another Stanford-educated grind. She has fully embraced being a Clinton and is now deliberately, willfully, on the road to greatness. She recently admitted that running for office one day is “absolutely” a possibility. Like every aspiring political-office holder, she found time in the busiest possible moment in life (in her case the first year of motherhood) to write a book: It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going! And, most important, two and a half years ago she put her name alongside those of her parents at their foundation, which has raised some $2 billion since its inception and is now called the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

This was no vanity move. Those who work with her at the foundation attest to her almost daunting intelligence, her diligence, and her genuine dedication to the job. But the question of whether Chelsea can lead remains to be seen, and if ever there were a moment to show some creative vision, it would be now. Never before has the Clinton Foundation come under such scrutiny—for the donations from foreign governments it received while Hillary was secretary of state; for those it continues to receive as she runs for president; and for the extremely large speaking fees that both Bill (up to $1 million) and Hillary (up to $500,000) have been collecting from foreign governments, corporations, colleges, and even small charities. Whether or not our global policies have been shaped by who gave what to the Clinton Foundation is nearly impossible to prove, but nevertheless there’s a perception problem, and scrutiny of the foundation’s fund-raising practices will grow only more intense should Hillary become president.

The problem is now Chelsea’s too. And yet, despite her vaunted position, she has been shielded from having to answer. Her spokesman, Kamyl Bazbaz, guided Vanity Fair to sources for this article, but Chelsea declined to be interviewed. Questions put to the foundation about her position on the fund-raising issue were redirected. Her television appearances have been strictly in friendly venues. Interviews with print media have been limited to discreet, non-controversial topics, such as her initiative to stop elephant poaching. Recently, when ABC News anchor Juju Chang found a moment to ask her about the fund-raising allegations, she did so apologetically (“I would be remiss if I didn’t ask … ”) and allowed Chelsea to sidestep the question.

Except among members of right-wing media, the idea of making Chelsea Clinton uncomfortable feels wrong. Our national instinct is to protect and revere her—to treat her more like royal progeny than an adult who has taken on a position of global consequence. The coddling is not simply because she’s the daughter of two political superstars who are loved and feared and protected by their own omertà—although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also because we witnessed the public humiliation she went through as a teenager by virtue of being President Clinton’s daughter, and because, in spite of all that, she appears to have emerged as a decent, serious young woman. The resilience was moving. As Anne Hubert, a friend from Stanford and now a Viacom executive, puts it, “People are rooting for Chelsea. They want her to be doing well.”

Our national sympathy for Chelsea is rooted in our image of her as a kid who exuded natural decency and earnestness. She was inculcated at an early age with the importance of world engagement. Before she could read, her parents read to her from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. At the age of five, she wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan questioning his planned, much-disputed visit to a German military cemetery that contained some Nazi graves. Todd S. Purdum, who then covered President Clinton for The New York Times (and is now a Vanity Fair contributing editor), recalls Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, showing Chelsea’s letter to him. “Dear President Reagan, I have seen The Sound of Music. The Nazis don’t look very nice to me. Please don’t go to their cemetary [sic].”

Despite the Clintons’ wish for their daughter to have a normal childhood, their will to change the world superseded everything. They sought to prepare her for the ugly realities that would come with that. As Hillary revealed in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village, when Bill was running for his second term as governor of Arkansas, the family did role-playing exercises at dinner. Six-year-old Chelsea played Bill, and he hurled insults in her face about what a terrible person he was. She ended up in tears the first night, but “she gradually gained mastery over her emotions,” recalled Hillary. She would need that skill. When Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, he requested that Chelsea remain off limits to the media. Most respected his wish, but she endured cruel barbs from Rush Limbaugh, Saturday Night Live, and John McCain that targeted her awkward teenage looks. Throughout, she remained a model of perfect manners. Purdum recalls a dinner in 1995 in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to celebrate the birthday of one of Hillary’s aides. “Someone from the Park Service gave Chelsea a commemorative Smokey Bear doll, and she was not going to leave that restaurant until she got the name and address of the person to whom she should send a thank-you note,” he recalls. “She also asked me what she owed for the pizza.”

But who could ever have imagined a more daunting challenge to filial steadfastness than her father’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky? Rumors about the president’s affair were brewing at the tail end of 1997, during Chelsea’s freshman year at Stanford. An observer recalls that Chelsea’s demeanor drastically changed—“from that friendly girl to being shut down and frozen.” After learning the truth, Chelsea was “confused and hurt,” wrote Hillary in Living History, and froze her father out for a time. Bill was tortured by the effect it had on her, and cried when he learned that she had read the Starr Report, which included sexual details of his dalliance. She relied on family friends and those at Stanford for support. Among them was her future husband, Marc Mezvinsky, a popular self-described “nerdy Jewish boy from Philly.” He, too, understood something about personal sacrifice for the Clintons’ greater good: His mother, Marjorie Margolies, had been a congresswoman when President Clinton’s controversial 1993 tax bill came up for a vote. The president made a personal plea to her, and she voted yes—going against promises made to her constituents and knowing it would likely cause her to lose her seat. Marc “was always someone Chelsea really turned to and leaned on,” recalls Hubert.

In the wake of the scandal, Chelsea did exactly what her parents had conditioned her to do: swallow the pain and soldier on. “She’s one of the strongest people I know,” says Elsa Collins, another Stanford friend, who is married to former N.B.A. player Jarron Collins. In the summer of that year, when the world wondered whether Bill and Hillary were headed for divorce, Chelsea played a key role in showing they would pull through. As they crossed the lawn to Marine One for the cameras, Bill walked with his head bowed; Hillary, wearing sunglasses, was erect and expressionless; Chelsea was in the middle holding their hands. She was the glue holding the family together and keeping the higher purpose alive. Her father’s gratitude was boundless. As a longtime Clinton associate puts it, “When you have an affair with the intern, you end up paying for it for the rest of your life.”

The first thing Chelsea wanted to do, understandably, was to get as far away from her parents’ psychodrama as possible. She “deliberately tried to lead a private life,” she recalled in a 2012 interview with Vogue. She headed to Oxford, where she earned a master’s degree in international relations. When her father first tried to get her involved in his fledgling foundation, even in small ways—to put her name on invitations or show up at events—she rebuffed him, according to foundation sources. After graduating, in what she has described as an act of “rebellion,” she chose the least do-gooder job possible: management consultant at McKinsey & Company, infamous for advising corporations to fire large numbers of people. When that didn’t satisfy her, she tried out Wall Street, getting a job as an analyst at Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund owned by Marc Lasry, who is worth $1.9 billion and has been a major financial backer of both President Clinton’s and Hillary’s. Ultimately, she left that too, explaining later that “[money] wasn’t the metric I wanted to judge my life by in a professional sense.” She went back to school—this time to get a master’s degree in public health from Columbia. Unlike most twentysomethings, she seemed not to be hamstrung by indecisiveness or self-doubt. “She never had any real angst about it,” says Elsa Collins. “I think she wanted to make sure that she explored all the avenues that were of interest to her.” At Columbia, she impressed Michael Sparer, the head of the department, who made her an adjunct professor. “She was extremely available to the students,” he says, “very unpretentious, very low-key.”

In late 2007, when Hillary was preparing for the primaries, 27-year-old Chelsea stepped into the national spotlight, speaking at campuses and town halls as a surrogate for her mother. Though she could hold her own onstage, those inside Clintonworld were insistent on protecting her, as if she were still a teenager in the White House: her mother’s campaign sent out the message to the press that they were not to talk to her. Those who defied it learned there were consequences.

In early 2008, David Shuster, then an MSNBC reporter, found himself near her at an event and tried to ask a few questions. He wasn’t surprised that she declined to speak with him—that was her prerogative. What did surprise him was getting warning calls 24 hours later from the campaign telling him Chelsea was off limits. Shuster recalls saying, “Look, she handled herself just fine. I respected her desire not to talk. But what’s wrong with you guys, feeling like you need to protect her or beat me up for asking questions?” The campaign responded that she was still the daughter of the president, and that was that.

But soon Shuster would find his job in peril. A few nights later he engaged in a typical breezy on-air exchange about Chelsea’s role in the campaign, and remarked that it seemed she’d been “pimped out” by the campaign. It was a terrible choice of words, to be sure. The campaign called for his head, making calls to Steve Capus, the head of NBC News, and to executives at General Electric (then NBC’s parent company), accusing Shuster of having called Chelsea a prostitute. Hillary issued a statement essentially demanding that Shuster be fired, and the campaign threatened to boycott an upcoming debate that was to air live on NBC. Under pressure from his bosses, Shuster wrote an e-mail apology and sent it to Howard Wolfson, Hillary’s communications director, to pass on to Chelsea. Shuster says he followed up with a call, in which Wolfson informed him that he had received the apology, but wouldn’t be forwarding it to Chelsea—no reason given. (Wolfson says he has no recollection of the call.) NBC suspended Shuster for two weeks and denied him any future Clinton stories. It was a warning to journalists: Chelsea needed to be handled with kid gloves.

More special privileges were in store—courtesy of a father who, some say, was still trying to make up for his sins. Her 2010 wedding to Mezvinsky (since graduation he had worked at Goldman Sachs and then at 3G Capital hedge fund) took place in upstate New York, in front of some 400 guests in a ceremony that reportedly cost $3 million. The next year Mezvinsky, along with two of his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, raised $400 million for their own hedge fund, Eaglevale, with significant investments coming from several longtime Clinton friends and supporters, including Lasry, British investment banker Jacob Rothschild, and Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein. According to a longtime Clinton associate, Mezvinsky has made the most of the events sponsored by the family’s foundation, such as “celebrity poker nights,” which are prime hunting ground for potential clients. In 2013, Bill and Hillary helped the couple buy a 5,000-square-foot apartment for $9.25 million in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, says a Clinton associate. (Chelsea Clinton’s publicist denies this.)

Under the circumstances it must have been easy not to care about money, as Chelsea claims not to. According to Anne Hubert, Chelsea and Marc’s social circle is “as broad and diverse as New York is a place” in that it includes people in finance, tech, media, law, the arts, and global health. Among the boldfaced names are Burberry designer Christopher Bailey, chef David Chang, and Ivanka Trump and her husband, New York Observer owner Jared Kushner. When Hubert is asked if the couple is friends with anyone poor or unemployed, she laughs as if the question must be a joke. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

In the view of the family matriarch—Chelsea’s late grandmother Dorothy Rodham, a spitfire from hardscrabble beginnings, whom Chelsea adored—having the last name and the perks weren’t enough, however. The family had a “responsibility gene” and it was time for Chelsea to take a seat at the table. Chelsea got to work, methodically trying to figure out how to become a public person with a purpose. She consulted with Hubert, whose Viacom division is aimed at millennials, about potential “platforms.”

Chelsea set her sights on two jobs that seemed totally at odds with what she’d wanted fresh out of college: board member of one of the Clinton Foundation’s initiatives, and network news correspondent. For the latter she landed, of all places, at NBC, where she was hired to do segments for NBC News and Brian Williams’s new television newsmagazine show, Rock Center. She would enter this public arena armed with personnel: a chief of staff, an assistant, and an outside P.R. team to craft her image and manage her social media. “She’s the most deliberate human being I know,” says a former colleague at the foundation. “Nothing is by accident”—not surprising, perhaps, when one recalls her family did polling about the name of their new dog. Those tasked with managing her public persona would face an uphill battle in making her sound less programmed and more authentic.

Her stint at NBC was a disaster, perhaps because it ran so contrary to her instincts. “Most of us were baffled [by the hire], because she never even spoke to the press,” says an NBC veteran. “She’d walk by with the imperial stare, looking forward, and interacted not at all.” The feeling inside NBC was that she had been hired to maintain access to and curry favor with the Clintons. When news broke that she had been getting paid $600,000—for a part-time job—NBC staffers were appalled. Most full-time correspondents were being paid far less. The big salary was predicated on the idea that she was already a star, and according to an insider, she started acting like one. Colleagues felt they couldn’t communicate with her directly. Instead, they had to go through her people. And she was hardly present in the office. “There was a joke inside the building that she was the ‘highest-paid ghost’ at NBC,” says a network source. It all might have been excused had she been any good. In the span of nearly three years, however, she filed only a handful of segments—all painfully stiff reports on global do-gooders, plus an attempted comic interview with the Geico Gecko. As the insider puts it, “NBC has made a lot of bad decisions in the last few years, but hiring Chelsea has to be very near the top.”

