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Tag: Steve McQueen

  • Poker’s NBA-and-Mafia betting scandal echoes movie games, and cheats, from ‘Ocean’s’ to ‘Rounders’

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    LOS ANGELES (AP) — The stakes. The famous faces. The posh private rooms. The clever cheating schemes.

    The federal indictment of a big-money poker ring involving NBA figures on Thursday, in which unsuspecting rich players were allegedly enticed to join then cheated of their money, echoed decades of movies and television, and not just because of the alleged Mafia involvement.

    Fictional and actual poker have long been in sort of a pop-cultural feedback loop. When authorities described the supposed circumstances of the games, they might’ve evoked a run of screen moments from recent decades.

    Poker in ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ ‘Molly’s Game’ and ‘The Sopranos’

    A 2004 episode of “ The Sopranos ” showed a very similar mix of celebrities and mobsters in a New York game whose players included Van Halen singer David Lee Roth and football Hall-of-Famer Lawrence Taylor, both playing themselves.

    In 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven,” George Clooney finds his old heist buddy Brad Pitt running a poker game for “Teen Beat” cover boys including Topher Grace and Joshua Jackson, also playing themselves. Clooney spontaneously teams with Pitt to con them. And the plot of the 2007 sequel “Ocean’s Thirteen” centers on the high-tech rigging of casino games.

    Asked about the relevance of the films to the NBA scandal, which came soon after a story out of Paris that could’ve come straight out of “Ocean’s Twelve,” Clooney told The Associated Press with a laugh that “we get blamed for everything now.”

    “‘Cause we also got compared to the Louvre heist. Which, I think, you gotta CGI me into that basket coming out of the Louvre,” Clooney said Thursday night at the Los Angeles premiere of his new film, “Jay Kelly.” He was referring to thieves using a basket lift to steal priceless Napoleonic jewels from the museum.

    2017’s “Molly’s Game,” and the real-life memoir from Molly Bloom that it was based on, could almost serve as manuals for how to build a poker game’s allure for desirable “fish” in the same ways and with the same terminology that the organizers indicted Thursday allegedly used.

    The draw of Bloom’s games at hip Los Angeles club The Viper Room were not NBA players, but Hollywood players like Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and “The Hangover” director Todd Phillips. (None of them were accused of any wrongdoing.)

    In the movie written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, Bloom, played by Jessica Chastain, describes the way a famous actor acts as an attractor for other players, the same way officials said Thursday that NBA “face cards” did for the newly indicted organizers.

    The unnamed actor, played by Michael Cera, was at least partly based on the “Spider-Man” star Maguire.

    “People wanted to say they played with him,” Chastain says. “The same way they wanted to say they rode on Air Force One. My job security was gonna depend on bringing him his fish.”

    In her book, Bloom described the allure for the players she drew.

    “The formula of keeping pros out, inviting in celebrities and other interesting and important people, and even the mystique of playing in the private room of the Viper Room added up to one of the most coveted invitations in town,” she writes, later adding that “I just needed to continue feeding it new, rich blood; and to be strategic about how to fill those ten precious seats.”

    Bloom would get caught up in a broad 2013 nationwide crackdown on high-stakes private poker games, probably the highest profile poker bust in years before this week. She got a year’s probation, a $1,000 fine, and community service.

    There were no accusations of rigging at her game, but that didn’t make it legal.

    The legality of private-space poker games has been disputed for decades and widely varies among U.S. states. But in general, they tend to bring attention and prosecution when the host is profiting the way that a casino would.

    A brief history of movies making poker cool

    Poker — and cheating at it — has run through movies, especially Westerns, from their silent beginnings.

    Prominent poker scenes feature in 1944’s “Tall in the Saddle” with John Wayne and 1950’s “The Gunfighter” with Gregory Peck.

    “The Cincinnati Kid” in 1965 was dedicated entirely to poker — with Steve McQueen bringing his unmatched cool to the title character.

