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Topic Archive: Hollywood
Two members of the Los Angeles bureau are among 11 staffers laid off at the magazine, says a report....
Posted November 4, 2009 1:24 PM
The Hollywood power lunch spot near the Cedars medical buildings on West 3rd Street is soon to shut its doors, after 20 years. “It’s not without some sadness and remorse,"...
Posted November 4, 2009 12:42 PM
The layoff of Alonso Duralde from MSNBC means ten members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association have lost their gigs in the last 18 months, says David Poland at...
Posted November 2, 2009 2:52 PM
Some bloggers, this one included, will make minor unannounced fixes shortly after a post goes up. Hollywood blog-meistress Nikki Finke takes it to a whole new level, as Gawker's John...
Posted October 29, 2009 4:52 PM
Produced and directed by Walt Disney, this is an animation classic with a capital C. It's the first cartoon in the Silly Symphonies series, animated by Ub Iwerks. I figured,...
Posted October 29, 2009 3:20 PM
Disney-ABC Television Group today told L.A. County that it will seek approval for a 56-acre production facility - including a dozen soundstages - on Disney's Golden Oak Ranch in the...
Posted October 28, 2009 2:54 PM
John Meroney spent a couple of days with Gore Vidal at his Hollywood home and files his dispatch for The Atlantic. Vidal says, among other things, that concerns about Barack...
Posted October 28, 2009 1:32 PM
As part of the promotion for his new movie, actor Adam Goldberg drives around Los Angeles pointing out some of the things he dislikes. Among them are the food,...
Posted October 26, 2009 12:25 AM
The new Regal Cinemas' L.A. Live Stadium 14 debuts officially on Tuesday with the first showings of Michael Jackson's "This Is It." Variety sees the new Downtown cineplex — which...
Posted October 25, 2009 11:39 PM
David Carr retires his tuxedo after four seasons. The new New York Times blogger on the red carpet beat is Melena Ryzik. (She tweets here, by the way.) The paper...
Posted October 20, 2009 5:12 PM
Bonnie Fuller is the "tabloid maven," as Style Section L.A. puts it, who is revamping HollywoodLife.com as part of the fledgling Jay Penske media empire. Fuller has hired New York...
Posted October 19, 2009 5:58 PM
About a week after leaving the LA Weekly, Steven Mikulan has been inked to write a new blog for The Wrap to be called L.A. Noir. The site also announced...
Posted October 19, 2009 2:46 PM
The indie film party is moving to LA Live and will be held in the evening, allowing for live late-night TV on the East Coast. Next year's awards are March...
Posted October 15, 2009 10:51 AM
L.A. Times film columnist and blogger Patrick Goldstein says all the noise about Hollywood supporting Roman Polanski overlooks something. There's no petition going around with the names of the real...
Posted October 6, 2009 10:59 PM
With the chatter about Nikki Finke on high due to this week's profile in The New Yorker, Gawker's Richard Rushfield is offering $1,000 for "a recent photograph of the scourge...
Posted October 6, 2009 10:24 PM
You know something's up when you wake up to Sunday morning email from Nikki Finke and the flack for The New Yorker, both flagging a story in the magazine that...
Posted October 4, 2009 1:01 PM
The Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills unveiled its fall schedule, starting tonight with Wayne Gretzky, Bruce McNall and a showing of "Kings Ransom," a documentary by Peter Berg...
Posted October 1, 2009 12:17 PM
DreamWorks founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, as expected, are co-hosting a fundraiser for Jerry Brown on Nov. 18. "This will be a big launching pad for his...
Posted September 30, 2009 4:25 PM
Elizaveta Mukasei was posted to Los Angeles as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1943, according to an interesting Wall Street Journal remembrance today. Mukasei, who died...
Posted September 30, 2009 4:14 PM
Los Angeles Magazine kicks off a new Hollywood sociology column, Cut!, in the October issue. New contributing writer Gina Piccalo writes the first one, talking to spouses and partners about...
Posted September 29, 2009 5:56 PM
This is kind of amusing. Yahoo's pick-up from Associated Press on the Roman Polanski arrest in Switzerland seemed for awhile this morning to include some not-for-public-consumption, reporter-editor go-between. "no surprise,...
Posted September 27, 2009 1:00 PM
Director Roman Polanski was arrested on Saturday as he arrived at the Zurich airport to receive an award at the Zurich Film Festival. Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley's office...
Posted September 27, 2009 9:05 AM
Conan O'Brien took a bump to the head while performing a skit on tonight's show and was taken by ambulance to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He's doing fine — NBC released...
Posted September 25, 2009 11:10 PM
At the end of her interview with the LA Weekly's Gendy Alimurung, French actress Audrey Tautou asked if she could snap the writer's picture. Does it with all the journalists...
Posted September 24, 2009 7:58 PM
In case you missed them: Bill Boyarsky spent a delightful evening with Norman Corwin, the 99-year-old "Los Angeles literary treasure," at the Barnes & Noble in Westside Pavilion. Visiting blogger...
Posted September 21, 2009 6:15 PM
The City Council voted unanimously to offer early retirement to 2,400 employees in lieu of layoffs and furloughs. LAT, Ron Kaye Producer John Wells was elected president of the...
Posted September 18, 2009 7:15 PM
TV producer Jay Sanderson succeeds John Fishel, who served 17 years as the Federation president and is leaving at the end of the year. A search committee picked Sanderson over...
Posted September 16, 2009 4:51 PM
That would be the filmmaker Michael Moore, who can't seem to stop blathering about subjects he doesn't seem to know much about. At a news conference in Toronto, he accused...
Posted September 15, 2009 9:02 AM
The star of "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost" had been battling pancreatic cancer. He was 57. (AP)...
Posted September 14, 2009 5:20 PM
Here's an extended excerpt from a series of interviews he did in 1998 for the Archive of American Television. He talks about working with Bob Hope, Carl Reiner, Sid...
Posted September 11, 2009 2:34 PM
One of the greatest comedy writers - ever. He's probably best known for the TV series "MASH," but there also was "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the...
Posted September 11, 2009 1:42 PM
Army Archerd was a Variety columnist for 52 years, a fixture on the red carpet and at Hollywood parties — and he liked to say that his style made him...
Posted September 8, 2009 10:05 PM
The newest iteration of "At The Movies" debuts this weekend with A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips installed as hosts — they both filled in a lot for Roger Ebert when...
Posted September 2, 2009 5:54 PM
Los Angeles photographer Phil Stern turns 90 tomorrow. That's his photo of Frank Sinatra lighting JFK's smoke. Vanity Fair celebrates the big day with an online piece by David Friend:...
Posted September 2, 2009 3:42 PM
Variety is advertising for an editor of the daily paper and for an online editor to run the website. Also, USC Annenberg is helping to recruit a project manager "as...
Posted September 1, 2009 3:10 PM
Kim Masters, host of The Business on KCRW, talks about her father's part in a secret unit that killed Nazis on today's Talk of the Nation on National Public Radio....
Posted September 1, 2009 2:50 PM
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable in partnership with Ovation TV have each committed $75,000 to help the Los Angeles County Museum of Art "extend continuous film...
Posted August 26, 2009 12:32 PM
Sharon Waxman at The Wrap says that Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke stands to pocket $80,000 out of a class-action lawsuit against E-Trade for being tape recorded without her permission. Waxman...
Posted August 12, 2009 1:17 PM
Variety columnist Brian Lowry isn't too smitten with the AM news station's refocus summed up in the ad slogan "Hollywood listens to KFWB." Honestly, I've tried, but I keep asking...
Posted August 7, 2009 9:02 AM
The screenwriter and director known for the films "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," "Pretty in Pink" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" among others died today while walking in Manhattan. A...
Posted August 6, 2009 4:46 PM
News items: Westwood movie future bleak and Westwood's Mann Festival RIP. Click the cartoon to view it larger. See more by Steve Greenberg in his LA Sketchbook archive...
Posted August 3, 2009 11:33 PM
Perhaps stung by the strong critical reaction to the decision to rethink its film program, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has put up an online forum to take...
Posted August 3, 2009 11:15 PM
Today's L.A. Times follows on our Thursday night news about the Festival theater closing and adds a triple whammy of bad news for Westwood: Mann is giving up its leases...
Posted August 1, 2009 1:44 PM
The film writer's affiliation with Variety has finally played its last note. She posts there that as of Sunday night, her Thompson on Hollywood brand will be housed at IndieWIRE....
Posted July 30, 2009 11:05 PM
Cari Beauchamp took her deep personal umbrage at Native Intelligence the other night, and now you can add the LAT's Kenneth Turan to the list of Hollywood and film aficionados...
Posted July 30, 2009 10:10 AM
Museum director Michael Govan announced the film program will be closed and rethought — audiences were down, he said. LA Observed contributor Cari Beauchamp, an author and film historian, calls...
Posted July 28, 2009 6:22 PM
Today's front page of the Wall Street Journal talks about Hamilton High senior Kenya Mejia receiving $1,800 to plug the movie "I Love You, Beth Cooper" in her valedictorian address...
Posted July 28, 2009 2:35 PM
Gawker just put out the word that the site's new West Coast editor will be Richard Rushfield, currently at LATimes.com. The note from Gawker's editor in chief is below (and,...
Posted July 27, 2009 12:52 PM
"We're young, we live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, we might as well have fun while we can," Zooey Deschanel's character says in "500...
Posted July 18, 2009 11:40 PM
David Carr came through town a week or so ago and lands on the New York Times' front page tomorrow with a piece on Nikki Finke. Her deal to sell...
Posted July 16, 2009 8:54 PM
Sing along with Steve Greenberg as he mourns runaway production from Hollywood. Click the cartoon to view it larger. See the entire LA Sketchbook archive and Steve's bio in one...
Posted July 14, 2009 12:45 PM
Aaron Sorkin will take over the script, Steven Soderbergh will no longer direct, but Brad Pitt is still attached to star and the movie remains at Sony, says Variety's Marc...
Posted July 9, 2009 3:36 PM
The Forest Lawn cemetery wedged between Griffith Park, Burbank and Toluca Lake calls itself FL Hollywood Hills for marketing purposes, but make no mistake: it's in the San Fernando Valley....
Posted July 6, 2009 2:35 PM
Cynthia Littleton at Variety reports that Brennan, a longtime reporter and editor for The Hollywood Reporter, died today at Cedars-Sinai after a yearlong struggle with cancer. "He was my friend,...
Posted July 2, 2009 10:06 PM
Sharon Waxman's report that Nikki Finke inked a $14 million deal to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily has yet to be confirmed by anyone on the record, and Finke declines comment...
Posted June 29, 2009 11:15 PM
As part of the promotion for the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie Bruno, GQ magazine runs photos of Cohen-as-Bruno cavorting on the field with the football team at Birmingham High...
Posted June 29, 2009 4:30 PM
News item: Oscar keepers expand best picture category to ten in desperate attempt to hook audience. See more Steve Greenberg cartoons in the LA Sketchbook archive....
Posted June 25, 2009 1:11 PM
Farrah Fawcett died at 9:28 AM at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, according to TMZ. Ryan O'Neal and Alana Stewart were at her bedside....
Posted June 25, 2009 9:45 AM
Getting nominated for a best picture Oscar won't mean quite as much now that the motion picture academy has returned to ten nominations in the category. And the winner will...
Posted June 24, 2009 1:24 PM
The LA Weekly's parent company congratulated Nikki Finke on being acquired (for $14 million apparently) and blogs that it wants to find another online Hollywood reporter. "We've had a great...
Posted June 23, 2009 7:07 PM
Deadline Hollywood Daily was bought by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC), which operates Mail.com, HollywoodLife.com, MovieLine.com and OnCars.com. From the company's announcement on her site: MMC also begins a long-term partnership...
Posted June 23, 2009 9:31 AM
Singer Chris Brown will have to do community labor and five years probation, stay away from Rihanna, give up a DNA sample and other steps in exchange for deal that...
Posted June 22, 2009 2:07 PM
For some reason Sony agreed to make a movie out of the Michael Lewis baseball bestseller "Moneyball." Brad Pitt got on board, crews were hired, shooting was to begin today...
Posted June 22, 2009 1:05 AM
Josef Adalian, the television editor at Variety for nine years until jumping last year to TV Week as deputy editor, is moving again. This time he is going to The...
Posted June 14, 2009 11:32 PM
For reasons only he can adequately explain, OC Weekly writer, author and "Ask a Mexican" creator Gustavo Arellano was on the red carpet asking questions of stars at this week's...
Posted June 13, 2009 12:20 AM
Info released today by county public health officials indicates there have been 22 positive HIV tests of porn performers since a scare shut down the adult video biz for a...
Posted June 11, 2009 10:38 PM
The Wrap has gotten hold of a memo listing the salaries and stock of top agents at William Morris. From Sharon Waxman's post: Who knows why John Fogelman, until about...
Posted June 11, 2009 3:25 PM
The art of the local editorial cartoon is alive and well at LA Observed, compliments of Steve Greenberg. Find him here most days. Yesterday's LA Sketchbook — Back to...
Posted June 11, 2009 2:13 PM
A female adult industry performer has tested positive for HIV and a "handful" of her partners are under industry quarantine for testing, XBIZ reports. So far they have tested negative....
Posted June 10, 2009 5:25 PM
I enjoyed "Away We Go" over the weekend and left thinking Maya Rudolph's performance was Oscar nomination worthy. So I was pleased to see Los Angeles magazine post a mini-profile...
Posted June 9, 2009 9:40 AM
The music industry publication shut down today, costing thirty jobs says The Wrap. Visitors to the website are re-directed to Billboard.biz. Also, The Hollywood Reporter eliminates another ten positions, including...
Posted June 3, 2009 5:04 PM
Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein says he'll miss the occasional calls from the longtime publicist, "one of the last remaining links to the Damon Runyon-esque era where you could...
Posted May 20, 2009 12:43 PM
With lots of careers ending today at William Morris and Endeavor, Hollywood writer Michael Oates Palmer gives a shout out to his now-unemployed agent: palmermix My agent was a casualty...
Posted May 18, 2009 4:25 PM
Solters at various times represented Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson and other celebrity clients, says Nikki Finke. She reports that Solters died in his sleep at home, and gets...
Posted May 18, 2009 4:12 PM
The Hollywood Reporter announced that former Fox entertainment reporter Roger Friedman will join the trade as a senior correspondent based in New York....
Posted May 18, 2009 8:47 AM
Haven't seen the book yet, but I like the title. "Beverly Hills Adjacent" is a debut novel with strong local flavor and media bloodlines: it's by Jennifer Steinhauer, the New...
Posted May 14, 2009 11:50 PM
Fortune.com reported the basic story that Hollywood mogul David Geffen recently sought to acquire the 19% stake in the New York Times that is held by hedge fund Harbinger Capital...
Posted May 11, 2009 3:21 PM
Sahl, who lives in Claremont, was reported missing by his wife on Friday, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune blogged this morning. An afternoon update says that Sahl, who turns 82...
Posted May 9, 2009 2:26 PM
Mark has the goods at LA Biz Observed: TV Week is going online only. * Update: TV Week alum Michael Schneider blogs the history at Franklin Avenue. Also: Video story...
Posted May 5, 2009 6:59 PM
The celebrity news site says that the comic actor died in his sleep last night at a Los Angeles hospital. TMZ The French Mistake scene in "Blazing Saddles" with DeLuise...
Posted May 5, 2009 9:17 AM
"The Soloist," which I saw Saturday night in Los Feliz, worked well enough for me as entertainment, as a Los Angeles movie and as paean to the best role newspapers...
Posted May 4, 2009 12:14 AM
Here's your chance to own wax figures of Uma Thuman (as Mia Wallace from "Pulp Fiction") and John Travolta as Vincent Vega. They are part of a May 1 auction...
Posted April 29, 2009 11:38 PM
Add L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan to those reporting back with lukewarm reviews of "The Soloist," despite wanting to like it. I could back up and write all this in...
Posted April 24, 2009 9:14 AM
Joint statement from the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers: LOS ANGELES (April 17, 2008) – The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers...
Posted April 17, 2009 1:06 PM
When Fox released "Dragonball:Evolution" in 2,000 theaters last weekend, it didn't bother with newspaper ads — or print reviewers, for that matter. The teens who were the target audience just...
Posted April 17, 2009 11:08 AM
Joe Flint will take the lead on Company Town, the L.A. Times' entry in the blog space where the NYT has The Carpetbagger. Flint has a long resume and does...
Posted April 16, 2009 4:59 PM
There's a local PR angle to the legal squabble between Woody Allen and Dov Charney's American Apparel. Michael Cieply captures it at The Carpetbagger, the NYT's Hollywood blog. Mr. Allen...
Posted April 16, 2009 3:59 PM
Variety columnist and blogger Brian Lowry wasn't impressed by L.A. Times columnist-blogger Patrick Goldstein's recent critique of the trade paper and Peter Bart. Lowry's open letter to Goldstein gets a...
Posted April 16, 2009 12:18 PM
While director John McTiernan awaits a new indictment over his use of wiretapper Anthony Pellicano in a divorce case, he's pushing a new documentary that alleges the Pellicano prosecution was...
Posted April 15, 2009 5:05 PM
George Harrison's son Dhani and widow Olivia today in Hollywood, where Harrison was honored with a star on the Walk of Fame (and they accepted a loaf of Monastery of...
Posted April 14, 2009 8:34 PM
Variety executive editor Michael Speier is among those losing their jobs as part of a 7% staff cut across parent Reed Business Information, says The Wrap.com. It's the second big...
Posted April 14, 2009 3:47 PM
Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein's latest split with his editors (and possibly some ad people) is over his advocacy of a front-page ad for tonight's NBC debut of "Southland"...
Posted April 9, 2009 12:49 AM
I've been curious what Amy Wallace would have to say about Bart being kicked upstairs at Variety, nearly eight years after she profiled him in a terrific, much-talked about piece...
Posted April 8, 2009 12:19 AM
Variety editor Tim Gray is now in charge of the news operation and Peter Bart gets a new position at the trade. "Bart has managed Variety's staff and news operations...