Getting the big title at the Clinton Foundation was viewed by many, naturally, as yet another unearned opportunity handed to Chelsea by virtue of her last name. But it was also a place where she could prove her grit. When she arrived, in 2011, her father’s prayers were answered. It was a sign, perhaps, that all was forgiven and that his legacy would be secured through his daughter. Says a former foundation employee, “People were very excited to see a succession plan take hold.” Like all things involving Bill Clinton, the foundation was both awe-inspiring and messy. What began at the end of his presidency as a modest nonprofit founded in Little Rock, Arkansas, was now a fund-raising juggernaut, thanks to the Clintons’ star power and ability to get heads of state, C.E.O.’s, leaders in philanthropy, and rock and movie stars to donate large sums to his foundation. Today there are nine initiatives (plus two associated projects) that target some of the most difficult problems around the globe. Among its most important has been providing affordable H.I.V. drugs to 9.9 million people in Africa.

But its very success created problems. The foundation grew so quickly it could hardly contain itself. By the time Chelsea arrived, there were more than 2,000 employees. There was no working infrastructure, no endowment or investment plan. Despite the large sums coming in, the foundation had reported an on-paper deficit of $40 million for 2007 and 2008, which Clinton later explained was a misleading accounting illusion. It was still being run by Clinton’s chief advisers from the White House days: Bruce Lindsey (the C.E.O.) and Ira Magaziner, and to some it still felt like the White House, with egos running amok and, according to a former colleague of Chelsea’s, “regular staffers who were not in the habit of challenging them.” There was intense concern about Doug Band, Clinton’s longtime “body man” and surrogate son, who’d come up with the idea for the Clinton Global Initiative (C.G.I.), the glamorous conference that became the centerpiece of the foundation. While still running C.G.I., Band co-founded Teneo, a corporate-consulting business, which came to be seen as too intertwined with and reliant on the president and his connections. The foundation was tarnished by some of the less attractive characters Band was bringing into its orbit, such as Raffaello Follieri—the Italian con man who was then dating Anne Hathaway.

Some control was clearly needed. And Chelsea started off with a McKinsey-esque bang—by helping to initiate an outside audit. “It was a very authoritarian action for someone who came in at day one,” says the former foundation employee. “The feeling was: we’re being audited—never a good word—because we’re doing something wrong. We wondered, Are our jobs at risk? That’s not a comfortable feeling for many people who’ve been dedicating their lives to the foundation.” The audit called for better management and budgeting policies. Lindsey was replaced as C.E.O. by Chelsea’s pick—Eric Braverman, with whom she had worked at McKinsey, and Magaziner’s job was greatly reduced. (Braverman left the foundation in January of this year over reported power struggles within the organization; Donna Shalala, Clinton’s secretary of health and human services, is now C.E.O.) Of the 13 financial-advisory firms that applied, the job of investing the foundation’s money went to Summit Rock, where Chelsea’s close friend Nicole Davison Fox is a managing director. (Her husband works with Mezvinsky.) It was felt in some quarters that Chelsea, who hadn’t paid her dues—by, say, spending real time in Africa, or cutting her teeth at one of the programs—was coming in and throwing her weight around. Lindsey and others complained to President Clinton but to no avail. “He has no ability to say no to her,” says a source familiar with the shake-ups.

For all the grumblings about nepotism, others believe that Chelsea is just the enforcer the foundation needed. Under her leadership, the various branches, once physically separated, were consolidated under one roof, and systems were put in place for the once disparate initiatives to communicate more effectively. The foundation rebuilt the board and started using data for measuring success. “We are now very conscientious about ensuring that we incorporate data, [that] we’re measuring, and that we’re actually making course adjustments based on that,” says Maura Pally, senior V.P. of programs. “The ethos that Chelsea has really helped instill here is that, as you evaluate, if the answer isn’t ‘This is a perfect program’ that’s not a failure but rather a learning opportunity.” Around the office, teeming with people in their 20s and 30s, Chelsea’s mastery of information spurs people to keep on their toes. Pally says, “I would spend tons of time trying to get myself up to speed on certain things, and Chelsea’s doing so many different things and yet would blow me out of the water with what she had read about somewhere and analyzed and synthesized and spit back out in a completely compelling, accessible way.” Julianne Guariglia, who works across all of the initiatives, attests to Chelsea’s compassion when she talks with victims and survivors.

While the reports about her leadership are mixed, the more pertinent questions, as her mother runs for president, concern the foundation’s fund-raising practices, which have come under intense scrutiny in the past few months. In 2008, when Hillary was offered the position of secretary of state, an agreement was reached between the Clintons and the Obama transition team that C.G.I. would cease accepting new donations from foreign governments and that the Clinton Foundation would report all donors on an annual basis. We now know that the latter term was not honored: for example, the Health Access Initiative failed to disclose its contributors. Making things murkier, the foundation continued accepting donations from foreign individuals, their foundations, and companies, including a member of the Saudi royal family and a Ukrainian oligarch—more than a dozen in total, which added up to between $34 million and $68 million during the years when Hillary was secretary of state, according to The Wall Street Journal. After Hillary stepped down, the board, which includes Chelsea, voted to resume accepting all foreign-government donations. (Now that Hillary has announced her candidacy, the foundation has limited the number of foreign governments from which it will accept money to six: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and the U.K., though all governments can participate in C.G.I.)

While these donations raise questions about foreign influence, the Clintons’ lucrative speaking careers have raised questions of simple good taste. Since 2001 the family has made more than $130 million in speaking engagements. Bill puts roughly a tenth of his fees into the foundation; Hillary, somewhat more. More than $11 million in speaking and appearance engagements have come from relatively small charities—the Happy Hearts Foundation, the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, among others—which have discovered that having a Clinton in the house comes at a hefty price. Consider the case of model Petra Nemcova’s Happy Hearts Foundation, which rebuilds schools hit by natural disasters. Sue Veres Royal, the former executive director, recalls trying, at Nemcova’s behest, to book the president for the annual gala—it took more than a year. “Petra was told by the foundation that they don’t look at anything unless there’s money involved,” recalls Royal. The cost was $500,000 in the form of a donation to the Clinton Foundation for use in Haiti—a big chunk of Happy Hearts’ overall net assets of $3.9 million. But in this case the bet didn’t pay off—in part, says Royal, because “no attempt was made from anyone at the Clinton Foundation to invite anyone,” and she was asked to comp Clinton friends, such as billionaire Marc Lasry, who, according to Royal, never made a donation. (Lasry declined to comment.)

Fund-raising, Clinton-style, has always been a seamy subject, and it seems Chelsea’s team has tried to keep her out of dirty waters. When it comes to her speaking fees—which have spiked to the low six figures—she’s taken the high road and arranges for 100 percent to go to the foundation. (Neither she nor her father receives a salary from the foundation.) The larger question concerns the future: What happens if Hillary wins the presidency? Would the potential for conflicts of interest simply be too great for the foundation to sustain itself? According to foundation spokesman Craig Minassian, “We’re very focused on what we’re doing today and implementing the work.” In the opinion of Fred Wertheimer, a prominent activist for government integrity and head of the watchdog group Democracy 21, “If Hillary Clinton is elected president, all three Clintons should cut their ties with the foundation for as long as she’s president.”

It sounds Draconian. Then again, it’s almost impossible to imagine Chelsea forgoing the chance to have a major hand in her mother’s administration. As a source close to the Clintons points out, “The ultimate foundation is the U.S. government, so why would you toil with a foundation on the side?”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated what degree Chelsea Clinton received from Oxford. It was a master’s degree in international relations, not philosophy. Ira Magaziner was identified as a vice-chair of the Clinton Foundation. He was not. While the Clinton Foundation did not honor the terms of an ethics agreement made with the Obama transition team in 2008, the Clinton Global Initiative did honor the terms.

It’s 8:50 P.M. at the Kelly File studio. The crew dudes finish shining her glass desk, through which viewers can see her shapely legs. Two makeup women, armed with blow-dryer and hair spray, put the finishing touches on her glistening tresses. And Megyn Kelly, Fox News’s breakout prime-time star, girded in a snug black dress and four-inch strappy heels, is champing at the bit to make another presidential contender—this time Jeb Bush—squirm in his seat.

“If it’s fair to question Mrs. Clinton for failures leading up to [Benghazi],” she says, looking into the camera at her 2.7 million viewers, “why is it unfair to question Jeb about his brother’s failures leading up to September 11, 2001,” as Donald Trump had just done. She turns the question to Jeb, speaking via satellite video hookup. “Is it a double standard?”

“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” replies Bush.

She points out that Jeb’s in fifth place in the polls, and she wants to know, “What would it take to make you get out [of the race]?” Bush, looking as if he were wearing a scratchy, too tight suit, replies that he’s going nowhere.

In the face of Donald Trump’s taunts, what’s his plan? “To me,” says Kelly, “it seems like you don’t know what to do. You’re like, ‘How am I supposed to respond to this?’ ”

He smiles forcibly and tries for a joke. “We’re in the same boat, Megyn,” he says, referring to Trump’s recent attacks on Kelly.

She beams appreciatively but refuses the bait. “Well, but I’m not running for president.”

The moment the interview is over, Bush bolts from his chair, grim and grouchy. The control room, alight with numerous monitors, is buzzing with excitement. “He’s not happy. I didn’t even get to thank him,” says a young associate.

“You can tell he’s on edge,” calls out another. “All through the interview, fake smile, fake smile. Soon as it’s done, no smile.”

Unnerving would-be leaders, blowhards, and didacts from both parties has become Kelly’s specialty, as the world learned in August. The first television journalist to call Trump out face-to-face on his obnoxiousness, she kicked off the first Republican debate by calmly cataloguing Trump’s sexism in a single question. To recall: “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals…. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton … that you are part of the war on women?” Trump tried to laugh it off mid-question, saying that those insults were directed only at Rosie O’Donnell, but Kelly wouldn’t let him off. He then complained, “Honestly, Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be based on the way you’ve treated me.” The following night, he suggested to Fox News’s rival network CNN that the reason she was so hostile was that she was probably menstruating: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” When that didn’t rattle her, Trump lashed out on Twitter, calling her a “lightweight,” re-tweeting that she was a “bimbo,” and stoking his supporters to boycott her show. Kelly took the high road and said on-air that she had no reason to apologize to Trump, and that she would “continue doing my job without fear or favor.”

Kelly’s Trump episode was one in a string of satisfying male-ego deflations that have helped her surpass cable’s biggest news star, Bill O’Reilly, in the key demographic of 25–54 for three months in 2015. Her occasional, yet highly entertaining, bucking of the conservative party line has attracted more independent-minded viewers and has even earned praise from liberals such as Chris Matthews, Joy Behar, and Gayle King. As of late, passersby have been calling out versions of “It’s not too late to come to the other side!” Still, some media types warn against getting too excited over Kelly. As Bill Maher put it, “We think of Megyn Kelly as the sane one over there at Fox News. It’s just because she’s surrounded by Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. She’s like the blonde dragon girl on Game of Thrones. Everyone else is a zombie or a dwarf or fucking their sister, so she looks normal.”

Whatever the case, Kelly has become a feminist icon of sorts—the sort who won’t actually call herself a feminist. Perhaps this is because Kelly works at Fox News, where “feminists” are in the same scary category as “liberals” who wage war on Christmas each year. Perhaps, as she claims, it’s because her accomplishments speak for themselves and have nothing to do with her gender.

Steve Martin said, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ I love that,” says Kelly, kicking back in her no-frills office at Fox headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. She’s in skinny jeans, hair pulled back, her wide eyes rimmed with dark eyeliner, looking more the take-charge hot New York mama than glossy Fox News anchor. Consider, she says, her own role model, Oprah Winfrey. “In all her years coming up … she never wallowed in any sort of victimhood…. She didn’t play the gender card and she didn’t play the race card. She was just so good we couldn’t ignore her. That’s my example…. Just get to the table and then do better than everybody else.” She adds with a laugh, “But every so often, as all [women] know, you have to stop and slap somebody around a little bit who doesn’t understand that we are actually equals and not second-class citizens.”

