“Hold Back the Dawn,” part of Mitchell Leisen retrospective @ UCLA Film & Television Archive

Film
“Hold Back the Dawn” (1941) looks so good on the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Mitchell Leisen retrospective roster. It opens a double-bill at the  Billy Wilder Theater this Friday night. Charles Boyer plays a Hungarian hoofer stranded in Mexico who dupes an innocent schoolmarm (Olivia de Havilland in an Oscar-nominated performance) into an arranged ...

Carole Bayer Sager’s splendid nosherai @ William Turner Gallery

Music · Visual arts
When the baseball stadium vendor cried out “peanuts, popcorn, cracker jacks,” little Carole Bayer Sager, as a kid, took that sing-song offering seriously. The prodigious lyricist/songwriter is also proud creator of a fun and poppy collection of super-sized snacks in serious, searing colors. The show’s early November opening at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica ...

Cocktails, canapes & Esa-Pekka chitchat to benefit Hear Now Music Festival

Music
Can there be a more beautiful invitation [click on it for detail] than to hang around a cool Culver City designer home, with smart music lovers, just breathing in the exceptionally artistic vibe of our great Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor laureate, the composer Esa-Pekka Salonen? The event will benefit the Hear Now Music Festival, a ...

Fitz featured in “Gatz”

Ideas & Opinion · Theater
Here stands the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in what strikes me as his penultimate Los Angeles portrait. Bleary-eyed but putting a good face on things — what we do so well in L.A. Noshing one night at Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Boulevard, I chatted with proprietor, the son of the original owner. He ...

“Hollywood Unknowns” stories revealed @ Larry Edmunds

Film · Ideas & Opinion
We received this nice note from our good friends at Larry Edmunds Bookshop: Author Anthony Slide is no stranger to the Larry Edmunds Bookshop. His association goes back much farther than my 22 years, and the number of books this resident film historian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has written is ...

“Loves of a Blonde,” Milos Forman’s low-key masterpiece,@ UCLA Film & Television Archive

Film
About a month ago, perusing the library’s dvd offerings, I plucked from the shelf Loves of a Blonde (1965), director Milos Foreman‘s precocious 1967 Academy Award-winning film. A small romantic comedy, shot in black and white and only 90-minutes long, the film patiently unspools its minimalist plot, a droll dissection of life in a Czech ...

His Royal Greatness. Michael Jackson in “Another Part of Me,” Wembley Stadium, July 1988 1

Dance · Music
Like this? Read more: MJ dances — a dance critic’s manifesto to Michael Jackson

Thanksgiving with MJ

Dance · Film · Music
By any stretch of a writer’s imagination, a good day this Thanksgiving Day. My advance piece about Trey McIntyre Project got front-page Calendar section placement in the L.A Times. But sharing the page with my writing, an even more exciting dance story (sorry, Trey!). It concerns tonight’s ABC-television broadcast of Spike Lee’s documentary “Michael Jackson: ...

Trey McIntyre, the pride of Boise and beyond

Dance
Trey McIntyre seems to have it all going for him. He’s talented, a gentleman, personable, accessible, friendly to all, hugely handsome and hey, he’s tall.  Six foot six to be exact. Interviewing the Boise-based choreographer for a piece in the Los Angeles Times we conferred with a friend of arts·meme, Nancy Wozny, a long time ...

Judy Morr’s Thanksgiving weekend weight-loss program

Dance
In as fine a pairing as Pinot Noir with turkey, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts executive vice president (and its dance doyenne for the past 26 years) Judy Morr has booked the all-American dance tribe, Trey McIntyre Project, for performances on Thanksgiving weekend. The TMP shows not only offer an alternative to football and ...