Interesting LA Times Paragraph of the Day

The front page of today’s LA Times business section is going to grate a little at the CAA, WME and ICM coffee table end. Above the fold is a reminder from entertainment reporter Daniel Miller of what UTA has and they don’t… yet.

The spectacular state-of-the-art 165-seat screening room, unveiled last fall at UTA’s new Civic Center Drive headquarters in Beverly Hills, has been put to frequent daily use. Via email, the writer-director of the very first feature shown had this to say to Miller:

“It was fun because the room has perfect sound and picture, the decor is beautiful but not gaudy and it does not have the ghosts of a thousand bad movies,” Judd Apatow said in an email.

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Sometimes, being a sportswriter is no fun at all. The assignments, especially in this blog-tastic digital age, occasionally barely pass the jock-strap smell test.

So… you try to make the best of it. Here for example is LAT sportswriter Chuck Schilken dutifully catching up to a weekend meeting of reality TV show minds Dennis Rodman, Kendall Jenner and Kylie Jenner at the Brea Mall:

Maybe the so-called basketball diplomat was seeking their advice on how to handle the sticky Kim Jong-un/Kenneth Bae situation…

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LA Times business reporter Ken Bensinger and tech beat colleague Andrea Chang take a look this morning at the amateur detective work conducted on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, Facebook and beyond this week in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings. Their conclusions are not pretty:

This watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

“This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “We’re really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we’re not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent.”

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Get ready to hear more about Prima Cinema Inc. in the coming months. Per an article in the LA Times by Daniel Miller, the company’s product costs around $35,000 plus another $500-600 per stream, plugs into expensive home-theater set-ups and allows the lucky homeowners to access select first-run Hollywood titles the same weekend the movies arrive in theaters.

From Miller’s article:

The Schultzes are not members of the exclusive “Bel-Air circuit”… Instead, these Rancho Santa Fe film fans, who also own a West Hollywood condominium they bought from actor Matthew Perry, are willing to pay a premium to screen movies as the Hollywood moguls do.

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The first nine paragraphs of today’s “Column One” by Hector Becerra are expertly constructed.

Taken as a whole, they perfectly illustrate (in a feature reporting kind of way) the old AP “inverted pyramid” lede principle. That is to say, the reporter sets the scene, draws the reader in and then, thunderously, delivers a wallop.

Becerra describes a recent Sunday visit paid by Robert Adler-Peckerar to Mount Zion, a Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of downtown LA. The gate was locked; a caretaker next door needed to be summoned. Once inside the dilapidated resting place, the searcher found the sadly fallen marker of the life he was investigating:

“This is what happened to one of the greatest Yiddish writers in LA,” said Adler-Peckerar, executive director of Yiddishkayt, an organization dedicated to preserving the Yiddish language and culture. “I’d never seen a cemetery like this in America.”

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On the front page of today’s Calendar section, Wesley Lowery pieces together some recent clues. Most notably comedian Dave Chappelle‘s recent three-day stint at the Comedy Cellar in New York and on-stage exchange with Chris Rock.

But it’s not easy to pin down Chappelle. Lowery got no response from Rock’s publicist, nor the two PR reps “known to work” with Chappelle. Other efforts were similarly unsuccessful:

Chappelle has spent much of the last seven years with his family in rural Yellow Springs, Ohio, tucked in the sparsely populated plains that lie between Dayton and Columbus. The sleepy, largely white town allows Chappelle to lead a peaceful life where he can shop for groceries, eat at restaurants and drop by the corner store for American Spirit cigarettes with relatively little attention.

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We keep thinking the Lakers season cannot get any worse. But today, not long after the team lost its beloved owner and watched a guy the NBA snatched away win All-Star MVP, there is yet another bit of tarnishing information to digest.

It’s not so much that Lakers equipment manager Rudy Garciduenas was let go along with a bunch of other employees in 2011 as part of a Phil Jackson-related purge. That kind of thing happens all the time in sports and indeed, Garciduenas has no ill will towards his former employer. Rather, it’s the way the faithful 26-year employee discovered he was being bounced. Per Bill Plaschke‘s column:

Garciduenas learned of his departure when he received a letter about temporary [COBRA health] insurance… The next day, general manager Mitch Kupchak summoned him to his office to confirm that he was being released as a cost-saving measure.

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As LA Times columnist Steve Lopez acknowledges, Randy Newman‘s “I Love LA” is going to be impossible really to equal. Still, both at the Oscars and on the geo-hit parade, there is some honor to being a runner up.

Lopez has blogged an update to his column earlier in the week asking for people’s favorite “odes to LA,” informing that reader response has been overwhelming. He lists a baker’s dozen of Vox Populi second-place frontrunners. For FishbowlLA’s cover-charge money, this is the one that might have to win:

Guns N’ Roses – “Welcome to the Jungle”

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The photo caption at the top of the Web version of today’s LA Times “Column One” article says it all: ‘David Perlman sits at his desk at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has been a reporter for 63 years.’

Sixty-three years! That means than when the now 94-year-old science editor first started at the paper, Albert Einstein was still alive. Perlman has definitely managed to keep a sense of humor about it all; here for example is what he told some Exploratorium museum staff as LAT’s San Francisco bureau chief Maria L. La Ganga followed him around:

She’s “doing a story about the oldest living reporter — me,” Perlman told the amused museum staff. “She has to be done before I die…”

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As we reported, Daniel Miller recently jumped from The Hollywood Reporter to his hometown newspaper the LA Times. He replaces Ben Fritz who, after a short break, starts next Monday at the Wall Street Journal LA bureau.

For his first LAT item, appearing in Saturday’s print editions, Miller focuses on Universal Pictures’ re-entry into the toy business. As Miller notes, it’s been a while:

The last time Universal mounted a significant products campaign was in 2005, when it partnered with toy makers on the studio’s King Kong remake…

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