It’s tempting to dismiss her “Just do it” motto as simplistic. Easy for her to say—she has obvious genetic good fortune, plus a husband, Doug Brunt, who is straight out of central casting for the Perfect Guy: a handsome, successful novelist, who is on call with their three young children (sons Thatcher and Yates and daughter Yardley) when she’s working. (Her normal workday stretches from the mid-afternoon until about 11 P.M.) But, in fact, her ascent has been marked by taking risks and obsessive preparation—the kind she did when she was a successful trial lawyer, her first career, until age 33. Perhaps more relevant, at a network whose on-air women seem to fit a certain mold, Kelly hasn’t sacrificed much of who she really is; she’s even cut her hair and started occasionally wearing pants on-air.

It helps that she’s a woman of preternatural charisma, with star power closer to that of Julia Roberts than to, say, Norah O’Donnell or Erin Burnett—two other beautiful TV newswomen who have made it big but have never exactly exploded. Now pulling down a reported annual pay package of $6-$9 million, she’s the alpha girl at the dinner party, the one telling the stories, cracking the jokes, the one who is nice to everyone but leaves people wanting more. Her ego is robust—in her mind it’s obvious why she’s a star—yet she enjoys taking the piss out of herself for a laugh. Witness just a few minutes of interaction with her husband, who has joined us for breakfast near their apartment on the Upper West Side: “I was just telling her that I was actually voted most popular in the eighth grade. It’s come to that.”

When Brunt remarks that she excels in every area of her life, even cooking—“There’s three or four things she cooks that are awesome … that chicken thing you do?”—she shoots back, “I just want you to know that that was complete and total bullshit.”

Gentle ribbing seems to be Kelly’s go-to mode. When Brunt apologizes to me for giving me his novels in a crumpled brown grocery bag, she doesn’t miss a beat: “It would have been a little much if you’d gift-wrapped them.”

Brunt is hopelessly enamored. In his opinion, “she’s like a combination of Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey, and then a Grisham character who’s a scrappy guy from the other side of the tracks who has a rare gift for the law, in a Grace Kelly package, with a little Larry the Cable Guy sprinkled on top.”

Walter Cronkite might be a stretch. The Kelly File, which Kelly bills as a “news” show as opposed to an opinion show, like Hannity or The O’Reilly Factor, is made up largely of the kind of stories you’d find on many other Fox News shows at any other time. Some recurring themes are political correctness run amok, the left-wing slant of the mainstream media, and the question of Hillary Clinton’s trustworthiness. (Hint: “She’s lying! She’s absolutely lying!,” says the mother of one of the Benghazi victims in a teaser.) Not so infrequently, the right-of-center axis roams into Hannity territory, like a recurring bit on “Ahmed, the clock boy,” who was mistakenly arrested after school officials thought he might be building a bomb—and then got invited to the White House. Not only was the clock really lame, The Kelly File told us, “just wait until you see what we found on his father’s Facebook page.” (Supposedly it called 9/11 an American hoax to encourage a war against Islam.) A go-to guest on the subject of race and law enforcement is Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced race-baiting policeman from the O. J. Simpson trial.

FAIR ENOUGH?

And yet … it’s not uncommon for the casual left-of-center viewer to say, in spite of himself, I kind of like her. In Kelly’s hands, these right-wing red-meat stories are presented with a varying degree of balance and often treated with humanity and wit. She’ll muster outrage at political correctness, but it feels rooted in common sense, not just derived from talking points. When, for example, a Muslim activist takes issue with Somalian writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s being given a public forum for views that are critical of Islam, Kelly shoots him down: “When you undergo genital mutilation, you may have a thing or two to say about it!” On the other side of the political spectrum, she can demonstrate reason and sympathy when encountering vicious, right-wing small-mindedness. “There’s so much hate for gays and lesbians and transgendered people,” she tells a Fox News contributor who thinks the transgender Chaz Bono is a danger to America. “You seem to be adding to the hate.”

She has no patience for talk that’s above the audience’s head. When a general talks about rebels “putting pressure on Assad, particularly Jabat al-Nusra, from Aleppo to Damascus,” she interrupts: “Hold on—nobody understood what you just said. Say that in plain English.” She won’t sell her soul for a ratings bonanza. When Trump made the shocking suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S., Kelly rightfully blasted the television media for giving him 18 hours of airtime over the course of 24 hours. Trump had played them, she said, and they were “marching like lemmings.”

And she owns her sexuality in a way that feels real and lighthearted. When Facebook C.O.O. Sheryl Sandberg recently came on the show to talk about how men who helped more with the housework had happier family lives and more sex, Kelly (who has talked about her breasts on the Howard Stern show and posed for racy shoots in men’s magazines) cheered. “We have been selling it all wrong in the past! More action, all right? That’s all you need to know, guys,” she said to the camera, giving a thumbs-up. “Do some laundry.”

Prominent female journalists from rival networks can’t help but praise her uncanny charm. “She doesn’t talk down to her audience,” says Campbell Brown, who hosted her own prime-time show on CNN and now leads a nonprofit in education. “There is none of the sanctimonious, condescending attitude. And, frankly, none of the hate. I think people are sick of these prime-time chest thumpers characterizing the other side as evil.” Jessica Yellin, a former chief White House correspondent for CNN, says, “She defies all the pigeonholing that usually happens to women on TV. She’s smart, strong, sexy, fierce, sympathetic all at once.”

Veteran newswoman Katie Couric praises her dogged interviewing skills, crucial when interrogating dodging politicians. “She takes no prisoners and takes no BS,” says Couric. “And I’ve noticed that she’s a really good listener. Sometimes the tendency is to go down a laundry list of questions and to not say, ‘Wait a minute.’ It requires you to think on your feet and to take the conversation in a totally different direction.”

IN THE ZONE

Kelly, who was raised in Syracuse and a suburb of Albany, the third child of a nurse and an education professor, fairly arrived on this earth the Queen Bee. “I distinctly remember being very young,” she recalls, “sixth grade maybe, and being at a party and hearing the mothers discuss the children. And the mothers said, ‘Well, it’s very clear who’s the leader in the group.’ And they were talking about me!” In high school, she took public speaking and found she got a rush from presenting in public. She felt bound for a career in journalism, but when she applied to Syracuse University’s communications program, it turned her down, so she majored in political science there instead. “Now they tell people I went there,” says Kelly, who delights in recalling past instances when people stupidly underestimated her. “I’m like, ‘Oh, I did not!’ ” She then went on to Albany Law School, after which she was $100,000 in the hole with student loans.

By age 33 she was married to a doctor (her first husband), was working at the prestigious law firm Jones Day, had paid back her loans, and was on her way to making partner (“And you can check me on that”) when she realized she wasn’t fulfilled. “I had this little voice in me saying, ‘I am more interesting than this. I am more interested than this.’ ” With the help of a friend, she cut a demo tape and started cold-calling local stations in the larger markets. She landed a freelance job at WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington. While WJLA was stalling in negotiating the full-time deal she wanted, she’d sent her tape to Fox News Washington-bureau chief Kim Hume, wife of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume. The couple became her champions. She told Brit that she believed in Fox News’s mission and that the mainstream media weren’t balanced. He passed her tape along to Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who scooped her up to be a reporter. “I could have kept doing [law], and I think I was in what my sister-in-law calls my ‘zone of excellence,’ ” Kelly says, with characteristic self-assurance. “But I chose a different path, and I made a big financial sacrifice when I first started, and wound up getting into what she calls my ‘zone of genius.’ ”

“Genius,” admittedly, took some time. “This is me on day one,” she says, handing over her Fox identification card. In the photo, she looks like a nervous co-ed. “Picture that woman. I don’t want to say I was scared shitless, because I knew I could do it. But I also knew I wasn’t very good yet.” In her early reports, delivered from Washington to Hume, Kelly is stiff, as if doing an imitation of what a perfect news correspondent sounds like. (“Now watch the poise and confidence here,” she would joke on her show seven years later, airing her very first clip.) In 2006, thanks to her legal background, Hume put her on the Duke lacrosse-team rape case, sensing that the story wasn’t what it seemed.

Her reporting got the attention of two men who would change her life, personally and professionally. Brunt, who’d gone to Duke, developed a crush on this whip-smart looker. Through a mutual friend, he concocted a fake business meeting as an excuse to go to Washington and meet her. They clicked immediately. While they were falling in love, he told her, “By the way, if you don’t want children, you should tell me soon.” As it happened, Kelly had long believed that she didn’t want kids, but she had recently experienced an epiphany: “I’ll never forget being in my own bed and thinking to myself, Oh my God! It’s not that I don’t want children. It’s that I didn’t want to have children with my first husband.” Thirty-seven when she married Brunt, Kelly got right to work on that front.

Meanwhile, Ailes saw that he had a star on his hands—if only she weren’t so determined to be perfect. As she recalls, he called her into his office and said, “Go out there and make some mistakes…. And don’t be afraid of taking risks. You’re trying too hard. And I have news for you. You don’t need to be perfect. No one will like you if you are, by the way.” Kelly concluded that, for her, taking risks chiefly meant using humor at her own expense. “Or even humor at all,” she says, “telling a stupid joke and maybe they won’t find it funny. Which happens a lot, by the way.” An on-air colleague, whom she doesn’t name, told her that trying to be funny was too risky, and attempted to talk her out of it. Kelly listened to Ailes instead, and it unlocked her voice. It was their Up Close & Personal moment—without the romance and all the mushy liberal ideals.

The star-in-the-making was groomed by appearing weekly on The O’Reilly Factor, during which she and O’Reilly developed a bit of shtick: sassy daughter takes on cranky old Dad. (He would, and still does, call her “Miss Megyn” and has sometimes referred to her as an “anchorette.”) Over the years, she has challenged him on everything from the number of opportunities given to African-Americans to how to talk to women more respectfully: “You have a penchant for that term ‘Calm down’ [to women]…. It’s patronizing.” Her ammo has been simply to have facts at the ready. “I’ve told him many times on the air, ‘You’re arguing with your heart and not with your head.’ ” She was given her own daytime show, America Live, in 2010.

Defeating the male blowhard by being fully prepared became a Kelly specialty. The rest of her career ascent would be littered with the bruised bodies of guys who had it coming—all while she continued to have babies. In 2011, when right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher remarked on his show, in reference to Kelly’s maternity leave for her second child, that maternity leave was a “racket,” Kelly, upon her return, invited him on her show. “Maternity leave? It’s a ‘racket’? … What a moronic thing to say! … What is it about getting pregnant and carrying a baby nine months that you don’t think deserves a few months off so bonding and recovery can take place?”

Gallagher tried to double down. “Do men get maternity leave, Megyn?”

“Guess what, honey—they do. It’s called Family Medical Leave Act.”

Next up was Karl Rove, Republican strategist and Fox News’s chief political analyst. It was Election Night 2012, and the election desk at Fox News had reported that Ohio—and the presidency—had gone to Obama. But Rove, sitting at the desk with Kelly and co-anchor Bret Baier, knew better. He spat out a whole bunch of numbers about the Ohio vote he was hearing about—in this county and that—which he was confident would lead to a Romney victory. “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?” Kelly asked. The clip of this humiliating moment made the rounds; even Jon Stewart celebrated her moxie. Less than a year—and another baby—later, she was given her own show in prime time.

The hits kept coming. In May 2013, she gave the Megyn treatment to Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs and contributor Erick Erickson, head of RedState.com, after they’d bemoaned a report that in 40 percent of households a woman was the breadwinner. To Dobbs, it was a sign of the end of civilization; to Erickson, a perversion of the natural world’s order in which male animals are dominant and female animals are submissive.

“I’ll start with you, Erick,” she said. “What makes you dominant and me submissive, and who died and made you scientist in chief?! … I’ve got a list of studies here that say your science is wrong.” Erickson scrambled, while Dobbs, getting rattled, tried the patronizing approach. “Excuse me. Let me just finish what I’m saying, O Dominant One.” Sheryl Sandberg, who didn’t know her, immediately saw a woman who leaned in hard, and promptly invited her to Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. “Megyn speaks truth to power,” says Sandberg, who has become a friend. “She’s tough, fair, and relentlessly brave.”

