Our Town

In lieu of another LA Lakers-Boston Celtics NBA final, we give you our fair city vs. “JP.” Those initials are the local colloquial for Jamaica Plain, a four-and-a-half square mile historic section of Boston.

With our beaches, healthy salads and top-down winter weather, you’d figure we’ve got JP handily beat, right? Wrong, according to recent Disney casting assistant Brittany Shapiro. She tells the Jamaica Plain Gazette why she is so thrilled to have relocated there:

“LA is such a tough city,” Shapiro said. “I love the community feel of JP. I found that lacking in LA. No one knew their neighbor. No one cared to know their neighbor.”

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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.

And in other Sports Illustrated news, Magic Johnson and Matt Kemp are on this week’s cover.

The actual article (by Lee Jenkins) is about the 78-hour sports whirlwind the city of Los Angeles experienced last weekend.

A very good (but lengthy) read that won’t result in any lawsuits.

You can add CBS2 to the growing list of local news stations (NBC4, Fox 11) that have butchered stories during this Los Angeles Kings playoff run.

If you look closely, you will notice B-roll footage of the Sacramento Kings mascot — not Bailey, the LA Kings mascot.

Don’t let me down, ABC7.

Here’s a reminder of just how embedded Twitter has become in the whole reality TV media mash.

We’re still two months away from the debut of K-Town, a YouTube reality show centered around some colorful denizens of LA’s Koreatown district. But already, in a press release dispatched in support of an announcement made today at New York’s Internet Week, there are the Twitter handles of all the show’s main participants. They include:

@JASMINECHANG089: A hairstylist who was born and raised in Koreatown. Whether it’s her platinum blond locks or her loud infectious laugh, Jasmine is the undeniable center of attention wherever she goes.

@Scarlet_Chan (pictured): A former exotic dancer who is sexually liberated and not afraid to express it. Scarlet is a self-admitted troublemaker who is introduced to the Koreatown scene by her close friend, Jasmine.

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Part-time Los Angeles resident Manny Pacquiao might have to find a new place to spend his free time when he’s in town.

The Filipino boxer and politician was barred from The Grove and the television show Extra after the shopping center was tipped off to a quote Pacquiao reportedly told the Examiner, saying that gay men “must be put to death.”

Well, that’s if you listen to the LA Weekly, who took the original article out of context and tipped off The Grove owner Rick Caruso.

This is what the Examiner article originally said:

Pacquiao’s directive for Obama calls societies to fear God and not to promote sin, inclusive of same-sex marriage and cohabitation, notwithstanding what Leviticus 20:13 has been pointing all along: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

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Down Under, in the pages of newspaper The Australian, University of California at Riverside professor Toby Miller has shared a damning and funny inculcation of USC, UCLA and other top U.S. film schools.

The chair of a Department of Media and Cultural Studies study-abroad program suggests life is not glamorous for many of those who graduate these days from a top film school. Some, he writes, wind up working the B-side of social media causes at Hollywood talent agencies; others may toil for one of YouTube’s 100 new channels. Or, worse:

A colleague from one of the top schools often bumps into alumni. All goes well until he asks what they’re up to. “Oh, I’m working,” they say. No further details are divulged.

Why? They’re making porn movies in the San Fernando Valley for online, cable and satellite consumption. They don’t use their own names. They are unhappy. But it’s helping pay off student loans…

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Interesting tidbit from TheWrap film writer Brent Lang.

Lowell Bergman, a producer with 60 Minutes from 1983 through 1997, told Lang that prior to the making of Michael Mann‘s 1999 drama The Insider, he arranged for Wallace to meet with the director at the Beverly Regent Wilshire hotel. Why? Because Mann at the time hoped to convince Wallace to play himself in the film (the correspondent was, of course, famously channeled in the end by Christopher Plummer). From Lang’s piece:

The movie depicted Wallace caving to CBS’ corporate leadership after the network refused to air the Jeffrey Wigand interview over concerns about a potential lawsuit from tobacco company Brown & Williamson. Wallace claimed that he never agreed that the story should be killed.

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Welp.

Someone is getting in trouble tonight over at NBC4.

Even if you were clueless about the NHL, the word “Sacramento” should have been a dead giveaway that this wasn’t the right logo for the Los Angeles Kings.

In the mid-2000s, Alabama single mom Katie Rogers was living in Mar Vista and commuting to a job at the Coldwater Canyon offices of TreePeople. Despite the challenges of making this 30-mile round trip without a car, that’s just what she did for about three months, with a cameraman in tow.

She wound up with 80 hours of raw footage and is now editing it down into the feature documentary CarLess in LA. At the time, she used the $2500 earned from the sale of a Toyota minivan to purchase a Sony HD camera.

“There are no buses that go over Coldwater Canyon, so I either had to hike or “mountain bike” ride on the last leg of the daily journey to get to work,” Rogers tells FishbowlLA. “It was truly “trekking” LA! I would ride my bike home though because it was mostly downhill and actually a nice ride. But not on Coldwater itself, that would have been too dangerous. I found other routes.”

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What a birthday for L.A. Youth executive director Donna Myrow.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the teen newspaper has raised more than $180,000, which is enough money to publish their next issue and remain open through the summer.

We told you last month the non-profit needed to raise $500,000 by May 14 or it would be forced to close their doors after 24 years on June 30. Thanks to an anonymous donation of $150,000 Friday, it gives Myrow more time to fundraise.

For more information about donating, check out LAYouth.com/Donate.