Posted April 5, 2009 7:56 PM
It's not just the WSJ story I linked in the Morning Buzz. Kim Masters at The Daily Beast also writes today about Hollywood squeezing stars to take less money. Masters,...
Posted April 2, 2009 12:54 PM
Writer-director and ex-journalist Rod Lurie uses a second bad experience with Nikki Finke's reporting to go off on a rant about the dangers of bloggers posting inaccurate stories, usually without...
Posted April 1, 2009 12:37 AM
I hadn't checked in with studio tradesperson Peggy Archer's blog in awhile. Today at Totally Unauthorized, she reports pseudonymously from a shooting set. One of our pivotal scenes yesterday involved...
Posted March 31, 2009 12:00 PM
Steven Bach was the executive at United Artists who took the fall for "Heaven’s Gate" and went on to write "Final Cut," which William Grimes in the New York Times...
Posted March 30, 2009 12:22 AM
Jarre won Oscars for the scores of "Lawrence of Arabia," " Doctor Zhivago" and "A Passage to India," and composed music for more than 150 other films. He died in...
Posted March 29, 2009 8:51 PM
Not Finke the reporter, but her website Deadline Hollywood Daily — though they are really one and the same. The Wrap's Sharon Waxman tries to figure out what the site...
Posted March 25, 2009 11:10 PM
Times film columnist and blogger Patrick Goldstein responds to Variety's weekend package on bloggers and says of Peter Bart: "He's launched his own blog, which you'd have to call...
Posted March 23, 2009 5:49 PM
Journalist Chris Willman attended an American Cinematheque screening of the 1976 Woody Guthrie biopic "Bound for Glory" at the Aero Theatre that became, he writes on Facebook, "a nerve-wracking, weird...
Posted March 21, 2009 10:27 AM
President Obama stayed at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza [or not; see below] on this trip into L.A. rather than bed down in one of the mansions around town, and...
Posted March 19, 2009 5:13 PM
The British-born actress, 45, is survived by her husband Liam Neeson, mother Vanessa Redgrave, sister Joely Richardson, aunt Lynn Redgrave and two children. Richardson won a Tony in 1998 as...
Posted March 18, 2009 5:40 PM
Silver had been undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer for two years. He died today at home in New York. Silver won a best actor Tony in 1988 for "Speed-the-Plow" and...
Posted March 15, 2009 9:11 PM
In a "Blowback" piece on the Times' opinion web page, former LAT staffer Allan Jalon goes into the controversy that ensued after Jim Bellows let Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber...
Posted March 13, 2009 12:54 PM
Amy Kaufman at The Wrap has a piece up raising a lot of questions about Fade In's promise of cash and an intro to Hollywood for the winners of a...
Posted March 12, 2009 4:59 PM
Hedges died Tuesday morning at home in South Pasadena of melanoma. He was 57. He was a leading Hollywood lawyer and also made a name for himself as an archaeologist....
Posted March 11, 2009 6:56 PM
Today's segment on KCRW looks behind the scenes at The Wrap, the new Hollywood news website headed by Sharon Waxman. It airs at 4:44 p.m. at 89.9 FM, or is...
Posted February 27, 2009 4:23 PM
Movieline is relaunching as a web portal "covering all things Hollywood" with former Defamer bloggers Seth Abramovitch, S.T. VanAirsdale, and Kyle Buchanan on board. The press release says to await...
Posted February 26, 2009 10:27 AM
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the actress who married San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, made "The Trouble With Romance" before they met. It has been out since Feb. 1 on Netflix and...
Posted February 25, 2009 11:25 PM
For the first time, Times reporters and editors covering entertainment in Calendar will work alongside the Business staffers who cover the harder news side of Hollywood. A new masthead job...
Posted February 25, 2009 1:50 PM
I agree with Mary Melton, the executive editor of Los Angeles Magazine, who blogs that the Bill Condon-Larry Mark-Hugh Jackman Oscars show was more watchable, not less. She posts: The...
Posted February 24, 2009 12:17 AM
Greg Hernandez, laid off by the Daily News earlier today after finishing his Oscars coverage, blogged about it tonight at Out in Hollywood. He said the site will live on...
Posted February 23, 2009 11:53 PM
Daily News entertainment writer Greg Hernandez worked long hours posting a whole bunch of blog items on the Oscars yesterday and today — and now posts on Facebook that he...
Posted February 23, 2009 4:00 PM
If you hope to win your Oscars pool, you should have had "Slumdog Millionaire" in eight categories including best picture. Full list of winners, plus backstage video at the Academy...
Posted February 22, 2009 10:52 PM
There will still be a Defamer brand and Hollywood posts, but they will run as a section of Gawker's main site. Owner Nick Denton explains it's part of Gawker's transition...
Posted February 22, 2009 10:27 PM
Dunder Mifflin's office, parking lot and hedge are located on Saticoy Street in an industrial part of Van Nuys. In case you suspected Scranton looked eerily like the San Fernando...
Posted February 21, 2009 8:46 PM
KCRW will announce later today that veteran Hollywood journalist Kim Masters is taking over as host of the half-hour showbiz show The Business, which airs Mondays at 2:30 p.m. Masters...
Posted February 20, 2009 2:19 PM
TMZ posted last night a photo it says shows Rihanna with bruises from the alleged attack by singer Chris Brown the night before the Grammys. It appears to be an...
Posted February 20, 2009 8:51 AM
L.A. County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore is getting some nice attention for Sunday's visiting blogger post at LA Observed about his famous father, the actor James Whitmore. He told the...
Posted February 16, 2009 2:47 PM
James Whitmore, the award-winning actor who died of lung cancer on Feb. 6, wanted to be wakened to see the inauguration of Barack Obama. He wasn't always lucid by then,...
Posted February 15, 2009 9:25 PM
In a statement this afternoon through crisis managers Sitrick & Co., performer Chris Brown doesn't mention Rihanna but does mention God: Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened...
Posted February 15, 2009 1:45 PM
The Huffington Post says the L.A. Times was the first major media outlet to identify Rihanna as the victim of Sunday's early morning domestic violence, "despite the LAPD's refusal to...
Posted February 9, 2009 11:00 PM
TMZ reports that law enforcement sources tell the site Rihanna was found in Hancock Park with two "huge contusions" on her forehead, and a bloody lip and nose, from the...
Posted February 9, 2009 4:15 PM
Both performers were supposed to appear this afternoon at the Grammy festivities at Staples Center, but instead Brown was being booked at the LAPD's Wilshire station and Rihanna's people were...
Posted February 8, 2009 10:20 PM
The Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor died today at home in Malibu. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer a week before Thanksgiving, said his son Steve Whitmore, a Los...
Posted February 6, 2009 3:43 PM
Hollywood apparently isn't impressed that the new Los Angeles Times thinks the cutting-edge way to cover Sundance is to give a print reporter a cheap cellphone camera and have him...
Posted January 29, 2009 9:50 PM
Brady did the celebrity profiles for Parade magazine for nearly 25 years — his last, of actor Kevin Bacon, runs February 15. Before that he was a Washington reporter for...
Posted January 27, 2009 5:44 PM
Columnist-blogger Anne Thompson is among the layoffs to hit the trade today. "Today I got slashed from the ranks of Variety staffers along with some 30 people, most of whom...
Posted January 26, 2009 4:16 PM
The best picture choices are "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "Frost/Nixon," "Milk," "The Reader" and "Slumdog Millionaire." For best actress: Anne Hathaway, Angelina Jolie, Melissa Leo, Meryl Streep and...
Posted January 22, 2009 7:29 AM
Variety columnist Brian Lowry is now blogging about television at the trade's new BLTv — "Good TV; reasonable prices." He posts that the current TV critics tour feels more pointless...
Posted January 15, 2009 11:29 PM
Jeffrey Katzenberg and other Motion Picture & Television Fund officials just revealed plans to close the acute-care hospital and long-term care residence at the home in Woodland Hills. About 100...
Posted January 14, 2009 1:40 PM
City Council President Eric Garcetti announced this morning that actor Ricardo Montalbán died today at home in his district, surrounded by family. Montalban was 88, according to Garcetti, who made...
Posted January 14, 2009 12:30 PM
CityBeat and film critic Andy Klein parted ways yesterday, say sources close to the weekly and to Klein. He continues apparently with KPCC's FilmWeek segment and "Off-Ramp." This follows last...
Posted January 14, 2009 12:21 PM
The Los Angeles production of "Wicked" closed Sunday after 791 performances (and 12 previews) at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Variety says the show registered more than 1.8 million admissions...
Posted January 12, 2009 11:52 PM
Americans who watch TV don't watch the Golden Globes any more, even if the newspapers, blogs and celebrity cable channels continue to insist they are a big thing. An average...
Posted January 12, 2009 5:41 PM
Longtime film writer Ella Taylor was told today that she too is being laid off by the LA Weekly, sources say. On top of the earlier news about Steven Leigh...
Posted January 9, 2009 3:11 PM
Word came down from Village Voice Media HQ in Phoenix that the LA Weekly can't afford a theater editor any more. That puts Steven Leigh Morris out of a job....
Posted January 9, 2009 12:18 PM
"Slumdog Millionaire" won for best picture, director, writer, young actor/actress (Dev Patel) and composer, A.R. Rahman. Sean Penn won the top actor prize for his role in "Milk." Anne Hathaway...
Posted January 8, 2009 10:29 PM
Variety blogger-editor-columnist Anne Thompson endorses Marc Cooper's autopsy on the decline in gravitas of the LA Weekly under New Times leadership. She posts: It's a sad tale. Like many L.A....
Posted January 8, 2009 1:08 PM
The latest web venture from Drudge Report West Coast man Andrew Breitbart goes live Tuesday. Big Hollywood, he says, "is not a 'celebrity' gabfest or a gossip outpost - it...
Posted January 5, 2009 7:53 PM
Variety reports that Ned Tanen, who served as president of Universal and Paramount and produced three popular "Brat Pack" films in the 1980s, died today in Santa Monica. He was...
Posted January 5, 2009 5:11 PM
Roman Polanski's lawyers argue that the director's bid to have that pesky sex with a minor case from the 1970s dismissed should be moved because the entire Los Angeles Superior...
Posted January 5, 2009 4:13 PM
Ron Boltz, announcer Bernie Brillstein, manager Bud Browne, filmmaker George Carlin, comedian Warren Cowan, publicist Gene Evans, fireworks showman Johnny Grant, honorary mayor Charlton Heston, actor Bobbi Holtzman, director...
Posted December 30, 2008 7:35 PM
California Editor David Lauter rebutted former reporter Anita Busch's comments yesterday in court tying the L.A. Times to convicted private eye Anthony Pellicano. Lauter, who emailed the response to Patterico,...
Posted December 16, 2008 9:39 PM
At today's sentencing of Anthony Pellicano, former Los Angeles Times Hollywood reporter Anita Busch — she's also the ex-editor of The Hollywood Reporter — accuses the Times of collaborating with...
Posted December 15, 2008 9:15 PM
I guess it was personal with Carina Chocano. [Or not. See note.] Two months after laying her off, the Los Angeles Times today named a new second film critic to...
Posted December 15, 2008 11:41 AM
Jane Espenson has been part of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Battlestar Galactica," most notably, and also has written episodes of "Angel," "Gilmore Girls," "Ellen," "The O.C.," "Star Trek: Deep...
Posted December 12, 2008 11:22 PM
The Paley Center for Media honored actor Carl Reiner tonight at the Hyatt in Century City, but apparently the main topic of conversation was the poor quality of the hotel...
Posted December 11, 2008 11:45 PM
Patrick Goldstein blogs at The Big Picture that Manohla Dargis, who left the LAT for the New York Times in 2004, is seen as a movie killer. It's an open...
Posted December 10, 2008 6:37 PM
Hollywood financier Ryan Kavanaugh's arraignment on fresh DUI and probation violation charges has been put over to Jan. 22. By then, Sheriff Lee Baca's charity hopes that Kavanaugh makes good...
Posted December 10, 2008 5:18 PM
Claude Brodesser-Akner, host of The Business on Mondays on KCRW, took a stand on the show against the resignation of Rich Raddon from the L.A. Film Festival over his support...
Posted December 10, 2008 9:01 AM
"Wall-E" is the best picture choice of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, with "The Dark Knight" the runner-up. Danny Boyle was picked as best director in 2008 for "Slumdog...
Posted December 9, 2008 9:45 PM
The director of "Nothing But the Truth" blogs some praise for newly laid-off Daily News critic Glenn Whipp and others who have lost their jobs, including Premiere's Glenn Kenney and...
Posted December 9, 2008 12:42 PM
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association will get together Tuesday and announce its winners of the year's movie awards. The org has a newly freshened website — the group photo...
Posted December 7, 2008 9:49 PM
The actress plays a newspaper reporter not — repeat not, director Rod Lurie winks — based on Judith Miller in next week's new thriller, "Nothing But the Truth." Beckinsale and...
Posted December 7, 2008 8:44 PM
The Hollywood financier was arrested again for drunk driving, speeding and driving on a suspended license — back in October, while still on probation for an earlier conviction, the New...
Posted December 5, 2008 2:33 PM
Variety has details on more than a dozen jobs cuts today at its rival Hollywood trade: The layoffs amount to a significant reduction in the paper's reporting staff. Also cut...
Posted December 4, 2008 11:06 PM
Last night at the Beverly Hills Hotel, PEN Center USA gave a lifetime achievement award to multi-faceted writer Larry Gelbart and its First Amendment Award to the Writers Guild. Jesse...
Posted December 4, 2008 8:17 AM
The life of a local television news cameraman involves a lot of hurry up and wait. Case in point: this afternoon's (yawn) Grammy nominations concert, as Channel 2's Bryan Frank...
Posted December 3, 2008 6:09 PM
It's not often you see Hollywood lawyers the prominence of Terry Christensen go to federal prison. He was sentenced today to three years, plus a $250,000 fine, for conspiring with...
Posted November 24, 2008 3:30 PM
From around the local media: Sam Rubin talked to SAG president Alan Rosenberg on the KTLA Morning News. "We've made monumental moves in their direction...and they have not moved one...
Posted November 24, 2008 3:08 PM
Variety editor in chief Peter Bart blogs that the Screen Actors Guild decision to call a strike vote can be summed up this way: "Its other strategies having failed, SAG...
Posted November 23, 2008 3:09 PM
Prince has lived in Los Angeles since last spring — that is, if you consider the rarefied gated nouveau complex of Beverly Park to be part of the real L.A....
Posted November 23, 2008 12:52 AM
Politico's Jeffrey Ressner compiled short bios on the seven insiders who he calls Barack Obama's real friends in Hollywood. "Obama’s tightly knit circle is mostly Chicago-based, but there is a...
Posted November 20, 2008 6:08 PM
The lead movie review in today's print Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times isn't by lead critic Kenneth Turan (his review of Stranded gets second billing.) Or Carina Chocano,...
Posted November 7, 2008 9:56 AM
The movie based on LAT columnist Steve Lopez's stories and book about homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers was already being promoted in trailers. But Paramount bumped it from the November schedule,...
Posted October 18, 2008 8:59 AM
Milwaukee lawyers Robert Bernhoft and Robert Barnes figured that getting actor Wesley Snipes off the felony tax charges he faced, and opening an office in Malibu, would gain them entree...
Posted October 16, 2008 5:35 PM
The New York Times' David Carr jets out to the coast and finds that in Hollywood, it's still morning in America. Hollywood comes by its indifference honestly. Certainly, the stock...
Posted October 13, 2008 12:13 AM
After 25 years as a talent agent and literary agent, Nancy Nigrosh is leaving Innovative Artists and Hollywood with a spirited call for a return to the lone screenwriter getting...
Posted October 2, 2008 10:36 PM
According to Nikki, producer Harvey Weinstein told Page Six he'll give $1 million to charity if she can produce an email that Scott Rudin wrote about Weinstein's "alleged callous treatment...
Posted September 30, 2008 11:22 AM
The Hollywood legend died yesterday at home near Westport, Connecticut, according to his publicist, Jeff Sanderson at Warren Cowan and Associates. Newman had been battling cancer for years and recently...
Posted September 27, 2008 10:37 AM
James Hibberd, senior reporter and blogger at the Hollywood Reporter, grades the 25 best and worst ad art for fall TV shows. Of the "Gossip Girl" poster he writes, "On...
Posted September 24, 2008 9:12 AM
Tina Fey won Emmy awards for acting, writing and being one of the executive producers on "30 Rock," which got the trophy for outstanding comedy series. Fey then took a...
Posted September 22, 2008 12:59 AM
Why yes, I believe they did. Terry Christensen's law firm sent out a press release today (via Sitrick & Co.) that says he'll be "withdrawing" from the practice of law...
Posted September 18, 2008 10:33 PM
The film in which Robert Downey Jr. portrays LAT columnist Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx plays downtown street musician Nathaniel Ayers, must be getting close. The trailer runs 2:31 on...
Posted September 16, 2008 11:10 AM
Sen. John McCain "has been relatively aggressive when it comes to tapping into the pool of Hollywood donors who, like their counterparts on the Democratic side, often give over concerns...
Posted September 5, 2008 9:25 AM
As Mark picked up earlier at LA Biz Observed, prominent lawyer Terry Christensen and former private eye Anthony Pellicano were convicted today of conspiring to illegally wiretap the ex-wife of...
Posted August 29, 2008 5:33 PM
Starr, the makeup artist for Angelina Jolie and other celebrities, was found deceased inside his Silver Lake Elysian Heights apartment. He was described variously as 48 or 51. Police forced...
Posted August 20, 2008 2:23 PM
LA Observed author David Rensin was on a book tour-vacation when Hollywood manager and producer Bernie Brillstein ">died, but I for one have been anticipating David's reaction. He helped Brillstein...
Posted August 14, 2008 4:24 PM
Bernie Brillstein, the successful Hollywood manager and producer, died last night after suffering from complications following double-bypass heart surgery in February. Here's a snip from Cynthia Littleton's story on the...
Posted August 8, 2008 8:58 AM
Journalist Sharon Waxman blogs that the trade paper is on the market, based on two sources....