Today, Erickson admits, “She definitely got the better of me. It was a wake-up call. You’ve got to be more responsible about what you say. Particularly when you have a daughter and a wife.”

THE DONALD DUCKS

Trump probably didn’t imagine he’d be next. After all, in his mind, what beautiful woman didn’t want to go to bed with him, right? When I remark to Kelly and her husband that Trump sounded like a jilted suitor after she asked her now famous sexism question, they share a knowing look, and Kelly proceeds cautiously. In the past, she says, “he would send me press clippings about me that he would just sign ‘Donald Trump.’ And he called from time to time to compliment a segment. I didn’t know why he was doing that. And then when he announced that he was running for president, it became more clear. But I can’t be wooed. I was never going to love him, and I was never going to hate him.”

In preparation for moderating her first presidential debate, Fox News research assistants put together massive binders on the candidates, on everything they’d ever said on every topic. As she read Trump’s, a couple of themes began to emerge. The one that hadn’t been explored was his sexism. Knowing that if Hillary were to be the nominee she’d hit him with that issue, Kelly had her first question. “I wrote it. I researched each line item myself. It was interesting to me after the debate when people started fact-checking my question. My own reaction was ‘Bring it on.’ You think I’d go out there and ask a question like that at the first G.O.P. debate without making sure I was bulletproof on every single word?” She drafted and re-drafted it, and showed it to her fellow moderators, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier, whose initial reaction, Baier recalls, was “Wow, let’s think about this … there clearly was going to be pushback.”

Kelly almost didn’t get a chance to ask it. The morning of the debate, while doing debate prep, she got violently ill. But, she says, “I would have crawled over a pile of hot coals to make it to that debate. No one was going to be sitting in for me, reading my questions. And I can say with confidence that neither Bret nor Chris wanted to read my questions—for many reasons!” She did the debate with a blanket over her legs and a bucket to throw up in by her side.

The Kelly-Trump exchange made headlines worldwide, and Kelly, much to her alarm, had become the news. “I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass,” she says. To casual viewers, it seemed an obvious win for Kelly. But Trump supporters unloaded a truckload of venom, reportedly sending her death threats, tweeting that she was a “c–t” and a “hag.” The candidate was intent on taking her down, with his top deputy re-tweeting, “gut her.” For the folks at Fox News, it wasn’t immediately obvious how to respond. Trump’s supporters made up a good chunk of the Fox News viewership, and Trump was a “friend” to a number of on-air personalities, who seemed terrified to lose his favor. Hannity, Geraldo Rivera, and Brian Kilmeade tweeted rather limp pleas for him to stick to the issues. A few days after the debate, Steve Doocy began an interview with Trump with the hopeful and slightly tragic words “Glad we’re friends again.” According to a report in New York magazine by Gabriel Sherman (author of the recent book about Fox News, The Loudest Voice in the Room), Ailes wavered in his support for his anchor. Kelly says this is “complete nonsense.”

“I talked to her on the phone every day,” says Ailes. “Whenever there is a crisis Megyn is a cool customer.” According to Kelly, “We were eye to eye on what we both wanted. Which was to move forward.” Immediately following the debate, her viewership climbed by 9 percent.

What with all the male bullies she’s put in their place, Kelly would be perfectly positioned to become a leader in women’s issues such as equal pay and reproductive rights. But Kelly, whose position on abortion, she says, is known only to her husband and herself, claims these issues actually divide women. “Why can’t there be an acknowledgment that, in some instances, women remove themselves from the workforce for a long time and when they come back of course they’re not going to get exactly equal pay?” she asks. “It’s like some of these things are anathema—if you say them, you get booted out of the feminist club…. Gloria Steinem doesn’t get to kick those other women out of the feminist club, or the female-empowerment club, because she says so!” Sensing herself getting uppity, she laughs and does a sassy snap across her face for emphasis.

In the smaller political arena within Fox News itself, Kelly, it seems, has taken the same, rather delicate tack in pursuing women’s empowerment: to fiercely pursue one’s needs while rejecting anything that sounds like lefty dogma. Her team is made up mainly of women, many of whom are pregnant or have just had a baby. “I’ve said to all of them, ‘If you feel overwhelmed, please come and talk to me and let’s try to find a solution.’ I don’t want all the young mothers to be driven off the show because they feel they have to choose between devotion to the show and devotion to their child.” According to a Fox News colleague, Happening Now host Jenna Lee, who has sought out Kelly’s advice on balancing children and work, “Megyn really owns who she is. When you see someone who really owns who they are, it inspires you to own who you are.”

In keeping with owning who she is, Kelly isn’t reticent about what she wants next: to do longer, more in-depth interviews, in the vein of Charlie Rose or Winfrey, which would be “less immersed in angry political exchanges.” She reports that some prime-time specials, featuring longer interviews, are coming down the pike at Fox News, but one senses that she’s already thinking one step ahead of this development, and restlessly pushing at the constraints. “Charlie Rose does it, and he does it very well. But that doesn’t mean nobody else can do it,” says Kelly. “I think that there’s a spiritual component to my personality that is completely unutilized in my current job.” Note to television executives everywhere.

At Le Pain Quotidien in Brooklyn Heights, where many thirty- and fortysomethings come to sweat it out on their television pilot/novel/screenplay/tech start-up or other get-rich-quick scheme, 24-year-old Noam Ash and 25-year-old Austin Bening are giddily basking in their recent Hollywood glory, having just learned that they’re this close to selling their YouTube Web series, My Gay Roommate, to one of the premium online networks. Like most things YouTube, the series, about a gay college student and his straight roommate, is about themselves. The show’s star, Ash, an Israeli-American, is the gay one. The director, Bening, grew up in Ohio, having never known a gay person until 2009, when he met Ash, his freshman roommate, at Tufts. They have lived with each other ever since.

“Six years, domestic partnership in the making, shared bank account. It was a beautiful thing,” says Ash, who speaks with rapid-fire excitement. He notices that Bening is looking at him funny. “Do I have something?”

“Yes, bubeleh,” says Bening as he reaches across their quinoa salads to wipe Ash’s face. “You got this little schmutz right here.”

Much to their amusement, people were puzzled by this rapport. (“People were like, ‘But you’ve made out.’ I was like, ‘No, never!’ ” says Ash.) And thus the germ for their YouTube series was born. With zero dollars and free college equipment they started the series—each episode is actually just a five-minute installment—during their last year of college. They continued it after graduating, when they moved into Ash’s aunt and uncle’s attic. Zero views turned into a thousand, turned into half a million, snowballed into 4.6 million. Fall 2015 had them making the rounds in Hollywood, pitching a fully fleshed-out take. From the buyers’ perspective, their built-in fan base was the key. Without it, says Ash, places like Netflix “would be like, ‘Thank you so much. You’re really, really cute. Like, go get a P.A. job, like, work in the industry for 10 years, and then maybe we’ll let you write half a script.’” But with fans apparently in the millions, says Ash, “they [are] like, ‘Come into our office.’ … I keep thinking how fucking lucky we’ve been. As an actor, no one would have known who I was.”

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that the YouTubers stole our children. Surely you’ve noticed, they enjoy nothing more than sitting with their eyes glued to their gadget, watching YouTubers see if they can deep-fry a pair of glasses, earnestly muse on empowerment, “vlog” about their activities that week, or give spirited running commentary while they play Minecraft. Now they’re conquering Hollywood, selling television series, making feature-length movies, and talking about “narrative.” More than 200 of them are worth several million dollars. They have agents and publicists, in addition to multi-channel networks (MCNs), which aggregate creators’ channels and manage their careers. Disney, DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Bros. have spent nearly $1 billion getting into the game. Production companies making digital series and movies have popped up, backed by the biggest names in the Hollywood establishment, such as Peter Chernin and Brian Grazer. And they’ve created a generation of expert salesmen who insist this is the future. Consider the words of Brent Weinstein, 40, who heads the digital-talent division of the Hollywood talent agency UTA. “The evolution of these types of content creators has dramatically and forever changed the landscape of entertainment,” he says.

Note to readers over the age of 25: this is Phase Two of the YouTube revolution, which likely requires an understanding of Phase One. Eleven years ago, when YouTube launched, no one imagined a career could be built out of it, much less an industry. “It was a playground for trying new things. It was purely a creative exercise,” says Rhett McLaughlin, 38, of Rhett & Link, a juvenile yet sharp comedy duo worth a reported $7 million, who started in the first wave. “There was no money in it. No brand integration.” There was something for everyone—pranks, satirical songs, makeup tips, goofy cooking, teenage activism, and lifelines for young gay people. It was a beautiful thing: a democratic platform, with a positive ethos; a grassroots Disney, created entirely by regular kids.

Then something crazy happened. Videos started going viral, getting thousands, even millions of views. Viewers wanted more, and the creators happily obliged, often doing “collabs” with each other to double or triple their fan base. Suddenly, the kids were sitting on a gold mine, and everyone wanted a piece: advertisers; Google (which in October 2006 bought YouTube); the MCNs; the studios, which gobbled up the MCNs. Meanwhile, at UTA, William Morris, and CAA, entire floors of interns and assistants were made into agents for digital talents, with the hope of turning their new clients into the next generation of movie stars. Now, they insist, those stars have arrived.

EVERYTHING’S VINE!

One such hope is 27-year-old Andrew Bachelor, the most popular “viner” on the planet—with 14.8 million followers—whom his agents at UTA are calling the next Will Smith. “King Bach,” as he’s known, makes vines—six-second video loops—of physical, goofy scenarios that often play off black stereotypes. For example: Bach, offended by a white guy who has offered him a plate of fried chicken, then gobbles it up on the sly. Or Bach wants to “make it rain cash,” like all his homeys are doing, but then reaches into his pocket and realizes he has no money, etc. Think a single-image cartoon, starring a young Eddie Murphy, coming to life for a brief moment. Traveling today by Glideboard, and wearing low-slung jeans that expose a lot of underwear, Bachelor has joined me in the lobby of his building: the W Hollywood condos, on the corner of Vine and Hollywood (an apt address for Bachelor, given the current crossroads of his life) to tell his story.

Having taken acting classes in college in Florida, Bachelor came to Los Angeles in 2010 to attend the New York Film Academy and then to make it as an actor. But he hit the same brick wall that most do. “They were giving all the roles to people who already had the names,” says Bachelor, who’s equal parts affable and laserlike ambitious. “You can’t make a name if no one gives you a chance.” So he started making YouTube videos, hoping to build a fan base and showcase his talents. Utilizing the high production skills he learned at film school, he was spending between $5,000 and $35,000 a video. For a short while, he could afford it. (Already tech-savvy as a kid, he’d invested in Apple when he was a teenager.) He soon turned to vines, videos he could make on his phone, for a fraction of the cost. A video of him doing a Denzel Washington impersonation as an irascible bus driver went viral. Three thousand viewers turned into a million. When he reached three million, the big agencies that before wouldn’t answer his phone calls started phoning him. He bought himself a suit and sat down with Josh Katz and Emerson Davis, two agents at UTA. “They looked me in my eyes. I could tell they were genuine,” recalls Bachelor. “They realized it’s a new wave that’s coming, and I’m the leader of it, and they wanted to be on board with me.”

Soon, Bachelor was landing real roles on House of Lies, The Mindy Project, and Black Jesus. Now even the cool black guys think he’s the cool black guy. He stars with Marlon Wayans in the movie Fifty Shades of Black, and with Mike Epps in Meet the Blacks. “When they post the links online to the Fifty Shades trailer, one of the top comments is ‘King Bach!’” Bach reports. “Marlon gets tweets, ‘Definitely going to go now that King Bach is in it.’ ”

He may soon be seen in his own series on network TV, based on one of his vine characters—an undercover cop. Produced by the comedy team Key and Peele, it launched a bidding war before landing at Fox, where it is in development for next season. His ultimate goal? “To be the biggest movie star ever”—said with the kind of confidence that only a 14-million-strong fan base can bring.

