Richard Horgan

The 2012 circumstances under which Frank Sontag (pictured) took over for Frank Pastore at KKLA 99.5 FM last fall were difficult. The regular afternoon show host was was critically injured in a freeway motorcycle accident and later passed away.

But such is, sometimes, life. This week, Salem Communications made the transition official, announcing Sontag as the permanent afternoon host for the 4 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. weekday slot on the broadcast outlet known as  ”The Intersection of Faith and Reason:”

“We are excited about having Frank Sontag join our line-up in the critical afternoon drive position,” says KKLA program director Chuck Tyler. “Frank is a true veteran of Los Angeles radio having worked at [former ABC Station] KLOS-FM for 27 years.”

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Fred Godlash, a marketing specialist with Business Wire in Los Angeles, finally decided to do something about the fact that a six-year-old article at the BW end keeps grabbing eyeballs when people type in the Google search question, How much does it cost to write a press release? He wrote a new answer.

He’s not talking about the do-it-yourself Internet press release that today goes for pennies on the PR dollar and generates about the same ratio of response. Rather, Godlash in his update post aims to accurately determine how the 2007 $5,000 pro-PR price tag calculated by former colleague Monika Maeckle has changed. The answer may surprise you:

If the press release produced in 2007 took 100 hours to produce, it is fair to say the 2013 release will take longer through adding multimedia content including video, infographics and social interaction. Comparing apples to apples, the release would need to include any available resources to make it as competitive as possible today.

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At one point during last night’s Live Talks Los Angeles event at the Alex Theatre featuring Phil Jackson and the coach’s former locker room charge John Salley, a Lakers fan sitting directly behind FishbowlLA bellowed, “Fire Jim Buss!” Never mind that the heckle-target is A) one of the team owners and B) a likely future Jackson brother-in-law.

First and foremost, Los Angeles still loves Phil, a sentiment on full display at last night’s sold-out Glendale Q&A. The talk was part of the zen coach’s very active media tour for his new book Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success and benefited from interviewer Salley’s humorous, insider approach.

For example, Salley led off with an anecdote about being hauled into Phil’s office and learning he was being released from the Lakers. Leading him to declare a change in that summer’s plans to smoking lots of marijuana.

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In terms of seed financing, Harvey Levin, the late Jim Paratore and Warner Bros./Telepictures have nothing on The National Enquirer.

When The New York Enquirer was purchased in 1952, it was a modest 17,000-circulation broadsheet favored by amateur horse racing handicappers. It would later, after a move to Florida, become the precursor to the modern era of celebrity news and gossip reporting. In a fantastic feature article in DuJour magazine, John Connolly shockingly reveals where some of the original funding came from:

For decades, rumors have swirled about the purchase price — placing it between $10,000 and $75,000 — and [owner Generoso] Pope Jr.‘s source of funds. According to exclusive interviews for DuJour magazine with former employees, the money came from two men: a $10,000 loan from Pope’s godfather, Frank Costello, the boss of the Luciano crime family and head of a national gambling empire, and an equal amount from the lawyer Roy Cohn, a friend of Pope’s who had helped convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and was soon to gain notoriety as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

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A year after Karl Jacob’s off-camera doubling for Sacha Baron Cohen as Aladeen hit theaters in The Dictator, the Minnesota-minted artist is gearing up for a sold-out Friday world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival of his co-directorial debut Pollywogs.

The drama is set in Minnesota and derives its title partly from the idea that its two lead adult characters (Jacob, Kate Lyn Sheil) are emotionally stunted. Ahead of Friday night’s big debut, Jacob spoke with Twin Cities Daily Planet movie blogger Jim Brunzell III about the many references in the film to his (and Bob Dylan‘s) childhood hometown of Hibbing, MN, as well as the challenges the movie’s title may present overseas:

“Apparently in the UK it [Pollywogs] means something different. One of the co-producers is British, and she said, “We may want to consider changing the title if it goes to Britain.” I think it could be some type of slang word.”

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LA Times reporter Jeff Gottlieb’s May 3 email to a Los Angeles Times Media Group exec is one of the ages. Two years after he, Ruben Vives and colleagues won a $35,000 USC Annenberg prize for their exposure of the massive Bell city corruption scandal (ahead of the Public Service Pulitzer), he was having to question the financial allotment practices at his own paper.

Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple thoroughly retraces the history of this long-simmering matter and also, for the piece, took Gottlieb’s complaints to newspaper spokesperson Nancy Sullivan. When, Wemple wanted to know on Gottlieb’s behalf, was that promised celebration party funded by residual Selden Ring prize money going to finally take place? From Sullivan’s quoted reply:

“A small amount was set aside for a staff party. The party was postponed several times for various reasons but will be held in the near future.”

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It’s not quite Epic Rap Battles of History. But Andy Hermann‘s late rebuttal to Hillel Aron‘s February 26 LA Weekly item “Echo Park: Greatest Neighborhood in Los Angeles, Which Has 87 of Them” is still a lot fun to read.

The nearby residents respectively overstate their neighborhood arguments and, within that context, Hermann saves the best for last:

And OK, if we’re really going to get into a neighborhood pissing contest, let the record show that Highland Park, not Echo Park, has the city’s most dazzling and dangerous display of illegal Fourth of July fireworks. Oh, you set them off over your nice big lake, Echo Park? That’s adorable. We light that sh*t up in our driveways and then run for cover. And we’re not talking M-80s, either. These are professional-grade pyrotechnics.

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Like so many of these things, news that something was up at VegNews magazine first broke on Twitter via the account of senior editor Jennifer Chen. Among those catching the June 10 tweet was a blogger who goes by the byline of Insufferable Vegan.

Late Tuesday night, he-she reported on LA-NYC website SuperVegan that it’s not just Chen who has decided to bail from the embattled San Francisco publication. According to the author’s sources, two other top masthead people have also quit:

The magazine’s website, which has yet to be updated, but hey, it’s not like they have the word “news” in their oh wait — still lists [Elizabeth] Castoria as its managing editor, Chen as senior editor and [Anna] Peraino as online editor. I guess it’s hard to update your masthead online when your online editor has quit.

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With a few days still left at the Kickstarter end, 1940s-set indie vampire drama Blood Kiss is already well on its way. Amber Benson and Neil Gaiman are attached to star; the initial target-budget of $50,000 has been surpassed; and a companion graphic novel is in the works.

The script for Blood Kiss comes from Michael Reaves, an author and veteran writer-producer on TV shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and Father Dowling Mysteries. Because of Parkinson’s disease, Reaves is now wheelchair-bound and must speak through an electronic voice box. Several celebrities have rallied around the Kickstarter campaign, but the biggest angle remains the fact that this will put Gaiman in front of the cameras:

“I’m willing to pretend that the prospect of acting doesn’t terrify me in order to help Michael make his film,” Gaiman says.

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For the first time since the Burt Reynolds-Cybill Shepherd musical comedy At Long Last Love was released in 1975, there exists a proper version on DVD. A reconstituted Blu-ray edition was released this month by 20th Century Fox and to mark the occasion, writer-director Peter Bogdanovich retraces on his Indiewire blog this unlikely miracle of modern film restoration.

The original version opened to very mixed reviews, although Woody Allen later told Bogdanovich he had seen it three-four times at Radio City Music Hall and loved it. The director cut a new “TV version” of the film shortly thereafter, but despite that effort, the movie quickly faded away. Cut to a few years ago:

A friend called to tell me that Netflix was streaming At Long Last Love. I decided to take a look at it that way; I hadn’t seen the movie in 35 years.

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