Posted August 5, 2008 12:21 AM
O'Brien takes over from Jay Leno next June 1, NBC announces. AP Also: Ebert and Roeper quit "At the Movies."...
Posted July 21, 2008 1:05 PM
A special edition of Claude Brodesser-Akner's The Business that aired at 2:30 this afternoon (and will again at 7 p.m.) features a rare head-to-head conversation with the dueling presidents of...
Posted July 9, 2008 4:17 PM
On one side, the Screen Actors Guild has just hired Sitrick and Company, Nikki Finke reports. AFTRA, on the other hand, uses 42West, the firm whose Hollywood practice is headed...
Posted July 1, 2008 11:21 PM
Britt Allcroft is the Santa Monica-based creator of "Shining Time Station" on PBS and "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends." If you have been the parent of young children, you...
Posted June 26, 2008 8:42 AM
The writer of the Times' weekly Big Picture column will now start posting to a blog, also called The Big Picture. The print column will become a rehash of what's...
Posted June 24, 2008 7:58 AM
The once-edgy comic who played on his counter-culture roots died about 6 pm at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica. He was admitted in the afternoon for chest pains,...
Posted June 22, 2008 10:34 PM
KCRW host Harry Shearer and KFI's Bill Handel are on the list to get their stars installed on the Hollywood walk of fame next year. Among the others are Cameron...
Posted June 19, 2008 8:59 AM
Anita Busch, the journalist who was famously threatened by associates of jailed Hollywood snoop Anthony Pellicano while reporting for the L.A. Times, has a letter in Saturday's LAT co-signed by...
Posted June 14, 2008 1:25 AM
Two of the lawyers featured prominently in the HBO documentary on Roman Polanski that debuted this week have issued a statement disputing the Superior Court's allegation that the film was...
Posted June 11, 2008 12:23 PM
The public information office at the Los Angeles County Superior Court has a bone to pick with tonight's Roman Polanski documentary on HBO. The court sent out this media advisory:...
Posted June 9, 2008 1:19 PM
Journalists attending the junket for "Love Guru" were required to sign a detailed contract about how they would treat...Justin Timberlake? Sharon Waxman verbally flails his handlers, appropriately: Has Justin Timberlake...
Posted June 4, 2008 11:14 AM
Perhaps hundreds of classic 35-millimeter film prints burned up in the weekend fire, causing an immediate impact on films available to theaters, museums and other places that use the old...
Posted June 4, 2008 9:54 AM
Turns out that irreplaceable master recordings from top artists may not have been lost in the destroyed video vault at Universal Studios. Nikki Finke was the first to report there...
Posted June 2, 2008 5:44 PM
The courthouse facade on Courthouse Square was saved, and no sound stages were burned. The statement that follows sheds no light on the fate of original master recordings said to...
Posted June 2, 2008 9:44 AM
The former E! Channel host, Elite model and daughter-in-law to Ed Asner (she's now married to Steven Soderbergh) has a new novel landing tomorrow. "Whacked" is set in Hollywood, of...
Posted June 2, 2008 12:43 AM
First, some raw Associated Press video from this morning. AP's Mike Meadows on the ground, via L.A. Times gallery: Aftermath, from Andrew Gombert / EPA via L.A. Times gallery:...
Posted June 1, 2008 7:59 PM
Thousands of original Decca, MCA, and ABC master recordings belonging to Universal Music were lost in today's fire at Universal Studios, Nikki Finke says, quoting an unidentified source. Artists such...
Posted June 1, 2008 6:54 PM
Universal's New York and New England sets, Courthouse Square, the King Kong stage, at least one soundstage and a video vault have been destroyed by a fire that began...
Posted June 1, 2008 10:41 AM
"Moguls, Millionaires & Movie Stars: Hollywood Between the Wars, 1920-1940" will be at the Huntington Library in San Marino on Friday and Saturday. Panels will explore the rise of the...
Posted May 28, 2008 11:40 PM
Andy Fiscella owns industry bars the Dime and Winston's, recently added Crown Bar, and is known for banning Britney Spears at one of his clubs. In today's Hollywood, that all...
Posted May 28, 2008 12:34 AM
Nikki Finke points a chiding finger at Defamer, Variety columnist Anne Thompson, LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein and Slate's Kim Masters for posting an erroneous item that she says began...
Posted May 27, 2008 10:31 PM
Cancer claimed Oscar winning director, producer and actor Sydney Pollack Monday at his home in Pacific Palisades. Pollack won his Academy Awards for best director and best picture for "Out...
Posted May 26, 2008 9:52 PM
Jennifer Lerew, an animation artist who blogs at The Blackwing Diaries, has posted some photos of women who worked during the Depression at Disney's old Hyperion studio. in what I...
Posted May 21, 2008 9:15 AM
Verdicts are still being read, but former Hollywood private eye and muscle Anthony Pellicano has been convicted of all but one count of racketeering and conspiracy. (So much for being...
Posted May 15, 2008 12:31 PM
Variety calls Cowan the "father of Hollywood press agents" and his firm, Rogers and Cowan, at one time "the biggest entertainment PR firm in the world, with a list of...
Posted May 14, 2008 11:59 PM
Film financier Ryan Kavanaugh's company, Relativity Media, backed Columbia Pictures’ “Catch and Release.” Today's NYT uses that connection to lead into a story about Kavanaugh's lawyer trying to use connections...
Posted May 5, 2008 8:59 AM
He actually sounds pretty forgiving about that whole Tupac Shakur business, while talking to Associated Press about getting his star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame and house-hunting in Los Angeles:...
Posted May 2, 2008 12:20 PM
The Huffington Post's Allison Hope Weiner means it sarcastically: Jettisoning the whole John Adams "fact is a stubborn thing" quote used by Mr. Saunders yesterday, Mr. Pellicano went with his...
Posted April 30, 2008 11:16 AM
The trade paper unveiled "a wholesale overhaul of its iconic brand," and it goes beyond just the design. Here's how The Hollywood Reporter itself explains it: "...a redesigned look and...
Posted April 28, 2008 9:13 AM
Ex-private eye to the stars Anthony Pellicano told the judge at his trial that he won't be testifying after all. And the accused got a little testy when the judge...
Posted April 23, 2008 5:40 PM
Actor Charles Durning landed on Normandy's Omaha Beach as a 17-year-old Army Ranger in June 1944. Before leaving Europe, he was wounded three times and awarded three Purple Hearts and...
Posted April 22, 2008 12:12 AM
Animation specialist Charles Solomon writes in the LAT obituary: Oliver Martin "Ollie" Johnston Jr., the last living member of the celebrated "Nine Old Men" of Disney animation whose work set...
Posted April 15, 2008 2:37 PM
Former New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub, who had teamed with Anita Busch at one point, also took the stand today in the Anthony Pellicano trial. Allison Hope Weiner's...
Posted April 9, 2008 6:19 PM
The reporter who started it all — by being threatend via Pellicano and associates to lay off a story about Steven Seagal — took the stand this afternoon. She recounted...
Posted April 9, 2008 2:50 PM
Allison Hope Weiner has more exclusive audio clips from the Anthony Pellicano case, of Michael Ovitz on the phone asking for a meeting with the felonious private investigator and Hollywood...
Posted April 9, 2008 11:18 AM
It's hard not to notice that the periodic recaps of web performance at LATimes.com don't dwell on writing or reporting quality, impact of the journalism or connecting with Los Angeles....
Posted April 8, 2008 1:22 AM
Charlton Heston wrote a lot of letters to the editor. Today's L.A. Times excerpts some the paper received. Sample: Spike Lee's threat IN a fit of pique at the Cannes...
Posted April 8, 2008 1:18 AM
Real name: John Charles Carter. Passing: Saturday at home in Beverly Hills. Previous diagnosis: Neurological symptoms "consistent with Alzheimer’s disease." IMDb credits: 1941-2007. Selected films: Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The...
Posted April 6, 2008 9:11 PM
Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger Nikki Finke didn't disclose that a law firm she wrote about is representing her in a lawsuit against E-Trade over surreptitious recording, the New York Observer...
Posted April 2, 2008 2:42 PM
Remember a few weeks back when LAO posted the news on Associated Press muscling up its entertainment and celebrity overage out of the Los Angeles bureau? That announcement, a month...
Posted March 21, 2008 12:24 AM
What did they charge to see a silent movie in 1923, a quarter? At UCLA's Royce Hall this afternoon, many in the nearly full house paid $25 to see Harold...
Posted March 9, 2008 11:53 PM
The Anthony Pellicano trial jury was seated today. The government's opening statement is set to begin tomorrow at 8 am. The prosecution's official witness list, unsealed today, has 127 names...
Posted March 5, 2008 5:56 PM
Would you believe 93.6 percent of 4,060 votes cast by Writers Guild of America members in Los Angeles and New York OK'd the new contracts, which runs through May 1,...
Posted February 26, 2008 4:39 PM
Initial numbers from Nielsen look like a 20% drop in TV viewers from last year. About two-thirds of the people watching TV during the show watched something else in Nielsen's...
Posted February 25, 2008 11:58 AM
Heather and Jessica got a gig live-blogging the red carpet for New York magazine's website, starting at 3 pm Hollywood and Highland time....
Posted February 24, 2008 1:00 PM
Crisis PR executive Michael Sitrick tried to collect a $7.7 million judgment from Ryan Kavanuagh, but a judge Friday said no. The reason is that Sitrick apparently agreed previously not...
Posted February 23, 2008 10:25 AM
Dan Becker, the Los Angeles-based director of entertainment content for Associated Press, announced a couple of moves as part of the wire service turning up its entertainment coverage: The Los...
Posted February 22, 2008 9:08 AM
A mini-profile of L.A. Times publisher David Hiller in tomorrow's New York Times leads with the idea that he's star-struck by the glamour of his adopted hometown. It's pegged to...
Posted February 18, 2008 7:41 PM
Today is when Hollywood and Highland really starts to feel the pain of hosting the Academy Awards for another year. Hollywood Boulevard is set to close to traffic at 10...
Posted February 18, 2008 3:12 PM
Of the 3,775 votes cast by members of the Writers Guild of America, 92% were for going back to work. "The strike is over," union president Patric Verrone said last...
Posted February 13, 2008 12:08 AM
Mark Lisanti has posted, by his estimate, 9,000 to 10,000 posts since he began as the original, and anonymous, Defamer. This one today was the hardest:...
Posted February 11, 2008 6:50 PM
William Booth, resident feature writer in L.A. for the Washington Post, lurked at Saturday night's Scientific and Technical Awards given out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...
Posted February 11, 2008 12:13 PM
If the members vote to lift the strike as Writers Guild leaders expect they will, some writers could go back to work on Wednesday. As it is, show runners are...
Posted February 10, 2008 3:51 PM
As Mark Lacter posted this afternoon, several media sources are reporting progress in the Hollywood writers strike. "Informal talks between representatives of Hollywood’s striking writers and production companies have eliminated...
Posted February 2, 2008 11:54 PM
Prompted by the $25,000 spent by the LAPD to escort Britney Spears to the hospital, Councilman Dennis Zine said today he'll push for an ordinance that would create a "personal...
Posted February 1, 2008 12:59 PM
Former L.A. Times movie critic Jack Mathews says he'll retire from the New York Daily News at the end of February. He and his wife are moving to the Oregon...
Posted January 30, 2008 4:03 PM
Channel 5 will remain at the Sunset Boulevard location indefinitely. The sale to Hudson Capital has been pending since last year and went through at $125 million. The familiar landmark...
Posted January 30, 2008 3:59 PM
Los Angeles does its annual movie issue for February, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julie Christie on the cover and a lineup inside that includes LA Observed's Mark Lacter challenging...
Posted January 24, 2008 8:08 PM
Author Samantha Dunn writes in today's Calendar section, "We should thank our lucky stars Mary McNamara's debut novel, 'Oscar Season,' arrives when it does, because if the writers strike goes...
Posted January 24, 2008 9:16 AM
In the story the New York Times will run in the paper tomorrow, Heath Ledger was found naked on the floor (not on the bed) and there were no illegal...
Posted January 22, 2008 9:36 PM
The two sides agree to talk about talking, but not to talk publicly: The Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) have issued...
Posted January 22, 2008 4:56 PM
The 28-year-old actor may have overdosed in his Mary-Kate Olsen's a SoHo apartment. He reportedly was discovered by a masseuse arriving for an appointment this afternoon. The body was face...
Posted January 22, 2008 2:00 PM
Defamer got a look at allegations against Hollywood payroll firm Axium filed in court documents, and teases "We're talking multiple identities, cash payments to former supermodels for 'consulting' and all...
Posted January 17, 2008 5:20 PM
Here's a sure sign that things aren't going well for you. Associated Press began writing Britney Spears' obituary last month, just in case it's needed unexpectedly. The wire service prepares...
Posted January 17, 2008 3:36 PM
The actor Brad Renfro was found dead at home on South Ogden Drive this morning by his girlfriend. Police said there was no suspicion of foul play, but a cause...
Posted January 15, 2008 5:59 PM
To follow up an item from the Morning Buzz, screenwriter and producer Roger Avary released this statement regarding the weekend crash in Ojai that led to Avary's arrest, the injury...
Posted January 14, 2008 9:27 PM
Nikki Finke has declared a week-long break in her frenzy of posting about the writers' strike. Says the LA Weekly columnist and Deadline Hollywood Daily blogger: I’m exhausted. I'm not...
Posted January 14, 2008 3:00 PM
W does its version of A-list Hollywood for February, with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy on the cover (and in an online slide show) and stories inside such as Gabriel...
Posted January 13, 2008 9:15 PM
Eric Estrin, a striking WGA member, is a moderator at Writer Action, the message board where Writers Guild members hang out to float conspiracy theories, skewer the producers and rip...
Posted January 10, 2008 9:15 PM
It's the end of an era in Hollywood. Johnny Grant, the last of the "honorary mayors" for whom the ceremonial title still meant something, was found dead tonight in his...
Posted January 9, 2008 10:03 PM
Three L.A. Times editors go online to defend the paper's use of three reporters to cover Ms. Spears' latest public meltdown. "If we had wanted simply to report the facts...
Posted January 9, 2008 9:07 AM
John Rabe of KPCC's "Off-Ramp," inspired by Frank Baker's memo to the Los Angeles bureau, ponders how the AP might incorporate more Britney news on the wire. Guess which dispatch...
Posted January 8, 2008 2:43 PM
Tina Daunt posits in her Cause Celebre column in today's Calendar that Hollywood's Hillary contingent is on the verge of buying tickets on the Barack Obama bus. On desks all...
Posted January 8, 2008 2:28 PM
Memo on coverage of faded pop tart Britney Spears from Associated Press' Los Angeles assistant bureau chief: From: Baker, Frank S. Sent: Tue 1/8/2008 11:58 AM To: News - Southern...
Posted January 8, 2008 12:46 PM
Dianne Ogden, a longtime music talent coordinator, was one of four women who testified in Phil Spector's murder trial (which ended in a mistrial) that he had threatened her with...
Posted January 7, 2008 10:57 PM
The New York Observer writes of Nikki Finke, calling her The Media Mensch of the Year: The biggest entertainment story of the year has also turned into the biggest story...
Posted January 2, 2008 8:36 AM
Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein got off some good observations about the waning quality, originality and relevance of Oscar race analyzing and gossip. The award announcements make a nice one-day...
Posted December 18, 2007 10:54 PM
In 1957 the mayor of Los Angeles helped install a plaque at 7th and Main streets downtown commemorating the birth of the local film industry at that spot. (It's where,...
Posted December 16, 2007 9:22 AM
The one-time vaudeville booker who became the agent for Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, Barbra Streisand and other stars died of lung cancer Tuesday at home in Beverly Hills. Fields was...
Posted December 12, 2007 1:32 PM
OK technically it was an editor's note. And the day was Sunday. But it was just pointed out to me. The subject is architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's piece in Sunday's...
Posted December 10, 2007 10:53 PM
There Will Be Blood was voted the best picture of 2007. Here are the other awards that local critics went for, picked up from the LAFCA website. DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas...
Posted December 9, 2007 11:23 PM
Nice photo from yesterday's writers guild street rally in Hollywood by Barbara Davidson at the L.A. Times. Strike coverage is pulled together at a compilation page on the LAT website...
Posted November 21, 2007 8:37 AM
Writers Guild strikers and their brethren are planning to converge Tuesday afternoon for a rally, accompanied by Alicia Keys. The guild is hoping for a turnout of thousands. Here's the...
Posted November 19, 2007 10:32 PM
Brian Grazer was "deeply upset by the episode" in which the L.A. Times asked him to guest-edit the opinion section on Sunday, then refused to publish it — and he...
Posted November 19, 2007 8:55 AM
OK, just kidding about that. But who knew her older sister is a rabbi on a kibbutz in Israel? I guess you would if you remember Sarah's debut joke on...
Posted November 19, 2007 12:47 AM
The writers strike has inspired a frenzy of non-stop posting by Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood Daily. (I shudder to think of the condition of her office.) Since Friday morning...
Posted November 18, 2007 11:25 PM
Axel Koester grabbed this scene (for the New York Times) of photographers swarming actress Mandy Moore's arrival at a Beverly Hills restaurant. The term paparazzi increasingly encompasses not only the...
Posted November 18, 2007 9:10 PM
"Dancing with the Stars" didn't work out for Leeza Gibbons, so the former celebrity gossip monger has time to take a new gig — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's appointee to the...
Posted November 14, 2007 5:57 PM
Monday was bring your family to the picket line day. The Tuesday target for Writers Guild media attention is Universal. The talent scheduled to appear outside the main gates on...
Posted November 12, 2007 11:02 PM
Sure, Allan Mayer is a veteran Hollywood crisis flack with many successes on his resume — but he's not the only one. So what explains this slobbery treatment in Elizabeth...
Posted October 31, 2007 11:54 AM
Brian Grazer (that's him on the left, pre-big hair) and his younger brother Gavin, who has nepotistic roles in several of Brian's movies, have a complicated relationship. Complicated enough that...
Posted October 28, 2007 11:49 PM
Remember that episode back in March when Andrés Martinez resigned as editor of the Times editorial pages after the publisher, David Hiller, didn't back him in the Brian Grazer...