Not every talent-on-the-verge is as intensely focused on world domination. You’ll find a shaggier type in 30-year-old filmmaker Freddie Wong. A friendly, high-octane teddy bear with a cerebral streak, Wong runs RocketJump, a quasi-studio that has the freewheeling vibe of a Silicon Valley start-up. Inside its Burbank warehouse, there’s a library of strategy games, big Lego creations, a 15-foot-tall, blobby Japanese mascot doll they call ChickyBoo, and a lot of young people moving around gear. A native of Seattle, Wong attended U.S.C. film school in hopes of becoming the next Kevin Smith, Michael Bay, or John Woo. “I always felt a little out of place [there] because everyone was like, ‘Ah, yes, Truffaut,’” laughs Wong, an unabashed anti-aesthete, in shapeless baggy jeans and slip-on sandals. After graduating in 2008, he could have gone the film-festival route, but, he says, “you were not hearing about the hot director getting huge deals to do stuff out of the festivals anymore.” At the same time, he saw that YouTubers were building an audience. YouTube, he realized, was “maybe not the place to exhibit feature films but a place to connect people with our work.” With his like-minded friends, he started a kind of collective YouTube channel, making comedy, action, and video-game-inspired shorts that caught on instantly with what Wong calls the “arrested development” quadrant. Before long they were getting four million views per video. “You just couldn’t grasp what that meant,” says Wong. But it meant something to Hulu, which bought the RocketJump series (co-conceived by Wong and his partner Ben Waller): short films, accompanied by a behind-the-scenes how-they-did-it. He’s now contemplating feature-film possibilities, his ultimate dream. “I feel like we cheated … because you read about these other directors, just like, Damn! They paid dues for 10 years before they got to get behind the camera. We cheated because technology was in the right place at the right time, and we were alive at the right age at the right time for us to take advantage of that.”

PLAYING WITH THE BIG BOYS

Despite having millions of young fans, the A-list YouTubers still crave the prestige of traditional media (which has come to include, in their minds, the streaming services Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu). And the Establishment has been only too happy to embrace them, offering them funding and its expertise in storytelling and polish, for a piece of the profit. Cross-pollinations between new and old media are popping up everywhere. The Fine Brothers (14 million subscribers), who make “React Videos,” in which kids react to videos they’re seeing on a computer screen, sold a “React” series to Nickelodeon. YouTube persona “Miranda Sings,” a grotesque and clueless star-on-the-rise (played by Colleen Ballinger-Evans), just landed a scripted series at Netflix. YouTube itself is aiming to be a kind of Netflix for younger people with its new scripted series available through its YouTube Red subscription service. Among its first offerings is the Fine Brothers’ Sing It!, a satire of singing-competition shows, and Scare PewDiePie, in which PewDiePie, 26, the most popular gamer on the planet (41 million subscribers, net worth $16 million), is dropped into unknown, terrifying scenarios.

PewDiePie had been looking to reach a broader audience. Robert Kirkman and David Alpert—the creator and executive producer of AMC’s The Walking Dead—jumped at the chance to provide him with a concept and narrative. “There’s a challenge not to become ossified,” explains Alpert. “Whenever there’s a new form of media that’s especially embraced by the young, the entrenched media tend to resent or belittle it. When rock ‘n’ roll came out, people said, That’s not music. It’s noise.”

Some of the biggest names of Hollywood’s Old Guard are getting in on the game on that same principle. In 2014, Imagine partners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer founded New Form Digital, a mini-studio aimed at making shows around YouTube talents; it has already sold 18 series to digital platforms. Grazer says he sees his company “as the digital extension of what I’ve done in TV and film.” On the movie side, media mogul Peter Chernin and Van Toffler, former head of Viacom Media Network’s music group, funded Supergravity, which is making movies with YouTube stars at a low cost and selling them directly to the consumer through iTunes and video on demand. Their latest was The Chosen, starring 20-year-old YouTube dreamboat Kian Lawley (3.1 million subscribers), about a child-stealing demon. Taryn Southern, a buoyant, 30-year-old veteran of YouTube, who’s a sharp observer of the entire digital culture, puts it this way: “They’re all making these digital movies, not because these people are like Meryl Streep but because these people can sell movies.”

CHANGE THE CHANNEL

For aspiring performers in the traditional realm, a built-in fan base is now deemed as critical to future success as possessing talent. According to UTA’s Weinstein, “One of the questions we get asked now [by studios, networks, and advertisers] is ‘How many Twitter followers do they have? How engaged are they on Facebook?’ … All things being equal—if the digital star is as good an actor as the more traditional performers up for the role or endorsement—the artist who’s got a massive, engaged audience … is going to have a real advantage in landing the job.” When producer Kathleen Grace, who runs New Form Digital, meets young aspiring actors, the first thing she tells them is to cultivate their social-media presence. “If you want to come up high in search results, you best have a YouTube channel,” says Grace. “Show that you have skin in the game. Make a Web series. Show that you’re interested in this world.”

Alas, not every aspiring actor is a natural social-media butterfly; some might even find the whole Look at me! culture off-putting. These skeptics now face an uphill battle. Southern sees her struggling-actor friends who never jumped on the social-media bandwagon now suffering the consequences. “They’re terrified by this,” she says.

Still, it remains to be seen whether these digital creators can actually succeed on Hollywood terms. So far, the biggest star to emerge from YouTube is Rachel Bloom, 28, whose videos led to landing the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for which she recently received a Golden Globe. But, it should be noted, she had also been a television writer and comedian. Others haven’t been as lucky. Grace Helbig, the 30-year-old Queen Bee of YouTube, with 2.8 million subscribers, was given her own show to host on E!, but the fans didn’t go there, nor did many other people. YouTube sensation Shane Dawson, 27, who bills himself as an actor, singer, and director (7.1 million subscribers), was given a chance to prove his directing chops on The Chair, a contest show on Starz in which two aspiring movie directors compete to direct a movie based on the same script. Dawson was confident he had what it took—after all, he’d been making videos daily for six years. But critics concluded that his movie, which cost $850,000 to make, was excruciating. Even one of the show’s producers, actor Zachary Quinto, said it was “egregiously offensive” due to its homophobia, misogyny, racism, and unfunny potty humor.

Some of the more important voices from this arena doubt that the digital stars will ever do something significant in the culture at large. Dana Brunetti, a producer of House of Cards, the first show to prove that an Internet service could provide stellar content, says that YouTube “missed their moment” to become like Netflix or Amazon Prime, precisely because of their longtime association with frothy juveniles and focus on clicks. “They could have been big a few years ago. Now no one in my business is taking them seriously.”

That hasn’t stopped the YouTube business from exploding. The field is increasingly crowded, competitive, and frenetic. Four hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Google is stoking the frenzy with its ever expanding number of YouTube spaces across the globe—in Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Mumbai, with plans for Rio and Toronto. Here, young people who’ve made it to 10,000 subscribers can use their soundstages at no cost and get free lessons in top-of-the-line gear, such as Red digital cameras and 360-degree cameras. Its flagship studio, in the Playa Vista area of L.A., is a 41,000-square-foot converted airport hangar, with seven soundstages and elaborate sets. It feels like an old Hollywood studio that’s been handed over to kids—a temple to millennial privilege. At the W Hollywood condos, where Andrew Bachelor lives, a dozen or so viners have moved in, hoping to do “collabs” with him so they can follow in his footsteps.

One can’t help but feel that the innocence and freshness from a decade ago is on the wane. “Now people are doing YouTube as a career move to build an audience, even if they’re only eight,” says Rhett McLaughlin. For all the talk about “authenticity,” social media’s favorite buzzword, it’s all about the views, and popularity can be easily manipulated. “You’ve now got a million and one kids that are all trying to be YouTube stars that know the system, know how to game it,” says Southern. “They understand how to optimize their S.E.O. [search-engine optimization], so they’ll title their videos these salacious titles with the crazy thumbnails to get the clicks. They’re 13, and they know how to tag their videos with all the right stuff!” According to Jocelyn Johnson, who runs VideoInk, a kind of Variety for the digital-star space, only 20 percent of a YouTuber’s subscribers are active: “Just like any system,” she says, “views on YouTube can be ‘gamed’ by buying them or running what is called a TrueView campaign, where videos run like ads across YouTube. If the viewer doesn’t ‘skip’ the video (like they can many regular ads), then it counts as a view.” The most accurate reflection of a fan base, therefore, is the number of likes one gets. According to Southern, it’s often a crushing blow to social-media stars when a photo they post gets 15,000 fewer likes than the last one. In this competitive environment, it’s no wonder that YouTubers today jump at any opportunity to be a virtual sandwich board for brands. They can get paid in six figures to “unbox” merchandise on their channels, and several thousand a month by Amazon to “shout out” recent items they’ve bought on the site.

DOWN THE TUBE

It’s enough to make a veteran like Southern question whether she has the stomach to continue—even though she has a number of digital projects happening, including a movie musical she’s producing with YouTube stars and a new online talk show that’s being funded by Maker, an MCN bought by Disney for $500 million. “There’s this pressure amongst the older crowd that’s been around for a while: How do we keep up with this? I feel like it’s just an insane world. Five years from now, I don’t want to be turning out videos and I don’t want to be feeling like I have to keep up with my fan base and stay young,” says Southern. Gaby Dunn, who has a channel, “Just Between Us,” about friendships, which has half a million subscribers, recently hit a similar mid-career crisis when she realized that her job may not be financially sustainable. She might have shared her doubts on her site, but, as she recently wrote in an article on Fusion.net, “authenticity is valued, but in small doses: YouTubers are allowed to have struggled in the past tense, because overcoming makes us brave and relatable. But we can’t be struggling now or we’re labeled ‘whiners.’ ”

Perhaps Southern and her ilk will be able to muster the energy to push through if one of these stars breaks out in a big way and emerges as a model: if King Bach does become the next Will Smith, if Freddie Wong does emerge as the next John Woo, if My Gay Roommate becomes the next Will & Grace. Until that happens, Southern seems to be warding off a psychic crisis. “YouTube is the perfect example of how democracy is not always better,” she says. “The populist opinion is not always the best one. You can chart algorithms all day long. YouTube can give boosts to people who have longer watch times and more frequent video uploads. That doesn’t make the content better.” And then there is a larger, more existential question: between the loss of conversation and real family time, and the elevation of narcissism as a personality trait, one wonders whether social media have done more harm in this world than good. Southern sits back, sighs, and ponders what she’s going to do that day and for the rest of her life: “It’s such a chaotic world right now. Do I really need to be adding to the noise?”

Among those who don’t actually know him personally, hating producer Dana Brunetti has become something of a blood sport in Hollywood. He’s youngish (42), he’s cute, and, as anyone who’s seen his Facebook or Twitter posts knows, his life is basically awesome. Members of an unofficial Brunetti-watch club e-mail one another with his more cringe-worthy posts, such as “My Gold Level Starbucks card arrived the same day as my Golden Globe. Coincidence? I don’t think so.” And “[Fifty Shades of Grey author] E. L. James called to invite me to something in June. Doesn’t she know I don’t even know what I’m doing next week, much less in June?” On the now defunct Humblebrag Twitter feed, started by the late comedy writer Harris Wittels, “Brunetti was an M.V.P.,” says one appreciator, “even when his tweets weren’t technically ‘humble.’ ” But what really rankles some Hollywood folk is his résumé, which suggests that if he keeps at it he could be the next Scott Rudin. In a landscape dominated by mind-numbing, big-budget tentpole movies, he’s produced two recent films—The Social Network and Captain Phillips—that earned Oscar nominations, got critical raves, and turned big profits, a combination that’s becoming increasingly rare. He has also helped change the face of entertainment delivery systems with the Netflix streaming series House of Cards. He’s proved he can dominate the box office, with Fifty Shades of Grey, which grossed $564 million worldwide. On top of that he can now add studio head to his résumé. In January, along with his business partner, Kevin Spacey, he swept in to save Relativity, Ryan Kavanaugh’s studio that had recently crashed and nearly burned.