    A pair of movies co-starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman really raised the game’s profile, though.

    In the opening scene of 1969’s “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ a hyper-cool Redford is playing poker and refuses to leave until another player takes back a cheating accusation.

    In 1973’s Best Picture Oscar winner “The Sting,” 1930s con-men Newman and Redford seek revenge against a big fish and run a series of increasingly bold gambling scams that could’ve come from Thursday’s indictments. Newman out-cheats the man at poker to set him up for the big con, a phony radio horse race.

    The 1980s saw a dip in screen poker, with the subject largely relegated to the TV “Gambler” movies, starring Kenny Rogers, based on his hit song.

    But the end of the decade brought a poker boomlet from the increased legalization of commercial games.

    Then, at possibly the perfect moment, came “Rounders.” The 1998 Matt Damon film did for Texas Hold ’em what “Sideways” did for pinot noir and “Pitch Perfect” did for a cappella: it took an old and popular phenomenon and made them widespread crazes.

    Soon after came explosive growth in online poker, whose players often sought out big face-to-face games. And the development of cameras that showed players’ cards — very similar to the tech allegedly used to cheat players, according to the new indictments — made poker a TV spectator sport.

    The “Ocean’s” films and the general mystique they brought piled on too.

    Clooney, talking about the broader set of busts Thursday that included alleged gambling on basketball itself, pointed out that his Cincinnati Reds were the beneficiaries of sport’s most infamous gambling scandal, the 1919 “Black Sox” and the fixing of the World Series, “so I have great guilt for that.”

    “But you know there — we’ve never had a moment in our history that we didn’t have some dumb scandal or something crazy,” he said. “I feel very bad for the gambling scandal ’cause this was on the night that, you know, we had some amazing basketball happen.”

    —-

    Associated Press writer Leslie Ambriz contributed to this report.

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  • One Fine Show: Steve McQueen’s ‘Bass’ at the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel

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    Steve McQueen, Bass, 2024. LED Light and Sound, co-commissioned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Pati Grabowicz, © Steve McQueen

    Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

    The output of the artist Steve McQueen (b. 1969) is so varied that there need not be a throughline that runs through his oeuvre, and I’m not certain that one does exist. However, when I think about his work, I remember all the times he seemed to draw my attention directly to exactly where he wanted it. Static (2009) takes the viewer in a helicopter circling the Statue of Liberty, showing you each of its features so that you must appreciate it as a sculpture, which we don’t tend to do. Seeing Shame (2011) in the theater, I remember watching the corner of Carey Mulligan’s eye just as a tear welled in it and wondering how he did that.

    One of his latest offerings, Bass (2024), has demonstrated his purest control of my perception yet. The work is both simpler and more complicated than anything involving a helicopter or an A-lister, consisting of lights that shift their color and tone as they fill an entire space, amid an original score that is full of a subtle bass. The composition is far less techno rave than you might imagine from the images and “emerged in collaboration with an intergenerational group of musicians from the Black diaspora under the direction of McQueen along with the renowned bassist Marcus Miller, who brought in several other acclaimed musicians: Meshell Ndegeocello and Aston Barrett Jr. (both on electric bass), Mamadou Kouyaté (on ngoni, a traditional West African string instrument) and Laura-Simone Martin (on upright acoustic bass),” per the press materials.

    Despite living in New York City, I missed the work when it debuted at Dia Beacon because it somehow made more sense for me to catch it in Basel—it’s been that kind of year. In Beacon, it was in the sprawling basement of that former factory. At the Schaulager, the work was not contained on one floor, taking advantage of over 1,000 LED tubes temporarily installed in the place of the lightly brutal interior of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed space. These lights shift subtly between almost every color of the visible light spectrum, breathing in tune with the music, with such a flow that you will barely notice going from deep red to teal.

