Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

Anna Kendrick: She's Just a Girl and She's on Fire

 

Anne Kendrick in "Pitch Perfect"

 

Published in L.A. Weekly's People Issue

From a booth at the restaurant Birds, actress Anna Kendrick eyes a TV commercial across the room. "How about that pocket hose, huh? It's a little tiny hose and it gets big. It's a real space-saver," she says. "If you have a yard that needs watering, I think you've got enough space for a hose. Sorry."

In addition to ridiculing infomercials over lunch in Franklin Village, Kendrick does many other things that adorkable, 27-year-old Angelenos are supposed to do — not because they're cool but simply because she wants to. She frequents hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurants and art-house theaters like Cinefamily and the New Beverly, sometimes by herself. She uses Instagram, and Snapchat, the latter of which is perfect for celebrities since the images disappear in seconds. She obsesses over the hoarding phenomenon, even hanging out in the Reddit community devoted to discussing the gory details.

She's done most things right in her career, too, rising to a level of welcome ubiquity that rivals Neil Patrick Harris and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fellow actor-singer-dancer-comedians who are so likable and of-the-moment that they can do no wrong. Kendrick effortlessly bounces from a Twilight sequel to Joe Swanberg's upcoming micro-brewing indie,Drinking Buddies, to the in-production film version of the cult musical The Last Five Years. Her solo in the a cappella movie Pitch Perfect — which involved a 75-year-old Appalachian folk song and a cup used as a percussion instrument, a trick she discovered via a video posted on, yes, Reddit — hit No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100.

L.A. Weekly April Fools Day Issue 2013

The L.A. Weekly home page on April 1

This year I helped organize L.A. Weekly's second annual online April Fools' Day issue, a tradition I helped stat last year. See above for what the website looked like on April 1.

Here are links to the stories:

L.A. to Build Football Stadium at 405-10 Interchange

West Hollywood Bans Flannel

MOCA to Merge With Pinterest

Street Parking Sign Examined Thoroughly, Inconclusive

Venice Drum Circle Goes Digital

New Restaurant Golgugi Burger Claims to Have Discovered 6th Taste

The pieces were written and designed by Stephen Perlstein, Eve Weston, Kai Flanders, Jacy Wojcik, Eva Recinos and me, Zachary Pincus-Roth, and our web editor Ali Trachta put the home page together.

Also check out last year's April Fools Day Issue.

MOCA to Merge With Pinterest

The new MOCA

Published in L.A. Weekly as part of its April Fools Day issue

Beset by financial troubles and a series of staff departures, the Museum of Contemporary Art has announced a surprise move: It will merge with the social networking site Pinterest.

Effective today, MOCA is closing its brick-and-mortar locations, including its Grand Avenueheadquarters, Geffen Contemporary building and Pacific Design Center space. The museum's collection will exist only online, where Pinterest users will be able to "like" or "re-pin" its artworks.

"We are very excited to be merging with Pinterest, a company that perfectly embodies the definition of term 'contemporary art' in the 21st century," said MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch at a news conference at Pinterest's San Francisco headquarters. "We feel they have a lot to offer MOCA when it comes to bringing in new audiences. And funding."

The art world had been speculating about MOCA's future in recent weeks, as LACMA made a formal proposal to acquire the museum; a partnership with the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., also was discussed. "We are happy that MOCA has found a partner that matches its level of artistic scholarship," said LACMA director Michael Govan.

As part of its new partnership, MOCA has already programmed a number of upcoming exhibits, starting with "Gift Wrap Ideas," running May 5 through Sept. 3, followed by "too cute for words," "Can I go here ... please???" and "Bundt Cakes!"

For the position of chief curator, which has been vacant since the museum ousted Paul Schimmel last summer, the museum has appointed Jennifer Charles of St. Paul, Minn., who has more than 16,000 Pinterest followers and is a self-described "food lover, gardening addict, surface pattern designer and mother of three."