His producing stories from the battlefield are littered with scenes that might have been straight out of Entourage: Vegas blowouts, networking at the Playboy Mansion, even a drunken pitch session. He’s almost unable to utter a sentence without using the f-word. (A word search of the first two hours of my interview with him turns up 94 instances of it.) He’s not afraid of openly calling people assholes or of giving a good public smackdown: when Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, the young stars of Fifty Shades of Grey, started making noise about wanting big raises for the sequel, he didn’t hold back in The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “I’m not going to cry for anybody who wants to be in this business just because a thing they were involved in did very well and they didn’t get paid [a lot]. That’s not the deal that you made. If it was, I’d have more than a couple Ferraris because all the money my films have made is f—ing insane.”

Ah yes, the Ferraris. At home in Los Feliz, he has three, along with two Teslas, two vintage Mustangs, a BMW i8, and a Prius. It’s enough to make Mike De Luca, a producing partner and one of his best friends, cringe at times. “I go to his house. I’m half jealous … but then I’m also like, Why? I think it’s weird to have eight cars in your driveway.”

Then again, there’s a reason that De Luca, 50, immediately fell so hard for Brunetti that De Luca’s wife now calls him Mike’s “other wife.” In a town full of people exchanging gift baskets and then slagging one another off behind their backs, Brunetti, De Luca says, is a refreshing straight shooter. “He doesn’t tiptoe around things,” he says. “He doesn’t have a separate face for public consumption. He isn’t one person in private and one person in public. What you see is what you get.” He adds, “I recognized in him qualities that I need more of.”

Likewise, Spacey, who gave Brunetti his first Hollywood job, as his personal assistant, appreciated Brunetti’s “common sense and his bullshit radar” and found in him a rare tenacity. “He sets his sights on something and goes at achieving it with full commitment,” says Spacey. Indeed, by all accounts, Brunetti is a master of the art of persuasion—or as Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, which became the movie The Social Network, puts it, “He has an incredible knack for getting people to do things.”

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

Perhaps it’s because Brunetti hustled his way to the Hollywood big time out of nowhere. From his office in downtown L.A., carefully festooned with a life-size Star Wars storm trooper, art-film posters, and a treadmill, he shares his story. Initially he hesitates, noting that he feels like he’s in one of his therapy sessions. He then decides, “I don’t care. I’ll give you all the dirt.” His voice is quiet but intense, with the slightest hint of a southern drawl. His look is metrosexual: super-trim beard, dark jeans, checked shirt, Louis Vuitton hiking boots.

He grew up dirt-poor in the paper-mill town of Covington, Virginia, the kind of “backwards town,” he says, “where basically everybody marries their high-school sweetheart, stays there, goes to work at the local mill, and no one gets out.” His mother left his father, a mailman, when Dana was a baby. There were visits, once a year, but he never felt any connection to her. Along the way, there were two stepmothers, assorted siblings, a half-sibling, and step-siblings. At the age of 11 he started working after school until midnight: mowing lawns, doing a paper route, and working at Cucci’s pizzeria. “Once I started making money, my parents [father and stepmother] were like, ‘School clothes, all that, you buy all of that [yourself].’ Which in a weird way has probably worked to my advantage because it’s part of my drive now. But psychologically and emotionally, it fucking sucked.”

“He worked so hard because he wanted out,” says his high-school girlfriend Amy, who still lives there. “You knew he was going to do something with his life.”

When Brunetti turned 18, life started sucking even harder. On his birthday, he nearly lost an eye waterskiing when the ski rope snapped. He says he spent two weeks in the hospital, only to come home to find his belongings packed up and the walls bare. He was getting kicked out. Sure, he was “a pain in the ass,” he admits, but nothing out of the ordinary for Covington. After spending a chunk of time living out of his car and couch-surfing, he moved in with Amy. But they were a combustible pair and spent most of their time at each other’s throat.

His father let him come back home on the condition that he go to family counseling. He agreed, and in an early session his father dropped the heavy news that his mother had left the family for a woman. Dana “pretty violently” fled the room, and moved to Pennsylvania to sleep on his sister’s couch, traumatized. “In the mountains of Virginia, [a gay relationship] doesn’t happen,” he explains.

A couple of months later, Amy called to tell him she was pregnant, at which point, he says, “I knew I had to get my shit together.” Her father, whom he considered more of a father figure than his own, encouraged him to go into the military. Moved by a Coast Guard rescue scene in Top Gun, Brunetti thought it could be cool. He ended up joining the Coast Guard because one of his brothers was in it, and because of a childhood poster he’d had of a 44-foot Coast Guard lifeboat crashing through a wave, which he thought was “fucking awesome.”

He was stationed at Jones Beach, on Long Island. Though Brunetti stresses the amount of sitting around he did, his former Coast Guard buddy Rob Asma attests to Brunetti’s heroics, such as the time their crew came upon a boat with no one on it. At first they wanted to move on, but Brunetti “pushed it,” says Asma, “[insisting,] ‘We need to search for this person!’ ” Sure enough they found the guy, the waves crashing down upon him. “Dana pulled him out,” says Asma. “The guy was moments away from dying.” Meanwhile, during his downtime, Brunetti honed his charm skills. According to Asma, “When we’d go out, he was so good at meeting people, getting us into places. He would talk the police into giving him rides places, almost chauffeuring him around.”

But then, a bombshell: while in the Coast Guard, he’d been receiving reports and sonogram photos from Amy of their future baby boy, whom they would name Brandon. Then one day, she admitted that the baby could be another guy’s instead (Amy says they were separated at the time). She asked that he sign paperwork giving Brandon her last name, but Brunetti balked. “I said, ‘I think it would be in the best interest of Brandon if he knew who his father was, and I’d be happy to sign this once that’s determined.” As it turned out, a paternity test showed Brandon was not his. Brunetti was pissed at first, “but after I got over that, it was a huge fucking relief. It was like, bullet dodged.” Even Amy, who still has affection for him, says, “I look back on his life and I think, Thank God. I know that sounds awful but thank God it wasn’t his. He would not be where he is today. As much as I wanted him to be the father.”

WATCH THIS SPACE

He was now a free man. After Brunetti’s four-year tour with the Coast Guard, another iconic 80s movie hotshot inspired his next move: Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, “this guy who came from nothing to living in this amazing apartment and the Hamptons…. If it can happen in movies, it can happen for real.” Alas, after getting his stockbroker’s license, Brunetti ended up not in a high-stakes, white-shoe firm but at a pair of sleazeball operations, straight out of The Wolf of Wall Street. “They were all fucking shady places,” he says. “We were basically legalized thieves.” In 1996, through a Coast Guard friend, he went legit, and became a salesman for a start-up called Omnipoint, which was setting up one of the first digital wireless networks in the Northeast. He rose through the ranks as the company grew to 2,000 people. Life was already more than he could have imagined possible back in Covington. But in 1997 he met the man who opened the door to something even more interesting.

An antiques-dealer friend invited Brunetti to a dinner, and Spacey was among the group. Brunetti was then 24, hungry, and ready for anything. Spacey had just been in L.A. Confidential (though Brunetti didn’t recognize him) and would soon be on his way to London for a theatrical production of The Iceman Cometh. He needed an assistant for the three months that he’d be there. As Brunetti recalls, Spacey semi-jokingly said, “When you get your shit together, you should come and be my assistant.” In true Brunetti form, he replied, “Fuck you. I’ve got two assistants running around for me. I’m not going to be your assistant.” Then late one night in the office he took a long, hard look at his supervisor, a middle-aged guy who commuted from New Jersey every day. “I just remember going, I don’t want to be that guy when I’m 40.” He called Spacey to see if the job was still open.

Brunetti had only been out of the country once and had never seen professional theater. From the start his new boss included him on everything—from “rolling calls” (Hollywoodspeak for going down a list of people to get on the line for your boss to talk to) to observing rehearsals. They stayed in London longer than expected, as Spacey fell in love with the Old Vic and dedicated himself to saving it from being turned into a nightclub. They returned to the States for Spacey to film American Beauty, and Brunetti soaked in every aspect of it, from the cinematography to the grassroots marketing campaign to the Academy Awards, when Brunetti went as Spacey’s plus-one. The movie won in five categories: best picture, best director, best actor, best cinematography, and best original screenplay.

Three Spacey movies down the line, however, Brunetti started to feel assistant burnout. He told Spacey it was time for him to leave. Not wanting to lose him, Spacey (who had a small production company in Los Angeles called Trigger Street) urged him to take some time off and come up with a new role that might make him stick around. Brunetti mulled over some ideas, focusing on the future of technology, one of his obsessions. He came up with Triggerstreet.com, an online platform for aspiring writers and filmmakers to upload and critique one another’s work through a then new and little-known technology called “streaming.”

Brunetti was loving life. He had the cool new job and was living in Tribeca with a new girlfriend, Johanna Argan, a costume designer (with whom he’d have a daughter, Estella, years later). But then Spacey called with a small request. The head of his production company was leaving. Would Brunetti join him in Los Angeles for a week or two so that they could look for a replacement? Brunetti agreed, though he made it clear that he had no intention of leaving New York, which Spacey accepted. Instead, says Brunetti, “I was here [in L.A.] for a week. [Kevin] left and went to London and said, ‘Good luck. The company’s yours.’ He basically shanghaied me into coming here. We didn’t get along for about a year and a half.”

An epic communication failure ensued, and they ended up putting out a bunch of movies that Brunetti despised. (He won’t say which, but you’ve never heard of them anyway.) Thinking Spacey was in charge, “I would send these scripts to Kevin to get his feedback on it. And he’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s great. We should do it.’ And so I’d be like, ‘O.K.’ And I’d put all my force behind it, and I would get these projects made. And … they sucked.” Dispirited, he went to London to discuss with Spacey their future together and to complain about the recent projects that he hated. Spacey admitted that he felt the same. “Well, why the fuck then did you say let’s do it and that you liked it?” Brunetti asked. Spacey replied, “I thought you liked it, and I was just trying to be supportive of you.” “I’m like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ ” From that moment on, Spacey told him, he had the freedom to run the company as he wanted.

PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT

Brunetti’s first real solo endeavor sprang from an addiction he’d developed to blackjack—and he felt there was a movie in there, somewhere. As it happened, he came across an article in Wired about a group of M.I.T. students who learned how to count cards and made millions in Las Vegas. Before even reading it, Brunetti knew this was it. He called the article’s author, Ben Mezrich, and made the pitch for an option. Mezrich, who had a book coming out on the subject, asked how much he would be paid—at the time he was majorly in debt, having blown through $2 million on a lifestyle bender (first-class travel, clothing, fancy hotels). Brunetti replied, “Zero.” Mezrich said he was coming to L.A. soon—could they meet and discuss? Brunetti replied, How about the Playboy Mansion? “It had a great effect,” admits Mezrich. So much so that when New Line came to Mezrich with an offer of $750,000 for the book, Brunetti persuaded him to turn it down. “Remember how fast you went through two million dollars? Just think how fast you’ll go through $750,000,” Brunetti told him, adding that if the movie got made it would change his life. “It was the perfect pitch for where I was in my life,” says Mezrich. His agent thought he was crazy.

Mezrich signed on with Brunetti, and Brunetti eventually partnered with De Luca, a veteran producer, who had a deal with Sony. He was recovering from a major flameout with a string of flops at New Line. Titled 21, the blackjack movie had a fair reception, but it led to the next movie, which would change the careers of all three men. Just prior to the release of 21, Mezrich shared with Brunetti the idea for his next book: the making of Facebook. Brunetti was skeptical that it would make a good movie … until Mezrich told him the story of Eduardo Saverin, Mark Zuckerberg’s co-founder, whom Zuckerberg tried to push out of the company. Now this was something. There was only one problem—Saverin was still reluctant to tell the whole story of his experiences at Facebook.