    McQueen has said that he sought “oceanic frequencies” for the composition, so it’s not original to say that it feels like you’re swimming underwater. Instead, I’ll say it feels like you’re walking around underwater, which is far stranger. I didn’t experience the Beacon iteration, but the effect of inundation must have been stronger in Switzerland, because it featured multiple floors. You felt like you were on the seabed, with leagues above you. Light doesn’t behave that way when you’re that deep down with scuba gear, but you can still feel the currents, and those sensations were recreated by the synchronicity between the music and all the LEDs changing color at the same time.

    The perfection of this coordination would almost be enough to make you paranoid, were it not so soothing. This unexpected offering from McQueen shows that he’s still challenging himself and still finding new ways to get into our heads.

    Steve McQueen’s Bass is on view at the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel, through November 16, 2025.

    More exhibition reviews

    One Fine Show: Steve McQueen’s ‘Bass’ at the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel

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    Dan Duray

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  • Video: ‘Blitz’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    Video: ‘Blitz’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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    The writer and director Steve McQueen narrates a sequence from his film set in London during World War II.

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    Mekado Murphy

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  • How Steve McQueen Became Hollywood’s Favorite Artist

    How Steve McQueen Became Hollywood’s Favorite Artist

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    Matthew Dentler, head of features at Apple TV+, appeared to be more personally invested in the picture than your typical movie studio head at a company with a $3.6 trillion market cap. He started discussing the project with McQueen “a couple years ago” and through the process they would text and call each other, bouncing off ideas. Dentler was at McQueen’s opening at Marian Goodman last September in LA. He’s hoping there’s time for a day trip during his next New York visit so he can make it up to Beacon to see Bass.

    “Obviously, we’re proud of the film, it’s been a rewarding experience to work with him and the team on this film—but I think also what’s been fun is getting to become friends with Steve,” Dentler said.

    The first trailer for Blitz dropped the same day that Dia’s Chelsea galleries opened for the season with three McQueen artworks, and there was a party for members that night. McQueen completed Bounty, a new installation of a few dozen photos of flowers in Grenada, quickly. He had gone to the island in July. In the same gallery was something much older: Exodus, which McQueen told me was technically his first film, even if he sat on it and didn’t show it until the late ’90s. I had heard about the piece. Apparently it came about when, during an amble through London carrying a camera, the young McQueen spotted two West Indian men in smart bowler hats carrying potted palm fronds and followed them, losing them only when they got on a double-decker bus. Was that true?

    “Yeah, that’s basically it,” McQueen said, staring at his first video playing on a loop on a ’90s-era block TV. “I just saw these guys and started following them around.”

    Most of the crowd that night gravitated toward Sunshine State, which had debuted in slightly grander form two years earlier at the HangarBicocca. In Chelsea it was a two-channel video installation projected on both sides, starting with two depictions of a smoldering sun that cuts to parallel scenes from The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first film with synchronized sound, about a cantor’s son from the Lower East Side who starts singing jazz and eventually finds Broadway fame. But when Al Jolson’s character starts applying the blackface that he wears onstage, his face disappears, and McQueen’s voice wafts through the room.

    “My father was called Philbert, a very Victorian name, and one of the last things he told before he died was a story…” McQueen says, the plummy disembodied voice hanging over the film.

    The story he tells is this: When he was a young man, Philbert McQueen traveled from Grenada to Florida on a job picking oranges, and one night after work McQueen’s father went to a bar with two other workers. When they walked in, everyone froze. The bartender told them he didn’t serve Black men. He didn’t use that phrase. One of the orange workers hit the bartender over the head with a bottle, and they fled into the night as the patrons chased after. McQueen’s father hid in a ditch, heard two gunshots, and stayed until morning, terrified, when he returned to work by himself.

    Michael Fassbender and director Steve McQueen on the set of Shame, 2011.From Fox Searchlight/Everett Collection

    “He never spoke to me about it before, until when he was going to pass,” McQueen had told me back at the Crosby Street Hotel.