Posted October 10, 2007 8:02 AM
This reorganization was announced Friday, but since I wasn't paying attention then — and I want to have the moves noted in the archives — here it is a couple...
Posted October 8, 2007 10:11 PM
Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson says the season for newspapers to crank up their Oscars-Globes-etc blogs is fast approaching. She gives a rundown on who's doing what at the big...
Posted October 2, 2007 10:10 PM
Daily News television blogger David Kronke had a bad run-in with some nuts (he's allergic) at this weekend's pre-Emmy tea thrown by BAFTA and the BBC. Kronke refers to himself...
Posted September 17, 2007 6:10 PM
Ratings for last year's Oscars with Jon Stewart hosting were abysmal, but the New York Times' Michael Cieply reports that he's the choice again. An announcement is expected Wednesday. I...
Posted September 12, 2007 6:47 AM
PeopleJam, a self-help website due to launch this month by Hollywood execs Robert Tercek and Matt Edelman, has already been dinged for the lame name and "sickly sweet" approach. Now...
Posted September 12, 2007 6:20 AM
The Oscar-winning actress and former Mrs. Ronald Reagan (when he was a SAG Democrat) never let her true age be pinned down. Katie Harris reports at Bloomberg that Wyman died...
Posted September 10, 2007 10:58 AM
The Hollywood Reporter's legal site gives up the ghost as a standalone publication effective, well, immediately. Coverage of Hollywood's legal movers and issues will become a "dedicated channel" on THR.com,...
Posted August 20, 2007 5:26 PM
Since the U.S. government appears to be sharing his email with journalists, the Times' Chuck Philips figures it's only fitting to get out the rest of the story. It begins...
Posted August 20, 2007 12:08 PM
In Friday's story about actor Steven Seagal feeling burned by the Pellicano scandal, Chuck Philips of the Times reported that U.S. Attorney spokesman Thom Mrozek "declined to comment" on questions...
Posted August 19, 2007 7:58 PM
Elizabeth Guider, the new editor of The Hollywood Reporter, is out of state but ordered the trade's website to take down this morning's story by Ray Richmond about Merv Griffin's...
Posted August 17, 2007 1:55 PM
He did not pay anyone to threaten reporter Anita Busch and pretty much loathes PI Anthony Pellicano, says the actor whose name was prominently mentioned when the feds first began...
Posted August 16, 2007 11:51 PM
Former ICM co-president Ed Limato is moving back to the William Morris Agency, as Nikki Finke reported earlier in the week. LImato spent ten years at WMA between stints at...
Posted August 16, 2007 4:03 PM
Alex Ben Block reports at Hollywood Today that production of "Desperate Housewives" has been kicked out of Stage One at Universal Studios and that talks are underway for "The Tonight...
Posted August 16, 2007 11:35 AM
Jim Bates, the deputy editor on the entertainment-tech desk in the Times' Business section, is jumping into the crisis PR game at Sitrick and Company. He has the second-longest tenure...
Posted August 9, 2007 4:58 PM
Jacob Adams, the man thought to have been mauled to death by dogs at the Brentwood home of Ving Rhames, is listed as the screenwriter of a current Rhames film...
Posted August 4, 2007 6:31 PM
Tim Swanson will leave Portfolio to take over as film editor in the Times' Calendar section. He's formerly of Premiere and Variety. Memo below:...
Posted August 2, 2007 3:59 PM
Elizabeth Guider, a 18-year vet at Variety who has been sliding down the masthead lately, has jumped to The Hollywood Reporter as Editor. Most recently she was an editor at...
Posted July 30, 2007 11:54 AM
Former LA Weekly publisher Michael Sigman has optioned the film rights to that piece about Washington lobbyists in Harper's by reporter Ken Silverstein, who posed as a customer to nab...
Posted July 27, 2007 5:07 PM
I'm guessing she won't get any rehab endorsement deals any time soon....
Posted July 24, 2007 11:14 AM
Lindsay Lohan, fresh off a second stint in rehab, was booked in Santa Monica this morning on suspicion of drunken driving and felony possession of cocaine. She also got nabbed...
Posted July 24, 2007 8:10 AM
I'm told that Women's Wear Daily confirms in today's paper that editors pulled a recent story on Hollywood journo Nikki Finke off the paper's website. (It's not on Lexis/Nexis or...
Posted July 18, 2007 1:12 AM
Jacob Bernstein, offspring of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein, tried in the July 6 Women's Wear Daily to comprehend the Nikki Finke phenomenon. He writes that "Finke has vaulted to...
Posted July 15, 2007 2:07 PM
Ross Johnson of Sitrick and Company did such a good job promoting Tuesday night's premiere party for Captivity that he had bloggers falling over themselves to pre-hype the event, got...
Posted July 12, 2007 12:44 AM
The actor whose familiar face graced these pages last year died Monday night at home in Brentwood. He was 102 years old. In January 2006, we and a couple of...
Posted July 10, 2007 6:08 PM
Marlise Kast is a former Hollywood production assistant who began digging up dirt for The Globe at age 21. She now dishes about her three years on the tabloid beat...
Posted July 5, 2007 12:24 PM
The actress uses her second contribution to the Huffington Post fray to decry the proliferation of "elimination-based" shows. "I understand there is a good side, a jubilant winner getting their...
Posted July 2, 2007 11:44 AM
I'll be part of a "poolside chat" at the Los Angeles Film Festival tomorrow night called "Who Let The Blogs Out?" The panel and schmooze session will be held around...
Posted June 25, 2007 4:40 PM
Anderson Jones, a freelance film critic who formerly reviewed for E! Online and made appearances on the "E! True Hollywood Story," died after suffering a heart attack at a promotional...
Posted June 23, 2007 12:22 PM
BBC correspondent David Willis' attempt to break into Hollywood as an actor has finally come to an end. But not before his ambitions crested with a call to be an...
Posted June 19, 2007 8:35 AM
Melissa Grego, managing editor at TelevisionWeek, posts to a blog-driven column reporting on her lunches with Hollywood figures. She started it up in January and most recently has dished on...
Posted June 17, 2007 11:39 PM
The mogul's backing of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is called "the political equivalent of the Oscar" in the Cause Celebre column by Tina Daunt that plays on this morning's LAT...
Posted June 14, 2007 1:00 PM
Paris Hilton was fitted with an ankle bracelet and released to house arrest after serving the four-plus days in county that are more typical for her kind of offense. The...
Posted June 7, 2007 8:08 AM
Thursday night's benefit concert for the Academy of Music at Hamilton High will feature David Foster as emcee, Kenny G, trumpeter Chris Botti, the horns of Blood Sweat and Tears...
Posted June 6, 2007 10:19 PM
Gawker says that New York Times Hollywood writer Sharon Waxman will go on book leave this summer then be reassigned off the beat and probably out of the L.A. bureau....
Posted June 4, 2007 7:03 PM
Paris Hilton turned herself in at the Men's Central Jail downtown on Sunday night — after attending the MTV Movie Awards — and was driven to her temporary new digs...
Posted June 4, 2007 8:02 AM
Brooks Barnes is leaving the Wall Street Journal's television beat to cover the business of Hollywood in the New York Times bureau here. He is replacing New York-bound Laura Holson....
Posted May 30, 2007 5:16 PM
Author Clive Cussler owes Crusader Entertainment $5 million in damages over the film Sahara, but the jury also ruled that Crusader owes Cussler about $8.5 million for the rights to...
Posted May 15, 2007 5:16 PM
Nikki Finke, apparently a main generator of traffic to LA Weekly's website, seems a mite upset that today's issue credits David Poland's Movie City News with a million visitors a...
Posted May 10, 2007 2:03 PM
Although Paris Hilton might be going to jail, Elliot Mintz is now a free man. He announced last night that he has resigned as the tabloid fodder's harried mouthpiece. He...
Posted May 7, 2007 2:32 PM
Paris Hilton will get no work release, furloughs, cushy suburban jail or electronic monitoring and instead must spend a month and a half locked up at the Century Regional Detention...
Posted May 4, 2007 5:23 PM
Just before jurors returned a verdict yesterday in a breach-of-contract case involving the creators of the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace," lawyers for the network revealed that the jury foreman...
Posted April 27, 2007 9:11 AM
Snakeskin Shamesin, third in the series of Naomi Hirahara's novels set in Southern California that feature Japanese-American gardener Mas Arai, won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America...
Posted April 26, 2007 9:52 PM
Publicist and friend Warren Cowan made the announcement that Jack Valenti, the former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, died this afternoon. He had been in ill...
Posted April 26, 2007 3:49 PM
The Center for Responsive Politics broke out the by-state contributions to the '08 presidential candidates: Sen. Hillary Clinton leads the way in mining California for bucks so far. Here are...
Posted April 18, 2007 3:05 PM
Don LaFontaine, whose voice has been heard on movie trailers for decades, has gone public on a Geico commercial. That was reason enough for Radar Online to chat up the...
Posted April 18, 2007 11:27 AM
In the new W, former Variety scribe Gabriel Snyder explains the role of Hollywood political consultants and updates the roster of who works with whom. Noah Mamet, for instance, wrangled...
Posted April 18, 2007 9:11 AM
What I think was the last single-screen movie house to open in Westwood Village, the Mann National, will close at the end of this week. It's where The Exorcist opened...
Posted April 17, 2007 8:39 AM
Back in 2003, the Daily Mail paid a financial settlement and retracted its report that producer Steve Bing had hired PI to the stars Anthony Pellicano to spy on and...
Posted April 12, 2007 9:05 AM
"Original blogger" Army Archerd compares the recent "Entourage" premiere party in the dome at the Arclight to the theater's 1963 unveiling as the Cinerama Dome. The Cinerama's super-wide curved screen...
Posted April 9, 2007 8:45 AM
Film director Bob Clark and his son Ariel were killed in the crash that kept Pacific Coast Highway closed through the Palisades during today's morning rush hours. Clark directed A...
Posted April 4, 2007 12:56 PM
Halle Berry seems pretty pleased that the studio paid up for her to receive a star this morning outside the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood and Highland. Via Defamer. Photo: AP...
Posted April 3, 2007 5:22 PM
Brian Grazer's thoughts on the big issues won't be in Sunday's Los Angeles Times Current section, if there even is a Current stuffed deep into papers this weekend. But here...
Posted March 22, 2007 4:49 PM
The L.A. Times has announced that Current, the paper's Sunday (for now) commentary and ideas section, will have a guest editor every quarter to bring a little outside intellectual...
Posted March 15, 2007 12:35 PM
Standup comedian Richard Jeni was found gravely injured from a gunshot wound Saturday morning inside his West Hollywood apartment. He died soon after at the hospital. His girlfriend told police...
Posted March 11, 2007 8:06 PM
Cynthia Littleton was the recently named (well, last March) editor of The Hollywood Reporter and Anne Thompson was deputy film editor. They join Variety as deputy editor for news development...
Posted March 5, 2007 3:34 PM
Men, that's who. Only 36 percent of the broadcast viewers on ABC were male, tying the show’s all-time lowest popularity among men, Alex Ben Block reports at Hollywood Today. Block...
Posted March 2, 2007 12:02 PM
Chris Ayres, Los Angeles correspondent of the Times of London, liveblogged the Oscars and found Her Majesty Gwyneth Paltrow's vocal stylings a tad odd. For a Crossroads girl, anyway: "My...
Posted February 26, 2007 11:15 PM
In emails flitting around Hollywood today, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez take offense at a passage in yesterday's Times by Susan King. It ran in The Envelope and read: "Demander...
Posted February 22, 2007 3:40 PM
Hollywood location meister Harry Medved, co-author of Hollywood Escapes, has a piece on MSN about the locations used in this year's Oscar-nominated movies. If the beach in Letters from Iwo...
Posted February 21, 2007 5:07 PM
Pasadena keeps the Rose Parade route open to the public pretty much until show time. Ditto for the Los Angeles Marathon. But for some reason, busy Hollywood Boulevard has to...
Posted February 20, 2007 1:46 AM
When the March issue of Los Angeles hits in a few days, media columnist RJ Smith will offer his suggestions for saving the Times after talking with publisher David Hiller...
Posted February 15, 2007 11:34 PM
Five Grammys for the trio that Bushies love to hate, including best album, record and song of the year. Online coverage: The Envelope, Red Carpet blog, Variety. Photo: Anne Cusack...
Posted February 11, 2007 10:25 PM
Forest Whitaker picked up the British Academy of Film and Television Arts' best actor award tonight at the Royal Opera House in London, for portraying Idi Amin in Last King...
Posted February 11, 2007 7:52 PM
Her lawyer says that the TV celebrity and former model has died. AP moved a news alert, and TMZ reports that she was found collapsed in her room at the...
Posted February 8, 2007 1:00 PM
Variety buries the lede: the trade's paywall has been dropped, so now "every story, article or item is available for free." Well not quite everything. The news is tucked onto...
Posted February 7, 2007 2:36 AM
Sasha Stone has run OscarWatch.com for seven years, but suddenly the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has hit her with a cease-and-desist letter over the name. She posts...
Posted February 6, 2007 2:36 AM
Lawyers for Phil Anschutz say the stinker of a movie lost $105 million because Clive Cussler lied about his book sales. Cussler says that's, uh, ridiculous. All I want to...
Posted February 1, 2007 4:35 PM
Sidney Sheldon had won a screenwriting Oscar (The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), a Tony ("Redhead") and created TV sitcoms ("I Dream of Jeannie" and "Patty Duke") before beginning to write...
Posted January 30, 2007 11:09 PM
Bob Carroll Jr. worked with writing partner Madelyn Pugh Davis for more than 60 years, including on all the television series that Lucille Ball starred in. Carroll and and Pugh...
Posted January 30, 2007 2:48 AM
Govindi Murty, co-founder of the Liberty Film Festival, sits in the guest chair this weekend on "Ebert and Roeper." She joins a lineup that has included Jay Leno, director Kevin...
Posted January 19, 2007 9:54 AM
Borat has been out since November and has grossed more than $100 million. The DVD release must be in sight. So some attendees at Wednesday night's members-only screening for the...
Posted January 18, 2007 11:43 PM
In a recent interview with FilmStew, Aaron Sorkin complained about the less-than-cheerleading coverage of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" by writers at the Times' Calendar section. He named Maria...
Posted January 16, 2007 9:52 PM
PI Anthony Pellicano's client isn't as much a fool as he seemed. A week after receiving court permission to represent himself against charges of racketeering and wiretapping, the Daily Journal...
Posted January 16, 2007 11:45 AM
Full list of winners and nominees at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association website....
Posted January 15, 2007 8:11 PM
How times have changed. The FBI filled a room at the Westwood federal building yesterday with screenwriters invited in for a seminar on how to realistically portray anti-terrorist efforts. Special...
Posted January 11, 2007 1:42 AM
Mogul Kirk Kerkorian got briefings from his high-powered attorney on what P.I. Anthony Pellicano was learning from illegal wiretaps of Kerkorian's ex-wife in their child-custody and support case, the New...
Posted January 10, 2007 10:23 PM
They're billing it as the First Annual L.A. Weekly Film Critics Poll, gathering votes from 72 critics "who span the spectrum of print, broadcast and online journalism." They include all...
Posted January 10, 2007 5:22 PM
Judith Regan's upcoming fight for her honor with Rupert Murdoch's empire inspires the NYT's Sharon Waxman to muse on Hollywood court battles of yore: think Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford...
Posted January 2, 2007 4:36 PM
James Mee, the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who arrested Mel Gibson in Malibu, claims through his lawyer that he's being harassed by supervisors. Mee's arrest report, you might remember,...
Posted December 27, 2006 7:09 PM
One thing I can add to the Times' appreciation today of It's a Wonderful Life, the film classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed: all that fake snow was created...
Posted December 23, 2006 1:27 PM
Warner Bros sends word that animation legend Joseph Barbera died today at home in Studio City. He and partner William Hanna, who died in 2001, had worked together at MGM,...
Posted December 18, 2006 5:58 PM
Hollywood Today calls itself a "newsmagazine, with attitude...we cover the world of entertainment in all its multimedia glory, from screens and stages large and small." The site has been active...
Posted December 15, 2006 12:29 AM
The founder of Atlantic Records died today in New York. Ertegun fell at an Oct. 29 concert by the Rolling Stones and later slipped into a coma. He will be...
Posted December 14, 2006 4:25 PM
AmericanLife TV is a "network for baby boomers" showing up on the new channel alignment for Time Warner Cable. Its selling point is old series' like "The Honeymooners,” “The Man...
Posted December 14, 2006 2:33 PM
Readers of The Envelope in yesterday's Times might have thought that Calendar staffer in New York Paul Lieberman's interview with Martin Scorsese was timely. It was all framed around the...
Posted December 14, 2006 10:55 AM
This is kind of fun: Bonhams and Butterfields' big auction Sunday of Hollywood materials includes papers that Warren Beatty apparently abandoned in a New York hotel suite in the late...
Posted December 14, 2006 12:33 AM
The author and screenwriter contributed a blog entry on Condoleezza Rice to the Huffington Post over the weekend that begins: I met Condoleezza Rice last weekend. She was much prettier...
Posted December 13, 2006 1:39 PM
A quartet of Hollywood old hands — Patrick Goldstein and John Horn of the LAT and Sharon Waxman and Laura Holson of the NYT — agreed last night at Zócalo's...
Posted December 13, 2006 12:35 AM
The New York Film Critics Circle today voted United 93 their best film of the year. Martin Scorsese was deemed best director for The Departed. Anne Thompson has more at...
Posted December 11, 2006 1:50 PM
If you saw the SUV barreling the wrong way in the carpool lane on the 134 early this morning, first, congratulations for not getting killed. Second, the SUV driver who's...
Posted December 11, 2006 11:08 AM
They are refining the masthead titles at Variety. The winner seems to be Michael Speier (pictured), who has been named executive editor of news for Variety and Daily Variety. He...
Posted December 11, 2006 1:52 AM
Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart uses today's column to say he doesn't think much of The Envelope, the L.A. Times' effort to take Oscar campaign ads away from the trades. He...