Brunetti would not let that stand in his way and began a mad courtship of Saverin, luring the “Harvard nerd,” as he puts it, into his Hollywood entourage, with flattery, girls, alcohol, and celebrity. Step One was inviting him to a mini-premiere of 21 in Boston. When the party photographer wanted to take a picture of Brunetti and a Hollywood agent, Brunetti pulled Saverin into the shot and identified him as “ ‘Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook.’ First time he’d ever been photographed or labeled the co-founder of Facebook,” claims Brunetti. “He loved that.” He’d heard that Saverin (who now lives in Singapore) had a thing for Asian women and, through Mezrich’s wife, rustled up one Lisa Wu, “a cute little Asian girl,” who worked at Intel (and went on to get a Ph.D. in computer architecture at Columbia). “I was like, ‘Let’s get a bottle of whiskey over here!’ We all got sloshed.” But still Saverin wouldn’t spill the whole story. Brunetti stepped it up a notch. A couple of weeks later, he invited Saverin to the real premiere of 21, in Las Vegas, followed by a “fucking insane” after-party at Planet Hollywood, and pulled out his big friend: Kevin Spacey. “This was the moment to strike. This is how I used Kevin. I use him like an arrow. If I need to get to somebody, I fire him at them…. We ended up hanging out—me, Kevin, Ben, and Eduardo. And that’s when Eduardo started to talk to us and give Ben what he needed.” Soon after, Sony e-mailed Brunetti, who was at the end of a boozy lunch, to say they wanted to hear the pitch again. That night he conferenced Mezrich on the phone with Sony and gave the pitch again. Sony bought the project on the spot. “I don’t know what I said,” Brunetti says, “but Ben told me, ‘Dude, you should do every pitch drunk.’ ”

But two weeks later Sony called to say that they’d hit a snag: Mezrich’s book proposal had been leaked onto the Internet, and independently, Rudin had come across it. He already had Amy Pascal, then Sony’s head of motion pictures, on board and Aaron Sorkin lined up to write it. A more cautious producer might have backed away, not wanting to burn bridges with such powerful Hollywood veterans. But Brunetti went into fighter mode. He told the Sony executive, “This is my fucking property. First rule of producing is you control the property. I fucking control the property.” After lawyers got involved, Sony brought the parties together. But still Brunetti felt that the fight for control wasn’t over. When news broke in the trades about the project, Rudin was the only one getting producer credit. At 11 P.M., Brunetti banged out a pissed-off e-mail telling Rudin, whom he had just met, that he wasn’t going to let himself be steamrolled. He promptly got a call from De Luca, whom he’d copied along with Pascal on the e-mail, wondering what the hell he was doing. “You’re fucking going to start World War III,” De Luca told him.

It was the kind of hotheaded behavior De Luca had tried to stave off before, and continues to. “A lot of things happen in the daily life of producers that annoy the shit out of us. It’s very easy to go off on things. But it doesn’t get you anywhere,” he says. “I’ve had this speech with him multiple times. I don’t know if it’s sunk in.”

Indeed, regret certainly hit Brunetti that night. After getting scolded by De Luca and the studio for picking a fight with the producer, he started Googling Rudin, coming across tales of his notoriously ruthless behavior with less important people. “Oh, fuck. What did I do?” Brunetti recalls thinking. He spent the night tossing and turning, certain he’d just blown his big chance. At four that morning, he got an e-mail from Rudin. He opened it with dread. According to Brunetti, Rudin told him that he understood his point. (Rudin declined to comment for this article.) Brunetti compares the moment to a lesson learned in the military: “There were some people there that would walk all over you until you stood up to them.”

Rudin would partner with him and De Luca again, two years later, for Captain Phillips, based on the true story of an American sea captain whose ship was hijacked by Somalian pirates. Nabbing the rights to the Phillips story also required hustling. Brunetti and De Luca—along with every producer in town—had been watching the real events unfold on the news, and waiting to pounce once the situation was resolved. The evening the captain was rescued, Brunetti, feeling sufficiently vulturous, called Phillips’s home, only to be hung up on. “I was just like, I’m such a slimeball. But I’m like, Fuck it, I’ve got to do it.” He persevered, got in there first, and eventually earned the captain’s trust. For various reasons, Phillips wasn’t a fan of the Coast Guard, but Brunetti had undeniable sea cred. This time, when Rudin spoke to the trades about getting rights to the story, he described it this way: “That wasn’t me, it was Dana Brunetti and Mike De Luca. They did it entirely themselves.”

MADE IN THE SHADE

Brunetti was earning the respect and trust of the major players in his orbit. In 2011, House of Cards was making the rounds in Hollywood with David Fincher attached as director, and Spacey and Brunetti as its producers. Brunetti was with Spacey in Malibu when Fincher called them to report on the offer from Netflix—then still best known as a DVD-rental company. Putting a major series on a streaming platform was a first, but according to Brunetti, the notion was a perfect extension of what he’d started at Triggerstreet.com, which, he claims, was one of the first streaming services. Spacey didn’t get it. ’ ‘Wait, so we’re going to do this on DVD?’ ” Brunetti recalls him asking. Brunetti made his pitch: this was where things were heading. And if we can do it now, we can be the first. According to Brunetti, Spacey replied to Fincher, “Well, Dana’s saying do it. Let’s do it.”

Given Brunetti’s penchant for making such self-assured claims, some would want to smack him down. Recently, in an exchange made public on WikiLeaks between Pascal and Brunetti’s fellow series producer Josh Donen, Donen griped that, in an interview with Fast Company, Brunetti had overstated his involvement in House of Cards. “He had NOTHING to do with Netflix and wasn’t in any meeting with them. EVER.” Donen added that Brunetti was “one of a kind … thank God.” After Brunetti found the exchange, he e-mailed Donen: “Look, say it to my face if you have a problem with me…. It’s pretty fucked up you would go to the head of the studio … and talk shit behind my back.” (According to Brunetti, Donen “manned up” and apologized.)

Still, Brunetti’s reputation as an uncanny authority would grow, and would soon lead to the unlikeliest of offers: to produce the adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. He was stunned when his agent called him to say that Universal—the studio that had won the bidding war over the rights—wondered if he’d meet with the author to discuss producing it. He asked his agent, “What about me and what I’ve done makes you think I’m the right producer for Fifty Shades of Grey?” Nevertheless, he and De Luca, who had his own, literary take on the book, decided to take a swing at it, and won the job over numerous other producers. The book’s author, E. L. James (whose real name is Erika Mitchell), was given the unusual position as a producer and was on set every day. As has been reported, James and the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, clashed throughout production, with James insisting the movie remain as true to the book as possible, to please the fans. As De Luca recalls, “Erika was in a pretty heightened state of anxiety throughout production.” It could have been a disaster had she not hit it off with Brunetti. “He was a great Erika whisperer,” De Luca says. “He knew how to contextualize any debate that came up. In an odd sense, he was a peacemaker worthy of Jimmy Carter.”

Alas for the Dana-haters, life couldn’t be better for him—both personally and professionally. He’s the doting father of three-year-old Estella; though he and Argan split up three years ago, they remain great friends and share custody. Professionally, he’s just made the kind of bold move that makes the earth shake in Hollywood.

In recent months, Brunetti and Spacey had been discussing the next steps for Trigger Street. Focusing on television, they signed a deal at Fox. (Their first project is The Residence, based on the book by Kate Andersen Brower, about the inner workings of the White House staff.) But the movie side was becoming increasingly restrictive, because they could no longer rely on studio funding for the kinds of movies they wanted to make. Could they build their own distribution network? Could they find their own funding? They had the reputation, they reasoned; all they needed was the infrastructure. The answer came in the unlikely form of Ryan Kavanaugh, who was struggling to take his beleaguered mini-studio, Relativity, out of Chapter 11, for which it had filed in July. In October, Kavanaugh, who had kicked in some money for 21 and The Social Network, invited Brunetti to his office to see if he and Spacey might be interested in saving him, in exchange for running his studio. Kavanaugh would be the C.E.O., Spacey the chairman, and Brunetti the president, making all the creative decisions.

Who cared that they were partnering with a former Hollywood bad boy—with two D.U.I. arrests and a probation violation—who’d run his studio into the ground. The two pride themselves on going against conventional wisdom. Indeed, Spacey said in a statement, “They thought we were crazy when we chose to do House of Cards with an online streaming service. They thought I was crazy when I went to run the Old Vic Theatre, when no one thought it could be saved; and this move with Relativity will be proof for some that we really are crazy.”

As for Brunetti, he says, “A lot of people might have viewed Relativity as a scorched-earth barren wasteland…. I ignore all that. It’s all going to come down to the product we’re putting out.” He won’t discuss a single detail about where Relativity’s new funding will come from, but is confident he’ll be able to make the kind of mid-budget, non-tentpole movies that once made Hollywood interesting, and that are, sadly, in increasingly short supply.

Even the Dana-haters love movies too much to argue with that.

It’s unintentional, mind you, but Alicia Vikander does the Luckiest Girl Alive thing effortlessly. Even doing an interview by Skype—her preferred mode of communication with far-flung friends these days—can’t conceal it. It’s 10 A.M. in Sydney, Australia, and she’s puttering around the house of her boyfriend, actor Michael Fassbender. (He’s decamped there to shoot Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. She’s on a two-week holiday between film sets.) Her hair has that just-out-of-the-shower look. She’s wearing a light-blue button-down shirt that, even if it isn’t her boyfriend’s, looks like it should be. She’s making the kind of breakfast that elegant, health-conscious European women eat: a mix of muesli and yogurt, accompanied by a beverage of fresh-squeezed lemon juice mixed with apple-cider vinegar that some holistic-minded Australian friends are crazy about. “It’s apparently very good for you, but it’s disgusting!” says Vikander. Unlike the typical person, whose face over Skype looks as if he or she were staring into a doorknob, Vikander looks as exquisite and glowing as ever.

This past year has been her year, as they say—the 27-year-old Swedish actress, who now lives in London, shot from relative obscurity to international superstardom with four major films in just 12 months—Testament of Youth, Ex Machina, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Danish Girl—the kind of feat that Jessica Chastain accomplished a couple of years ago. Vikander was the “It girl” of this past awards season, earning a best-actress Golden Globe nomination for her role as an intensely alluring robot in Ex Machina and winning the Oscar for best supporting actress in The Danish Girl, as Gerda Wegener, the wild and determined wife of one of the earliest men to undergo gender-confirmation surgery, played by Eddie Redmayne. She’s both a muse to modern fashion designers—a year ago she became the new face of Louis Vuitton—and a dream for costume designers doing lush period dramas. No one has worn romantic, charming period frocks with such conviction since Helena Bonham Carter, as Lucy Honeychurch, frolicked in the grass in A Room with a View.

Now the world is at her feet, and she’s picking out projects according to nothing but whim and personal passion. A pair of guilty-pleasure blockbusters? Check. She’s currently in Jason Bourne, opposite Matt Damon, and she’s gearing up to play Lara Croft in the next Tomb Raider movie. A venture with an iconic European director? Another check: Wim Wenders’s Submergence, opposite James McAvoy, which she’s just wrapped. An indie with an old friend? She got that too: Euphoria, directed by Lisa Langseth, the woman who discovered her. It also happens to be the first title from her film company, Vikarious Productions, which she started, well, in order to do exactly what she wants.

But first, there’s the Oscar-bait film with movie-star boyfriend: The Light Between Oceans, out in September, about a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who, grieving from two recent miscarriages, discover a baby who washes ashore in a rowboat and make the disastrous decision to raise her as their own. Directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, A Place Beyond the Pines), it’s the kind of wrenching adult melodrama that Hollywood rarely makes these days, because it’s hard to pull off successfully—although they got this one right. It’s also where she and Fassbender fell in love. All of it is so absurdly charmed, and Vikander is still wrapping her head around it. “Hollywood was like a rumor,” she says, musing on how far she’s come. “I and my mum, we’d set the alarm to two A.M. to watch the Oscars, and it was like a window onto another universe. And then to have her there next to me [at the Oscars] this year. We were just cursing in Swedish. . . . It’s been pretty fucking . . . Wow.”

To those who’ve worked with her, Vikander is such a rare force of nature that the only way she could have remained in Swedish obscurity would have been if she’d made a concerted effort to do so. Co-stars and past directors tell a similar story—one that begins with instant enchantment by some kind of ineffable star quality. “I was just beguiled by her!” says Joe Wright, director of Anna Karenina—a reaction that’s rather typical from her collaborators. Their admiration deepens as they witness Vikander’s perfectionist tenacity, born from years of ballet training. “In dance, you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again, until you get it right,” says Redmayne. “The pain of ballet to get to the beauty. She brings that absolute rigor and absolute desire to give the very best.” Finally, and most powerfully, it’s about the emotional passion that she unleashes in a scene, all the more disarming due to her physical pristineness. As Redmayne puts in, “There’s this other thing that has nothing to do with her technical brilliance. A kind of deep emotion and capacity to feel that is volcanic.”

