Zachary Pincus-Roth.com

No, It's Not the "Second-Strongest Summer" at the Film Box Office

Published in L.A. Weekly

 

Last Tuesday's L.A. Times sported a front page headline claiming that 2015 is on track to be the “2nd-strongest summer” for film box office, with $4.4 billion. The verdict has since been repeated in a number of places, and the official tally has been pegged at $4.48 billion.

Unfortunately, as with a lot of film box office reporting, the claim does not account for inflation. The Times story mentions that another summer (2011) raked in $4.4 billion, but if you account for inflation then 2011 would pull ahead of 2015 ($4.4 billion is $4.67 billion in today's dollars). According to the The Hollywood Reporter, 2009 got $4.33 billion, which is $4.82 billion today. According to Deadline.com, 2007 saw at least $4 billion, which is $4.6 billion today, and 2004 saw $3.95 billion, which is $4.99 billion today.

A similar issue cropped up earlier this summer, with news stories touting Jurassic World as the no. 3 movie of all time domestically. But Box Office Mojo's inflation-adjusted list puts it at no. 23, below the original Jurassic Park at no. 16. An article in Forbes praises the hiring of Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow to helm the ninth Star Wars movie while citing the claim that Jurassic World's opening weekend set a record, but when you factor in inflation, it's actually no. 2, behind The Avengers.

Ignoring inflation makes it difficult to accurately gauge how healthy the industry is compared to past years and to determine the summer box office's impact on Hollywood companies' bottom lines. The people making and exhibiting the films have to account for inflation when dealing with costs, so why ignore it when the money comes in? (While box office observers often acknowledge movies' costs, sometimes they ignore them when they might be useful. For instance, were the summer movies of 2015 also the second-most costly of all time?)

Some might call this nitpicking. So what if the summer of 2015 slides a few places down in the list? But when the front page of the daily newspaper in the city Hollywood calls home touts this summer as the second-biggest ever, it's bound to make a lot of people feel all warm and fuzzy when they shouldn't.

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When a Cartoonist Landed in L.A. County Jail, She Drew What She Saw, Using Only a Golf Pencil [PDF] [Extended Online Version]

A longform, graphic novel-style story written and drawn by a cartoonist who spent two months in the L.A. County jail system on a misdemeanor charge. This story led the women's section of the L.A. County Jail system to implement improvements, including:

• Inmates offered showers every 24 hours while in temporary housing
• Monitors on the lights, to prevent guards from turning off the lights during the day for no reason
• Inmates getting seven pairs of underwear a week, instead of four or five

L.A. Weekly's April Fools Day Issue 2015

Yesterday we brought back L.A. Weekly's annual April Fools Day issue — a screen shot the home page is above.

This year's stories were:

 

• With Head Start on Senate, Kamala Harris Will Run for President Too
  
• L.A. Votes to Move Santa Monica “Closer”
• New Art Walk Consists Entirely of Food Trucks
  
• Kanye West Interrupts Kanye West Concert
  
• New Study Says You Would Have Been Late Even If There Had Been No Traffic
  
• L.A. Actors’ Friends Sitting in the Audience Want Minimum Wage, Too
  
• Student Film Crew Promises to Be Out of the Way in 5 Minutes
  
• White Guy Won’t Shut Up About “Inspiring" Trip to Watts

The stories were written and designed by Michael Ciriaco, Brandon J. Sornberger, Stephen Perlstein, Kaitlin Beauchemin and me. I edited the project, and our web editor Ali Trachta put the home page together.

Also see our past year's issues:

2014 April Fools Day Issue
2013 April Fools Day Issue
2012 April Fools Day Issue

Stories With Two Titles, or Why People Should Maybe Just Make Up Their Minds

Published in L.A. Weekly

If Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) wins the Best Picture Oscar will we hear the whole title?

To address your puzzled look, yes, that is the title. These words — “or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” — are there, at the bottom of the poster. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu says it's the title. A publicist for the film assures me it's the title.

And the name will, indeed, read Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) on the Oscar envelope if it were to win. Come Sunday, it has the chance to become the longest-titled Best Picture winner of all time.