Posted December 9, 2006 1:45 PM
Hollywood Reporter lays off five more, including executive editor Peter Pryor, Fishbowl LA and Nikki Finke say. Earlier in the week editorial director Howard Burns got the axe. (I'm...
Posted December 7, 2006 4:50 PM
Tuba players came from all over to play at USC's Bovard Auditorium in tribute to the member of their club whose deep notes you have heard the most. Tommy Johnson,...
Posted December 5, 2006 12:10 PM
Amy Pascal, promoted this year to co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, tops the latest edition of The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment Power 100. She also holds the title of...
Posted December 5, 2006 2:23 AM
William Morris has sent along the press release on former Villaraigosa deputy Cecile Ablack, who we told you Friday was going Hollywood. The flackage — which notes that Chris Petrikin,...
Posted December 4, 2006 6:48 PM
Reports in the newsroom are that Howard Burns, editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter, will leave the job tomorrow. A call to him was transferred to spokeswoman Linda Miller, who...
Posted December 4, 2006 3:32 PM
Lippin had co-managed Brian Wilson and had been a PR rep for, among others, Prince, Eric Clapton and Stephen Stills. The Lippin Group, where she was president, said that she...
Posted December 4, 2006 1:33 PM
Bobby is getting mixed reviews as a piece of drama, but this Los Angeles history buff liked it. Where the story line lagged, the sound track (even Demi Moore crooning...
Posted November 29, 2006 11:51 PM
Inventing Lonelygirl15: Wired's December issue goes inside the Los Angeles apartment where the wildly popular web tale of Bree and Danny was hatched and taped. Writer Joshua Davis met creator...
Posted November 27, 2006 2:29 AM
Times Hollywood columnist Patrick Goldstein is given a page in today's print version of The Envelope to deliver his take on four of the bloggers who occupy his space in...
Posted November 22, 2006 8:59 AM
Andrew Gumbel is The Independent's man in Los Angeles and a Huffington Post blogger. He's been watching the response to Michael Richards' outburst and finds "there's something about the sheer...
Posted November 22, 2006 1:50 AM
After presumably watching Michael Richards' halting, disjointed and not terribly convincing mea culpa on David Letterman last night, Blair H. Taylor — president and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban...
Posted November 21, 2006 12:14 PM
The director died last night in an undisclosed Los Angeles hospital. His production company hasn't yet released the cause of death. Altman directed critical favorites such as M-A-S-H, Nashville, The...
Posted November 21, 2006 11:15 AM
TMZ.com is getting a lot of attention (again) — managing editor Harvey Levin is live on CNN right now — for video of comedian Michael Richards throwing around the n-word...
Posted November 20, 2006 10:44 AM
They bill Anthony Pellicano's scribbles as a Web exclusive guest column, but it's really a pick-up from a book of legal writing on the concept of reasonable doubt. The imprisoned...
Posted November 20, 2006 1:35 AM
If you want to be technical, The Knife is "a blog about restaurants favored by the entertainment industry. Monday through Thursday, The Knife is where to eat and drink in...
Posted November 14, 2006 1:05 PM
Former L.A Times and New York Times reporter Anita Busch, in an amendment this week to a civil suit, names onetime Hollywood power Michael Ovitz as one of the figures...
Posted November 9, 2006 10:12 PM
TMZ.com went down to the Los Angeles County courthouse, pulled the papers and has them posted exclusively. Spears is using celebrity divorce lawyer Laura Wasser, whose clients have included Angelina...
Posted November 7, 2006 3:43 PM
David Willis returns this week to his day job as a reporter in the BBC bureau in Los Angeles, after a six-month sabbatical to try his hand at Hollywood. He...
Posted November 6, 2006 11:23 AM
Sharon Stone's appearance last week at the International Women's Media Foundation banquet in Beverly Hills. Stone presented the group's Courage in Journalism award to the mother of Christian Science Monitor...
Posted November 6, 2006 10:27 AM
Tom Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner have inked a deal to take over MGM's dormant United Artists film label, Anne Thompson reports at the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz...
Posted November 2, 2006 10:54 AM
Filming for Live Free or Die Hard has been postponed a couple of days, so the production won't be shutting down Imperial Highway beside LAX until the weekend. Previously: Vengeance...
Posted November 2, 2006 10:38 AM
Wilshire & Washington is designed to "highlight the enduring relationship between entertainment and politics. More than a mere curiosity, the intersection of these worlds play out daily in fund raising,...
Posted November 1, 2006 2:00 AM
Rob Reiner's California Children and Families Commission, also known as the First 5 Commission, is the target of a stinging state audit. The commission "failed to properly award millions of...
Posted October 31, 2006 12:06 PM
Paparazzi agency X-17 is making plans to go after celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton for profiting from the company's photos. Radar Online says the agency is talking to other creators...
Posted October 31, 2006 10:12 AM
Live Free or Die Hard received the permits it wanted and will be disrupting traffic in El Segundo and the south side of LAX starting Thursday. And not just a...
Posted October 30, 2006 6:26 PM
TMZ says that a camera crew working for E! Entertainment Television entered an open gate at Brad Pitt's Hollywood Hills compound on Oct. 19 and was caught on videotape. The...
Posted October 25, 2006 10:50 AM
The Hollywood Reporter has joined the website redesign parade, giving the site a thorough remake. Flackage: New features include site-wide integration of The Reporter’s database, streamlined video, easier navigation and...
Posted October 23, 2006 4:15 PM
James Mee, the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy in Malibu who booked Mel Gibson in July, had his home computer confiscated and other records seized last month, TMZ reported this...
Posted October 12, 2006 5:13 PM
A newsroom source says the staff will be gathered shortly to be told that The Hollywood Reporter publisher Tony Uphoff is out and will be replaced by someone from Billboard....
Posted October 10, 2006 2:03 PM
In order to shoot scenes for Live Free or Die Hard with Bruce Willis, 20th Century Fox wants to close Imperial Highway beside LAX — and some lanes of the...
Posted October 5, 2006 9:05 AM
In an essay that ran in the Los Angeles Review, novelist Tara Ison writes about her six-month relationship with an actor who has worked enough to be familiar — and...
Posted October 3, 2006 11:53 PM
Nikki Finke adds some meat to Monday's Allan Mayer-exits-Sitrick stories, saying that Mayer wanted to move from crisis PR into "a more strategic kind of communications." She reports the split...
Posted October 3, 2006 10:58 PM
Allan Mayer, who developed the entertainment practice for Sitrick and Company after writing a book with the boss, is leaving to start his own firm, Anne Thompson reports at her...
Posted October 2, 2006 6:50 PM
In today's story about Republican congressman Mark Foley's suggestive emails to congressional pages of the underage male variety, The Hollywood Reporter grabbed the wrong photo. After an urgent call for...
Posted October 2, 2006 2:09 PM
Shortly after Michael Ovitz launched his post-Disney comeback through Artists Management Group, the agency began amassing a noteworthy photography collection. Of course, comebacks don't always live up to their advance...
Posted October 2, 2006 2:21 AM
Laemmle Theatres has pulled out of the Fairfax 3 discount house at 7907 Beverly Boulevard. No word on what the future holds for the site, just off the corner at...
Posted September 29, 2006 11:19 AM
By the way, the memo went out Monday that Sallie Hofmeister is the Times' new Business section poobah for entertainment and technology coverage. It follows after the jump:...
Posted September 21, 2006 11:34 AM
Tony Bill is a regular around Santa Monica Airport and the Spitfire Grill, which is one of LA Observed's unofficial remote bureaus. He's been flying since he was a teenager...
Posted September 21, 2006 1:01 AM
You might think of director Sydney Pollack as a New Yorker, but he has been here for thirty years. He answered questions for the blog of the 92nd Street Y...
Posted September 21, 2006 12:57 AM
John Meroney writes at the National Review Online that Brewer, who died Saturday, "never ran a movie studio or directed a picture, [but] for about a decade he had as...
Posted September 20, 2006 2:51 AM
Celebrity gossip Marc Malkin is taking his act from The Insider to E! Online. He will write the daily Planet Gossip column to launch in October and co-host a weekly...
Posted September 14, 2006 12:24 PM
Scriptland is billed as a weekly-on-Wednesday addition to Calendar by freelancer Jay A. Fernandez. For the first installment, he reads from James Vanderbilt's 200-page screenplay adaptation of Against All Enemies:...
Posted September 12, 2006 10:25 PM
Kitson, the Robertson Boulevard shop with an owner who is backing a tabloid photo agency, isn't getting mentioned in US Weekly as much as it did before. So now the...
Posted September 12, 2006 1:22 AM
The Black Dahlia opened the Venice Film Festival yesterday, with James Ellroy and the stars in attendance. (Variety covers and reviews: "...literally ripping good yarn is undercut by some lackluster...
Posted August 31, 2006 10:54 AM
Hollywood lost another stalwart today. Actor Glenn Ford was found dead by paramedics called to his Beverly Hills home about 4 pm. Ford lived with his son Peter and his...
Posted August 30, 2006 9:47 PM
Kirk Douglas says that Let's Face It will be the last of his nine books. The announcement at Publishers Lunch calls it a "humorous and poignant examination of moments in...
Posted August 30, 2006 8:48 AM
It was forty years ago this month that Peter Bart wrote a positive story in the New York Times about a young Hollywood producer, Robert Evans. Bart later went to...
Posted August 29, 2006 6:45 PM
TMZ reports that Mel Gibson's lawyer dropped in on Malibu's courthouse today and revealed a deal with prosecutors. He pleads no contest to misdemeanor drunk driving, but counts of driving...
Posted August 17, 2006 12:25 PM
You get pretty far into Mary McNamara's LAT piece on Mary-Louise Parker (pegged to tonight's return of "Weeds" on Showtime) before you learn that she is not a happy faux...
Posted August 14, 2006 4:18 PM
Actor-screenwriter Dan Futterman will play the part of Daniel Pearl in the upcoming movie based on Mariane Pearl's book, according to the Washington Post's Reliable Source column. When it became...
Posted August 14, 2006 11:29 AM
Tomorrow's Jewish Journal compiles the invitations extended to Mel Gibson by groups that apparently hope to be part of whatever mea culpa tour the actor-producer decides will cleanse the taint...
Posted August 10, 2006 3:45 PM
It's not as surprising as, say, usually reliable Hollywood Democrats Spielberg, Katzenberg and Saban endorsing Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, as they did last week. Mel Gibson has well-known religio-conservative leanings. Still,...
Posted August 8, 2006 6:14 PM
Bruce Feirstein jumps into the pool at Native Intelligence with a post that labels Arianna Huffington's "defining Hollywood moment" spin on the Mel Gibson affair ridiculous and dismisses Ari Emanuel's...
Posted August 2, 2006 2:11 PM
In a column tomorrow motivated by Mel Gibson's anti-Jewish recidivism, Times Calendar columnist Patrick Goldstein chides Hollywood executives for not distancing themselves from the actor-producer. Amy Pascal is my hero....
Posted August 1, 2006 5:59 PM
Morning Buzz Mel: "I am not a bigot" Mel Gibson's people have a released a statement in which the actor denies having anti-Semitic beliefs and apologizes for his Jewish-conspiracy...
Posted August 1, 2006 9:51 AM
So much for Mel Gibson wrapping himself in God. When he was arrested Friday on suspicion of DUI in Malibu, a very un-pious Gibson resisted the deputy and threatened repeatedly...
Posted July 29, 2006 6:37 PM
TMZ.com says that Mel Gibson was arrested this morning on suspicion of DUI by the Malibu sheriff's. He made the mistake of speeding in the dark on Pacific Coast Highway....
Posted July 28, 2006 2:25 PM
Those instructions on how aides are supposed to "staff" Mayor Villaraigosa are still being passed around. The demand for unlimited Listerine breath strips and room temperature water, as reported by...
Posted July 27, 2006 11:06 PM
Aquaman the movie? John Horn reports on the Times website that the real Ari Emanuel is at the center of real "informal talks" on a movie deal that parallels the...
Posted July 27, 2006 5:18 PM
Writer, producer, novelist (and significant other of Helen Hunt) Matthew Carnahan had his personal home page taken hostage by pro-Palestinian hackers. Ray Richmond blogs that Carnahan hasn't written or done...
Posted July 26, 2006 11:28 PM
Today's Wall Street Journal cranks out a piece on GOOD, the magazine for young people who do good things (get it?) that is being pulled together in West Hollywood by...
Posted July 20, 2006 5:57 PM
At gunpoint, no less. Channel 2 News says the actor's Thunderbird jumped the curb, sped into the parking lot of Nina's Kitchen Bath and Hardware at Wilshire and Saltair in...
Posted July 19, 2006 6:10 PM
In this week's New Yorker, Ken Auletta focuses on the Hollywood presence and Pellicano-tainting of powerhouse lawyer Bertram Fields. Auletta congratulates himself on getting "the most feared lawyer in Hollywood"...
Posted July 17, 2006 3:50 PM
Jim Benning, who edits the travel website World Hum, wrote about lucha libre wrestling in Tijuana for last Sunday's Washington Post. It’s Friday night in a small Tijuana arena, the...
Posted July 14, 2006 10:44 AM
Buttons began in burlesque, had his own TV show in the early 1950s and won a supporting actor Academy Award for the 1957 film Sayonara, which starred Marlon Brando. His...
Posted July 13, 2006 1:17 PM
I knew that the threatened Nickelodeon Theatre had a lengthy history in Hollywood, but I had rushed out Tuesday's Morning Buzz item without researching all of the past. Several readers...
Posted July 13, 2006 1:33 AM
Movie City News has added rough, uncut video interviews to its mix of blogs. Up currently is a three-part chat with Vinessa Shaw, who strolls self-consciously through Palisades Park in...
Posted July 10, 2006 12:51 PM
Hilary Swank has been an LA Observed fave since she took her Oscar entourage (and newly won statuette) to Astro Burger. In the August issue of Vanity Fair, though, she...
Posted July 6, 2006 3:42 AM
Yesterday's almost entirely positive media story on Nikki Finke gets another day in the news, thanks to her insistence that the piece by Jon Friedman of Marketwatch was "misogynist" and...
Posted June 29, 2006 9:40 AM
Marketwatch media columnist Jon Friedman got columnist-blogger Nikki Finke to come out to lunchdinner with him in Santa Monica and calls her "a rarity at a time when many entertainment...
Posted June 28, 2006 12:43 PM
Legendary television producer Aaron Spelling died this evening, five days after suffering a stroke. His wife Candy and son Randy were at his side, according to publicist Kevin Sasaki. Spelling's...
Posted June 23, 2006 9:39 PM
Sharon Waxman in the New York Times looks for, and mostly doesn't find, larger meaning in the move of Creative Artists Agency and International Creative Management out of Beverly Hills...
Posted June 8, 2006 2:09 PM
Claude Brodesser, who has been flying solo at FishbowlLA since Michael Sonnenschein exited the scene in early April, posts that he is leaving to write the industry column for TMZ.com,...
Posted June 7, 2006 10:59 AM
Speaking to the Guardian about Ask the Dust, John Fante and our fair city: Robert Towne, the writer of Chinatown, grew up in San Pedro, the so-called port of Los...
Posted June 2, 2006 8:15 AM
Paul Gleason became an actor after watching Splendor in the Grass with Jack Kerouac. Sixty-some films later, plus Broadway and roles on "Seinfeld," "Friends" and dozens of other TV shows,...
Posted May 29, 2006 10:29 PM
From BillboardBiz.com via the Hollywood Reporter: One of the most colorful careers in music came to a close today as pioneering booking agent Ian Copeland died in Los Angeles of...
Posted May 24, 2006 2:58 PM
Franklin Avenue caught Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's appearance on "American Idol" last night, telling finalist Katherine McPhee that she was to sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." She's the first Angeleno to...
Posted May 17, 2006 1:06 PM
In his latest blog letter from Los Angeles, Times of London correspondent Chris Ayres goes off on Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible III: Like a sucker, I believed the advance...
Posted May 3, 2006 10:53 AM
By now most people have probably heard of the Times' promotion-gone-wrong for Mission: Impossible III. Devices placed in newsracks to play theme music when the box is opened apparently look...
Posted May 3, 2006 8:53 AM
Nikki Finke [and lots of others] got advance leaks of the upcoming Vanity Fair story on the Anthony Pellicano case. She compiles a series of links to highlights. Among them:...
Posted April 26, 2006 10:31 AM
Talk about a career. Ernest Borgnine's first film credit came in 1951 as Hu Chang in China Corsair. He has portrayed J. Edgar Hoover, Angelo Dundee, Vince Lombardi, Marty Piletti...
Posted April 26, 2006 2:19 AM
Wednesday's Daily Journal will report that the Justice Department and the FBI may launch investigations into who gave the New York Times memos on government interviews in the Pellicano case...
Posted April 25, 2006 11:58 PM
Look behind just about any big story in Los Angeles and crisis PR guy Michael Sitrick is usually there, quietly working the media on behalf of, say, Cardinal Roger Mahony...
Posted April 20, 2006 9:47 AM
OK, bear with me. Los Angeles billionaire Ron Burkle has been in the news a lot lately for 1) His divorce, 2) His interest in buying the new McClatchy newspapers,...
Posted April 20, 2006 12:21 AM
The photo shows longtime Los Angeles journalist Frank Swertlow, on the case for People outside the Tom Cruise home recently—as reported at Gawker. The New York gossip site explains: "Sent...
Posted April 19, 2006 10:03 AM
Die Hard director John McTiernan, the top Hollywood name to be charged in the Pellicano wiretapping case, appeared in court today on the charge of lying to the government and...
Posted April 17, 2006 3:49 PM
Both the Sunday New York Times and the current LA Weekly devote column inches to understanding the phenomenon that is (or at least was, until recently) Amanda Scheer-Demme. They might...
Posted April 17, 2006 2:31 AM
Reacting to the scandal about extortion, horse trading and freebies at Page Six, former Variety columist Army Archerd—whose marketing slogan is "Hollywood's first blogger"—blogs a tale out of his past....