“Hollywood was like a rumor,” Vikander says. “Like a window onto another universe.”

These two forces—rigorous determination and devil-may-care abandon—seem to be roiling about inside her. Which adds up to someone who’s more down to earth than she appears. True, she possesses a physical poise in pictures and on-screen that can be distancing or make her seem prissy or haughty. And yet in real life she has a big laugh and is surprisingly chatty—even a bit rambling. One might be interested to learn that she’s not afraid to tell a story with her mouth full of yogurt and that she carries around the retro dice game Yahtzee in her handbag. She’s private about her romance with Michael Fassbender, yet she’s been known to have a girlish enthusiasm for sharing naughty tidbits. “You might not think you can tease her, but she kind of likes to be teased,” says Wright. He recalls of their time making Anna Karenina, “She had a new boyfriend at the time, and she’d come in rather sloshed on Monday mornings. She had a little chafing on her chin from all the kissing she’d been doing on the weekend. I’d tease her about that. And I’d tease her about being a perfectionist as well. I really appreciate and admire her perfectionism, but it’s important that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Photograph by Mario Testino. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Body Language

In many ways, Vikander had an upbringing that was tailor-made for creating a young actress. Her parents, Maria and Svante, divorced when she was a baby, and Alicia divided her time between them. Maria was a company member at the state theater, which provided a kind of collective creative playground for Alicia. She performed small roles there as a child. Svante, a psychiatrist, was, evidently, something of a ladies’ man—with a total of six children, from four different marriages. Like Alicia, these half-siblings were constantly coming and going between their father and respective mothers, and one can imagine the vying for attention that took place. At the age of four, she took up ballet. It wasn’t serious at first—just the result of a little girl’s desire to wear a tutu. But by nine, she was studying dance at the Royal Swedish Ballet School and was, almost without realizing it, on the path to becoming a serious dancer. This wasn’t anything like the bohemian playground of her childhood but rather a new universe of perfectionism, pain, anxiety, and self-doubt. She didn’t even think she was especially pretty. “My image of myself was not the best,” she says. “Being in ballet school and being in leotards in front of a mirror I don’t know how many hours a day was quite tough.” The stress landed her in therapy, which she hid from her parents.

She found relief in the form of acting when, at age 16, she was cast in a mini-series. But her hopes were dashed when she applied to, and got rejected by, the local drama school. She applied to law school, thinking the verdict was in. Then, one day, while working at a Levi’s store, she got a call from a casting director. A Swedish film director, Lisa Langseth, was looking for a girl to star in Pure, about a deeply troubled young woman whose only solace is classical music and who falls in love with an older, rather cruel conductor. After reading for Langseth numerous times, Vikander landed the part—one that called for remarkable darkness and savage rage. She fairly attacked it, and it unleashed a kind of cathartic dark thrill. She realized, “In film you get the license to try and go for emotions that you normally try to keep away from you . . . [but] certain emotions that you fear are [actually] very close to you.” Recently, Vikander re-watched that first film and thought, “Wow, where did I get that from? I really don’t know.”

Vikander’s performance won Sweden’s official film award (the Guldbagge) and caught the attention of some European casting directors. Alas, that took her as far as … Denmark. Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel had been looking to cast the lead in A Royal Affair, based on the real-life story of Caroline Matilda, who was married to the mentally ill King Christian VII of Denmark and had a tragic affair with his doctor. Arcel says he’d looked at “every single actress between 16 and 35 in Denmark” (which, while impressive-sounding, let’s face it, couldn’t have taken all that long) before widening the pool to Sweden and Norway. “As soon as I saw her [on the tape] even just standing there, even before she started to speak, I was like, That’s her!” There was one small issue—Vikander didn’t actually speak any Danish. When she did start speaking, “it was completely nonsensical,” says Arcel. “And yet she didn’t hold back at all. She was full-on emotional.” Vikander studied Danish over the next eight weeks to learn enough to do the role. But true to her perfectionist nature, she was convinced that she was failing. “I think now I was terrified,” she says. “By Week Six, the nerves were taking over, and [I thought], I’m not going to get it.” By shoot time, she’d nailed it. The movie received an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film.

Alicia’s “commitment made me focus and make sure I was as committed,” says Fassbender.

Conquering the world of English-language films was another matter. For a memorable stint following A Royal Affair, Vikander embraced the life of a struggling artist, in all its scrappy, bohemian glory. She moved from Stockholm to London, where she shared an apartment with three Swedish girlfriends, who were all aspiring pop singers: Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo of the duo Icona Pop, and Tove Lo. (No doubt, they were the hottest Swedish rooming group ever to hit London.) The apartment spilled onto Portobello Market, so the kitchen was infested with rats. “It was the dirtiest bachelorette pad you’ve ever seen,” Vikander says. The four girls shared two beds and all their clothes, which they kept in a pile on the floor. She auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Snow White and the Huntsman and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She made 15 “self-tapes” for various American television pilots and got completely ignored. “I didn’t even get a ‘No,’ ” she says—her first taste of Hollywood.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Finally, a break came her way. Director Joe Wright was planning an adaptation of Anna Karenina that would be highly stylized, “a ballet with words,” he says. While Wright was searching for an actress to play Kitty, Vikander’s dancing background was key to getting considered. “Dancers have this incredible discipline and rigor,” he says. “Their feet are bleeding, and still they have these serene faces.” But it was her raw performance in Pure that sealed his decision to cast her. The film would set in motion nonstop film work—including some projects with famous actors which nonetheless turned out to be disappointments: Son of a Gun (with Ewan McGregor), Seventh Son (with Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges), The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. She had a breakout of sorts in Testament of Youth, in which she played English pacifist Vera Brittain. But while generally well reviewed, the film never quite broke free from the predictable British period-piece mold.

It was not until Alex Garland’s script for Ex Machina landed in her lap that she had the kind of material that would make her a movie star. The plot revolved around a computer analyst charged with administering a Turing test to an alluring female android. In fact, “Is the really hot droid human?” was the central dramatic question—one that any actress would love to sink her teeth into. The role of Ava called for an enormous amount of physical control and precise movements. Yet just beneath her perfect surface she had to suggest that she had real feelings. Vikander pulled off the balance exquisitely, and it earned her a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress.

If Ex Machina was about an exacting balancing act, Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl would call on her emotional abandon. No one involved was quite prepared for how much Vikander would internalize Gerda, who tackles every emotion—from silliness to rage to undying compassion—as her husband, Einar, attempts to undergo the first known gender-confirmation therapy. Yet the audition might have suggested it. In the scene she read, Gerda confronts Einar, after having seen him—dressed in public for the first time as Lili Elbe—kissing a man at the ball. Redmayne, who’d already been cast, recalls, “The camera was by my head. We read the scene, and got to the end of the scene. I was waiting for Tom [Hooper] to call ‘Cut.’ I looked over to my right, and there he was, gently sobbing.”

“The audition moved me to tears to an almost embarrassing extent,” admits Hooper. “Eddie was like, ‘You’re so busted. There’s no way you’re not going to cast her if she made you cry on the first take.’ I’m like, ‘No, no. I’m—it’s just a bit of allergy. I’m fine.’ ”

In The Light Between Oceans, based on a full-on weepie best-seller by M. L. Stedman that had director Derek Cianfrance crying on the C train in Brooklyn when he finished it, there was, likewise, no room for restraint. In his search for an actress to play Isabel—a woman so filled with grief that stealing a baby seems like the only option—he says, “I was looking for someone who had no filters. Isabel, if she loves you, she’s going to ask you to marry her. If she finds a baby at sea, she’s going to keep it. If she hates you, she’s never going to speak to you again.” Vikander’s major films had not yet come out when Cianfrance was doing the casting, so he was not familiar with her work. He recalls, “She didn’t come in there caked with makeup, trying to impress me. She came in there trying to explore something.” The audition lasted four hours. “She absolutely laid it all bare. Sometimes you meet with actors and they don’t want to embarrass themselves. They don’t want to fail. Alicia immediately came out with so much faith and trust and bravery.” (Note to readers: the word “brave” came up so many times in reference to Vikander that I couldn’t not include it in this piece.)

As is his wont, Cianfrance orchestrated the experience to be as immersive, and as full of odd surprises, as possible for his cast. For that reason, he decided not to show Vikander any photographs of the location—a lighthouse on breathtaking Cape Campbell, one of the most northeasterly points of South Island, New Zealand, well away from civilization. Instead, he had another idea in mind. At two A.M., Vikander, who was staying in the city of Dunedin, was woken up by a crew member, put in a car, and then blindfolded. “I was like, ‘What are you guys doing?!’ ” she recalls. Told it was Derek’s idea, she was driven off.

They arrived on set at the lighthouse, with Vikander still blindfolded. “They put me in a woodshed. There were no windows. They put me in my clothes and my hair.” She was told by a crew member, “I’m going to open this door in 16 minutes now, and then you are going to see a small film crew somewhere. . . . Derek just wants you to do whatever you want to do.” They opened the door two minutes before the sun came up. “I saw the lighthouse and this amazing sea,” recalls Vikander, “and I was crawling up onto this hill where the lighthouse was because I saw the camera crew there. And then when I got up, it was the ocean on the other side of the hill and the sun came up. And I had never seen such nature in my entire life. So it’s a bit silly when I see that take in the film. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s just not acting. That’s just me being like, ‘Oh my God!’ ”

The next surprise was learning that she, Fassbender, and a handful of crew were going to actually live at the lighthouse for the next month. Fassbender was reluctant, thinking, “Is that necessary?” But Vikander didn’t question it. “She doesn’t take anything for granted,” says Fassbender. “With a lot of these actresses coming out, there’s this bravery that you don’t see so much in male actors. . . . I noticed this as well with Lupita [Nyong’o] in 12 Years a Slave—this focus and understanding that there’s an opportunity given to you and you grab it.” Vikander’s determination to get Isabel right inspired Fassbender, an actor who hardly needs improvement, to up his game. “She doesn’t mind taking a character she’s playing to an ugly place. Her level of commitment made me focus and make sure I was as committed.”

Labor of Love

The gorgeous, smart, and wildly talented Vikander meets her on-screen husband, the gorgeous, smart, and wildly talented Fassbender. Is it any surprise what developed? Vikander was still feeling like a newcomer compared with Fassbender and remembers feeling “terrified and very alone” at the beginning of the shoot. As it happened, Fassbender had already been well aware of Vikander, having seen her dancing at a party at the Toronto Film Festival the year before. She quickly discovered that he wanted her help in finding his footing. “He was very sweet at letting me in. . . . He was like, ‘Can you please give me a note? What do you think I should do?’ It was such a sweet thing to kind of let me in.” It was little surprise to Cianfrance to see his two co-stars falling in love. “It wasn’t hard for me to see that the chemistry could be there, just knowing them as individuals,” he says. “What I saw was two great people who were so supportive of each other, who were really picking each other up, and pushing each other. . . . They were an undeniably good match and they pushed each other. . . . Michael and Alicia, they were like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. They were going to make one another better. And they were better together.” The real feelings invariably intensified the fictional romance. Even Fassbender, who’s abjectly reluctant to speak about his personal relationships, admits, “These things of course sort of spill through to what you’re doing.”

What with all the success, and the highly visible romance, Vikander has found herself the focus of public curiosity. She’s well aware that the public likes to build female stars up, only to take them down a few notches (Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lawrence), and of the cruel power of tabloids and social media. “The gossip press is so big out here,” says Vikander, a few days later in Los Angeles, by phone. “There’s an urge to find that one thing that you say that can make a headline. It’s tough because I don’t want to be reserved, or holding back, or to not be myself.” It seems she’s speaking from personal experience, so I ask if there have been any stories out there in the press that she regrets. She’s about to answer when, as if on cue, a junior publicist who has been listening in loudly interrupts. “Can we skip the question and wrap it up real quick?” Taken aback, Vikander laughs uncomfortably. For a moment, one wonders whether she isn’t ready to have someone else be the Luckiest Girl Alive.