And yes, to address your now squinty-eyed expression of disgust, that is the punctuation — or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

The filmmaker's intention probably was to place the whole subtitle entirely within parentheses, as in (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), so that this second title issue read as an aside. But the “or” fell out somewhere along the way. The fact that someone let this pass means that perhaps no one was really taking this second title thing too seriously anyway.

What to make of a second title that no one uses?

Since we all call it Birdman, as in the sentence “Let’s go see Birdman,” this second title exists in name only. Even Wikipedia seems to be confused. Iñárritu, of course, isn’t being revolutionary — Stanley Kubrick famously named his film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and similar titles show up across media.

I've always had trouble with these titles, thinking them to be lazy or disingenuous, trying to have it both ways. But after a journey down the dual title rabbit hole, and a more nuanced picture, I'm ready to be accepting — to a point.

Can TV Save India?

Published in L.A. Weekly

As a teenager in Bombay, Aamir Khan was a tennis champion. When he came home from a match, his mother would ask if he'd won. Usually the answer was yes. She'd give him a hug.

After five or 10 minutes, though, she'd come back and sit next to him. She'd say, "The boy who lost to you, he must have reached home now as well. And his mom must have asked him the same question. And he would have told his mom that he lost." What is his mom feeling, he wondered?

The first time it happened, Khan thought: Did I do something wrong? Should I have lost? But over time, Khan started to look at his opponent differently. He would still try to win. He just would try to connect with him, somehow.

Decades later, Khan is watching a video to prepare for an episode of his first talk show,Satyamev Jayate. A woman has been gang-raped, and the rapists later tracked her down and burned her. On her hospital bed, she speaks her dying words.

Looking for Comedy in the Hindu World

Published in L.A. Weekly

On a Friday night in September, Aditi Mittal paces on onstage at the Canvas Laugh Club in Mumbai. She's talking about sanitary napkins.

"Saying the words 'sanitary napkins' in public is like standing in a Hogwarts common room and saying 'Voldemort,' " quips Mittal, who's 27, with hair down to her shoulders and large, dark glasses.

The crowd is mostly 20s and 30s, dressed in jeans and button-downs. They're laughing in between sips of McDonald's sodas and Kingfisher beers.

"Each pad is individually wrapped, which is then placed inside a plastic packet, which is then wrapped in a newspaper by the chemist and then placed inside a black plastic back. I have seen more careless cocaine smugglers," she continues. "By the time you get to the first pad you're, like, 'But I've already reached menopause.' "

The World Pun Champion Defends His Title

Published in L.A. Weekly

After Ben Ziek won big at the 2013 world pun championships, his life didn't change. He kept the same job he's had for 13 years, as a night auditor at the Burbank Airport Marriott. He gets in at 11 p.m., helps balance the books, does wake-up calls and deals with guest complaints before leaving at 7:30 a.m.

Co-worker Angelique, who sits at the desk nearby, does not appreciate his punning. "She doesn't like it all," Ziek says. "For 13 years I've joked that she doesn't have a sense of humor."

A 38-year-old gentle giant with a dark crew cut, Ziek has the fortune and misfortune of being among the best in the world at something many people disdain.

John Ridley: The 12 Years a Slave Oscar Winner Isn't Just a Black History Screenwriter

Photo by Ryan Orange

Published in L.A. Weekly

John Ridley is on his cellphone, talking to his sister for the first time since he won an Oscar for writing 12 Years a Slave.

"It's like Excalibur. I should give it to the Lady of the Lake," he says, dismissively: The statuette has ended up in a drawer. When it was in the kitchen, "We had to dust around it."

It's not that he's ashamed of the honor. But he wants to force himself to focus on the future.

In recent years, Ridley has been pegged as a black-history specialist. In addition to 12 Years, he wrote a still-unmade L.A. Riots script. A Jimi Hendrix song, "Sending My Love to Linda," inspired him to write and direct Jimi: All Is By My Side, starring Outkast's André Benjamin; it comes out in June.

Jimmy Kimmel: L.A.'s King of Late-Night

Photo by Ryan Orange

Published in L.A. Weekly

Jimmy Kimmel shops at Costco. The Hawthorne Costco, near his beach house, is different from the Burbank Costco, near his Hollywood Hills home. "There are beach things there, like volleyballs and surfboards, that they don't have at the Costco in Burbank," he says. He's been to Costco in Hawaii, in Cabo San Lucas.