    In the gallery, Matthew Barney listened, mouth agape. Louise Lawler sat with the gallery director Philipp Kaiser, who works at Marian Goodman, and Swofford, McQueen’s agent at CAA, was standing with Stigter as Joan Jonas stared deep into the monitor. After a few loops of the film, it was time to leave for dinner, and in the next room, McQueen was surrounded by the flowers of Bounty. The night before, there was a dinner too. The next day he had to fly to Milan, and in two weeks he’d be in London for the premiere—and in New York the next day for the film festival, and Los Angeles the day after that.

    Eventually, I found McQueen staring at the minute-long Exodus. “I love work, I just don’t love all the promotion,” he said.

    He turned away from the monitor to look at me.

    “As I told you, I’m not good with small talk,” he said. “All I have is my work, my family, a few friends you can count on one hand. I’m not good with small talk. All this small talk, you just have to cut it off.”

    For details, go to VF.com/credits.

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    Nate Freeman

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  • Steve McQueen Fuses Wartime Amsterdam and Modern-Day Extremism in ‘Occupied City’ Trailer

    Steve McQueen Fuses Wartime Amsterdam and Modern-Day Extremism in ‘Occupied City’ Trailer

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    Steve McQueen bridges the past horrors of Nazi-era Amsterdam with a threatening present-day extremism in the trailer for Occupied City, a four-hour documentary from the 12 Years a Slave helmer inspired by a book by his wife, Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter.  

    The teaser trailer, which A24 dropped on Tuesday (below), remains tightly focused on modern-day Amsterdam as McQueen’s camera captures in his adopted city locals walking, jogging, skating, dancing, getting married and otherwise going about their everyday lives.

    But those visuals are overlaid by narrator Melanie Hyam recalling the murders, suicides, resistance and betrayals that convulsed Amsterdam’s Jewish community in the early 1940s as the occupying German’s noose steadily closed around the neck of their embattled community.

    That combination of McQueen’s elegant portrait of Amsterdam today and a matter-of-fact narration written by Stigter, author of the book Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945), which inspired the documentary, connects the 1940s and now as the Holocaust serves to foreshadow growing extremism today.

    “In 1942, the deportations began,” the viewer hears Hyam recount at one point in the trailer as McQueen shows a young child running in front of the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, happily scattering a flock of seagulls on the ground.

    McQueen’s fresh documentary approach to occupied Amsterdam during the first half of the 1940s has the narration never commenting directly on his visuals, but instead indirectly hinting at ghosts from the past.

    The trailer at times features present-day police in Amsterdam moving on horseback, in helicopters or armored trucks to disperse crowds, including those protesting COVID-era crackdowns.

    Occupied City, which bowed in Cannes and played at Telluride and the New York Film Festival, will open in theaters on Dec. 25.

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  • Steve McQueen on Expectations: ‘I’m Happy to Defy Them’

    Steve McQueen on Expectations: ‘I’m Happy to Defy Them’

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    The Cannes Film Festival holds a special place in Steve McQueen’s heart, because it’s where his directorial debut Hunger made its way into the world back in 2008. He remembers the 15-minute rapturous applause of an audience who had just discovered a promising new director, taking the stage with star Michael Fassbender afterwards for a Q&A—and the conversation the next day around the festival, which was all about why the film wasn’t in the Competition lineup. 

    “That’s another story. One day I will tell that story. Not now,” McQueen tells me as we sit down in a corner booth at a bustling restaurant in Cannes. 

    McQueen, who went on to make 2011’s Shame (also starring Fassbender), 2014 Oscar best picture winner Twelve Years a Slave, and 2018’s Widows, has a different story to tell today: about his first documentary, a four-hour exploration of the past and present set in Amsterdam. The film, which played out of Competition at the festival, is based on his wife Bianca Stigter‘s book, Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945, which meticulously chronicled the Dutch city’s occupation by the Nazis.

