Downtime

By Lev Grossman, Rebecca Winters Keegan

After the Close-Up. Actors have been hogging the director's chair long enough. Now actresses are taking their turn. Here are four of their projects

THE WAITRESS

Director: Adrienne Shelly

Release date: May 2

In Shelly's third directorial effort, Keri Russell (above center) is a pregnant diner waitress in a bad marriage. The comedy's release is bittersweet--Shelly was murdered in November.

Why she stepped behind the camera: Shelly was pregnant when she started writing The Waitress. "It's almost a sacrilege to say becoming a mother is scary," she said in the production notes. "I wanted to write a movie about those fears and give them a voice."

What's next: The Adrienne Shelly Foundation will offer women funds for film school and productions.

2 DAYS IN PARIS

Director: Julie Delpy

Release date: Aug. 10

When Before Sunset, the romance she co-wrote, snagged an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2004, the French actress acquired a taste for the other side of filmmaking. First up is a comedy about a bickering couple's European vacation, starring Delpy (above right) and Adam Goldberg.

Why she stepped behind the camera: "Acting makes you feel slightly insecure, exposed," says Delpy. "When you're directing, you're the alpha dog."

What's next: Writing, directing and starring in The Countess, a period drama about "power and vanity."

AWAY FROM HER

Director: Sarah Polley

Release date: May 4

Calling the shots on her first feature, the Canadian actress from The Sweet Hereafter and Go tackles an unlikely project for a 28-year-old: Alice Munro's short story about a long-married couple (Julie Christie, above left, and Gordon Pinsent) coping with an Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Why she stepped behind the camera: "I'm a control freak," says Polley. "I have an endless need to know what's happening at all moments."

What's next: Writing another film and acting in an HBO mini-series about John Adams.

THE CAKE EATERS

Director: Mary Stuart Masterson

Looking for a distributor

The tomboy from Fried Green Tomatoes makes her directorial debut with a drama about two rural New York families connected by secrets, starring Bruce Dern, Kristen Stewart and Aaron Stanford (above, on scooter).

Why she stepped behind the camera: "I love film sets, but I don't necessarily love being the center of attention," says Masterson. "As a director, I get to have a much broader creative expression than as an actress. I'm not just blond and 5 ft. 4 in."

What's next: Founding a production company.

REVIEW

NIXON AND KISSINGER By Robert Dallek 740 pages

When Oddballs Ruled the World

They're like twin antediluvian monstrosities: too ugly, too wonky, too scaly and strange to flourish in today's cold political climate when the blinding comet of television has wiped out their kind, leaving only furry grinning mammals behind. Richard Nixon barely knew Henry Kissinger when he appointed him, notes Robert Dallek in Nixon and Kissinger, but they turned out to be two of a kind: both the products of unhappy childhoods, both paranoid, combative, grandiose, deceptive, relentlessly driven men. They shared power on an unprecedented basis, and it's hypnotic and--retroactively--terrifying to watch this unsteady Siamese-twin act toddling around the globe, from China to Chile, Vietnam to the Soviet Union, simultaneously propping each other up and cutting each other down (Nixon called Kissinger his "Jew boy"; Kissinger referred to Nixon as "that madman," "the meatball mind" and "our drunken friend").

Romping through reams of newly available tapes and transcripts, Dallek turns in a fresh and disturbing double portrait that includes such hilarious, pathetic images as the desperately insecure Nixon in a Shanghai hotel at 2 a.m., smashed on "mao-tais," begging his aides to reassure him that his China trip was a success.

It's probably better that they're gone, but everybody misses the dinosaurs once in a while.