He also goes to the Hollywood Farmers Market. The Cheese Store of Silver Lake. Surfas restaurant supply store in Culver City. (He owns a paella grill, a La Caja China pig roasting box, a tandoor oven.)
"People assume that I have someone that goes shopping for me," he says. "I have such an odd job that it's nice to go into Smart & Final.

"I almost never relax," he adds. "When I'm running errands I'm only doing one thing, and that's why it's a nice little break."

L.A. Weekly's April Fools Day Issue 2014

Yesterday brought the return of L.A. Weekly's annual April Fools Day issue. To re-live the experience, click on the image above to see it larger, and click on these links to the stories:

• L.A. Man Solves Drought With "Just Use Ocean Water" Plan
• 16,751 People Found Using One Westside Rentals Account
• Man on Date at Griffith Observatory Fakes Incredible Knowledge of Science
• Friend Visiting From Out of Town Would Like to Go to "the Bar From Swingers," Tonight
• Edward Snowden Leaks Drastic New Coachella Security Measures
• L.A.'s Coolest Music Venue Is This Guy's Self-Storage Unit
• New App LikeGrandmaMade Tells You Which Ethnic Foods Are Authentic

The pieces were written and designed by Ben Westhoff, Stephen Perlstein, Lindsey Barrow, Rachel Hastings, Kaitlin Beauchemin, Paul Bradley and Tien Nguyen, and edited by me, Zachary Pincus-Roth. Our web editor Ali Trachta put the home page together. Thanks for all your help.

Also check out:

• L.A. Weekly's 2013 April Fools Day Issue
• L.A. Weekly's 2012 April Fools Day Issue

 

When You're On Your Way Home, and You Come Upon an Opera

 

Passersby look on, as the opera "Invisible Cities" is performed at Union Station in November

Published in L.A. Weekly

It's 10:20 p.m. on a Friday in November when Kevin walks into Union Station, pumped for his bus ride home and a little buzzed from beers with dinner. That's when he stumbles upon an opera.

The show, Invisible Cities, involves 175 audience members wandering the station, following singers and dancers as they weave around unsuspecting travelers.

Kevin joins the crowd standing in the south patio courtyard, eyes wide. The audience, clad in fancy jackets to ward off the chilly night, paid up to $75 to be there. Kevin stands out in a white T-shirt and white sweatpants. He's tall and burly, with a hard-edged, rectangular face framed by a gray backward cap, mustache and goatee. Not a guy you want to mess with.

One performer, a large bearded man with a backpack, strolls as he sings: "I must go to another city. I must go where I find another past awaits me."

"You ever experienced the term 'surreal'?" Kevin says. "I think this is the first time I've ever seen a surreal moment in my entire life."

L.A. Weekly Podcast: Alien Abductions

I created a pilot version of the L.A. Weekly podcast, where we plan to conduct interviews with our writers about their stories, along with other L.A. figures.

The episode is an interview I conducted with staff writer Gendy Alimurung about her two-part series on alien abductions.

Click on the play button below to listen to the podcast via Soundcloud:

Slash Fiction: A Fantasy World in Which Male TV Characters Find Romance — With Each Other

Cover design by Darrick Rainey

Published in L.A. Weekly

Racked with pleasure, it was all Obi-Wan could do to keep his feet as he came, that large warm hand milking every drop of semen from his body. —Keelywolfe, "Sacred Flames Within"

Calysta Rose discovered slash fiction in 1998, when she was 23. In her office at an oil company, she followed a chain of links online and came upon a sexy short story involving characters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn from Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace participating in a sort of "summer solstice" celebration.

"I knew what kind of happy, fun times happen at summer solstice, and Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, they're attractive dudes," she says. "So I read it and I thought, 'Oh my God, I shouldn't have read it at work. Oh my God.' My face burning up. It was really, really hot. I thought, 'Oh my God, I can see the appeal of this.'" A 15-year obsession began.

You've probably heard of fan fiction — eager amateur writers using fictional characters from books, movies or TV shows to create stories of their own. Slash is a subset of fan fiction, sticking those characters in gay romances, regardless of their actual sexual preference.

