The September Issue—the documentary about the making of Vogue’s biggest fashion issue ever in 2007, a four-pound tome that couldn’t be squeezed into a mailbox—debuts this weekend. Although tonight is the SF premiere, the film’s already been showing in NYC, timed well with Fashion Week. The movie’s release also has a darker sense of timing—magazines across the country are in trouble and being forced to reinvent themselves. Even Conde Nast, which has always remained mythically golden, has been in the spotlight, as McKinsey & Company has been called in to survey the wreckage. You can always rely on the New York Observer to giddily tell it how it is: “Three weeks after McKinsey & Company slipped its foot into the door of the emerald tower, Condé Nast staffers continue to ask what fresh hell they find themselves in.”

Editor Anna Wintour, of course, has been making the rounds. She’s on David Letterman, looking as if she literally can’t smile for all the Botox—not just because Letterman asks her if she’s ever put anyone in a headlock. Jennifer Pollock, 7x7.com’s managing editor, used to work for Conde Nast and recalls—like all former Nasties—the infamous elevator rides with Wintour. “It’s scary,” Pollock reports. “I actually stalled an elevator with her in it once, by throwing my H&M bag in as the door started to close. She was there in her fur and her glory. But she just looked ahead.”

This is the stuff movies are made for.

Reserve your tickets now. I’ll be at the Sundance Kabuki theater on the balcony bar, with a girlfriend who gets it, a glass of rose and some popcorn.