    For the documentary, McQueen filmed slice-of-life moments in modern-day Amsterdam, and paired them with voiceover that describes the atrocities committed in those exact locations by the Nazis. It’s an uncomfortable juxtaposition — and that’s exactly what McQueen was going for. “I thought that it would be a radical idea to do that, to make a picture without archive footage. Just the present day, being illustrated by the past,” says McQueen. “For me, Occupied City is not a history lesson. It’s an experience.”

    McQueen’s film is radical in many ways, not only for being a documentary without the traditional talking heads or archival footage, but also because of its 262-minute running time (with an intermission). “I want to push things because the form isn’t done,” he says. “Everyone says, ‘this is a documentary. This is how you’re doing a feature film.’ Well, no.”

    Occupied City isn’t the first time McQueen has pushed the boundaries of how a film is defined. His last Cannes contribution was in 2020, when two of the films in his Small Axe series were included in the line-up. (The festival had to shift to a virtual program due to COVID-19.) The five-film series, which aired on BBC One and Amazon Prime, landed a Golden Globe nomination for limited or anthology series but also appeared on the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s award for best picture. At the time, McQueen stated that it was always intended for TV. But when I talk to him now, he calls them films. It’s clear McQueen won’t be boxed in by these sorts of labels. “Well, that’s not my debate, that’s your debate,” he tells me, looking me square in the eye. “I make this stuff.”

    For Occupied City, McQueen actually captured 36 hours of footage as he filmed every setting featured in the book starting in 2019. But then he had to cut it down to four hours. “It was a process. It was a long process, but it was wonderful to have all these things at your disposal you could grab here and there, there was nothing I didn’t have to work with,” he says. “So it was a lot of work, but it was defiant. It was wonderful.”

    He made the film to be shown in theaters (it’s being distributed by A24), and when I ask him if he’s concerned at all that the run time will scare people off, he’s unconcerned. “I didn’t make this to be long. I made it to be right,” he says. “As an artist, you’re just trying to do the best thing for the subject matter. The subject that is asking for a certain kind of length, or some kind of how it wants to be presented.” He admits that at first, he wondered if A24 would be okay with the lengthy running time, but they never had an issue with it. “People maybe have expectations of me. I’m happy to defy them. You have to push yourself in ways which are not neat and tidy, or not what people want from you or expect.”

    He’s also aware that it can be demanding to absorb both the present day visuals and the horrific stories being told. He doesn’t expect audiences to take in both at every moment — that’s part of the experience. “Sometimes you are in it and it’s too much information, and you’re just looking and you’re not listening. Sometimes you’re listening, and you’re not looking at the images,” he says. “It’s just going to classical concerts. You’re not holding it all in the head. It’s ungraspable.”

    McQueen, who has had a home with his wife in Amsterdam for 27 years (they split time between there and London), says he didn’t have any trouble gaining access to people’s homes. Many of the residents allow him to capture intimate moments from their lives, from quiet days at home to COVID weddings in empty hotel rooms over Zoom. “I think when we’re talking about the second World War, people are very open,” says McQueen. “That’s why when you walk in the streets of Amsterdam you look in people’s houses, see them cooking and washing up and doing things because the people are sort of like, what have you got to hide? There’s nothing to hide.”

    The film also captures modern day Amsterdam during the COVID-19 lockdown, including the anti-vaccination protests. But McQueen says he wasn’t necessarily trying to draw a parallel between a city under siege in the 1940s and the same city being locked down today; he was simply capturing the present moment in time. “One is not necessarily to illustrate the other,” he says. “But life does that. You can look at the military police there and think of the Nazi occupation, but at the same time you might not. So it’s one of those things where it’s a situation where life is a weird thing where you could drift in and out.”

    McQueen, who is currently in post on his next feature film—Blitz, a WWII-set drama—has a lot of thoughtful answers about Occupied City, speaking about it with a fast cadence and a sort of frenetic energy. But toward the end of the conversation, I mention that it seems brave to make a movie that breaks from the traditional format of a documentary. That there’s a risk to it. He seems stumped in how to respond, other than telling me he wouldn’t use the word brave. He pauses, quietly thinking it over for a couple minutes. “It’s not done. It’s just not done. Things are not done yet,” he says. “Our responsibility is not to be comfortable, but to push. You have to throw yourself off kilter.” For McQueen, it’s not brave. He simply has no other choice.