How USC Grads Freddie Wong and Ryan Coogler Became the Future of Filmmaking, Via Two Very Different Paths

Fruitvale Station

Published in L.A. Weekly

A road diverged for two 27-year-old USC film school grads, and each went a different way: one the Sundance/Harvey Weinstein path that has been a young filmmaker's dream for two decades, the other through new-media outlets such as YouTube and Kickstarter.

One became the toast of the indie-film world after winning two top prizes at January's Sundance Film Festival. Another is an icon to a core group of Internet experts and millions of teen fans.

These days it seems the latter has the advantage — YouTube is the new frontier, and it can be more lucrative, even if top indie-film projects still enjoy more prestige. But as the two release wildly divergent new projects this month, it's possible both of them represent the future of filmmaking.

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.

 

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's Most 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.

How to Succeed on YouTube: Goof Off in Your Basement...Only Better

Dane Boedigheimer's Annoying Orange just made the transition from online series to cable TV.

Published in L.A. Weekly

Also check out the rest of our L.A. Weekly YouTube issue, which I look the lead in editing

Daniel Grimes, a high school student from Ypsilanti, Mich., flew to Los Angeles last July for the YouTube convention Vidcon. He came to see his favorite YouTubers, including Toby Turner, a comedian known in part for his "literal trailers."

"He'll take a video game trailer and sing over it, describing everything that's happening in a painfully obvious but very funny way," Grimes told me, as we sat in an audience of hundreds in a ballroom in the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel.

As I blogged at the time, Turner took the stage to perform his literal trailer for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, playing the keyboard and singing exactly what everyone saw on the screen, e.g., "Mysterious hooded man joined by other hooded people."

I had a flashback to a family road trip listening to my brothers spoofing the opening song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast: "There goes the toilet cleaner with his plunger/The same old plunger as before."

My family is weird. But as we've learned from YouTube, a lot of people are weird — and don't mind sharing the evidence. The sort of goofing off that once took place in the privacy of your car, basement or backyard has become a form of entertainment, even a profession, whose practitioners will gather at Vidcon this weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center.

Why Clybourne Park Is Overrated

Published in L.A. Weekly

I have a dirty theater secret: I thought Clybourne Park was pretty good. As in merely pretty good. As opposed to the modern classic it's now perceived to be, after its premiere Off-Broadway brought it the Pulitzer Prize, followed by runs at the Mark Taper Forum, a hop to Broadway and, finally, on Sunday, the Tony Award for Best Play.

It's obvious why Clybourne is a good bet to win in your Tony Awards pool or Pulitzer Prize for Drama draft (and I'm not ashamed to admit I've participated in both such things). It's a well-made play, along with the perceived edginess that comes with a play that talks about race, written by a playwright, Bruce Norris, who had been on the rise and was considered due for such consideration.

Quick plot summary, for the uninitiated: In the classic 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the matriarch of the African-American Younger family purchases a house in the white Clybourne Park neighborhood of Chicago, with the hope that it would bring the family a better life. Clybourne Park is set in that house, and in the first act the white family living there is visited by neighborhood busybody Karl Lindner -- who also shows up in Raisin, with the same agenda he has here: stopping the Younger family from moving in.

In the next few decades, the neighborhood becomes a black neighborhood. And in the second act, set in the present day, a well-to-do white couple buys the house and plans to make some renovations, while their black neighbors -- sensitive to the historic nature of the house and the neighborhood -- try to change their minds.

It's a clever conceit: the last half-century of American race relations played out through real estate. So why did I, along with a number of friends who have seen it, come away surprisingly disappointed?

Bill Simmons: He Writes, He Scores

Published in L.A. Weekly

Bill Simmons has lost 15 pounds. He's sleeping less. His hair has gone gray. All for a website. "It's more work than I thought it was going to be," he says.

Last June, Simmons raised eyebrows by starting Grantland, an ambitious sports and pop culture site, named for legendary sports reporter Grantland Rice. It's a literary, experimental subdivision of ESPN.com, with a quarterly print journal and contributions from such nonfiction-writing hiperati as Chuck Klosterman and Malcolm Gladwell.

