Road rules provide captive audience. It’s 7:45 a.m. on a Friday morning, and the Koo Koo Roo on South Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills is almost full. I am here for traffic school. I ran a red light at the intersection of Robertson and Beverly boulevards, and the city of Beverly Hills has the photo […]

On the distaff side, need we say more than Zsa Zsa? When my friend Lawrence Karman, cameraman par excellence, invited me a few weeks ago to a screening of “Bánk Bán,” the filmed version of the classic Hungarian nationalist opera, I accepted enthusiastically. Not because I’m a big fan of opera in general or Hungarian […]

Hollywood launches ads to spark student support for Israel. While leafing through their college newspapers Monday morning, students at several major Southern California universities came across a full-page advertisement featuring Barad Zemer, a 23-year-old Israeli film student. Beneath Zemer’s photograph it read: “I love filmmaking, jazz and photography. I hate the image I carry of […]

New Trillian novel bucks literary trend and provides comic relief. Over the last year, I have read many wonderful novels: “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, “Atonement” by Ian McEwan, “The Hours” by Michael Cunningham. Well-written, emotionally resonant, all best-sellers, these highly praised literary works are required reading in book groups in Los Angeles and […]

Truth to tell, I didn’t start to despise “The Pianist” — Roman’s Polanski’s Oscar-nominated film of concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs of Warsaw during World War II — until the very end of the film: The war has ended and a friend has taken Szpilman to a farm in the Polish countryside. There used to […]

Across the country, Americans are wondering, “Why is Hollywood against the war?” On TV programs and TV and radio talk shows, in magazines and newspapers, they see actors and actresses opining, talking the talk and walking the anti-war walk. This has led to a separate thread of programs and opinion pieces about whether Hollywood stars […]

His paintings ask: Is this all there is? British painter Lucian Freud is considered Britain’s greatest living painter, one of the towering figures of realist portraiture. The largest retrospective of Freud’s work has now come to Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the only U.S. venue for this exhibit. Organized in 2002 for the […]

The Beatles on “Ed Sullivan.” Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk on the “Motown 25th Anniversary Special.” Ricky Martin at the Grammys. Each of these TV appearances launched a musical career into the stratosphere. On Wednesday Feb. 12, 2003, Jill Sobule appeared on “The West Wing.” Will lightning strike again? If you watched the episode, you may have […]