Posted April 10, 2006 11:56 PM
According to the BBC's David Willis, Claude the security guard at the gate of The Prospect Studios in Hollywood was nice to the right casting director enough times for it...
Posted April 6, 2006 2:59 AM
♦ David Poland of Movie City News takes 1,400 words to explain why his column The Hot Button is going down to three days a week. It's all about the...
Posted April 4, 2006 5:56 PM
♦ Deputy City Controller Ruben Gonzalez is leaving Laura Chick's staff after four years to be a vice president at Englander and Associates, the lobbying firm headed by Harvey Englander. Gonzalez...
Posted April 3, 2006 6:33 PM
Reporters on the Pellicano story for Vanity Fair, the Daily Journal and other publications have been beating a path to the door of Hollywood talent manager Seth Ersoff, says The...
Posted March 28, 2006 2:48 PM
Press release this morning from the mayor's office, verbatim: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the Los Angeles City Council and Police Chief William Bratton will honor Lionsgate, Paul Haggis, the producers, cast...
Posted March 28, 2006 9:55 AM
Andy Spahn, the head of corporate affairs at DreamWorks and political consigliere to Messrs. Geffen, Spielberg and Katzenberg, is heading out on his own. Well, he won't exactly be alone....
Posted March 24, 2006 2:45 AM
NBC Universal hired Thomas Properties Group to re-start the process of developing the studio's backlot into homes, offices, stores and production facilities. "Sooner or later, it's going to get developed,"...
Posted March 23, 2006 3:00 AM
RAND, the Santa Monica think tank, debuted a new Foreign Policy Roundtable series targeting leaders of the entertainment and media communities. Friday night's gathering at the Bel-Air home of Kenneth...
Posted March 20, 2006 2:13 AM
Comments by George Clooney on the Huffington Post about being a proud and unabashed liberal created a small blogosphere boomlet this week, but the aftermath may prove more entertaining. Clooney's...
Posted March 15, 2006 12:15 PM
David Willis is the BBC's West Coast correspondent, based here. He has reported on several continents, and returned to L.A. in 2004 after completing a fellowship at Oxford. For six...
Posted March 10, 2006 1:04 PM
LAPD crime maps go interactive (left)...It's going to be cold and windy today...Praising Brokeback despite the Oscar upset...blocking traffic for the mayor...questions but few answers about Herb Wesson Jr....reviews of...
Posted March 10, 2006 2:34 AM
First reviews of the Oscars and Jon Stewart: not good. Also, Arnie Berghoff's diabetes roast gets some scrutiny, the Times finds waste in the local bioterrorism budget, Villaraigosa promises to...
Posted March 6, 2006 1:54 AM
The LA Weekly has created another new blog, "Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily." The kickoff post announces that she will be live-blogging the Oscars on Sunday: Come for the Cynicism...
Posted March 4, 2006 12:48 AM
Variety has hired Monica Corcoran away from In Style's Los Angeles bureau to replace Ginny Chien as style editor, today's Women's Wear Daily says. Corcoran becomes part of the lifestyle...
Posted February 28, 2006 9:42 AM
The longtime comic actor, who lived here in West Los Angeles, died of lung cancer yesterday at UCLA. Knotts was best known as Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith...
Posted February 25, 2006 6:33 PM
In case you didn't catch enough premature Oscar buzz the first time around, the LAT is publishing the best of The Envelope and other Times coverage as a special tab...
Posted February 22, 2006 11:13 AM
* Newest shorts at the bottom... ⇒ More subplots in the Anthony Pellicano affair, a thirteenth defendant and Leslie Abramson joins the case. Also, the Times says anonymous witness 'Johnny...
Posted February 18, 2006 11:24 PM
A federal grand jury charges that Terry Christensen, 65, paid private eye Anthony Pellicano at least $100,000 to wiretap Lisa Bonder Kerkorian, the wife of billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian, during...
Posted February 15, 2006 4:32 PM
Quick, name the highest-grossing actor of all time.... Turn the page for the answer:...
Posted February 14, 2006 4:56 PM
You know it's been a tough location shoot when you get stabbed in the forehead on set and the producers get in a brawl. Second item under Studio City Tales....
Posted February 10, 2006 5:35 PM
Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue out Tuesday has more than Scarlett and Keira nude on the cover (though that's a pretty decent jump-start on newsstand sales.) There's a Vicki Ward piece...
Posted February 7, 2006 9:22 PM
A guy named Darnell Riley was sentenced today to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to robbing "Girls Gone Wild" creator Joe Francis in his Bel Air home. What...
Posted February 7, 2006 6:11 PM
Dateline: Hollywood's spoof of the week headlines the news that "automobile fatalities in Los Angeles are up 85% in the past month as residents seeking meaning in their lives intentionally...
Posted February 6, 2006 4:05 PM
The Rev. Cecil Murray, who stepped down in 2004 as pastor at First AME Church, is co-producer on Color of the Cross, a new film that will feature a black...
Posted February 6, 2006 2:44 PM
The Smoking Gun has posted sixty pages of government allegations that private investigator Anthony Pellicano "illegally recorded Sylvester Stallone's telephone calls and accessed confidential law enforcement records pertaining to other...
Posted February 6, 2006 11:50 AM
Eyewitness News goes hi-def, James Frey has a few words for the LAT, the Downtown News loses patience with Villaraigosa and a former mayor goes in for a tuneup—plus a...
Posted February 6, 2006 2:31 AM
The first eight pages of this morning's Calendar section in the Times—including six full opens plus most of the cover—are devoted to coverage of the Oscar nominations. The State of...
Posted February 1, 2006 10:13 AM
In the news this morning, the FBI looks at that videotaped shooting by a deputy in Chino...misreading Los Angeles...quitting James Frey...buying off Stuckey...and Hollywood's gay thing analyzed from a couple...
Posted February 1, 2006 2:21 AM
Character actor Charles Lane turned 101 last week. Jon Weisman counts 322 roles on his Imdb credits, including more than two hundred movies before he became a familiar face on...
Posted January 31, 2006 3:48 PM
Looks like Brokeback Mountain's year. Variety, THR, LAT, Movie City News....
Posted January 31, 2006 10:23 AM
Chief Bratton makes a finding in the Devin Brown killing, Guerdon Stuckey gets an offer, Richard Meruelo didn't lay a million on the Center for Law in the Public Interest,...
Posted January 31, 2006 2:15 AM
Fayard Nicholas, the Tony Award winner and Kennedy Center honoree who was half of the groundbreaking Nicholas Brothers tap dance team, died Tuesday at home in Burbank. Fayard and his...
Posted January 25, 2006 11:10 PM
The Santa Monica Daily Press interviewed neighbors outside Chris Penn's condo on Ocean Avenue yesterday who claimed (not for attribution, apparently) that they weren't surprised by the actor's death. Prior...
Posted January 25, 2006 3:08 PM
The actor and younger brother of Sean Penn was discovered about 4 pm in his Ocean Avenue condo. Police aren't making any suggestions of foul play. Chris Penn's film credits...
Posted January 24, 2006 10:06 PM
After the two entertainment companies complete their $7.4-billion acquisition deal, Pixar CEO Steve Jobs will be the single largest shareholder in the Walt Disney Co....
Posted January 24, 2006 5:01 PM
Just catching up to last Friday's Variety story on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deciding where it wants to build a movie museum. Steve Rosen reports the...
Posted January 23, 2006 11:59 PM
Gawker has the news that the Golden Groundhog award will honor the best underground movie of 2005, chosen from among "genuinely outstanding films from the previous year that lacked the...
Posted January 18, 2006 9:57 AM
The Colin Campbell Network blog has some details: According to sources close to the production, a team of ESPN executives from the East Coast informed the staff of ESPN Hollywood...
Posted January 17, 2006 1:11 PM
My choice is Defamer. The scene, the parties and the gossip viewed from slightly askew. They also anoint Isaac Mizrahi as the new king of red carpet dish. I didn't...
Posted January 17, 2006 12:43 PM
Smelly beaches in the South Bay, no new Wal-Mart in the Valley, horny females on Channel 2 and the winners of the Golden Globes—plus where Alex Padilla will eat breakfast...
Posted January 17, 2006 2:21 AM
The House that Jack Kent Cooke Built might be no more, air rights are hot again downtown (and so is Richard Meruelo), Tad Friend expounds on Los Angeles car chases...plus...
Posted January 16, 2006 3:43 AM
Updated all weekend, with the newest at the bottom: ⇒ KCRW music host Chris Douridas is free on $1 million bail after being arrested Jan. 6 on suspicion that he...
Posted January 14, 2006 11:25 AM
While I may seem to pile on the Times for taking a boosterish approach to awards shows in its hunger to attract new readers and website visitors, The Envelope is...
Posted January 13, 2006 1:18 PM
Today's LA Weekly cover story by Paul Cullum reconstructs what happened near Wilshire and Bundy in 2001 when screenwriter Eric Red plowed his Jeep Cherokee into a stopped Honda, careened...
Posted January 12, 2006 5:50 PM
Another Pellicano case guilty plea, Arnold's illegal problem, Patterico and Hiltzik go mainstream, DA Cooley wants to reform three strikes—plus the end of the UFW series, Michael Eisner, Mack Reed,...
Posted January 11, 2006 1:24 AM
Los Angeles under siege is a timeless Hollywood conceit. In Wednesday's New York Times, Chris Gorak's first film Right at Your Door, starring Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack, is summarized...
Posted January 11, 2006 12:15 AM
Back in 2001, former Clinton Administration official-turned-D.C. lobbyist Jarvis Stewart mused that he might someday open an L.A. office to help celebrities "learn how to get their messages across in...
Posted January 6, 2006 2:18 AM
We're number two! USC lost the Rose Bowl and the national championship to Texas 41-38. Thirty-two of those points came in the last quarter. Today's front pagesNew York Times See/Read...
Posted January 5, 2006 1:04 AM
⇒ City Controller Laura Chick turned up the heat today on schools Supt. Roy Romer, making a public records act request for all federal, state, county, and internal audits of...
Posted December 27, 2005 4:21 PM
If I promised not to post again until after Christmas, some news would surely come along to make a liar out of me. So let's just say the pace will...
Posted December 23, 2005 1:33 AM
Variety's review today of the Fun with Dick and Jane remake coulda and probably shoulda said that one of the executive producers is none other than reviewer Justin Chang's boss,...
Posted December 21, 2005 5:59 PM
Colleagues of longtime LAT film reviewer Kevin Thomas have been unhappy that he was nudged to take the buyout and upset that after four decades the paper did not plan...
Posted December 20, 2005 8:42 PM
At the Hollywood crew blog Totally Unauthorized, "Peggy Archer" tells the story of a mean-looking power juicer who got drafted into a scene as a security guard because the guy...
Posted December 20, 2005 9:59 AM
More than 2,000 people (LAT; AP says "hundreds") viewed the body of executed murderer Tookie Williams Monday at a mortuary on South Vermont. Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Snoop Dog...
Posted December 20, 2005 1:27 AM
With lots of buzz around today about Tom Cruise and Scientology, various sources emailed to remind me of some seminal local reporting in addition to the 1990 Sappell-Welkos series in...
Posted December 19, 2005 12:46 PM
⇒ The Daily News' Beth Barrett takes off from last week's nugget (and follow-up) about City Council time off to compare the L.A. council's pay and perks to other cities....
Posted December 18, 2005 11:04 PM
In 1990, L.A. Times reporters Joel Sappell and Robert Welkos ran a six-part series on Scientology that took them most of five years to report, vet, re-report, write, re-write, lawyer...
Posted December 18, 2005 6:35 PM
Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman's party to raise campaign cash for Senate Democrats was supposed to be the last big Hollywood political event of the season. Melissa Etheridge came to...
Posted December 16, 2005 12:49 AM
A bunch of movies and actors got Golden Globe nominations today. If you care, Variety has the lineup. It's at all the other new awards-hyping sites too since today is...
Posted December 13, 2005 10:57 AM
Don't miss posts from the weekend on the DreamWorks sale, the QM2, Richard Pryor's passing and a little media roundup. On to today: ♦ The state Supremes nixed a stay of...
Posted December 12, 2005 1:18 AM
Variety's latest celebration of its centennial is a weekly countdown of the Top 100 awards ceremony fashions. They've reached the final ten on Variety.com. In order, they are worn by:...
Posted December 11, 2005 5:03 PM
Paramount today confirmed the huge Hollywood shocker that it will pay $1.6 billion for DreamWorks. The story began to get out Friday in the Wall Street Journal, and on Saturday...
Posted December 11, 2005 1:36 PM
Barbra Streisand wanted to make sure we all got to read the full text of her letter to the editor that ran—edited—in the L.A. Times on Nov. 28, protesting the...
Posted December 7, 2005 11:40 AM
No sooner did the Hollywood Reporter gets its annual Power 100 of most important women into print than Publisher and Editor-in-chief Robert Dowling announced he is leaving at the end...
Posted December 6, 2005 3:48 PM
She hasn't posted since the Kings began their annual fade in the standings, but actress Elisha Cuthbert is on board as the L.A. hockey team's blondest, most exclamation-pointed official blogger....
Posted December 6, 2005 3:30 AM
Might this billboard pop up in Hollywood around Oscar time? It's a freshened up version of a billboard spotted during the 2002 Oscar season. The protest group Guerrilla Girls showed...
Posted December 5, 2005 12:28 AM
Today's Hollywood Reporter is out with the who-makes-what piece of the trade's annual Women in Entertainment issue. Julia Roberts stands atop the actress salary Top 10, able to command a...
Posted November 30, 2005 1:22 PM
Hollywood will add jobs this year and next, but the overall picture is still cloudy says a report to be released today by the L.A. Economic Development Corp. Advancers in...
Posted November 29, 2005 2:20 AM
Wife-and-husband team Elizabeth Snead and Joel Stratte-McClure used to jointly byline their celebrity gossip dispatches for the Daily News and the other LANG papers. Then Snead started dispatching her side...
Posted November 27, 2005 7:47 PM
In the December issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin is the latest writer to take a look at the Jesus-ization of Hollywood. They sit in a semicircle on the homey...
Posted November 25, 2005 11:39 PM
♦ Alex Padilla on Monday endorsed Eric Garcetti as his successor in the City Council president's chair. Let the record show that on May 27, LAObserved posted: "Alex Padilla will remain...
Posted November 22, 2005 1:40 AM
When the Times chose to stake its biggest website initiative on the dicey notion that Hollywood awards are a year-round obsession of its readers, my main fear was that the...
Posted November 19, 2005 2:46 PM
♦ More cuts are coming within weeks, Times Editor Dean Baquet confirms in a staff story about his shutdown of the Outdoors section (reported here yesterday) for financial reasons. "I made...
Posted November 15, 2005 1:22 AM
Catching up with a longer-than-usual helping of Monday morsels... ♦ The Times' powerful package on conservator scams was three years in the making: among other things, a prime example of the...
Posted November 14, 2005 5:37 AM
♦ Today's Jewish Journal cover features a large noose and the question: Should Tookie Die? Today's front pages New York Times See/Read Washington Post See/Read LA Times See/Read Daily News See/Read...
Posted November 11, 2005 2:10 AM
The venerable and recently retired Variety columnist began posting yesterday and says that Michael Hiltzik's blog in the L.A. Times inspired him to take the plunge. "I'll avoid the obvious,...
Posted November 10, 2005 9:46 AM
Facing a Monday with more bad circulation news and head scratching about the Times' outsized devotion to Hollywood awards hype, Associate Editor John Montorio dispatched an email to the Calendar...
Posted November 7, 2005 12:04 PM
In addition to the newsy posts below about Nissan and Chief Bratton, here are some morning nuggets... ♦ The City Council approved an unusual tax-exempt bond scheme that could be worth...
Posted November 3, 2005 1:57 AM
If you go to the movies at CityWalk, Beverly Center or the Magic Johnson Theatres, you'll soon get some new entertainment for those nineteen minutes [seems awfully high!] that on...
Posted November 1, 2005 12:20 PM
When AFI Fest comes to Hollywood next month, the Times will host a day of interviews and panel discussions with prominent filmmakers, journalists and actor George Clooney at the Arclight....
Posted October 25, 2005 3:58 PM
In his latest LA Notebook, Times of London correspondent Chris Ayres tells U.K. readers that he has decided to become a Los Angeles bicycle rider, despite his loathing of that...
Posted October 25, 2005 12:46 PM
Actor and director Joan Chen tells Filmstew.com that her on-screen career stalled after The Last Emperor "because people don't know how to write for me, that's just the way it...
Posted October 19, 2005 5:13 PM
♦ City Hall lobbyists now have to disclose online their clients, the issues they advocated and how much they got paid every three months. Daily News ♦ Hollywood waits and worries over...
Posted October 19, 2005 2:44 AM
Matt Haber at the New York Observer compiles the recent media attention paid to Jennifer (J.J.) Philbin, a writer for "The O.C" who is the daughter of Regis Philbin. It...
Posted October 13, 2005 11:21 PM
♦ Robert Iger and Steve Jobs make nice, and will start making ABC shows available on the new video Ipod. ♦ Add a new pro to the ranks of local bloggers about...
Posted October 13, 2005 2:15 AM
Remember last week's ungrammatical smooch that the L.A. Times gave Harvey Weinstein in the form of a free full-page ad, the same day that the Weinstein Co. paid for ads...
Posted October 7, 2005 9:56 AM
♦ Mayor Villaraigosa nearly filled the Tom Bradley Room on the top of the City Hall tower with media there to hear him recite the accomplishments of his first 98 days...
Posted October 7, 2005 2:58 AM
♦ Marc Weingarten reports in today's New York Times on a bitter lawsuit here in L.A. between singer Leonard Cohen and the manager he says looted millions from his accounts while...
Posted October 6, 2005 1:54 AM
♦ Adelphia blames equipment failure related to the Topanga fire for depriving thousands of their "Desperate Housewives" fix. ♦ Mayor Villaraigosa's plan for improving schools falls into the hands of the Times'...
Posted October 4, 2005 1:40 AM
This morning's Variety and Hollywood Reporter had stories on the new WGA board, at its first meeting, dumping executive director John McLean. The interim replacement is David Young, the guild's...