The museum's annual gala, now scheduled to be held online, will be organized once again by performance artist Marina Abramovic, who said in an interview that she plans to "break new ground in Internet art" by creating web videos of nude performers having sex with each other. MOCA also has enlisted James Franco to create a Pinterest board called "James Franco," where he plans to pin "photos of James Franco," he said.

Philanthropist Eli Broad had to sign off on the merger, as stipulated in his agreement to donate funds to save MOCA from an earlier financial collapse, in 2008. "I had hoped that MOCA would be a partner for the Broad, my new museum across the street, but frankly it's kind of great that I'll be the only museum on Grand Avenue now," said Broad, who added that he hadn't heard of Pinterest before this development. "This is all very new to me. I was having a hard enough time with the Twitter."

The Pinterest-MOCA merger drew immediate criticism from art-world insiders, who charged that Deitch, a former gallerist, was continuing his overly populist approach to running the institution. "MOCA doesn't seem to realize that art is more than just categorizing random images that you happen to find somewhere," said famed L.A. artist Ed Ruscha, known for his series of photographs Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

 

Watch My Standup Comedy Video

My standup comedy performance at the Westside Theater in Santa Monica on March 14, 2013:

Theater Review: The Nether Takes Placein a Virtual Reality of Sexual Fantasies

 

Dakin Matthews, left, and Jeanne Syquia in The Nether; Photo by Craig Schwartz

Published in L.A. Weekly

Jennifer Haley sets much of her new play, The Nether, in an elaborate virtual reality — think Second Life, where you wander about as your chosen avatar, but a hyped-up version that allows you to see and feel the experience happening around you.

It's a fantasy world that shares a striking similarity with one portrayed in a buzzed-about film that also opened last week: Spring Breakers. Like The Nether, the film shows characters trapped in a life of drab buildings and sexual repression who escape to a realm of decadence, ruled by a man with a one-word name, sometimes crossing ethical and legal boundaries along the way. While Spring Breakers has more of a knowing smirk — you won't see girls in bathing suits and ski masks holding guns and dancing to Britney Spears at the Kirk Douglas Theatre — both engage the question of whether to indulge our innermost urges, sexual and otherwise.

Its ability to dovetail with the movie of the moment is part of what makes The Nether such a rare gem. Big-budget theater rarely has this kind of hip factor and hardly ever addresses issues in cutting-edge technology with as much sophistication as we see here. Plus, it's not every day that the elite L.A. theater company (Center Theatre Group) offers the world premiere of a play by an L.A. playwright performed by L.A. actors and shaped by L.A. designers. All of this is cause for celebration — making it easy to ignore the fact that this thought-provoking work, in its current form, does not ultimately offer enough of an affecting emotional ride.

Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie: L.A.'s Theater Power Couple Keeps the Drama Onstage

Photo by Star Foreman

Published in L.A. Weekly's Couples Issue

Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie spend a quarter of their time living in different cities, a situation that can be difficult for any couple. But they feel it shows the strength of their relationship. Besides, for the first few days of each trip, they can indulge the habits that drive each other crazy. She can leave copies of the New Yorker around the house, for instance, while he can throw away plastic bags.

"Kate will save plastic bags from the grocery, and we'll have 80 of them," Ritchie says, in a voice that meshes his Worcester, Mass., accent with the nasality of Ray Romano. "There's not going to be a moment when we have to pack 80 plastic bags. Can we go down to 10?"

The couple sits in the living room of their impossibly charming though surprisingly low-key house on a narrow, curvy road in Los Feliz. The front door and garage door are a matching light blue, and there's a yard out back, where Ritchie's domain is the potted plants and Burton oversees the garden. Running around somewhere is their excitable lab mix, Phil.

That "surprisingly" is because of their high-profile careers. Ritchie is artistic director at L.A.'s powerhouse Center Theatre Group, which controls three stages, the Ahmanson, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas, and regularly prepares shows for Broadway. Burton is one of the country's most celebrated theater actresses, once earning two Tony nominations in the same year (2002), for Hedda Gabler and The Elephant Man.