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    Rebecca Ford

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  • Weird Facts

    Weird Facts

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    Steve McQueen had a habit of demanding free items in bulk from studios when agreeing to do a film, such as electric razors, jeans, and other items. It was later discovered that he donated these things to the Boys Republic reformatory school, where he had spent time during his teen years. 

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  • Veronica Ryan wins Turner Prize for evocative sculptures

    Veronica Ryan wins Turner Prize for evocative sculptures

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    LONDON — Artist Veronica Ryan has won the prestigious Turner Prize for work that transforms materials including fruits, seeds and volcanic ash into elusive and evocative sculptures.

    The Montserrat-born British artist was awarded the 25,000-pound ($30,000) prize at a ceremony in Liverpool, England on Wednesday evening. She won for work including public sculptures in London’s Hackney area in the shape of tropical fruits – custard apple, breadfruit and soursop — that honor the contribution to Britain of post-World War II immigrants from the Caribbean.

    “Better late than never,” said Ryan, who at 66 is the oldest artist ever to win the prize.

    The Turner Prize judges praised the “personal and poetic way she extends the language of sculpture” through found and often forgotten objects and materials including fruits, plants, seeds and volcanic ash from the Caribbean island where she was born.

    Work by Ryan and three other finalists is on display at the Tate Liverpool museum in northwest England until March 19.

    Named for 19th-century landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, the award was founded in 1984 and helped make stars of potter Grayson Perry, sculptor Anish Kapoor, shark-pickling artist Damien Hirst and filmmaker Steve McQueen.

    But it has also been criticized for rewarding impenetrable conceptual work and often sparks debate about the value of modern art. In 2019, all four finalists were declared winners after they refused to compete against one another. Last year all five finalists were collectives rather than individual artists. The 2021 winner was the 11-member Array Collective from Northern Ireland.

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  • Steve McQueen’s Former Beachside Malibu Mansion Is On The Market For $17 Million

    Steve McQueen’s Former Beachside Malibu Mansion Is On The Market For $17 Million

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    The Malibu, California estate once owned by the late actor Steve McQueen is on the market for $17 million. He was a beloved performer for Baby Boomers and one of the highest-paid actors in the world in the 1970s. McQueen was the epitome of cool, both in real life and his movies, including The Thomas Crown Affair, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid and Le Mans. McQueen and his wife, fellow actor Ali MacGraw, lived in the Malibu Beach home for a few years in the 1970s. Since then, it has been completely updated.

    The stylish mansion was sold in 2020 by McQueen’s son, Chad, and then to Ammar Malik, of Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” fame, for $8.35 million. The songwriter spent millions to transform the property from a dated beach home to one of Malibu’s best. Located on a bluff to provide the privacy that the Indiana-born McQueen craved, the home now exemplifies the California contemporary style with over 4,300 square feet, four bedrooms, dining and living rooms, plus several wide decks.

    Huge sliding doors open on the first floor—which feels as though it’s floating above the ocean—to some of Southern California’s best views from Broad Beach to Point Dume State Beach and Preserve on the coast of Malibu. The primary bedroom is situated above the main floor with a soaking tub and large deck. Other features include outdoor showers, a fireplace, chef’s kitchen, wood-accent walls and spa bath. A private staircase leads down to the iconic beach.

    McQueen lived in Malibu when it was still a remote area near Los Angeles, popular with surfers and a few actors. Today, Malibu is one of the country’s most popular and expensive beach towns with spectacular mansions and upscale shops. Still extremely popular with actors, current and former homeowners include Leonardo DiCaprio, Emma Stone, Miley Cyrus, Jack Nicholson, Jenifer Aniston, Britney Spears and Cher.

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    Brenda Richardson, Senior Contributor

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