Posted September 27, 2005 2:29 PM
Claude Brodesser did indeed join FishbowlLA this morning, as reported last week. The former Variety reporter looks like a nice addition to the lineup. He will help out regular fisheye...
Posted September 26, 2005 10:39 AM
♦ Rachel Uranga reports in the Daily News on the phenomenon of L.A. immigrants skipping English to learn whatever is spoken in their neighborhood: "Peruvian immigrant Miguel Aliaga always knew that...
Posted September 26, 2005 1:34 AM
For the second time this week, a Hollywood guild elected a new president who is expected to take a harder line in union negotiations. Alan Rosenberg won the leadership of...
Posted September 23, 2005 11:29 PM
Mickey Kaus still can't get the LAT to let him de-subscribe...Anthony York at the Capitol Weekly, and The Roundup, report on Gov. Schwarzenegger excluding the Times from a series of...
Posted September 21, 2005 2:18 PM
Members of the Writers Guild of America/west threw out the old and voted in the entire "Writers United" slate of new board members, plus new president Patric M. Verrone. Turnout...
Posted September 20, 2005 6:40 PM
♦ In today's New York Times, Dennis McDougal reports that the Writers Guild is sitting on millions of dollars owed to writers it can't find—no-names like Tom Clancy, Mira Nair and...
Posted September 19, 2005 12:53 AM
Question: Who did VLIfe put on its cover, following Jennifer Connelly and Halle Berry? Remember, they're trying to sell on newsstands these days. The October issue does contain an inspired...
Posted September 16, 2005 1:14 AM
• Looks like Gov. Schwarzenegger announces Friday that he will run for reelection, the Times says. Also, La Opinión says its reporter was denied entry to the governor's recent community meeting...
Posted September 15, 2005 1:26 AM
Southern California writers dominate the books section in the current issue of The Nation. In fact, they write the whole thing. David L. Ulin, recently named Book Editor of the...
Posted September 8, 2005 11:59 AM
Local website Cinemocracy has redesigned and launched a cool new service: video-on-demand of selected classic (or at least old) "politically relevant" films, free of charge in MPEG2 format. The first...
Posted September 7, 2005 5:07 PM
• Screenwriter Tom Benedek shoots his own unproduced scripts—literally, with a .45-caliber pistol—and mounts them as art. His exhibition "Shot by the Writer - Works on Paper: 1982-2004" opens this month...
Posted September 7, 2005 2:15 AM
Matthew Fox, or more particularly his "Lost" character Jack, is the prototype of the new L.A. Hunk, Shane Watson heavy-breathes in Sunday's Times of London. "Jack is the modern woman’s...
Posted September 6, 2005 2:57 PM
The Times' Robin Abcarian sends Variety's Army Archerd into columnist retirement with a piece in today's Calendar. It opens during the Friday lunch scene on the patio at Spago. Robert...
Posted September 6, 2005 10:28 AM
In this case, the competition was to see which of the trades would be first to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. James Nash reports in the...
Posted September 6, 2005 3:09 AM
Welcome to September... • Seems like every gas station between Hollywood and Santa Monica went to $3-plus a gallon overnight. The 76 station at Olympic and Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills...
Posted September 1, 2005 1:43 AM
I just caught up with the new blog of screenwriter Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, Black Dahlia), and now I can't get any work done. He calls it I...
Posted August 31, 2005 4:02 PM
I'm told that the Writers Guild of America, West board tonight rescinded its decision to give the group's prestigious Valentine Davies Award to defrocked ex-prez Victoria Riskin. She resigned...
Posted August 29, 2005 9:21 PM
The Times is getting credit from Defamer and elsewhere for today's story on Scarlett Johansson’s 911 call, placed after she had a fender-bender near Disneyland perhaps trying to elude paparazzi....
Posted August 25, 2005 12:03 PM
This is the month that Variety's glossy VLife hits newsstands and begins to find out if there's any (v)life separate from the trade's subscriber list. Halle Berry decorates the cover...
Posted August 25, 2005 3:07 AM
• That's Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth in the photo, taking a parachute jump with an instructor at Lake Perris. It's front and center on the DN website this morning....
Posted August 25, 2005 2:43 AM
Blogger Steve Smith posts his astonishment that longtime baseball figure Bobby Bragan just became, at age 87, the oldest pro baseball manager—and the oldest to be tossed from a game....
Posted August 16, 2005 11:46 PM
Roger Ebert's Chicago Sun-Times review gives zero stars to Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and also recounts last February's little spat between Rob Schneider, the film's "star" (if that's the right...
Posted August 16, 2005 12:01 AM
Timothy M. Gray is the new Editor of Variety and Daily Variety. In a shuffle of positions at the trades last year, he became executive editor. In the moves just...
Posted August 15, 2005 11:35 PM
Sounds like there are a ton of insider references in Hollywood Hussein, the new novel by Ken Baker, West Coast editor for Us Weekly. Monday's Page Six says that the...
Posted August 14, 2005 11:25 PM
Hollywood's sound stages and location crews are swamped these days. At her blog Totally Unauthorized, Peggy Archer regularly posts about what it's like from the working stiff vantage point. In...
Posted August 12, 2005 2:29 PM
• The last radio station to be located in Hollywood leaves Friday at 11:05 p.m., Bob Pool says in the LAT. • All the high-profile ankling from The Firm, the once-hot Hollywood...
Posted August 11, 2005 1:32 AM
Can't let it go unmentioned that Army Archerd will write his last regular column for Variety on Sept. 1. He will still file occasional reports. Archerd has been at it...
Posted August 4, 2005 10:35 AM
This week's light posting has been due to me being out and around on assignment. It's likely to continue today. Late shorties will be tacked on to the tail end....
Posted July 22, 2005 12:39 AM
The author of Inside Daisy Clover, The Slide Area: Scenes of Hollywood Life and a biography of Natalie Wood died Sunday at age 80. His death was announced by "The...
Posted July 19, 2005 2:06 PM
Geez, you try to skate by for a few hours and stuff starts to pile up in the in-box... • Former Burbank mayor and current city councilwoman Stacey Jo Murphy was...
Posted July 14, 2005 5:43 PM
The comedian performed here at the Laugh Factory on Saturday night and was found dead the next morning at a friend's place. He was 35. Soto moved to Los Angeles...
Posted July 13, 2005 1:22 AM
The only screenwriter to receive an honorary Oscar died on Saturday at age 89. The news didn't get out until today. The Writers Guild website's obituary calls Lehman "one of...
Posted July 5, 2005 10:26 PM
Hollywood freelancer (for the New York Times and others) Ross Johnson has fallen into the blogging web. And for his first meaty entry at The Ross Files, he names names...
Posted June 23, 2005 10:23 AM
Nikki Finke says in the LA Weekly that Anita Busch, the former Hollywood Reporter editor and writer for the LAT and NYT who was threatened over pursuing a story on...
Posted June 22, 2005 11:42 PM
Anne Bancroft, an actress for fifty years, has died of uterine cancer in New York. She was 73. Of her many roles, she might be best known today for playing...
Posted June 7, 2005 3:19 PM
An evolving post, with the newest items at the bottom: • If true, this will open up some movement in local politics. According to email from a senior staffer at City...
Posted June 4, 2005 5:08 PM
A Defamer operative files a report from last night's $125-a-head Hillary Clinton fundraiser: The beer and wine flowed freely, for those guests brave enough to cross Emmerich’s mud-filled lawn to...
Posted June 2, 2005 1:16 PM
Sharon Waxman reports in Thursday's New York Times that, with his star Tom Cruise increasingly pushing Scientology and acting oddly while promoting War of the Worlds, Paramount chief Brad Grey...
Posted June 2, 2005 12:43 AM
Guests at Wednesday night's fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton at the Hollywood Hills home of producer Roland Emmerich are being warned not to speak with any reporters. It's part of...
Posted May 31, 2005 2:49 PM
When aspiring screenwriter Jeffrey L. Clemens sent threatening letters to a couple of federal judges in 2003 and 2004, he was (amazingly enough) given a warning. But after his lawsuit...
Posted May 27, 2005 2:55 AM
The Times is throwing Pulitzers at the Disney company beat in the Business section, hiring two-time winner (and ex-Register reporter) Kim Christensen. Most recently he has been an associate managing...
Posted May 18, 2005 4:50 PM
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer set up a website called The Dionaea House last year and posted a series of correspondence between characters in his horror screenplay. After all, if the Internet...
Posted May 10, 2005 10:59 PM
PR Week quizzed the LA Weekly's Deadline Hollywood columnist about how she landed at an alternative weekly, what she thinks of other reporters on the entertainment beat, and how she...
Posted May 2, 2005 9:03 AM
Today's New York Times revisits the death on Oscar weekend in February of R. Gregory Stevens, the gay Republican operative who had been staying with actress (and active Democrat) Carrie...
Posted April 27, 2005 9:12 AM
The comedian who played a bit part in the Los Angeles mayor's race, as a friend and campaigner alongside State Sen. Richard Alarcon, underwent a kidney transplant last week, his...
Posted April 25, 2005 10:59 PM
Buried on page 28 of today's Calendar section in the Times, Universal runs an unusual message in plain serif type, with no art or adornment: Last week, Universal Pictures and...
Posted April 22, 2005 12:40 PM
In the ongoing feud between the two Writers Guild of America spheres, score one for the New Yorkers. Walter Bernstein, who sits on the WGA-East council, got a piece onto...
Posted March 28, 2005 2:10 AM
Disney's board today named Bob Iger as the successor to Michael Eisner. Here's the Disney press release, reaction from dissidents Roy Disney and Stanley Gold, and staff coverage in the...
Posted March 13, 2005 1:41 PM
LAT investigative reporter Gary Cohn emerges from the Schwarzenegger-groping beat to chip in a piece in today's paper about KTLA entertainment reporter Zorianna Kit grazing up against an ethical line....
Posted March 1, 2005 2:01 AM
Madeleine Brand did a good scene piece this morning on Day to Day about how soft the backstage press is with the Oscar winners. Transcripts of the Q-A with best...
Posted February 28, 2005 3:15 PM
Nikki Finke reports in the LA Weekly that host Chris Rock will tone it down a little for the Oscars on Sunday, but still intends to tick off Bush voters:...
Posted February 23, 2005 12:37 PM
The New York Observer phones up David Halbfinger for a chat about his new job sharing the Hollywood beat for the New York Times with Sharon Waxman. "It’s a great...
Posted February 23, 2005 2:15 AM
Other projects and a stubborn cold have slowed me down the last day or so. Here's some things I missed: • Estrich vs. Kinsley: USC law professor and columnist Susan Estrich...
Posted February 17, 2005 11:03 AM
The New York Times' former film critic is following the occasionally-beaten path—again—and going to work for Hollywood. Back in 1992, Mitchell took a post at Paramount and lasted six months....
Posted February 15, 2005 4:48 AM
The New York Times bureau had its "So long!" party for the departing Bernard Weinraub last night. Someone who was there said the cocktail soiree, held at bureau chief John...
Posted February 13, 2005 12:54 PM
Franklin Avenue links to a Variety story on L.A. Times Opinion columnist Joel Stein scoring a second TV pilot with ABC. He'll be co-executive producer, which causes the blog (written...
Posted February 8, 2005 2:38 PM
Three days after the Times' Tim Rutten castigated movie reviewers, Patrick Goldstein writes in his Calendar column that conservative commentators attacking the treatment of euthanasia in Million Dollar Baby are...
Posted February 8, 2005 10:43 AM
Business Week's L.A. bureau chief Ron Grover posted his latest Power Lunch column on the success of Ray and what it says about the Hollywood play of Phil Anschutz. His...
Posted February 7, 2005 11:12 AM
Hilary Swank picked up another trophy last night at the SAG Awards for her performance as Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby. Earlier in the day, Tim Rutten's Regarding Media...
Posted February 6, 2005 1:35 PM
Updated through the weekend Lesbian chic: Screenwriter and "L Word" creator Ilene Chaiken is profiled in Sunday's NYT Arts section. "In 1999, after writing a magazine article about same-sex couples...
Posted February 6, 2005 12:58 PM
The New York Times Hollywood correspondent fills in the blanks for The Forward. Some snippets: Waxman was born into an Orthodox family in the Cleveland suburb of University Heights, Ohio,...
Posted February 3, 2005 4:10 PM
That Los Angeles magazine story generally praising Michael Kinsley that I mentioned awhile back is now online. Also up on the Los Angeles website from the February issue are the...
Posted February 3, 2005 1:06 PM
Rob Schneider bought a full-page ad in today's Variety (pg. 39) to reply to Times columnist Patrick Goldstein's Jan. 26 dig at the studios for making sequels like the upcoming...
Posted February 3, 2005 11:38 AM
Tanya Gold of The Guardian looks at this month's Vanity Fair cover—another triptych of young actresses—and sees "a desperate sight to make all feminists tremble. This is Disempowerment as she...
Posted February 3, 2005 10:30 AM
You knew this was coming. The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke turns her Deadline Hollywood column this week to an examination of last Sunday's farewell piece by New York Times Hollywood...
Posted February 3, 2005 1:07 AM
Bumble Ward is getting out of the Hollywood publicity wars to write novels because, basically, life is too short to hold the hands of celebrity clients. Kim Masters writes in...
Posted February 2, 2005 11:41 AM
In Sunday's New York Times, retiring L.A. bureau stalwart Bernard Weinraub pens a personal farewell to Hollywood and admits to his fallability. He was star-struck, had money envy, and agrees...
Posted January 30, 2005 9:18 PM
Bumble Ward, who represents Quentin Tarantino, Sofia Coppola, Tim Burton and others, is quitting the business to write novels. Michael Fleming writes in Variety that "Ward's decision is a stunner:...
Posted January 27, 2005 11:19 AM
Journalist Doug Ireland calls The Aviator a mendacious film that "glorifies the odious Howard Hughes. Scorcese [sic], of all people, ought to know better than to have done so." His...
Posted January 27, 2005 10:54 AM
The deck on the cover story by Brendan Bernhard in the LA Weekly observes that "Bruce Wagner infects his novels with madness, celebrity, name-dropping, drugs and sex. And that's just...
Posted January 27, 2005 1:50 AM
In a New York Observer diary that begins with a riff on the Hollywood swag season that is upon us and ends with a personal tribute to Johnny Carson, Bruce...
Posted January 26, 2005 11:51 PM
Johnny Carson: No shortage of appreciations and retrospectives online and on the air for the late-night pioneer who died Sunday at home in Malibu (of emphysema at age 79). David...
Posted January 23, 2005 9:20 PM
Sherry Lansing chats with Newsweek's Sean Smith about leaving Paramount after 12 years as chairman and being the first woman to run a major studio. She insists, of course, that...
Posted January 17, 2005 1:34 AM
• The L.A. Times has an obit today on Marcus Arnold, who rocketed to Internet stardom as a 15-year-old legal expert on AskMe.com. Turns out Arnold died back on May 1,...
Posted January 13, 2005 1:54 AM
Presenters at the Golden Globes will receive a wicker ottoman stuffed with gifts that total out at $38,390. That is if you count the full $16,000 value for the wine...
Posted January 7, 2005 7:25 AM
Defamer spots a casting call that offers a day of SAG work on the new NBC series "Medium." It's nude if you can meet the punctuation-challenged requirements, and especially nice-looking...
Posted January 5, 2005 11:00 PM
The actress donated $1 million to the American Red Cross for tsunami relief efforts in Asia and Africa. She had previously sent a million to the Red Cross after the...
Posted January 3, 2005 4:14 PM
Forbes calls this story "Flack Attack." The piece by Los Angeles bureau chief Seth Lubove details a legal dispute over $6 million in investments that Michael Sitrick of crisis PR...
Posted December 10, 2004 11:07 AM
The WGA board voted unanimously Monday night to let Written By go ahead and publish a roundtable discussion of guild politics—but only after a committee of non-editors removes "personally defamatory"...
Posted December 8, 2004 9:47 AM
Regular readers of New York's Gawker and its L.A. spinoff Defamer may have noticed a certain fascination with gossip about teenager Lindsay Lohan on both blogs (and with her nipples...
Posted December 7, 2004 9:41 AM
The Writers Guild board is under fire for playing thin-skinned publisher and yanking a roundtable discussion of guild politics from Written By, the organization's magazine. Variety's Dave McNary reports that...
Posted December 7, 2004 8:48 AM
Variety editor Peter Bart turned this month's issue of Vlife (not online) over to guest editor Brett Ratner, director of After the Sunset. Ratner took full advantage, getting stories on...
Posted December 6, 2004 1:13 PM
Michael Kinsley's latest East Coast addition to the Times pundit lineup runs today at the bottom of the Sunday Opinion cover, without introduction or bio blurb, under the label "Laptop...
Posted December 5, 2004 1:36 PM
Eric Spiegelman at Cinemocracy treks to the wilderness of Beverly Hills—"or, as I usually refer to it, across the street"—to check out the odd monument to film celebrities that rises...
Posted December 2, 2004 4:52 PM
The holiday cheer-spoiling piece about Los Angeles I read over the weekend was Mary McNamara's profile in the Times Sunday Calendar of character actor Michael O'Neill. You know him: he's...
Posted November 28, 2004 11:15 PM
Carmine Caridi, the ex-Academy member who lent his complimentary VHS film screeners to a friend who copied and pirated them, has been fined the maximum $300,000 by a federal judge....
Posted November 23, 2004 11:48 PM
It's been more than 24 hours since the last post involving Fleishman-Hillard—so here goes. Actually, this news comes from the shop of crisis PR hotshot Michael Sitrick. Today he promoted...
Posted November 23, 2004 9:10 PM
Once again the LA Weekly posts Nikki Finke's Hollywood column online ahead of the print paper. In this one, she writes about her long-ago New York Observer story on the...
Posted November 23, 2004 12:34 PM
Hollywood PR power Pat Kingsley of PMK/HBH fired the president of the New York office, Leslee Dart, in a power struggle over control of the firm. Dart's clients include Martin...