Burton initially resisted the profession, in part because of her parents: her mother, actress and theater producer Sybil Williams (now Christopher); her father, Richard Burton; and her stepmom, Elizabeth Taylor. "As much as my parents were delightful and rambunctious, I didn't want to have their lives," she says.

The bizarre job of the sitcom warm-up comic

Photo by Star Foreman; Design by Darrick Rainey

Published in L.A. Weekly

Mark Sweet has warmed up the audience at more than 4,000 sitcom tapings, and he almost always begins with the same joke, the one he's using tonight at CBS' Mike & Molly, as it gets under way at 6 p.m.: "Turn to the person to your right and shake that person's hand."

The joke — and it is a joke, which becomes clear when you see what happens next — accomplishes something more than mere laughter: It gets audience members comfortable with the people around them. The message is that this isn't the L.A. Philharmonic, where an errant cough requires you to shrink in humiliation. "I've been in a warm-up where I started a show and people said, 'Is it OK to laugh?' " Sweet says. "They're not sure what to do. They think they're in a movie set."

On television, sitcoms are a slick, breezy 22 minutes. But a sitcom taping is an absurdist, theatrical event of Wagnerian length. The actors do two, three, four or more takes of every scene. Between takes, as the cameras and props are reset, the writers convene on the sidelines to rewrite jokes that didn't work.

During the lag time, Sweet keeps the audience not just occupied but primed to laugh. On a raised platform in front of a bleacher full of spectators, he emcees a variety show of jokes, magic tricks and competitions. One standby, a dance contest, typically involves a frisky audience member using the mic stand as a stripper pole while gyrating to a song like "Bust a Move." It can be corny, yes, but it's impossible not to laugh.

Some comics warm up for talk or reality shows. But it's sitcom tapings that bring the greatest difficulty and biggest paycheck. A network gig goes three hours or longer (Friends sometimes went seven) — and can pay $4,000 per night.

This odd, behind-the-scenes vaudeville is something of a dying art: The number of sitcoms shot in front of an audience — called multicamera comedies, because many cameras shoot at once — has dwindled in the last couple decades. But the handful of top warm-ups who are still around are in high demand.

Mark Sweet, who has steady gigs on Chuck Lorre's three platinum CBS shows (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and Mike & Molly), is at the top of the profession.

Two Magicians Created the Magic Castle'sMost Popular Show in Years. But They're Not Finished

Photo by Kevin Scanlon; Design by Darrick Rainey

Published in L.A. Weekly

I ran out the exit door and down an alley behind the Magic Castle, clutching a wooden box. Two magicians had picked me as a volunteer during their show at the private magic club, with instructions to hide the box somewhere on Castle grounds. I panicked — the trick seemed to depend on my hiding place. Finally, I stuck it in a concrete ditch, behind a pipe, then ran back to bang on the exit door and rejoin the audience.

The rest of the box trick will not be revealed here. There will be no description of what happens and no explanation of how it works (even if I were somehow able to find out). It's better just to see it. If music writing is said to be dancing about architecture, magic writing is figure skating about castles in the sky.

Suffice it to say: "The piece with the box was just awesome," says Bill Goodwin, the Castle's librarian, who saw the show. "They don't do like other magicians, where [they say], 'We're going to do this or that.' They just do it and they respect the audience to get it themselves. So you get to the point as an audience member where you're thinking, 'No way, this can't be possible!' " But then it happens.

The magicians in question are Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio, who performed together at the Magic Castle's Peller Theater during a weekend in January. The show proved so popular that they brought it back in June, and then again in August and September. Celebrities like Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes could be found milling around the bar outside, clamoring for a spot in the 50-seat theater.

Goodwin has been a Castle member since 1978. Other than a couple instances, like performances by celebs such as Steve Martin or Jason Alexander, "I cannot remember people waiting two hours in line show after show after show," he says. "Sometimes you hear, 'Oh, you got to see this show!' and you do and you see it and it's great. But there is something different about this one."

