Old School

The Simpsons creator Matt Groening has donated $500,000 to the UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT).

Groening, 57, will fund The Matt Groening Chair in Animation. The endowment will allow the TFT animation program to bring in visiting professors and working professionals to teach classes and work with students.

“Matt Groening is recognized globally as a preeminent and pioneering animator, storyteller, cartoonist, writer and producer,” Dean Teri Schwartz said in a statement.  His groundbreaking animated series have truly changed the landscape of television and have become a gold standard for animation and great storytelling throughout the entertainment industry.”

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.

USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism announced the recipients of this year’s Getty Arts Journalism Fellowhips this week. The winners are all fellowship alumni and will combine  efforts on a pop-up newsroom called Engine29. Fellows will publish work on Engine29.org during the week of Nov. 4 to 13–corresponding with the arrival of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 exhibit. Annenberg already experimented with the pop-up newsroom model earlier this year, with its Engine28 project to cover the blizzard of theater festivals that arrived in Los Angeles this summer.

Los Angeles freelancer Ariel Swartley and LA Times pop music critic Randall Roberts are LA’s representatives to the Engine29 team.

Update: Duh, GOOD’s Alissa Walker is from LA too. Sorry we missed you Alissa.

Full list of fellows after the jump.

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“Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980″ officially launched over the weekend, and FishbowlLA kicked off the six month exhibition series with an opening party at MOCA for “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981.” The series takes its name from the album by the L.A.-based punk band X.

Guests had a chance to preview the exhibition, which centers around a particularly turbulent, experimental period in the city’s art scene. Appropriately, the turbulent, experimental Henry Rollins DJ’d the party.

A wall of Black Flag concert flyers, drawn by Raymond Pettibon.

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Times are tough all over. But with a little ingenuity and a lot of gumption, many of those stuck in depressed America can usually find a way.

Today’s shining example of this approach, via WXYZ-TV Channel 7, is 21-year-old Detroit native Remington Devereaux. To try and help cover his tuition this fall at the Los Angeles Film and Recording School (part of the LA Film School at Wilcox and Sunset), he is operating an adult version of the kiddie lemonade stand and soliciting drive-by customers:

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The white silk dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in The Seven Year Itch sold for $4.6 million over the weekend, setting a record for movie memorabilia. And that isn’t including an additional one million for commission fees. The buyer of the iconic dress bid over the phone and remains unidentified, but there’s one thing we know for sure – we’re jealous as hell.

Monroe’s dress was one of hundreds of items from of Hollywood’s history that actress Debbie Reynolds had been collecting for decades, in the hopes of someday opening a Hollywood memorabilia museum. But that plan fell through, and Reynolds sold off her collection this past Saturday at an auction in Beverly Hills.

Other notable auction sales include Judy Garland’s dress from The Wizard of Oz for $910,000, and the ruby slippers for $510,000, and Audrey Hepburn’s ascot dress from My Fair Lady for $3.7 million. A full list of sales from the auction can be viewed here.

Previously on FBLA: Marilyn Monroe’s Iconic Seven Year Itch Dress Up For Sale

It’s been a banner year for television production. During the 2010-11 development cycle, a record 169 shows developed pilots. Cable TV was cranking out two and half times as many pilots as the previous cycle. Normally that would be good news for the LA production world. Just six years ago, 82 percent of all pilots were shot in LA. According to a new report from the non-profit group FilmL.A., however, that number shrank to 51 percent this cycle. As a result, despite the banner year for TV production, less pilots were shot in LA than in 2004-05 cycle.

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The Catalina Island Museum will unveil an exhibit in August about the year a young Marilyn Monroe spent on the island. Monroe was still known as Norma Jeane when when she moved to Catalina in 1943 as a teenage bride. Her husband Jim Dougherty, whom she married to escape life in foster care, was sent to the island by the merchant marines.

Many of the photos from the period will be familiar to Monroe fans — indeed, the photo to the right of Marilyn standing on Catalina’s Descanso Beach is often used by biographers to illustrate the terrible perm she was sporting when first discovered by modeling agents.

From the museum website:

“Before She Was Marilyn: Marilyn Monroe on Catalina Island” is the first major exhibition documenting the year Marilyn Monroe lived on Catalina Island. Although a brief period that is often ignored by historians, this candid and often disturbing exhibition brings to light documentary evidence and photographs that reveal the pivotal importance of this period in understanding the troubled psychology of a woman who would become an icon of popular culture.

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Back in the 1980′s, Anton Fury purchased an envelope of negatives at a New Jersey garage sale. “I thought it was just some chick in a bikini,” Fury explained to the New York Post.

Upon closer inspection, Fury realized it was two chicks in bikinis — namely, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. The pictures are estimated to be from 1950. Monroe would have been just 24 years old.

Fury is currently working with Los Angeles art dealer David Streets in Los Angeles to learn as much as they can about the photos — including who the photographer might be. Fury would like to sell the images, but copyright law is an issue, as someone with legal claims to the photos might come forward.

CNN has a slideshow of the photos Fury has made public.

 

The white halter dress that blew over Marilyn Monroe‘s head in The Seven Year Itch is being offered for sale by none other than actress Debbie Reynolds. The dress is part of an extensive collection of Hollywood memorabilia, which Reynolds originally intended to turn into a museum. But after numerous false starts, the museum dream fell through, and now the 79-year-old is selling off her treasures in a Beverly Hills auction on June 18.

“Basically, what Debbie has is what’s left of Hollywood,” Profiles in History auction house president Joe Maddalena tells the New York Post.

The pending sale of Monroe’s famous white dress has moved a number of Hollywood history enthusiasts to start a campaign to rescue the garment from a life of obscurity in a private collection. The SAVE-THE-DRESS Project is attempting to raise funds to acquire the dress so that it can be placed on permanent, public display.

It’s no secret that Hollywood can be a bit careless with its own history, but this one shocked even us cynics. Warner Bros. and Viacom Inc. are selling Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, maybe cause the Harry Potter franchise didn’t make them enough money or something. The buyers are Elie Samaha and Don Kushner, a couple of film producers who, rumor has it, have some frightening plans for the historical Hollywood landmark.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Several Hollywood sources said they had heard that the new owners are considering turning the theater, which has 1,152 seats, into a nightclub. It’s worth noting that Samaha has interests in two historic Hollywood Boulevard movie theaters that have recently been transformed into nightlife venues: the Fox Theatre and Vogue Theatre.

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