Posted November 19, 2004 9:57 AM
Michael Eisner began his testimony in the Disney shareholder lawsuit in Delaware, prompting recollections of his calling Jeffrey Katzenberg "the little midget" under questioning five years ago. This time, Eisner...
Posted November 16, 2004 10:05 AM
In the new Classic Hollywood issue of Los Angeles magazine (not yet online), Steve Erickson nominates ten classic films that don't belong in the pantheon, and ten that aren't regarded...
Posted October 29, 2004 12:22 AM
Howard Blume at the LA Weekly asked Kerry voter Michael Kinsley why his L.A. Times editorial page didn't take a stand on the presidential race. Kinsley is up-front about his...
Posted October 28, 2004 12:22 AM
On Radford just north of Ventura in Studio City, the offices near CBS where John Wayne hung out when the studio was Republic Pictures, where MTM writers turned out sitcoms...
Posted October 27, 2004 11:39 PM
It's going to be on the op-ed page or in whatever the reinvented Sunday Opinion section is to be called, written by Time (and ex-Entertaiment Weekly) columnist Joel Stein. In...
Posted October 27, 2004 9:31 AM
The New York Post's Page Six got hold of an email from Sharon Waxman, the New York Times' Hollywood reporter, to I ♥ Huckabees director David O. Russell. The pair...
Posted October 18, 2004 10:56 AM
The Writers Guild of America (both coasts) has announced a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract. The official view: "It's been a long five months since we walked away...
Posted October 13, 2004 12:56 PM
Anne Thompson in the New York Times weighs in on the case of ex-magazine writer Jeff Grosso, who sued Miramax for allegedly stealing his screenplay idea about a high-stakes poker...
Posted October 13, 2004 12:11 AM
Los Angeles filmmaker, playwright and web presence Brian Flemming, who created the Slumdance film festival in 1997 to promote his Hang Your Dog in the Wind, (and who has scored...
Posted October 12, 2004 11:08 AM
• In the Downtown News, Anschutz Entertainment Group president Tim Leiweke suggests that more upheaval is coming in the local sports scene. With the Clippers' lease to play at Staples Center...
Posted October 11, 2004 10:38 AM
Ross Johnson profiles Scott Greenstein, the ex-Miramax exec and Barry Diller protégé who brokered Howard Stern's lucrative deal to move onto pay radio, in today's New York Times. Greenstein sounds...
Posted October 11, 2004 2:14 AM
LA Weekly columnist Nikki Finke bypassed the paper (which shutters on the weekend) and broke the news of actor Christopher Reeve's death of cardiac arrest in an email blast to...
Posted October 11, 2004 1:44 AM
The nasty fight between Hollywood lawyer/celeb wedding presider Barry L. Hirsch and his ex-partners made today's New York Times. The piece by Ross Johnson details the hurt feelings, mean words...
Posted October 6, 2004 9:11 AM
Scott at The Juxtaposition reports on his trip up to attend the Liberty Film Festival and gives a few reviews. Being conservative in Hollywood is like having your first day...
Posted October 4, 2004 1:11 AM
WriterAction.com is where about 400 members of the Writers Guild go for their daily fix of of dish, dirt and grousing, behind a firewall open only to other guild members....
Posted September 24, 2004 1:49 AM
Hollywood A-listers and assorted other liberals turned out at David Geffen's Beverly Hills manse last night to celebrate New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's visit to tout her new book,...
Posted September 22, 2004 9:14 PM
The Hollywood Reporter is taking over the Hollywood Creative Directory line of guides and Lone Eagle Publishing. "We are thrilled to add such strong brands to our entertainment portfolio," THR's...
Posted September 22, 2004 9:42 AM
Daniel Petrie Jr. remains president of WGA West in a landslide vote. He got 71.3% of the 2,110 votes cast by guild members, swamping dissident Eric Hughes, who received 25.6%....
Posted September 22, 2004 12:11 AM
Remember Steve Webster, the TV publicity exec who imploded his career by eavesdropping on high-level conference calls at FX long after he was fired? He pleaded no contest yesterday to...
Posted September 21, 2004 10:43 AM
The lineup for what organizers advertise as "America's first conservative film festival...and there's nothing Michael Moore can do about it" is firming up. From today's press release: HOLLYWOOD, Calif., Sept....
Posted September 17, 2004 4:13 PM
Adam Moss continues to reinvent New York magazine. His latest addition is Ken Tucker, the ex-Herald Examiner rock critic and longtime critic-at-large for Entertainment Weekly. He becomes the magazine's film...
Posted September 16, 2004 1:36 PM
At FilmStew.com, Richard Horgan's "Hollywood Spin" says today's tabloids would have gone gaga when Greta Garbo walked out of her 1927 wedding to actor John Gilbert, as the guests were...
Posted September 9, 2004 12:07 PM
Yes, blook. Ian Williams in the LA Weekly uses the term to describe the recent books by Arianna Huffington and the sister-brother team of Amy and David Goodman. He calls...
Posted August 5, 2004 1:17 AM
In today's LAT Business section, Claudia Eller checks the progress of Phil Anschutz' crusade to remake Hollywood. Around the World in 80 Days bombed in June, apparently to the boss's...
Posted August 2, 2004 12:02 PM
Don Mischer apologizes for and explains his unexpected starring role on CNN the last night of the Democratic convention. He is the convention producer whose plaintive, then exasperated f-word pleas...
Posted July 31, 2004 12:26 PM
Randolph Steven Webster used to be vice president for publicity at FX until he was fired in 2001, then went on to be VP for corporate communications and marketing planning...
Posted July 31, 2004 11:36 AM
Local music writer Kate Sullivan writes on her blog about trying to interview Pamela Anderson and David LaChapelle recently. It didn't go well. The interview was probably the most emotionally...
Posted July 29, 2004 1:04 AM
Lawyers for Cameron Diaz want the Gawker Media websites to stop reporting on and having fun with that for-sale video showing the actress topless in S&M scenarios when she was...
Posted July 14, 2004 12:27 PM
The top 50 box office grosses for Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ tended to be at more suburban theaters dispersed from Texas and Florida to Orange County, while the...
Posted July 13, 2004 12:54 AM
The federal Dept. of Labor will be monitoring the upcoming vote for president of the Writers Guild. A Variety story (shorter free version at Yahoo) today spells out the terms...
Posted July 9, 2004 10:46 AM
In today's New York Observer, Bruce Feirstein considers the evidence and sees a perfect storm of unavoidable change headed at the entertainment business. The piece is long and hard to...
Posted July 7, 2004 2:00 AM
This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is publicizing the names of actors, directors, writers and others who have been invited to join up and become Oscars...
Posted June 30, 2004 10:32 AM
Nikki Finke sounds rightfully horrified at the prospect of an "un-sequel" to The Graduate that begins filming next month. It is, she writes in the current LA Weekly, "certain to...
Posted June 25, 2004 11:27 PM
How's this for runaway production. Robert Towne is shooting Ask the Dust, based on John Fante's classic Los Angeles novel of the 1930s, in Cape Town, South Africa. He explains...
Posted June 22, 2004 12:02 AM
The former Hollywood Reporter editor and (sometimes) L.A. Times Calendar writer filed suit late last week against jailed private eye Anthony Pellicano, LAPD detective Mark Arneson and others over that...
Posted June 1, 2004 2:07 PM
Mel Karmarzin resigned today as the number two executve to Sumner Redstone at Viacom, to be replaced by Tom Freston, the CEO of MTV Networks, and Leslie Moonves, CEO of...
Posted June 1, 2004 10:12 AM
The all-but-gone E! Networks CEO explains her sudden resignation to TV Week, but claims she didn't read the Times scoop that foretold her removal -- and insists she was not...
Posted May 28, 2004 1:35 AM
An emailer says that publisher John Salazar is out and that the paper may not publish this week for the first time in 37 years. Stay tuned....
Posted May 27, 2004 11:14 AM
Sallie Hofmeister reports in today's Times that Mindy Herman, CEO of E! Networks, could be dumped as soon as today (with a $20 million severance package), "accused of abusing her...
Posted May 27, 2004 1:01 AM
Suspect Entertainment, the Los Angeles talent and production company that provides gangbanger actors and street thug atmosphere for Hollywood movies, videos and TV commercials, is profiled on the front page...
Posted May 26, 2004 1:28 AM
The Wolfesden Actor Exchange was a bulletin board run by actor Sterling Wolfe where actors could post complaints and questions about casting directors and Hollywood practices. Wolfe closed the site...
Posted May 24, 2004 3:19 PM
Nikki Finke reports in the LA Weekly that Wall Street Journal media editor Rich Turner decided not to bother chasing the L.A. Times and New York Times on the Graydon...
Posted May 20, 2004 1:09 AM
Business Week L.A. bureau chief Ron Grover interviewed Disney dissident Stanley Gold on Friday for BW Online. Gold predicts that, even with Disney's recent 71% jump in earnings, Eisner will...
Posted May 17, 2004 10:43 AM
LA Weekly "Deadline Hollywood" columnist Nikki Finke predicts via email that the New York Times will publish a first story on Graydon Carter and his supposed Hollywood conflicts Friday or...
Posted May 13, 2004 5:37 PM
Mike Hiltzik's "Golden State" column in today's LAT skeptically analyzes the media ripples that followed Reuters' April 21 report that Sony was close to buying MGM. The report created a...
Posted April 29, 2004 1:25 PM
Hollywood sees journalists and our ilk as the next great comedy foils, the Boston Globe writes. Lawrence O'Donnell ("West Wing") is doing a half-hour comedy for HBO set in a...
Posted April 14, 2004 6:50 PM
After 13 years of litigation, an L.A. judge threw out a lawsuit seeking royalties on Winnie the Pooh after ruling that the plaintiffs' investigator broke into Disney offices and stole...
Posted March 29, 2004 5:47 PM
In a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor, the Writers Guild has set an election for president a year early on September 20. The feds will oversee the balloting...
Posted March 24, 2004 8:47 PM
The L.A. Times' Michael Cieply profiles Disney communications chief Zenia B. Mucha, a former aide to New York Gov. George Pataki nicknamed the "Director of Revenge." Razor-sharp and acid-tongued, Mucha,...
Posted March 24, 2004 1:49 AM
The Writers Guild's embattled stand-in president Charles Holland resigned today. The email to WGA members follows, forwarded from several members while I've been out and around (thanks to you all):...
Posted March 18, 2004 3:16 PM
Walter Chaw lives in Littleton, Colorado, likes movies and reviews a ton of them for Film Freak Central.net and Rotten Tomatoes. To his surprise, Chaw found himself invited to the...
Posted March 17, 2004 6:28 PM
This time from Diane Disney, Walt's last surviving child. She tells Jim Bates of the L.A. Times that it's time for Michael Eisner to step down. Tick, tick, tick......
Posted March 10, 2004 1:44 AM
The former editor and publisher of The Hollywood Reporter died Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai after complications from intestinal surgery, the paper reports today. She had suffered from Parkinson's disease for...
Posted March 9, 2004 11:55 AM
Michael Hiltzik, in today's LAT Business section: Speaking as someone who lived and worked for years in a string of petty Third World dictatorships, I believe I'm well qualified to...
Posted March 8, 2004 9:14 AM
This week in the L.A. Business Journal, Editor Mark Lacter moves his weekly commentary out to the cover and calls for Michael Eisner's departure from Disney. Over the years, there’s...
Posted March 7, 2004 5:39 PM
Attention West Side writers: screenwriter Aleks Horvat, founder of the Hollywood Creative Directory, has opened a private rental work space on 26th Street in upper Santa Monica (across from the...
Posted March 7, 2004 3:03 PM
Elizabeth Guider has been named deputy editor of Variety and Daily Variety and Timothy M. Gray has been named executive editor. From the published story: Guider, who grew up in...
Posted March 4, 2004 12:53 PM
Steven Mikulan in the LA Weekly sets the scene for the upcoming contract talks between Hollywood screenwriters and producers. With the Writers Guild's president under siege, financial pressures and the...
Posted March 4, 2004 11:42 AM
The humiliation of Michael Eisner. Top right on the New York Times front by Laura Holson, with sidebars. Lead story in the LAT, mainbar by Richard Verrier and James Bates,...
Posted March 4, 2004 12:42 AM
Screenwriter Chuck Pfarrer, who really did serve as a Navy SEAL, has sent an open email to members of the Writers Guild calling out guild president Charles Holland, who has...
Posted March 1, 2004 3:12 PM
In his weekly column, Variety Editor Peter Bart faults last week's New York Times story by Sharon Waxman in which studio heads say (not for attribution) that many won't work...
Posted March 1, 2004 8:50 AM
David Freeman, the author and screenwriter whose latest Hollywood novel It's All True is about to be published, puts the Oscars into a little local perspective in Sunday's LAT Calendar...
Posted February 29, 2004 10:45 AM
Lead story on "Marketplace" today: We don't want to say that Michael Eisner's days are numbered, but......
Posted February 27, 2004 3:48 PM
Juicy stuff in Michael Cieply's LAT story today about a letter from Michael Eisner to Michael Ovitz firing him from his ill-conceived Disney post back in 1996. The seven-page letter...
Posted February 26, 2004 11:00 AM
Aaron Tonken, the Hollywood scammer due to be sentenced soon after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges, is circulating a book proposal, says New York Post gossiper Cindy Adams. She...
Posted February 24, 2004 2:34 PM
Gary Dretzka at Movie City News examines the Bernie Weinraub question and the new Los Angeles magazine piece -- as well as journalism about Hollywood -- in a column that...
Posted February 23, 2004 11:26 PM
He is profiled at home in Toluca Lake in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. The piece is by Deborah Solomon. Roy E. Disney, who has long been derided as...
Posted February 20, 2004 1:12 PM
The top story at the Hollywood Reporter is the mixed message surrounding Saturday's Writers Guild of America awards at the Century Plaza. While writers are being feted, dissident members upset...
Posted February 20, 2004 11:31 AM
L.A. writer Christopher Noxon has more than passing interest in Mel Gibson and the Passion of the Christ. He wrote about the movie and its maker (and its maker's wacky...
Posted February 17, 2004 11:29 PM
Patt Morrison notes in the Times today that while the Capitol stayed open until 5:30 p.m. on the day of the State of the Union speech, Hollywood Boulevard in front...
Posted February 16, 2004 10:25 AM
Richard Horgan at FilmStew tracks down Rona Barrett, once a fixture on Los Angeles television, now a lavender farmer near Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch in the Santa Ynez area. When...
Posted February 11, 2004 10:33 AM
Comcast went around Disney chairman Michael Eisner today with a public bid to buy the company for $54 billion. Breaking web-only stories are up at the LAT, NYT, Variety, and...
Posted February 11, 2004 10:01 AM
Sharon Waxman in the NYT pokes around at the news that 69-year-old director William Friedkin is going to make yet another movie for Paramount, where his wife Sherry Lansing is...
Posted February 9, 2004 1:26 AM
That's Variety headline-ese for the repercussions from the Janet Jackson show at the Super Bowl. The latest: Janet confirms she won't perform at the Grammy's, and the SAG Awards will...
Posted February 6, 2004 1:23 AM
Roger L. Simon signs a petiton calling for the recall of newly installed but embattled Writers Guild of America (West) president Charles Holland and urges others to do the same....
Posted February 6, 2004 12:45 AM
Despite having CBS atop the ratings, Nikki Finke writes in the LA Weekly that Les Moonves should resign in the wake of several embarrassing incidents. Yes, resign, even though the...
Posted February 5, 2004 10:50 AM
Page Six claims that unnamed members of the Disney board have reached out to National Basketball Association Commissioner David Stern about taking over if Michael Eisner is ousted. A rep...
Posted February 5, 2004 1:01 AM
Film critic Henry Sheehan is promising to post daily reports from the Berlin Film Festival on his website at henrysheehan.com, beginning Friday....
Posted February 4, 2004 3:34 PM
It's time, apparently, for another movie set in the San Fernando Valley. This time, Paul Thomas Anderson (who made Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, but not Two Days in...
Posted February 4, 2004 12:44 AM
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences thinks so, and they've got the cash -- a $134 million (and growing) nest egg, thanks to the annual Oscar show --...
Posted February 3, 2004 12:30 AM
John Markoff in the NYT ("Hollywood Mogul Plays by Technology's Rules") and Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller in the LAT ("Clash of CEO Egos Gets Blame in Disney-Pixar Split")....
Posted February 2, 2004 1:33 AM
Now that Pixar has broken with Disney, studios are getting in line to propose marriage to Steve Jobs. All he's done is bring in $2.5 billion in box office and...
Posted January 30, 2004 1:18 AM
The Writers Guild board kept Charles Holland in place as president, despite questions about the stories he tells about his background. I especially like that when the Times could not...
Posted January 28, 2004 1:27 AM
The Writers Guild board meets today to figure out the latest mess it has itself in, involving the credentials of the new guild president, Charles Holland. A quick recap: Holland...
Posted January 26, 2004 11:20 AM
Rep. Billy Tauzin has turned down the MPAA's offer to take over for Jack Valenti. Instead, he'll apparently become the highest paid trade association lobbyist in the country. Wash Post,...
Posted January 23, 2004 6:28 PM
The first time Nikki Finke met Ray Stark, the producer-agent-publicist threatened her. She calls him the Most Vindictive Man in Hollywood, but still wept upon his death over the weekend....
Posted January 22, 2004 12:15 AM
The L.A. Film Critics awards for 2003, via Movie City News. The site's Leonard Klady opens the door a little on the selection process....
Posted January 8, 2004 12:52 PM
© 2003-2009 • About LA Observed • Email the editor
| Bev Hills billionaire Ron Burkle has $56 million in loans against his two houses. The McCourts have borrowed $28 million on their properties.
| Steve Jones, the self-proclaimed Sire of Wilshire (a nod to the physical address of his former home at Indie 103.1 FM), is back on the air!
| She gaped at me like I was living history -- Miss Jane Pittman come to put her withered lips to the "Young Only" fountain straw of ageism.
As newspapers and television pull back from investigative reporting, foundations and other organizations are beginning to fill the void. One of the most interesting is Accountable California, a project of Local 721 of the Service Employees International Union.
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