Contest

American City Business Journals (ACBJ), parent company of the Los Angeles Business Journal, has announced an ambitious and rather cool competition called “Social Madness.”

Through May 15, companies in 43 cities served by ACBJ can enter their firm into the appropriate employee-size category. Local winners will be selected by July 17, while national champs are to be crowned September 11 and garner the privilege of donating $7,500 to a charity of their choice. From today’s announcement:

Social Madness participants will be ranked based on a scoring algorithm that measures social influence. The algorithm will track votes on bizjournals.com, LinkedIn connections, Facebook activity and Twitter followers during the challenge period…

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

The funniest portion of  the video that won Hofstra journalism students Jackie De Tore, Melanie Rubin and Beth Laschever the chance to cover the Academy Awards this year for KABC’s On the Red Carpet is their spoofing of some signature red-carpet banter.

After a fellow female student waltzes out of a college dorm elevator sporting a Snuggie, De Tore asks who the designer is. After a moment’s hesitation, her campus celeb replies, “As Seen on TV:”

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Orange County Register reporter Peter Larsen got the jump on yesterday’s popular “Sling Baby” Doritos commercial with a weekend feature about its maker, Huntington Beach native Kevin T. Willson (pictured).

For the past three years, Willson and his two OC producers have cracked the finals of Doritos’ popular “Crash the Super Bowl” contest. In 2010, his “Casket” spot aired during the big game, and this weekend, once again, he was one of the top two vote-getters with a 30-second bit about a grandmother and grandson conspiring from a back porch to get hold of a prized bag of Doritos chips. Per Larsen’s piece:

“We have no idea every year,” Willson said by phone last week from Indianapolis [about which two of the top five Doritos finalists make it to air]. “You’re sweating it out and it’s very stressful and an incredible feeling.”

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The culmination of a very cool Canon-sponsored contest has been posted after separate red carpet premieres last month in New York and Los Angeles.

The 24-minute drama When You Find Me, produced by Ron Howard and directed by his daughter Bryce Dallas Howard, takes its narrative cue from eight different winning category photographs. The first one shown, which cues the opening moments of the short, is of a snow-covered tree in a wide open field.

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Exactly a week after celebrating the third-year anniversary of a wedding arranged just days before the passing of Prop 8, LA residents Travis and Ian-Mathew attended the November 7 Nokia Theatre premiere and rooftop after-party for the new historical action drama Immortals. They were there as winners of a contest sponsored by this blog. So… how was it?

“I’ve been to many screenings before but never a premiere,” Travis tells FishbowlLA via email. “What a treat. The after-party was even better than I could have hoped for. I thought maybe the stars would be in a roped off VIP area but they were basically hanging around their tables, so that anyone could walk up to them.”

“I told director Tarsem Singh that The Fall was one of my favourite movies,” he continues. “He was very excited that I even knew that film and said, ‘Anyone who is a fan of that movie is a friend of mine!’ We met all the main stars– Henry Cavill, Stephen Dorff, Luke Evans, Kellan Lutz… All of them were SUPER nice!!”

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On Monday night in downtown LA, Relativity Media will host the red carpet world premiere of R-rated historical action-drama Immortals starring Mickey Rourke, Henry Cavill and Freida Pinto. FishbowlLA, in partnership with the Cimarron Group, has two VIP tickets to give away, which also include admittance to a star-studded VIP party that will follow the 7:30pm Nokia Theatre screening.

To enter, please send an email by 5 p.m. PT today with your name and phone number to fishbowlla@mediabistro.com. From the movie press kit, here is director Tarsem Singh (The Cell, The Fall) talking about working with Hollywood’s ultimate (and now resurgent) bad boy:

“Mickey is the real deal,” says Singh. “I let him go with it. I had very definite direction for the other actors, but Mickey was allowed to bring whatever he wanted. He took the simplest of lines and added to them.”

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FishbowlLA has to hand it to Budd Friedman and Mark Lonow (pictured), co-founders of legendary Melrose Ave. stand-up comedy club The Improv. They have come up with a comedy competition name that doubles as its own punchline.

“Up Yours” doesn’t mean they want to hear exclusively from would-be Andrew Dice Clay‘s. Rather, they are exhorting undiscovered funny people to up(load) your(their) videos for judging as part of a social media-embedded competition. Per the press release:

The winner will be provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet with APA Talent Agency and a chance to perform on the Improv stage. The performance will be taped and shared on the comedy club website.

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Greetings loyal Fishbowl readers. We have a pair of tickets to give away for the Oct. 7 showing of Theresa Rebeck‘s Poor Behavior at the Mark Taper Forum. The show starts at 8 and stars Johanna Day, Sharon Lawrence, Reg Rogers and Christopher Evan Welch.

The first person to email us with the subject header “Poor Behavior” gets the tickets. We’ll make sure they’re waiting for you at will call. All you aspiring theater critics out there, this one is especially for you. So email us right away. For FishbowlLA readers who want to check out the show but aren’t quick enough to win the giveaway, you can get discounted tickets here.

More info on the show here. Read the always reliable Steven Leigh Morris‘ take on the show in the LA Weekly here. Legal mumbo jumbo after the jump:

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Quietly, Amazon Studios has been rewriting the rules of screenplay competitions. They have introduced a lot of innovative elements to the process, including the ability of competitors to voice a scene from their script.

To publicize that element of the operation, Amazon recently went ahead and enlisted the services of a quartet of Hollywood celebs for “Star Tracks,” an A-list version of the same said service. Lending their talents to the proceedings are Fred Armisen, Jeffrey Tambor, Tricia Helfer, and Alison Pill.

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The winners have been announced for the tenth annual Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, sponsored by Massachusetts web resource WinningWriters.com. And lo and behold, the third place $400 prize claimant is none other than Alicia Ruskin (pictured), a commercial agent and partner with LA powerhouse agency Kazarian, Spencer, Ruskin & Associates.

Ruskin’s composition, “Speaking of Speaking,” makes fun of “flarf,” a post-modern movement that uses Internet search text for the purposes of cultural commentary. Here’s just a snippet of Ruskin’s bronzed composition:

Before we begin, please turn off any cell phones, pagers, watches, free standing inserts, November, dogma, the capitals of Europe and fleece.

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