The 42-year-old Simmons is in jeans and a dark blue polo, sitting in his new office in the L.A. Live complex, which looks like a dorm room on move-in day -- a phone on the ground here, a Boston Celtics hat there. The place is meant as a staff hangout -- Simmons writes his column from coffee shops. That column, often topping 6,000 words, made him the definitive sportswriter of the Internet age. It's written not as a fly on the wall but with the subjective passion of a fan, often answering reader questions and drawing meaning from a single free throw in a Celtics-Lakers Game 5 with a kind of Talmudic fervor.

Jenna Marbles: The YouTube Star

From Jenna Marbles's video "How to trick people into thinking you're good looking"

Published in L.A. Weekly

One Friday in July 2010, Jenna Mourey drove home from her job at a tanning salon in Boston; she had to shower and change for her night gig as a go-go dancer. As she walked into her apartment, she decided to film herself getting ready.

She enjoyed go-go dancing (getting paid to dance -- in flats!). But she had a master's degree from Boston University in sports psychology and counseling. Her life was, as she says, "ridiculous."

"I went to school, tried really hard, did everything I was supposed to do, and now, like, what the fuck is this mess I'm in right now?" the 25-year-old recalls thinking. "I'm going to work dancing in my underwear, making myself look like a whore on purpose."

That night she edited together a video called "How to Trick People Into Thinking You're Good-Looking" and posted it on YouTube. By the time she got to her night gig, the other dancers had already passed it around Facebook. It has since been watched 38 million times.

Jenna Marbles, as she now calls herself, eventually started posting weekly to her YouTube channel, which has 2.9 million subscribers (No. 6 on the site), and almost half a billion views. Most of her fans are teenage girls, who relate to her foul-mouthed, brutally straightforward comedy sketches on the plight of young womanhood.

L.A. Weekly April Fools Day Issue 2012

L.A. Weekly's home page on April 1, 2012

If you visited L.A. Weekly's home page yesterday, you might have noticed a few stories that seemed a little off -- our contribution to April Fools' Day.

For those of you who want to relive the moment, click on the image above to see it bigger, and links to all the stories are here:

• Mayor Villaraigosa Invited to White House, Refuses to Leave
• Honda Accord Takes Last Parking Spot in Westwood
• MOCA to Import 'Heavier Rock' From 'Much Farther Away' 
• Skrillex Opens Grillex, the First Dubstep-Themed Food Truck
• Gwyneth Paltrow's Quick Recipe for Busy Moms: Quail Egg Pasta With Black Truffles
• "I Hate You Too" By The 405

The pieces were written by Simone Wilson, Wendy Gilmartin, L.J. Williamson, Paul T. Bradley, Jacy Wojcik and me, and our web editor Jake Swearingen did a lot of the graphics and put the home page together. Thanks to everyone for helping out.

Honda Accord Takes Last Parking Spot in Westwood

Published in L.A. Weekly (April Fool's Day edition)

A Honda Accord driven by James Duffy, 27, claimed the last parking spot in Westwood on Saturday afternoon, witnesses reported, a discovery that sent shockwaves through the neighborhood near UCLA.

Duffy drove up Westwood Boulevard and circled the neighborhood for more than 20 minutes before locating the space, which was next to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Gayley Avenue. He was parking to meet his friend Scott for pizza and maybe a movie afterwards, according to sources close to him.

The spot at first appeared to be too small. "I thought it was impossible," Duffy said, "but when I cut the steering wheel to the left and pulled back, I knew I had it." Duffy later admitted to Scott that he slightly bumped the Subaru Impreza in front of him.

Howard Braham's 11-11-11 Party at 1111 Olive Ave. in Burbank

​Published in L.A. Weekly

On November 11, 1998, when Howard Braham was a student at Columbia University, he realized around 10:30 p.m. that it was about to turn 11:11 on 11-11. He knocked on the door of his friend Steve Schwartz and they decided to gather 11 people, head up to the 11th floor, turn on the television and watch channel 11, which, Braham recalls, was the 11 o'clock news.

Since then, Braham hosted 11-11 parties almost every year, spacing them out so that the 11th of these parties took place last Friday, on on 11-11-11. The venue was George Izay Park, selected because its address is 1111 Olive Ave., in Burbank.

Braham, who now lives in Glendale and works as a Disney Imagineer, arrived just before 11:11 a.m. and stayed until the final moment of truth -- 11 seconds after 11:11 p.m.