Mike Pisciotta, a manager at the Castle and a friend of DelGaudio's, says, "I've been in magic for over 20 years and it's the best magic show I've ever seen."

American Idol Meets the Museum

Published in L.A. Weekly 

"BlackBerrys, Turkish garlic, baby food, chocolate bars, perfume, fuel ... ." Artist Liz Glynn is fumbling through the multicolored wooden drawers in her installation at the Hammer Museum, pulling out lead sculptures.

The objects are life-size versions of banned or difficult-to-find items that Palestinians have imported through the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. The idea is that museumgoers can play with these things, taking them from the drawers and arranging them around the room. The exhibit includes a wooden tunnel that gets smaller and smaller, like a sideways pyramid; a round, white section of another tunnel, made of reinforced concrete bricks; a box of white gloves for handling the sculptures; and a closet with a wedding dress — brides have been smuggled, too.

Museumgoers particularly like the lead crabs. "People like to put them in funny places that have sort of a narratively suggestive" quality, Glynn says. "Peeking out from behind something, or the crab with a cellphone next to its claw." Some visitors have tried on the dress.

People are technically allowed to take the objects anywhere in the museum, though guards sometimes stop them. Glynn once found a lead BlackBerry stuck in a planter. She pictures people walking around with these items in their pockets, feeling their weight, simulating the experience of sneaking something where it's not supposed to go.

Glynn, 30, a graduate of Harvard and CalArts, grew up outside Boston, obsessed with the mummy display at its Museum of Fine Arts. The idea for her exhibit began with the great pyramids, where pharaohs were buried with belongings to use in the afterlife — and then got more complicated.

"I try to start with something any fifth grader would know," she says, but adds, "You aren't expected to know everything. It's better if you don't, and have your own story of the time you put something in your pocket or having been in a mine shaft or something else."

Whether people can relate to her work is a particularly important question for Glynn, one of five finalists for the Hammer's inaugural Mohn Award. The prize — which pays out $100,000 over two years and includes a book published about the artist's work — is given to the top artist in the museum's inaugural biennial, "Made in L.A.," featuring new work from 60 young or under-recognized L.A. artists and running through Sept. 2.

The twist? It is museumgoers who vote to determine the prizewinner — a process that has angered many L.A. artists and fueled a discussion about whether popularity is an appropriate goal for visual art.

At LACMA Collectors Committee, Art Acquisitions Is a Battle Royale

The object of Robert T. Singer's affections: Fudo Myoo: The Indomitable Foe of Evil

Published in L.A. Weekly

Robert T. Singer stands in a LACMA gallery holding an envelope with a list of words scrawled on the back, in a combination of English and Japanese: "condition, value, function, age, male, female..." Each talking point helps express his love for the 12th-century, $550,000 wooden Buddha several steps away, which he first spotted in a Kyoto gallery.

Singer, LACMA's head curator of Japanese art, is about to give a speech at the museum's annual Collectors Committee event. Ten curators have each picked an artwork they want the museum to buy, and have shipped it here for the occasion. On this April morning, they'll present it to donors, who vote that evening on which works will be purchased — after paying at least $15,000 for the privilege.

Begun in 1986, Collectors Committee is an atypical tradition, modeled after a similar event at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's especially important for LACMA, a relatively young museum where most departments don't have an endowment for acquisitions.

LACMA director Michael Govan calls Singer the event's Ty Cobb, who holds baseball's best-ever batting average. In 22 presentations, he's been successful 21 times. The one time he lost, he picked a set of screens depicting flower carts. "I was too clever by half," he says. "I was thinking, 'This will appeal to the group.' No, it has to appeal to me." He later learned that in sophisticated New York circles, where many of the donors grew up, homes often had copies of similar screens. To them, he says, "It was a cliché."

Singer spots a 60-foot Robert Rauschenberg print — his biggest competition. Many attendees are contemporary collectors. Plus, doesn't the fact that it dramatically fills the wall bias people toward it? "If that's your thing," he says.